A chance for the bot to get agitated about Snappy Tom's offering? With bonus refreshments to give the bot new challenges ...

 

The pond was mildly nauseated by the smug, condescending self-congratulatory tone of these closing lines in Media Watch's story, Photographing famine.

So consequential, the work of these photographers, on Saturday the Israeli military announced it would allow the resumption of air drops of food and reestablish safe routes for the deployment of aid convoys into the strip.  
Evidence the right image at the right time can move the world.

Actually the air drops are a pathetically minuscule bit of token bandaidism, and ditto the small number of trucks currently rolling out.

This situation has been developing for months, and suddenly it takes snaps of kids now well into starvation for the Australian media to take notice? (and even then not to take notice, in the case of the lizard Oz).

Others didn't need a few snaps as a reminder. Bernie Sanders was tweeting back in April ...

And he was speechifying on 8th May ...

WASHINGTON, May 8 – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today gave remarks on the Senate floor marking 68 days since Israel allowed humanitarian aid into Gaza and calling on the U.S. to end its complicity in the destruction of the Palestinian people. 
M. President, I want to say a few words about an issue that people all over the world are thinking about – are appalled by – but for some strange reason gets very little discussion here in the nation’s capital or in the halls of Congress. And that is the horrific humanitarian disaster that is unfolding in Gaza. 
Today marks 68 days and counting since ANY humanitarian aid was allowed into Gaza. For more than nine weeks, Israel has blocked all supplies: no food, no water, no medicine, and no fuel. 
Hundreds of truckloads of lifesaving supplies are waiting to enter Gaza, sitting just across the border, but are denied entry by Israeli authorities. 
There is no ambiguity here: Netanyahu’s extremist government talks openly about using humanitarian aid as a weapon. Defense Minister Israel Katz said “Israel’s policy is clear: no humanitarian aid will enter Gaza, and blocking this aid is one of the main pressure levers.” 
M. President, starving children to death as a weapon of war is a clear violation of the Geneva Convention, the Foreign Assistance Act, and basic human decency. Civilized people do not starve children to death. 
What is going on in Gaza is a war crime, committed openly and in broad daylight, and continuing every single day. 
M. President, there are 2.2 million people who live in Gaza. Today, these people are trapped. The borders are sealed. And Israel has pushed the population into an ever-smaller area. 
With Israel having cut off all aid, what we are seeing now is a slow, brutal process of mass starvation and death by the denial of basic necessities. This is methodical, it is intentional, it is the stated policy of the Netanyahu government. 
Without fuel, there is no ability to pump fresh water, leaving people increasingly desperate, unable to find clean water to drink, wash with, or cook properly. Disease is once again spreading in Gaza. 
Most of the bakeries in Gaza have now shut down, having run out of fuel and flour. The few remaining community kitchens are also shutting down. Most people are now surviving on scarce canned goods, often a single can of beans or some lentils, shared between a family once a day. 
The UN reports that more than 2 million people out of a population of 2.2 million face severe food shortages. 
The starvation hits children hardest. At least 65,000 children now show symptoms of malnutrition, and dozens have already starved to death. 
Malnutrition rates increased 80 percent in March, the last month for which data is available, after Netanyahu began the siege, but the situation has severely deteriorated since then. 

And so on, and here we are at the end of July and Media Watch thinks a few snaps will fix things?

Perhaps too much time following the reptiles and not enough time in the real world?

It's beyond the valley of the deeply pathetic.

But the pond digresses. 

This is the third instalment in the pond's attempt to discover what set the Google bot off, and made it issue demands about age verification or else.

Thus far the pond has reclaimed nattering "Ned" and the prattling Polonius from the bot ban, but the third offering, Snappy Tom, will only be interesting to completists.

The pond only featured Snappy Tom as an interruption because nattering "Ned", scribbling about child care, had been even more tiresome than Dame Groan, and that's saying something.

The trouble with Snappy Tom is that his Trumpish offering of canned tuna on the weekend is now well past its use by date.

The frenetic Commander in Cheat has managed to garner all kinds of headlines since then (and already that nickname feels dated President Trump's New 3-Word Nickname Is Going Viral). 

The news about King Donald cheating at golf is about as fresh and revelatory as news that he's a fraud, a grifter and a snake oil salesman of the first water.

King Donald merely has to open his mouth to yap before a new headline joins the world ...

The upside is that all this provides a relentless stream of 'toons and columns ...Trump's mental decline is on vivid display as he rages about Epstein ...

It was nice of Donald Trump to travel to Scotland and show our European allies firsthand that the United States is led by a self-absorbed and deeply weird man in obvious mental decline.
Over the span of a weekend, the U.S. president’s addled brain raced about like a dull-witted Labrador attempting to outsmart squirrels. He went on lengthy diatribes about windmills. He ranted about the ungratefulness of starving children. He forayed into nonsensical conspiracy theories regarding the Jeffrey Epstein scandal consuming his administration, while laughably saying upon arriving in Scotland on July 25: “I’m not focused on conspiracy theories.”
Trump's head, based on his overseas babbling, is 90% conspiracy theories and 10% brain cells.
Coverage of Trump's Scotland trip doesn't show the extent of his rambling
The trip was largely a taxpayer-funded chance for the grifter in chief to promote his Scottish golf properties, which in the realm of “things Trump can do that no other president would ever get away with” barely registers as a blip.
It was also a chance for him to talk “deals” with the European Union and the United Kingdom, with a “deal” being something resulting in trade tariffs that will negatively impact American consumers.
Or as Trump likes to call it, “Winning.”
News coverage tends to trim Trump’s voluminous prattling into digestible sound bites that sound vaguely sane. But if we care about a president’s lack of mental acuity – and I’ve been told by many that we do – it’s worth sticking your head in the high-pressure stream of nonsense that shoots out every time Trump opens his face hole.
Trump shows he's laser-focused on the scourge of windmills
On July 25, Trump deplaned in Scotland and immediately showed reporters he was armed with weapons-grade non sequiturs.
“This immigration is killing Europe,” he said, racistly. “And the other thing, stop the windmills killing the beauty of your countries.”
Two days later, he sat with European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, who looked like she would love to be elsewhere, and uncorked this: “And the other thing I say to Europe, we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States, they’re killing us. They’re killing the beauty of our scenery, our valleys, our beautiful plains. And I’m not talking about airplanes, I’m talking about beautiful plains, beautiful areas of the United States, and you look up and you see windmills all over the place, it’s a horrible thing. It's the most expensive form of energy; it’s no good. They’re made in China, almost all of them. When they start to rust and rot in eight years, you can’t really turn them off, you can’t bury them, they won't let you. But the propellers, the props, because they’re a certain type of fiber that doesn’t go well with the land, that’s what they say. The environmentalists say you can’t bury them because the fiber doesn’t go well with the land; in other words, if you bury it, it will harm our soil. The whole thing is a con job.”
OK. That was a thing nobody asked for. It’s also filled with lies – wind isn’t the most expensive form of energy, and windmills last far longer than eight years. But who would expect honesty from someone rambling like that?

And so on and on, and so much material. He's not the best show runner in terms of quantity, but he's up there in terms of quantity.

But while acknowledging that everything Snappy Tom had to say is now pretty irrelevant or redundant, the pond didn't want the bot to win.

It turned out that the pond didn't really need Snappy Tom talking about King Donald to do a segue to those yarns, but hear him out, because he's feeling a trifle despondent...

The pond included a cartoon and a naughty word that might have got the pond into bot trouble:

Oh, is that a hint of WSJ sauciness and p***ing (*) on the trousers that the pond hears in the header? 

US President’s troubles come cheap but will leave expensive, The White House is brewing up a perfect storm that could hurt investors and savers in friendly nations like Australia.

The caption: US President Donald Trump arrives to speak at an AI summit in Washington. Picture: Julia Demaree Nikhinson / AP Photo

The mystical advice: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

(* the pond doesn't want Snappy Tom to suffer from the pond's verbal exuberance, it was just a harmless reference to a cartoon about the WSJ showing the actual activity)

The reptiles clocked snappy Tom as a seven minute read and he didn't seem happy:

It has been a fevered six months since Donald J. Trump took the oath of office at the Capitol in Washington. Like a true Meta bro, the US President (jersey numbers 45 and 47) has moved fast and broken things, albeit some of which were fragile to begin with. Trust in financial systems. Rules-based orders. Global agreements. Decorum. His policy frenzy eclipses whatever writer Philip Roth might have had in mind when he conceived the notion of the “indigenous American berserk”.
Shape-shifting tariffs may be an act of self-harm but they hurt global trade and growth. After being smacked with a 25 per cent tariff, Tokyo this week did a deal with the US. Japan opened up its economy to American rice and cars, and the impost on Japanese imports was cut to 15 per cent.
The Albanese government, too, is angling for relief and on Thursday announced the removal of a ban on imported US beef from cattle reared in Canada and Mexico. Washington claimed the win gleefully; Labor has other fish to fry.

Now there's an excuse for a Sunday 'toon (now Wednesday of course):

Tom also went the Powell angle:

Trump’s fiscal foolhardiness taunts creditors and will exact a huge debt-servicing burden on young Americans. The independent Congressional Budget Office this week reported the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s tax cuts and spending would add $US3.4 trillion ($5.2 trillion) to the US deficit across 10 years.
The White House also is gunning for US Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell; the savagery, recklessness and seeming randomness is sending a chill through financial markets and the ranks of the world’s central bankers. What’s motivating it? “I can’t speak for what goes through Mr Trump’s mind,” Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock says. “I’m not sure anyone can.”

For some reason the reptiles offered a snap of Bullock rather than Powell, perhaps a reward for her line about not being able to penetrate a fog, RBA Governor Michele Bullock at the Anika Foundation lunch in Sydney. Picture: Gaye Gerard / NewsWire

Snappy Tom got stuck into the naked corruption:

Trump’s attention-seeking, narcissism and lust for dominance of the attention economy are a given. While many hope things will settle down at some point, it’s Trump’s ease of using power that has astonished DC’s political class.
According to the US Federal Register, Trump has signed 171 executive orders in his second term; he signed 220 of these presidential actions (which direct federal agencies on how to act) during the four years of his first administration. In total (391), that’s already more than two-term presidents Barack Obama (277), George W. Bush (291) and Bill Clinton (364) and Ronald Reagan (381).
Trump’s orders are all over the shop, from TikTok enforcement to nukes, but their titles pop with telltale MAGA branding: “restoring”, “unleashing”, “empowering”, “fighting” and “protecting”.
April’s Liberation Day tariffs rocked financial markets for a time, as well as central banks. Then Trump wobbled, extending timelines by 90 days for implementation. A British financial pundit alleged “Trump Always Chickens Out”. TACO stuck as a trading strategy for the money movers.
Westpac chief economist Luci Ellis wonders whether a better framing would be Trump Ambit Claims Often, “a description of a negotiating strategy rather than the suggestion of a character flaw”.

Oh come on Luci, do better to earn your snap, Westpac chief economist Luci Ellis. Picture: Jane Dempster / The Australian

Snappy Tom kept worrying about the economy ...

In a note, Ellis says the tariffs are as much about showing the world who is boss – or, as the White House itself put it, “Keeping America in the Driver’s Seat” – as about economic policy goals.
“The tariffs are still an act of inflationary self-harm, so the default presumption should be that re-escalations are negotiating tactics, not the likely end state,” she says.
The former RBA assistant governor believes “we are more in the realm of psychology than economics and must proceed accordingly”. “A lot will depend on other governments striking the right balance between belligerence and obsequiousness,” she says.
This week the International Monetary Fund warned in its annual External Sector Report that tariffs were not the answer to fixing America’s external accounts. The problem was homegrown: Washington’s loose budgets, its billowing deficits and debt.
In the short term, the IMF report says, “escalation of the trade war would have significant macroeconomic effects”, with reduced global demand and further inflationary pressures through rising import prices. Further geopolitical tensions also could trigger shifts in the international monetary system, which in turn could undermine financial stability.
Investors also may lose confidence in the US dollar, which the. IMF says has been the backbone of the global system over the past 80 years, “despite momentous changes such as the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1973, the end of the Cold War in 1991 and the creation of the euro in 1999”.
That dominance means the US has been able to borrow more and at a lower cost and extract big returns (which the IMF calls “exorbitant privilege”); but it also has exposed the nation to risk, with the US offering insurance against shocks to the rest of the world (or an “exorbitant duty”). The privilege has softened and investors are reassessing their dollar exposure.

Come on Snappy Tom, you can't use the economy as a distraction. Remember the main game:

Snappy Tom insisted on worrying about the big bust:

IMF chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas says tariffs will reduce savings and investment in the tariffing country, and neither reduces US excessive external deficits or China’s super-sized surpluses. “A major risk for the global economy is that countries will instead respond to rising imbalances by further raising trade barriers, leading to increased geoeconomic fragmentation,” Gourinchas says. “And while the impact on global imbalances will remain limited, the harm to the global economy will be long-lasting.”
When the RBA kept the cash rate steady in July, it noted the probability of “severe downside scenarios” for our growth and employment that staff had war-gamed looked to have declined. Bond and equity markets had settled, signalling “the most extreme outcomes for US tariffs were likely to be avoided”.
Still, the July board minutes noted “the future state of US trade and other policies was unpredictable and geopolitical tensions remained acute”, and three of nine board members voted for a rate cut because of subdued local growth and a likely slowing abroad.
More worrying for financial stability is the MAGA assault on Powell. Trump called the world’s most powerful central banker a “numbskull” and “Too Late”, for failing to cut the federal funds rate; it is now 4.25 to 4.5 per cent, where it has been since December.

At last a snap of Jerome, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell. Picture: Mark Schiefelbein / AP Photo

To be fair - the pond is feeling incredibly fair this day - Snappy Tom was probably onto something by refusing to take the bait. 

After all, as Glasser noted, the current scandal has been hiding in plain sight for many years. She wrote:

...On the surface, it’s a classic Washington gotcha. No surprise that there have been lots of predictably sanctimonious allusions to Howard Baker’s most quotable Watergate moment; these political feeding frenzies almost invariably come down to Baker’s question of what did the President know and when did he know it. But this is Trump we’re talking about, and this scandal, I regret to inform you, is not on the level. In fact, we’ve known for years about Trump’s sleazy dealings with Epstein—one particularly awful aspect of this particularly awful story is having to watch, over and over again, that 1992 video of the two of them partying, which is recirculated online with each incremental new development. In Trump’s first term, his appointee as head of the Labor Department, Alex Acosta, resigned after controversy over his role as a former Florida prosecutor in giving Epstein a sweetheart plea deal. And remember when Trump said of Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, “I just wish her well”? Here we are five years later, and Todd Blanche, Trump’s Deputy Attorney General and former personal lawyer, travelled to interview Maxwell in a federal courthouse in Florida on Thursday, supposedly in search of additional evidence. Hmm...
The scandal, then, is not the revelation that Trump was friends with a sexual monster who exploited underage women, since it is not a revelation. Nor is it that the President lied to the American public, something he does with remarkable frequency. No, the novelty here is that millions of Americans who knew that Trump was friends with such a horrid man and voted for him anyway now appear to have decided that, in a choice between Trump and a favorite conspiracy theory, they may just stick with the conspiracy theory. (this in a now dated New Yorker piece, here, archive link here).

Tom stayed true to Jerome and the economy:

After the Federal Open Market Committee held rates in June, Powell said near-term measures of inflation expectations had moved up in recent months and identified tariffs as the “driving factor”. He warned increases in tariffs were “likely to push up prices and weigh on economic activity”.
Trump insists the Fed’s policy rate should be “at least” three percentage points lower. Last week he canvassed congressional Republicans about whether to fire Powell.
The Wall Street Journal reported US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent advised his boss not to sack Powell. Bessent now declares the entire monetary institution should be formally examined.
“There was fearmongering over tariffs and thus far we have seen very little if any inflation,” he told CNBC. “We have had great inflation numbers, so I think this idea of them not being able to break out of a certain mindset – you know, all these PhDs over there, I don’t know what they do.”
It was yet another attack on experts. Jason Furman, a former chief economic adviser to Obama, argues firing Powell “would unleash a massive amount of uncertainty, litigation and market turmoil”. The Harvard professor says when central banks are protected from political interference, they deliver lower and more stable inflation without job losses.
“Fears about the Fed’s independence would send markets into a tizzy with more risk and higher expected inflation almost certainly driving up longer-term interest rates,” Furman wrote last week in The New York Times.
On Thursday, Bullock voiced support for Powell. “You would have to say that the Fed is doing what it is supposed to be doing, which is focusing on the economy and employment,” the RBA chief told an Anika Foundation lunch. “They are not getting drawn into debate. Central bank independence is very important. Certainly, what’s going on in the United States is challenging that.”

(The pond will allow this distracting detou, as it seems harmless enough and not likely to excite the bot)

Dammit, the pond gave him every chance, but snappy Tom missed the best joke, as transcribed by The Bulwark ... a real-time fact-check (you have to watch the vision to see the Powell head-shaking)

Trump: “It looks like it’s about $3.1 billion. It went up a little bit…The $2.7 is now $3.1.”
Powell: “I’m not aware of that.”
Trump: “It just came out.”
Powell: “This came from us?”
Trump: “Yes.”
Powell: “You are including the Martin renovation. You just added in a third building.”
Trump: “It’s a building that's being built.”
Powell: “No, it was built five years ago.”

(See what the pond means about being dated? That now reads like an antiquated antique item down there with antimacassars and the aspidistra on the what not - yes, the pond once lived in a house with such a thing).

Snappy Tom kept on with his Chicken Little impression, though fair dibs, the sky might soon be falling:

The biggest long-term worry is the US budget’s trajectory after congress passed the OBBB Act. Even before this fiscal abomination is factored in, the CBO estimated federal public debt, now equal to the size of the US economy, would rise to 156 per cent of GDP over the next three decades.
Former Clinton administration Treasury chiefs Bob Rubin and Larry Summers argue fighting the Fed, busting the budget and a trade war will set the US on a road to ruin. Before Trump’s budget bill was passed, they warned the fiscal trajectory would lead to higher interest rates and capital costs, reduced business confidence, crowding out of private investment and derail America’s ability to cash in on the AI revolution.
Annual US deficits, which add to the stock of public debt, are rising from 5 per cent to 7 per cent of GDP in coming years. Washington is spending more on interest payments than defence. For perspective, Canberra’s expected $42bn underlying cash deficit this year is 1.5 per cent of GDP.
Harvard’s Greg Mankiw says there are only five ways to stop this upward trajectory in debt to income: extraordinary economic growth (he says, don’t bet on it); government default (Trump has expanded the range of policy possibilities); large-scale money creation (if Trump has his way with the Fed); substantial cuts in government spending (out of the question); and large tax increases (most likely in the long run).
“If one day the bond vigilantes wake up and start viewing the United States as a large version of Greece or Argentina, they will stop buying US debt at normal rates of interest. Congress will have no choice but to face the music, regardless of the political consequences,” the one-time council of economic advisers chief under Bush 43 said in a speech this month honouring Reagan-era deficit hawk Martin Feldstein.
According to Mankiw, the bond vigilantes may strike sooner rather than later.
Cracks are developing in the fiscal foundations, such as Moody’s downgrading of US government debt below AAA status. None of the major credit agencies gives US debt its top rating.
Australia may be one of the few countries with a gold star from credit watchers, but fiscal perils lurk for a nation with a federal deficit default setting. Then there’s the constant “friendly fire” from the White House and the likelihood of further trade and defence shakedowns, higher global borrowing rates and other shocks.
A perfect storm is brewing and it could sink the fortunes of many: countries, private investors, savers and retirees. Australians are not immune. As Richard Ford wrote in his story collection Rock Springs (1987), “Trouble comes cheap and leaves expensive.”
Or maybe Trouble just hangs around for a while ...

The trouble with all this is that King Donald is like a relentless threshing machine.

Snappy Tom getting all angsty is just a dime a dozen stuff.

For example, just yesterday Politico was running this story, Trump got his tariff hike. The rest remains murky.He is taking a victory lap on his trade agenda after reaching deals with the EU and Japan, but it’s not clear how much countries have agreed to. (*archive link)

And so on and it's all a murky mess, with new deals and new angles unfolding each day, of the kind a failed New York casino and real estate developer might do to create an image of looking busy.

After the pond finished with Snappy Tom, there followed a few distractions which the pond will allow because they seem harmless enough and unlikely to scare a bot. 

First came a few toons...

Then a joke

Welcome to Scotland, bonnie lad...

A poem for MAGAts to recite, full of loss and yearning. Take it away, Robbie ...

O how can I be blythe and glad,
Or how can I gang brisk and braw,
When the bonnie lad that I loe best,
Is o'er the hills and far awa.

But of course the Commander of Golfing Cheats is now back, far away from the bonnie protesting Scots.

The flim-flam man wins again.

And so to the pond's conclusion to this segment ... a reminder of why the pond refuses to watch CNN, for fear it might encounter another Jennings ... 

Why is it that in and outside the fifth form, that name is always a problem?

(At this point the pond included a clip which surely caused no bot harm, though the long absent lord knows that children should be sheltered from the man. Of course it's dated, there have been days of jokes since ...)

 

 And if none of these have caused bot alarms, on to the final offering tomorrow at 4.30 pm, featuring a couple of other distractions the pond offered to make the lizard Oz swill more digestible. Same bat - or should that be bot? - channel