Quick, the pond is in urgent need of some magic water ...

(Above: and more Moir here)

So now the pond knows how far Alan Joyce will go in forelock tugging, bowing and scraping in a bid to save his job and shake down the government ...

By coincidence, the pond has been reading about Vidkun Quisling - you can do a Greg Hunt and wiki him here - so nothing surprises the pond when it comes to servility and kow towing, but did Joyce really expect anyone to swallow the humbug that the second Qantas release on the effects of the carbon tax was just a "normal daily clarification" and "not inconsistent with what we've said before". (Joyce says Qantas hasn't changed tune on carbon pricing)

And now it turns out that Joyce rang jolly Joe Hockey to talk about it ...

Such humbug is admirably breathtaking, and a fair indication of why Joyce is a bad politician as well as a bad businessman.

No doubt Joyce thinks the "low level" writer of the original release should go, but that would be to entirely miss the point as to where the buck should stop - and with alleged friends like David Epstein furiously scribbling Alan Joyce's plan 'irresponsible', says former Qantas executive, who needs enemies? (forced video at end of link).

So that's the comedy of the day, though it reminded the pond of the recent Air Crash Investigations about a DC-8 pilot so focussed on his landing gear that he ran out of fuel and crash landed in Portland ... which reminded the pond that Portlandia is back ...

Oh dear freebasing again.

Time to straighten up and celebrate, because no doubt many will be exceptionally pleased that the carping curmudgeon, the generally grumpy Paul Sheehan, has returned to soil the pages of digital Fairfax in a way that suggests he really should have joined the reptiles at the lizard Oz long ago.

Yes, you can get the tone just from the header ABC management finds sorry is the hardest word, a genuinely comic gem from a man who somehow found sorry the hardest word for his sordid promotion of magic water. For those who came in late to that sorry story, the pond always recommends the Possum's Too good to be true, and Media Watch here.

Ah there's nothing like an old yarn to lighten the Thursday gloom, and for the real capper, you need to head off to Sheehan's piece in 2005, Magic of water is overshadowed by mystery, wherein he explains that three years after the original folly, I'm still taking the water, every day, along with several hundred other people who believe it has helped them, but the clinical trial has not since materialised.

Sheehan concluded that piece What on earth was he thinking?, without seeming to understand that linking thinking and Sheehan is a bridge too far ...

Three years on!! and still imbibing the magic water, even though it seems it was slowly dawning he'd been conned and hustled and duped ...

Back to the present, and Sheehan concludes his piece by muttering in best lizard Oz style darkly about Chris Kenny v the ABC. Indeed. Why, that's just the right time to link to Liam Kenny's bold and brave In Defence Of The Chaser's False Depiction of My Dad Having Sex With Dog.

But credit where credit is due, it was the routine presence of Sheehan in the old tree killer edition of the Sydney Morning Herald that saw the pond terminate its subscription to the rag, and frankly ever since the red backs in the purse have danced for joy ...

What else? Well there's the splendid sight of Tom Switzer explaining how Vlad the impaler is doing a perfectly proper thing in the Ukraine, and it's Obama that's got it all wrong, as you can read in Barack Obama playing risky game of Russian roulette over Vladimir Putin's Crimea invasion.

It's always great to read someone defending the ways of dictatorial thugs and bully boys, often using the excuse that the United States is also prone to thuggishness and bullying, with the peculiar maths that two wrongs invariably produce a right. Given the pond's reading last night, what a pity that Neville Chamberlain's cabinet is now long gone, because Switzer would be a shoo-in for a posting ...

What else? After all, we haven't even gone near tree killer, forest hater, World Heritage delisting Tony Abbott (too much Tasmanian forest 'locked up') or The Australian on this overcast, gloomy day...

Surely the reptiles can come up with a bit of fatuous nonsense that will keep the spirits soaring?

Yep, that'll do nicely.

That's right up there with Émile Coué de la Châtaigneraie's Tous les jours à tous points de vue je vais de mieux en mieux.

As usual, the real question is why the reptiles offer up, behind a paywall, expecting punters to fork over the readies to get access, a re-hashed, or more correctly, re-heated - perhaps in a nutrition-ruining fucking science over that lit their house on fire - piece that first saw the light of day back on the 16th January 2014 under the header The Realism of Global Optimism ...

The piece itself is a feel good content free zone, with a couple of conspicuous plugs for the Copenhagen Consensus, and at the bottom of the piece in the Oz, a plug for a book edited by Lomborg.

Why do the reptiles bother? Are things so bad in Murdoch la la land that they can't even find someone in house to drum up a piece explaining how things are much better in Australia since we decided to chop everything down and cover it in tar and cement?

Can it get any more fatuous?

Of course it can. The Bolter began the day with this plea:

Just wondering… Does anyone know of good video of the green pantheism at work? Some illustration of the religious fervour that had the Greens locking up forests because humans were too sinful? 
Long shot, I know. (A long shot)

It's lucky the pond read it, because it seems that the Bolter, already slumped in ratings gloom at Ten, seems to have forgotten Avatar.

That featured the sorry story of blue tree-hugger greenies who indulged in wilful Na'vi pantheism at the Tree of Souls, while kindly humans tried to go about the usual business of turning nice trees into chipboard and pulp, so the nice Japanese people would have enough paper for their present-wrapping ...

Needless to say, it was produced by Hollywood liberals, in the grip of the international Jewish conspiracy which also controls the banking system, the House of Windsor and the United Nations ...

Kill the blue creatures, kill the blue creatures ...

Oops, the pond apologises. That's what happens when you spend too much time in the company of loons.

Naturally the prime loon in the Murdochian stables was at it again today. First of all there was some dark muttering:

A very bruising attempt to get another article published means I will not comment directly on this very unfortunate development and risk inflicting yet more legal expenses on my long-suffering employer: Warren Mundine, the head of Tony Abbott’s indigenous council, has directly advised the Prime Minister to reverse his government’s plans to repeal a key section of the Racial Discrimination Act, saying he has the backing of the council.

You see, that allows martyrdom, plus it also allows the Bolter to duck and weave away from a direct assault on Mundine, currently an Abbott favourite. Well that wouldn't do, would it, attacking an Abbott advisor ...

Instead the Bolter cannily links to the reptile editorialist at the lizard Oz blathering on about free speech being a principle to be upheld consistently, where the Bolter's martyrdom is given yet another tedious going over, and there's not a word about said free speech routinely seeming like an excuse for the hive mind to parrot groupthink under the leadership of Chairman Rupert ...

But if Mundine's protected, surely there's someone the Bolter can pick on again? Seeing as how he's a posturing thuggish verbal bully of the first water ...

Why of course. Come on down Adam Goodes:

If you can be bothered to lower yourself into the cesspit of Adam Goodes' lecture lets us all down, you can see why the Bolter is so good at climate science denialism.

The Bolter's obsession with race would be painful to behold if it wasn't so nakedly Freudian and deeply disturbed.

In what is now a standard routine for the neocons in the Murdoch stable, he berates Adam Goodes for pointing out a 13 year old indulging in racist abuse. Suddenly the victim is the guilty one, and the guilty one, persecuted by a large, tall, powerful black man subjecting her to national humiliation, is innocent.

Try running that line with a couple of good time girls kicking and abusing a nearly blind man on a bus ...

As for Goodes himself and his early life, here's his version, as printed by the reptiles themselves:

Horsham, 300km north-west of Melbourne, 1994. Lisa May was a single parent raising three sons, the Goodes boys, Adam, 14, Jake, 12, and Brett, 10. Lisa May had separated from the boys' father 10 years previously, and had recently chosen to escape from an abusive partner. She chose not to be a victim, not to wallow in a past that saw nine of her 10 siblings taken from their parents; saw her removed at the age of five from her parents at Point Pearce, an indigenous town on the Yorke Peninsula, South Australia, 70km from Wallaroo where Adam Goodes was born on January 8, 1980. She chose to devote her life to her sons. (here)

And here's the Bolter's painful, convoluted attempt to deny that reality, none of it directly related to Goodes' or his mother's actual experience:

For instance, he said his mother, raised by an English family, was “a member of the stolen generations”. But whether the stolen generations exist is a highly contested issue. 
 She came from South Australia, which the state’s Supreme Court found in 2007 never had a policy of removing children just because they were Aboriginal. 
Brian Bennett worked for the Aborigines Department when Goodes’s mother was a girl, and told the court: “I don’t believe that I, at any time during my career as a welfare officer, had the power to remove an Aboriginal child from its parents.” 
The judge also cited a letter written in 1958 by the Secretary of the Aborigines Protection Board: “Our legislation does not provide that neglected children can be removed from their parents, except by transfer to the Children’s Welfare and Public Relief Board who in any case, will not accept them.” 
In South Australia, Aboriginal children could only be adopted “with the authority of the parents” but too few got that chance — as Goodes’s mother apparently did. 
“Unfortunately, there is a considerable amount of undernourishment, malnutrition and neglect,” the secretary mourned. 
 Our history is not as simple as Goodes claims. Nor is our guilt.

Pathetic, and risible. A good journalist would have tackled Goodes, would have taken the time to discover what happened, instead of citing Bennett and a court, followed by mysterious generalities - the pond is still pondering on the significance and meaning of "as Goodes's mother apparently did" ...

But then the Bolter isn't much of a journalist, so much as a rabid ideologue deeply hung up on race.

Still the pond knows who to turn to when the genocide of the Tasmanian Aborigines needs to be explained away and swept under the rug.

Yep for its sins, the pond has lately been reading up again on Sir George Arthur (ADB him here) and his useful fool George August Robinson (ADB him here).

Genocide, but don't you go worrying about simple history. Worry about how to gild the lily ...

Meanwhile, the pond is deeply tortured. Who to most like in this glorious smack down between David Rowe, here:

And David Pope, here:

The pond gives it to Rowe on points, but bless their socks, this pair are sometimes the only way to get through the day, especially when surrounded by racists and tree killers ...