In which the pond offers a supper of dashing Donners and prattling Polonius ...

The pond knew its duty … attention had to be paid to the thoughts of prattling Polonius, even if slotted into the late shift on the pond Weekly …

But first a word from a pond favourite, dashing Donners, with a sure fix for everything educational, who turned up in the reptile rag on Friday …it won't take long, and it probably won't fix anything …

That's as opposed to the Catholic education clique that Donners represents so whole-heartedly. 

But the pond must express some disappointment in this opener. No mention of the glories of Western Civilisation, exemplified by our noble and learned spawn? No mutterings about the dire threat posed by Gramsci's long march?

Frankly dashing Donners is off song, barely able to carry his usual melody ...

Indeed, indeed, what nonsense. Fancy all this talk of future societies changing rapidly and profoundly. Why, only yesterday the pond was on Tik Tok with Donners, noting its remarkable similarity to the use of pigeons in the first world war, and reminiscing about the ways that the telegram brought the world closer together …and mocking foolish young people for their assorted addictions, from phones to games to apps involving a Chinese conspiracy to rule the world by reducing them to simpletons ...

But alas and alack, Donners couldn't but help slipping into his old ways … what with his refusal to acknowledge any form of disruption … and his joyous belief that politicians will fix things, perhaps by dragging out the strap and the cane. 

What was wrong with a little continuity and a good whack on the bottom? What will happen to SM as a fetish if children aren't given the benefit of a good Catholic education? At least the Donald knew the benefits of a stout magazine applied with a whack to a saggy bottom ...

It should not surprise that ….?

Well here the pond must express some surprise, because experts can be found poking at the shape of the camel and coming up with all different sorts of things, and not so long ago at that, in August 2018 …

Well there's more at Grattan here, and dashing Donners can go on arguing with the camel, but the pond has properly honoured him, and hopefully has helped him a little, because his failure to blame the long march of Gramsci is a shocking error, a bad miscalculation, a hint that re-education might be due, a sign that he might be losing the plot ...

And so the pond turned to prattling "Polonius" with some relief.

Relief? How can that be?

You see, from out of nowhere, last weekend the reptiles dragged out a very strange man still carrying on the same way as he did when he was a chook with feathers…

And then from the Major on Monday to Polonius on Friday, the reptiles maintained their usual rage about the ABC and its programming …

What a relief it was that even Polonius was bored by the reptiles' compulsive fascination with the ABC!

It was Nine's turn, and Polonius had swung his gimlet eye on the recalcitrants and found them wanting.

Inevitably, it involved a tedious history lesson, yet more proof that Polonius has taken to living in the 1950s, making it his own, and claiming no one else understands what went down …

Oh dear, it's quaint how he wraps himself in equivocations, and evasions, just in case some time in the future the story might run against him.

Could anyone other than Polonius come up with "It is not being suggested that Wang has not told the truth, only that his story should be scrutinised."

The double negative is doing its work, when really Polonius is surely suggesting that Wang hasn't told the truth. Talk about hedging your bets …talk about old school equivocating Polonius ...

...There; my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.

And so on and on. Watch out for them coming, and watch out for them going, and he should be scrutinised so all might know he's not telling the truth, but watch out, if you indulge in censure, be sure to reserve your judgement, because who knows which way the cock crows or the wind blows ...

Or some such thing … and so on with even more lack of definitiveness, hazy clouds of uncertainty, and degrees of scepticism …

And that's why the pond has a soft spot for Polonius. Who else would dare, while scribbling for a Murdochian rag amongst fellow reptiles, scribble "The problem with contemporary journalism is that so much is action driven and so little is motivated by objectivity."

Come on down Murdochian tabloids, driven by objectivity, come on down reptiles of the lizard Oz, fonts of objectivity, motivated by the desire to discover, politely but decisively, all that's truth and justice in the far right …

The pond has gone light on cartoons this outing, but surely there's no harm showing objectivity at work …

Well all that was by way of delay, because here comes the long-awaited history lesson …

Hang on a tic, wave that mo, Walker was using the same rhetorical device as Polonius?

For "potentially", why not substitute:

"It is not being suggested that Wang has not told the truth, only that his story should be scrutinised."

So much better than "potentially", so subtle and nuanced.

Putting equivocation aside, the pond suggest the real reason for Polonius's ire was that Walker had raised the matter of Petrov, and that was foolish and wrong …

Oh he might have acknowledged gaps remain in the defector's narrative, but his work demanded Polonius's intense scrutiny, and a history lesson ...

Should the pond point out that Polonius has managed to mention the Petrov Affair, at tedious length, and the Wang 60 minutes allegations in the same article?

Does he have any capacity at all for irony?

Even worse, about the only insight on offer in his piece is about Petrov, because Polonius clearly doesn't have the first clue whether Wang is telling the truth, but wanted to take a shot at Nine, in the hope that later, down the track, Wang would be exposed as a fraud, and Polonius could run around thumping his chest, and saying "see, I was right, I called it early, I called it strong and hard, I scribbled furiously, only I know about the huge significance of Petrov …"

Put it another, whole hearted, all-in, full of conviction way:

"It is not being suggested that Wang has not told the truth, only that his story should be scrutinised."

To be fair, the pond doesn't have the first clue about Wang either, but why on earth scribble a column at third hand without a clue as to what went down?

And when is Polonius going to chastise the Murdochian tabloids and the lizard Oz for their own overconfident exaggerations, which litter the landscape the way cane toads infest the deep north? Is it all for an eternity just going to be about Nine, supposedly Fairfax in disguise, and the ABC?

Say what? He doesn't want to bite the hand that feeds him? Oh good, that's very Xi of him ...

For all his desire to live in the 1950s, carrying on and carping in this Polonial way seemed an awfully Donald thing to do, and as good an excuse as any for a couple of closing cartoons …

In which the bromancer and nattering "Ned" brighten up a meditative Sunday ...

Yes, Polonius has scribbled, yes this week saw dashing Donners dashing out and about, and yet … what better way to wake up to a Sunday meditation than with a serve of bromancer, garnished with his usual taste for the absurd ...

The time has come,' the Bromancer said, 
 To talk of many things: 
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax — 
 Of cabbages — and kings — 
And why the sea isn't boiling hot — 
 And whether Anderson's cattle have wings.'

What pleases the pond is that, in a rag dedicated to activism and emotional outbursts (all the reptiles are frayed, and nervous, besieged by Gramsci's long march and wretches who refuse to embrace fundamentalism and bigotry),  the bromancer should promote himself as the voice of science and reason  ...

Of course you could look at it another way. Murdochian activists never level with people, and go careening on, wildly spending words as the mood suits, which might put the world in a precarious position, which in turn would mean drastically reduced living standards.

So when inevitably climate inaction explicitly reduces living standards, wrecks reefs, worsens climate events, jacks up insurance to horrendous levels, the reptiles are gratified, and pleased to see their work done, their mission achieved…

I met a bromancer from an antique rag, 

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, 

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, 

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, 

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read 

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, 

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; 

And on the pedestal, these words appear: 

My name is Chairman Rupert, King of Kings; 

Look on my minions' climate denialism, ye Mighty, and despair! 

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare 

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

But enough of old favourites, let's not get in the way of the paranoid bromancer ...

Corey isn't/wasn't an extremist? Why he pushed his body to the limit …

 

… talk about cut, talk about buff. And he knew how to cut and buff and burn climate science …

When Bernardi launched his Conservative Leadership Foundation (CLF) in 2009, one of the first action items of the groups the CLF helped to establish was to go after policies that put a price on greenhouse gas emissions. Bernardi’s inspiration for forming the CLF, at least in part, came from a reported trip to the Leadership Institute in the US a year or two earlier. The Leadership Institute trains young people to be conservative activists and “freedom fighters” that will go out into the world to “defeat the radical left.” The CLF helped to fund and establish a network of conservative websites, including stopgillardscarbontax.com, which had another US-based global warming sceptic, the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels, as a science adviser. Bernardi himself has spoken twice at climate conferences organised by the US climate science denial group the Heartland Institute – once in Chicago in May 2010 and then again in Sydney in October that same year. Each time, Heartland paid Bernardi’s expenses. (Graudian for links and more)

And so on and on, because this extremist was too extreme even for the hard right extremists in the Liberal party, the mutton Duttons determined to drive out the wets.

Sad to say, Corey was a fundamentalist loon in about every way imaginable, and hooked up with a bunch of Xian fundamentalist loons as his final ploy, before drifting into complete irrelevance.

So who else have we got? Please, dear long absent lord, don't let it be prattling Polonius. Oh no, it is, it is ...

There is nothing remotely equivalent to Jeremy Corbyn?

More Graudian here, more Rowe here ...

What the pond loves most about the bromancer is the way his irrational activism and Wuthering Heights emotionalism always leads him into the land of the cartoon figure … and could there be a better cartoon than John Anderson?

You see, Anderson is one of those closet climate science denialists who purport to accept the science, but then do everything they can to subvert anyone doing anything about it, which makes him a much-loved reptile favourite …

He's in the school of "but, billy goat butt" …

“I’m not a climate change denier but …"

Go on billy goat, butt away ...

"… but I would be very wary about using this as a political device,” he said. 

 The deputy prime minister and Nationals leader, Michael McCormack, also said: “I’m a believer that the climate is always changing and it’s been changing since Moses was a boy.” 

Verity Morgan-Schmidt is from a multigeneration farming family in Western Australia and is CEO of Farmers for Climate Action. She said the comments were “a disservice to many of our farmers who are already facing the reality of climate change”. “My family has been on properties out in Western Australia for over 100 years. We can say this has well and truly moved beyond natural cyclical patterns,” she said. 

 “The idea that we could be accused of playing politics by accepting reality is a bitter pill to swallow. The science is clear. Climate change is increasing the severity of extreme weather events that include drought. 

 “The vast majority of farmers and National party voters that we speak to are growing increasingly frustrated at the lack of action on climate change at a federal level.”

That was back in June 2018, Graudian here, but the bromancer is still playing the Andersonian billy goat butt game ...

Oh fucketty fuck, not all that Western civilisation crap again, and inane, stupid, rhetorical questions of the "should we stop feeding the world?" kind.

And so on to a final gobbet of inanity ...

And there you have it. All that talk of emotions rather than facts, and reasoned insights, and the bromancer manages to reduce the American revolution to a half-baked piece of conservative piety, and the French revolution to a simplistic six words.

You can't get much more fuckwitted than that. It might pass the Fox News chyron test, Donald Trump might even recyle it in a loon tweet, but why does the bromancer work so hard at showing why he and the other reptiles keep getting held in ever greater contempt?

Well it's time to pause before the usual great challenge …and we're not talking ...

The pond is talking of making it through a nattering "Ned" column, the Everest of hand-wringing, moaning and sighing …

Just the header made the pond's head slump on shoulders. All the pond could do was suggest stray, innocent, unaware readers pack a lunch, carry plenty of fluids, and enjoy the cartoons the pond ha sprinkled along the way …like raisins in a very glum, dull plum pudding ...

It will be noted that these cartoons bear absolutely no connection to the tedious scribblings of an aged lizard Oz loon, but imagine how terrible it would be if there was some connection …

Okay, there's an excuse to run with an infallible Pope …

Now it's back to the anxiety attacks and the hand-wringing

Yes, it's getting harder to trust government, and the pond doesn't have a clue why …

And some of the shellfish are beginning to ask awkward questions ...

But let's not have any talk about that sort of stuff, let's see how "Ned's" anxiety attack might be going down with the reptiles' aged readership:

Of course it had absolutely nothing to do with the people who have been kept in indefinite detention for no reason or purpose for soul-destroying years … but we know about that kind of human caring …

It's the sort of policy triumph that comes from moral giants ...

And so back to "Ned" nattering away ...

Ah, that it'd be the same progressive ideology and article of faith that promotes all that climate alarmist nonsense … when the real solution to it all is some old fashioned-religion, freedom of speech, and an end to people feeling threatened …

And so to a moan about education, which coming from a reptile mob that denies a whole branch of science, is reasonably rich ...

Well it could be worse …

… but let's not have any talk about procrastination, because it's time for congratulations to any stray, innocent reader who has made it this far. You have reached the final "Ned" gobbet of unhappiness and despair ...

Shane Stone to lead the response and recovery?

Well that must mean we can all spend our happy days playing skipping stones …

Perhaps we should look abroad for help and wisdom, if it turns out that throwing Stones only manages to break a few windows…

Never mind, Xmas is coming, and what joys that will bring …