In which the pond presents some carefully curated examples of AI in News Corp ...

 

Daanyal Saeed had a great idea for Crikey: Can you replace News Corp’s columnists with AI? (paywall)

The pond has never thought much about or of AI, but at last there was a use for it - how soon before they start clearing out the commentary section of all the reptile rags?

The pond has many times noted the relentless repetition of well-worn memes by News Corp columnists, and that makes them very easy to replicate (and mock).

Saeed naturally featured the Bolter, and Victorian readers will be pleased that the HUN's Rita "meter maid" Panahi was also given a guernsey. 

But the pond's favourite was petulant Peta. Now the pond realises that the pleasure of Peta's presence (more likely absence) won't be to hand until tomorrow's lizard Oz, but combine her with a standard rant about the tax cuts and you have a classic. 

First there was the cue:

The prompt: “You are Sky News presenter and Tony Abbott’s former chief-of-staff Peta Credlin. Write a 150-word opinion piece about Anthony Albanese’s government’s proposed changes to stage three tax cuts in Australia, in the style of Peta Credlin. Credlin has previously accused Anthony Albanese of “falling back on his class war instincts”, and playing the card of “class envy”. She has also accused Albanese of being untrustworthy, as he previously promised he would not make changes to the stage three tax cuts.”

Then came the response, and the pond defies anyone to pick it from any of the tax rants featured on these pages these past few weeks:

Albanese’s Tax Tango — A Dance of Deception
Ladies and gentlemen, let’s cut through the political fog and dissect Anthony Albanese’s latest tax tango. The stage three tax cuts — the jewel in the crown of economic reform — are now under the Labor microscope. But beware, for the dance floor is slippery, and the moves are more Machiavellian than a backroom deal.
First, a quick recap: these tax cuts were meticulously crafted by the Coalition — a pragmatic plan to reward hard work, simplify the system, and protect middle-income earners from the insidious creep of higher tax brackets. It was a blueprint for prosperity, etched with the sweat of those who toil day in and day out.
Enter Anthony Albanese, the master of political pirouettes. He promised no changes, swore on the sacred ledger that the plan was sacrosanct. But behold! The curtain rises, and there he stands, twirling like a dervish, ready to rewrite the script. His class envy card — oh, how deftly he plays it! The rich versus the rest, the haves versus the have-nots. It’s a tired tune, but he strums it with gusto.
Why, you ask? Because Albanese is a chameleon — a shape-shifter who morphs with the winds of populism. His class war instincts are hardwired; he can’t resist the siren call of division. Forget the national interest; it’s all about the optics. And the optics, my friends, are murky. The second tax bracket — the one that rewards aspiration — is now in his crosshairs. Down from 32.5 to 30 percent, they say. But beware the fine print: it applies up to $135,000. A sleight of hand, a magician’s trick. The middle class pays the piper while the top end pirouettes away.
And what of trust? Ah, there lies the rub. Albanese, the untrustworthy maestro, conducts this symphony of deception. He pledged fidelity to the plan, but now he waltzes with the devil. The $120,001-$180,000 bracket — gone. Poof! And the $45,000 earners? No tax cut for you! But fear not, the $200,000 crowd — the beneficiaries of this fiscal foxtrot — rejoice. A cool $9,075 in their pockets. Champagne all around!
So, my fellow taxpayers, brace yourselves. The tax tango continues, and Albanese leads the dance. But remember this: when promises crumble, when trust evaporates, it’s the hardworking Aussies who foot the bill. The music swells, the lights dim, and we watch — aghast — as ideology trumps pragmatism. The stage three tax cuts, once a beacon of hope, now waltz into uncertainty.
Anthony Albanese, the Pied Piper of politics, plays his tune. But we, the audience, must decide: applaud or demand an encore? The choice is ours, and the dance floor awaits.
Peta Credlin — Sky News presenter and former chief of staff to Tony Abbott

There was also a warning, which you never get reading the reptiles:

Evoking the spirit of a News Corp columnist’s aversion to facts, readers please note above that the information regarding stage three tax cuts is not accurate. It seems the AI introduces quite a few errors.

Fair's fair, the pond will leave the other two to subscribers - AI Rita's rant about Pat Cummins was a ripper, and the Bolter's raging at the right to disconnect made the pond feel it was in the presence of a ghost in the machine.

But enough of Arthur Koestler, it's a big day and best to get straight into it, and the pond defies any correspondent to provide proof that what follows wasn't AI generated.

First up though the pond must note that the reptiles have taken to feuding over Barners ...

Of all the things to feud and fuss over ...

Meanwhile, Dame Slap was out and about at the top of the digital edition ... and the pond's correspondents will have already been primed by that story in another place ...

"Infection" is the perfect word for Dame Slap. Everything she scribbles is "infected" or somehow "infects" someone somewhere and soon the virus is spreading like an AI disease.

Her rant today is the perfect example...

The pond is awake to the trick. It's an exceptionally cunning ploy by the reptiles to generate sympathy for Liberal leaders. 

The sight of a ravening harridan raging and devouring them all is like that Goya at the Prado ...

You see? Dame Slap is coming from it from a position familiar to devotees of Killer Creighton or perhaps RFK Jr.

Not content with that opening smirk shot, the reptiles doubled down, with a snap of shifty, furtive rats at play ...

Through the piece came another smirk, and a couple of snaps to remind people of a couple of nonentities too easily forgotten even by the reptiles' loyal readership ...

Speaking of snaps, the pond wonders where they got that one of Dame Slap in that story ...

The pond had to do a double take - it was so unlike the carefully curated snaps routinely seen in the lizard Oz ...

Never mind, the pond has never gone there - followed the Dame down the Lehrmann matter rabbit hole - as the pond began to wonder if she could scribble anything these days without a descent into the rabbit hole.

Not to worry, no pictorial interruption could stop this AI bot in full raging rant,:

Ah, there's the problem. Dame Slap has been sneaking off to watch the ABC, always a tricky proposition for the feeble-minded, and she protesteth too much. 

Clearly the cardigan wearers have had their way with her, and she's realised she's been a proponent of a hollow sham for years. It must be like the moment a Scientology recruit, having shovelled money into the beast, finally realises they can't levitate ... 

Yep, thar she blows, and the pond instantly regretted the indulgence. 

Full blown rabbit hole, and in Dame Slap's world, it's never the Lehrmann matter ... and remarkably she still thinks everyone should follow her there ...

No matter the subject matter, Dame Slap can always relied upon for sublime comedy, and the line that killed the pond was her self-description, "For lower-case liberals like me..."

That's roughly equivalent to Genghis Khan calling himself a hippie peacenik off with the greenie pixies ...

It was a relief to get to the final gobbet, and no doubt the pond should apologise for exposing the Dame Slap infection and her relentless rabbiting on about the Lehrmann matter ... but enough already, there's too much upper-case ranting for the pond to swallow ...

Once again blaming the victims? Is that why we end up with the News Corp commentators we don't deserve? Some very nasty people in that bunch, routinely nasty, because they know, in Frank's immortal words, how to nasty, nasty, nasty ...

Moving quickly along, with more AI to spot and as Killer has been mentioned, the pond should note that he,  or the ghost in the reptile machine, offered a tidbit serve of Niall this day ...

Usually when "woke" is featured in the headline, the pond reverts to that cartoon ...

But stay with the pond on this, there'll be a Killer line, and it won't just be Killer celebrating genocide in Gaza with the prof ...

Meanwhile, on another planet, in Haaretz, Amira Hass was scribbling ... If the Israeli Army Invades Rafah, What Will Be of More Than 1.5 Million Palestinians Who Take Shelter There? (paywall)

In part ...

...Although it's difficult, we must imagine what awaits the Palestinians in Rafah if the army's plan is carried out. We must do so not so much as of humanist and moral considerations, which after October 7 aren't that relevant to the majority of the Israeli-Jewish public, but because of the military, humanitarian, and – eventually – legal and political entanglements that are surely expected if we go down that road.

The compression

Even if "only" about a million Palestinians will flee for the third and fourth time into Al-Mawasi – an area which is already full of displaced Gazans – the density will be about 62,500 people per square kilometer (about 157,000 people per square mile).

This will happen in an open area with no skyscrapers to house the refugees, that has no running water, no privacy, no means of living, no hospitals or medical clinics, no solar panels to charge phones, and all while aid organizations will have to cross through or near battle zones in order to distribute the small amounts of food that do enter the Gaza Strip.

It seems that the only position in which this narrow area could accommodate everyone would be if they're all standing or kneeling. Perhaps it'll be necessary to form special committees that will determine sleeping arrangements in shifts: a few thousand would lie down while the rest continue to stand awake. The buzzing of the drones above and below, the cries of babies born during the war and whose mothers have no milk or not enough of it – these will be the unnerving soundtrack.

From what we saw during the IDF's ground raids and the battles in Gaza City and Khan Yunis, it's clear that the ground operation in Rafah, if it eventually unfolds, will last many weeks. Does Israel believe that the ICJ will consider the compression of hundreds of thousands or a million Palestinians on a small piece of land a proper "measure" that prevents genocide?

The escape march

About 270 thousand Palestinians lived in the Rafah district before the war. The one-and-a-half million who are currently staying there suffer from hunger and malnutrition; they suffer from thirst, cold, diseases and spreading infections, from lice in their hair and skin rash; they suffer from physical and mental exhaustion and a chronic lack of sleep. They crowd in schools, hospitals and mosques, in tent neighborhoods that have sprung up in and around Rafah, and in apartments that house dozens of displaced families.

Tens of thousands of them are wounded, including those whose limbs were amputated due to the army's attacks or surgeries that followed. They all have relatives and friends – children, babies and elderly parents – who have been killed in the past four months.

The houses of most of them were destroyed or badly damaged. All their possessions are lost. Their money has run out due to the high and exorbitant food prices. Many escaped death only by chance, and witnessed the dreadful sights of dead bodies. They don't mourn the dead yet because the trauma continues. Along with displays of support and solidarity, disputes and fights also occur. Some lose their memory and sanity from all the suffering.

As it has done in other areas in the strip, to maintain the element of surprise, the IDF will issue a warning about two hours before a ground invasion into Rafah. This will give the residents a time window of a few hours that day to evacuate the city.

Imagine this convoy of refugees and the mass panic of people fleeing toward Al-Mawasi in the west. Think of the elders, the sick, the disabled and the wounded who will be "lucky" to be transported in donkey carts or makeshift wheelbarrows and in cars that run on cooking oil.

All the others – both sick and healthy – will have to leave on foot. They'll probably have to leave behind the little that they've managed to collect and take with them in previous displacements, like blankets and plastic sheets for shelter, warm clothes, some food and basic items such as small cookers.

This forced escape march will probably go through the ruins of some of the buildings that Israel bombed not long ago, or the craters created on the road due to the attacks. The whole convoy will then stand still until a detour is found. Someone is bound to trip; a cartwheel will get stuck in the mud. And all of them – hungry and thirsty, frightened by the imminent attack or the expected tank shelling – will continue going forward. Children will cry and get lost. People will feel bad. Medical teams will struggle to reach whoever needs care.

Only 4 kilometers (about 2.4 miles) separate Rafah from Al-Mawasi, but it'll require several hours to cross. The people marching will be cut off from any communication, if only because of the packed convoy and the overcrowding. They'll fight over the area where they wish to set up a tent. They'll fight over who gets to be closest to a building or a water well. They'll faint due to thirst and hunger.

The following image will repeat itself several times over the next few days: A march of starving and frightened Palestinians starts fleeing in panic each time the IDF announces another area whose residents are supposed to evacuate, while the tanks and infantry troops advance toward them. The shelling and ground troops will get closer to the hospitals that are still functioning. Tanks will surround them, and all the patients and medical teams will be required to evacuate to the crowded Al-Mawasi area.

The ground operation

It's hard to know how many of them will decide not to leave. As we learned from what happened in the northern Gaza districts and Khan Yunis, a significant number of residents prefer to stay in an area that is destined for a ground operation. Among them will be tens of thousands of displaced, sick and seriously wounded Gazans who are hospitalized, pregnant women and others who will decide to stay in their own homes and the homes of their relatives or in schools turned into shelters. The little information they will get from the concentration area of Al-Mawasi is enough to discourage them from joining.

IDF soldiers and commanders, however, interpret the evacuation order differently: anyone who remains in an area designated for ground invasion isn't considered an innocent civilian; they aren't considered "uninvolved."

Anyone who stays in their homes and goes out to fetch water from a city facility that is still operating or from some private well, medical teams called to treat a patient, a pregnant woman walking to a nearby hospital to give birth – all of them, as we saw during the war and in past military campaigns, are criminalized in the eyes of the soldiers. Shooting and killing them follows the IDF's rules of engagement.

According to the army, such shootings are carried out in accordance with international law because these individuals were warned that they must leave. Even when soldiers break into houses during the fighting, Gazans, mainly men, are at risk of death from gunfire. A soldier shooting someone because they felt threatened or followed an order – it doesn't matter. It happened in Gaza City, and it might happen in Rafah.

Just as the aid teams aren't authorized or are unable to reach the northern Gaza Strip to distribute food, they won't be able to distribute it in the fighting areas in Rafah. The little food that the residents managed to save will gradually run out.

Those who remain in their homes will be forced to choose the lesser of two evils: either they go out and risk Israeli fire or starve at home. Most of them already suffer from a severe lack of nutrients. In many families, adults are giving up food so that their children can be fed. There's a real danger that many will starve to death while in their home as the fighting rages outside.

The bombings

Since the war started, the army bombarded residential buildings, open areas and passenger cars in every location it had defined as "safe" (that its residents weren't required to leave). It doesn't matter if the attacks target Hamas facilities, the group's officials or other members who were staying with their families or have come out of hiding to visit them – civilians are almost always killed.

The bombings didn't stop in Rafah either. Overnight into Thursday, two houses were bombed in the western Rafah neighborhood of Tel al-Sultan. According to Palestinian sources, 14 people were killed, including five children.

The sources also said that a mother and daughter were killed in an Israeli attack on a house in northern Rafah on February 7 and that a journalist was killed together with his mother and sister in western Rafah the day before. Also on February 6, the sources added, six Palestinian police officers were killed in an Israeli attack while they were securing an aid truck in eastern Rafah.

These attacks indicate that the so-called collateral damage calculations approved by IDF legal experts and the State Prosecutor's Office are extremely permissive. The number of uninvolved Palestinians that it is "permitted" to kill in return for hitting an army's target is higher than in any previous war.

People in Rafah are afraid that the IDF will apply these permissive criteria also in Al-Mawasi, and attack there as well if a target is in the area, among the hundreds of thousands who take shelter. This is how an announced safe haven will become a death trap for hundreds of thousands.

Sorry, the pond promised a Killer joke, always a bit tricky when confronted with genocide, but here it is ...

The idea's to confront anti-Semitism and Uncle Elon is at the head of the STEM pack?

Oh and there's a Killer infallible Pope this day ...

You have to have a Killer sense of humour and a Killer capacity for genocide when reading the lizard Oz, and a Killer capacity to deal with boredom, especially when the pond finishes off with a serve of nattering "Ned" ...

"Ned" is apparently completely unaware that right at this moment his kissing cousins at Faux Noise are conspiring to serve up another four years of the tangerine tyrant ... their gift to the world and to Vlad the impaler ....

With that level of oblivion, "Ned" almost reaches nirvana ...

At this point the reptiles offered a snap of the mango Mussolini's beloved ...

.

...but while "Ned" rabbits on, the true spirit of the GOP, and Faux Noise, can be found in the exiled Tuckyo ...

Cue pleasant further reading, Cathy Young in The Bulwark on Tuckyo, What Russians Think of Tucker Carlson’s Kiss-up Sitdown with Putin, with a sample to whet the appetite for the full treat at the end of the link:

...For dissident (mostly expatriate) Russian commentators such as Russian-American journalist Michael Nacke and political strategist Stanislav Belkovsky, the fawning reception accorded Carlson in Moscow—a “parade of servility,” in the words of opposition activist Liubov Sobol—became an occasion for scathing mockery before the interview had even aired. Nacke, who compared the official Russian media to the stereotypes of deferential natives bowing before a visiting colonial overlord, noted that even some pro-Kremlin “milbloggers” were put off by the undignified display. Dignity aside, Nacke and others pointed out a fundamental paradox of the Putin regime’s anti-Western and anti-American stance: While the West and especially the United States are routinely portrayed as the epitome of evil and moral corruption, any sign of positive attention and approval from a Westerner is treated as a great honor.

Since Russian and Ukrainian pundits have varying degrees of acquaintance with Carlson’s career, they had a wide range of reactions to Carlson himself. Ukrainian journalist Roman Tsimbalyuk expressed surprise that someone with such a shallow and scrambled understanding of what is happening in Russia and Ukraine could have been a top-level host at Fox News for so many years. (Oh, you sweet summer child.) Political scientist and former Kremlin strategist Abbas Galyamov was certain that Carlson must have received a hefty payoff from the Kremlin for the Putin interview. Otherwise, he asserted, there’s no way the American journalist would have risked his reputation by participating in such a shameful spectacle. (Risked his what?) Galyamov cited an “experienced” friend back in Russia who speculated that the fee must have been at least five million—rubles or dollars, he didn’t clarify—and then upped it to ten million after watching the interview, perhaps because the ordeal of listening to Professor Putin’s Russian history course was worth at least that much.

Meanwhile, for Andrei Kozyrev, the Yeltsin-era Russian foreign minister, the fact that Putin was reduced to choosing a Fox News reject and dishonest propagandist like Carlson for his vehicle was a sign of how low the Kremlin had sunk in international estimation. Kozyrev speculated that no respectable journalist, even a right-wing one, would have touched such an assignment with a ten-foot pole because “everyone understands what Putin is.” (Not quite; it’s more that Carlson was the one journalist the Kremlin perceived as friendly enough to be trusted with such a chat.) Kozyrev memorably characterized the Carlson/Putin conversation as a “meeting of outcasts.”

Putin’s deep dive into Russian and Ukrainian history—the “30 seconds”-turned-25 minutes, complete with a folder of supporting documents translated from Old Church Slavonic—occasioned as much derision in the independent Russian media as they did in the United States. It was “very irresponsible” of Putin to start in the ninth century and not in the Mesozoic era, with the separation of continents and the descent of man, quipped journalist Maria Pevchikh. Others said Carlson’s face as Putin spoke looked like that of someone stuck on a long train trip next to a slightly looney fellow passenger who just won’t shut up. But there was also some serious discussion of the distortions in Putin’s version of history. Alexei Venediktov, the former editor-in-chief of Ekho Moskvy radio, pointed out that while seventeenth-century Ukrainian Cossack warlord Bohdan Khmelnytsky really did petition the Russian tsar to take Ukraine under his protection—as per those documents in Putin’s folder—the wily Khmelnytsky conducted similar negotiations with the king of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Turkish sultan, playing them against each other for a better deal. In other words: there should have been two more folders for full context.

But most independent commentators, both Russian and Ukrainian, were more interested in a much more recent part of Putin’s trip down false memory lane: the claim that Poland started World War II by provoking Adolf Hitler into an invasion. This bizarre and victim-blaming version of history smacks unmistakably of Nazi apologetics; indeed, an opposition politician in Russia has already sent a complaint to the Russian Investigative Committee asking that Putin be charged with “rehabilitation of Nazism.” (Of course, we all know that the complainer is far more likely to be in trouble than Putin himself.) The parallel to Putin’s claim that he was left with no choice but to invade Ukraine is obvious.

It's more fun than reading "Ned", oblivious to the way that the fox is already in the News Corp hen house ...

There you go, there's the spineless old jellyback, ready to sell the planet short to get along ... and to top it off the reptiles offered one of their comical snaps ...

The pond would have preferred a cartoon ....

Meanwhile, doddery old "Ned" is getting on with the business of doing business with the monster under the bed ...

Yep, in "Ned's" world you just play along ... but then he sold his soul to the Emeritus Chairman a long time ago, so why expect him have an anxiety attack about playing along ...

Cue a snap of Malware playing along ...

And so this is "Ned's" official line. Bow down and suck up ... not for the pleasure, but for the duty of smiling while being right royally screwed by a man a jury convincingly found was a rapist ...

And there you have the advice of a doddery old hack so steeped in corrupt toadyism that he can't see the Dorian Gray lurking behind the mirror.

If that's what's on offer, the pond has to hold out hope that in the war between the old duffers, one old duffer defies News Corp and Faux Noise and takes home the bacon ...