In which the pond makes a scientific breakthrough to astonish the ages and then turns to brooding about genocide and tradition ...

(Above: the very spot where the pond's amazing scientific insight struck. And while the fallen apple might appear to be invisible, rest assured it's there).

Yesterday the pond managed to disprove the entirety of climate science thanks to a single event.

Where's your global warming now Mr Flannery and how soon before you apologise to the pond and the world?

By sheer chance, around the same time, the pond managed to refute Pythagoras (or perhaps Parmenides or Hesiod). We happened to be at a high point in Sydney's noble real estate, and when gazing off into the ether,  we happened to notice first the flatness of Sydney airport, and then even more remarkably, the flatness of the horizon line. So much for the world being round.

Oh Ikea, it's thanks to you flattening vast swathes of Sydney that great scientific advances can occur ...

Now credit where credit is due. Primarily these earth-shattering discoveries are due to the pond's Sherlockian capacity for astute scientific observation, but due tribute must be paid to the reptiles of Oz, an ongoing source of inspiration and sage scientific discussion.

Who can forget Chris Kenny's recent insight into a rain event?

Yes, the pond had to sacrifice many chilis and herbs and a computer key board, thanks to the study being flooded, to come to this remarkable conclusion - but at the very moment, as we type on a borrowed keyboard, the results are off to Nature Climate Change, before the pond heads off to the Vatican to join others in warming the socialist Marxist communist pinko pervert pope to stick to his original religion ...

None of it would have been possible without the Chairman ...

Global warming indeed! Thugy leaguers terrified and forced to leave the field, the city in chaos and confusion, and people blathering about extreme weather events, while children romp and play in the hail ...

Meanwhile, this being a meditative Sunday, how pitiful was it the way jolly Joe folded on a matter dear to his heart:

Jolly Joe knows what happened:

“In the dead of night on 24 April 1915, 250 Armenian political, religious, educational and intellectual leaders in Istanbul were arrested, deported to the interior of the country and murdered. On that same day, 5000 of the poorest Armenians in the city were rounded up and slaughtered on the streets and in their homes. This is now recognised as the beginning of an official attempt by the Turkish government to exterminate its Armenian population,” Mr Hockey, then in opposition, told parliament. 
“Over the next three years, the Turkish government ordered the deportation of the remaining Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire to concentration camps in the desert between Jerablus and Deir ez-Zor. 
“They were marched through the country on foot in a hard and cruel journey. Women and children were forced to walk over mountains and through deserts. These people were frequently stripped naked and abused. They were given insufficient food and water, and hundreds of thousands of Armenian people died along the way. 
“Around 1½ million Armenians were murdered during the Armenian genocide out of an estimated total Armenian population of just 2½ million people. 
“My own grandfather was himself a survivor of the genocide. He never knew the fate of his siblings and his friends as they were presumably led to their deaths. 
“Australian people deplore this sort of racism and barbarity. This country has prospered though the immigration of people from countless nations, including Armenia. I urge this parliament to recognise the Armenian genocide for what it was — not alleged, not supposed and not so-called. 
“It was the intentional attempted obliteration of an entire people. To refuse to acknowledge this genocide is to ensure that future Hitlers can capitalise on the world’s reticence in taking a stand.”

Australian people deplore ...?

Can we just rewind that, and get an official example of the Australian people deploring?

Last June, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop wrote a letter to the Australian Turkish Advocacy Alliance, reassuring them that: 
The Australian Government acknowledges the devastating effects which the tragic events at the end of the Ottoman Empire have had on later generations and on their identity, heritage and culture. We do not, however, recognise these events as ‘genocide’.  (100 years on, Australia's still out of step on the Armenian genocide).

Uh huh. What to say to that "insight"?

The foreign minister is wrong on two counts: the Armenian genocide doesn’t warrant quotation marks, and what happened is no more of a debate than the realities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. 
But Bishop is right on two points. First, Australia has misconceived the Turkish reaction as merely “sensitive”, when in fact their ferocious denial is a vital lie, one that goes to the very essence of the modern Turkish Republic.

Thanks Colin Tatz, but how easy it is to distort history, perhaps because the government has long learned the art of distorting science.

Fine words in 2008 from jolly Joe, silence in 2015 in a craven capitulation to the desire to bung on a do at Gallipoli and stay in good with the Turks, and no doubt future Hitlers will be able to capitalise on Australia's reticence to take a stand ...

Of course Australia has its own genocide, most successful in Tasmania, thanks in no small part to that useful fool George Augustus Robinson.

How say you Colin Tatz?

Australians have a strong proclivity not to remember, or to refuse to remember, the dark side of history, as with the eras of physical killings of Aborigines and, later, the forcible removal of their children. 

Indeed, but then Tatz places his hopes in Joe Hockey and in Gladys Berejeklian, also of Armenian descent, and in the case of jolly Joe,  look how that's turned out.

Let nothing like a genocide and historical truth get in the way of Australians celebrating a useless losing campaign of mass slaughter, designed and run by a bunch of inept Pommie generals ...

Speaking of which, the pond has just got the time to note that it seems that it's the tradition these days, by sports commentators on television networks, to speak of football on Anzac day as a tradition.

Which reminds the pond of how traditions are lost, or changed or subverted over time.

In no particular order, and let's not think just three clippings show how the argument once waxed and waned over the years, this in the Sydney Morning Herald, 24th April 1942, The Age 19th July 1954 and The Age 13th January 1976:

It seems it's the tradition to forget traditions, and the fierce arguments that once devolved around sport and other frivolous activities being held on Anzac Day, and now the tradition that emerged in recent years is the only tradition that matters ... and so it's on to events like Camp Gallipoli ...

Yet once upon a time traditional Australians would have deplored holding a sporting event on Anzac day and deplored the time that such a heresy would have become a tradition.

So it goes, but never mind, it's at times like these that the pond likes to remember that genocide is also biblical and traditional, and the long absent lord Herself can take credit for a most successful genocide, though it seems that She overlooked a couple of details:

But back to the science, and these sorts of outrageous slurs still doing the rounds:

Dammit, Peter Doherty, it cost the pond a keyboard to achieve its scientific breakthrough, and now you're saying we're out of synch and out of touch globally with what's happening, and so on and so forth here?

Well now the pond has to return the borrowed keyboard, and it's off to the Apple shop to feed the maw of the beast and its Singapore profits - providing a genuine genius can be found early on a Sunday - and where's the fairness in that, though we just have time to put up this little cartoon, found here.