In which the pond puts on the helmet and goes down into the mind and finds all the usual stuff about Islamophobia, climate science and gay whales ...

(Above: and more Matt Golding here).

Surely it has to be a first.

The Bolter is such a rabid ratbag that the pond just has to agree with Eric Abetz!

Think of that, and how unimaginable it might have been, but for Julie Bishop heading off to Iran to form an axis of intelligence weevils, with a Satanic state long demonised by the Murdochians.

Said Eric:

The commentator then presses Abetz on whether Bishop should have “stood up for western values” by refusing to cover her head. 
“There are other requirements and I think if it shows respect for their views, so be it,” Abetz answered. “When you are a visitor to somebody else’s country, then it’s like if the culture is to take off your shoes visiting somebody else’s home, then you should take off your shoes.”

Well yes, in Japan, the pond always takes off its shoes. Come to think of it, when in Amsterdam in the home of finicky friends, the pond also takes off its shoes.

And when - rarely, in the old days - in a Catholic church or a church of the more fundamental Protestant kind, like a Lutheran assembly in South Australia - a hat or a head scarf was merely being polite ... why one time the pond's mother even insisted a man's handkerchief was better than nothing, which explains why the pond also approves of Bishop's choice of head covering ...

Ah the good old Lutherhans. Almost worthy of the angry Sydney Anglicans:

(and more here).

Dear sweet long absent lord, even John Roskam had a clue, albeit of a Machiavellian kid:

“What happens in Iran is women are subjugated. The hijab is compulsory,” Roskam continues. “Iran is a totalitarian state. But if you are the foreign minister going to a totalitarian state, not wearing a hat, not wearing a hijab, it is unlikely to get the cooperation that we now need from Iran.” (The Graudian, here).

Well yes, that'd be the cooperation needed to take sides and join in a religious civil war, and rest assured, wearing a bikini in Vatican City's St Peter's is unlikely to get you the sort of co-operation you might be hoping for ...

You can either make the gesture, and be diplomatic, or you can be a rabid Bolter, which makes the pond eternally grateful that the Bolter is just a ratbag, demagogic rabble rouser for a tabloid newspaper, and a weekend ratings killer for an eternally loser television network ...

Meanwhile, the pond resolutely refuses to join in the carry-on about macho man indulging in a bit of adolescent skulling, or skolling or what have you (the pond was delighted to learn the word came from skaal, Danish for bowl, so henceforth it should be skaaling).

Sure, it's childish, but the child is always strong in this man. The pimpled uncertainties of priestly days still bubble along under the surface, and so the lad has no trouble matching the sort of preening alcoholism once displayed by Bob Hawke ...

But the real lesson to be learned is the ongoing tragedy of cartoonist Bill Leak.

Here's David Rowe turning the preening adolescent's comedy to good use (and more Rowe here):

And here's the ongoing tragedy of Bill Leak, which the reptiles keep insisting the world must see by putting Leak outside the paywall:

That's about as funny as being whacked across the chops by a large haddock, and the use of an unwatched second TV set to make some sort of point about groupthink is beyond tragic ... 

Apparently Leak hasn't caught up with the way we're now part of an axis of intelligence weevils joined at the hip in the religious civil war ...

Besides, there was a different kind of skolling on view in caricatured form by Simon Bosch:

That's a lot of liquid to skoll in a few seconds!

Yes, that turned up at Fairfax on the very day the reptiles at the lizard Oz offered up this as click bait:

Fancy that. What a completely unexpected surprise ...

Of course the Fairfaxians made an even bigger meal of it, and tried to call it an EXCLUSIVE, here:

Erwin Jackson, deputy chief executive of the Climate Institute and a long-time observer of climate negotiations, said the questions showed the international community saw Australia's commitments as "woefully inadequate" for it to do its fair share in meeting the agreed global target of keeping warming to within 2 degrees. 
"This is the first salvo. If the government doesn't come forward with a credible post-2020 target these kind of criticism will continue and only increase as other countries accelerate and deepen their own action," he said.

But the more interesting Fairfax story, which featured that Bosch cartoon, was Matt King's Shrinking Antarctic has us skating on thin ice:

Australia should not stand back and wait for other nations to do the work for us. Our Antarctic claim, frozen under the Antarctic Treaty, is to 44 per cent of the continent. That claim consists of about 30 metres of potential sea-level rise. Most of that sea level is safe for millennia, but perhaps not all of it. Indeed, we now know that two huge areas of potential instability sit, almost unstudied by anyone, within the Australian Antarctic Territory. 
Last month an Australian and US collaboration revealed a significant chunk of one of those regions can be added to West Antarctica as potentially vulnerable to collapse – a further four metres of sea-level rise now comes into play. Again, we don't know if this will occur, and if so, how fast. We know the hazard, we just do not know the degree of risk to us, our coastlines, our economy and our lifestyles. And for the same reasons, we don't know the risk to our regional neighbours, many of whom are not as well equipped to adapt as we are.

No worries Prof King. Let's just slash away at the scientific research budget, or maybe throw it at big pharma, and here have another beer, and make sure you skaal it ... the pond's told that the faster you drink, the more your eyes glaze and the quicker the old noggin wanders off into la la land with the adolescent leader ...

But there's not too much point getting depressed, not when the finest policy achievement of the current government is an ability to sink a beer in six seconds ... which is a lot faster than jolly Joe's guessing might see a surplus in the land ...

And so, as recommended by a correspondent, the pond is doing a Jon Stewart and pretty much leaving the reptiles alone this day.

My biggest objection to Fox News, I say, is not the scaremongering, it’s the way it’s reshaped the Republican party. It will misrepresent social and economic issues, and promote the more extreme elements of the party, politicians such as Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, in a way that is hugely detrimental to American politics. (For the record, Rupert Murdoch disagrees, and last year claimed that Fox News “absolutely saved” the Republican party.) “Watching these channels all day is incredibly depressing,” says Stewart. “I live in a constant state of depression. I think of us as turd miners. I put on my helmet, I go and mine turds, hopefully I don’t get turd lung disease.” (Graudian here).

Indeed. This very day there are plenty of opportunities to get turd lung disease.

Why there's that lesser Bolter, the Bleagh:

Now the actual splash makes no sense, but that's to assume that Bleagh should actually make some kind of sense. The truth is, the Bleagh, a wannabe Bolter of the minor league, holds some kind of grudge, some chip on the shoulder, and finds this sort of thing infinitely witty:

Poor trumps rich. Black trumps white. Female trumps male. 
Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum neatly described this simple two-stage process last week: “1. Identify the bearer of privilege. 2. Hold the privilege-bearer responsible.” 
In practice, of course, it can get a little complicated playing leftist grievance poker, although it’s intriguing to consider that somewhere out there is a blind African quadruple amputee AIDS-afflicted lesbian who can win any argument just by walking into the room. You know, if she could walk.

Yes, that's what still passes for comedy in little Timmie land, gay whales and all that, but all it offers the pond is a chance to contract turd lung disease.

And there was the Bolter at it again:

Ah the old "de facto tax" riff. We might as well get outraged by being charged a fee by the Heart Foundation for putting a tick on foods that are less damaging than others, though still damaging enough, and the faux patriotism of Australian made, which allows the likes of Coles to proclaim its Australian content ... except when it isn't ...

The Bolter is in fact using, and abusing and misrepresenting and ignoring the findings of an ABC fact check. It might be simpler to read the original report here ... while the pond might pose a counter-question:

Why is there absolutely no protest from the Bolters around the land against genuine - not de facto - tax exemptions and tax subsidies that see all sorts of money pour into all sorts of churches, from scientology through to fundamentalist Islamic and Christian, and with a bonus set of chaplains in schools?

Where was the Bolter then?

Oh right, here he was:

What a half-baked load of equivocating tosh.

But that's what you get when you're confronted by a man deeply mired in Islamophobia, while still dog-whistling to his conservative Christian constituency. Lots of chances to catch turd lung disease ...

(Below: more New Yorker cartoons here, Greg Hunt the cat here).