In which, it being Friday, the pond spends some light-headed time with Barners, Rachel Weisser, and the whore of Babylon ...

It turns out that Barners' nightmare is bobbing up everywhere:

                                   

But Barners, how did you manage to get Crikey to conflate Yanis Varoufakis with your nemesis, the Professor Moriarty of the north west slopes and plains, the wicked Windsor?

Did you get your agents to do the switch? Though there is a certain family resemblance. Check his Facebook page, and you'll see:

 

Yes, yes, the pond can see it, in a sort of cold-hearted German expressionist way, where screwing the peasants to keep the bankers of Bavaria in potato and sausage is a way of life ...

Good old Barners has been generating lots of news, including indirectly the splendid sight of Rebecca Weisser, reptilian opinion editor at the lizard Oz, once again sounding like a prize twit and being done like a dinner as she celebrated the Shenhua mine on The Drum.

You can have that pleasure here - only the sturdy of heart and strong of spirit should click - and it happened when they wheeled in Fiona Simson, who actually knew what she was talking about, and who asked the gotcha question as to whether Weisser had actually been to Breeza or had the first clue what she was talking about. (Yes, the pond has been to Breeza, Caroona, Curlewis and Werris Creek and has a real soft spot for the old railway station in that run-down old coal town).

Weisser eventually had to claim she was from Armidale, seemingly unaware that the town is notorious as the home of dropkick academics and losers (relax, the pond is being as frivolous as Weisser), while waving her hands in the air and suggesting she'd been to Gunnedah or thereabouts.

Weisser had a certain eyes-closed hand-waving style evoking the way that actual facts, or awareness of reality, meant little to her, not when it came to following the party line:

The pond gave every round to Simson:

Yes, yes, the pond knows that on the NSW Farmers' site she spells her name Simson, and is an actual director of a mixed farming enterprise near Premer on the actual Liverpool Plains, not dwelling amongst the apples and academics on the New England tablelands, but there's your modern ABC at work. Invite a guest on and then mis-spell their name right at the start of the interview.

As clueless as Weisser, and no doubt explaining why they invite her on regularly.

Now the pond has no excuse for watching The Drum. It was meal time, and the box was on, and it just happened to be on the goggle box, and the pond goggled, which was, it will be recalled, the original form for googling.

And then Barners provided Pope with another rural jape:

Tits on a bull! Fair dinkum, the pond hasn't thought of that saying in yonks, and instantly was swept back to a time when the sexists of Tamworth thought it a marvellously witty saying - why Barners is probably still chortling in the dunny (and you can get more Pope here).

And look Rowe had balls dangling in the Breeza (and more Rowe here):

Children, avert your eyes from the instrument on the dash.

But there you go Barners, why don't you grow a pair, resign, make a stand, show some guts, turn up on Q and A, do something man, anything, instead of wittering on about the wickedness of the mine on RN.

Talk about a dropkick and a loser. You're sounding like someone from Armidale (disclaimer - the pond has lived in Armidale).

Talk about distraction. All this before the pond got anywhere near the reptiles of Oz, or paused to consider that mushroom who was allowed out of the dark to blather about mushrooms.

But while all the tabloid reptiles are going wild about Bill - and the pond can give the Billistas in the family a hard time - the pond's duty is to seek out the eccentric, the strange, the wonderful and the weird, as any decent reptile whisperer must do, and naturally this splash in lizard land caught the pond's eye, and by luck and coincidence, it was also about coal, coal, coal for Australia and the wooorrrrrlllld:

Indeed, indeed. Of course in the pond's eye, it's un-Christian to hitch your wagon to the barking mad IPA, and do their bidding, or to scribble columns for the Murdochian reptiles, and sometimes wishes, in a melancholy way, that there was a hell where all such sinners might writhe for all eternity ...

But even more un-Christian is to go around labelling this, that and the other as un-Christian and attribute to Christ a view on coal which he never, ever expressed, while dressing up an interest and a concern for the poor as a pro-coal view.

But what if Christ's plan is to scourge the world and humanity with climate change? What happens to the poor then? (and never mind the crustaceans and their shells).

You can only get into this sort of illogical knot if you're an alleged Christian as silly as James Grant.

Now we all know that Pope Francis is un-Christian. His recent encyclical established that:

There is an urgent need to develop policies so that, in the next few years, the emission of carbon dioxide and other highly polluting gases can be drastically reduced - for example, substituting for fossil fuels and developing sources of renewable energy. Worldwide there is minimal access to clean and renewable energy. There is still a need to develop adequate storage technologies. We know that technology based on the use of highly-polluting fossil fuels - especially coal, but also oil and, to a lesser degree, gas - needs to be progressively replaced without delay. Until greater progress is made in developing widely accessible sources of renewable energy, it is legitimate to choose the lesser of two evils or to find short-term solutions. But the international community has still not reached adequate agreements about the responsibility for paying the costs of this energy transition.

But then any thinking person knew that already, because he's not a Christian, he's a Catholic, and the head of a church notoriously dubbed the whore of Babylon by scholars such as Martin Luther.

Ah, the good old days of the Sunni-Shia split, and as good a scientific qualification as any for blathering on about the wonders of coal, and never you mind the climate science.

But the pond has been doing a tease. The onerous, burdensome un-Christian duty is to hand, and we must look at the writing of the heretic Grant, so fierce in his opposition to the Papists working hand in glove with the UN to introduce a world government and have the Catholic church appointed the preferred world religion (now that'd sort out declining priest numbers as they head off to do the IPA's work).

So let us begin, noting the particularly shameless way that Grant references Francis right at the start, without giving any indication whatsoever that he actually read that notorious encyclical or paid any attention to its contents:

Here's another home truth. Read the bloody encyclical, and stop mouthing the IPA ideological line, you Father Coughlin imitator, you ...

But do go on, because the pond loves to test the limits of any stray reader, to see if they're suitable for playing football for NSW. Can they do the hard yards and take it up the middle to the toads? Are they hearty sexist Tamworth lads?

Possibly not, but do go on ...

So where's the common good if the affluent nations of the world wreck the planet's climate? And developing countries join them in the job?

Completely clueless, and it should go without saying, deeply immoral, but here's your Catholic at work at the IPA, while having the cheek to talk about immorality, as if the immorality of his work and his logic cannot be understated:

Yep, it's coal, coal, coal for Orztralia and the wooorrrrld, and it's the Christian thing to do, so it's farewell the Liverpool plains and its water table, and hello the Hunter Valley's mountains of the moon ...

And the Catholic church wonders why its numbers are falling in Australia ....

Come on Barners, come on, they're all laughing at the way you've been crutched ...

As for the immoral wind emanating from Grant, it reminded the pond of the wind - or is that hot air -which turned up in a couple of Tandberg cartoons, and more Tandberg here: