First a bigly thanks to the correspondent who provided the archive link to Trump, 79, Gets Confused Explaining Water to the Navy.
No thanks to the lizard Oz lack of coverage, the pond frequently feels King Donald deprived, and this was a ripper...
“You know, the new thing is magnets. So instead of using hydraulic that can be hit by lightning and it’s fine. You take a little glass of water, you drop it on magnets, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Trump said.
“So, you know, the elevators come up in the new carriers—I think I’m going to change it, by the way—they have magnets. Every tractor has hydraulic, every excavator, every excavating machine of any kind has hydraulic. But somebody decided to use magnets.”
The 79-year-old president then stumbled over his words and failed to complete a coherent sentence before moving on and asking the watching troops whether they preferred hydraulics or magnets.
Trump then called out to a “top-ranking general” in the crowd for his opinion before continuing his tirade against the 2,000-year-old technology.
“I’m going to sign an executive order. When we build aircraft carriers, it’s steam for the catapults and it’s hydraulic for the elevators. We’ll never have a problem,” Trump said. “He agrees. Everybody agrees. But, ahh, these people in Washington.”
Trump has labored under the misunderstanding that magnets are somehow destroyed by water for at least 18 months.
In August, Trump also suggested that the global reliance on magnets was some kind of conspiracy orchestrated by China.
“You know, China intelligently went and they sort of took a monopoly of the world’s magnets, and nobody needed magnets until they convinced everybody 20 years ago, ‘Let’s all do magnets,’” Trump said. “There were many other ways that the world could have gone.”
Ironically, it was the Chinese who first made use of magnets as far back as 200 B.C.
Trump let slip on Monday that he underwent an MRI scan that the White House tried to keep quiet during his second medical exam earlier this year. The medical profession has used MRI, or Magnetic Resonance Imaging, since the 1970s. The scanners, which contain a large magnet, use a natural phenomenon identified by an American physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery in 1944.
And so on, and that was much more fun than the latest FAFO fest ... ICE Barbie Deports Trump-Fanatic Cuban Immigrant to Africa
And at least equal to ...
On the other hand ... ACLU Sues After Protester Detained and Handcuffed for Playing Darth Vader Theme at National Guard in Viral TikTok Clips
Even John Williams! Celebrating Darth, Stephen Miller's personal hero!
Moving quickly along, while Dame Groan was busy devising "just live with it" slogans this morning, the pond couldn't help but contrast the coverage of that very big event in other places.
The Sydney Daily Real Estate News was full of it, where "it" means extreme weather...
So too was the UK Graudian ...
... while the local version of the Graudian was even more deviant ...
And the lizard Oz?
Crickets ....
... except for Dame Groan devising epic slogans, of the "learn to live in windy sh*t and like it" kind...
We all know why ...
But the pond hadn't intended to go there, the pond had wanted to explain why some times, on some days, the pond envied little England.
Take the latest racist fuss ... celebrated by the cracking Crace ... Nige thinks Pochin’s comments were ugly and unpleasant. But he agrees with them
It’s the hottest new competition in Westminster. The accolade some MPs will do anything to win. It’s Racist of the Week. To Robert Jenrick’s intense annoyance, the Tory whip Katie Lam won it at a canter last week. Chin up, Honest Bob. Your time will come again. Though probably not this week. It may only be Monday but the Reform MP Sarah Pochin has already stretched out a commanding lead. It will take an immense effort from someone to knock Nurse Ratched back into second place.
Weirdly, it always seems that those people who complain the loudest about political correctness gone mad and how you can’t say anything these days are the ones who seem to find a way to let everyone know how they feel. It’s almost as though they do protest too much. Poor Sarah. Think how she suffers. Imagine the things she might come up with if only she didn’t have to hold herself back. She is just too good for such a cruel world.
To recap, Nurse Ratched was appearing on TalkTV when a viewer phoned in to complain about the demographics in adverts. This turned out to be a tipping point for Sarah and there was no stopping her. Her whole life had been blighted by having to see so many brown and black faces on TV. It was like a form of torture for her. She couldn’t even bring herself to pause the ads and then fast forward. Every black face she saw was like a knife to the heart.
The number of black and brown faces drove her mad, she said. What Sarah wants is a world of whiteness. Even a Hovis advert is a trigger for her. What’s wrong with Warburtons’ thick white sliced? That’s the proper bread for a traditional English breakfast. Even our food is now subject to diversity, equity and inclusion laws...
Cue Marina, determined to hand out a good hydeing... It’s the noblest battle of our new free-speech age: Sarah Pochin’s anti-woke couch ad crusade
...Either way, this week we are talking about Reform MP Sarah Pochin’s turn in a TalkTV phone-in, where she responded to a caller’s gambit on advertising “demographics”. Declaring the caller was “absolutely right”, Pochin explained that “it drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people”. Mad? Listen, she said it. Contrary to initial positive assessments of Sarah’s talents when she was elected, she is starting to come across as an armchair short of a three-piece suite. But on reflection, I think the mad she is talking about is the angry kind. The kind where if you see another non-white face in a 15-second spot for a product you don’t need and are under precisely zero obligation to buy, you will literally lose your mind.
Why does little England have all the fun?
And it can be a learning experience.
The pond confesses that it had never heard of Richard Littlejohn, whose name evoked Sherwood forest and the robbing hoods, until reading the hydeing ...
...Perhaps the point is that profits would have been up even more if they’d done an ad in which some suitably Aryan young professionals and the corpse of Eugène Terre’Blanche were snuggling up watching Christmas telly or something. Certainly, I would like to have seen this thought experiment explored in Richard Littlejohn’s latest admiring column on Pochin’s comments. For younger readers – anyone under the age of 70 – Richard currently appears twice a week in the Mail, though I’m not sure where he currently physically resides. For decades, he worked from home in Florida, railing against things like people working from home, or the problems of the country. The country of the UK, obviously. The country of the USA, where he lived – lives? – famously doesn’t have any problems.
Anyway: adverts. As Richard’s latest thunk-piece reveals, he was recently to be found not in Florida, but in – actually, I’ll let him tell you. “We spent the weekend before last in North Norfolk,” he divulged promisingly to readers, “and practically the only non-white face we saw belonged to a young woman serving in the seaside village convenience store where we stopped to pick up our Daily Mail.” Uncanny. Having not meaningfully participated in the popular cultural life of the UK over the past decades, Richard perhaps doesn’t realise which TV figure of fun this riff immediately and powerfully calls to mind. Likewise a revelation elsewhere in the same column: “Admittedly, a while ago I did spot a traditional white, middle-class, heterosexual, married couple during one ad break, but I was so taken aback I can’t remember what they were supposed to be selling.”
That's the price the pond pays for ignoring snails, whether of the deep north Currish Snail kind or the mindless Daily Snail kind ...
What riches they must hold ...
More than enough already, but speaking of little England, why did the reptiles bury this offering from Marriott of The Times early this morning?
The pond treasures The Times, a rag of incredible reliability ...
Oops, never mind, at least Jimbo was allowed to strut about in the lizard Oz hive mind later in the day. Take it away Jimbo ...
The header: Why elitism is the key to survival of democracy, It is unfashionable to favour a superior expert class yet its destruction has flooded our society with misinformation.
The caption for the meaningless illustration: It’s remarkable how quickly people drift off into the irrational when their careers no longer depend on elite approval.
The pond should note that the lizard Oz presentation was no match for the 'leet offering which ran in The Times a few days ago ... and which was pickled in archive ...
It will be noted that in the 'leet
Times, those reptiles didn't bother with fey or tedious illustrations, offered as distractions in case the 'leet talk of 'leets got too much ...
I am inclined by temperament towards the innocuous middle ground of most issues. So I was pleased to discover on a panel discussion a couple of weeks ago that I had embarked on an inadvertent brush with the glamour of contrarianism.
Lauding the virtues of that much-despised institution, the “mainstream media”, I noticed my remarks were being met with – perhaps booing oversells the drama of the occasion. Let us call it a dark and audible murmur of dissent.
I should not have been surprised. Few nowadays are sympathetic to the notion of a superior expert class. Anti-elitism is the fashionable pose of our time, adopted almost as readily by desperate technocrats as by populists.
Elitism is just a bad look: snobbish, anti-egalitarian, undemocratic. Every modern politician must find an establishment to fight (or pretend to fight): old boys’ clubs, woke cabals, civil service cronies.
But increasingly I’m persuaded that elitism is a profoundly democratic sentiment. It may be my most unfashionable opinion.
We’re all familiar with the popular notion that social media has “democratised” our discourse. The voiceless have been given a voice. Experts have been dethroned. Information and debate are no longer controlled by a self-interested and self-satisfied elite of journalists and academics. If you want to address the nation, you no longer have to get past that intimidating figure, the comment editor of The Times.
Barely had this little England Jimbo got started than the reptiles down under felt the need to interrupt with a mindless snap of King Donald, Before America’s experiment with MAGA populism there was a gravely undemocratic mismatch between popular views on vaccines and elite views on vaccines.Picture: AFP
Our Jimbo from little England might have proposed "climate science is a cult", or "nuke the country to save the planet", or "SMRs are ready now at a low, low price", but chose safer targets for his 'leet discourse...
But as political philosopher Dan Williams points out, a more democratised discourse can be radically anti-democratic in its effect. More people can speak, true. But the resulting proliferation of ignorant, wrathful and inexpert voices means ordinary people are increasingly poorly informed. Brigitte Macron is a man. Barack Obama is a lizard. Such stuff would have puzzled even the Daily Sport in its 1990s heyday. Online it’s rife. The result is that a smaller and smaller minority of people – almost invariably wealthier and better-educated newspaper readers – have access to reliable information about the way their country really works. Not so fair and democratic.
American essayist Richard Hanania recently pointed out that before America’s experiment with MAGA populism there was a gravely undemocratic mismatch between popular views on vaccines (as many as 25 per cent of Americans fear they cause autism) and elite views on vaccines (20 years ago, virtually no politicians were anti-vaxxers). In the anti-elitist Trump era, politicians are much better aligned with popular views on the subject.
Technically, the situation is now more democratic: people’s opinions are better represented by their politicians. But in another, more important sense, it is less democratic.
More people (predominantly poorer, less-educated people) are catching measles. Meanwhile, the portion of the American population still plugged into elite discourse (again, mainly the educated and the wealthy) are less affected by anti-vax misinformation and therefore less likely to catch it.
The obvious problem with the democratisation of our discourse is that popularity is a poor test of ideas. It was not that the old liberal elite was more intelligent or virtuous. But they were competing for prestige in a system that, for all its faults, ascribed social status to rationality as well as to mere name-recognition.
If you wanted to run for parliament, host a BBC program or be welcomed rather than snubbed at a north London dinner party, it helped to be popular. But you were also strongly motivated to subscribe to a tolerant and sane “elite” world view.
It’s remarkable how quickly people drift off into the irrational when their careers no longer depend on elite approval. Former BBC presenter Neil Oliver now inveighs against vaccines and “one-world government”. A thriving online fandom means he no longer needs to impress TV commissioners to get another series of Coast. We’ll miss the old elite when it’s gone.
Again the reptile bot interrupted with a bot snap.
Mention a name, and the bot cranks in to gear, and here you go, Former BBC presenter Neil Oliver.
Neil Oliver?
This being the time for collecting oddities and cranks of a little England kind, couldn't the reptiles have interrupted with something more fun?
What a marvellous fruit loop, willing and able to give Little John a log fight.
So much fun in little England, and then the pond realised the reptile strategy.
They were trying to match the Graudian, they were trying to pose as a 'leet publication, well above the hoi polloi ...
It was a 'leet rag, offering 'leet views, almost fresh from 'leet little England ...
If I had really wanted to annoy my audience the other weekend – to turn the mutterings into hisses – I could have suggested that democracy as we know it is a kind of elite ideology, at least partly the creation of 19th-century bourgeois liberals.
Even now, a century after the franchise was extended to the entire adult population, democratic government is not a universally popular idea. A recent survey infamously discovered that about a quarter of the population favours “a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with parliament and elections”.
Support for democracy is stronger among old-fashioned political and media elites than on “democratised” social media. Anti-democratic “thinkers” such as the preposterous Curtis Yarvin (who argues that America should be ruled by an absolutist monarch) would never have got within a mile of the op-ed pages of an old-fashioned newspaper. Online, he’s a celebrity.
And even if only a minority of internet users are actively enthused about autocracy, many more of them fail to respect the virtues of tolerance, respect and free speech that once were considered fundamental to democratic discourse. It may turn out that liberal principles such as respecting an enemy’s right to speech are fundamentally counterintuitive to most people and that we needed an elite to impose them.
None of this, of course, is to say elitism is remotely a perfect principle. Only that it’s becoming obvious that it’s preferable to anarchy. Elites are callous, self-serving and snobbish. They are prone to the stupidity and errors of groupthink.
Perhaps we need to paraphrase Churchill and call elitism the worst possible idea except for all the others. Not an inspiring argument. But I believe it. Don’t boo.
The Times
And so to a bonus, and the pond merely offers this to explain why the pond left Dame Groan standing proudly alone, and slogan defiant, this morning ...
The header: Back Australia: We either innovate, or we will stagnate … it’s that simple, Australia must radically shift towards a knowledge-based economy or risk being left behind as artificial intelligence and China reshape the global landscape.
The caption for the generic image: A researcher at the University of Queensland’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience.
This was a four minute outing, but it was shorn of images and so could be swallowed in a few gulps ...and it was so mindless, it was designed to leave no trace until expelled from the digestive tract ...
The only certainty about Australia’s future is that it faces enormous change.
Strange, the pond felt certain that The only certainty about Australia’s future is that it faces enormously clichéd gibberish in the lizard Oz.
But do go on, for certainly much has been done, but much remains to be done ...
The challenge for Australia is how to take advantage of that change to build a future competitive economy radically affected by artificial intelligence and an emerging China obsessed with research-driven innovation.
In that future our mineral deposits are likely to diminish in value as the major world powers battle over scarce resources such as critical minerals, and technological breakthroughs rearrange manufacturing and energy processing.
Australia therefore needs to change its priorities. Weighed down by public debt, a decade of forecast deficits and a lack of vision, Australia needs to accelerate the expansion of our knowledge-based economy.
There is a desperate need to use Australian innovative brain power now to grow the economy and safeguard our standard of living by commercialising our key research. Building a large knowledge economy, however, takes time, money and collaboration.
Let’s first deal with the ugly realities of Australia’s position in the world, and then the positives.
Australia is a middle-ranked nation with a population of only 27 million, located some distance from the world’s current major markets. Federal governments, of all political persuasions, think short-term, weighed down by three-year election terms.
Social media has turned politics into a circus sideshow where managing the 24-hour media cycle is more important than long-term policy thinking. The legislative requirements and red tape burdening our companies and superannuation funds makes our corporate leaders risk averse. The blunt reality is that outside our superannuation funds, Australia is capital-poor, and we lose too many of our brilliant ideas and research overseas before those ideas have a chance of being commercialised at home.
Now the positives; Australia is on the doorstep of Southeast Asia, which will see rapid growth both in population and economic activity between now and 2050. That provides enormous opportunity for Australian trade and investment. Equally important, we have some of the best research institutions, business leaders and thinkers in the world. We need to corral our visionary thinkers with industry leaders and government and plan a future strategy of where Australia should be in 2050.
Talk about an abundance of clichés, with "blunt reality" the sharpest knife in this toad drawer.
At this point the reptiles interrupted the word salad with some advice ...
This article contains features which are only available in the web version
Take me there
Sadly the pond had visited the web version, so couldn't be taken there, and yet couldn't find any additional features.
Still it was a jolly good interruption before plunging back into the word salad ... with the verbiage speaking for itself ...
The federal government has had an economic reform summit; what we really need now is an innovation summit in Canberra where nothing is off the table. The Prime Minister and Treasurer should convene a meeting of Australia’s best and brightest from our research institutions and universities with the hard-headed leaders from industries to determine a vision for Australia by 2050.
A key part of that strategy needs to focus on attracting research investment partners in medical science, mining services, future energy, agriculture, AI, IT, environmental management, education, the arts, transport management and our other service industries.
Australia now needs to think long-term and smart. No one should think we lack the brain power. Last week the University of Queensland celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, one of the major research institutions established under my government’s Smart State strategy. The results speak for themselves.
Professor Kate Schroder from IMB studies chronic inflammatory diseases that have no cure or effective treatment. As head of IMB’s Inflammasome Laboratory, she is the co-inventor on patents for small molecule inhibitors of a protein complex that drives inflammation.
This has enormous implications for the treatment of debilitating conditions such as cardiovascular disease and arthritis, and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and motor neurone disease. The research is currently under commercialisation by Inflazome, founded by IMB group leader Professor Matthew Cooper and acquired by Roche in a landmark deal that is one of the largest in Australian and Irish biotech history. There has been more than $3bn invested in IMB intellectual property, resulting in 20 spin-out companies, as well as global collaborations and industry partnerships.
At the IMB, there have been kidneys grown in a dish, plants that function as medicines, and algae examined for its role in regenerative medicine, cell growth and solar-driven biotechnologies. Deadly spider venom has been developed to treat heart attacks, and the invasive march of the cane toad has been reduced with pheromone lures that disrupt its breeding cycle. There has been a vital progression in the understanding of inflammation, and a bee-friendly pesticide on national shelves.
By harnessing the power of nature to cure disease, many researchers have successfully commercialised their discoveries. The life-changing power of scientific research not only saves and prolongs lives, it also drives economic activity. The IMB is only one of Australia’s research institutes. I plead guilty to a conflict of interest. I am currently the chair of Brandon BioCatalyst, a collaboration of more than 50 Australian and New Zealand medical research institutes, hospitals and universities, and I know that investing in Australian brain power is an economic driver. Brandon Capital is now Australia’s largest investor in medical science and has more than $1.3bn under management, with offices in Melbourne, Sydney, San Francisco and London. Brandon BioCatalyst’s collaboration model needs to be repeated in other industry sectors.
Any plan for Australia’s future that does not include a strong focus on encouraging research and innovation is just words without meaning. Too often Australia’s public discourse drowns in the noise of the latest shallow meaningless debate about nothing and misses the big picture.
That picture is very clear; we either innovate or stagnate. It is that simple. The rest of the noise is just that; noise.
Peter Beattie is a former premier of Queensland and the chair of Brandon BioCatalyst.
'Leets gotta hustle, and reptiles gotta pander, and how pleased is the pond that this was consigned to the late arvo waste bin...
And now feeling vaguely queasy, as if having licked the skin of one too many cane toads, it was time to close where the pond had started,
off with King Donald and his minions ... (no defaming of vampires intended)...
