Forget about the weather, it's hard to pick the biggest threat ... the ABC, the Islamics or ASIO ...

It takes an exceptional strength not to mention climate change whenever strange weather patterns and record winds are sighted, but the reptiles are made of stern stuff and did their very best:

Well played reptiles, though the commentary section brought out the usual riff-raff of devoted denialist readers, which may be googled at leisure.

Of course the pond couldn't comment on such matters - enjoy your current, early for the season, heatwave crow eaters - but does suggest shifting the discussion to Miami and Elizabeth Kolbert's excellent report in the latest issue of The New Yorker, The Siege of Miami - currently outside the paywall.

Miami in recent years has been sinking into the water, or the water is bubbling up over it - take your pick - and a lot of people - most notably Republican - are in denial about it.

Kolbert has some telling anecdotes, and a bit of history:

Marco Rubio, Florida’s junior senator, who has been running third in Republican primary polls, grew up not far from Shorecrest, in West Miami, which sounds like it’s a neighborhood but is actually its own city. For several years, he served in Florida’s House of Representatives, and his district included Miami’s flood-vulnerable airport. Appearing this past spring on “Face the Nation,” Rubio was asked to explain a statement he had made about climate change. He offered the following: “What I said is, humans are not responsible for climate change in the way some of these people out there are trying to make us believe, for the following reason: I believe that climate is changing because there’s never been a moment where the climate is not changing.” 
Around the same time, it was revealed that aides to Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, also a Republican, had instructed state workers not to discuss climate change, or even to use the term. The Scott administration, according to the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, also tried to ban talk of sea-level rise; state employees were supposed to speak, instead, of “nuisance flooding.” Scott denied having imposed any such Orwellian restrictions, but I met several people who told me they’d bumped up against them. One was Hammer, who, a few years ago, worked on a report to the state about threats to Florida’s transportation system. She said that she was instructed to remove all climate-change references from it. “In some places, it was impossible,” she recalled. “Like when we talked about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has 'climate change' in the title."

And then there's the present:

To cope with its recurrent flooding, Miami Beach has already spent something like a hundred million dollars. It is planning on spending several hundred million more. Such efforts are, in Wanless’s view, so much money down the drain. Sooner or later—and probably sooner—the city will have too much water to deal with. Even before that happens, Wanless believes, insurers will stop selling policies on the luxury condos that line Biscayne Bay. Banks will stop writing mortgages. 
“If we don’t plan for this,” he told me, once we were in the car again, driving toward the Fontainebleau hotel, “these are the new Okies.” I tried to imagine Ma and Pa Joad heading north, their golf bags and espresso machine strapped to the Range Rover.

Now there's an image ... the new Okies ...

And so on. Have a read, because as usual, the pond must tend to the needs of the hysterical reptiles, and this day they are seriously besieged, not by water and flooding, but by Islamics, the ABC and ASIO, and it's hard to work out which is the direst threat.

All seem life-threatening, as the Islamic bashing so beloved of the reptiles has come under a teensy weeny bit of attack.

Where would this leave the likes of the rabid Donnelly going on and on today for the Terrorists about things he has gone on about for yonks, but is now outside the tent, with his beloved crusader, wall-punching master gone?

And then there was the ABC.

Talk about a threat to the business plan:

Indeed, indeed. The pond bitterly regrets the ABC's move in to radio, and television. If the corporation had only stuck with courier pigeons to reach the nation, then the pond's grandfather's scheme to supply the birds would have worked out, and we would have been filthy rich.

This new technology. How dare they. Restrict the ABC to the speed of the pond's Optus connection and all will be well. Dial up on a good day ...

Alas, even cardigan wearers aren't as fuckwitted as the reptiles when it comes to a little competition in the new world. Harden the fuck up, reptiles ... a new world has dawned, you've never got it, and it seems you never will ...

Lordy lordy, they's got the fear ...

Yes, even before she turns up to work, they's got the jitters and the desire to jibber jabber ...

No wonder there's ongoing talk of the need for an insurgency ...

But who'd have guessed that the real problem this day was ASIO's love for teh Islamics, and the dire threat it posed to the legacy of the burnished insurgent?

It led the pond to an agonising choice ...

Gorge on the delicious creamy fruit loopy delicacy known as the Oreo biscuit, or contemplate the bizarre sight of the bromancer sobbing into his keyboard as he performed an act of treason against Australia's national security agency?

It was tough - hardened criminals have been reduced to tears given much easier choices - but in the end, the pond had no way out, because an assault on the insurgent wall puncher is an attack on the essence, the heart, the soul of the country. 

Or at least on the reptile kool aid machine and its faithful lackeys.

Now it's clear enough here what's going on. Moderation, in any form whatsoever, is anathema to the reptiles. The right to portray Indians as mango chutney munchers and Islamics as foaming, frothing fundamentalists goes to the heart of the business model.

Where would the sweet things be without a goodly dose of hysteria? Why like an NT croc in a waterhole without the sighting of a German tourist for weeks on end ....

What does the pond find hysterically funny about this?

Well you could start with that recycled, endless blathering about the need for a reformation - since it was the Protestants that bunged on that do, not the tykedom of Sheridan and Abbott - and the talk of the enlightenment, since the reptiles have routinely decried climate science and cheered when a crusader creationist was elected to federal parliament - but the capper for the pond was talk of the need to develop acceptance of the separation of church and state ...

School chaplains anyone? Fund religious schools of all persuasions anyone? Refuse to tax the churches anyone? And so on and on, and all at the heart of the wall puncher's love of the Catholic church's ponzi scheme, which must be supported, even as other religions hop on for the ride ...

Throw in chatter about the need to accept pluralism - just try getting the reptiles to blather on about the joys of gays and gay marriage, before moving on to women's rights - and you have a quadrella of nonsense.

Has there ever been a more conformist bunch of lookalike monoculturalists than the lizards of Oz, as alike in the pod as the notorious Tweedle Dee and Dum?

Pluralism? That's only useful for nouns in the world of the reptiles ...

Of course the real crime of that ASIO man was his implication that Abbott was something of a table-smashing dummy, since that would clearly implicate Sheridan as a bromantic lover of table-smashing dummies.

So on the bromancer went, getting more and more agitated in his paid by the endless word way ...

Yes, there's the crime the thought police spotted in an instant. The slapping down of Abbott and the other insurgent Liberals who wanted to have a piece of teh Islamics, bold, brave monoculturalist crusaders that they are ...

And so to the wrap up, which naturally included tears of the 'more in sorrow than anger' kind ...

Do they still scribble "very poor show", these days, in reptile land?

Well as you've seen, they clearly do. What ho, Bertie, eh gad that was a very poor show chaps. 

Now it would help if you were sitting in a creaking leather chair with a glass of port in hand before dashing out to kick over the Spitty motor - feel that Roller roar - to get the mindset perfectly located, but here's the pond's idea of a poor show:

But what a wonderful sight that hurricane Sheridan makes doing loop the loops, as he tries to reconcile a profoundly admirable man in general performing very poorly for pointing out the bleeding obvious ... and thereby somehow politicising security, as opposed to the insurgent doing his level best to use terror to mount a comeback and the reptiles using terror as the foundation of their current crusader business plan ...

Time then for a cartoon ... and more Moir here ... as the desire to wreck the joint continues unabated ...