And so to other-worldly times and spaces ...

Eva Cox:

Let's acknowledge Abbott's parental leave plan is better (behind the paywall so you don't have to support feminists supporting Tony Abbott).

Say what?

Let's acknowledge Abbott's parental leave plan is better?

Actually let's acknowledge it's a massive transfer of wealth towards those who are well off, and away from those who aren't.

Now it might be that the pond has a lingering sense of bitterness about the cleaning work that the pond's mother did to get the pond through high school, or it might just be that Eva Cox has a profound sense of entitlement, a love of middle class welfare, and a complete disdain for egalitarian principles. After all, she lives in a very nice home in the very nice suburb of Glebe, and it's clear she wants to look after her own, and the devil take the hindmost.

Her piece brought out the usual people making the usual obvious points, and because the pond is tired, we'll quote just one of them by one bluepoppy:

Better for whom? Certainly better for those who will benefit from the scheme but not better overall. This scheme is pork barrelling and should not be mistaken as ideology. 
It is another middle class welfare scheme that will mostly benefit those at the middle to top end of the income scale. Cox talks about high level career women taking time off from large salaries to have a baby not doing so if this affects income. What about low income parents? Surely a richer person has more money to save and prepare for the addition of a baby.

Well yes, but it should be taken as ideology, part of the ideology of wealth transfer, so beloved of the well to do, who just want to be weller to do.

There might be many other things that could be said about such a naked transference of wealth and the inequities involved in it but the pond is tired.

There's no necessity for feminists to be socialists or concerned with social justice - Cox is clear enough evidence of that - and it's a funny old world that sees the pond line up alongside the likes of Dr. Jensen (have a coke on the pond Dennis and explain how it's full of carbon dioxide), and the IPA, but that's what happens when confronted with the sight of Cox sucking up to Abbott.

And then comes the standard rebuttal:

Too much of the discussion has been emotive, often sexist and deeply irrational.

The old sexist ploy, yet it occurs to the pond that it wasn't the sexists who deployed the term "women of calibre".

Well there's not much room for rational discussion here it seems, so fuck Eva Cox and the feminists she rides with, and the complacent way they intend to support Tony Abbott in his redistribution of wealth in a way that panders to people with a deep sense of entitlement.

And next time you read a member of the commentariat - like Janet "Dame Slap" Albrechtsen - celebrating the "egalitarian" quality of Abbott's welfare policies, you are hereby licensed by the pond to deliver a cynical, existential hollow, Treasure of Sierra Madre laugh in their middle-class, sense of entitlement, welfare faces ...

Phew that felt good, it's not often the pond strays from the sisterhood, but when confronted with lickspittle fawning lackeys jumping all over Abbott, what else is there to do?

Meanwhile, on another planet, commonly known as Tim Blair la la satirical land, Blair presented a "Second Sandwich Theory". In it, Blair draws repeated comparisons between Texas in 1963 and Queensland in 2003 (click to enlarge):

PM Gillard cops a sandwich in 2003 in Queensland, a decade earlier than the current sandwiching?

There's some sort of deep satirical thrust at work here, some other-worldly sense of time and space, but it's all too opaque for the pond.

Perhaps the 2003 dating is to do with the alternative universe, the other dimensions which Blair inhabits, returning - very occasionally returning - to earth to lavish his wit on his readers.

And so to the peculiar matter of Graham Lloyd.

Now occasional readers of the pond will know the pond pays faithful attention to the rotating splash at the top of the lizard Oz's digital page. Here lies gold, and whenever Graham Lloyd writes about the environment it's usually 24 carat tosh - no rolled gold for Lloyd.

Sustainability!

At last a serious discussion of a sometimes intractable word and issue. Naturally the pond post-haste evaded the paywall, and rushed off to read How we live is the key to a sustainable Australia, not how many of us there are.

Oh dear, sometimes the paywall should be respected for what it offers by way of preventing thought contamination.

You see, there's more content in the lengthy header than the 209 words that follow.

209 words?

That's what passes as a splash feature these days at the lizard Oz?

A few statistics about Australian population derived from a report for which no link is provided?

Concluding with these simplistic pieties:

The report makes clear sustainability is not necessarily about how many people there are but how they live. 
 Denser cities and better planning are the key.

Uh huh. Not a word about the shadow big cities cast on surrounding regions, how densely packed cities can be made sustainable, what the costs of that sustainability might be, the blighting of agricultural areas by the demands of big cities, the uneasy interface between dense cities and rural hinterlands ... interesting topics and extremely relevant to the topic at hand, and yet not a word in the 209 words on offer.

There is an upside. It was free, if you evaded the paywall.

If the pond had actually paid for this offering, one hesitates to consider the environmental damage that might have been done to the computer and the desk ... especially with the letters "d" and "a" sticking on the keyboard and a new keyboard having to be rolled out at a moment's notice. Damn, these first world complaints are everywhere these days ...

And so to the final blow for the day, Niki Savva scribbling A rollicking good politicking (inside the paywall so you can avoid being ripped off). It opened thusly:

Aah, go (copulate) yourself?

For fuck's sake, speak English.

It turns out that Savva does the usual predictable routines, looking at abuse in politics, and concluding that everybody should lighten up, and that Wayne Swan is a bore.

Of course he is, but Savva shows her real lightweight fellow-travelling lickspittle colours by failing to note that Abbott is also a jock bore of the first water, a politician who resembles a parrot capable of learning only a few lines, repeated over and over again, and that if anyone hired the pond to compile a book on the wit and witticisms of Tony Abbott, it would be a very short tome (we love to talk of tomes, it's such an irritating word).

That's how things roll at the lizard Oz, always a bad word for the likes of Swan, and never a bad word about the tedious wretches on the opposition benches, and in particular the dour MAMIL world of jock Abbott.

No doubt in the future we'll see masterpieces like The Wit and Wisdom of William McMahon re-purposed and rolling out across the intertubes with the splendid header The Wit and Wisdom of Tony Abbott, and requiring no more than five minutes of anyone's time, such is the inanity and pomposity of the cycling prat.

You can't make a silk comedic witty purse out of an inane parroting sow's ear - that's a fucking certainty - and the pond looks forward to the sow's ear taking power, so we can have enduring comic moments like this one, which graced the pages of The Age on November 14 1978, complete with ears.

Indeed Billy ...