In which the pond fails to elevate its Sunday meditation, but for that, prattling Polonius, the Angelic one and Dame Slap should take some of the credit ...

 

The pond realises it had promised a triple treat for this meditative Sunday, which only goes to show that you need to read more than the headers in the lizard Oz if you want to live up to a promise.

First up, the dog botherer had to go. 

He delivered a rant about immigration, but there's no point in turning to him for insights about a sensible immigration policy. That would be like asking him to offer a way forward for climate science. 

If the pond wants hysterical raving about criminals and rapists and furriners flooding and floating the country with vermin and disease, it will stick to Dame Groan delivering a dinkum groaning ...

What was left began to look distinctly tattered, threadbare and worn. A Polonial prattle, the Angelic one, and Dame Slap? 

It was like the pea trick, with the trick not to have a pea under the walnut shells. 

Worse, in terms of content, they all verged towards singularity, and we all know what happens then ...AI takes over.

At least that gives the pond a chance to reference a few scribbles about AI before tending to the reptiles.

This effort by nerdish Melburnian Nikhil Suresh runs way too long, so this is just a teaser trailer...

..And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper's robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet's engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn't worked out how to test database backups regularly. This is why I have to visit untold violence upon the next moron to propose that AI is the future of the business - not because this is impossible in principle, but because they are now indistinguishable from a hundred million willful fucking idiots.
II. But We Need AI To Remain Comp-
Sweet merciful Jesus, stop talking. Unless you are one of a tiny handful of businesses who know exactly what they're going to use AI for, you do not need AI for anything - or rather, you do not need to do anything to reap the benefits. Artificial intelligence, as it exists and is useful now, is probably already baked into your businesses software supply chain. Your managed security provider is probably using some algorithms baked up in a lab software to detect anomalous traffic, and here's a secret, they didn't do much AI work either, they bought software from the tiny sector of the market that actually does need to do employ data scientists. I know you want to be the next Steve Jobs, and this requires you to get on stages and talk about your innovative prowess, but none of this will allow you to pull off a turtle neck, and even if it did, you would need to replace your sweaters with fullplate to survive my onslaught.

And then there was this from Helen Beetham a few weeks ago giving Tony Bleagh a hard time. 

Again it's lengthy and so there's only room for a teaser trailer ...(the pond liked it so well, it left a comment) ...

...It’s an open secret that the Tony Blair Institute for Global Governance (TBI) has been advising Starmer for years, and its 1000-odd staff will be filling key advisory roles in his government. TBI’s relentlessly millennial vibe is technology on drum and privatisation on bass, with backing vocals from a band of states with dodgy human rights records, and Larry Ellison (tech billionaire) on the decks. So it’s no surprise to hear Blair crooning for Starmer to feel ‘the full embrace of the potential of technology’. AI is ‘the only game changer’ that will ‘turbo charge growth’ and ‘save the government tens of billions of pounds’. That’s a bold prediction when there is growing scepticism from investors and push-back from almost every commercial sector against the hype around AI productivity. But the public sector has always been a place for big tech to find acceptance when the commercial world turns harsh and judgy.

Specifically, Blair proposes to use AI to ‘cut workforce time’ by 20% across the board, amounting to around 1.15 million public sector jobs by the end of the next parliament. Expected redundancy payments of £24billion will be offset by an AI productivity bonanza, and if trade unions are pushing back against these proposals, it is surely a sign that they must be on the right track. Working with Faculty AI (spoiler alert - Faculty will appear more than once in this piece), TBI analysed roles in the Department for Work and Pensions and estimated that over 40% of tasks here could be automated. Ironically or not, ChatGPT was used in the task analysis. DWP is twice as nice for AI, it seems, because so much of its work is ‘citizen-facing interactions’, and because pensioners, people with disabilities, and people in situations of desperation and poverty are especially keen to talk with chatbots about their circumstances. (TBI/Faculty admit that the study was theoretical and did not actually interface with any public servants or service users).

Enough already with the geeky nerd talk, it was time for the pond to admit its Sunday failure, with Polonius leading the way with his prattle, and the only real interest when the ABC might enter the yarn ...

Why are the sinister, invidious left always sneering in Polonius's pieces? 

Couldn't they sometimes be snivelling? Or snickering with vorpal blades? Or sniggering? Or scoffing? And if you get tired of an abundant use of "s", perhaps belittling, deriding, jeering, disparaging or disdaining...

There's something deeply weird about Polonius in his tired old age hopping on the 'leets, intelligentsia bandwagon, and bemoaning the fate Western Civilisation ...

And yet here we are, a tired rehashing of the Ughmann's appearance yesterday, albeit with a slightly different illustration ...

The pond left that full size not because it showed how innocuous it all was, but because of that credit, Picture: X.

As the pond remembers it, X isn't an actual source of snaps of the iStock kind. 

What the credit meant was that a desperate, poverty stricken lizard Oz graphics department had headed off to X, found a tweet (yes, the pond still thinks of tweets, rather than xeets), found a picture, and downloaded it ... like any other form of desperate, philandering social media ...

There was a credit for the other snap, and a video to serve as a distraction ...

That left no room for a river sewer joke for Melburnians ...

Then it was on with Polonius doing a pursed lip routine.

You know, "various performers in various stages of undress..."

Really? Since when has Polonius been channeling Mary Whitehouse ... and yet here he is ...

Oh FFS, "a sneer at Western Civilisation"?

Not that the pond bothered to watch, but talk about an hysterical beat up.

Then it all became clear. Polonius had been allowed to leave the reservation and had fallen in with the likes of Covid hysteric Dennis Prager and The Daily Signal, kissing cousin spawn of the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 ...

More interesting was when the ABC would enter the Polonial picture ...

Say what? There was once a degree of diversity in the ABC? When did this long lost golden era actually exist?

According to Polonius way back in 2012...

...when Pell is involved, however indirectly, in a controversy about sexual abuse or any other scandal, there is a tendency to depict him as managing director of Australian Catholicism, responsible for all its sins of commission and omission.

This is not the case - as ABC producers and presenters should know. The formal head of the church is the president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference - Archbishop Denis Hart.

Pell should never have appeared in the Four Corners program "Unholy Silence", by Geoff Thompson and Mary Ann Jolley, which aired on ABC1 on July 2. These days the ABC should be regarded as hostile territory for Catholics who follow the teachings of the Vatican. The ABC is replete with disillusioned current or former Catholics. Also, it provides a cheer squad for the same-sex marriage cause, which is opposed by the Catholic Church - along with some other Christian churches, Islam and the majority of Hindus.

Ah well, there's diversity and then there's memories, and then there's Dawkins, showing the fundamentalist streak which allows Marxists to turn capitalist and vice versa ...

Speaking personally, as we must do when entering these troubled waters,  the pond doesn't mock Xianity as part of the Judeo-Christian tradition on the basis of a left-driven alienation from society.

The pond is perfectly happy to celebrate a pagan Xmas, complete with Santa Claus and stockings and pine trees (preferably cheap fakes with cheap trinkets) and all the other signs that the Roman Saturnalia is alive and well, and as for Ēostre, the pond doesn't mind participating in pagan fertility rites, provided they come these days in the form of chocolate eggs ...

Who knew that Polonius had such a deeply ingrained Pecksniffian attitude to the world?

“'Playful -- playful warbler,' said Mr Pecksniff. It may be observed in connection with his calling his daughter a 'warbler,' that she was not at all vocal, but that Mr Pecksniff was in the frequent habit of using any word that occurred to him as having a good sound, and rounding a sentence well without much care for its meaning, such bemoaning the fate of Western civilisation and the suffering of French taxpayers to the applause of the fiendish left intelligentsia from Australia. And he did this so boldly, and in such an imposing manner, that he would sometimes stagger the wisest people with his eloquence, and make them gasp again.”

And after that gasping, it was time to gasp again with the Angelic one, with the topic the same, because ... reptile singularity ...

Not Dawkins again, and even worse, not Uncle Elon, and yet worse again, with cat man JD.

Of all the people to hitch bandwagons to, but that's the way it goes with the Angelic one ...

Things are getting really weird ...

...Trump, in perhaps his most insistent defense yet, said at least four times in the next minute that Democrats are weird.

“Well, they’re the weird ones,” he said, before once again criticizing Harris’ laugh. “That’s a weird deal going on there. They’re the weird ones. Nobody’s ever called me weird. I’m a lot of things, but weird I’m not. And I’m upfront. And he’s not either, I will tell you. J.D. is not at all. They are.

“I mean, who wants to have open borders where prisoners—that’s weird—where prisoners and where mental institution patients are taken out of hospital and jails and they’re let into our country. That’s weird,” he said, without examples or evidence, before attributing other things to Democrats that he believes are “weird.”

Trump then blamed the media for reporting on Harris and her campaign’s messaging. “You notice the evening news, every one of them, you know, they introduced the word ‘weird,”’ and all of a sudden they’re talking about ‘weird,’” he griped. “No, we’re not weird people. We’re actually just the opposite. We’re right down the middle.”

The Harris campaign jumped on Trump’s defense shortly after. “Trump (who is weird): They’re the weird ones! Nobody’s ever called me weird. I’m a lot of things, but weird I’m not. And JD Vance is not either,” it wrote on X, along with a clip of the former president’s comments. (Daily Beast paywall)

How weird, though very much on the weird Angelic one's family turf ...

...In November 2020, Vance said on a conservative podcast that childless Americans, especially those in the country’s “leadership class,” were “more sociopathic” than those with children and made the country “less mentally stable.” Vance added that the “most deranged” and “most psychotic” commentators on Twitter – now known as X - were typically childless.

In August 2021, one month after launching his candidacy for the Senate, Vance’s campaign sent fundraising emails referring to the “radical childless leaders in this country” following his appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” where he made comments deriding “childless cat ladies” and leaders running the country. The comments sparked a widespread backlash against Vance when they resurfaced on social media following his nomination to the Republican presidential ticket.

Vance later tried to clean up his comments on Megyn Kelly’s podcast last week. “Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. I’ve got nothing against cats,” said Vance, adding that his remarks were not about criticizing people without children, but rather focused on policy and claimed the Democratic Party has become “anti-family” and “anti-child.”

A CNN KFile analysis found several examples over the course of a few years of Vance saying similarly disparaging things when talking about people without children — usually while targeting Democratic officials.

“There are just these basic cadences of life that I think are really powerful and really valuable when you have kids in your life,” Vance said in November 2020 on a conservative podcast. “And the fact that so many people, especially in America’s leadership class, just don’t have that in their lives.”

“You know, I worry that it makes people more sociopathic and ultimately our whole country a little bit less, less mentally stable,” he said. “And of course, you talk about going on Twitter – final point I’ll make is you go on Twitter and almost always the people who are most deranged and most psychotic are people who don’t have kids at home.” (CNN)

Super Weird ...

In remarks to a Catholic group, JD Vance attacked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for having “a sociopathic attitude” about families and children.

“One of the politicians that I criticised is AOC,” said Vance in 2021, while campaigning for the US Senate seat in Ohio he would win the following year.

“Maybe AOC hasn’t found the right person, whatever the case may be. AOC has said basically – if you look at her public remarks on this – that it’s immoral to have children because of climate change concerns. Right? This is, let’s just be direct, a sociopathic attitude towards family.”...

...Vance, who now has three children, spoke in 2021 to the Napa Institute, a Catholic group that seeks to “advance the re-evangelisation of the United States”.

“My basic view,” Vance said, “is that if the Republican party, the conservative movement stands for anything … the number one thing we should be is pro-babies and pro-families.”

Claiming “a civilisational crisis” fueled by unhappy families and “healthy intact families … not having any kids”, he said: “So many of the most miserable and unhappy people in our media and in our public life are people without kids.

“And I think that they were trained to chase credentials, to chase degrees, to chase money, when the thing that is ultimately going to give you the most fulfillment in life is your family.”

Vance said he did not want to “criticise every single person who doesn’t have children”. His goal, he said, was to point out “that it’s one thing to have a society where some people don’t have kids. It’s another thing to build an entire political movement that is explicitly anti-child and anti-family. And that’s what the left in this country is. It is anti-child and anti-family.”

After attacking AOC, he said: “What does it say about our civilisation that so many of our leaders don’t have kids? What does it say about the incentives that are built into the Democrats’ entire movement that they reward the young people who don’t have families instead of the young people who do?

“I think it’s just pretty sick … and it suggests something pretty broken.”Ocasio-Cortez did not immediately respond. But Mother Jones pointed to a social media post earlier this week, in response to a complaint from the Trump ally Vivek Ramaswamy about attacks on Vance and Trump for being “weird” about women, families and children.

“Being obsessed with repressing women is goofy,” AOC said. “Trying to watch what LGBTQ+ people do all the time is abnormal. Punishing people who don’t have biological offspring is creepy … it’s SUPER weird. And people need to know.”(Graudian)

Difficult question. Is the Angelic one just deeply weird, or creepy and Super Weird?

On the evidence that the Angelic believes god is in a gluten-laden wafer (She shape shifts into a cat to do it), and that cannibals should devour real human flesh and swallow real human blood on a Sunday while singing and chanting in Latin, the pond suggests she's Super Weird.

Almost as weird as seeing a JD re-xing the Super Wired (as well as Weird) Don Jr....

There was a little more weirdness to go, with the Angelic one all in on Vance and his sociopathic tendency to discover the sociopath in others ...

Indeed, indeed, where will it all end?

Luckily there was just a short gobbet of weirdness to go ...

Where will it all end, this endless weirdness? It was too hard for Tom Tomorrow ...

And so eventually to Dame Slap, and for those terrified that it was going to be exactly the same weirdness as everyone else, relax, Dame Slap was using it as a bait and switch, and would move on to other things.

But why wouldn't she use it as a bait? The reptiles are endlessly fascinated by cross dressers and drag acts and frock devotees....

Why that's less weird in the eyes of the reptiles must remain a deep mystery. (What Christ would make of it also stays a mystery, since the long absent lord has never returned to file some new comments).

Whatever, there's nothing like lesser weird drag acts to get the reptiles going ... and Dame Slap is all in on the notion ...

You see? It was just a bit of drag bait and switch, and there were snaps too ...

Naturally the ABC copped a Dame Slapping, but it's odd that when the Dame gave SBS a slap, she went to the old trope of foreign movies ...

Really? Everyone knows the main channel is for Nazi docs, and that elsewhere you can find NITV, one of the few outings for Aboriginal voices available in the country. (Not many can tune in to CAAMA). 

The pond doesn't expect Dame Slap to have the slightest interest in pesky, difficult, uppity blacks, but it's as good a reason for SBS to be funded as any the pond can think of ...

But then why is the pond surprised that Dame Slap is just doing one of her usual bigot routines. What else to expect from a bigot?

Sure, she'll blather on about Noel Pearson and indigenous people and migrants and all that, but watch NITV for an hour? Not on your Slappian nelly ...

Pardon Dame Slap's ignorance. The dignity of the individual has been around for a long time in all kinds of manifestations ...

A universal or formal claim to human dignity is absent from Homer and later Greek literature. Indeed, the period lacks the language to support a formal claim. Notwithstanding this assertion, it would be a mistake to dismiss the overwhelming evidence suggesting that the substance of a concept of dignity existed in Homeric and later Greece. Dignity is a concept similar to what Orlando Patterson argues regarding "freedom," in Freedom in the Making of Western Civilization: it is a widespread human value that does not have to be articulated, argued for, or formalized until extensive threats to it appear, along with the possibility of its loss. Interactions between and among Homeric characters support a deep awe and reverence that raises individuals above a price, whether they be slave or free, and this treatment extends to animals and nature in Homer, as the evidence shows. (Abstract for an Oxford book)

Enough hole in the bucket man stuff. 

We all know where this is heading ... per The Conversation ...

Australia’s population is more diverse than ever. The latest ABS Census data shows just 54% of Australians now claim an Anglo-Celtic background. Around 25% have a non-European background, 18% have a European background, and 3% have an Indigenous background.

Yet new research from the University of Sydney, UTS Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research, and Media Diversity Australia confirms the journalist workforce remains overwhelmingly Anglo-Celtic and white. The research found that almost 80% of television news and current affairs presenters on the major free-to-air networks are Anglo-Celtic. Likewise, 78% of senior network news editors are Anglo-Celtic. Just 1.3% of on-air talent on commercial networks are from a non-European background.

Yep, that'd be right ...

So it goes...

The pond's only regret? For once Dame Slap didn't begin to rabbit on endlessly about judicial activism. 

The pond had a few cartoons on the subject. Ah, what the heck, toujours gai Archy, just do it, do it live ...

Luckily there was just two gobbets of blather about the dangers of cultural relativism to go ...

Meanwhile, the genocide continues ... while Haaretz is the one source worth reading if you happen to think there are bigger issues than a bit of lamination ...

Israeli Defense Chiefs Believe Netanyahu Isn't Interested in Gaza Deal, Top Official Says (paywall)

Senior member of Israel's negotiating team describes 'a chasm' between Netanyahu and top defense officials over the hostage deal; TV report quotes heated exchange in which PM accused them of being too 'soft'

Israeli defense chiefs believe Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not interested in a hostage deal/cease-fire with Hamas, a senior member of the Israeli negotiating team told Haaretz on Friday.

Earlier on Friday, Israel's Channel 12 reported on a tense exchange between Netanyahu and the defense chiefs, in which Shin Bet head Ronen Bar said, "It feels like the prime minister doesn't want the framework that's on the table." Turning to Netanyahu, he added that if that is the case, "you should tell us."

There were other stories you could find:

• How Netanyahu has systematically foiled talks to release hostages from Hamas captivity
• Senior Israeli negotiator says Netanyahu knowingly creating crisis in cease-fire talks
• Israel presents new Gaza deal position to mediators; officials warn it could risk talks

But the pond must be brief. It's already been a far too long walk with weirdness ...

The report also quoted the head of the Missing and Captive Soldiers Division in the IDF, Maj. Gen. (res.) Nitzan Alon, who told Netanyahu: "You know that all the parameters you've added [to the framework] will not be accepted and there will be no deal."

Mossad chief David Barnea stressed to Netanyahu, "There is a deal on the table. If we delay, we could miss the opportunity. We have to take it."

Netanyahu, per the report, reacted angrily, accusing the defense chiefs of being "soft."

"You don't know how to negotiate. You're putting words in my mouth," he was quoted as saying. "Instead of pressuring me, pressure [Hamas leader] Sinwar," the prime minister reportedly told his security chiefs.

The senior official who spoke to Haaretz described the Wednesday meeting as a culmination of the brewing crisis between Netanyahu and Israel's defense chiefs. "There is a chasm between us and the prime minister," he said. "Everyone is convinced that Israel's new additions will blow up the talks, and, conversely, that we have the security tools to handle a deal that doesn't include them."

As if to rub salt into the wound, the reptiles used the last few lines of Dame Slap to plug the lizard Oz video services...

Stop. Enough unbridled fear mongering and loathing and hatred of the other and blather about identities already ... or we'll end up in octaroon territory.

Suffice to say, it's already got ugly. Dame Slap is routinely ugly, the Angelic one is ugly, prattling Polonius has tipped into deep ugliness, and the entire rag is unremittingly ugly ... bigoted, prejudiced, alienating, bristling at the idea that people might be different and embrace different identities, and might even, for example, be biracial or biethnic or whatever... and so the pond's unbridled ethnic diversity, a bit Irish, a bit German, a bit mongrel, must be hidden from reptile view ...

That's why the pond turns to the comfort of 'toons, though you have to be deeply weird to find any comfort in them ...