In which the pond has a gay old time with Erica, Moorice and other fine feathered fowls ... yes, some reptiles had feathers

(Above: Rowe in memory of lost friends enjoying a holiday, eh GD? Here no envy, no envy here, but more glorious Rowe here).

The pond occasionally feels a tad bitter about its chosen path, heading down into the reptile swamp each day to recover a few glittering ironies ...

... while over in the United States, the likes of Jon Stewart can dance and clap hands with glee at the thought of the retirement gift Donald Trump has given him.

And look at the fun that Larry Wilmore has bringing on a bully to explain why the United States needs Chris Christie as President.

It's just not fair, the pond's all out of loons this size and it just wants its share (what about me, there's a little Dottie waiting at the counter of a corner shop, knocked to the ground, pushed around, yadda yadda, until Nollish nausea sets in on the Moving Pictures).

All the same, the pond will settle for the irony that Tony Abbott could become the PM at the helm when gay marriage is introduced into Australia.

It's not likely of course. Such is Abbott's homophobia that he'll fight it tooth and claw, but even the reptiles know that a recalcitrant, fearful Abbott is a story:

And naturally the Fairfaxians have made a meal of it:

And what better way to get proceedings started than by dragging a moth-eared old bigot out of the cupboard, and allow him to rabbit on at great, unendurable length about activist judges and blaming the media, as you can read if you have the strength to dive deep into the murk in The fight for same-sex marriage in Australia is far from over.

Actually the wording of the splash gave the game away:

An institution worth protecting because those deviant gays are going to ruin everything. The whiff of a prime carcass full of bigotry reminded the pond of that great internet meme:

If you actually get deep into the mire of Abetz hate, you'll find him praising Justice Antonin Scalia of being of sound mind, and so on and so forth, a reminder that the illiberals in charge of the poorly described Liberal party can sometimes match it with Donald Trump ...

Meanwhile, the reptiles are in top form, still brooding about the ABC, a never ending saga of navel gazing and fluff gathering.

And by golly there's some prime fluff to be found because Moorice isn't just amongst the world's greatest climate scientists, he knows everything about everything, and it was inevitable that, in the cause of duty, the pond would plunge into the heart of darkness once more.

Now for the faint-hearted, the weak-kneed and the lily-livered, the pond can summarise Moorice's arguments much more succinctly. Abolish the ABC and give the remnants to Chairman Rupert...

But if you're up to climbing Everest, you won't see it stated quite so baldly, so here we go, here we go:

The doddering old goose probably doesn't understand that people use Facebook to point friends and colleagues to sources of news, often to be found in the mainstream media, and that YouTube features clips from conventional media, frequently pointed to via Facebook.

In fact the senile old clown is probably more at home in a club sipping on a decent port, luxuriating in the creaking of leather chairs than getting down with 4chan, which admittedly is more reliable than the Murdochian empire, but onwards we must go, back to the future of Joe Lyons and 1978:

And you see, there's the rub. The rabid ideological posturing of the Murdochian reptiles receives resounding approval from Moorice:

It is this clash between the requirements of the ABC’s statutory obligations and the deep impulse of contemporary journalists to change the world that makes coexistence virtually unworkable. We should forget balancing left and right. It’s too late for that. In the same way management can no longer separate journalism from advocacy. The genie is out of the bottle and, for all practical purposes, impossible to put back. 

And so the propaganda machine can proceed on, unimpeded. And then?

A case can be argued that governments should be held to account and a public broadcaster, free from commercial constraints, is best placed to do it. This view is naive. While the ABC defiantly plays the “independent” card, the government of the day controls the purse strings. When the operating costs are north of $1 billion a year and growing, it is legitimate for any government to question whether taxpayers are getting value for money, particularly for output that is replicated broadly in the private market. It is a difficult case for the broadcaster to win.

Don't you love it? The output is replicated broadly in the private market ... because the Murdochians really do make a wonderful Four Corners and so does the FTA crowd ... and they just love to show documentaries too ...

But then you knew all this already, and the real import of Morry's scribblings. Stop funding the ABC and give the corpse to comrade Rupert.

There'll be a lot more of this in the next year, in a bid to cow and de-gut the ABC, even more than its current status as a quivering, wobbly jelly, but bring it on. If Abbott really did try to deliver the final blow to the ABC, instead of death by a thousand cuts, what an uproar there would be ...

Meanwhile, given Morry's celebration of the full to overflowing intertubes, the pond, as a lover of delicious ironies, couldn't help but also read today's stern reptile editorial, warning of the dangers of ... the intertubes ...

Much of it is just standard reptile gloating at the Fairfaxians, but the pond loved that bit about the vile claims and patent untruths being hurled around on blogs ...

Quoth the editorialist: And now, we're standing by to present you with Morry's latest insights into climate science ... with a stiff chaser of Bjorn Lomborg and Gary Johns and Dame Slap and  ...

Truth to tell, it's impossible for a legion of bloggers, Roman empire size, to have corrupted and ruined the truth in the way managed each day by Rupert's reptile minions ...

And so to a little redeeming sanity and David Pope, but first you need to cop a little visual reminder:

And as always, more Pope here: