In which the pond proposes nasho for correspondents, and shows what active service is like by getting into the trenches with the Caterist and the Major ...

 

So soon? Just one comment on the Saturday, suggesting an unhealthy torpor, a lassitude, a lackadaisical  approach to herpetology studies has set in, and the pond hasn't even yet conducted mid-term exams.

Correspondents have gone MIA, the desultory responses suggesting that they need a good lashing, a shaking into life.

What they need is a return to nasho, a way get them doing pond community service, and it wouldn't hurt vulgar youff either ... or so says a Bergin, brimming with plans to give the younglings a newfound purpose...

How a new youth corps could rebuild our social capital
Australia should be bringing our young people together for a common national purpose. National service could do just that.
By Anthony Bergin

It was such a Westfield billionaire vision splendid that - while the full text could be found at the intermittent archive - the pond couldn't resist the rest of the spiel, the pitch to bring back nasho ...

...Lowy’s national service push could be achieved if we established an emergency management corps modelled on the Australian Defence Force Gap Year program. The ADF program enables 17 to 24-year-olds with a year 12 education to experience segments of defence force training and employment for up to 12 months. There’s no obligation to continue their service beyond the year.
An infantry soldier in the Gap Year program is paid about $82,000 a year. The program is now established as a key avenue of entry to the ADF. There were 825 young people enrolled in the program last year. A high proportion of entrants elect to remain in the permanent defence or part-time reserve workforces.
The EMC should be a two-year program, during which participants work with emergency management organisations in the states, gaining and practising skills applicable in emergencies without demanding a long-term, full-time commitment from them. They would be paid like defence reservists and would be required to maintain their participation in the EMC when conditions demanded it until the age of 40.
The EMC would introduce a common national approach to the training of emergency workers that would enable them to be used cross-jurisdictionally.
Under the EMC, the main roles for corps members would include severe flooding response and post-impact recovery and clean-up, bushfire and severe storm and cyclone response. Once they’ve completed their training, they’d be kept at a high state of readiness, available for immediate deployment within the state or nationally. Resources would need to be provided to the states to train, direct and deploy EMC members.
Defence might be able to assist in some aspects of training in the EMC. Civil defence roles could be part of the work of the EMC: our strategic environment has changed and warning times may be very short. Long-range missile strikes on this country are a possibility. We need some planning on how and what civil defence measures are needed to protect the civilian population during conflict and recover from any hostilities.
The EMC could be trained in civil defence roles such as assisting in evacuation, management of protective shelters, rescue and emergency accommodation and supplies. Most young people would consider counter disaster and rescue work more appealing than military service, although that would be included as a choice.
There is some element of danger in countering disasters that might worry parents, but much less so compared with the military. A manageable element of danger (in a good cause) would be an attraction to many young people.
Mixing at an early-stage EMC member will bring subsequent benefits of greater mutual understanding and co-operation.
Lowy should be applauded for advancing the idea of national service to help Australia get ambitious again about its values, giving young Australians an outlet to contribute to our pluralism.
Anthony Bergin is an expert associate at the Australian National University’s National Security College.

Well played - the pond just loves reptile 1950s and 1960s dreamings - and good luck with all that ... as the conscripted reptiles went about the right and proper jihad for the day, giving Albo a bloody good hiding at the top of the digital edition this morning ...

If you want to be shocked, startled and appalled by that line up of reptile EXCLUSIVES, the sudden transformative reptile approval of feminists can be found here, with the shocked, newly feminist Shanners tit-titting and clucking here. (Only 3 minutes worth, mind).

Sheesh, and there was the pond thinking it was just another sample of bro influencer culture, but it turned out that there was nothing to laugh about, as the reptiles went full feminist pious apoplectic.

As for the reptiles desire that AI should roam wild and free, that could be found here - please, no heavy-handed regulation of AI - while the conventional, "we'll all be rooned"- gotta make gas run wild and free warm up for tomorrow's Dame Groan - could be found here ...

What a pity that they couldn't save all the verbiage by running an immortal Rowe ...

The pond regrets it couldn't spend more time in a state of alarm and panic, just as it couldn't find the time to spend with simplistic Simon, sounding an apocalypse now alarm ...

16pc state primary vote signals Libs wipeout
The path once trodden by the Coalition through NSW on its way to government in Canberra is now looking more like an overgrown goat track.
By Simon Benson
Political analyst

The pond saved it to the intermittent archive, but does commend the reptiles for coming up with a most excellent opening illustration, featuring a deer caught in the headlights ...

Speaking of the windmill-fearing beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, the quarry whispering Caterist was also on the case:

The header: Taylor’s TikTok challenge: complex policy in 45 seconds; The TikToxicisation of politics is spreading infection across the broader civic landscape.

The caption, with exceptional Emilia credit, for a most moving collage: Pauline Hanson, Anthony Albanese and Angus Taylor. Art: Emilia Tortorella. Sources: iStock

The pond couldn't see a problem - it usually only takes 45 seconds to understand the Caterist at his most complex is a form of drivel - but the flood waters decipherer was determined to show he was down with the exotic and arcane ways of vulgar youff:

In August 2018, Australian politics quietly entered a new age. Almost nobody noticed.
The trigger was the creation of an exceptionally addictive digital platform by Chinese technology company ByteDance. ByteDance’s new supercharged TikTok algorithm used artificial intelligence to process mountains of information containing clues to an individual’s appetite for, say, performances by dancing cockatoos compared to acrobatic cats.
If that makes TikTok sound trivial, it is because, at one level, it is. It prefers attention-grabbing stunts and smart-alec comments to lectures on quantum physics or reasoned discussions about tax policy. The algorithm craves attention above everything, which explains why the federal Disability Minister was caught on camera in his office last week behaving like a jackass, waving his arms around theatrically and gyrating in his suit. Mark Butler, 55, wasn’t drunk or amusing a restless infant. He was trying to grab your attention to tell you the great news about Labor’s tax cut, the one so small you’d otherwise miss it.
The TikToxicisation of politics is spreading infection across the broader civic landscape. Time senior ministers once spent poring over policy documents or crafting cabinet briefs is now spent crafting clever one-liners.

What to do, what to do? Turn to a man with the charisma of a wet and rather smelly sock? Angus Taylor reacts to a speech in the House of Representatives. Picture: Getty Images

Just the man to deliver a most engaging leer... as the Caterist stayed on the case...

Indeed, some younger backbenchers newly arrived in politics seem to think entertaining social media audiences is all they have been elected to do.
One Nation has adapted quickly to this brave new world. Pauline Hanson’s Please Explain cartoon series was tailor-made for the algorithm. Facebook-era social media helped One Nation build a network of supporters in a limited older demographic. The TikTok era has broadened the party’s geographic and demographic appeal.
The good news for Angus Taylor is that the algorithm doesn’t much care about partisan politics. Previous Liberal leaders have struggled with the proliferation of pro-Labor and Green bias in what we now call the legacy media.
All the algorithm cares about is engagement. Taylor understands the need for strong digital content better than most. Lifting the opposition’s digital technology game was one of his top priorities when he was elected leader.
The challenge for Taylor, however, is not form but content. The reforming policies the national interest demands from grown-up governments are not easily explained in 45 seconds. Platforms that prioritise engagement respond less well to complex arguments for fiscal reform than to emotionally compelling narratives spiced with crude ad hominem attacks.
The bias Taylor faces is not partisan but structural. The serious debate on economic reforms he knows he can win will struggle to survive a hard fight for attention when Labor ministers are prancing around like performing seals. The relationship between politics and the fourth estate has survived other technological revolutions. The introduction of rotary presses in the 19th century vastly increased the circulation and influence of newspapers.

Quick, a snap of a villain devoted to the superficial, Health Minister Mark Butler has gone to great lengths to grab your attention.

And how does the Caterist cope with all this new-fangled stuff? 

Why, by reverting to Ming the Merciless and little Johnny and Arthur Calwell, because nothing signals contemporary relevance better than trotting out the names of politicians that vulgar youff wouldn't have a clue about ...

Robert Menzies adapted quickly to the radio era, recognising the potential for politicians to talk directly to voters sitting comfortably in their own homes. His Forgotten People radio essays in 1942 were not just a forum for political communication but also a platform to assemble a coherent statement of philosophical intent.
The end of Labor leader Arthur Calwell’s career was hastened by his inability to perform on television. John Howard bypassed the hostile press gallery by mastering talkback radio. Taylor’s challenge, however, will be considerably harder in the era of media abundance, which accelerated with the arrival of smartphones and ubiquitous high-speed internet. In the analog era, consumer choice was constrained by technological and commercial limitations. Today, market choice is effectively infinite. The scarce resource the algorithms allocate is time.
Watch time, rewatches, comments, shares and likes, and similar behavioural metrics provide the price signals that inform the market. Like Adam Smith’s invisible hand allocating capital, the algorithm apportions the scarce resource of human attention to the highest bidder.
Structural biases are inevitable. Nuance is cognitively costly. Outrage is cognitively cheap. Engagement systems value moral-emotional and conflict-oriented content, discounting subtlety and reason. Ad hominem attacks triumph over substance.
Content expressed with certainty typically outperforms content that acknowledges complex­ity and uncertainty. That may suit populist parties advocating simple solutions but it is inimical to politicians who recognise the need for trade-offs. A video that argues for and against in the hope of arriving at an acceptable middle would sink without a trace on TikTok.

By golly, this day he's up there with his insights on the movement of floodwaters in quarries, as the reptiles flung in the real reason the lizard Oz is still in an abject panic ... Pauline Hanson and One Nation have adapted quickly to the brave new world Picture: Martin Ollman

From the wreckage, the Caterist managed to produce signs of hope, because he was down wit it...

Instead, the algorithm creates feedback loops that reduce exposure to competing perspectives. There’s little to be gained in challenging a mind that is already made up.
It is tempting to look back at the quarter-century that began in the early 1980s and expired in the late 2000s as the golden era of reform, presided over not by mere politicians but by leaders blessed with a sagacity that transformed them into gods.
Yet it is a moot question if Howard would have survived four elections in the era of social media.
Would the GST have become law if its second-reading speech had been delayed for 25 years and been subjected to the mockery, smears and distortions that drive engagement on TikTok?
In his reply to the budget in May, Taylor outlined the most substantial economic reform proposal from an opposition leader this century. The arguments for abolishing bracket creep might not be particularly engaging to the algorithm. Yet Taylor is determined to persist.
Taylor did not abandon a successful career as a business consultant to become a social media content provider. He did not withdraw from running his family’s farming business to grow clickbait. His objective is not to accumulate Facebook friends to gain power, fame and influence for their own sake.
Taylor remains true to the spirit of his party’s founder who, when the party faced a low ebb in the early 1960s, delivered a counterintuitive line that may well have gone viral, framed in contemporary rhetoric.
“We are not here just to win elections,” Menzies told a party gathering at Hawthorn Town Hall in the heart of his Kooyong electorate. “We are here to win something for the country.”

Say no more, the Caterist and the beefy boofhead are going to score by staying true to the spirit of the 1950s and Ming, and that'll larn them vulgar youffs ...

Aside from this form of low comedy, do the reptiles even begin to realise that the current government has vulnerabilities? 

The pond thought that as yet another ad for gambling flashed across the pond's screen, despite the pond's very best attempts to block such advertising ...

And yet the hive mind is clueless ...

Meanwhile, the Australian Daily Zionist News strand of the hive mind featured yet another piece by Major Mitchell ...

The header: How Israel’s reality of happy coexistence shatters the narrative of global hate; The Israel of social media hate bears no resemblance to everyday life in the country.

The caption for the snap of one of the Major's enemies: Former Adelaide Writers Festival director Louise Adler appearing on the ABC’s 7.30. Picture: ABC

The pond only runs the Major so that it can provide the odd alternative, like this one...

And so on, and it goes without saying that the Major's portrait of the current state of Israel under the current far right government bears no actual connection to the rabid, extremist reality ...

The Israel of social media hate and look-at-me public protesters globally bears no resemblance to the actual country.
This column is being filed from Tel Aviv and the country’s north where Israelis seem back to their best after a pall of sadness was lifted with the return of Hamas’s hostages last October.
A year ago, again visiting my daughter, grandson and son-in-law who live in central Tel Aviv, the usual boisterous Israeli mood had given way to a feeling of national mourning after October 7 and the hostage crisis.
Huge “bring them home banners” – some many storeys high – were draped down the outsides of buildings and on people’s verandas and car windows.
The faces of the hostages were plastered in adhesive stickers across lamp posts, bus stops and park benches in towns across Israel from the north to the Negev.
The country’s national purpose, to provide a home for Jews who for thousands of years have known this is their homeland, was – as this column wrote in October 2023 – always going to be challenged by the taking of hundreds of hostages.
That piece said Israel’s psyche demanded every Israeli everywhere be rescued no matter the cost. Israel, after the loss of six million Jews in the Holocaust, is where Jews must always find safety.

The reptiles flung in a snap ...Rachel Goldberg and Jonathan Polin, parents of Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, attend a demonstration calling for the hostages’ release. Picture: AFP

And now before proceeding with the Major's Benji worship, try this in Haaretz, A Thousand Days of Netanyahu's Repulsive Revisionism About October 7; Building on his long record of Holocaust revisionism, Netanyahu now needs Israelis to swallow obvious, and often contradictory, lies about the biggest disaster in the country's history to win the elections (*intermittent archive link)

And so on, but carry on Majoring if you must ...

This is a country that sent the late brother of its present Prime Minister as a 30-year-old soldier to rescue the Entebbe hijack hostages in 1976.
Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu was killed leading the successful rescue of 100 hostages in a daring mission on the tarmac at a Ugandan airport.
This is the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who in 2011 traded 1027 Palestinian prisoners for a single soldier captured by Hamas, Gilad Shalit. Among those freed prisoners was Yahya Sinwar, who would go on to plan the October 7 pogrom that killed 1200 innocents on a Sabbath morning in their homes, in their beds and at a music festival for peace.
Western protesters who understand nothing about Israel or the Middle East love to hate Bibi, but he came to the latest conflicts with Iran and its proxies with a far deeper understanding of Palestinian terror than any politician alive anywhere.
Last Saturday, the Sabbath, we went to a local beach. Thousands were on the white sand and in the water – Jews picnicking on the grass by the sand alongside Palestinian families.
On Tuesday morning at the same beach, a young Palestinian mum in what Australians might call a burkini was swimming with her two young sons next to a small group of Israeli mums.
I accompanied my daughter to an indoor swimming lesson for the 18-month-old in northern Tel Aviv. Two Palestinian mums in similar swim attire were in the heated pool with their toddlers singing along in a Hebrew version of Eensy Weensy Spider.
This is not the Israel the West’s foreign correspondents report, always keen for an easy line on Palestinians and their Jewish “oppressors”.
Nor would the keffiyeh-wearing crowd at an Australian pro-Palestine march find a European settler coloniser society were they to visit. Even among the Jewish population, 60 per cent are of Middle Eastern background.
My grandson’s paternal grandfather left Iraq in 1950 and the Iraqi government confiscated all his property. He had lived in Erbil so dodged the June 1941 anti-Jewish pogrom in Baghdad.
Known as Farhud, Nazi-aligned forces killed 500 Jews and injured 1000 in two days. Like much of the Middle East, including Palestinian Grand Mufti Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the Iraqis were Hitler’s allies.

That Haaretz piece opened with a few words relating to a few of the Major's notions...

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a long record of historical revisionism. Take, for example, the Holocaust.
Over the last decade, he has claimed that the (pro-Nazi) Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, invented the Final Solution, not Hitler; whitewashed Nazi collaborators in Poland and Hungary; and declined to push back at Russian President Vladimir Putin's claim that his army was "denazifying" Ukraine. Netanyahu's habit of calling the Iranian regime, Hamas and U.S. college encampments the "new Nazis" is not only analytically substandard, but legitimizes the flattening of the Holocaust in global public rhetoric to become a cheap and ubiquitous slur.
But Netanyahu's campaign of revisionism regarding the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 is not only blatant and egregious, but its success or failure will determine the results of Israel's imminent elections – and the fate of millions of Israelis and Palestinians.

As for Benji, so the Major, as the object of the Major's worship intruded, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Picture: AFP

Then came a gross defamation, a profound distortion of what actually happened during the 1948 Nakba ...

My daughter’s mother-in-law migrated from Algeria.
While 700,000 Palestinians left the newly formed, United Nations-backed state of Israel after independence in 1948, more than a million Jews from around the Middle East fled the other way.

They just upped and left? Appalling, but not if you want to act as Benji's Lord Haw-Haw:

Many had lived in places like Baghdad, Tehran, Cairo and Damascus since long before the Prophet Mohammad was born.
As Sabine Sterk wrote in The Times of Israel on August 7 last year: “Israel absorbed its refugees, often from hostile lands, building housing, jobs and education. Arab countries weaponised their refugees, refusing them citizenship, confining them to camps and using their suffering to demonise Israel.
“These Jews didn’t have to be expelled by war, they were expelled by hate.”
And yet people in this country are happy.
The global World Happiness Report released in March rated Israel eighth worldwide. Most of its Middle Eastern neighbours rank near the bottom of the index.
Israel’s under-25s are even more happy. They rank third, while the youth of the US plummeted to 60th, according to the Times of Israel.
The study said the young in Israel benefited from strong “family ties, community faith, a sense of belonging and strong social bonds”. Precisely the attributes young Australians seem to be missing.
Researcher Anat Fanti from the Bar-Ilan University said young Israelis did military service while their foreign peers were still in college.

Somehow the reptiles think this sort of snap works, People enjoy a day at the beach along the Mediterranean at Tel Aviv, Israel. Picture: AP

As if it is a counter to the ugly reality of the ethnic cleansing, and the rampant destruction, which the UN has estimated will cost US$70 billion to make good ... what a mess ...

 And there's other stories that never enter the hive mind orbit ...

UN commission of inquiry says Israel committing genocide in Gaza by deliberately targeting children

As for the rest, it's predictable, a kind of ongoing Major set of thought crimes in support of a far right government intent on producing a greater Israel ...

“They make decisions between 18 and 21 that are far beyond their years,” she wrote.
It’s a country the Western left once lauded for its working class socialism in action on Kibbutzes, in the government-subsidised healthcare sector, and the fact education is available to all citizens, whether Jewish, Bedouin, Muslim or Christian.
Yet to hear the likes of former Adelaide Writers Festival director Louise Adler describe it, Zionism – which is no more than the acceptance of the reality of Israel’s legal existence – is a kind of racist thought crime.
Adler wrote on Deepcut News on June 29 – the day Steven Lowy, son of Westfield founder and Holocaust survivor Frank Lowy told the antisemitism royal commission his family had received 1500 online threats a month – that the inquiry should really be looking at the Israel lobby to find the cause of Australia’s rising antisemitism.
She argued much of the evidence presented to the commission was about the hurt feelings of Jewish Australians before and after the December 14 massacre of 15 people during a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach.
Adler’s piece ends with a defence of the idea that ordinary diaspora Jews “should be held responsible for Israel’s conduct”. Why? Because the “Israel lobby” conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism”.
A more cogent assessment of the “guilt by association” thinking of modern leftists was presented in The Australian by Nick Dyrenfurth on Wednesday, critiquing a push by academics to force a Melbourne University scholar to hand back a prize linked to a Jewish institution.
An open letter published in Overland called for historian Matthew Champion not to accept the Dan David prize for a work on medieval concepts of time because of the Dan David Foundation’s links to Israel.
“Totalitarian regimes of both the left and the right perfected the technique of guilt by association dressed up as virtue,” Dyrenfurth wrote.
People in Israel understand the moral and historical inversions being framed against their country – the deliberately warped use of words such as genocide or apartheid that could never apply to Israel in their ordinary meaning.
Palestinians have been offered a two-state solution many times since the 1930s. They have rejected these offers.
Today, sadly, Israel and Jews globally have few friends, even in the US, UK and Australia.

And why is that? Because genocide and apartheid can be applied to Israel in their ordinary meanings, and all the denialism in the world won't alter that reality.

In earlier times, the pond was relatively neutral on the matter of Israel, especially as the behaviour of radical Islamic extremists wasn't appealing, and never mind the Israeli government's desire to fit up South Africa's apartheid regime with nukes.

But there are some things that are impossible to ignore, unless you happen to have a pair of the Major's rose-tinted glasses to hand.

It's a bit like trying to deny other current realities, ones for which Faux Noise and News Corp must shoulder a bigly amount of blame...

On the other hand, there's always Vladimir Rudolfovich Solovyov, the crème de la crème of contemptible Lord Haw-Haws, to provide a little light relief ...