So this was Halloween, another pagan festival done, roll on Xmas, but where's all the fun?

Sadly, this Halloween was a bust.

The pond scoured Newtown, centre of the known universe when Tamworth's having an off "let's elect Barners" day, and only the firies attempted a modest display (at least it stops them from torturing the next door plods with witty signs).

Ever since the funeral director left the Enmore road and took the period hearse away, the public celebrations have been muted. It was hard enough to spot a Goth, let alone mount a competition with Harajuku ...

These days the pagan celebration is the turf of the breeders. The whole area has gone suburban. Children, with parents in tow, walk the streets in search of a sugar hit, and as John Oliver has explained to the world on YouTube here, that's no better than watching junkies in search of a cocaine fix.

Every second house seemed to have decorations and invitations to the pint-sized junkies to step up for a fix, and while the pond's data gathering was imprecise, this seemed to represent a 98.99% increase on last year's effort (yes, why leave it to nonsensical Bob Ellis to make up nonsensical figures on the spot).

Even the local scientologists bunged on a few balloons and a Harry Potter reference:

The pond did seize the moment to confiscate a copy of L. Ron Hubbard's The Way to Happiness, a dangerous compendium of cliches and rewritten Xian cliches, which urges the holder to treat the booklet like an emotional Ponzi scheme ...

Give the person several additional copies of this booklet ...Have the person present these copies to others that are involved in his or her life. By continuing to do this you will greatly enhance your own survival potential and theirs.

And maybe help another mug punter get fleeced by a faux church.

Now the pond has a fondness for paganism and there's always a special thrill seeing an eight year old wearing the face mask of the psychopathic mass murderer in the Scream franchise, or wielding a chain saw in honour of the Texas franchise, but even the Xians seem to have given up getting agitated about the pagan fest.

Oh sure the angry Sydney Anglicans obligingly provided a link to a fundie getting agitated in the usual fundie way:

This fascination with the occult comes as America has been sliding into post-Christian secularism. While the courts remove all theistic references from America’s public square, the void is being filled with a pervasive fascination with evil, paganism, and new forms of occultism. 
In addition to all this, Halloween has become downright dangerous in many neighborhoods. Scares about razor blades hidden in apples and poisoned candy have spread across the nation in recurring cycles. For most parents, the greater fear is the encounter with occultic symbols and the society’s fascination with moral darkness. (here)

Shameless, really, peddling that sort of nonsense, since these days the only sort of razor blades to be found in supermarkets are things that look like they belong in a futurist X-men Marvel comic.

But it was half-hearted - the best the angries could do was a link to a southern Baptist fundie doing heebie jeebies about Satan?

And then came the news that an oracle established by the Jensenists was winding up and transforming its activities to an online digital platform, dancing amongst the satanic digital digits (The end of the beginning).

But in a curious way, it all led to the pond brooding about false gods, and somehow this triggered a reminder of that false god Lord Monckton.

The pond spent the rest of the Halloween walk amongst the pagans wondering what had happened to the man.

Once upon a time, the mainstream rightwing ratbag commentariat were all over his lordship like a feverish kid in search of a candy hit.

Who can forget Paul "magic water man" Sheehan back in February 2010 with Ten anti-anti-commandments and Lord Monckton's verbal bombs. The climate maddies loved it, and were shattered and indignant when they perceived editorial interference in Sheehan's undiluted Monckton worship here.

Janet Albrechtsen, always fruity, was particularly fruity:

Emails started arriving telling me about a speech given by Christopher Monckton, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, at Bethel University in St Paul, Minnesota, on October 14. Monckton talked about something that no one has talked about in the lead-up to Copenhagen: the text of the draft Copenhagen treaty. 
Even after Monckton’s speech, most of the media has duly ignored the substance of what he said. You don’t need me to find his St Paul address on YouTube. Interviewed on Monday morning by Alan Jones on Sydney radio station 2GB, Monckton warned that the aim of the Copenhagen draft treaty was to set up a transnational government on a scale the world has never before seen. Listening to the interview, my teenage daughters asked me whether this was true...   
So I read the draft treaty. The word government appears on page 18. Monckton says: “This is the first time I’ve ever seen any transnational treaty referring to a new body to be set up under that treaty as a government. But it’s the powers that are going to be given to this entirely unelected government that are so frightening.” 
Monckton became aware of the extraordinary powers to be vested in this new world government only when a friend of his found an obscure UN website and hacked his way through several layers of complications before coming across a document that isn’t even called the draft treaty. It’s called a “note by the secretariat”. The moment he saw it, he went public and said: “Look, this is an outrage ... they have kept the sheer scope of this treaty quiet.” 
Monckton says the aim of this new government is to have power to directly intervene in the financial, economic, tax and environmental affairs of all the nations that sign the Copenhagen treaty. (here at the pond)

And so on, the sort of stuff best said with a torch pointed upwards in a darkened room while bats swing from the ceiling ...

But they were all in on it, the Monckton worship and the Monckton citing, and the Monckton conspiracy, Tim Bleagh, Akker Dakker, Miranda the Devine, the Bolter, the whole rag tag bag of ratbags ... while bemused obersvers watched from the sidelines and wrote My response to Monckton's conspiracy theory ...

Those were the days, as Monckton swept around the world like a pagan festival or kid in search of addictive candy ....

So where is he now, as they used to ask about crewman number six in Galaxy Quest? (Don't you worry about Sam Rockwell, he's doing fine, at least in terms of staying in work and never mind the movies).

Well here's the killer snap:

Yes, there's the faux rogue lord with rogue MP Geoff Shaw and rogue fundie Pastor Danny, and the funny thing is that the only mention of rogue Monckton in the HUN story Frankston MP Geoff Shaw hangs out with Lord Christopher Monckton and Rise Up Australia leader is a line about abortion.

This was only a couple of months ago, but only a few intrepid souls paid any attention at all:

(tweeted here)

In fact, if you watch the montage of TV assembled by the rogue Pastor Danny crowd and put up on YouTube here, Geoff Shaw hogs all the action and the screen time, except for some shots of the clap happy crowd being clap happy. Monckton is more like a paid extra hanging around to deliver a couple of lines ...

Others have examined the tortured relationship of the Bolter to Lord Monckton, and the Bolter's sudden, belated realisation that once again he'd been caught hanging around with barking mad fundamentalists (Andrew Bolt is still on the fringes, whether he stands with Lord Monckton or not).

And that's the thing.

Monckton did his damage long ago, and the willing subservient servants who trotted out his message - the Bolter, Albrechtsen, Sheehan - the whole merry crew - have never clawed back or apologised for their original outings. And meanwhile you have to search long and hard to see how the mighty have fallen into the outer rings of Frankston crazy ...

How many sleeps before Shaw is sent packing? Not too long if Frankston swings like a Poe pendulum at the end of the month ...

Well to complete the circle on this meditative Sunday, all that was needful for the pond was to find out where Pastor Danny stood on the matter of Halloween ...

There's no direct guidance but the pastor's website did reprint Should You Turn Your Light on at Halloween?

Then one year the Lord spoke this scripture to our family: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16, New King James Version). We realized that God wanted us to reach out to our neighbors on Halloween night. So we changed our MO! We bought good candy, not the cheap stuff—you know, the kind that has bubble gum in it that loses its flavor as soon as you put it in your mouth. We got chocolate bars! And we began to minister the love of God to those who were participating in Halloween. We handed out candy to our neighborhood kids, gave them tracts, and asked them if we could pray with them about anything. 
Halloween is a great time for us to get to know our neighbors. Streets are packed with parents and children. Paul said it this way: “When I am with those who are weak, I share their weakness, for I want to bring the weak to Christ. Yes, I try to find common ground with everyone, doing everything I can to save some. I do everything to spread the Good News and share in its blessings” (1 Corinthians 9:22–23, NLT).

Dear sweet long absent lord.

There's two matters arising here.

(a) At least in terms of their links, the angry Sydney Anglicans are even more fundie than fundie Pastor Danny;

(b) It seems that it's now the Xian thing to do to hand out cocaine sugar bombs to innocent kids with the craving and the hunger for junk in their veins. Why your average Xian these days is a junk dealer boasting how they hand out the purest high grade quality candy hits, not the cheap stuff cut with floor cleaner or icing sugar but the genuine undiluted stuff that hits the veins like a blast  ...

Well at least it helps keep Halloween's reputation as a time for weirdness to stalk the earth ...

And that just leaves room for a Tom Tomorrow cartoon, so we can cover a few more world fevers on this meditative Sunday, and more TT here.