There is a sentence in Sunday’s New York Times editorial that deserves to be read slowly, then read again.

“Ms. Noem and Mr. Bovino are lying in defiance of obvious truths. They are lying in the manner of authoritarian regimes that require people to accept lies as a demonstration of power.”

That is the Editorial Board of the New York Times (not an op-ed columnist, not an outside contributor, but the institutional voice of the paper itself) stating plainly that the Secretary of Homeland Security and a senior Border Patrol official are lying. And not merely lying, but lying in a specific way: the way authoritarian governments lie.

This matters. It matters because major American newspapers have spent years tying themselves in knots to avoid the word “lie.” They have preferred “misstated,” “claimed without evidence,” “falsely asserted.” The conventions of objectivity have often meant treating obvious falsehoods as matters of contested interpretation. On Sunday, the Times abandoned that convention entirely.

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Dictation used to mean cleaning up your own mess. You spoke, the software transcribed faithfully (every “um,” every false start) and you spent as long editing as you would have typing from scratch. That changed when AI entered the equation.

I have spent a few days reviewing the dictation tools available in Australia in 2026. What surprised me: after forty years of thinking through my fingers, from typewriter to mainframe to personal computer, I may finally have a viable second mode.

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Writing software code is no longer a scarce or expensive activity. In fact, at scale, it now costs less than a fast food worker’s hourly wage. That sounds implausible until you separate coding from engineering and look at what autonomous AI systems are already doing today.

A technique called the Ralph Wiggum Loop is quietly reshaping how software gets made. Named after the persistent, never-give-up character from The Simpsons, it runs an AI coding agent in a simple loop, feeding it the same core prompt repeatedly until the job is done. No coffee breaks. No sleep. No complaints about the brief.

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I could only read one chapter a day. That’s not hyperbole or literary flourish. It’s what Dark Emu demanded of me. Each chapter so thoroughly upended what I thought I knew about this continent that I needed time to sit with the disorientation before continuing.

As Australia Day arrives again, it seems worth sharing why.

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For years, the politics of US immigration enforcement rested on an implicit bargain: this is about them, not us. The raids, the detention centres, the armed agents: these were tools pointed at a specific population. If you were a citizen, if you were white, if you were armed and law-abiding, you weren’t affected.

Minneapolis has shattered that bargain in the space of three weeks.

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From twelve thousand kilometres away, I’m watching the United States tear up its founding document in real time.

The country is in a Cold Civil War. It’s fought on two fronts: online, where narratives are deployed within minutes of a killing to pre-empt sympathy for the dead; and on the streets, where federal agents operate as an occupying force in American cities.

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Tom Hiddleston introduced me to Heat before Pacino or De Niro did.

His impression on Graham Norton, hamming up the famous diner scene for laughs, somehow captured the weight of the original. I watched it, laughed, and filed it away.

Months later, past midnight on Netflix, I finally saw what he was channelling.

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