How to ruin a business plan with a baseball bat ...

The pond prides itself on its capacity to pick losers, drop kicks, and fear-mongering old doddery codgers shouting at clouds ...

But, but, you say, anxious to recycle a billygoat joke for the umpteenth time, surely that's as easy as clicking on the reptiles, and so spending a nanosecond at the lizard Oz ...

And it's true it's that easy. No one seems to know where they come from in their hordes, or why they're there - it certainly can't be for the business model - but it's as easy as going to an old tailings heap and stumbling on an abundance of quartz, or perhaps a little iron pyrites - fool's gold was always a lure to the pond when mullocking around at Bowling Alley Point - and never a hint of anything metallic worth more than a ha'penny.

But that's the pond's lot in life, and lordy lordy, what a dud this Peter Baldwin is turning out to be. Can we score a mention of George Orwell in the first gobbet?

Yes, we did, we did, and along it, a truly noble gherkin who takes at face value that which Daesh asserts ...

Now others might have wondered about Daesh boasting about how it's already inserted thousands in Europe, given the few creating mayhem that have been discovered so far ...

But that would be to reckon without the mathematical and statistical skills of a Baldwin:

And so with a leap and a bound, we have Daesh's terrifying status confirmed, and 130,000 Daesh sympathisers in Europe this very year, most of military age, with extensive military training and combat experience.

Of course the pond can play this game with skill. Let us recall that in April 2012, Marie Le Pen scored some 6,421,426 votes in the French presidential election. Using a modest 10% guide, it would seem that there are therefore at least 642,142 crazed, fundamentalist, heavily armed French right wing extremists ready to do battle with Daesh fundamentalists ...

And they say the pond can't make figures dance like Bob Ellis ...

One can imagine Baldwin waking at 2 am in the grip of a serious fever, shouting the apocalypse has come ...

And sure enough he announces the apocalypse in the pages of the lizard Oz ...

Two Orwell sightings in a single piece! With bonus apocalyptic nightmare!

And what is the reality of the situation we must face? Well the obvious one is that doddery old codgers shouting at clouds will conjure up an invasion of Europe by Daesh in vast numbers, and the stupid reptiles of Oz will publish the ramblings and the fear-mongering, somehow thinking it will assist in calculations and in the debate ... simply because the old codger once served under Hawke and Keating way back when ...

Why if being a Labor minister was any sort of qualification, the pond might have to take the likes of Gary Johns seriously ...

But on a more serious level, this sort of alarmist carry-on gets in the way of anyone wanting to have a sensible discussion about fundamentalism, terrorism and what might be done about it ...

Thank the long absent lord the virus is confined to the reptiles and devoted reptile watchers ...

Do these dodderers have any idea of how they harm the Labor brand with their ramblings?

At a time when Bill is the Mr 15% man, because Turnbull has undercut him - and Abbott - on just about everything, this sort of hysterical fear-mongering does no good to anyone, and especially the reptiles' business plan.

The pond can already sense the clicks on the pond dropping like flies. Not Peter Baldwin again. Sheesh, may as well get out the baseball bat and give the head a right royal Balmain boy pounding as read it ...

What else? Well it seems Bruce Billson is about to swell the ranks of potential reptile contributors, while over at David Rowe's twitter account here, the infallible cartoonist takes a view on the rough Brough.

How soon will he be scribbling for the reptiles and helping with their business plan? (But who is that mysterious figure posing as a lamp shade?)