In which the pond is relieved to learn, courtesy of the reptiles at the lizard Oz and Peter Craven, that the world is saved ...

(Above: an Easter thought from Pope for those who prefer the chocolate variety, and more Pope here).

Speaking of the environment, as the reptiles at the lizard Oz routinely do, the news is good. 

Yes, the story is all the go in denialist circles, and a stern refutation of the nonsense being peddled by the pinko pervert commie UN subverted black helicopter NASA mob in stories like 2015 Arctic sea ice maximum annual extent is lowest on record:

The main player in the wintertime maximum extent is the seasonal ice at the edges of the ice pack. This type of ice is thin and at the mercy of which direction the wind blows: warm winds from the south compact the ice northward and also bring heat that makes the ice melt, while cold winds from the north allow more sea ice to form and spread the ice edge southward. 
“Scientifically, the yearly maximum extent is not as interesting as the minimum. It is highly influenced by weather and we’re looking at the loss of thin, seasonal ice that is going to melt anyway in the summer and won’t become part of the permanent ice cover,” Meier said. “With the summertime minimum, when the extent decreases it’s because we’re losing the thick ice component, and that is a better indicator of warming temperatures.”

Typical commie blather and subterfuge. Enough of it you NASA pinko preverts.

What we need is an expert who can sort this mess out in a few words and what luck we have the reptiles at the lizard Oz ready to do the job:

Yes, it's stabilised, despite a record low maximum ice extent, and new research showing the melt is beginning days earlier ...

That's stability in la la Murdoch land, which perhaps explains why newspaper circulation figures are routinely stabilising in the same la la land.

But do go on, and please, make sure you cherry pick:

But lo and behold, not only is the sea ice and the world saved, there is good news and rejoicing in the West, as a new messiah is born and slouches towards Bethlehem ...

The favourite pet of the reptiles, the chosen one, is coming down under, and what rejoicing there is in lizard land:

Here for the hot links, and of course there's been a little petulant gnashing of teeth by small minds:

But the best line in that piece was saved up until last:

Yes, indeed, now we know where to go to, which is off to read The Millions Behind Bjorn Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus Centre US Think Tank.

But hark, there's dangerous reefs ahead, shoals and sharks, which threaten the peaceful progress of denialists through the world, as Tess Livingstone noted today in her piece about the pope for the reptiles:

Yes, bugger off you wretched bilbies, leave poor puss alone ... a cat's just gotta do what a cat's gotta do, and the last thing the world needs is news that the Vatican has joined in the alarmist hysteria, and is providing a base for the UN black helicopters as they mount a final push towards world government ...

Fancy calling climate denialism a sin! Why if that were the case every reptile at the lizard Oz, every last one of them would be off to hellfire for all eternity! With Graham Lloyd's once white soul encased in the dank black carbon specks that are a sure sign of the sinner's sins ... or so a Dominican nun once assured the pond ...

And speaking of hellfire, there's an Easter message by Peter Craven - how hard it is not to make a cruel Tamworth schoolyard jape about this jolly chum's name - which follows the last refuge of the theological scoundrel and trades off art to sell the Christian message. This sort of stuff:

There is a lot more of this kind of nonsense.

Craven proceeds through Thomas Cramer, T. S. Eliot, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Piero Della Francesca's The Resurrection, Titian's Resurrection, Raphael's The Transfiguration, C. S. Lewis and his lion, the irrefutable Bach's St Matthew Passion, pausing only to take a sideswipe at Dawkins.

Then it's on, at tedious, mind-boggling, desperate length, trading off and slogging through Dante's Divine Comedy, Beckett's Endame, the mysteries of the cross, the Hosanna moment, Matthew's Gospel, Craven editing Scripsi (oh yes, he was once a literary god too), and an old poet talking of Pilate as a good literary model, and the Jews, oh the difficult Jews, not that anyone's got anything against the Jews, and St Jerome and the King James translators and Handel, and the sorrows in Isaiah, and the perfidious Jews again, and Paul Celan's Fugue of Death, and Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran and Julie Bishop and Tanya Plibersek and Malcolm Turnbull and other pollies, and living in a post-Christian country, and the great De Profundis psalm, and poet David Jones, and poet Peter Levi, and William Faulkner's Light in August, and Patrick White's Riders in the Chariot, and so on and on and on, until finally the pond arrived at this:

Strange indeed. Get lost bilbies ... bunnies are the go, and anyone throwing a bottle at them will be severely punished ...

Actually wouldn't it have been more honest, in this orgy of trading off and appropriation of artists, to at least acknowledge that Pasolini was a weird mix of Marxist, atheist, unbeliever and nostalgist? Who happened to get bashed to death ostensibly while picking up a male prostitute, though over the years the tale of the murder has muddied a little (Greg Hunt it here).

The real mystery here is how a gay atheist Marxist could make a film Craven hails as a masterpiece, because it makes a nonsense of his trading off, using other artists and art works to make spurious claims for Christianity ...

It's the oldest and cheapest rhetorical trick in the book, and it gives a special status to art and artists as a mystical sub-division of Christianity and the church, and yet when contemplating artists in the flesh, it turns out that they're just as big a bunch of thieves and rogues as might be found in the general community ...

Craven's methodology is as meaningless, pretentious and corrupt as the pond claiming Beethoven's ninth symphony as a militant ode to joy at the way atheists can write mystical tracts at the drop of a hat and fool the true believers into a state of mystical exaltation .... when they might just as easily get the same result by taking a toke, or dropping an E tablet or swallowing a tab of LSD. Ah yes, in days gone by, the pond enjoyed mystical pleasures while contemplating art ...

And speaking of the left, and just to wrap things up this wet miserable Sydney Saturday, didn't Pryor do a nice tip of the hat to good old Marty? And more Pryor here.