In which the pond deplores the politics of envy and, inspired by Julie Bishop, tries to work out the most dire threat to civilisation at this time ...

(And more New Yorker cartoons here).

Once again the dastardly Fairfaxians are out and about preaching the politics of envy. Sometimes the pond thinks they're as bad as the Labor party:

Shocking, outrageous stuff.

No, not the hapless millionaires, who after all just want to run wild and free, in a benign world free of onerous tax, just like those tax-free bandits making out like lords on 18k a year ...

Look how they struggle and suffer:

There's more here if you like, but the pond is outraged that this sort of politics of envy should stalk the land, when the Bolter, courtesy of Peter Costello, has explained that there's not enough rich people to make a difference:

Yes, high income earners aren't the problem. Who cares if a few millionaires run wild and free, and what's wrong with envying them and their splendid accounting advice anyway?

Let them and the multinationals be, let them peacefully go about their business. And let the bulk of the population suffer instead ... It's called the dinkum Aussie idea of a fair go, because dinkums never envy, except in an aspirational way ...

And so to the problem of having a long and useless memory.

It seems only a day or so ago in the pond's mind that we were being warned about Iran and the axis of weevils, and before you know it, there was Julie Bishop heading off to have high level chats with the highest weevils.

It wasn't so long ago that North Korea, armed and posturing with nukes, was deemed a high risk. Why even the possibility of Pakistan's nukes falling into the hands of rabid ratbags was reckoned to be a real risk ...

But as Julie Bishop noted, there's no point in holding on to old, out-dated fears, when fresh newly minted fears are always turning up over the horizon, and so Islamic fundamentalists are now all the go.

Sure, those preaching the politics of this kind of fear can usually be found preaching against the politics of climate alarmism ...because you only need so many fears to do the rounds at any one time, and anyway, the pond has it on good advice that Bjorn Lomborg is going to sort that climate panic, and so cheaply too ...

So it's fallen to a couple of hundred thousand to pose a threat to the 7,3 billion or so on the planet (world population clock it here), so gangrenous, corrupt and festering are the masses that they're ripe for picking, and being turned into Islamic fundies and signed up to a world caliphate.

Now the pond has taken the top figure of 200k for the Daesh desperadoes, as per The Independent here, just to add gravity to the world's plight.

The pond has already noted Julie Bishop's astute fear-mongering on the desperation situation, which was naturally taken up by little Sir Echo:

Who knows how North Korean might respond, in a fit of pique at being so slighted?

So having already taken a shot at Ms Bishop's fear-mongering, you can imagine the pond's alarm at discovering that the reptiles of Oz have dared to publish a piece that dares to suggest that Julie Bishop might have been exaggerating just a tad.

This is the sort of heresy that verges on the treasonous:

How outrageous to note the conventional thinking of Daesh, which is to build a caliphate, which is to say a government, which is to say to build a state. Now sure the ambition might be to build a single one-world theocratic government to last a thousand years, but isn't that the aim of any decent "-ism"?

And there's an irony in Dibb mentioning a nuclear winter, seeing 

Shocking stuff. But what luck, thanks to a humble four mill to Bjorn Lomorg, that climate change doesn't constitute a palpable threat to world order.

Seeing how it's raining in Sydney right at the moment, is there a dumb one in the house?

Which reminds the pond of the real, dire and deepest threat to civilisation. The House of Murdoch ...