In which the pond strays from fewal rabbits and Godwin's Law to rotten ice in Greenland, with a stop over in reptile la la land ...

(Above: and more excellent Popery here).

You'd have to be a mug punter to give much weight to the talk of a DD.

The interesting thing is that the conversation was leaked, and that with obvious purpose.

Is there a mug punter in the house?

Say no more.

Meanwhile, there was a feeble attempt by that master of distraction to get the pond back on to the subject of Godwin's Law, which inter alia was intended for this purpose, or so originator Godwin contended here:

By 1990, I had noticed, something similar had happened to the Nazi-comparison meme. Sure, there are obvious topics in which the comparison recurs. In discussions about guns and the Second Amendment, for example, gun-control advocates are periodically reminded that Hitler banned personal weapons. And birth-control debates are frequently marked by pro-lifers' insistence that abortionists are engaging in mass murder, worse than that of Nazi death camps. And in any newsgroup in which censorship is discussed, someone inevitably raises the specter of Nazi book-burning. 
But the Nazi-comparison meme popped up elsewhere as well - in general discussions of law in misc.legal, for example, or in the EFF conference on the Well. Stone libertarians were ready to label any government regulation as incipient Nazism. And, invariably, the comparisons trivialized the horror of the Holocaust and the social pathology of the Nazis. It was a trivialization I found both illogical (Michael Dukakis as a Nazi? Please!) and offensive (the millions of concentration-camp victims did not die to give some net.blowhard a handy trope).

Indeed. Bill Shorten as Goebbels? Please! If only he was ...

But that's what the master smirker to the press gallery wanted. Another distraction. Just like eating another onion. Now there's no crime in eating an onion - the pond does it every time it cuts one up for a curry, sneaking a slice or two.

The crime is to pretend that the skin has any nutritional value or pleasing aesthetic taste, as opposed to the macho, boofhead, strutting pose value a skin-eating, balding middle-aged man might treasure when confronting a mid-life crisis...

Meanwhile, the distractions didn't actually work.

Someone at Fairfax snapped and came up with an editorial yesterday:

What a silly header for the piece here (with forced video). Something must change? If he stops eating onion skin in public, will that be enough? How about he gives up on talk of Nazi megastructures? Well it''d be something

But we expect this sort of ranting at Fairfax. What continues to disturb the pond is the rumbling of the reptiles at the lizard Oz cafe as they sip on their lattes and get agitated in a Surry Hills way.

Oh okay, you'd expect that from Gra Gra, the Swiss bank account man, who on some deluded days still imagines he's on the other side of the fence to Abbott, but how about David Crowe?

Crowe's really on a roll and is starting to sound like a raging dissident leftie.

First there's the story about backflips and rebuffs:

Ah, there;' the flavour of the week, John Daley explaining to jolly Joe how it should be done.

But do go on Mr Crowe:

Uh huh. Confusion and chaos from Kaptain Kaos, making a play to replace Alan Arkin in the role of Captain Invincible:

What's also notable is the way this content is now making its way over to the Business Spectator:

Yes, yes, and so on, but that's another distraction in these troubled media times, because Mr Crowe had another story running in the lizard Oz, and it was equally good fun:

Bewildered? That wouldn't have happened in Dr Goebbels' time.

But do go on:

We can expect the most lacklustre, pretty dull, pretty routine budget in recent memory?

Hang on, hang on, didn't the Fin's front page this very day feature a story about a plunge towards the $80 billion deficit mark?

So $80 billion's dull and routine?

Yes there's nothing like a massive budget blow out to produce a lacklustre, sedate response. Move along, nothing to see here, except a massive blow out by professional liars who promised to bring the budget back to surplus with no actual cuts.

Naturally Crowe hared back to the grand days of Peter Costello, before returning to the present sad reality:

It's all got so disheartening and debilitating that the editorialist at Oz is in despair.

But there's an upside. Yesterday the movie of the day was Groundhog Day, not a bad comedy, if not the best, and today the editorialist references one of the pond's favourite movies:

Oh dear, someone's been channeling Niki Savva, but how piquant for the Oz editorialist to reference one of the pond's favourite movies.

No, not Star Wars, what do you think the pond is, some sort of onion skin eater?

It's Dog Day Afternoon, which is all about how Sonny pulls a bank heist to find the funds to finance wife Leon's sex reassignment surgery. Is this a sign that the poodle will hop on Senator Leyonhjelm's gay marriage bill?

The Oz editorial is outside the paywall so there's more on site for anyone who can be bothered, but isn't it grand that the hapless reptiles have now routinely resorted to movie references to describe the comedy of the fin de siècle regime.

They really are in a state of abject despair, and the pond desperately looked around for signs that there was still a barking mad conservative in the house.

Luckily, there were other distractions to hand, and the Oz editorialist restored the pond's faith in the reptiles' capacity for idiocy.

It's a first class example of a 'teach the controversy', or in this case 'print the controversy' bit of nonsense, in the matter of the reptiles continuing to wage a war involving feeble science:

It's outside the paywall if anyone can be bothered, but there's nothing new, just more of the same same, because we've been here many times before ...

You know, like the way the reptiles have an open mind about climate science, and the supposed adverse impacts on the world, if any.

Like the way the reptiles have an open mind about cigarette smoking, and its supposed health impacts, if any, and to help that argument along, they printed all sorts of fudged data about plain packaging.

No doubt if push comes to shove, the reptiles would have an open mind about creationism, evolution, women's rights, gay marriage and anything else that provided click bait for reactionaries ...

The funniest thing however is that headline. Like any decent blogger, or rabid Maoist, you can track the thinking by the use of terms of abuse, and "lapdog" is a classic.

Of course in the old days, it would have been something like the "running-dog lickspittle lackeys should swing from the gibbets hewn by the honest labour of the working classes", but the use of "lapdog" is an honourable attempt, albeit with an eastern suburbs/Surry Hills twist, what with lapdogs still loved in such regions ...

But enough of the lickspittle idlers, the kulak parasites, the Bonapartist pigs, the Trotskyite fascist hyenas, the lazybones stoner revanchists, the running dog lackeys, and the bourgeois class traitors of the proletariat - and if that doesn't score the pond a Godwin's medal of merit, what will? - because the fuss reminded the pond of that old Doonesbury cartoon:

Yes, and don't forget the Oz reptiles' wind farm controversy. The reptiles get it. Do you?

Meanwhile, the pond has been reading Gretel Ehrlich's Rotten Ice.

Sadly, it's inside the Harpers' paywall, but it's a first hand account of what's happening in Greenland by someone who has regularly visited remote parts of the country since 1997.

Of course, you might prefer the insights of world famous, internationally renowned climate scientist Andrew Bolt, derived from pouring a really decent glass of red, and listening to an opera while roaming through denialist sites on the web ... so let's not have any talk of major weather events or the folks in north Queensland (and a shout out to the pond's reader up there with the hope that all's as well as a category four will allow).

Your choice really. But at least the budget is sorted and fixed and more Rowe in a clumsy rotating 16:9 display here:

Oh dear. Here's a final treat.

It seems everyone is in despair, a deep deep funk. Why does this make the pond so pleased?

It's just more of the same, and sorry Ms Tingle, the pond finds it immensely funny and gratifying.

Why your very own paper frequently ran damning front pages, along with editorials urging a vote for Mr. Abbott ... back in those days - only a short while ago really - others were structurally unfit to govern and the economy was in trouble.

Remember the glory days?

Sic transit gloria.