In which the pond indulges in a Maundy Thursday cornucopia of climate, god bothering, greenie bashing, and the fraudband rollout ... only to arrive at a nightmarish image of hell on computerised earth ...

(Above: and more Pope here).

Well there's a good Popish joke for the long weekend, as the pond celebrates this Maundy Thursday.

Pope is of course trading off on a variety of reports of this kind:

There's more here, but let's just settle for these lines:

"Australia, as a wealthy country with over 20 years' experience in detailed climate policy analysis, should be amongst those – including Mexico – who have met that deadline," Mr Connor said. 
While the timing of goal-setting was useful to help negotiations later in the year, it was more important that countries implemented promises that would keep global temperatures from rising 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, he said. 
"For Australia to match the US efforts, our post-2020 target would have to be around 30 per cent below 2000 levels by 2025," Mr Connor said. 
"This is well beyond our current minimum target of 5 per cent by 2020, but still not sufficient to be a fair contribution to the internationally agreed goal of limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees," he said. "For that, our 2025 target should be 40 per cent below 2000 levels."

What great comedy stylings.

Now there's the pond's definition of an optimist. Tony "climate change is crap" Abbott, with world famous climate scientist Moorice as his business advisor, is going to step up to the plate?

Why that's like herding meerkats ... maybe it's time for Abbott to discover why the Chinese are fearing a smog revolution.

But today is the day when god botherers suddenly come to life and start bothering everyone else, and sure enough, the Daily Terror, home to the regressive, is on hand to help out:

Part of our rich tapestry ... if ever there was an opening for a Monty Python skit.

And how about the very opening line? Anyone who suggests state schools should be secular, what with all the contending religions, a veritable tower of confused babble, is apparently a member of a devout group of naysayers ...

And what the fuck is sympathetic religious instruction? Is there room for sympathetic maths and sympathetic science and a sympathetic understanding of spelling?

Hmm, this bears closer inspection ...

No, no, not the picture of the author, the argument please, Daily Terror, so the pond can select its favourite line or argument from the piece:

Oh yes, that's rich pickings. Somehow imagining that the United States is in the grip of secularism as opposed to fundamentalist states in an orgy of gay bashing legislation ... that's exceedingly rich.

And what fun to endorse all the various forms of fruitcakery now doing the rounds, but what a pity Dickson left out Scientology in his offering of the various towers of babble entitled to blather at hapless school children ... Never mind, the federal government funds them all the same.

Envelope maestro please, and the pond nominates as its favourite line ...

With everything else teachers have to know and do, they are never going to be able to understand the Bible as well as, say, the middle-aged mum from the local church who's been reading scripture for decades ....

There you go, there's a line of impeccable stupidity, and then Dickson generously extends it to all the other babel blatherers, including the Qur'an ... cue fundamentalist middle-aged mums landing in schools to denounce the likes of Dickson as infidel heretics ...

Some might prefer the notion that kids will be denied ignorance of a key dimension of human life, as if children grow up in a vacuum and don't have access via their family to all kinds of ratbag fundamentalism ...

But of course it's the way of Ponzi scheme Christians that they need to be able to send out their middle-aged mums as proselytizers to keep the Ponzi scheme recruiting fresh talent ...

That said, let's be fair. The half hour a week the pond once spent in a state school being bothered by a god botherer - a corpulent Catholic priest who couldn't wait to get out of there and on to the golf course - did more to lead the pond to a secularist life than any angry atheist could have imagined or contrived. What fun it was to see the dullard priest reduced to apoplexy by cheeky intelligent students asking tricky questions of a mindless follower of one of the seven deadly sins ...

Meanwhile, the pond still can't get over the way that Newtown is now the centre of the known political universe. Get lost Barners, get lost Tamworth ...

Why there in the Daily Terror is yet another denunciation of the heretics:

 Uh huh. But is there a clue as to where Stephen Galilee is hailing from this Maundy Thursday, as we get ready to hail the man from Galilee?

He's from the NSW Minerals Council?

Why say no more.

And then over in the Oz we were offered more introspective brooding by yet another member of the ALP:

Ah Jamie, Jamie ... another member of the Labor party not prepared to give the toads, and the shearers, their due ...

This time the pond hied off to the Labor history timeline to cop this:

The Labor Party as a formal organisation had its beginnings in Queensland (initially called the Workers' Political Association) and New South Wales (initially the Labor Electoral League). Which came first depends upon what level of organisation or symbolism is regarded as more important. Often the symbolic birthplace of the party is regarded as the Queensland town of Barcaldine, where pastoral workers demonstrated in 1891, out of which protest came the Manifesto of the Queensland Labor Party in the following year. However, the Queensland branch of the Australian Labor Federation had already been organising to endorse parliamentary candidates in 1890, and the first local branch of the WPO was formed in Fortitude Valley in February 1891. Meanwhile, in 1890 the NSW Trades and Labor Council, through its parliamentary committee, was already drafting a constitution and rules for a new party to contest elections in 1891. The first local branch of the LEL is claimed for Balmain, in April 1891. In both colonies the new party was the creation of the trade union movement, especially of shearers, but with many other unions participating.

As for good old Ben, we look forward to a revival of his 'nationalise the banks' policy, to accompany all the blather about privatisation ...

But here's a thought. You ditch the Balmain and Newtown obsession, Jamie, and the concerns of the voters who indicated, by way of protest, that they were pissed off with the impending destruction of their suburb by a motorway, and half-baked, half-assed alternative schemes, as outlined in Labor backs half of WestConnex but not the middle, and with any luck, the voters in those suburbs will ditch their obsession with the ALP. Permanently ...

Finally the pond has been marvelling at the way whenever anybody proposes a reform, the proposal immediately produces a flurry of self-serving opposition.

So it is with the proposal that Australia follow New Zealand and allow importation of cars (Open Wide), which has seen all sorts of defenders of the status quo pop out of the woodwork.

The Daily Terror performed another classic in today's digital edition, heavily featuring the Labor party, as if they're the ones in government:

And the Terror followed it up with a tub thumping editorial:

And so in a singular flurry of chaotic conflation and confusion, the Terror manages to obscure the issue of superannuation reform, and how it could be made fairer and less rewarding for the rich.

Instead the Terror cunningly turned it into a discussion of politicians' entitlements ... at a time when ex-politicians are increasingly using their post-office position for devious ways to advance their personal interests and perks. So let's punish the politicians and forget about tapping the rich on the shoulder to play fair.

Well played Terror. That's the way to fool the western suburbs into thinking you have the slightest interest in a fair society ...

Now the pond knows it said "finally" a few pars ago, but you know how it is with ancient mariners clutching one of three, and the pond would just like to note a few other bits of news in relation to fraudband:

The cost of rolling out a fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) NBN may not be as egregious as that posited by the Coalition government and NBN Co, with Universty of Melbourne’s emeritus professor Rod Tucker saying that the latest costings for an all FTTP deployment leave out some crucial details. Speaking at the Conference on Optical Fiber Communications in Los Angeles last week, Professor Tucker said that the claim in the latest strategic review that FTTP deployment would cost $4300 per household is artificially inflated. 
“The figure of $4300 recently quoted by NBN Co for rolling out fibre to each premises is high because NBN Co has not implemented many of the cost-savings methods identified in the 2012 Corporate Plan and the 2013 Strategic Review,” Professor Tucker said. (and so on at Business Spectator here, may be paywall affected).

And then there was Simon Hackett here:

And then came this, whereby it seems the well-off are voting with their feet:

There were 12,691,000 internet subscribers in Australia at the end of December 2014. This is an increase of 2% from the end of December 2013. As at 31 December 2014, almost all (99%) of internet connections were broadband. The number of dial-up internet connections continued to decline. Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connections increased by 4% between December 2013 and December 2014 from 4.9 to 5.1 million connections. 
In percentage terms, fibre continues to be the fastest growing type of internet connection, increasing by 94% since the end of December 2013, to 324,000 connections at the end of December 2014. (ABS here).

Oh okay, it was only so the pond could end with this grotesque Knight cartoon, and more Knight here.

Damn you Mr Knight, the pond isn't going to get a wink of sleep this Easter with that image embedded in the noggin ...