From a conspiracy to a pilgering, the pond travels north by north west* ...

(Above: click to enlarge. More Doonesbury here).

Every day the full to overflowing intertubes turns up bright, shiny bangles and beads as a way to start the day.

The slow-moving pond has only just caught up on the news that Barack Obama and a flock of co-conspirators cunningly conspired to make the world believe that he'd come from Kenya, rather than where he really came from ... Hawaii.

Apparently the status of being a Kenyan African in the streets of Chicago was simply too much for a materially indulged, emotionally deprived typical American child of divorce ... who didn't want to talk about being born in down market ... Hawaii ...

Or some such thing. It's all here at the Village Voice in Afterbirthers Assemble! Rightbloggers Accuse Obama of NOT Being Born in Kenya, and it's way funnier than anything the pond could concoct.

Some might think it's clear evidence that the extreme right wing in the United States has now lost the plot, dropped its marbles, and gone feral crazy mad, but the pond prefers to think of it as a long range result of the Civil War going the wrong way. If only Obama was still down on the plantation tending cotton in a socially useful way ...

Meanwhile, the pond has been counting the many local government initiatives that will provide endless work in the future.

There's the separation in New South Wales of city and country rail services. In due course there will be another round of letter heads and business cards when - in a splendid initiative - a new government decides to re-unite the two services in the aid of efficiency.

The privatisation of the Sydney ferry services can follow the same course as the privatisation of tram and train in Melbourne. After the current privatisation strategy fails, the ferries can be returned to government with great fanfare, in the name of efficiency and better service, and who knows, perhaps a year or so after that, they can be privatised again.

Now under cover of the Craig Thomson ruckus, Qantas has come up with a splendid initiative worthy of government. Yes, it will split off its domestic and international businesses, and so double the size of its management - bring on the chiefs, sack those Indians.

Casual readers with a long memory will recall how Qantas and TAA were joined together to reduce management structures, and increase efficiency, and now it's only appropriate in the befuddled Joycean way - heir to the befuddled, oh heck let's hand it over to private equity Dixonian way - that domestic and international operations be sundered.

As usual, the pond had great fun reading the speculation at Ben Sandilands' blog, in Qantas split could be a prelude to cutting and running, though the ink was barely dry on that before Ben turned up with Qantas: Emirates stages dramatic cameo appearance.

All the pond hopes is that domestic Quantas is now rebadged as TAA. Somewhere in the attic lurks a host of quaint TAA memorabilia, which will suddenly become fresh and relevant again.

Has the pond ever participated in great new initiatives by government that were reversed only a few years later? How did you guess? But look at the upside. Think of the work for the designers as they re-badge the re-badging ... and roll on that fast train to Canberra to give Sydney a second airport ... in Canberra.

Meanwhile, since today is clearly a day for upsizing in a downsizing kind of way, it's only just occurred to the pond that the most unseemly thing about Mitt Romney and his episode of gay bullying isn't so much the bullying, as the selective amnesia involved.

Who hasn't at some time growing up done something that still sears into the memory - bullying, or a hurtful thing done to a sibling, or a moment of wild-eyed mad shoplifting (for the record the pond was bullied more than a bully, hurtful to a sibling, and caught shoplifting at a very tender age, but was led on by a local copper's spawn).

The adult thing is to acknowledge the sin, or the crime, apologise if it was hurtful to others, and move on. Which means the homophobic, wogphobic, geekphobic, misogynist First 13 of Tamworth High School in the pond's day has still got a lot of apologising to do ...

But once again there's an upside. Doonesbury is after the Mitt, and there will be fun.

Speaking of homophobia, The Drum is making hay and drumming up the hits by doing its usual trick of printing the controversy.

Not so long ago, gay marriage was given a right royal pilgering by John Pilger in Gay marriage is a distraction: remember Manning.

According to the pilgering, gay marriage is mere bourgeois aspirationalism, a cheap distraction from the real issues surrounding Bradley Manning.

It's expected shortly that a new scientific study will reveal that pilgered Leftists are simply incapable of chewing gum and patting their tummy at the same time ... because thinking about gay marriage and Bradley Manning in the one sentence is just too hard.

Legal obstacles should not prevent people marrying each other, regardless of gender. But this is a civil and private matter; bourgeois acceptability is not yet a human right.

Damn you bourgeoisie, damn you to hell.

Still, the pilgering fondly reminded the pond of the gay old days of persecution in Cuba (now changing), and the Soviet Union (still persecutory in vile ways), and the quaint notion that instead of civil liberties, certain sections of the community should be required to keep wearing hairshirts (and not just the kinky ones who enjoy that sort of thing) while more important issues can keep on being pilgered.

It must have pleased the Pilger no end to see that his disdain for bourgeois ways - damn you middle class oppressors, damn you to hell, remember Manning - put him in the same camp as eccentric Christian Jim Wallace, furiously scribbling Extreme intolerance of gay activists, and generating a whopping six hundred plus hits.

Never mind the quality of the writing, or the thinking, feel the hits, eh ABC.

Bring Wallace out of his locked cage at the Australian Christian Lobby, and watch him send the punters mad.

There is of course no point in arguing with Wallace, nor any point in reading through the six hundred plus comments. That way lies madness. The point surely should be to pilger the highlights, the moments of quintessential silliness, and surely Wallace delivers in his last par:

Professor George should be invited back to the Victorian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, and claims by homosexual activists of equal parenting outcomes should be subjected to much more rigour before politicians legislate to create another stolen generation.

But Jim, Jim, haven't you heard? There never was a stolen generation, it was all a lie and a fraud and a myth. Haven't you read your Keith Windschuttle? You know, in the same way that the devious Obama pretended to come from Kenya because of the enhanced status it gave him in the wild streets of Chicago.

And Jim, Jim, haven't you heard? Even Andrew 'the Bolter' Bolt has taken a pot shot at Professor George for saying gays aren't normal people. Now agreed, you're a little more clever in your wording ...

His crime was to join 150 other medical practitioners in a submission to a Greens-inspired Senate Inquiry that stated, among other things, that children do best with their biological mother and father.
This statement of commonsense, of course, does not deny that same-sex couples can love a child and parent competently.

... but if the Bolter's bolted, don't you see all that's left for you is to shut the gate? You see it was all in the phrasing and the use of the word "normal", which aroused even the Bolter's ire, and so it didn't sound common sensical at all, it sounded mean and spiteful and hateful. Here you go:

We further submit that legalisation of same-sex marriage will have significant ramifications that have been confirmed by research and events here and elsewhere
• the further “normalising” of homosexual behaviour through education with all the health consequences of that behaviour for our children (3)

You see, Doctors for the Family labelled homosexual behaviour as abnormal, which shouldn't be "normalised", and that particular footnote (3) led to a fear-mongering rant about HIV - when you might expect domesticity and child-rearing and nappy-changing would get gays out of the wild life, and into a cosy conservative lifestyle, ready and willing to deplore Obama for using his Kenyan credentials to disguise the fact that he was actually an aspirational bourgeois type born in Hawaii! Damn you bourgeoisie, you need a good pilgering ...

And finally a reader has noted that in the usual inimitable Faux Noise way, Greg Sheridan put up his hand for enhanced interrogation techniques on Q&A, a show the pond simply couldn't watch because of the unimaginable mingling and consorting of the likes of Sheridan and Kathy Lette. There's water-boarding, and then there's Kathy Lette cracking puns. Why the pond would rather be whip-lashed than Lette pun-lashed ...

But to be fair, Sheridan did make a valid point:

Jeffrey Eugenides: If it's painful, it's torture, even if it doesn't leave a lasting mark.

Greg Sheridan: Look, it's painful to go to a news conference, I can tell you that, and that leaves a lasting mark at a newspaper. It's even more painful to read The Australian, and especially the gob-smackingly distorted pieces I write for the rag, I can tell you that ... That sort of definition ...

Or was that a misquotation? Did the pond, through the foggy memory induced by the soul-rending torture of reading the commentariat, get Sheridan wrong?

Oh well, at least thanks to the full to overflowing intertubes the pond keeps learning new things every day:

Melissa Clouthier channeled young Obama, interpreting him as a "hippie kid" whose father was "some Kenyan big wig" and his mom "a self-important sociologist." "You are a mixed race kid on Hawaii in the sixties," murmured Clouthier, presumably while gazing into a crystal ball or a public access cable camera, "which is not a big deal because everyone has Hawaiian blood and has mocha skin... You are relatively wealthy and end up at a prep school with other wealthy kids. You have to justify your existence." Thus, naturally, "you lie," said Clouthier. "....You pretend you're part of the victim class."

But don't believe the Village Voice or the pond.

Click on that Clouthier link to understand exactly why Obama pretended to come from Kenya while in actual fact being born in Hawaii, and never mind that for years and years birthers have been raving about that fatally flawed birth certificate.

Yes, the entire world is simply just a giant, vast, unimaginable loon pond, now fully wired for loonacy by the intertubes.

It's either a vision and a dream ... or a nightmare ...

* North by north west? Sorry, there ain't any such compass point, but rest assured that as Hamlet is to a handsaw, so Obama is to a Hawaiian hawk ... and a pilgering is to a Sheridan.

(Below: Tom Tomorrow in 2009. And has anything changed? Not really).