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Open Mike 24/09/25

Written By: - Date published: 6:00 am, September 24th, 2025 - 53 comments
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For announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose.

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Step up to the mike …

53 comments on “Open Mike 24/09/25 ”

  1. Todays Posts 1

    Today's Posts (updated through the day):

  2. PsyclingLeft.Always 2

    trump ever more unhinged….the oblivious irony. Whose country is going to hell ?

    'Your countries are going to hell': Trump attacks UN and Europe in general assembly speech

    "Your countries are being ruined," Trump added. "The United Nations is funding an assault on Western countries and their borders."

    https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/573901/your-countries-are-going-to-hell-trump-attacks-un-and-europe-in-general-assembly-speech

    And the fascist loon shakes his small fist at media..

    Pentagon imposes new restrictions on media covering US military

    The move is the latest by the administration of President Donald Trump to control media coverage of his policies, after he suggested that negative stories could be "illegal".

    This from defensive Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth

    "The press is no longer allowed to roam the halls of a secure facility. Wear a badge and follow the rules – or go home."

    Some who follow World news might remember this shithead earlier

    The new rules come months after Hegseth faced stark criticism for revealing timings of US air strikes on Yemen's Huthi rebels in a Signal group chat that inadvertently included a reporter.

    Hegseth – a former Fox News co-host and Army National Guard veteran – was also reported to have shared those details in a separate Signal group chain that included his wife.

    https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/573686/pentagon-imposes-new-restrictions-on-media-covering-us-military

    IMO Dangerously crazy people….

  3. PsyclingLeft.Always 3

    The nazi's wanted lebensraum. Israeli far right just want real estate

    Israel's finance minister suggests a real estate 'bonanza' in Gaza will follow the war

    Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has described Gaza as a potential real estate "bonanza" and claimed he was talking to the United States about how to divide up the war-torn enclave.

    Speaking at the Urban Renewal Summit in Tel Aviv on Wednesday, the far-right minister said that Israel and the US had "paid a lot of money for the war, so we need to share percentages on the land sales in Gaza".

    Smotrich also said he had already started negotiations with the US on how to divide Gaza, claiming there was a business plan on the matter sitting "on President [Donald] Trump's desk."

    "We have done the demolition phase, which is always the first phase of urban renewal – now we need to build," he said.

    https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/573523/israel-s-finance-minister-suggests-a-real-estate-bonanza-in-gaza-will-follow-the-war

    Far right religious terrorists….incl the "Minister for the Advancement of Women"

    Statements from far-right ministers

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right_politics_in_Israel#Statements_from_far-right_ministers

  4. Joe90 4

    A libertarian with his hand out? Who would thunk it.

    /

    United States President Donald Trump’s administration has offered to step in to support Argentina’s economy amid severe volatility in the country’s financial markets.

    Washington stands ready to do “what is needed” to help stabilise the Latin American country’s economy following a large-scale selloff of its assets, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Monday.

    https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/9/23/us-pledges-to-do-what-is-needed-to-support-argentinas-economy

    • AB 4.1

      Did members of the Trump administration buy pesos at knock down prices just before announcing support for Argentina? I guess we'll never know. Anyway, the Trump administration is the purest expression of the true soul of America – the frenzy for money disguised as the pursuit of freedom.

  5. PsyclingLeft.Always 5

    Jimmie Kimmels back? American Media push back.

    trump and his cronies arent quite as all powerful as they would like. And they would very much like.

    Jimmy Kimmel’s television show set to return

    Before news of his pending return on Monday, more than 400 artists, including Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep and Jennifer Aniston, signed an open letter, organised by the ACLU, in support of Kimmel.

    There were organised protests against Disney outside of the company’s offices in New York and Burbank, California over the past week, as well as outside the theater where Kimmel’s show is recorded in Hollywood.

    https://www.rnz.co.nz/life/screens/tv/jimmy-kimmel-s-television-show-set-to-return

  6. Joe90 6

    Embarrassing.

    @BlueATLGeorgia

    Daniel Dale fact-checks Trump's UNGA speech.

    • Egypt–Ethiopia dispute was over an Ethiopian dam (there was no raging war with thousands killed)
    • There is no Serbia–Kosovo active war to stop
    • Congo–Rwanda is not resolved and hostilities continue
    • India denies Trump mediated any ceasefire
    • Inflation is not defeated and rising, 2.9% from 2.7%
    • Grocery prices are up due to tariffs
    • US electricity costs are up 6.2% year-over-year
    • There is no $17 trillion in US investment. His own press secretary cited ~$9 trillion (and even that is dubious)
    • China is the world leader in wind power usage

    https://xcancel.com/BlueATLGeorgia/status/1970524069616377979 (video)

    • Bearded Git 6.1

      You leave my mate Donald alone. Only today he has taught me that:

      -global warming doesn't exist and is a "green scam"*

      -the UN only writes “strongly worded letters” and does nothing else*

      -Trump has stopped 7 wars single-handed*

      -Sadiq Khan has introduced Sharia Law to London*

      -paracetamol kills babies*

      -Argentinian President Milei is a good guy and deserves US aid*

      -renewable energy projects will lead to "the death of Europe"*

      -supporting Palestinian state is only a reward for Hamas and nothing else* (genocide in Gaza doesn't warrant a mention)

      -Europe is "going to hell" because of its borders being completely open to immigrants*

      -because of Trump the USA is in "a golden age"*

      Without Trump's fact and science-based utterings how would I know anything.

      P.S. items above marked with an asterisk * are either inaccurate or plain lies.

    • joe90 6.2

      Rasmus Jarlov, chairs Denmark’s defence committee.

      https://xcancel.com/RasmusJarlov/status/1970085213532492081

      • arkie 6.3.1

        Not a great example, the 'fact-checkers' are too keen to use an unreliable sycophantic auto-correct to find the 'source'.

        https://xcancel.com/ThePeterBriggs/status/1970641471691952264#m

        The supposedly plagiarised phrase doesn't appear in the text claimed. This text can be searched here: https://epdf.pub/downbelow-station-5ea6c75117b07.html

        • Psycho Milt 6.3.1.1

          This is appearing more and more in social media. People post the delusions of large-language models and imagine they've proved something, it drives me nuts. I once asked ChatGPT to write me a brief bio I could use for a presentation and the guy it came up with was awesome – non-existent, but wow, what a guy. That was before I realised that if you ask it for citations it invents some for you. These days I'm less gullible.

          • weka 6.3.1.1.1

            why does it invent citations?

            • Psycho Milt 6.3.1.1.1.1

              The best I heard it described was that a large-language model is programmed to give a plausible answer, rather than an accurate one.

              We picture them drawing on huge databases of information that have been fed into them, but in reality they just process possible combinations of words until they have one that reads the most plausibly based on the huge number of sentences they have as models. That means that if you ask it for citations it will have documents with citations that it can draw on as a model to create a plausible citation, but there's no guarantee the citation will refer to a real piece of research.

              • weka

                can you not ask it to only give citations from real research?

                • Psycho Milt

                  You can, but it doesn't really have the concept of what 'real' is. It's very difficult to get a general large language model to restrict itself to real citations. Academic publishers that provide AI-based summaries of research have to be very careful to restrict the input the AI receives to actual published research and to impose all kinds of borders on what it can say to people. There are often also human checkers employed to spot-check its output.

                  • lprent

                    I am finding AI is somewhat useful with suggestions on smallish bits of code. Sometimes I even use it. But mostly I just pick an idea from it. It also tends to be irritating with non requested suggestions. This is mostly with copilot on jetbrains IDEs.

                    ChatGPT doing text revision tends to be florid and somewhat deceitful. Especially when I gave it a CV to spruce up.

                    My partner has used a number of tools for scriptwriting – seems to favour Claude as a idea generator. She gets irritated with all of the image generators when doing slidedecks. The iterations of instructions to a program with forgetful state are often endless.

                    It allows us to jump further in new areas, like picking up new or updated computer languages. But productivity is areas that we know tends toward the negative because of its endless intrusions.

                    • Psycho Milt

                      I've had some nice pieces of code from t3.chat. I think AI lends itself well to 'expert system' type things where there are instructions, rules etc to apply to the output, but expecting it to write something based on minimal input as though it were human is a big ask.

  7. Joe90 7

    the only democracy….

    .

    @infolibnews

    US-born Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard is running for Knesset on the platform that Israel should starve and, "if necessary," nuke Gaza. This is consistent with "Jewish morality," he suggests. Pollard, despite being a traitor to America, was permitted to "make Aliyah" by Trump in 2020 and received a hero's welcome in Israel.

    https://xcancel.com/infolibnews/status/1970446013467873779 (video)

  8. Ad 8

    Just in case we think that resistance to our corporate overlords just never works, this is how citizens united as customers to ensure Jimmy Kimmell got back on air:

    Why The Disney Boycott Over Jimmy Kimmel’s Suspension Worked | HuffPost Life

    I found this very encouraging.

  9. Sanctuary 9

    New Zealand's revanchist settler government completely threw in the towel on our noble experiment of self-determination and sovereign self rule and has appointed a foreign neoliberal to lord over the yokels and run the reserve bank. The new RNBZ governor has zero cultural experience of this country, a technocratic priest appointed to a rural parish to ensure ideological purity.

    Colonisers gonna keep p colonising I guess.

    • Ad 9.1

      Here's a useful primer on her thinking:

      Anna Breman: Monetary policy decision-making

      Thankfully her PhD is well versed in decision-making through crisis and not presuming that everyone is a rational agent:

      "My own doctoral thesis was in the field of behavioural economics. My interest in economics was born during the 1990s crisis and deep recession in Sweden. When I started my PhD in the autumn of 2001, I planned to focus on macroeconomics and international economics, but the macroeconomic models of the time were based on representative rational agents, often referred to as homo economicus.

      Instead, I became interested in decision-making under risk and uncertainty. My thesis built on experiments and empirical research based on theories from behavioural economics.

      I have benefited from my knowledge of decision-making under risk and uncertainty during my time on the Executive Board."

      The one thing we know about the New Zealand economy from the last 20 years is that there will be a substantial crisis at least once every 3 years if not more. So it sounds like she is prepared for us.

    • Jimmy 9.2

      She sounds like a good appointment. Perhaps the Reserve bank will now concentrate on what it should concentrate on and do a better job.

  10. bwaghorn 10

    https://thekaka.substack.com/p/god-help-new-zealandthe-mood-of-the

    The boardroom say willis and luxon must go, Stanford and the bish rate highly3

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