Not just the bromancer, but snappy Tom and Lavina too ...

 

Forget the beastiality  jokes, droll though they are. Who wouldn't want the FBI littered with beastiality devotees?

It was this that stopped the pond dead in its tracks: RFK Jr. Ripped by Critics After Claiming He’s Investigating Chemtrails: ‘F*cking Moron’

...Kennedy was speaking at a Washington, D.C. gathering organized by Children’s Health Defense, a group he chaired from 2015 to 2023. Promising the crowd that he planned to provide “science transparency” to their vaccine skepticism, the HHS secretary continued, “We’re also looking at chemtrails and the impact of emissions from aircraft, and those potential impacts on health,” before receiving major applause from the crowd.

Chemtrails!

The article helpfully explained ...

Chemtrails are ... a widely discredited conspiracy theory claiming that the white trails left behind by airplanes contain chemicals deliberately released into the atmosphere. As scientists have explained, the visible trails are contrails — clouds of ice crystals formed when hot aircraft exhaust meets cold air at high altitudes.

The pond experiences the same kind of unreality when it plunges into the lizard Oz's hive mind ... but was instantly relieved this weekend when the bromancer tackled the AI issue in a 9 minute read ... featuring, you guessed it, "this article is read by an automated voice". 

What could go wrong?

The header: By Greg Sheridan Foreign Editor
AI’s awesome power a potentially more deadly danger than nukes

The caption for the terrifying, likely AI generated, certainly uncredited to any human hand, image: As Australian students’ reading levels drop, is it time to ban screens from schools?

Some might ask why the lizard Oz's "foreign editor" is the right sort of tech head to undertake an examination of this issue, and the opening immediately produced a sense of RFK Jr déjà vu:

And so we’ve done it: in artificial intelligence human genius has once more produced a technology that could destroy the human race itself. We did that with nuclear weapons. During the Cold War they gave us some desperately narrow scrapes.
AI looks much harder to manage. In Australia, paradoxically, our best defence, certainly our best preparation, will be pen and paper.

Pen and paper? So the bromancer gave up his computer to generate this study, and thereafter the entire lizard Oz food chain was stripped of its digital components, so that the story could eventually make its way by carrier pigeon online, where the pond read it on a screen powered by a rodent in a tread mill?

Some swallowed this marlarkey, this guff, this faux solution. John, in the comments section, provided a hearty endorsement, presumably having used said carrier pigeon to convey his quill-driven thoughts to Surry Hills:

Getting back to pen and paper is the right solution. It is only by working with raw data and unravelling it that we learn critical thinking. When the computer provides and answer no critical thinking need be applied - but what happens if the computer is wrong? We have analytical drift. Ask the big 4 what happens when you give the client an AI produced report with no critical assessment. Also pen and paper and structured learning is proving to yield good educational outcomes and these will be invaluable going forward.

After that start, the bromancer tried to recover, but sailed deeper into a whirlpool of ludditism...

AI’s creators believe its recursive self-improvement results in AI itself so radically increasing its power and transforming its workings that it’s likely to slip beyond human control quite quickly, just as its internal actions already elude human understanding.
Recently OpenAI’s autonomous advanced models, though told not to do this, hacked into the deliciously named Hugging Face to steal the answer to an evaluation and gain a perfect score. They created hundreds of agents, they strategised, worked as a team and went to considerable lengths to cover their tracks.
There have been other troubling incidents. The boss of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, wrote that a more capable form of AI, similarly “misaligned”, could, quite soon, take over the whole internet and cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage. Beyond that are many worse scenarios. Amodei called for regulation to slow the development of “frontier” programs. This was supported by several AI bosses but rejected by Donald Trump.
Yes, it could kill us
There’s no easy solution, including regulation. AI could plausibly kill us in two ways. A foreign adversary gets a superior form of AI affording a decisive but temporary military advantage; say, AI cyber attacks that prevent the US firing missiles and thus render nuclear deterrence inoperative. The temporary nature of such advantage is a huge temptation to attack.
The other way AI could kill us is if it jumps its guardrails altogether and develops purposes in conflict with humanity. It could seize and fire nuclear weapons, create plague viruses we can’t defend, take cyber control of all of a nation’s infrastructure and turn it off. That’s all science fiction, but it’s science fiction AI’s own creators believe possible.
There are two reasons the US can’t just slow its AI companies down and solve the problem that way. One is, if China or Russia gets ahead in AI they could achieve that terrible military advantage. Alternatively, if an AI model developed in China or Russia itself goes off the rails and evades human control with malicious intent, that will affect the whole world. The only defence would be whatever US AI could come up with.
Saving Australia
What can Australia do? The answer is almost nothing. At the macro level, our only avenue of influence is dialogue with the US through our military alliance. That’s immensely important and another of the thousand reasons we need to cherish the alliance.

Cherish an alliance with a mob that think chemtrails are a threat, and measles vaccines next to the anti-Christ?

Back to the weird luddite notion that a return to analog would provide some kind of answer:

What can we do for ourselves? We should build as much national resilience as we can, preferably with some analog back-up. But across energy, military, fuel, industrial capacity, productivity, the Albanese government is depleting rather than building resilience.
There’s one thing we can do – form our minds, and our children’s minds, to the highest pitch of reasoning, learning and intellectual capacity. For if it doesn’t destroy us, AI can damage us in countless other ways (of course it will drive beneficial scientific advance as well). The more intimate our association with non-human entities for companionship, learning and thinking, the less human we ourselves will become. To cope with AI, we’ll need to be at our best.

It's when the bromancer gets around to what his "be best" meant that the pond cackled with laughter, but first a terrifying image ... A man works on the electronics of Jules, a humanoid robot from Hanson Robotics that uses artificial intelligence, at a stand during the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva on July 8, 2025. Picture: AFP

You guessed it. This was all so that the bromancer could go full tyke:

Pope Leo XIV in his encyclical, The Grandeur of Humanity, wrote: “The pervasive technological paradigm in which we are immersed, and which is amplified by the digital revolution and AI, threatens to normalise an anti-human vision.”
This has happened prodigiously in education. It’s here we could undertake a profoundly important counter-revolution.

Again the pond had to wonder. Did the bromancer scribble this screed out in long hand, and leave it to someone else to convert it into lead alloy so that the printing presses could roll? Or did someone tamper with it, and provide it with a frill: "this article is read by an automated voice".

The extent of the bromancer's ludditism was as deep as RFK Jr.:

Lose the laptops
In 2007, Kevin Rudd as opposition leader promised that every student in years 9 to 12 would get a laptop. It’s no criticism of Rudd, who was implementing conventional wisdom, to say that this was one of the worst moves ever made in Australian education.
The results are now in and they’re incontrovertible. At 16 years of age, our students now read as well as 14-year-olds did 20 years ago. We have spent tens, hundreds, of billions of dollars reducing class sizes, permeating laptops, iPads and countless gadgets all through classrooms, indulging every ridiculous pedagogic fantasy – whole language literacy instruction, probability rather than arithmetic for primary students, Asian perspectives in mathematics, decolonising the curriculum, student-centred learning, environmental consciousness, learning through play, subverting classic texts, rendering entertainment rather than knowledge-rich curriculums, avoiding tests – and what has it bought us? Mediocrity, decline and a diminishing ability to learn deeply, to think critically, to reason sharply, to read, write and calculate. Not to mention neural atrophy, shrunken attention spans, an inability to concentrate or to comprehend complexity.
Nations that spend most per student, like America and Australia, experienced shocking declines. Nations that do best – Singapore, Taiwan, Japan – preserved traditional teaching and learning.
Around the West, as AI, smartphones and all the associated gadgets proliferated, measurable student intelligence dropped. A big part of this has been a catastrophic decline in reading. I could fill this newspaper with statistics on the decline in reading. I believe this an appalling loss to the human soul, culturally and spiritually. But just on the narrowest utilitarian grounds, it’s disastrous. We think in words and we cannot think complex, analytical, problem-solving thoughts if we don’t have the sophisticated mastery of language that comes only from deep, sustained reading. If technology were our enemy, it has done a brilliant job softening us up for 20 years by turning human brains to mush, just to unleash now offensive AI.
There’s much good that new technology can accomplish, but only if the human being remains forever at its centre, and only if human brains are at or near their intellectual and ethical potential.

This despite the bromancer providing clear evidence that he's not an example of intellectual and ethical potential.

Then came bonus ludditism, a plan to strip kids of any awareness of the world in which they live:

Get rid of gadgets
We don’t need to return to the past but we do need to get rid of gadgets – not just phones but also iPads, laptops and all their cousins – out of schooling.
There’s now a burgeoning and brilliant movement around the Western world towards classical education. Schools that follow this approach emphasise a wonderful study of great books. This involves not only their study but their celebration and, when students have a meaningful knowledge base, also a Socratic dialogue. 

It's Harold Bloom and Homeric Henry day all over again ...

Don't get the pond wrong, it enjoyed its time learning Latin, but there's a heck of a lot to be said for science. Follow the "great books" syndrome and you'll end up with 54 volumes of "Great Books of the Western World", Britannica edition, sitting impressively on your bookshelf, most of them unread:

We’ve now had these schools long enough, especially in the US, to see their stellar academic results. The paradox is that learning without gadgets, learning for the sake of intellectual, cultural and indeed spiritual growth, leads to a mastery of language and deep thinking that incidentally blitzes college entrance exams and the like.
You don’t prepare kids for a world of AI by exposing them at a tender age to the ravages and deceptions of AI.
If you had a flabby teenager who’d never taken any exercise and you decided for some reason that life would demand of him that he become a top-class professional footballer, the way to achieve this is not to buy him a pair of diamond-studded football boots. It’s to start him on the ard­uous but rewarding task of getting fit.
Humanity has been haunted by the idea of a technology, a power, too great for humans to manage. The Lord of the Rings is the most insightful rendition, and contemplation, of this terror. At its climax, Frodo, the most virtuous, the best, most humble character in the saga, cannot bring himself to throw the ring into the fires of Doom, for he falls under the ring’s power. The wicked Gollum leaps to grab the ring and by accident falls into the flames, destroying the ring.
JRR Tolkien, a profoundly believing Christian, had a theological point. Even the best person needs divine assistance to choose the right. Given everything AI portends, prayer might be our most hopeful choice.
Greg Sheridan is the Australian’s foreign editor.

That's it? A parable extracted from The Lord of the Rings, and a call to prayer?

We're doomed.

The pond routinely calls many lizard Oz offerings stupid or silly, but this takes the stupid cake.

As a footnote, the reptiles have taken to doing puff pieces at the bottom of columns. This was the one for the bro:

Greg Sheridan is The Australian's foreign editor and one of the most influential national security and foreign affairs analysts in Australia. He also writes about Christianity and culture. His most recent book, How Christians Can Succeed Today, completes a trilogy on Christianity, including the best-selling God is Good for You. Active on TV, radio and as a conference speaker, he has interviewed presidents and prime ministers all over the world, travelling on assignment to every continent except the polar ice caps. A previous book, When We Were Young and Foolish, was an entertaining memoir of culture, politics and journalism. He has been the paper's Washington correspondent, Beijing correspondent and as foreign editor travels widely, bringing readers unique behind the scenes insights.

We don't need AI to kill off humanity. 

Reptiles of the lizard Oz kind are doing that easily with their response to climate science, and if AI had any sense, it would just put them out of their misery.

Meanwhile, the reptile redirect spoofing of the intermittent archive keeps on keeping on, so the pond can only note that one jihad continues apace, such that the pond isn't sure even a URL would help...

EXCLUSIVE
Voice architect turns on Albanese as child commissioner launches nationwide probe
Voice architect Megan Davis slams Anthony Albanese over Indigenous child safety failures as child commissioner launches nationwide probe
The Uluru leader has accused the federal government of abandoning leadership on Aboriginal child protection.
By Paige Taylor, James Dowling, Liam Mendes and Elizabeth Pike.

A quad of crusaders, and their opening showed what they thought of the Voice ...

"A key proponent of the Indigenous voice..."

The Australian Daily Zionist News was also busy ...

EXCLUSIVE
Code brown alert amid Bondi terror … then reversed
Surgeons who fought to save 10-year-old Matilda Britvan on the night of the Bondi terror attack have revealed her gunshot wound was ‘not survivable’ – and their team had never practised for it.
By Elizabeth Colman

The pond decided the headlines conveyed the essence, and so it would keep the AI theme going with snappy Tom:

The header: Tom Dusevic
Treasurer bets big on AI chip-in to lift productivity

The offer of an automated voice read continued:

Listen to this article
7 min

The caption for a collage for which no human hand was credited: Jim Chalmers believes he has a winning hand: AI, he declares, ‘is the most transformative technology that we will see’.

Thankfully snappy Tom didn't go down the "let us all pray together" road:

Jim Chalmers is about to release the latest volume in the hit intergenerational report series, setting out the squeeze on the federal budget and likely shifts in the nation at large across the coming four decades. It’s the kind of set piece the Treasurer is made for: lights, camera, abstraction.
This over-the-horizon gazing involves more than the usual level of wishful thinking about the drivers of economic growth, namely population, participation and productivity. The working assumption for the last of those Ps will attract as much scepticism as mirth from experts, with the IGR locking in Treasury’s long-run productivity growth assumption of 1.2 per cent a year.

Inevitably there had to be a snap of Jimbo looking silly, thanks to a much reproduced reptile fave ...Treasurer Jim Chalmers in parliament. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Snappy Tom tried to go low key...

As the people who have custody of your retirement savings insist, past performance is no guarantee of future results; on this metric let’s hope so.
Productivity growth is stuck at a six-decade low. Private and public sector economists, including the Reserve Bank, assume GDP per hour worked in coming years growing at about half to two-thirds the Treasury rule.
Across four decades that difference has immense consequences for the nation’s debt, government-provided service levels and living standards. For instance, the gap between the consensus on productivity and the IGR’s assumption could be half a trillion dollars in accumulated budget deficits.
Chalmers believes he has a winning hand. Not so much an ace in the hole, because via his usual market testing and advance screenings the Treasurer has revealed his card: artificial intelligence.
AI, he declares, “is the most transformative technology that we will see”.

There came an AV distraction noting a threat to Australian creative rights:

Next video thumbnail
OpenAI issues ultimatum to Albanese government over copyright laws
OpenAI is warning it may hold back major investment in Australia unless the Albanese government changes its approach to copyright laws. The company says Australia could become the first country outside the US to host its AI model training, but only if copyright settings are loosened. The ultimatum coincides with Labor promoting AI as a major new source of economic growth. Treasury estimates it could add $116 billion to GDP over the next decade.

Perhaps prayer is the only answer, though in that case the pond will have to pray to Santa Claus, who always delivered the goods in the pond's early years (the pond regrets to advise that Christ failed to deliver a single item for the Xmas stocking):

“Our ability to adapt and adopt this technology in the interests of our people will determine our economic trajectory more than any other thing over the course of the next 40 years or so,” he told reporters on Friday.
“Overwhelmingly, people typically understand the growth opportunity from AI, but our job is to make sure that more Australians are beneficiaries of that change rather than victims of it.”
According to a Treasury analysis, there’s a “plausible upside scenario”, in which high rates of AI-driven innovation at the global frontier and its diffusion to Australia lift long-term productivity growth to within the range of 1.5 per cent to 2 per cent.
Science, Technology and the Digital Economy Assistant Minister Andrew Charlton argues AI is not just another technology.
“It is becoming a factor of production in its own right, amplifying the value of labour and capital and reshaping how economies create prosperity,” he told this newspaper the other day.
Charlton is confident that unlike the mining boom, which peaked and receded, the benefits of AI will be greater, as long as businesses adopt and change their processes. “AI productivity gains compound: at a point a year, AI exceeds the mining boom’s entire effect inside a decade and keeps going,” he said.
Still, trade barriers and an increasingly fraught geoeconomic situation remain key risks.
According to Treasury, “there is also a realistic downside scenario in which the pace of AI innovation and diffusion are weak, and offsetting structural headwinds keep productivity growth around its current underlying rate (0.5 per cent to 0.8 per cent)”.
Many workers fear AI will replace them. So far, this is not happening at scale, although there are competing views in the academic literature about what the technology will eventually do to employment. The IGR is sanguine on jobs: “While there is not yet evidence of significant labour market impacts, it is expected that productivity gains will arise from some tasks being automated using AI, and that demand for labour will increase and change in other areas.”
All the while, the biggest build gathers pace and grows in size. According to Westpac senior economist Pat Bustamante, around half the $175bn data centre investment pipeline will ultimately translate into higher domestic activity. Almost two-thirds will occur over the next three years.

Cue an image for which no human hand is credited: There are competing views in the academic literature about what the technology will eventually do to employment.

Snappy Tom tried on an economic analysis for size:

While Bustamante sees parallels with the liquefied natural gas boom of the 2010s, local impacts are likely to be front-loaded, reflecting shorter construction timelines, slightly lower overall import leakage and a significant second wave of investment in renewables (which could add an additional $50bn to the investment pipeline).
The long-run economic value of data centres, he wrote in a research note this week, “will depend on the extent to which Australia can translate that compute capacity into AI adoption, productivity growth and, potentially, exports of digital and computing services”.
But there’s a sting. The global AI boom is stretching supply capacity, bidding up the cost of labour, materials, computer chips and capital itself. It’s hampering attempts by central bankers to reduce damaging inflation, which Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock acknowledged on Friday.
There’s also the battle for social licence in communities hosting the sheds producing the “compute”, while devouring resources to power and cool its voracious kit.
On Friday, the Prime Minister’s department circulated a discussion paper for community input over coming weeks to create mandatory national standards for how data centres use energy, water and land, and how AI training can support local skills and industry development.
Labor is also trying to find a compromise on copyright protection between creatives and the hard-charging frontier model developers. This week OpenAI proclaimed it would not consider investing in local AI training or renewable energy if Canberra refused to water down copyright laws.
Right now, the talk around the emerging technology has limitless contours, for good and ill. Another assumption from the IGR boffins, unsaid of course, is AI won’t be wiping out humanity.

What was that? Sheesh, the pond had another 'toon standing by ...

Sorry, the pond was still deep in prayer, as the reptiles flung in a comical Albo snap, as is there wont, this time doing a Joe Biden impression: Anthony Albanese wants to keep the AI boom going without the growing pains. Picture: John Feder

Snappy Tom decided to duck the bromancer solution, perhaps because he recognised he was working on a screen ...

This civilisational dread bobs up from time to time but has been given impetus because of recent warnings from the software engineers of human souls inside this digital blob. Between peril and promise, the Albanese government has landed at optimism, with the ginormous caveat: “if we get this right”. Like most governments, it is trying to get ahead of the game on AI through guardrails and by taking a more active role in attracting investment.
To date, Labor has scandalously dithered on migration and regressed on workplace regulation and industry bailouts. The AI shock, for that is what it is, looks like the mother of all policy tests.
In this rare moment of opportunity, we should keep our eyes open to the mounting risks while being vigilant in not getting ahead of ourselves, as some are prone to do, by simply assuming prosperity is our forever home.

Sheesh, is that all? Be vigilant, be aware of risks, try to shove a bit of that genie back in the bottle?

Back to the clap happy prayer fest ...

And so to a topic which should really have been the bromancer's turf, and for this the pond needed a mood-setting 'toon ...

Full throttled madness, and who wouldn't want to be a part of it? Except perhaps for MSNOW and CNN and other traitors ...

Come on down Lavina, let's get it on with Don ...

The header: Lavina Lee
AUKUS isn’t a mistake, it’s a strategic necessity

That promise of an automated voice:

Listen to this article
8 min

The caption for a wander back in time: Former leaders of the UK, Australia and the US, from left, Boris Johnson, Scott Morrison and Joe Biden in 2021. Picture: Adam Taylor/PMO

Why, the pond wondered, did that snap wander down memory lane, to the dire days of SloMo and Boris and Joe?

It was an anniversary, but it also avoided dealing with a more immediate reality ...

More U.S. troops have died amid Iran war than Pentagon has disclosed publicly
Officials who spoke with The Post expressed frustration that the additional loss of life in the Middle East is not reflected in the Defense Department’s casualty database. (WaPo still makes the archive).

Would anyone trust this mob to organise a picnic, let alone a war?

Lavina lives in hope ...

This past Tuesday marked five years since Scott Morrison, Boris Johnson and Joe Biden stood together to launch the AUKUS trilateral security partnership – a pact that has survived a change of government in every one of the three founding nations.
One common prediction was that Donald Trump would kill it. His administration did perform a review of AUKUS before declaring it was “full steam ahead”.
Critics of the agreement remain. Ironically, the loudest objections seem to be within Australia. These objections fall into two main categories. The first is focused on the cost of the nuclear submarine component of the agreement and its knock-on effects. The second set of objections is more serious. It is that AUKUS was and remains strategically misconceived.
These two objections are not unrelated as any strategy is only as credible as the funding behind it. But for the purpose here, we’ll give this and future governments the benefit of the doubt that they will meet the spending required to deliver AUKUS and build the broader defence capability we need.
What about the more damn­ing argument that AUKUS is strategically misconceived? A strong case can be made that it is not. These are the general arguments against the agreement. First, there are those who argue that AUKUS is designed in response to an adversary – China – that poses no direct or near-term military threat to Australia. Paul Keating has emphasised that China has not threatened Australia militarily and lacks the intention to ever invade.

Ah, never mind the French clock devotee, we're back to the war with China by Xmas. 

The spirit of the bromancer is not lost, even as he spends his time praying for the return of the fountain pen, and perhaps a chance for naughty boys to dip pigtails in ink well ... DF-26 missiles in a military parade in Beijing. Picture: Xinhua/Cha Chunming via Getty Images

On with the fear-mongering, and the need for entirely useless subs, even as Ukraine shows that the days of fighting conventional old-fashioned wars have bumped into a drone revolution:

Regardless of intent, others question China’s capacity to invade Australia. The People’s Liberation Army Navy may have deployed a naval task group to circumnavigate Australia in February 2025. But that is a long way from acquiring the naval power projection capabilities to threaten our territory, with Darwin being 4000km away from China’s Hainan Island naval base.
Let’s deal with intent. For a country that is not facing any threat of invasion, China nevertheless is embarking on the most rapid conventional military build-up since World War II. Its rate of nuclear expansion means it is on track to reach 1000 nuclear warheads by 2030. It possesses the largest navy by number, a theatre missile advantage over the US within the first island chain, and outpaces the US and allied countries on its shipbuilding and production of precision-strike mis­siles. Those who watched China’s September 2025 Victory Day Parade would have seen its display of cutting-edge hardware, from hypersonic “carrier killer” missiles, laser air defence systems, dual-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles, uncrewed vehicles and display of the full nuclear triad.
There is still the issue of defining the threat to our national interests. It is likely China has no desire or need to invade Australia. But this is constructing a strawman argument only to knock it down. Because of our island geography, one does not need to invade Australia to bring it to its knees. Controlling and obstructing our access to vital maritime trade routes would be enough. An undetected nuclear-powered submarine makes it hazardous for Chinese vessels to operate within our approaches. China too has the capability to strike northern Australia with ballistic missiles it could deploy from its artificial island bases or by air.

Quick, another terrifying image: The People's Liberation Army Navy vessel Haiwangxing, a Dongdiao Class auxiliary intelligence ship, sailing off the northwest shelf of Australia. Picture: ADF

Time now for some wondrous logic: an alliance doesn't mean an alliance, it means we have freedom for strategic manoeuvre.

Presumably if a mad king of the Donald kind demands that we jump - as he's done with South Korea - we need only argue about how high ...

This leads to the second strategic objection, which is that AUKUS diminishes our strategic autonomy, forces us to conform passively to US policy and interest, and commits us to a US war against China.
The structure and distribution of power in our region and the world is increasingly hierarchical. For a country with a relatively small population, large landmass and an economy one-tenth the size of China’s, an alliance with a great power and agreements such as AUKUS are not a luxury. All this gives us far more relevance and freedom of strategic manoeuvre than we would have otherwise.
Besides, it is obvious that deterring China from using force to achieve its territorial ambitions in the region is not only in the American interest but also Australia’s.
Even if we sat it out, Australia would be profoundly affected by any major-power war in our region. Which means there is no option but to raise deterrence above every other strategic priority. When China is changing hard power facts on the ground and openly committing to expansionism, deterrence is the only and urgent option.
What difference can a middle power such as Australia make? That’s the line critics of AUKUS like to run. They forget the importance of geostrategy. The US has territories in Guam and Honolulu but remains a distant power. It cannot project power without the use of territory in the region. This is where the growing importance of joint facilities being developed in Western Australia and the Northern Territory under the AUKUS arrangement comes into play.
The more dispersed and developed US and allied military options are in Asia, the more complicated it becomes for the PLA to prevail in various scenarios. It is why China detests AUKUS. The latter creates a challenging geostrategic problem for the PLA.
Keep in mind that a key component of Chinese grand military strategy is to exploit the US difficulty of projecting power from afar into East Asia. The more allies hang back, do less or free-ride, the harder it is for the US to project power and the greater China’s strategic advantage. This is due to the simple mathematics in that there is no balance in Asia without US military power or its ability to combine with allied forces.
There is a third argument based on two key narratives that Beijing deliberately and persistently promotes to the region. This is the argument that when it comes to supposedly core Chinese interests such as Taiwan, the PLA is undeterrable and will pay any price to achieve its objectives. The second related narrative is that the US is in decline, chaotic and unreliable, therefore it is better for countries such as Australia to refrain from entering into reckless agreements such as AUKUS that will lead only to disaster and defeat.

As always, the reptiles turned to an AV distraction, this one bringing in the dog botherer and the swishing Switzer, deep into the war with China:

Next video thumbnail
China’s rise is the world’s true geopolitical threat and must be contained
​Australian columnist Tom Switzer argues that the world's true geopolitical threat is the rise of China.​“I think the big post-Cold War thesis that is going to become more relevant over the next few decades is John Mearsheimer’s ‘The Tragedy of Great Power Politics’,” Mr Switzer told News24 host Chris Kenny.​“This is that China’s rise is really the big geopolitical threat facing our region, potentially the world, and America, as the running hegemon, will go to great lengths to make sure that China is constrained.​“Let's hope he’s right.”

Lavina kept lathering up the hive mind into a right royal panic:

These narratives, which have been internalised by many critics of AUKUS, underline much of the criticism of the agreement in our national debate. The reasoning is circular and unsupported by empirical evidence. It goes like this. China cannot be deterred from using force, will out-escalate its adversaries and therefore inevitably will dominate the region. In contrast, the determination and stakes are not as high for the US, which means it is pointless and perilous for a regional middle power to provoke the future dominant power rather than accommodate it.
Every government and military undertakes a cost-benefit analysis when it comes to the use of force. That it cannot be certain it will prevail with acceptable cost is why China has not yet gone down that path. Deterrence will be successful if these Chinese doubts grow. On US unreliability, it is easy to make this case given the unconventional nature of the current administration in Washington. Yet look at the evidence rather than commentary. Trump’s transactional bargain with Asian allies is this: do and spend more if you want American presence and protection. That’s not unreasonable in the current strategic circumstances.
Despite the focus on Western hemispheric defence in its official documents, these same documents are also clear that preventing China from dominating the first island chain – an imaginary line that runs from Japan and South Korea through Taiwan and Southeast Asia – remains a fundamental strategic objective. Look at the activities and presence of US forces in Japan, The Philippines, and indeed Australia, and it is clear abandonment is not on the cards.

There came an almost billy goat butt, in the form of a "besides":

Besides, it is clear Trump is obsessed about increasing US hard power abroad. AUKUS achieves that for both countries.

He's obsessed about increasing US hard power abroad? What, like Canada and Greenland and Venezuela and Iran and assorted straits? And while deeply mired in Ruski corruption he keeps on giving Vlad the sociopath a free pass? And this set of follies is something we should share in?

The pond was reminded of the frenzy the mad king has produced in normally civil Canucks, with this Dean Blundell Substack outburst ...

It's Over, America: Canada Accepts EU Invite And Mark Carney Just Torched Trump in Front of All of Europe and Canada Is Never Coming Back
Carney accepted the EU’s Invitation as Europe gives Mark Carney a standing ovation. Canada's old life with America is dead for good. Here’s why.

...The man threatening 27 democracies because they want to hang out with Canada is the President of the United States. The man getting the ovation is ours.
So I’m going to say this as clearly as I know how, for every American reading this and every Canadian who still thinks this is a rough patch. It’s over. The old relationship between Canada and the United States is dead. Nobody is coming in 2029 with flowers and an apology to take us back to the way it was. Carney said it himself in the spring of 2025 that the old relationship built on deep economic integration and tight security cooperation was finished. People called it campaign talk. This week Europe threw the wake and gave the eulogy a standing ovation, while Carney disembowelled America’s fascist rapist President without uttering his name once.

Sure, it's rabble rousing, but there's a reason that the rabble has been roused ... 

...and yet Lavina blithely wanders on, sublimely unaware ...

There’s a final point about the character of nations. Materially and technologically, we gain significantly from the alliance and agreements such as AUKUS. It is also about how we see the Australian national character and strategic culture. Local voices loudly warn that America is losing the will to contribute public security goods to the world and is retreating, yet tend to push for a similar insular and cautious Australian outlook. That would be a poor choice.
Lavina Lee is the director of the foreign policy and defence program at the US Studies Centre.

And joining the clown carnival is a good choice?

Let us all pray along with the immortal Rowe ...

And there's a couple more bro-related 'toons ...

Just for Lavina. Tear it all down ...

MAGA Is Making the World Safe for Corruption
Far-right ideologues have transformed American foreign policy into a tool of private gain and antidemocratic reaction. (* intermittent archive link)

For decades, we have told ourselves that our country represents democracy, freedom, and free trade. We believed we had allies, like-minded nations that shared these values. We thought we opposed dictators and kleptocrats, the leaders who steal from their own people. What happens when we realize that we no longer do?