In which Polonius goes MIA, so the pond is left with comrade Jennie and Dame Slap dregs for the Sunday meditation...

 

Prattling Polonius went MIA at the time the pond was preparing its Sunday meditation.

His last entry in the lizard Oz, at time of writing, was back on 20th September under the header...

Media elites trip up over fake Charlie Kirk murder claims
The assassination of Charlie Kirk illustrates the point that some individuals of high intelligence and considerable education are sometimes foolish.

Those who miss the aged pedant can still use that as a temporary fix (straight to the eyeball).

Perhaps it's a cunning ruse, a way to foil the pond, a way to make Polonius's late entrance stage right seem grand. The pond will check back and if Polonius steps out from behind the arras, the pond will do a late post.

In the meantime, the pond must make do with substitutes, standbys, stop gaps, understudies, locum tenens as it were ... and inevitably the quality will turn even more abysmal.

Perhaps an opening distraction in the Polonial spirit?

The pond was enchanted by Cathy Young's celebration of Animal Farm's 80th birthday, including her proposal that, while it was about Stalin, it was also about others with a taste for Stalinism ...‘Animal Farm’ Never Gets Old:

...in 2025, Americans may be reading this novel with somewhat different eyes than in times gone by, when strongman rule, cult-like worship of leaders, and reality-denying propaganda were things that happened somewhere else. Today, it’s hard to read Orwell’s mordant description of the extravagant panegyrics to Napoleon (“two cows, enjoying a drink at the pool, would exclaim, ‘Thanks to the leadership of Comrade Napoleon, how excellent this water tastes!’”) and not think of the examples we are witnessing daily—from the downright idolatrous sensibility common among Trump’s base to administration officials falling all over each other to heap praise on Trump at a cabinet meeting, or a member of Congress telling reporters Trump is “never wrong,” or press secretary Karoline Leavitt gushing, “Cracker Barrel is a great American company, and they made a great decision to Trust in Trump!” Likewise, when Orwell wryly notes that the animals “had nothing to go upon except Squealer’s lists of figures, which invariably demonstrated that everything was getting better and better,” one can’t help thinking of Trump firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner who wouldn’t deliver that message.
The rewriting of slogans, the insidious conspiracies invoked to explain anything that goes wrong, the propaganda chief convincing the other animals that things they saw with their own eyes didn’t happen or happened very differently: The parallels are all over the place. You could even point out that, like Orwell’s animal revolution, Trumpian populism purports to champion the downtrodden and the scorned. And Trump’s cozy huddle with Vladimir Putin last month evokes the novel’s haunting last line in which the animals “looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

Well yes ... there are cartoons for that ...

While mentioning Stalin, a nod to one of the pond's favourite movies, The Death of Stalin, with an honourable mention to Peter Duncan's rarely noted off the wall black comedy Children of the Revolution, starring a bonkers Judy Davis carrying Stalin's child.

Alas, pleasures end all too quickly, and so the pond must do a quick survey of some reptile contenders pleading for attention, but again the pond had to rule out assorted reptile jihads ... like this one, an alleged "EXCLUSIVE" ...

EXCLUSIVE
Cancelled again for crossing the trans crusade
Greens patriarch Drew Hutton faces a fresh setback as a crowd-funding platform mysteriously suspends his campaign to fight expulsion from the party he co-founded.
By Jamie Walker

Just because he's an alleged greenie doesn't stop him being a silly old bigot. Off to the cornfield archive with him ...

The pond also had no time for this outing, a man defending a genocide and lying his socks off ...

ANGRY SPEECH
Netanyahu says critics ‘caved’ to pressure, as his isolation deepens
The Israeli prime minister, who spoke to largely empty UN hall after a walkout, lashed out at the idea of a Palestinian state and vowed to keep fighting Hamas.
By Anat Peled

Sensible people walked out on him, and the pond sent him to the cornfield archive, but did have a cartoon to celebrate his singular achievement, down there with Adolf's treatment of the Warsaw ghetto ...

The final touch to finish it off completely would be to put Tony Bleagh in charge, doing an East India company administrator impression.

Moving on, remarkably the reptiles have only just managed to catch up this aged, distant English fuss, by deploying a local angle.

How this Aussie couple became caught up in the literary scandal of the decade
Joanne and David Parsons walked for more than 1041km along England’s coast, but their biggest challenge came when the hike was over, and a bestselling memoir titled The Salt Path hit the stands.
By Ros Thomas

Sorry Ros, it's old and tired and stale, and so it's off to comrade Jennie doing her climate science denying, renewables hating riff ...  

She's not the Ughmann, she's no Lloydie of the Amazon, but she'll have to do ... even if devotees will find it remarkably similar to previous outings ...

The header: Why Labor’s renewables transition fails the reliability test, Labor’s targets-driven energy transition, built on ‘magic pudding economics’, threatens deindustrialisation and a ‘Future Made in Australia’. With a nuclear ban in a resource-rich nation, the current path defies common sense.

The caption: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. We’re facing serious deindustrialisation due mainly to the high cost of energy and the loss of our comparative advantage. Picture: Jason Edwards / NewsWire

It's like putting on a pair of old slippers, of the kind the pond wore back  on 25th August when comrade Jennie's bees were buzzing in the old noggin ...

Bowen was right: there’s no point in a target the country can’t meet
Our power prices are among the highest in the world and without assured baseload supply 24/7, deindustrialisation will gather pace.

(Naturally that one began with a snap of sinister whale killing windmills down Goulburn way)

Same old, same old, same as it ever was ...

The Albanese government is determined to press ahead with an energy transition based on intermittent, weather-dependent renewables regardless of cost and emerging problems. The 2035 targets are politically determined, set at 62-70 per cent, even though Labor’s 2030 targets won’t be met.
Setting higher targets can’t mask the fundamental problems of a targets-driven transition. It will satisfy an international audience but will fail our domestic needs.
The 2030 targets are enshrined in legislation; the 43 per cent reduction in emissions are underpinned by 82 per cent renewables, on the way to net zero by 2050. These targets are based on commissioned RepuTex modelling, once lauded as “the most comprehensive modelling ever done, for any policy, by any opposition in Australia’s history”. When it became clear that promises made would be promises broken, the RepuTex modelling was abandoned. This was a convenient political solution, shifting the blame for not delivering the promised $275 cut in electricity prices by 2025, the impending failure to meet the 2030 emissions target, and a promised further cut of $378 and 604,000 new green jobs.
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen remains blind to reality, unable to deal with the problems that have emerged.
Our economy can’t be powered by intermittent, weather-dependent renewables, nor are they the cheapest form of energy when whole-of-system costs are included. That’s why the government refuses to release full costings. Without the billions in taxpayer-funded subsidies and relief packages, Labor’s transition would have collapsed by now, and still may. It’s magic pudding economics and it’s not sustainable.

The beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way turned up in an AV distraction dancing with Caleb ... Shadow defence minister Angus Taylor discusses Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s UN address concerning climate. “We do support getting a seat on the Security Council … on emissions, can I say that they have set targets for 2035 that are completely unrealistic?” Mr Taylor told Sky News host Caleb Bond. “I got prices down by 10 per cent and emissions down by 10 per cent in my time as energy minister; Chris Bowen is nowhere near achieving that.”

Comrade Jennie did her old rat in the ranks routine ...

The billions spent and misspent in pursuit of Labor’s plans remain shrouded in secrecy. It’s in breach of the public’s right to know. All the renewable projects are underwritten by taxpayers in off-budget secret contracts that leave only the Australian National Audit Office to protect the public interest.
The mantra that renewables are the cheapest form of energy started with the promised $275 cut in electricity prices and Anthony Albanese’s assurance it would be delivered: “Well I don’t think, I know. I know because we have done the modelling.” Ever since, power prices have gone through the roof, the queues in energy poverty keep growing and industry is hard hit by energy prices that are among the world’s highest. The $275 broken promise remains emblematic of a failing transition.

The reptiles then distracted with an incredibly informative and relevant illustration, The $275 broken promise remains emblematic of a failing transition. Picture: iStock

Really, reptiles, that's the best you can do? 

Sadly, the lizard Oz once had a graphics department, now it's dedicated to visual slush, though that at least matches Comrade Jennie's inclination to verbal slop...

Based on experience, Labor’s assurances can’t be taken at face value. Don’t believe the spin. We’re not on track to meet the 2030 targets based on the modelling that has since been abandoned. The Prime Minister was desperate to avoid this issue in the lead-up to his government’s re-election. He tried to shift responsibility, saying: “Our energy policy offering is all out there. RepuTex modelling was RepuTex modelling that they put out.” The journalist persisted: “Why are they still your targets if you are distancing yourself from the model?” There was no answer.
Too often, asking difficult questions, raising concerns or criticisms, has led to accusations of spreading misinformation, being climate deniers and now “cookers and crackpots”. Masking the truth never works. It won’t detract from economist Ross Garnaut’s conclusion that the 2030 targets won’t be met, falling short by a “large margin”, or similar assessments by experts at Wood Mackenzie and Rystad Energy. No one can guarantee that power prices will fall because the brief of the Australian Energy Market Operator is to deliver Labor’s legislated targets.
It’s a targets-driven energy transition. From the start, the priority was never to deliver the most affordable and reliable power 24/7.
These parameters are defined by the legislation, no matter what promises are made about power prices falling in future. There’s no chance prices will fall with the costs of 10,000km of new transmission and huge projects such as HumeLink still to be passed on in our bills. With even higher targets, the crunch will come at a critical time, when 90 per cent of our coal-fired power leaves the system across the next decade. Labor cannot guarantee this lost capacity will be replaced by reliable and affordable baseload power 24/7, ensuring the lights stay on. We’re facing serious deindustrialisation due mainly to the high cost of energy and the loss of our comparative advantage. A Future Made in Australia is on shifting sands.
We’re the only G20 nation with a nuclear ban and a closed door on next-generation technologies such as small modular reactors.
Just days ago Britain and the US entered a partnership to deploy SMRs by the early 2030s. The energy demands of the new world of artificial intelligence, data centres and quantum computing will be met worldwide by nuclear energy.

Huzzah, she went the SMR, nuking the country to save the planet routine, and the reptiles helped out ... The Three Mile Island nuclear power near Middletown, Pennsylvania. The planned reopening of the plant is praised as a boon for Pennsylvania and a boost for AI. Picture: AFP

If the pond might be so bold, it isn't the average consumer who will benefit ...

If Three Mile Island comes back online, Microsoft will be the one benefiting, as its long-term power purchase agreement would secure it enough energy to power roughly 800,000 homes every year. Except in this case, it’ll be used to help run the company’s data center infrastructure in the region.
This isn’t the first recent sign Big Tech is jumping in on nuclear power: Earlier this year, Amazon purchased a data center site right next to the Susquehanna nuclear power plant, also in Pennsylvania.
While Amazon will use only part of the output of the Susquehanna plant, Microsoft will buy all the power that Three Mile Island produces. That raises the question of who’s paying for what in this whole arrangement. Ratepayers won’t be expected to shoulder any of the costs to restart the facility, Constellation CEO Joe Dominguez told the Washington Post. The company also won’t seek any special subsidies from the state, he added. (here, WaPo story archived here)

But that's comrade Jennie for you, always concerned for big tech and the need to nuke the country to service their needs ...

In a country blessed with energy resources, we’re stuck with a nuclear ban stretching back almost 30 years while building an energy system based on intermittent, weather-dependent renewables and batteries. It makes no sense.
It’s never too late to put our nation’s interests centre stage. Energy is the economy and energy security is national security. Only a strong economy can secure our future prosperity. It’s time to lift the nuclear ban and to test the market.
Jennie George is a former ACTU president and former Labor member for Throsby.

Ah comrade Jennie ... well played ...

After nuking the country, the pond decided as a bonus that it was time to nuke common sense.

Come on down Dame Slap...

The header: The post-literate peril: What if we aren’t just reading less, we are also thinking less? The dawn of the post-literate society ought to make us think long and hard – while we still can.

The caption for the hideously banal image, which suggests the reptiles are pushing visual illiteracy ... We are only just coming to grips with the consequences of people, especially teenagers, reading fewer books than previous generations. Picture: iStock

The reptiles assured the pond it was a nine minute read, enough to test anyone's patience.

Before beginning, the pond would like to draw attention to a piece by David A. Graham in The Atlantic ...

The President Who Doesn’t Read, Trump’s allergy to the written word and his reliance on oral communication have proven liabilities in office. (*archive link)

Ironically, it was the publication of a book this week that crystallized the reality of just how little Donald Trump reads. While, like many of the tendencies described in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, Trump’s indifference to the printed word has been apparent for some time, the depth and implications of Trump’s strong preference for oral communication over the written word demand closer examination.
“He didn’t process information in any conventional sense,” Wolff writes. “He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-­literate.”
Wolff quotes economic adviser Gary Cohn writing in an email: “It’s worse than you can imagine … Trump won’t read anything—not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”
While Trump and his allies, as well as some mainstream journalists, have attacked the accuracy of Wolff’s book, Trump’s allergy to reading is among the most fully corroborated assertions Fire and Fury makes.
Ahead of the election, the editors of this magazine wrote that the Republican candidate “appears not to read.” Before the inauguration, Trump told Axios, “I like bullets or I like as little as possible. I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you.” In February, The New York Times reported that National Security Council members had been instructed to keep policy papers to a single page and include lots of graphics and maps. Mother Jones reviewed classified information indicating Trump’s briefings were a quarter as long as Barack Obama’s.
In March, Reuters reported that briefers had strategically placed the president’s name in as many paragraphs of briefing documents as possible so as to attract his fickle attention. In September, the Associated Press reported that top aides had decided the president needed a crash course on America’s role in the world and arranged a 90-minute, map-and-chart-heavy lecture at the Pentagon. And amid the hype over Wolff’s book, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough wrote a column Friday saying that in September 2015, he confronted Trump over poor debate performances, saying, “Can you read?” Met with silence, Scarborough pressed again: “I’m serious, Donald. Do you read? If someone wrote you a one-page paper on a policy, could you read it?” Trump replied by brandishing a Bible from his mother and saying he read it all the time—probably a self-aware joke, given Trump’s proud impiety and displayed ignorance of the Bible.

And so on, and frequent readers of the pond will know where this is heading.

Who could love an illiterate, pig headed, deeply ignorant, narcissistic searcher for a peace prize by settling wars in his own fevered brain?

Why the pond is glad you asked, because Dame Slap could ...

Fear not kiddies, Dame Slap is going to give you a terrible bashing, but when it comes to the crunch, she'll happily don her MAGA cap for her King ...

Dame Slap just loved herself a man chronically incapable of reading ... and so it's time to press on, but relax, there'll be the odd bit of visual relief ...

Earlier this month, one of the top sellers on Nielsen BookScan’s nonfiction list of books in Australia was a colouring book for adults called Cosy Creepy. A few weeks later it slipped to No.11, just below the 10th biggest seller in Australia: another colouring book for adults.
A popular colouring book, devoid of words, tells its own story. We’re living in a post-literate society. Reading books that demand our full concentration for a lengthy period has become a last-century pastime.
The top 15 bestselling nonfiction books in early September featured psychology self-help book The Let Them Theory at No.1; a few puzzle books including Minute Cryptic; a design book; some books for dads (Father’s Day was around the corner); and a couple of recipe books for time-poor cooks.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these books. If people want to read a book to learn that they can’t control the behaviour of narcissists or others around them, then The Let Them Theory book is for them. Given it is a top seller, good luck to author Mel Robbins. But the source of Robbins’s fame is another insight into our post-literate society.
Robbins seems to be a bigger hit on TikTok with her two-minute psycho-sessions than in bookstores. No judgment here – I watch dog videos sometimes, so whatever floats your boat.
We are, however, at the start of a colossal transformation of human minds and human relationships. Fifteen years into the near universal use of smartphones, plenty has been written about the dangers of children – and young adults – spending a chunk of their daily lives online. Playing violent video games and falling down rabbit holes with strangers, where real connections are replaced with virtual ones, can’t be good for boys. Girls are inundated from a young age with scrolling images – hundreds a day – decreeing, without even saying so, what it takes to be beautiful, popular, hip, cool, loved. Those same girls, barely in their teens, are posing in selfies to impress “friends” that they are all or some of those things. You want your head read if you think that’s good for a girl’s wellbeing.

Ah, but we know what's good for a girl's wellbeing. King Donald peddles it all the time ...

Sorry, but it is a Sunday toon fest as well as a meditation ...

There is plenty of focus, too, on the effects on our political culture where adults inhale daily, hourly, the exhaust fumes of agreement on social media. This sustained practice of nodding along to people you agree with can’t be good for them, or for society. We’re losing brain muscle, along with the ability to see disagreement as healthy.
Losing the ability to concentrate
Behind all that online commotion and disorder is the dismal fact that doesn’t get much attention: fewer people – kids and adults – are reading books.

Hang on, concentration is all very well, but does it get you the loot? Does it prepare you for bag man duties?

Hey ho, on we go ...

A national reading survey in 2023 revealed that more than a quarter of Australians didn’t read a single book that year, with the numbers of non-readers even higher among young Australians. This reflects a global trend of younger generations reading fewer books.
“Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 per cent of high school seniors said they read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11 per cent who said they hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages flipped,” Rose Horowitch wrote in a 2024 piece in The Atlantic headed “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books”.
‘Losing yourself in a book is fundamentally different to tuning out on social media platforms.’
Horowitch’s interviews with 33 college professors late last year revealed a common tale: students saying they can’t concentrate on a book, ideas they don’t understand or even a sonnet.
It’s also worth placing the popularity of colouring books for adults next to our sliding literacy rates. Australian Bureau of Statistics data reveals that about 44 per cent of adult Australians have low or very low literacy rates. The Grattan Institute’s The Reading Guarantee report last year called for urgent action to stem the rates of illiteracy among Australian school students. The authors called for schools to embrace phonics-based decoding skills when teaching kids to read.
An OECD Survey of Adult Skills late last year found “a mixed global picture of literacy, numeracy and adaptive problem-solving proficiency”. Apart from Finland, Japan, The Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, where a large proportion of adults showed advanced abilities, “on average across OECD countries, 18 per cent of adults do not even have the most basic levels of proficiency in any of the domains”.
Writing in the Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch traces declining concentration spans in students to about 2010 – when the smartphone became ubiquitous for teenagers, even some pre-teens.
Even if a child can avoid the mental health problems explored by Jonathan Haidt in The Anxious Generation, there is a longer-tail question about the effect of social media on our attention span. What if we aren’t just reading less, we are also thinking less?

Thinking less? Outrageous, why read when you can enjoy a bloody good movie?

Perhaps Dame Slap doesn't get the joke, perhaps she's movie-deprived ...

Too few people are asking what will become of our modern society if the brains of its citizens are being rewired daily by the commercial drivers of tech companies using algorithms to feed online addictions, fuelling fast-paced scrolling habits, holding us like hostages, away from long-form reading.
In his weekly Cultural Capital newsletter, The Times columnist James Marriott has written a series of important pieces about “the dawn of the post-literate society”. Last week he compared the “reading revolution” that started in the mid-18th century to the mass dependence on smartphones that kicked in just over a decade ago.
In the mid-18th century, people started to read like never before. Modern societies have benefited from “the greatest transfer of knowledge into the hands of ordinary men and women in history”, Marriott writes.
The world of print is orderly, logical, rational, he notes, quoting media theorist Neil Postman: “To engage with the written word means following a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classification, inference making and reasoning.”
Postman said it was no coincidence that some of our greatest achievements happened when people started to read: the birth of capitalism, the rise of reason over superstition, scientific developments, democratic traditions taking hold, and so on.
“If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history,” Marriott wrote, pointing to surveys of Gen Zers spending nine hours a day staring at a screen, much of it “a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-videos and social media rage bait”.
Michael Parker agrees that we are only just coming to grips with the consequences of people, especially teenagers, reading fewer books than previous generations.
Parker is the headmaster of Newington College, one of Sydney’s highly regarded private schools. In a new book out this week called Thinking for Yourself, Parker and Fiona Morrison offer a counterweight to the online forces that discourage thinking, not just among young people.
The keys to critical thinking

Morrison, Parker’s wife, is an associate professor in English at the University of NSW. Their extensive experience teaching students led them to write this book. Thinking for Yourself is part of a David and Goliath battle for the minds of the next generation. Tech companies want kids to stay on smartphones. Unlike earlier technological developments such as the TV, the smartphone is with you all the time. Like a gateway drug, the smartphone is rewiring a kid’s brain towards craving more and more hours scrolling, living on a screen. Parker and Morrison’s book encourages us to pause, to concentrate longer, to read more books, to think more critically. People thinking well is, they say, a prerequisite for a healthy democracy.
Speaking to Inquirer last week, Parker points to a shelf behind him jammed with dense textbooks about critical thinking. These books won’t get much traction among students, let alone adults.
Thinking for Yourself is a short manual for adults wanting to make better decisions about everything from buying a home to resolving workplace conundrums. For students, it’s a guide on how to argue well, convincingly, thoughtfully, free of emotion – skills swamped by the tsunami of social media

The key to critical thinking? King Donald's got that one covered...

Drew Hutton must have been part of that research team...

Eventually the reptiles did interrupt the rant with a snap, which, with great respect, was exceedingly dull ... Head master of Newington College, Michael Parker. His book is part of a David and Goliath battle for the minds of the next generation. Picture: Supplied

Dame Slap continued to have an anxiety attack about vulgar youff, reminding the pond of the days when Carl Barks was snatched out of hand as a waste of time, and never mind the joys of square eggs ...

Sorry, do go on ...

The human brain contains about 86 billion neurons, each capable of forming connections with other neurons to create more than one trillion connections. Though the number of neurons doesn’t change, the connections – or synapses – do. Some neuroscientists have a shorthand for it: “What fires together, wires together.”
What happens when kids stop reading books
Dementia specialists talk about people maintaining cognitive health to help ward off diseases such as dementia. What about the cognitive health of kids?
Parker is concerned the content and fast-paced instant gratification of social media, with algorithms directing kids into echo chambers of agreement, is literally changing the cognitive pathways in a child’s brain. “Doomscrolling”, he says, whether on TikTok or Instagram or other social media platforms “makes Australia’s Funniest Home Videos look like Tolstoy by comparison”.
Losing yourself in a book is fundamentally different to tuning out on social media platforms, he says.
“Fiction enlarges your humanity by having you understand others. Nonfiction, whether it’s biography or just the proposition of an argument, of a field that allows you to see all around it, requires a student to sit patiently and concentrate. I’m worried that form of concentration, like a muscle, is lessening. I talk to kids in English classes and in year 12 interviews. Child after child tells me they’re struggling with the concentration of sitting there, reading whole books or doing an exam for them,” says Parker, who was an English teacher before rising to senior roles at Cranbrook School, Oxley College and now Newington,
His observations are so commonplace, they risk being blindly accepted as the new normal.
The question is whether the new normal is good for students, and for the world they will inherit. Morrison, who teaches second and third-year honours students, says students are interpreting a mass of material every day, in forms different to previous generations. “They’re reading in complex ways all the time, but it is a little bit harder these days to say: See this long novel, it’s going to be OK to down tools on all that busy-ness and work with me slowly, deliberatively, in detail, through this long thing. Once they go with me, it is OK, but it’s just not their habit,” she says.
Feelings over logic and reason
Morrison has noticed students are resorting more and more to their feelings when forming arguments. “Somehow we’re in a strange place with intensity of feeling replacing fact.”

Here the pond must interrupt to reassure the younglings.

Don't worry vulgar youffs. 

Feelings are just fine. Trust King Donald, Dame Slap's preferred President? Sure can ...

For Trump, Who Has ‘Strong Feelings’ About Autism, the Issue Is Personal

“I always had very strong feelings about autism,” Mr. Trump began on Monday, saying he had been waiting for such an event for 20 years. Later, Mr. Trump proclaimed: “I’ve stopped seven different wars. I’ve saved millions of lives. I’ve done a lot of things. This will be as important as any single thing I’ve done.”

You see kids? No need to worry about feelings as a substitute for arguments, thinking or the need for the scientific examination of things. You can have strong feelings about vaccines or Comey or Vlad the Sociopath, and everything will turn out fine. All good.

Don't listen to Dame Slap's nonsense, just go with the man she celebrated with a cap-donning, and you'll end up as scientific as he is, and without any need to read at all ...

President of the USA ma, and no reading or science required ...

Indeed, no need for peer reviews, research, clinical trials, data, just go with your Dame Slap-approved King and his feelings ...

Parker agrees. “It’s OK to have feelings, but for feelings to substitute for argument, a thinking argument, is just a short-cut way to not having to examine anything.”
When feelings take centre stage, it’s easy for students to say that an argument makes them feel uncomfortable or unsafe, says Parker. And that constrains people listening to different opinions as well.
He is a firm believer that critical thinking will, and should, require people to confront arguments and conclusions that may make a person feel profoundly discombobulated or upset.
“That’s part of building up the cognitive architecture so that you can be thinking, and be thinking well, thinking responsibly as a citizen, as somebody in a workplace, somebody who’s got responsibilities to other people and making decisions,” says Parker.

Hang on, hang on, no need for cognition when you spot the enemy ...

Frankly the only good thing to be done with a book is to ban it, and while we're at it, ban those bloody comedians too ...

By this point Dame Slap was winding down, and the excuses for running a 'toon were also getting every thin, so best wrap up proceedings for those who did the reading between the 'toons ...

Compare this with our own schooling. As students we weren’t encouraged by concerned teachers to confront arguments that might have upset us. Instead, it was an intuitive part of our daily education.
Jane Curry is responsible for publishing Thinking for Yourself. The founder and managing director of the independent Ventura Press is also seeing our concentration spans change.
“We publishers are competing for people’s time and attention, and when you are up against Netflix, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, that is a very tough battle,” she tells Inquirer.
“Reading is a solitary, immersive experience, which is the very opposite of a digital dopamine hit. We find if people are in the reading habit, then they are hooked. But overall reading habits are declining and that is a challenge.”
Audio books: why reading and listening are different
Curry says not everything digital is a threat: “The BookTok trend has brought in a younger generation of ‘romantasy’ fans, who read authors such as Sarah J. Maas, which is keeping us all in business.”
People also are listening to audio books, Curry says, with enormous growth through Spotify, Apple and Audible.
Still, when you’re reading a book, as opposed to listening to an audio book, you can’t drive a car, do some admin or colour in. Reading and being bored are different, but not entirely so. If being bored has become unnatural, as university professors are witnessing among their students, it’s little wonder that reading is a chore rather than a joy for them.
This solitary pastime that demands our undivided attention has wired hundreds of millions of human brains in a certain way over almost 300 years, producing many of modernity’s finest achievements. If we are indeed at the dawn of a post-literate society, the impacts of social media, smartphones and screens are barely nascent.
That ought to make us think – while we still can.

Nah, if thinking involves lining up to don a MAGA cap for the Don, count the pond out.

The pond has spent an inordinate amount of time watching movies and television, once celebrated as the ruination of youth, and ditto listened to endless amounts of radio, once upon a time the ruination of youth, and read a lot of comics and wasted inordinate amounts of time on sci fi, all certain to ruin impressionable young minds.

First a little social media. Relax, younglings, you don't have to read about Dame Slap's king's inclination to fascism, you can just see it and hear it ...

Fascism?  You only need basic reading skills and a bit of social media to find it ...

And now for a bit of fun using a sci fi comic combo, and where's the harm?