Of course.

Why Chat GPT doesn’t always tell the truth – hallucinations, bias and lies

Colorado to include Trump on 2024 primary ballot as state GOP appeals to Supreme Court

Hilary Clinton, owned.

Report: Joe Biden Takes 418th Vacation Day in Virgin Islands for New Year’s

Scientists Destroy 99% of Cancer Cells in The Lab Using Vibrating Molecules

Sage Steele Reveals the Subject ESPN Told Her She Couldn’t Talk About Anymore

Tim Pool
@Timcast

Be it driving them to suicide, sterilizing, or aborting them

Given Luigi the Unbelievable’s own sketchy paternity, Leak’s cartoon of Luigi denying paternity of mini-me Luigi is hilarious.

That was my 1st thought a when reading it .. not sure if that was Johanne’s intent but definitely fits ……….

When I wake up in the morning usually the first item of business is to pop into the bathroom and ‘make water’.

Indolent must have a bladder where links accumulate overnight and that demands he hose the blog with links when he gets up.

Society must also take responsibility.

How about we start with parents.

David Pocock has introduced an amendment to copywrite legislation that will see a cap on royalties paid to musical artists each time their song is played on the radio lifted.

The artists, represented by ARIA, will then negotiate with the radio networks to raise royalties from their current level.

ARIA lady interviewed on local radio this morning let it slip that, “Of course, what artists would really like is for government to set the rate.”

Of course!

Perhaps they’d also like a tax exemption on account of being “artists”?

Only a desperate, reckless, power-hungry fool would try to open that door.

Er…that would be former Liberal Communications Minister Paul Fletcher.

Labor has simply picked up where he left off, which was handing ACMA everything it asked for in a 2021 request, with the legislation flagged just prior to the 2022 election.

Hi, Paul!

Forgot this one at the start:

By JOHANNES LEAK

‘Son of Hamas’ Gives Unbelievable Interview on The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and Exposes Hamas

Goodbye, 2023: The year of living angrily

From George Pell to #MeToo, the seeds were sown of a harvest of activist outrage that swept through 2023.
By henry ergas
From Commentary
December 29, 2023
7 minute read
103

2023 will be remembered as the year of living angrily. As storm followed storm, the debate, if one can call it that, was almost always vituperative, rarely civil and never friendly.

But the year’s tone merely reflects the legitimation, over the past decade, of outrage as the dominant style of political expression.

Of course, politics is inherently antagonistic: it involves a clash between alternatives. Henry Adams had a point when he wrote, way back in 1907, that political competition is “the systematic organisation of hatreds”. The promise of democracy, however, is that it moderates that competition’s excesses, funnelling its passions into well-defined channels that prevent controversy degenerating into limitless conflict.

Quite when that promise slipped our grasp is inevitably hard to determine. But a crucial step was the persecution and near judicial execution of Cardinal George Pell.

More clearly than in any previous case, that maelstrom involved the convergence of virtual lynch mobs on Twitter, unabashedly one-sided reporting by the ABC and SBS, and a political chorus led by the Greens but which included substantial parts of the ALP.

Pell was, no doubt, a scapegoat. Indeed, it was hard, observing that process, not to be reminded of an early definition of that term which, in 1711, said “in most of the Nations of the World, where publick Divisions have prevail’d, they always had People among them (who were forced) to bear Scandal without Guilt, to be Condemn’d without Crime, sent, like the Scape Goat, into the Wilderness with other Men’s Faults upon their Backs, without any regard to their own”.

But the choice of target was no accident. As well as paying for the sins of the church, Pell stood for everything his assailants detested: attachment to tradition; a scholar’s love of the Western canon; and an adamant rejection of the belief that personal identity and sexual preference are mere consumer items, to be adopted and discarded as readily as a snake sheds its skin. Expressed by a Muslim cleric in Lakemba or Broadmeadows, conservative Islamic values would have been entirely acceptable. Expressed by a Christian prelate from Ballarat, conservative Western values were not.

Viewed in the longer term, that episode’s legacy to our political culture was three-fold: the cult of the victim, whose allegations had to be taken at face value; the entrenchment of self-loathing, in which Western values were necessarily despicable; and a vision of the world dichotomised into saints and devils, along with a scarcely concealed command to extirpate the latter

That Manichean vision – along with the rapidly crystallising coalition of online lynch mobs, public broadcasters and the “progressive” wing of politics – was then seamlessly transferred into the climate change activism that reached new heights after Greta Thunberg’s rise to stardom.

Led by “Extinction Rebellion”, those movements’ striking feature was their utter contempt for the law. Endorsed, or at least tolerated, by education authorities, schoolchildren were almost everywhere allowed to skip classes and engage in mass protests. At the same time, the movement’s militants acted – often with official connivance – as if public inconvenience could never outweigh what they (fallaciously) considered their rights.

They were, in other words, fanatics; once again in the original meaning of the term, which Philip Melanchthon, the great German Lutheran reformer, coined to describe those possessed by the phantasm of “enacting on Earth the kingdom of heaven through the elimination of the devils who stand in their way”.

All that provided immensely fertile ground for #MeToo. As the Gadarene swine became the epitome of the age, the presumption of innocence – already trashed by the Pell case – was trampled underfoot in the rush to condemn. Any word of caution, any hint that tantrums needed to be distinguished from traumas and grudges from genuine grievances, was denounced as sure evidence of misogyny.

With #MeToo deployed to devastating effect against the Morrison government, the sordid Brittany Higgins saga then gave Labor and a herd of “progressive” media personalities a formidable weapon in the election campaign.

What that proved, were further proof needed, was the strategy’s extraordinary effectiveness. As rage and spite marched hand in hand, shaping the public mood, the massed battalions of social media activists, left-wing broadcasters and “progressive” politicians seemed invincible – all the more so as the Hayne royal commission, which had fanned anti-business hysteria, convinced large corporates that opposing the zeitgeist was suicidal.

It is consequently unsurprising that the newly elected government went into the referendum brimming with hubris. It may have been madness; but in the shrewd formulation of Roy Porter’s A Social History of Madness, “even the mad are men of their time” – and this was a time that seemed to be going their way.

The referendum campaign therefore relied on the standard playbook, including casting the issue as a struggle between unquestioned good and unredeemed evil. There are very few instances, if any, of the No campaign’s leading figures denigrating their opponents’ intelligence or good faith; there are at least 65 instances of prominent Yes campaigners, including government ministers, describing the No case’s supporters as bigots, liars or just plain stupid. Nor did defeat quell their rage: it simply converted it into a potentially deadly cocktail of abject denial, aggrieved silence and simmering resentment.

There are, in this chain of events, stark echoes of an ancient lesson. The Greeks, who thought deeply about rage, believed it differed fundamentally from ordinary anger: anger had a defined focus; rage, a sign of fury at the world, was labile, readily shifting from one object to another. Characteristic of personal immaturity, it was by its nature opportunistic, rushing to the target of the moment, like a child rushing to a new toy.

Centuries later, Anna Freud, in a well-known article on aggression, reprised that conclusion. A good or true lover, she noted, is faithful; “in contrast, a ‘good hater’ is promiscuous: he has free aggression at his disposal and is ready to cathect with it on a non-permanent basis any object”. Love sticks; the perpetually restless, never satiated, aggression of haters moves and spreads. And as it does so, it readily resuscitates, albeit in ever varying form, the hideous archetypes of the past.

That is why the founders of Critical Theory, including Theodor Adorno, Jurgen Habermas and Ernst Fraenkel, who had lived through Nazism, saw the students who stormed their lectures in 1968 as “red fascists”, primed to veer, as many did, into anti-Semitism. And that is also why the keffiyeh-clad storm troopers of the movements that transformed this country into a persecuting society now defile our venues with the exterminationist cry of “from the river to the sea”.

None of that has come out of the blue; it is the fruit of a decade of “progressive” activism, which has elevated rage into its modus operandi. Labor purports to be uncomfortable with its results; it would be better if it had the moral clarity to acknowledge how we got here and reflect on its lessons.

As 2024 dawns, we will remember our Tennyson: “Ring out a slowly dying cause, / And ancient forms of party strife; / Ring in the nobler modes of life, / With sweeter manners, purer laws”.

But we will also remember Thucydides’ grim yet lucid warning. It is, he wrote, in the nature of human affairs, with their weaknesses and crippling imperfections, that the abysses loom far greater than the peaks. And when mayhem is on the march, pushing us towards the abyss, all of humanity’s reserves of culture, courage and resolve are needed to stop it in its tracks.

For anyone that is interested plus the relative cost (USD) of ammo that may have been used:

Here’s How Super Hornets Just Shot Down Houthi Drones
Ward Carroll

Thanks, Zulu

My pleasure, Wally. All the best for the New Year.

Mother Lode

Dec 29, 2023 8:55 AM

When I wake up in the morning usually the first item of business is to pop into the bathroom and ‘make water’.

Indolent must have a bladder where links accumulate overnight and that demands he hose the blog with links when he gets up.

Quite so.
A Tsunami of coffee.
Perhaps it’s the cut and paste rush, but many links don’t say what he thinks they say.
Particularly the “Died Suddenly” ones.

Another defenestration in Russia overnight.

Tom
Dec 29, 2023 8:52 AM
Barking Toad, I tried to post the Spooner article (+cartoon), but Dover’s spaminator ate it.

Same same here as well Tom, including the Johannes Leak piece as well.

anthony dillon anthony dillon
‘Phantom culture’ a brake on Indigenous progress

5:00AM December 29, 2023
106 Comments

The Weekend Australian recently reported Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney saying: “The really important thing is the first few weeks of (2024), to make sure that we’ve got a road map forward.”

Road maps for advancing the wellbeing of Indigenous Australians have been provided to and by successive governments for many years. These road maps contain a mix of strategies; some good, some shockingly bad. The good strategies typically speak of the need to respond to those Indigenous Australians who are in most need, focusing on employment, education, health and housing. These strategies contribute to possessing a sense of purpose and oneness with their fellow Australians.

The bad strategies are the product of bad ideologies that serve the need of a few selfish or misguided individuals. These individuals include politicians, educators and Indigenous leaders. Abandoning bad strategies and ideologies will result in many more Indigenous Australians enjoying a rich quality of life similar to what many of them already have, but for which far too many currently do not. Problems such as crime, violence, suicide, and community dysfunction will rapidly fade, and Indigenous communities will become places where families and individuals thrive.

Perhaps the most pervasive and toxic ideology is one I have written about in these pages before: that Indigenous Australians are vastly different from other Australians in how they think and what they need, resulting in the closely related ideology that Indigenous Australians are the only ones capable of effectively understanding and helping each other.

This results in an us-them mindset, for which all Australians are diminished. I believe an us-them mindset was a main driver of the call for an Indigenous voice to parliament because, apparently, existing voices to advise on Indigenous affairs were considered neither relevant nor appropriate for Indigenous Australians. Sadly, this ideology has not died with the death of the voice referendum.

In November, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet published its “Eleventh Meeting of the Joint Council on Closing the Gap Communique”. Quoting from the online document: “… when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are in control of policy and services that affect them, better life outcomes are achieved.”

I have a good idea of what the roadmap for Indigenous Australians under a Labor government will look like. I have no problem with Indigenous Australians having significant involvement in policies and services that affect them. In fact, I have seen many excellent Indigenous organisations and individuals provide or contribute to quality services for Indigenous Australians. But I have also seen many Indigenous Australians receive compromised care and opportunities because it was assumed that only Indigenous people could help Indigenous people.

But the ideology that Indigenous Australians are vastly different from other Australians is evidenced in the largely unchallenged and erroneous doctrine that Indigenous Australians of today possess a culture that is vastly different from that of mainstream Australian culture.

I am not advocating Australia possess a monoculture. I am very respectful of Indigenous culture where it exists. But I am not respectful of a fabricated culture, which is what we have far too often when discussing the needs of Indigenous Australians.

Many Australians have a vested interest in viewing Indigenous Australians as having a culture and outlook resembling that which was common before colonisation. Like a phantom limb, we now have a phantom culture that all too often is simply not there, but we like to think it is there. I am not saying there are not some Indigenous Australians who embrace and practise aspects of their traditional culture, but I am saying where such a culture exists, it should not be a barrier to participating effectively in broader society.

This phantom culture informs many of the policies designed to help Indigenous Australians today. It informs what gets taught in learning institutions and how non-Indigenous Australians are expected to relate to their Indigenous brothers and sisters. All of this has resulted in the laughable call for the decolonising and indigenising of workplaces, and the insistence of “yarning circles”, a preoccupation with “cultural safety” and harmful practices relating to Indigenous children in need of care and protection. Unless we abandon the harmful ideologies that have ruled Indigenous affairs for generations, we can expect more closing-the-gap reports that tell us the same stories of failure. This fits Einstein’s definition of insanity: “Doing the same thing over … and expecting different results.”

In 2024, let’s make it the year for Indigenous thriving. Let’s get off to a great start and not waste energy on Australia Day protests/debates or other woke gestures. Instead, let’s focus on what works. Let’s use good strategies we know make a difference – strategies that have already proven effective with many Indigenous Australians.

In 2024, let’s make it the year for Indigenous thriving. Let’s get off to a great start and not waste energy on Australia Day protests/debates or other woke gestures. Instead, let’s focus on what works. Let’s use good strategies we know make a difference – strategies that have already proven effective with many Indigenous Australians.

Sadly the retards grifting, aiding and abetting and running the ‘aboriginal victim industry’ will choose to ignore Anthony Dillon…because…its a massive tax payer funded milk cow.

When they enter a free society they indulge themselves in a maelstrom of abusive behaviour for which there are no consequences. but which would have had then killed in their own sewer.

Why do we not embrace this aspect of multiculturalism? This would be an excellent place to start.

The ACT is our California.

Maybe Faruqi could sell her many investment properties and pay reparations to Pakistan, if it concerns her so much.

Paywallion.
Hope fully this works on the second attempt:

How silly can serious get?
You know there’s a problem when comedy festivals and cartoonists trip over their own sanctimony.

Published November 13

One thing I don’t understand is the flag disrespect.
I couldn’t care less if Houthis line dance on them, or Pakistanis eat them (oh yes they did) or morons set them and themselves on fire.
this bloke.

Keep the spite festering along, nurse Tutlehead. Always a good idea to run an overnight stoush next day.

Any new opinion on professions you don’t like?
Last evening’s was brilliant as usual.

Keep the spite festering along, nurse Tutlehead.

Typed without any sense of irony by the site’s most vituperative shrew, who holds multiple micro-grudges that run for years.

Yet tells us he has the IQ of a jet-pilot.

Nyt, might be paywalled. At least you know the nyt is acknowledging the truth
Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7

Louis
Good comment. I’ll respond later in the afternoon.

JC at 12:12.

Any new opinion on professions you don’t like?
Last evening’s was brilliant as usual.

I am yet to hear how “bureaucracy” ruins the life of a pilot.
A big chunk of those “bureaucratic rules” are what keep aviation relatively safe.

Isn’t milk an ingredient in traditional spaghetti bolognaise?

There was a good, suburban style Italian restaurant in Crows Nest over a decade ago. The owner/chef was tragically murdered by an employee. I once asked him, some time before he was killed, how he made such smooth Spag.Bol. He told me that the secret was added milk, and I have followed this advice ever since.

Bruce of Newcastle
Dec 29, 2023 1:59 PM
BOM radar showing direct energy weapons at work out of Hedland.

Much rumbling at the Cafe atm but the thunderstorm is missing here and going straight to Calli’s place instead. I was musing that BoM’s rain radar is excellent, but as soon as they insert a human into the loop it gets silly.

This is how good the BOM (Bunch of Muppets) is –

The BOM predicted a hot dry summer right before the flooding rains came…

https://joannenova.com.au/2023/12/the-bom-predicted-a-hot-dry-summer-right-before-the-flooding-rains-came/#comments

On diet.
I see a lot of people who go on “high protein” diets which are also massively high in saturated fat and salt.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Beare
Dec 29, 2023 12:57 PM
Trump struck off the Maine ballot
This legal nonsense needs to go to the Supreme Court as a matter of urgency.
Otherwise, American democracy really is gone.

I still maintain that the Supreme Court will refuse to take the case or will wait until it’s too late. The SC couldn’t care less about democracy, their social standing in Washington DC is all that matters, they are the swamp.

Republicans should refuse to engage in any activity on Capitol Hill till this attack on democratic process is knocked back by the Supreme Court as both vexatious and criminal. If the SC doesn’t do that then they are not doing their job, and America is a failed state.

Republicans in congress are not displeased with Trump being barred from Colorado and Maine ballots.

And yes, America is a failed state.