That's it? A serve of "Ned" asking questions? What, no Barners? No Uncle Elon? Where's the laffin', reptiles of Oz?

 

The pond woke up late, chilly and grumpy, and nothing in the lizard Oz helped ... there was absolutely nothing of interest, no Uncle Elon carrying on like a ratbag, the current US kerfuffle disappeared, Ukraine merely a dream, the Gaza genocide removed from the top of the page...

All the pond was left with was a serve of nattering "Ned", Dame Slap rabbiting on about Aboriginal leadership, and the Prof, JC, in a state of ecstasy about the Olympics ...

Luckily Francesca Ebel and Mary Ilyushina had provided the pond with a dose of culture yesterday in WaPo in Artists say Putin’s push for patriotism is killing Russian culture (paywall):

MOSCOW — Not even the famed Bolshoi Theater has been spared President Vladimir Putin’s wartime push for Russian culture to prioritize patriotism over artistic freedom.
Several Bolshoi stars have fled the country. The theater no long tours in Europe and America. And its longtime director resigned last year and was replaced with a staunch Putin loyalist, after publicly admitting that its repertoire was censored to remove works by directors or choreographers who criticized the Ukraine invasion.
The Bolshoi is hardly the only iconic Russian institution under pressure. The longtime directors of Moscow’s Tretyakov and Pushkin fine art museums were also replaced.
Musicians, actors and writers who oppose the war are being hounded into exile or driven underground — while artists remaining in Russia are compelled by the government to echo a new nationalist zeal in their work. Those who actively voice support for the war are rewarded with fame and fortune. Movies or music glorifying the army or upholding patriotic values receive hefty government subsidies.
President Vladimir Putin’s push to re-engineer his country as a militarized superpower in conflict with liberal Western values is sterilizing Russia’s once-vibrant cultural landscape, artists say. By demanding that the new turbocharged patriotism pervade everything from fine art exhibits to rap music to ballet performances, the Kremlin is stifling creativity and squashing free expression.
The changes represent the starkest shift since the 1930s, when the Soviet Union, under Joseph Stalin, adopted socialist realism as its official cultural doctrine — requiring artists to depict and promote Marxist-Leninist ideals in every form of their work.
“I am afraid what we are witnessing now may be the end of Russia as we have known it, the end of the cultural phenomenon that is associated with the term ‘Russian culture,’” the acclaimed Russian detective novelist Grigory Chkhartishvili — better known by his pen name, Boris Akunin — said in an interview from London, where he now lives.
A prominent theater critic said that a Soviet relic — the assignment of a curator from the KGB to control what gets onstage — has made a comeback, and major theaters now have minders from the FSB, the KGB’s main successor.
A department within Russia’s Interior Ministry, known as Center E — named for its official task of countering extremism — plays a crucial role in the state’s control over the arts and often sends agents to sit among spectators at performances, according to musicians and directors.
At the Bolshoi, home to the storied ballet company, the longtime director, Vladimir Urin, was replaced by Valery Gergiev, a Putin loyalist who also runs the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. Urin had supported Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014 but signed a petition opposing the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Gergiev, by contrast, has long been an unequivocal supporter of Putin and had an engagement at La Scala in Milan cut short when he refused to condemn the war.

And so on, and the pond knew this despicable Gergiev character as the man who ostentatiously, and pretentiously, conducted orchestras with a toothpick ...

Yet again "Weird", the word of the week and possibly the month ...but enough pleasure, needs must, and so it was off to "Ned" for a bit of domesticity designed to induce a power nap ...

Amazingly "Ned" will offer up this rumination without a single mention of Barners ... yet the lad has been in astonishing form ...

The pond would have been better off reading John Hanscombe in yesterday's Canberra Times' The Echidna newsletter...

To borrow a few of Mr Hanscombe's insights before continuing to purge with "Ned" ...

Barnaby is sorry. Sorry for using a terrible analogy at an anti-wind turbine rally in the Illawarra on the weekend. Sorry for likening votes to bullets, ballot boxes to magazines. Sorry for comparing the democratic act of voting to loading a gun and shooting it to be rid of three senior members of the government.

But he's not sorry for the bizarre turn of phrase he used after trying to deflect criticism of his heated rhetoric on morning TV before turning on wind farms: "It is like saying the fertilising capacity and the beauty of dog turd on your lawn in the middle of the morning works as well ... absolutely disgusting. Nobody wants them."

There's colourful language and there's incomprehensible language. Barnaby does a roaring trade in both. And that begs two questions. After so many years - so many faux pas, scandals and drunken misadventures - why is he still in parliament? And why is is he still on the frontbench, even in opposition?

To answer the first question, one has to assume the people of New England love him and are prepared to forgive the embarrassment he must rain down on the electorate. You can imagine them in the pub after the planter box incident: "Yes, he's Barnaby, but he's our Barnaby." And, of course, voters have every right to elect - and re-elect - the yokel of their choosing.

The second question is a little more complicated. It might seem counter-intuitive for the Coalition to keep Barnaby on the frontbench where his frequent naps and apparent disinterest are highly visible. But keeping him there means he can't make mischief on the backbench, where in an attack of relevance deprivation syndrome while unsupervised he might launch a plot to unseat the current Nationals leader David Littleproud.

The decision to keep Barnaby front and centre is entirely up to the Coalition but the rest of us should be worried. What happens if the Coalition wins government next year? Even the remote possibility Barnaby might once again become a minister should send a shudder down any spine still attached to a brain.

Even sober - as he reportedly has been since the planter box episode - Barnaby still suffers from acute foot in mouth disease. Trying to cosplay as a friend of the environment by opposing wind and solar farms, while using violent analogies about guns and ballot boxes, was bound to get him into trouble. Bound also to see him once again saying sorry for his stream of unconsciousness that came out as words.

By way of contrast, the reptiles did the usual trick of inflating "Ned's" piece with assorted snaps, shrunk here to a more decent and fitting size ...

Then it was on with enduring the unendurable ...

Speaking of the onion muncher, he'd been out and about in his usual way ...

If only he'd stayed in Hungary worshipping Viktor Orbán or perhaps dining in little England with Nigel, but instead he poked his fingers in some local pies ...

How the keen Kean sticks in the guts of the old climate science denialist mob ...

There was a snap as usual ...

...and then in the final line the real level of delusion became apparent ...

Cold on nuking the country to save the planet? Naturally he can't be a member of the cult.

Sorry, the pond took an elaborate side tour there, an enormous leap to the right, but be calm, "Ned" is still here, still rabbiting on in his very unique way ...

The pond is lucky that it kept a few infallible Popes to hand in the case of a dire emergency, and this one will do ...

Poor Gladys, poor pond, still trapped with "Ned" and not a washing machine or clothesline in sight ...

Sheesh, memories of Gough, ancient times from an ancient reptile living in the land of lost past glories.

It was lucky the pond had this clip of Barners (left over from before the journos went on strike) which could help celebrate real leadership ...

Now that's entertainment, sadly lacking in "Ned's" tiresome and tiring piece ...

Oh sheesh, more of the JAQ routine, and yet not a single question about the nuking of the country to save the planet ... what a relief to reach the end ...

"Ned" asks about capturing the imagination, but all he captured was the numbing sense of being trapped in the members' bar with an epic bore ... memo to "Ned", you need to weird it up a little.

Luckily the pond had kept another infallible Pope to help wash the taste from the mouth ...

As for the rest, the pond decided to call it quits early ... the Prof sounded like Leni Riefenstahl on a bad hair day ...

If the pond wanted a serve of this sort of nonsense, it would head off to watch Olympia, available in various versions on YouTube.

It started with all the usual pieties and shots of tastefully nude Germanic bodies ...

Spoiler and nausea alert, the Prof emeritus kept up his dribbling and drivelling to the bitter end, showing an inclination to devour sentimental movies ...

It goes without saying that the Olympics is a deeply corrupt business, wandering around the globe, looting countries and leaving little but medals and waste behind ...

If you want to celebrate sport, try some of the world championships that are held outside that corrupt body, that band of international pirates, or at least celebrate the merde in the Seine ...

And that's it for the day. Sorry, no Uncle Elon, no low comedy, though there was plenty to hand ...

Back in the day, uncle Elon was some kind of extinctionist himself ...Elon Musk: we must colonise Mars to preserve our species in a third world war

Humans must prioritise the colonisation of Mars so the species can be conserved in the event of a third world war, SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk said on Sunday.

“It’s important to get a self-sustaining base on Mars because it’s far enough away from earth that [in the event of a war] it’s more likely to survive than a moon base,” Musk said on stage at SXSW – just days after Donald Trump announced plans to meet the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, in an attempt to defuse rising nuclear tension.

“If there’s a third world war we want to make sure there’s enough of a seed of human civilisation somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark ages,” Musk said, responding to questions from his friend Jonah Nolan, the co-creator of the TV show Westworld...

...Musk said he was now kept awake at night by the threat posed by unregulated artificial intelligence, which he has previously warned could lead humanity into a third world war – another the reason to go to Mars.

“Mark my words,” he said, “AI is much more dangerous than nukes. So why do we have no regulatory oversight?”

He suggested a public regulatory body would need “insight and oversight” to confirm that everyone was developing AI safely and in a way that is “symbiotic with humanity”.

However, even coming up with the safety parameters would present all sorts of insidious and unexpected risks, Musk said. If the utility function of artificial intelligence is to maximise happiness of humans, a super-intelligent AI might decide that the best way to do that is to capture all humans and inject their brains with dopamine and serotonin.

Musk proposed that digital intelligence should instead be directed to maximise “the freedom of action of humanity”.

The Q&A session ended on a surreal note as Musk, his younger brother Kimbal and Nolan all donned stetsons and sang a snippet of My Little Buttercup, a song from the 1986 movie The Three Amigos.

“This is going to be real bad,” warned Musk. He was right.

And now here we are ...Elon Musk defends posting a deepfake video of Kamala Harris with a vulgar dig

You see "Ned"? This is how to do weird ... Elon Musk Attacks Gavin Newsom in Phallic Online Rant: ‘Deeznutz’

And so on and on, endlessly on ... and all the pond could do was end mourning what was missing this day in the lizard Oz headlines ...