In which, after some distractions offered by the poodle and others, the pond gets down to some real theological meat and potatoes thanks to Miranda the Devine ...

Before they disappear into the digital trash bin of the full to overflowing intertubes, the pond would just like to commemorate a few headlines:

Yes, you won't find the reptiles running that sort of headline every day in the lizard Oz.

Humiliating failure? Oh sure, it's an understatement, and by today the reptiles had settled down to bemoaning the poor poodle's fate and blaming everyone else apart from the truly deserving ... the unhouse-trained, relentlessly yappy poodle himself ...

And this in the Fin should be celebrated:

It's not every day that we'll get to see a poodle charge like a bull at the gate, and reel back nonplussed at the gate's unseemly desire to stay shut ...

So much for collegial and consultative processes designed to beguile and seduce the herd of unrepresentative swill.

And there were other oddities yesterday, surely the oddest being this one:

Indeed, indeed and to be sure Taoiseach, at Fairfax here, with forced video, and if only the pond hadn't toured Ireland in search of Tipperary roots and copped a full dose of the Irish blarney ...

We all know he's a git, but the real rub for the gittishness is coming up soon, per the reptiles:

Yep, having dismally floundered and failed and back flipped into budget chaos and confusion last time round, we're back with the bullying bluster again ...

The Fairfaxians excelled themselves with this nonsense here:

The PM's bullish? Is that code for bullshit? And is bullshit code for sounding like Wayne Swan? Does he really think he'll be around in five years?

Look at poor old jolly Joe. What a pitiful, despondent figure ...

And you can imagine the log the pond fell off when it caught this splash:

Why they've turned into the Labor party.

The pond's prediction? More Rowe cartoons, and more Rowe here:

Truly a dog's breakfast of meatydata.

But look, all this is just the daily comedy of life.

The pond always insists on real meat, tough thinking, from the most hardened ideological warriors.

So it was delighted that this came up in the Terror:

Yes, it's more of the Terror's photoshop at work.

Forget Luke Foley.

Who'd have thought they hated koalas, and wanted the last koala in NSW strung up at the nearest tree?

Join the Terror in its "kill a koala a day" campaign? Koalas are just gum-leaf inebriated pisspots always pissing on tourists and the sooner we're rid of them the better?

Let's not even argue about the spelling of "looney", a subject close to the loony pond's heart, or the American tendency shown by the Terror, borrowing as they do from Bugs and friends:

The Terror has been at its best in recent days - the pond was indebted to Junkee for a story by little Timmy Bleagh about some idle abuse in a piece by that angry old petrol-head man who shouts at clouds, as you can see in The Daily Telegraph Let A Truly Cringeworthy Error Slip into A Column:

And when the pond last checked this morning, it was still there in the online edition:

But Junkee's mistake was to think it was a cringeworthy error.

It has all the signs of a deliberate Bleeaghism, because he'd think it was fucking funny. Which is why the pond furkan dares the Terror to prove it was an error ...

Enough already. You see, up in the top left hand corner of the Terror's front page came a hint of the real meat and potatoes for today, from that "string a greenie from the nearest lamp post" woman, Miranda the Devine.

Today the Devine explains yet again how jihadists and barking mad Islamic fundamentalists are all the fault of atheism and militant atheists.

Here's the beguiling splash:

Yes, she does, truly she does say that. Apparently Atheists are taught to believe in nothing while deep thinking religionistas like the Devine are taught to believe in climate denialism and Lord Monckton.

Take it away fundamentalist Catholic Devine, bleat in our ears, the pond always yearns for deep, engaging intellectual discourse:

Oh a simple minded digital 1 and 0 binary good and evil cartoon to begin with. Love and hate Robert Mitchum style:

Never mind, let's get into the meat and potatoes because it seems that the Devine feels aggrieved and offended:

Now in all that, the thing that stuck in the mind, apart from the Devine's simpleton capacity for stupidity, was the use of "bien pensants".

In the old days, that used to mean, pace the Oxford here,  a person conventional or orthodox in attitude, or if you will, a conventional and orthodox person.

These days it's routinely trotted out as a term of abuse by really stupid members of the right wing commentariat, who seem to think that atheism is now the conventional and orthodox way of the world.

In taking that position, they're confessing to the failure of orthodox, conventional religion, and yet they seek to shift the blame for that failure on to atheists, with the wide-ranging claim that it's all the fault of fundamentalist, unhinged, militant atheists.

You can't get much sillier than that, but naturally the Devine goes one step further, linking militant atheism to lefties to explain how Islamic fundamentalism scores its recruits:

It goes without saying that the pond rarely thinks of Michael Carr-Gregg, but whenever his name is mentioned, the pond is reminded of the old saying to beware psychologists, psychiatrists, priests, the police, prison wardens, and any other functionary whose job description starts with a "P".

Anyone who roams around offering juice to the Devine so she can blather about the "soul", all spotty and pock marked and blackened with the carbon of sin (yes that's how Catholic priests used to talk and probably still do) should be drummed out of the profession (oh dear that starts with a "P" too).

The trouble of course for fundamentalist Catholics like the Devine is that the process of becoming a religious fundamentalist of any stripe is unnervingly close to the bone.

That fanaticism helps explain the sort of behaviour displayed by Catholics in the Inquisition and during the conquest of South America (and yes secular fanaticism of the Stalinist kind is equally at home in this world - since Stalin adopted all the iconography and tricks of conventional religion, as did Mao and the rest of the dictator pack).

Devine is so stupid that she sees no apparent contradiction in scribbling that all atheism could provide was despair, while in the very next sentence blathering on about educated, happy uncomprehending adult atheists ...

Say what? Whence does this happiness come from, if they were taught to believe in nothing, thereby failing to enjoy life, love, food, art, sex and other wonders of the world?

There's none so blind as those who wilfully refuse to see, but thanks to the Devine a little more rabid ignorance, mixed with a generous dose of paranoia, fear and bigotry has made its way into the world.

Of course she could have more profitably written about other headlines this day. Like this one:

But when you're a fanatic long ago embarked on a fundamentalist zealot's cause, that gets tricky.

Update: thanks to a reader, the pond hared off to some blithering idiocy about blood moons and solar eclipses and the usual malarkey about the end of the world being nigh, though luckily without a comet in sight for the moment. It's under the header Coming Eclipse seen as 'Judgment' Middle East in Prophecy and it's not far removed from the defensive paranoid mindset of the Devine ... waiter, some more of the double strength kool aid ...

Never mind, time for a real Pope and thank the long absent lord, the real Pope has decided to change the topic, and more real Pope, not Faux Francis Pope, here.

Hang a greenie from the nearest lamp post, Mr Pope, and dream of Lord Monckton, and all will be well in the world. If you believe in Santa Claus, fairies, the turning of wafers and wine into flesh and blood for cannibalistic consumption, you can surely believe that: