Speaking of the inclusive message emanating from failed business models ...

(Above: and after this vision of loons conjuring up rustic lords of the fly-blown wheatfield, more of the most excellent Pope here).

One of the more forlorn sights came yesterday at the lizard Oz:

Well, there's your failed business model problem right there in one. 

What sensible person would want to pay to read the dog botherer moaning about how sensible people refused to pay to read the dog botherer? 

Who wants to pay for useless jobs supporting useless, irrelevant fading mastheads, and dog bothering scribblers with nothing better to do than write about the ABC and SBS?

Does the dog botherer think the world owes him and his fellow reptiles a living? Talk about a sense of entitlement and complaint.

In the old days, the pond was taught that if you built a better mousetrap, you could attract flies to the honey pot, or whatever other useless reptile metaphor you care to employ.

Yet, as sure as Paris is now happening, what did the reptiles stick at the top of the digital page yesterday?

And he was still there this morning.

Talk about déjà vu all over again. If the only expert you've got is the Australian taxpayer-deprived Lomborgian, and that tired hack is all you can roll out, what sensible person would waste their hard-won money?

And when you throw in a standard climate denialist, even the notion of peeking behind the Times' paywall loses its appeal.

Matt Ridley's denialism is all over the intertubes, and can be pursued at tedious, exhausting length for free, by masochists who accidentally locked their baseball bats in the closet, and now need something else with which to pummel their heads. Why not just DeSmog him here, and here.

And look what the reptiles have to offer today ...

That's like wandering into a fast food store, and discovering Michael Douglas at the counter with a gun. It's hardly an invitation to consume ..

You know the feeling ...

Each day visiting the reptiles feels like a trip to the dentist for root canal therapy.

Is it any wonder that the UK Sun felt the need yesterday to drop its paywall?

It won't make any difference to the pond. The pond ignored the Sun yesterday and now it's free, the pond will ignore it today ...

The pond woke up this morning to the ABC's RN recycling the BBC reporting The Sun Newspaper Drops Paywall,  but it didn't mean two beans in this troubled world that both of these services were taxpayer funded.

There were many other sources for the news - such as this speculation on the advertising implications, and the Graudian making some obvious points early in November in Sun's paywall saga shows it's never too late to change the rules.

The Sun had been blitzed by the online cesspits otherwise known as the Daily Mail and the Mirror, and whenever the chairman spots others doing well, the siren song of the cesspit calls:

The real point about the Sun’s decision to blow up its paywall is that Rupert Murdoch can be wrong as well as right. Remember how he decreed, five years ago, that all his papers would have subscription walls because you couldn’t possibly give news away free. Well, cancel that last pronouncement (as well as his visionary belief that Apple iPads “may well be the saving of the newspaper industry” before his tablet Daily crashed and burned). There are no immutable rules in this free versus paid-for game. 

And so on.

If one might be so bold and take that headline from the Gary Johns' piece, and offer it to the reptiles this day: quit with the sense of entitlement and the ongoing complaint and the whining and the moaning and the carry-on.

You see, you backed that failed horse, the chocolate cake man, for nigh on two years, and now the Fairfaxians are making hay with the defiant Tones, Peta and the whole damned thing.

That's what's needed for your mousetrap, reptiles. A decent soapie saga, with a warped, twisted bitter woman at the heart of the tale - a Lady Macbeth if you will - and a supine, long-suffering male.

Now some might say we would have all died happy if Abbott had died on the morning of the coup, but that's too cruel, and besides it misses the essence of melodrama that the Fairfaxian version offers ...

The pond felt such a deep ennui that it turned to the reptile editorial this morning, simply because it was outside the paywall - have to give it away for free these days, eh reptiles? Not much future in that kind of brothel house - and because it resonated with the Pope cartoon above:

Now as always, this offers the multiple layers of irony the pond requires in all its reptile dining.

The use of the satanic Harry Potter, for starters, is rich in resonance. And quoting Daniel Pipes without mentioning his rampant Islamophobia, while talking of confected claims, is sublime ...

Even richer was the citing of Frydenberg's clarion call to hear more of moderate Muslim voices when all that can be heard around the town square at the chanting Murdochians and the far right of the Liberal party, including fundamentalist Christian warriors who happen to believe in creationism ...

Of course there's an even deeper irony when talking about Muslim theocracy, because Frydenberg just happens to be a big supporter of a different form of theocracy ...

Liberal MP Josh Frydenberg has savaged Bob Carr’s patronage of Labor Friends of Palestine, branding the “lazy” former foreign minister an “opportunist” and a “dilettante”. Mr Carr’s decision to take up a prominent role for a new ALP group pressing for Palestinian statehood comes almost 40 years after Mr Carr launched Labor Friends of Israel with Bob Hawke, believing then that “Arabs were terrorists”. Mr Carr, premier of NSW for a decade before his stint as a federal minister, said Israel had changed and accused fanatics in the country’s government of promoting “apartheid”. “It has become virtually impossible for the centre-left in politics to maintain support for the ‘ethno-nationalists’ who are now opposed to a Palestinian state and back expansion of Jewish settlements in occupied territories,” he said. “Social democrats find this impossible to live with.”...

...Mr Frydenberg denied the government was under pressure to recognise the state of Palestine, as Sweden did last month. “Tony Abbott has proven himself to be a steadfast friend of Israel and that’s because he understands that Israel is a democracy and understands Australia’s values,” Mr Frydenberg said.

Yes, who else would understand Australia's love of gulags? Quick, build another wall ...

Of course, the ladled-out irony gets even richer when that humbug Scott Morrison lurches into the picture ... and not just because it allows the pond to offer a flashback link to Scott Morrison at Shirelive ...

Rather it's the sight of a barking mad clap happy speaking in tongues fundamentalist urging moderation ...

The often chimerical threat of Islamophobia?

The Murdochians live and breath Islamophobia, and the Daily Terrorists were up to it again today ...

The technique, the methodology, if repeated with the odd variation, is familiar enough ... big headlines, threatening figure ... serve over and over again until business model goes down the drain ...

And so on and so forth, but the irony icing on the cake came with that reference to Galileo's Inquisition ...

Actually, it was the Catholic Church's inquisition, the very same church that has the reptiles slavering and slobbering about freedom of religion so that the persecution of gays and the rights of women can continue (how sad they must be that there's been a little shift in the wind in Ireland).

Galileo didn't own the inquisition; there should be no need for a possessive illiterate comma.

The inquisition started in the twelfth century, long before Galileo pointed a telescope at the heavens, and it's still going, only it was re-badged as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and no longer has the capacity to organise a decent heresy trial or an execution ...

We leave that to our Wahhabist mates in Saudi Arabia these days ...

So can fundamentalist ratbags of assorted fundamentalist religious persuasions help Islamic fundamentalists get out of their fundamentalist woes?

Why on earth would you ask? Just keep reading the dog botherer, the Ridleyians, the Lomborgians, the Caterists and the entitled, complaining Johns for your answer ... and remember, fundamentalists need each other to sustain their opposing big and little endian fundamentalisms ...

Meanwhile, speaking of barking mad fundamentalists, as the pond always does, something very strange has happened in Cory la la land ...

If you head off to his Twitter account here, everything between a loving tribute to Gina Rinehart on 27th November and a tweet dated 26th July 2012 has disappeared ...

There was some collateral damage of course ... masterpieces disappeared at the stroke of a keyboard ...

The pond was distraught, and in view of the conversation du jour, the pond particularly misses this contribution:

Indeed, and can we speak of Jesus's sex life, and his mother having sex with a spirit? Before we get on to transubstantive cannibalism ...

Naturally there was much frivolity and mirth at the way only Gina and a song about mining rights - impossible to inflict on sensible folk - survived the brutal massacre ...

If this keeps going, Cory is a dead cert to reclaim his rightful place in the pond's banner ...

And there's your answer. If ever we needed a local explanation as to why radicalisation might be taking place, one only looks to the reason for the ongoing radicalisation of the pond ...

Talk about a clown frightmare ...

More of more up to date Rowe here, and last, but not least, another memento of the rough Brough found on Twitter. Who knows if it was faked, who cares, just love the resonance ...  and if there was a photographer who snapped it, please accept the pond's accolade of Snapper genius of the week ... the waiting might have been tedious, but it was worth it ...