Speaking of Bret Stephens and the Apocalypse, watch out, World War III is coming to a screen near you ...

But enough of Pope and domestic jokes - anyway you can always find more excellent Popery here - because in a bid to establish its thought leadership potential, the pond is honoured to honour the reptiles reprinting an American celebrity ...

Now it's true that this is a tad re-heated, a leftover from the WSJ which requires a little microwaving in the magic science oven to restore its freshness ...

Yes, you can find the three day old shop soiled original fodder at the WSJ here (paywall, needs to be googled), but let us attend to the man whom, his wiki here assures us, was voted a Young Global Leader back in 2005!

Talk about thought leadership ...

Indeed, indeed, apocalyptic language is no doubt reprehensible, and the human propensity for breeding like rabbits will no doubt produce great good in the world in due course, and when ten billion live on the planet, they can all go live in Texas ...

Now it takes a particular skill to interweave climate science, a religion without God, bell-bottoms, China's one-child policy, and mistakes on a grand scale, but of course it wouldn't be a pond entry if there wasn't also irony on a grand scale ...

So here it comes. It turns out that Bret Stephens quite recently authored an impressive tome ... (how the pond loves to use such a pretentious word) ...

Note well "The Coming Global Disorder"!

The subject is the debate surrounding the role of the United States as the world's policeman (policewomen can tend to domestic duties), and inter alia, in the introduction, diligent readers will come across this:

This book takes a side in this debate. No great power can treat foreign policy as a spectator sport and hope to remain a great power. A world in which the leading liberal-democratic nation does not assume its role as world policeman will become a world in which dictatorships contend, or unite, to fill the breach. Americans seeking a return to an isolationist garden of Eden - alone and undisturbed in the world, knowing neither good nor evil - will soon find themselves living within shooting range of global pandemonium. It would be a world very much like the 1930s, another decade in which economic turmoil, war weariness, Western self-doubt, American self-involvement, and the rise of ambitious dictatorships combined to produce the catastrophe of World War II ...

Bring on World War III, not that we're into apocalyptic thinking, or lucrative book contracts or lavish conferences ...

The pond particularly loved - since it had some bearing on apocalyptic thinking - one comment left at the WSJ:

Congratulations Mr Stevens You just nailed the government Official religion where there is no wall between Church and state. The SPECIAL Religion for the "Special' people. Its called the Secular Progressive Evolutionary Cult of Intolerant Atheistic Liberals. They reject God and worship everything else but. They lack humility and shame. They pursecute all who disagree and aim to make government their tool to enforce the edicts of their religion. 
 "To wit, what explains the fatal attraction of the secular mind to the politics of impending apocalypse?" 
Their inability to comprehend their own end and to realize that God is eternal and his judgment comes ...

Indeed, a tad cruel not to get his name right, but at least the reader shared with Stephens the right kind of coming apocalypse ...

Now followers of the American Republican apocalypse - which permits Chairman Rupert to celebrate a creationist as his number one pick to be President of the United States - will already have come across Bret Stephens as a classic example of a bear with very little brain, but an astute capacity to follow the designated talking points - Mediaite features a clip here of him turning up to argue about climate science with Bill Maher .

He is a classic reptile confusionist, citing Bjorn Lomborg and the rest of the pack, and doing his very best to seed doubt and fear, without the slightest evidence that he's done more than skim the surface of denialist texts and then woven them into assorted diatribes about woolly liberal Marxists being to blame for climate science ...

There is a nice moment when Maher points out that Galileo wasn't so much dissenting from science, as he was from religion, when Galileo endorsed the heliocentric view that had popped up over the centuries, only to be crushed by theologians and the church.

Stephens didn't even pause mid-sentence to marvel at the enormous stupidity of his logic ... though it's a favourite meme of climate science denialists that all they're doing is following in the footsteps of Galileo

But this is also a warning to the pond. If we began to follow American loons of the Stephens kind, there would be absolutely no space left for parochial players of the Paul 'the magic water man' Sheehan and Dame Groan kind ...

We're in the big league ...

Uh huh. Creationist Claims Richard Dawkins Isn't a "Real" Scientist and Should Stop Criticizing Dr. Ben Carson ...

This is the top game, where a magazine might fall into the hands of a leading climate denialist, who might then tweet to reassure the punters, though some punters didn't sound reassured ...

Oh dear, as if Chairman Rupert would dare impose an editorial line, seeing how magically and mysteriously the WSJ and the reptiles of Oz are peas in a pod ...

Maybe, after all this talk of the apocalypse and Murdochian conspiracies, it's time to get back to local waters, to the yarns and the cartoons the pond loves so well, and more Moir here ...