In which the pond TGIF's with a sizzling Sharri and a fizza ...

It's the custom of the pond for a TGIF luncheon to kick back the heels and enjoy some quality fun time with a Sharri sojourn, thanks be unto the Terrorists ...

Even starting on the Sharri hunt routinely produces fond memories of the bliss poop kind ... 

Oh look, sweet Akker Dakker in his Stalinist five year plan phase urging on the socialists to do what's right for coal ...

The pond loves a whiff of socialism and nationalisation and Corbynist thinking  at lunch time ... let the government invest in cola and the fat owl will pick up the bill, and still have enough left over for a snack at the tuck shop ...

And so to Sharri, as usual at her apocalyptic Friday best ...

Say it ain't so ... the pond could cope with Xi in a quest for world domination, and the Donald as a doofus, but Lisa Wilkinson switching television networks?

Why the stars of heaven have dimmed ... the pond heard the owl scream and the cricket cry, there's husbandry in heaven and their candles are all out ...

But with a singular act of will the pond avoided the clickbait and pressed on with Sharri ...

Ah, indeed, indeed, a splendid graphic, evoking the government's political agenda ...

Having ruined the NBN, there must be many more things for Malware to ruin or at least reduce to the third rate spineless jellyback sort of compromise he loves ...

Perhaps Sharri will explain the next bright shiny toy to be trashed ...

Oh sweet long absent lord, he's found a solution to climate change? That's the next NBN?

That's what the pond loves about Sharri ... she's a deep thinker, and the Terrorists love to show her in deep thought up against the government's deep thinking PM.

Why, the pond can feel its own little deep thinking montage coming on ...

Sorry, there's not much in that for the discerning elderly gentleman reader, but the pond must press on ...

What did he say?

Oh pick me, pick me, I know the answer miss.

He said, look, I'm a multi-millionaire living in Point Piper in a quite handsome harbour-side shack, and I find if you spend anywhere between 30 and 50 k you can end up with quite a nice solar array, and if you throw in a battery or two - I think they start around the 8k mark, but never mind, I didn't much notice the price being a multi-millionaire and all - you can iron out any wobbles in the supply ...

Please allow me to refer you to this story here, if you want a Malware role model ...

Indeed, indeed, just the way to establish an affinity with the battlers struggling to beat the impending summer heat ...

Explain to them how you're doing it tough, just like them, but there are solutions.

Lead by example, the pond says, and a handsome splashing of the cash.

Oh heck, the pond probably got all that badly wrong.

Malware probably didn't boast about his power bill in his home ...

Oh dear, the pond has no idea why Malware might be a bit leery ... after all, every other grand prediction has come to pass in splendid, wondrous ways, such as this one back in November 2013 ...

“If people want to see their household bills reduced by $550 on average, if they want to see power bills down by $200, gas bills down by $70, they’ll want to see the carbon tax gone and that’s why in the end I think that ‘Electricity Bill’ Shorten will roll over,” he (Abbott the onion muncher) said. (here).

It'd be a bit like promising great connectivity via copper and multinodal hyperdrive ...

Electricity Bill? Why Mr Harbourside Mansion is much cleverer, coming up with Blackout Bill ... when he really needs to be Lithium Battery Bill ...

Now can we have a snap of a very serious looking Josh to help wrap things up?

Well we've been there before, and we'll probably go there again, with or without battery storage, and the pond finds that the old nicknames are always worth keeping on hand, a bit like energy stored in a battery. You never know when something will come in handy ...

And so to a Rowe and a different sort of fizza ... with more fizzling Rowe here ...

In which the pond learns that winners are losers, except when losing is a kind of winning ...

It took the pond's breath away, so right was its shouty essence of bitter denialism ...

Losers take power?

NZ shock?

Yep, the reptiles were having their Hillary Democrat moment ... and they kept it up in the digital edition with exactly the same bizarre use of the English language...

The pond has to congratulate Ean Higgins and Primrose Riordan, not just for the notion that losers take power, but for the way in the very first line they slipped in "socialist-leaning."

Where were they when the Donald won? Yes, he won, and the reptiles never ran with USA shock: loser takes power thanks to weird electoral college ...

At least the Oz editorialist tried on a little history, with dire implicit threat of doom ...

Now the pond doesn't actually much mind or care what happens in New Zealand, though it loves the Kiwi accent to death and could spend endless hours talking of fush and chups ...

But naturally the pond turned to the bromancer to understand what happened, and why the reptiles were suffering such a bitter aftertaste from a vanilla poll ...

Naturally she won? 

But she lost. That's what the Oz said ...

How could this be? The front page of the lizard Oz had assured the pond that she was a loser, in much the same way that the Donald lost, and that black is white, except on the odd occasion when white is black ...

Hillary Clinton was a winner, but lost?

And now for the pronouncement of doom and gloom ... though the pond can't recall the reptiles getting so agitated about the Donald getting the gig ...

Julie Bishop is ludicrous?

The reptiles really know how to turn the pond's world upside down. Even an NZ election can turn into an epic mindfuck of alternative realities ... and speaking of which, naturally the bouffant one was on hand to deliver more confusion to the pond.

With the Donald already having struck it down, what's the first thing a reptile would reach for to pluck from the reach of the new socialist leaner? The cat? The family photographs? Some other treasured heirloom? Fush and chups? An improvement in your ludicrous manners?

Actually it's none of these things, because after much huffing and puffing, the best that the bouffant one  can do is reach for the TTP, such a thriving, surging, energy-charged  trade negotiation ...

In reality, even the trade pact is such a tedious irrelevance, such a storm in a Tasman sea teacup, that the bouffant one could only manage a few pars for his beat-up ...

And since the pond is congratulating winners this day, surely the bouffant one must score the Seinfeld award for the best column about nothing. 

It should fit nicely alongside the loser cup that the pond has awarded to winners Ean Higgins and Primrose Riordan. 

Yes losers can be winners, and winners, by definition, are always losers ... or so Pyrrhus of Epirus assures the pond ...

And now, since in truth talking about fush and chups is usually a short affair, there's just time to drop in on some real losers and dropkicks ...

It took a little time for the penny to drop and for the losers to realise that they were the winners of an ancient scheme ...

And so the reptiles maintain the rage and keep the usual dropkick coal-loving climate denialists close to their sooty bosom ...

Unless it's coal-fired business as usual, the luddites will never be happy ...

Let the pricing begin, and that way the winners are certain to be losers, unless losing is winning ... and carbon will be priced out of the marketplace ... though the pond hesitates to call it a price on carbon, even though carbon will end up being priced ...

Which brings the pond to the Pope of the day, with more infallible Popery here ...

The pond's first car was an FX and it's pleasing to see that the Pope has drawn the right grille ...and he's also evoked the mindset of the likes of Craig Kelly and George Christensen, stuck in the 1950s, while back in the actual 1950s they preferred to looked forward to the future ...

We could have done the same in the new millennium, and looked to electric cars and future ways of doing things ... instead, the winners wanted to be losers ...

In which the pond continues bleeding obvious Thursday with the bromancer ...

The pond had many possible distractions for a bleeding obvious Thursday, not least the bleeding obvious way that the Bolter would drag Waleed Aly into the pay dispute - anything to needle the Islamic and get him agitated - and side with Julian Assange and Vlad the Impaler ...

If Hillary Clinton is damned by her links to sexual predators, what to make of the Donald or Steve Bannon in the locker room of life?

But it wasn't distilled essence of bleeding obvious, and the pond had to rule out other contenders for the same reason ...

Johnsie going the green fiends? Actually that was too bleeding obvious, and anyway, who'd spend time with an insincere, hollow untrustworthy loon who started in the Labor party and veered off like an Oscar Wilde rocket to the hard right, which threatens us all?

And there were the reptiles, getting very excited about Nick X, though it was bleedingly obvious they were doing a poll-driven beat-up ...

Is there nothing a silly poll can't achieve, apart from silly headlines left, right and centre?

Naturally the dog botherer had to pour cold water on all this ...

But in the end it was the bromancer that hit exactly the right bleeding obvious tone ...

The bromancer even had the cheek to dress it up as a rhetorical question:

You thought the bromancer was a cluelessly provocative twit? Right!

Now the pond immediately knew it had a bet going. The bromancer would spend endless time on China, but there wouldn't be one mention of Manus Island, Nauru, or Australia's treatment of its indigenous population, pace the record-breaking prison achievements of the NT government ...

Actually, notwithstanding the pond's indifference to lawyers, there's something to be said for the evolution of a legal system, and it's worth noting that China has moved some distance from the madness of Mao's cultural revolution, which took place around the same time as that great bastion of human rights and democracy decided to move over 500k military men into Vietnam and bomb the country either to corrupt democracy or the stone age, whichever came first. Oh yes, those were the great days for human rights ...

And speaking of human rights, it seems about the right time for the pond to raise some ancillary matters ...

Well yes, and more at the ABC here, but thanks to Nauru and Manus Island, and treatment of indigenous folk, Australia is eminently qualified to sit alongside the likes of Pakistan and the Congo ...

Indeed, indeed, and more and hot links here,  though it seems a pity not to celebrate Australia's role in liberating Iraq and helping generate the wondrous respect for human rights in the middle east, with Abu Ghraib symbolic of all little Johnny helped achieve ...

Of course all these epic achievements are in turn used by the Chinese Communists to justify their own wretched behaviour.

With all these great human rights achievements going down, the pond almost lost sight of the bromancer's final gobbet ...

The pond loves it when the bromancer talks dirty, or of eerie realisations of George Orwell's dystopian vision, while at the same time in another country ...

Turnbull denies new facial recognition measures amount to 'mass surveillance' ...

Mass video surveillance about to change Australia ...

And what's this back in June 2013? Big Brother surveillance is our reality ...

Mass surveillance of a country's citizens by its government can no longer be said to be the preserve of authoritarian and dictatorial states. 
The publication last week by The Guardian of classified National Security Agency documents has exposed the extent of surveillance by the US government, throwing into question the security and privacy of the communications of people around the world. 
Not only does the US government have carte blanche access to data collected by phone companies about every single phone communication conducted on American soil, but it also has a direct line into records kept by internet companies such as Google, Microsoft and Twitter. In short, the US has the ability to spy on citizens of almost every country across the globe. 
Even living halfway around the world, seemingly out of the reach of the US government and its vast and intrusive intelligence program, it is safe to say that Australians have been the subject of US government surveillance. Their Gmail records and Facebook photos have been vulnerable to examination and investigation. Their phone calls have been tracked. And they have no means of recourse to prevent this activity from continuing.

Now there's a comfort, knowing the Donald has been fully briefed ...

But at least thanks to the bromancer we now know that China doesn't care too much about human rights, and there's another rich win for the bleeding obvious and deep irony ... and don't you worry about what Malware or the Donald might be doing ...

Meanwhile, there's an actual humanitarian crisis of astonishing proportions going on in Bangladesh, courtesy of a Myanmar government ostensibly led by a woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize ...it makes UN Warns of Looming Humanitarian Crisis on Manus Island look like small beer, but perhaps the bromancer might take some time out to look at the mote in our eye ...

And so for distraction and light relief a few bleeding obvious cartoons ...

In which the pond embarks on a bleeding obvious Thursday ...

What, no goats? No exploding volcano?

A baleful, glaring oscillating fan instead, with a rather dubiously kitted power board?

No doubt Rowe felt the need for a little variety, and more 'all sorts' are available here, but today is bleeding obvious day at the pond, and who better to introduce the theme than the savvy Savva?

True enough, given that Comrade Bill is, on his own, a singularly awkward lump of stodge, but the pond is willing to bet that nowhere in the piece will the savvy Savva note the singular capacity for failure of Malware ... or the way his willingness to carry out the orders of the onion muncher damaged his status and his political standing ...

Only a completely wretched doofus of the first water would respond this way ...

We rolled out a turkey, and now we expect to hear a lot more gobbling?

Yep ...

“It is a bit like television. If you’ve got hardly any viewers, you won’t get a lot of complaints,” he told the Nine Network. “[Customers] are rolling on and around 30,000 to 40,000 a week. Clearly you are going to get more complaints.”

Yep, totally tone deaf, and you can't pin that on the onion muncher, nor can Malware now pin the NBN on the onion muncher.

Sure he was only carrying out orders, sure it was the onion muncher that told him to destroy the NBN, but they hung plenty at Nuremberg for following orders ...

But enough of the Godwin's Law swear jar, let's see how the savvy Savva seeks to deflect and save  her man ...

Uh huh ...

Of course Malware is also doing a lot of their work for them. 

Old spineless jellyback never tackles the onion muncher, and panders to the hard right in his party, and gets himself tied up in all sorts of dubious policies to please them, and the result provides a barrel of apples for Comrade Bill and his team to dunk away at ...

But you won't read any of this in the savvy Savva ... instead, rich irony of ironies, she turns to covert Labor people to explain the Liberal situation ...

Uh huh. Of course that could have been written:

"Take energy, which is a difficult issue for the climate science denying, coal living hard right side of politics. Malware has succeeded in making it unclear what the government's position is. Didn't he once accept the science? Wasn't coal on the way out? Weren't marketplace mechanisms the way forward? Didn't renewables deserve their place in the sun? It should be a great issue for them, a marketplace driven renewable way forward to drive down prices and at the same time save the world, and yet Malware pandered to the hard right and the coal lovers and the climate deniers and above all the onion muncher and so the spineless old jellyback destroyed it ..."

But you won't find any of that in the savvy Savva. Instead she'll keep listening to the Comrade Bill whisperer, dumping a big surf on the onion muncher ...

Still they dream that the onion muncher will change his ways?

Still they hope for his return to the fold?

All sorts of rewards could follow, beginning with the restoration of respect, but ending with a seat in the cabinet?

This is beyond dreaming, this is a kind of madness ...

Every time the pond reads the savvy Savva, reluctantly it's herded in the direction of Comrade Bill, and away from the big game hunters ...

More Wilcox here, and so to a short, revealing bonus from the bouffant one ...

You see, the bouffant one comes at the problem from a different angle, one of trepidation, fear and loathing, because he knows the skill set of the team of sellers ...

Of course the bouffant one poignantly suggests that finally we have a workable climate policy, but that's a bit like suggesting that we have a working NBN made out of multi-nodal copper and cabbage string and sealing wax ...

The seat might be getting a little hot, but don't you worry about that, and pigs might have wings, but Malware's NBN and energy policies have not, and so it becomes a tricky business selling them to a once bitten, twice shy, mad as hell punter ...

Indeed, indeed, and the reptiles can keep talking up coal as the future, and talking down renewable energy, and Malware can keep pandering to this sort of climate science denying hard right element, and look, there comes Comrade Bill ...

Now, all the pond needs for a bleeding obvious Thursday is a few goats and perhaps a volcano god ...

That'll do flying pig, that'll do ...