A pot pourri of paranoia and lizard Oz pleasures ...

Things are bubbling along nicely on several fronts this day.

Once again Queensland provides a joyous spectacle, as Farmer Jones and Napoleon's pigs dine together, which is a roundabout Orwellian way of saying that Campbell Newman's piggies were caught with their snout in the trough.

It's all there in Campbell Newman flags measures to look at politicians pay scales following this week's backflip but it's solution that sends the pond into paroxysms of glee.

There's to be a five point plan and a new independent authority - yes another government body - to solve the problems created while Napoleon was out of town, and Jeff Seeney was in charge of the purse.

If he keeps going this way, Campell "quango mango" Newman could become the new Minister for Reports and Authorities, giving Anthony "Minister for useless reports on second Sydney airports" Albanese a run for his money.

And for a bonus laugh the $400k on offer to Campbell Newman would have rivalled the amount due to the POTUS, but could anyone imagine Campbell Newman as a jumped up POTQ?

 Meanwhile, it's been a slow build since news of Chairman Murdoch's dissembling double-faced forked-tongue appearance before The Sun's staff, only to be caught out by a leaked tape recording.

The chairman is facing fire on several fronts - Rupert Murdoch to be recalled by MPs over comments on illegal payments runs one story, and Rupert Murdoch: police investigate secretly recorded Sun meeting runs another.

Now you ask how the pond could gloat over the leaking of an unseemly recording, made without consent, of a private conversation amongst chums, and how the pond could dance about at the ongoing persecution of an elderly gentleman who has already experienced the most humbling day of his life, and you know, it turns out ... it's surprisingly easy and such fun.

The pond is always into poetic irony, and by golly there's plenty of irony in the chairman's poetic fate.

Nothing will come of it, of course, nothing ever does, and especially not the talk of finding Murdoch not a fit and proper person, no matter that there's plenty of evidence to discuss, but if there's some incidental pain inflicted along the way, then that's a start...

But speaking of the Chairman, that's good enough for a segue to see what's happening with the reptiles at the  lizard Oz - and it turns out they're acting like bullhead ants reacting to someone poking a stick into their nest. The pond marvels and wonders at the way the ants have been sent into a scurrying frenzy this past week by the arrival of the Ruddster.

And while everyone else has completely forgotten about the bumbling billionaire buffoon, the war on Clive Palmer continues apace in deadly earnest:

Yes, forget Campbell Newman, it's Clive who's ruining the country, and needs to be ruined.

And a new front has been opened up in the war on the Ruddster:

Oh she says she isn't but we know she is, because after all, she refuses to answer the question as to when she stopped beating her husband.

Imagine: a bloody Pommy bastard as first lady, just as our valiant brave lads on foreign soil find themselves on a sticky wicket, and not just in a pub late at night pissed as a parrot. Recently a hairdresser and now a damned furriner ...

What's that you say? An American resident runs the vast majority of Australia's print media? Sssh, not a word, let's keep it a secret, it might disturb the jingoists at the lizard Oz ...

And meanwhile the war on the main target continues, as the very best drones have been called out on a seek and destroy mission. Top of the digital page:

And it wasn't just the digital page:

Closely followed by Dennis "the tie" Shanahan:

And the reptiles at the lizard Oz are back doing what they do best - not reporting, but campaigning.

What is always marvellous for the pond is the way the flock wheels and whirrs and turns in the sky in unison, a flock of starlings all squawking as one. And all the Krudd jokes flood back, like a comfortable old glove ...

No one else bothered with this - the front page of the tree killing Sydney Morning Herald concerned the rating of the Great Barrier Reef as poor, and The Age was getting agitated about their recent discovery that school competition is a myth.

Education, the environment? The Great Barrier Reef stuffed, and Campbell Newman paid at POTUS rates to supervise the stuffing?

Pshaw, what nonsense. The Daily Terror turned up the "faceless men" rhetoric yet again, as if - if only oh if only - Paul Howes and Bill Shorten were faceless men:

And what stops the Daily Terror from banging on about the behind the scenes administrative team, "the faceless men and women" who run the Liberal party, on a daily basis?

By golly the pond knows how to ask useless questions.

But, you say, it isn't just daily anti-Labor rhetoric, the reptiles in Murdoch la la land care deeply about the reef and the environment and climate science and ...

Uh huh. No doubt that's why the lizard Oz gave Bob Carter's latest book a healthy splash yesterday:

Yep, they felt the need to wheel out the notorious Matt Ridley to handle the brave Carter's latest imitation of Don Quixote, but contented themselves with tagging Ridley as a scientist and author.

In the usual way, Ridley's wiki is much more forthcoming, including a reminder of his war with George Monblot.

Inter alia, that war was about Ridley's attitude to government, and so it's with a heavy heart that the pond reports the last line or Ridley's review, which is full of the usual denialist rhetoric and guff, long on abuse, and short on science:

Carter is a courageous man, because within academia those who do not accept that climate change is dangerous are often bullied. 
Indeed, Carter, who retired from James Cook University before he got interested in the global warming debate but remains an emeritus fellow, recently found himself deprived of even an email address by colleagues resentful of his failure to toe the line. As the old joke goes: what's the opposite of diversity? University.

Carter was bullied because he lost an email address from a former employer? An email address? A bloody email address?

That's it, that's all? That's the symbol of his courage and his persecution? Right up there with Joan of Arc?

Strangely the pond lost its employer email addresses on the day it left its employment, but surely you couldn't get a funnier indication of the bizarre world of entitlement and paranoia that infests Ridley's scribblings.

What's exactly the same as stupidity? A cheap Ridley joke ...

Perhaps he and Carter should get a life, and get a gmail account. They're both free ...

As for the man who presides over this daily nonsense, the shadowy man who lurks in international waters? Let's see him grovel one more time ...