In which the pond mounts a splendid Sunday blockbuster edition of rabid denialism and rampant Colonel Blimp jingoism ...

The pond was shocked, shocked it has to be said, at a few correspondents wondering about Gerard Henderson's heroic war service, and his willingness to cast aside all personal concerns, enlist and trip through the Agent Orange liberally distributed over the jungles of Vietnam.

If you Greg Hunt the lad here, he would have been 19 or thereabouts when conscription was introduced - the right age for the song - but sadly the wiki people seem to have lost his war record, and focussed instead on his academic achievements.

No doubt there might be the same sort of response to the tub-thumping Colonel Blimp patriotism of an Akker Dakker, but before we get on to the fat owl of the remove, the pond usually likes to mention something which has some relevance, interest and usefulness to a wider world, because there's surely three fifths of fuck all of use in the average rabid demagogue scribbling of the Murdoch reptiles ...

First up, there's a compelling story in The New Yorker, which happily at this minute is outside the paywall and can be read under the header Weather Underground The arrival of man-made earthquakes:

Until 2008, Oklahoma experienced an average of one to two earthquakes of 3.0 magnitude or greater each year. (Magnitude-3.0 earthquakes tend to be felt, while smaller earthquakes may be noticed only by scientific equipment or by people close to the epicenter.) In 2009, there were twenty. The next year, there were forty-two. In 2014, there were five hundred and eighty-five, nearly triple the rate of California. Including smaller earthquakes in the count, there were more than five thousand. This year, there has been an average of two earthquakes a day of magnitude 3.0 or greater. 
 William Ellsworth, a research geologist at the United States Geological Survey, told me, “We can say with virtual certainty that the increased seismicity in Oklahoma has to do with recent changes in the way that oil and gas are being produced.” Many of the larger earthquakes are caused by disposal wells, where the billions of barrels of brackish water brought up by drilling for oil and gas are pumped back into the ground. (Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking—in which chemically treated water is injected into the earth to fracture rocks in order to access oil and gas reserves—causes smaller earthquakes, almost always less than 3.0.) Disposal wells trigger earthquakes when they are dug too deep, near or into basement rock, or when the wells impinge on a fault line. Ellsworth said, “Scientifically, it’s really quite clear.”

The rest of the piece is about how many people, using the Tony Abbott mantra of greed and fear, have done their very best to make any discussion of the matter really quite unclear ...

And then came this, in Climate change: US agency says March hottest globally on record as Barack Obama urges action.

Rising temperatures across the planet have set more records as the US government announced the globe experienced its hottest month of March since record keeping began in 1880. 
The period of January to March was also the warmest on record, according to the monthly report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). 
The latest data, which takes into account global averages across land and sea surfaces, follows announcements from the same US government scientists that 2014 was the hottest year in modern history...

And this:

...Also of concern was the finding that Arctic sea ice was the lowest on record for March. "The average Arctic sea ice extent for March was 430,000 square miles (1,113,699 square kilometres, 7.2 per cent) below the 1981-2010 average," the report said. "This was the smallest March extent since records began in 1979."

So what do we cop from that brave warrior, the pompous, preening, hilariously posed Akker Dakker today?

Yes, it's a kind of Murdochian guarantee. The one thing you won't find Akker Dakker dealing with is the realities of distant, or even closer, lands ...

Instead it's all the fault of lefties...

What have you got? Well there's your answer ... lefties ...

Which is why a luddite thinks that "luddite" is a clever term of abuse, coming as it does from a luddite ...

Well that's all pretty much as might be expected - never let it be said Akker Dakker would expect anyone to keep an election promise - but correspondents are invited to note the confused thinking at work in this bit of the rabid outburst:

Yes, there's the high comedy.

Start off by slagging off feminists and GLBTers, in best Taliban fashion, and then round on Iran and deplore its attitude to women and its misogynistic attitudes and its treatment of women's rights ...

You'd have to be brain dead to think that the readership might not notice the absurdity of the coming and the going ... the mocking of feminists interested in women's rights and the alphabet of minority sexual groups, and the deploring of similar Iranian attitudes, but remember this is the Daily and/or Sunday Terror, where such crocks of shit are routinely paraded ...

As for Akker Dakker's heroic war record ... well you can Greg Hunt it here, but warning, it'll be a bit like a hunting for the snark ...

But you will find a reference to an episode of Media Watch, and the mendacious misuse and abuse of a quotation, and Akker Dakker's appearance there, noble, brave, climate denialist that he is, which might help explain why he continually rants at the ABC ... for daring to suggest the fat owl is in urgent need of a few feathers, in the same way the emperor could have benefitted from some decent threads ...

But wait, this is pond super dooper Sunday, with bonus rabid ratbag patriotism in abundance.

You see it's Miranda the Devine day and she's in top notch "first refuge of the scoundrel" form:

Now anyone with a passing awareness of history might recognise the Devine. She's the sort that used to go around passing out white feathers to men.

And so to the text:

Yes, there's something deeply nauseating about that sort of jingoist hysteria, that rabid denunciation of people who take an alternative view, and perhaps even might think war is not a picnic, nor a jolly jape amongst chums, or a reason for a jolly junket by a bunch of chums who win a ballot to celebrate the spilling of blood.

But there you have it. Try being an Aboriginal soldier who came back to partake of a share of the glory :

Upon their return to Australia, instead of recognition and grace, Aboriginal Diggers received ignorance and racism, were not eligible for returned servicemen land grants or even membership of Returned Services League (RSL) clubs, and sometimes even found that the government had taken their children away while they defended their country ...

Yes, there's knockdown glory for you ...

Of course things haven't gone entirely the way of the war mongers in recent days. The lamentable film, The Water Diviner, received the lack of interest it deserved, the Gallipoli mini-series screened on Nine sank without a trace (Nine CEO admits Gallipoli audiences are a 'disappointment'), and then came news that Stars pulled as networks get cold feet on Gallipoli (with forced video).

Which won't stop all the tub-thumping and the jingoism, usually on offer from Colonel Blimps that never did a day in the armed forces ... while at the same time cheering on a government that attempted to stiff soldiers being paid too little for the honour of dying for their country ...

But back to those lucky ballot winners, which it turns out isn't quite the same as winning the ballot to die a conscript in Vietnam, or winning the lucky dip with the first prize death ... and perhaps the second prize being drowned in Murdochian jingoism:

More the usual tosh about 'leets? More blather in the Akker Dakker mode about feminists? Do they all think like the Taliban at News Corp?

And what's this about a civil religion, as if the concept has some sort of meaning? What next to be elevated to a civic religion? Surfing?

Uncivil nausea, more likely ... but here you go, have a white feather courtesy of a war monger ...

And so to a poem, one of many arising from the great war that failed to end war, which repeats a lie first phrased by Horace, but he wasn't the last to say it, not when there are Devines around to do their own variation:

Amen to that ...

Lest we forget ...