The pond is moving again, this time from one area of the mighty 'Gong to another.
The pond will end up in a suburb known to the locals as Fez Mez.
Fez Mez? As usual, AI showed it could summarise Reddit and Facebook ...
Slop chasing slop ... and the pond apologises for promoting AI.
Aka Cholesterol Corner (apparently because of the number of fast food joints, though they seem sparse compared to Sydney), or Fairly Ghetto, or Pixie Paddock, or if you will, Fairy Meadow (the pond refuses to indulge the homophobic versions that do the rounds in unrefined circles, which aren't allowed in this 'leet blog).
Hopefully this will be the last time ever that the pond must do a shift - life is short and the pond is old - but as a result, postings in the near future will be intermittent, and on days when the tech support tries to get the pond back online, non-existent ...
The best the pond can do is fling up the odd morsel at odd times to satisfy the insatiable appetite of devoted herpetology students ...and as the pond must be out and about today, that's why Dame Groan is the chief morsel in this abbreviated coverage.
How could the pond avoid showing off a Groaning? Could anyone possibly guess what's buzzing around in the old dame's noggin?
Hands up those who expected a rousing defence of freedom of the press, a stern condemnation of the conduct of mad King Donald in banning sundry news organisations?
Or hands up those hoping for a serious explanation of the issues surrounding AI?
Hands down those who thought it would be another bog standard bit of blather about the way that furriners were rooning us all?
Why should the pond reward smart alecks who always manage to be right?
The pond has had to resort to screen caps so it can quickly fling up the groaning and go about its other business this day, but as it's just the old biddy shrieking about mass migration, where's the harm?
Apart from a little preening self-congratulation at the way the government kow-towed to her and other bigots, is there anything much new?
There was only a gobbet to go ... and sure enough, Gina's pampered pet was front and centre, with her and the Groaner in trinitarian mode, an encompassing one-ness ...
There you go.
Were it not for Pauline.
The Groaner is being exceptionally modest. Were it not for the hysteria emanating from her and the rest of News Corp this past decade, faithfully recycled and regurgitated by the ABC - always ready to drum up a scare story about the dangers of Chinese EVs and other fears of furriners - there might have been a little sanity in the land.
Here, have a break and instead of a Kit-kat, have a 'toon ...
The immortal Rowe sets the tone for the next reptile.
Speaking of hysteria, this quick throwing up of screen caps allowed the pond the time to indulge the bromancer, the ban the screens, the repent and turn to pen and ink man, who was in fine form ...
It goes without saying that the bromancer was going to express a deep fear and loathing of AI ...after all, if you think banning screens and reverting to long hand is the educational solution, you're going to be down on everything beyond the dipping of girlie pigtails in inkwells (please, don't ask about those days).
The pond can remember any number of fatuities given unto the world by the bromancer, decades of contradictions and stupidities, imbued with the fairy tales exuding from Xianity, but sadly doesn't have time to go into them, save to wonder what Dame Groan might have made of his devotion to the Indonesian language, when of course furriners are rooning the country ...
Who can forget the reptiles denouncing broadband, and doing their level best to ruin the NBN?
One of the direst conditions that afflicts the reptile mind is that somehow we must arrive at a Valhalla, which is usually some golden age long in the past.
With this mindset, rather than expecting and acknowledging that everything will change, some things for the better, some things for worse, the reptile mind is always set to a keening wail of endless horrors ...
Ye ancient cats and ancestral dogs, once again the bromancer proved the pond wrong.
Have another 'toon ...
The pond couldn't resist turning to Mein Gott for a bonus.
There was more at the link, but was there a single correspondent expecting Mein Gott to take notice or pay heed?
The pond apologises for the way that this has been flung together, and unfortunately screen caps will be again all the go on the morrow ...
A.I. Queries From Abroad Raise Fears of a Biological Weapons Race
ReplyDeleteBloomberg (Gift Article): Anthropic Says Yemeni Cell Used Claude in Missile Development. And from Carl Zimmer in the New York Times (Gift Article): A.I. Queries From Abroad Raise Fears of a Biological Weapons Race.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-11/anthropic-says-yemen-group-used-claude-in-missile-development?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc4OTQwODY3NywiZXhwIjoxNzkwMDEzNDc3LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUTDZaV1JLSVVQU0cwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiIxQzU5RkM5NjZDRTU0N0QwOTc1RkRBNTFBRTY1N0ZENyJ9.bwd1vk-EbkpXM4NJSwVcnm-MplIl1dAW6O8kFsqBtxA&leadSource=article-gifting
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/14/science/ai-bioweapons.html?unlocked_article_code=1.BFE.YjWr.ni0f3S_0RHC8&smid=url-share
Mein Gotte's Rulez... and a way of explaining to an old fogey conservative...
ReplyDeleteTldr... my rulz first, until I control the board.
"In a now-viral video viewed well over 3.5 million times, Dori addresses her off-screen, 82-year-old mother with a Monopoly metaphor. "Let's say you're playing Monopoly," she starts. "If, during the first half of the game, we said that Cas and I could buy property, but you could not, then halfway through the game, we say, 'Now the rules are even. Now the rules are the same for everybody.'"
...
https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexalisitza/viral-monopoly-inequality-analogy
Don't think I'll win plaudits for posting elite smarts to cover for my as paraphrasing ability (an order lower than DP or Chadwick), yet time, money, and "why nostalgia has become such a powerful political factor"... article shows what drives... "Dame Groan, the bromancer and Mein Gott"
ReplyDeleteDP "With this mindset, rather than expecting and acknowledging that everything will change, some things for the better, some things for worse, the reptile mind is always set to a keening wail of endless horrors" ...
Newscorpse scribbler affect and Intensification of nostalgia described... (except with only one reptile eye, nostalgia is seen as contemporary).
Third, I argue that restorative nostalgia is the phenomenologically intelligible response to this disjuncture — intelligible even, and perhaps especially, among those cohorts whose own material security is not directly threatened — and that the platforms, which profit both from the disjuncture and from its aestheticization, are engines of its intensification rather than its cause.
"The Temporal Disjunctures of Post-Fordism
"Or, why nostalgia has become such a powerful political factor
Besnik Pula, PhD
Sep 13, 2026
...
"Nostalgia is not, in itself, a novel condition. Nostalgia is inherent in modernity. The Fordist boom coincided with agrarian and small-town nostalgia, the stagflationary 1970s produced a wave of 1950s revivalism, and the nineteenth century was inspired by eras older still. The mere presence of nostalgia does not serve as a diagnostic of a crisis. This essay makes a narrower claim. What is distinctive about the present conjuncture is not that people long for the past but what they long for and how. The object of contemporary nostalgia, beneath its variable surface content, is regulated time itself — the predictability of a life course, the credibility of the expectation that what worked yesterday will work again tomorrow — and its dominant political form is the demand that this predictability be restored by an act of sovereign will.
"To account for this, the essay brings together two bodies of theory that have rarely been made to speak to one another: the French Regulation School’s analysis of accumulation regimes and modes of regulation, and the Schutzian phenomenology of time, typification, and the social stock of knowledge. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, I argue that every mode of regulation is, among other things, a temporal order — an institutional arrangement that makes particular time horizons credible for particular categories of subject. Second, I argue that the finance-led regime of accumulation that has prevailed since the crisis of Fordism, and within which platform capitalism has become the most dynamic and most visible sector, has not failed to produce a new mode of regulation but has produced one of a peculiar kind: it regulates asset timerather than life time, and thereby generates what I will call a temporal disjuncture between the horizons it stabilizes and the horizons that subjects require in order to orient their lives. Third ..."
...
https://indications.substack.com/p/the-temporal-disjunctures-of-post
Bonus link.
The phenomenology of time, space, and sociality
Besnik Pula, PhD
September 21, 2024
https://indications.substack.com/p/the-phenomenology-of-time-space-and
Simpler... "... coherent in its logic and lunatic in its ends. It will burn the biosphere to keep the quarterly returns intact. It will starve a nation of thirty million to protect a shipping lane. It will hand its children to the surveillance state and its daughters to the trafficker class and call this the defense of civilization.
Delete"Stop Psychoanalyzing Empire
BettBeat Media
Sep 18, 2026
...
"The explanation is banal. If he [MBS] defies Washington, Washington kills him. It has killed men for less. Everyone becomes irrational when rationality gets you killed.
"If he ends the war on terms Ansar Allah will accept, the internal machinery of the Saudi state, which has been built entirely around the American security guarantee, devours him from within. His palaces vanish. His harem scatters. He ends in a courtyard with a bone saw of his own. He is not making a personal choice. He is a piece of iron in a magnetic field, and that field is what determines his motion. To call him irrational is to act as if the field is not there.
"The same is true of Trump. He is not choosing this war against the resistance in West Asia because voices in his head are telling him to. He is choosing it because BlackRock owns the arms manufacturers, because Palantir holds the targeting contracts, because Google and Amazon carry the occupation on the spine of Project Nimbus, because the entire postwar architecture of American power rests on the control of the hydrocarbon corridor from the Persian Gulf to the Bab al-Mandeb, and because the loss of that corridor means the end of the dollar’s imperial function, which means the end of the American standard of living, which means the end of the domestic consent that holds the empire together.
Trump is doing what the machine requires. His derangement is decorative. Any other face bolted onto the same skull would be reading the same lines. Biden read them. Obama read them. Bush read them. Clinton read them. The lines never change.
"The Theology of Personifying US Imperialism
"Here is what I want Dimitri and Jamarl and every reader to understand. When we say a leader is irrational, we are performing a small theological act. We are declaring that the system he serves is rational, and that his personal failure has produced the catastrophe. Replace him and the system will resume its sanity. Vote harder. Wait for the midterms. Trust that somewhere in the belly of the beast there is a competent grown-up who will restore the equilibrium.
"But the system is not rational. The system is what is irrational, and it is irrational in a very particular way. It is coherent in its logic and lunatic in its ends. It will burn the biosphere to keep the quarterly returns intact. It will starve a nation of thirty million to protect a shipping lane. It will hand its children to the surveillance state and its daughters to the trafficker class and call this the defense of civilization. The men at the helm are not the source of the madness. They are its most faithful expression. They rise because they fit perfectly. If they didn’t, they would be dead.
"Empires do not fall because their leaders are mad. Empires produce mad leaders because they are falling. The pathology is downstream. When the historians of some future century, if there are any, sit down to describe our era, they will not waste much ink on the psychology of the men in the suits. They will describe the corporations. They will describe the algorithms. They will describe the extraction. And they will marvel, if they are still capable of marveling, at how long the population of the imperial core was willing to believe that the whole thing came down to one particularly loud man, and that if only he could be removed, the sun would come out again over the wreckage."
https://bettbeat.substack.com/p/stop-psychoanalyzing-empire
Drat - Killer wrote a few comments that verged on sensible yesterday, and I was otherwise occupied. That 'occupation' was a fire front to our west, with a breeze easing it our way. Twelve years back, September was almost a 'free fire' month here - it was when generations had 'done their burn'. The front of yesterday started on Sunday as a 'controlled burn', approved by, and allegedly controlled by, local volunteer group. By yesterday it had a 17 unit response, aircraft, graders and dozers, with us residents checking our response equipment, getting the bunk-out bags near the car, calling neighbours for 'R U O K?' and so on. And missing possibly interesting observations from Killer.
ReplyDeleteAnywhere else, we might have taken that to be evidence of climate change, but this is, for now, the safest 'National' state and Federal electorate. I say 'for now', because the second place in most recent voting has gone to One Notion. So, no - just unfortunate circumstances to have a fire 'get away' in September. It may trigger some griping IF the local warden stops issuing permits for the rest of this month - but he is not generally inclined to do that.
Chadwick, I hope your bug out (bunk-out) bag stays put.
DeleteAnonymous - thank you for that thought, and I shall try to concentrate on the more common term for quick departure, if we must.
DeleteWe keep in mind that although this area was damaged extensively in the fires for which the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements was set up, as response, in April 2020, the then elected members of our Council resolved not to make a submission to that inquiry. Nor have subsequent Councils made any effort to follow-up the recommendations from that inquiry. Nationals Heartland - it is for someone else to get us out of the next lot of fires and restore the land.