In which the pond discovers the source of Jean-Paul Sartre's La Nausée

Well there's a voice for sanity, and you can find the full cartoon at First Dog here.

Now let's hear from the clinically insane:

Greater than the cold war?

Oh come on, he couldn't have said that, could he, not even the depths of hysteria whipped up by the Murdochians, and in the strutting and posing and fear-mongering lathered up by a government which now fancies itself as Churchillian.

But yes, if you read George Brandis claims Australia faces security threat greater than cold war, you cop this blood chilling, blood curdling sight - the bookshelf man in full war cry:

Fuck the pond dead, what a drongo, how futile was First Dog's attempt at a little sanity ...

Luckily the pond had just recently read Jonathan Holmes' Islamic State is not an existential threat to us.

Holmes was responding to a previous Brandis outing wherein the bookman called out the dogs of war and announced we were facing an existential threat.

You can find bookshelf man Brandis's brush with Jean-Paul Sartre in Brandis: Islamic State's caliphate ambitions an 'existential threat' to Australia, though the book man did it in the typical fuckwitted tones of a devious, deviant lawyer: "represents or seeks to be an existential threat to us".

"Seeks to be"? Well yes, but Brandis seeks to run a fascist inclined terrorist state, which punishes journalists for daring to report on his government's activities, but that doesn't mean he's achieved his aims just yet, and seeking it isn't the same as accomplishing it, though perhaps it's fair to say he does represent an existential threat.

Never mind, Holmes belled this sort of rhetorical silliness cat:

An existential threat! When I left the United Kingdom in 1982, hundreds of missiles armed with nuclear warheads, some a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, were trained by the Soviet Union on those small islands. As NevilShute's On The Beach not unrealistically portrayed it, a full-scale nuclear exchange would have threatened human existence even in far-off Australia. That was an existential threat. 
ISIL is brutal, and merciless. It undoubtedly threatens the lives and well-being of some hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions – of people in northern Iraq and eastern Syria. It has made clear that it wants its followers to kill Australians too. But, whatever it "seeks to be", it is not and never will be an existential threat to Australia.

There is a point to all this rhetoric. Brandis wants to introduce the most intrusive government measures this country has seen outside world war two, and to add punitive measures to ensure that there's a cloak of invisibility around the intrusions. For all the crap he talked about freedom, he is the epitome of Big Brother. And all the small government, we must be Tea Party free humbuggers lap it up like a cat at a bowl of milk.

Holmes also made the obvious point that if we were going to talk about existential threats, it might be wise to take climate science seriously, but the jihadists in the Abbott government - notably but not exclusively Cory Bernardi - resolutely refuse:

"If we do not change our ways," warned Professor Cory, "and greenhouse gas emissions keep growing as they are now, global average temperatures are predicted to rise by 4.5 degrees by the year 2100. That would mean a hotter world than at any time in the last few million years." 
It's the kind of talk that is privately dismissed by many prominent members of the Coalition government, and publicly derided by most of their supporters in the media, as "global warming alarmism". 
Tony Abbott did not attend Tuesday's United Nations climate change summit (forced video at end of link) in New York. But he will, of course, be in New York on Wednesday to help decide what to do about the Islamic State of the Levant.

Sure enough, forget the climate science, and watch as Abbott turned up to mouth hypocritical pieties, strength in diversity, and other mugwump hogwash of the disingenuous kind, given the way he's been dog whistling for conflict for years.

A free multicultural future, "a beacon of hope and exemplar of unity-in-diversity" and so on and so forth ...

How funny didit get?

“Perhaps the realisation is now dawning for all peoples, all cultures and all faiths that it can never be right to kill in the name of God,” he said.

So let's go bomb the shit out of someone.

Yes, the pond noted last night that already the first shots of dazed and bewildered innocents wandering through bombed ruins had begun to filter out on to the news services.

As for that beacon of hope and exemplar of the true and the just and the righteous and all the other bullshit words routinely deployed by this unctuous, mealy-mouthed politician, how's it actually working out in practice?

That's right, and in that Graudian story, Asylum seekers: Morrison to sign resettlement deal with Cambodia, is a tale of national disgrace and infamy.

At the moment the deal is secret, the UNHCR has been cut out of the loop, and at the heart of it is the cynical use of bribery, and of cash in the paw reportedly amounting to some $40 million:

Despite the dearth of details, the refugee plan has been roundly criticized by NGOs and opposition politicians, who say Australia is shirking its international obligations to ensure that the asylum seekers are resettled in a country that can guarantee their safety. 
They accuse Australia of ignoring the Cambodian government’s history of human rights abuses to make the deal happen, and of sending the refugees to one of the poorest and most corrupt countries in the region. Cambodia also has a poor record on handling asylum seekers. 
In 2009, Cambodia forcibly deported 20 Uighur asylum seekers back to China before thoroughly assessing their asylum claims. (The Cambodia Daily, full story here).

Nauseating, and there's a lot more detail in the Graudian about the reality of the country Morrison is now doing deals with ... in particular the comments of an actual Christian, as opposed to the faux Christianity of the speaker in tongues:

Sister Denise Coghlan, director of the Jesuit Refugee Service in Phnom Penh, said the news of the impending MOU was “stunning,” particularly because of a failure of the Cambodian government to consult with civil society groups.

Is there any upside this desperate day?

Well at least there's no need to go hitting head with hammer to do self-harm.

The tabloids have been having a field day with the lone wolf routine, so the pond has boycotted them.

It was left to the NT News to provide some balanced front page coverage without the Photoshopped hysteria or cornball puns that routinely feature on the pages of the Daily Terror, which the pond suspects isn't of use even for wrapping dead fish, lest the fish object to the stench emanating from its pages:

And the pond has now made its black ban on the reptiles at the lizard Oz official.

There'll be no links to the digital rag, nor any including of the rag's ratbag feral rightwing commentariat in the national conversation so long as the link leads to an embarrassing, pleading, begging letter for subscriptions.

Click on Greg "bromance" Sheridan in full uxorious flight today, and what do you get?

Clicking on that produces this:

Yep, there's the nausea at the thought of seeing Sheridan quivering in awe and licking the boots of statesman Abbott (with the Shortened one thrown in for purported bullshit balance), and then there's the nausea of someone in the lizard Oz's marketing department shouting at the pond.

Well NO THANKS. NO ACCESS IS FINE, IT DOESN'T MATTER TO THE POND THAT SHERIDAN IS HOWLING AT THE MOON AND WITH HIS FEARLESS LEADER.

The Fairfaxians also seem to think that they've tightened up their paywall, but it's a risible and pathetic effort.

The problem with the Fairfaxians is that there's not much in the way of content worth a link, unless you count their cynical putting of an advertisement in front of a sample of John Oliver, while the full segment is being given away for free on YouTube.

The pond is still stewing about it. The Faifaxians even had the cheek to put their own logo on the excerpt. Look, up there in the right hand corner:

Did they pay Oliver who can be found at YouTube here and without advertising or a Fairfax Media logo?

Or did they plead the standard fair use excerpt bullshit and never mind the commercial gain?

Not to worry, if Fairfax can do it, so can the pond. We will cheerfully pirate content, and evade the Fairfax paywall as required, and plead that it's strictly for fair use, educational and informational purposes ...

Meanwhile, the typos have got so bad that the pond spends all its time getting visual frights:

The pond was going to click through on both those stories, but then got interupted.

Now people in glass houses shouldn't through stones, and the pond is littered with errors, but then we can only afford amateur New Zealand subs disemployed by John Key ... but at least the pond doesn't yammer on about being professional and a much needed element of society, and being a bastion of freedom, liberty and balance and such like ... while running Paul "magic water" Sheehan ...

Up against the genuine horrors of this wretched day, these matters are small comfort, but that's all the comfort the pond gets these days contemplating a spineless, supine media, as a contemptible government runs amuk ...

Ha, got you, take a look at mengamuk - as descriptive of Tony Abbott's as any doing the rounds - before peddling 'amok' to the pond ...

At least the Fairfaxians have a decent couple of cartoonists, and by golly David Rowe - more Rowe here - and the Pope - more Papal material here - are in exceptional form.

But they'd need to be, considering the nature of this government, which is swerving from the banal to the actively wicked, with the wingman and the magic cloak man front and centre: