In which the pond settles for mad King Donald's war of choice and a serve of pearls of wisdom...

 

At the start of the first episode of season five of The Wire, Bunk and his cop mates use a photocopier as a fake polygraph to fool a credulous young crim.

As the routine goes down, Bunk's mate observes Americans are a stupid people, by and large. We pretty much believe whatever we're told. And then later Bunk adds The bigger the lie, the more they believe.

This isn't anti-Americanism, though for a 2005 show, it's prescient enough about the mess America is currently in.

After all, Bunk is just recycling Herr Adolf and we all know what the Germans made of believing the big lie.

And what might be said of the hive mind produced by the lizard Oz, save to say that the longer the lie is repeated, the more the jihad works.

And that's where the pond starts today, with newly anointed jihadist, the canny Cranston, tag teaming with Brownie at the top of the "news" section ...

That splash gives the reptile game away ...

BRACE FOR AN IRATE RISE
Chalmers defends plunging house prices as living standards flatline
Treasurer admits tax reforms a factor in house price fall but vows no change
Jim Chalmers has conceded his tax reforms helped drive house prices down yet refused to change course, even if the damage to the property market worsens.
By Greg Brown and Matthew Cranston

Just note the comical graphic at the head of the jihad to see the propaganda intent...

Not to be outdone, reliable jihadist Geoff was on hand just below, eager to add to the bad news, and blessed by another snap making Jimbo look silly ...

COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS
Now the Treasurer is even blaming algorithms

Jim Chalmers’ inconvenient truths, as economy runs on fumes
Jim Chalmers has added social media to his growing list of things that make his job harder.

The pond highlighted these jihadists because it's Thursday and so the pond is going to do a bunk on a couple of the contributors on the extreme far right, both beavering away for the Daily Zionist News.

The pond has never much bothered with petulant Peta, and this bleat ensured an ongoing lack of attention...

The Bondi Beach massacre inquiry is a sham unless it’s reopened
We owe the dead the truth, and unless this royal commission urgently reopens hearings and takes evidence from politicians and senior leaders, we will have failed them.
By Peta Credlin
Columnist

The petulant one was backed up by another contribution, though the pair seemed hopelessly confused and contradictory ...

Enough evidence is there for the antisemitism royal commission – let Virginia Bell tally it up
The true reckoning of the work of the commission comes only after we see the commissioner’s report
By Michael Easson

C.f. another "news" story dressed up as an EXCLUSIVE ...

EXCLUSIVE
Creatives hold closed-door roundtable with royal commission
Virginia Bell’s royal commission heard from prominent Jewish creatives to gather testimony about antisemitism infiltrating Australia’s arts sector.
By Elizabeth Pike

What's the point of this incessant ongoing campaign? 

Partly it's to keep up the incessant drum beat, in a way that will sustain the jihad for months. Never mind any contradictions, just keep it running like that campaign to ruin the Voice.

More importantly, as the pond has suggested a number of times, if the Commission doesn't come up with recommendations suited to the reptile agenda - at this point it seems that agenda will only be satisfied if all criticism of the government of Israel and its ethnic cleansing activities in Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon is banned - then the mother of all jihads will be launched over the holiday season break, ensuring a happy Xmas for reptiles.

The pond is so over it that it couldn't even muster the strength to head off to Haaretz to hear the latest news about the ethnic cleansing and the apartheid system currently being deployed in Israel.

And with that issue kicked to the corner, the pond couldn't muster much interest in much of anything else.

Savaging Telstra is like being given a free hit with a photocopier acting as a polygraph:

Telstra outage: The next ‘long fuse’ may have already been lit
How a single system failure has exposed the wider, hidden risks within Telstra
The release of an investigation into Telstra’s network outage marks an important turning point for chief executive Vicki Brady.
By Eric Johnston
Associate Editor

And the pond could only wish Samer a happy time as he contemplated the Iran folly ... what with economic D-day having given way to the bombing of weddings as a solution.

Besides, his piece was an import from The Times, a reminder of the dreck served up by locals on a Thursday ...

The pond could at least use that as an excuse to slip in a Luckovich, what with Herr Adolf a running theme today ...

(For more sieg heil details, see the Georgia Recorder)

Sameh did his best to sort it all out in his final gobbet ...

Say what? It's now all about getting the mad Mullahs to go back to the MOU, which was a confession of the abject failure of this war of choice, with the hope of getting a few concessions, like ... we didn't really mean for you to be in control of the strait, we meant more that we wanted a sock puppet government of the Venezuelan kind, so we could make out like bandits on a colonial oil junket, just to help climate science with a final epic push to the two degree mark.

Speaking of climate science that set the tone for a serve of pearls of wisdom:

The pond is pleased the pearls included a reference to the joys of AI (and the data centres the bots need) because it did enjoy this double-edged 'toon by Jennings in The Graudian ...

Apart from being on the road to hell, what's the point of these pearls?

It's the usual, forget net zero, forget climate science, forget renewables ...

The government’s commitment to high-cost and intermittent energy sources that cannot meet the growing demands of AI data centres is made worse by Canberra’s bizarre insistence (until recently) on the kind of energy that is unsuited to data centres.

The pearls that subsequently dropped were just window dressing, an elaboration on that theme ...

The government’s likely demand is that AI not replace a single union member’s job in this country or undercut their conditions. And its 2026 budget assault on savings and investment, as we know, will penalise high-risk and high-return investments across the economy, with the government and its bureaucrats to police a narrow carve-out for some start-ups.
Chalmers describes AI as the “next wave” of technological change “that has now arrived”, giving the impression that it has materialised out of thin air.
But technological change is a by-product of innovation and risk-taking by entrepreneurs in search of profits, with investors and consumers – acting through free markets – the ultimate judge of their success or failure.
A government that is hostile to entrepreneurs and believes bureaucrats rather than markets should allocate resources will only stifle, rather than foster, this process. Yet Chalmers believes “we” – meaning our politicians and bureaucrats – can somehow micromanage the AI revolution to maximise its productivity benefits and eliminate its costs and risks altogether.
This is rubbish. I don’t pretend to know whether the AI revolution will prove to be a big bang or a whimper. But if it proves to be the former, it will – like every previous positive structural shock we have experienced – cause considerable economic pain.

For no particular reason the reptiles flung in an AV reminder that the best way of dealing with a moronic desire to use black roofs in a sunburnt land is to deploy solar panels ...Treasurer Jim Chalmers confronts Australia’s first one trillion dollar national debt

Golding caught that spirit ...

For man who confessed to not having the first clue about the AI revolution, this Pearl delivered a number of inane pearlers...

The pain is not something governments can wish away or abolish but inevitably accompanies – indeed is the reverse side of – the economic benefits these episodes bring.
China’s economic renaissance at the end of the 20th century is a case in point. We became one of that country’s most important suppliers of iron ore, coal and other commodities while benefiting enormously from its low-cost exports.
This shock lifted growth, productivity and living standards in this country, but also led to the elimination of many jobs in the manufacturing and textile sectors.
Bob Hawke and Paul Keating understood that this was a package deal. If the benefits were going to be enjoyed by the many, the costs would have to be borne by the few. Rather than micromanage this process as the Labor Left and unions wanted them to do, which would’ve killed it off and left us poorer as a result, they encouraged it by largely getting out of the way. Their reasoning was that the bigger the economic dividend we could earn from our expanding trade ties with China, the more rapidly displaced manufacturing workers would be re-employed elsewhere. And for those unable to do so, growing government revenues would easily fund targeted safety nets.
While AI is a different case, the same logic applies if it does end up cutting a swath through our white-collar industries.
That remains a big if, given we cannot predict the future (as Treasury has demonstrated recently with its rent and house price guesses). If Treasury were doing its job, it would have rejected the idea of an AI policy framework that could somehow capture the benefits of this technology in a cost-free way.

Did the pond need any further evidence to add to the mountain that proved that the French clock devotee and the dinkum drinker lived in reptile minds rent free? Not really ...Paul Keating and Bob Hawke. Picture: Getty Images

The pond thought another Golding was more to the point ...

After that came a reminder that the real point was standard climate science denialism, with net zero the usual reptile sticking point ...(sorry, people of Nepal, sorry Pacific islanders)...

It would be telling the government to support structural change, whether from AI or any other source, by cutting corporate tax rates to attract investment; lowering spending to take pressure off interest rates; increasing the flexibility of the labour market; abandoning net zero to bring down energy costs; and making sure specific help is available for affected workers.
Who knows, perhaps the latter could be allowed to dip into their superannuation savings to fund necessary retraining?

A master stroke, yet another way to make sure that super will never serve its intended purpose, though on the evidence people do tend to have a certain longevity, at which point super might be handy to help offset a miserable, miserly pension.

Towards the end, this Pearl did attempt a minor billy goat butt ...

I am not suggesting we should disregard wider AI risks; for example, to copyright holders and consumers. 

But that butt was immediately met by another butt ...

But where possible these should be dealt with under existing laws rather than creating a parallel, AI-specific, legal regime.
When a possible technological revolution beckons, we have a simple and inescapable choice.

And so a climate science Luddite was able to fling around with wild abandon the notion that he was besieged by Luddites...

Do we embrace it, trusting that the benefits it will bring to the many – in the form of higher productivity and living standards – will outweigh the dislocation and pain it inflicts on the few?
Or do we resist it, putting the protection of every threatened job ahead of the interests of the rest of the community, like modern-day Luddites?
Chalmers, in his characteristically muddled way, thinks we can have the best of both worlds. When a treasurer is incapable of acknowledging trade-offs as obvious as this one, perhaps he should be looking for another portfolio.
David Pearl is a former Treasury assistant secretary.

Not bad for a man who confessed in a muddled way characteristic of reptile contributions, I don’t pretend to know whether the AI revolution will prove to be a big bang or a whimper. 

This offerer of pearls of wisdom probably brings the same intellectual depth to his understanding of climate science...

And so to wrap up proceedings with an immortal Rowe, bringing together EVs and RBA ...

And as the pond has reached season five of The Wire in its retrospective season, why not offer that opening scene?