Cat Stevens, Pellists, Jensenists, what have you got, because the pond's agin it, unless it happens to feature manly men in frocks ...

The pond realises that it's been failing in its duties in relation to meditative Sundays ... we simply haven't been pounding the keyboard hard enough.

This came upon the pond while watching Spotlight last night.

It isn't a particularly good film. The reporters at the Boston Globe are each given haloes, and Mark Ruffalo is given an obligatory intense speech to ensure nominations, while good old Stanley Tucci acts the socks off him. And then there's the banality of the underscore, which frequently delivers bouts of "doing" music to accompany montages of activity (a Christmas carol also performs this duty).

And poor old Rachel McAdams is given the job of becoming a female beagle, such is the intensity of her winsome looks (punters will recall with affection that Anthony Lane awarded Ryan Gosling the title of male beagle when he noted a sure way for the local animal shelter's fund-raising leaflet to raise oodles of money was to have Gosling as the beagle on the cover. It never fails ...)

And yet the sheer enormity of what the Catholic church got up to in Boston, the cover-ups and the abuse, carried the pond through the movie, and made it wonder whether we will ever see the Pellists back in Australia ...

North Coast Voices here carried news of the full, active and rich life the Pellists are currently enjoying in Rome,  and soon we will hear whether that will continue or whether the Pellists will take the trip back to face the music. If the movie is any guide, it's not likely.

Here's one of the end titles for that film ...

So it goes, and so the pond isn't holding its breath ...

And then who should bob up on the Huff but Cat Stevens preaching Guff ...

What a doofus. What an addle-brained ratbag.

Try Greg Hunting Cat Stevens' comments about Salman Rushdie and see if you can forgive this wretch and would want to get on a peace train with such a sorry and pathetic dissembler ...

But the pond always looks for hope alongside sorry tales of despair, and before we get on to despairing about that other axis of weevils, the Jensenists, it's time for a little hope.

It involves a story some months ago in The New Yorker, happily at the moment outside the paywall concerning the redemption of one member of the Westboro church.

Unfollow, How a prized daughter of the Westboro Baptist Church came to question its beliefs, is a long read, and the pond must deliver a spoiler alert, because we're cutting to the chase with the final few pars ... as Adrian Chen and Megan Phelps-Roper returned to the church of hate and its hate signs:

Directly across the street stood a house painted in bright, horizontal rainbow stripes. The house had been bought, in 2012, by Planting Peace, a nonprofit group whose mission, according to its Web site, is “spreading peace in a hurting world.” The Equality House, as it’s known, is home to a group of young L.G.B.T. activists. Planting Peace has worked with former Westboro members to spread its message of tolerance. Megan first visited the house in 2013, after her cousin Libby encouraged her to visit. She sneaked in the back door, for fear of being spotted by her family. 
Today, Megan and Grace’s only connection to Westboro is virtual. Although Phelps-Roper no longer believes that the Bible is the word of God, she still reads it to try to find scriptural arguments that could encourage Westboro to take a more humane approach to the world. Sometimes she’ll tweet passages, knowing that church members will see them. After they left the church, Megan and Grace were blocked from Westboro’s Twitter accounts, but they created a secret account to follow them. Sometimes, when her mother appears in a video, Megan will loop it over and over, just to hear her voice. 
Fred Phelps died in March, 2014, at the age of eighty-four. Former members of the church told me that Fred had had a softening of heart at the end of his life and had been excommunicated. (The church denies these claims.) Zach Phelps-Roper, Megan’s younger brother, who left the church later that year, said that one of the precipitating events in Fred’s exclusion had been expressing kindness toward the Equality House. At a church meeting, Zach recalls, members discussed the episode: “He stepped out the front door of the church and looked at the Rainbow House, the Planting Peace organization, and looked over and said, ‘You’re good people.’ ”

Westboro is a particularly hate-filled version of extreme Calvinism, which naturally brings the pond to the hating of the angry Sydney Anglicans and the Jensenists ...

Lately the Jensenists have stopped turning up at their old haunts, and Michael Jensen can be found scribbling away at The Drum ...

Sad to say, The Drum - much like the ABC in general - isn't what it used to be, and even though this particular piece of rotting fish is days old, it was still top of the digital page ...

Now anybody with the requisite cast-iron stomach can attend the page here, but please allow the pond to set the tone of the discourse with this stomach-churning gobbet ...

This is classic Jensenism.

It involves either a deliberate lie - as with some Islamic fundamentalists, it is considered legitimate to lie to infidels - or a confession of profound ignorance and stupidity.

Of course it could be just a mix of the two, and so let us now set off to judge by word and by deed ...

Why not head off to Meet Alliance Defending Freedom, Fox's Favorite Anti-LGBT Legal Organization ...

How about How An Extreme Anti-LGBT Legal Powerhouse Is Working To Enact "Religious Freedom" Laws ...

Why not dabble in This Right-Wing Legal Powerhouse Wants To Make Gay Sex Illegal ...

Of course in the world of Jensenism, wanting to make gay sex illegal isn't "gay hate", it's just saving gays from hell ... or making practitioners get their deserved comeuppance.

Either way, it isn't hate. Just as a tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye is a jovial form of barter. Or some such thing ...

Why would the Jensenists not think working in assorted countries around the world to get gay sex criminalised, or re-criminalised, or to stay criminalised isn't an example of gay hate?

Why, it's because angry Sydney Anglicans have been in the thick of such activities in Africa, as recounted many times by the pond in the past ...

The angry Calvinist Sydney Anglicans stand, if the pond may borrow from the Jensenist phrasing, against the encroaching of tolerance and a liberal 'live and let live' philosophy, with a fierce form of Calvinist fundamentalism, which is anything but liberal, since it actively seeks to eradicate homosexuality from public life entirely ...

This is how radical extremism and bigotry works. It seeks to pretend that extremists are moderates just going about their moderate daily business of discrimination in a godly way ...

It's a lie, built on lies, and perhaps that's why there's a shortage of respect.

You can't pretend you're doing one thing, while off doing wicked things.

Time then for a little Elmer Gantry Holy Roller judgement:

For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.

And this is what requires judging. It's the half-baked apologetics. See if you can recognise the classic equivocating Jensenist style ...

Now, as it happens, I don't agree with everything that the ADF says, or with its approach to church-state relations ...

....these are serious people who make sustained legal and intellectual arguments for their positions, and use legitimate tactics to pursue them

....Even a passionate pro-choice advocate should surely recognise that the issue of abortion is extremely morally complex. It deserves argument, whatever your position ...

...The place and shape of the family is likewise a matter for serious debate, whatever one's views.

...We seem to have lost the vision of a genuine pluralism, in which competing points of view on serious moral issues are both allowed to coexist so that the arguments for each may be put...

...Rather, we resort to tweeting and shouting.

Of course there's rich pickings there. A genuine pluralism seems to consist of one side being cast into hell for all eternity ...

And the issue of having an abortion is easily understood ... if you happen to be a woman, with the right to be in control of your body.

As opposed to men, such as angry Anglicans and fundamentalist Islamics wanting to control it for you ...

In the end, Westboro's hardline haters are more intellectually honest than those who claim they use fancy legal and intellectual arguments and legitimate tactics... while pursuing exactly the same homophobic, hate-filled outcomes that the Westboro mob want

The Westboro mob - what's left of them - just hate. The rest is fancy dressing and frippery and airy talk of legitimate tactics, of the kind Calvinists should really disdain ...

As for tweeting and its wickedness?

Perhaps the angry Anglicans should get out into the world and tweet a little more ...

On December 20, 2009, Phelps-Roper was in the basement of her house, for a church function, when she checked Twitter on her phone and saw that Brittany Murphy, the thirty-two-year-old actress, had died. When she read the tweet aloud, other church members reacted with glee, celebrating another righteous judgment from God. “Lots of people were talking about going to picket her funeral,” Phelps-Roper said. When Phelps-Roper was younger, news of terrible events had given her a visceral thrill. On 9/11, she was in the crowded hallway of her high school when she overheard someone talking about how an airplane had hit the World Trade Center. “Awesome!” she exclaimed, to the horror of a student next to her. She couldn’t wait to picket Ground Zero. (The following March, she and other Westboro members travelled to New York City to protest what they described in a press release as “FDNY fags and terrorists.”) But Phelps-Roper had loved Murphy in “Clueless,” and she felt an unexpected pang—not quite sadness, but something close—over her death. As she continued scrolling through Twitter, she saw that it was full of people mourning Murphy. The contrast between the grief on Twitter and the buoyant mood in the basement unsettled her. She couldn’t bring herself to post a tweet thanking God for Murphy’s death. “I felt like I would be such a jackass to go on and post something like that,” she said.
...Her hesitance reflected a growing concern for the feelings of people outside Westboro. Church members disdained human feelings as something that people worshipped instead of the Bible. They even had a sign: “GOD HATES YOUR FEELINGS.” They disregarded people’s feelings in order to break their idols. Just a few months earlier, the Westboro Web site had received an e-mail arguing that the church’s constant use of the word “fag” was needlessly offensive. “Get a grip, you presumptuous toad,” Phelps-Roper had replied. She signed off, “Have a lovely day. You’re going to Hell....”

...As Phelps-Roper continued to tweet, she developed relationships with more people like Hughes. There was a Jewish marketing consultant in Brooklyn who abhorred Westboro’s tactics but supported the church’s right to express its views. There was a young Australian guy who tweeted political jokes that she and her younger sister Grace found hilarious. “It was like I was becoming part of a community,” Phelps-Roper said. By following her opponents’ feeds, she absorbed their thoughts on the world, learned what food they ate, and saw photographs of their babies. “I was beginning to see them as human,” she said. When she read about an earthquake that struck off Canada’s Pacific coast, she sent a concerned tweet to Graham Hughes: “Isn’t this close to you?”

Perhaps angry Anglicans might be better off not scribbling for The Drum in support of bigotry and homophobia and hate ...perhaps they should take to twitter, and perhaps then they might even end up seeing others as human ...

And so, just to complete the circle, and having dissed an Islamic, Catholics, and angry Anglicans, the pond would like to thank a correspondent for helping complete the circle.

The pond has always loved to end its meditative Sunday pieces with sightings of men in frocks.

Usually this has featured the Pellists, but there are some excellent frock sightings elsewhere, thanks to Cardinal "manly man" Burke.

Here, for example, and here, and at the pond correspondent's link here, while you can find the manly Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke's manly man insights here in an interview ...

Cardinal Burke: First of all, be manly yourself. In other words, cultivate your own manly qualities, because the priest is first and foremost the spiritual father; he is a man. You need to have manly qualities of selflessness, chivalry and discipline to avoid situations improper for a priest. A priest must have the manly confidence and credibility to be a spiritual father to his flock, giving clear firm guidance with kindness and charity.

What a hoot it is, unless of course, you happen to have been a child growing up in Boston, or in certain parts of Australia, or elsewhere around the world, and caught up in a pandemic of evil ...

Never mind, let's end with a few manly men sightings ...

In 2525, perhaps if we're still alive, thanks to the fearless prattling of Polonius ...

It's always good to start with a joke, but surely the boom tsch should have been along the lines "provided his British passport is cancelled too" ...

Never mind, the pond was inexpressibly moved, almost to tears, to be reminded of its early start as the Michael Duffy Files, a shocking example of the  crime of cyber-stalking, but only done because of dire extremity and extreme vexation.

Where is the Duffster now?

Who knows, perhaps deep in novelistic crime land, repenting of his earlier crimes. 

The pond can never re-visit those days - it would be too much like a Tamworth dog chewing on grass, and anyone who's ever had a Tamworth dog chew grass knows what that signifies (get out the back Rover, get out there quickly).

Never mind, the pond's intrepid correspondent on matters archival also noted how the Duffster eerily sounded like prattling Polonius, which is why it was an easy choice between the dog botherer peddling his anti-republicanism in today's lizard Oz and Polonius on the same theme ...

Perhaps what the parvenu upstart meant to say was that Turnbull reflects the mood of the Murdochian commentariat and their infinite capacity to create a solid hive mind ...

But in a contest between the parvenu and the noble Polonius, prattling away in his inimitable "I'm a republican, but you do know a republic is never going to happen" way, it was never going to be a contest. 

The pond is always loyal, has been loyal and true and faithful for years, and the pond was almost moved to tears - for the second time in the day - by the way that Polonius feared the hurt that republicans would suffer:

Of course the google splash ignored the key point that made the notion of a republic entirely problematic ...

Yes, those damned Islamic radicals have ruined everything, and so we should embrace the sort of royal system that has worked so well in such fine countries as Britain ... and Saudi Arabia ...

Get lost dog bothering blow-in, let us brood along about the hurt with the nervous nelly, hand-wringing Polonius ...

The republic?

By th' mass, and 'tis like a camel indeed.

It is back'd like a weasel.

Very like a whale ...

Now there's no point in talking of optimism when there's a prattling Polonius to hand. A generous dollop of doom and gloom is required, a kind of instinctive, reflexive recoiling.

The republic will come soon enough, certainly by the twelfth of never, and that's perhaps too soon.

There's simply no point in thinking about any of it until good old queen Lizzie drops off the twig, and then really it would be too soon to think about while a grieving Prince Chuck is briefly on the throne, and then who would be so intemperate as to think about it and rush to judgement, just when the young 'uns finally get a chance to sit on the perch. Who would want to cast out the fledglings?

Why, if we can take the counsel of the infinite and patient and wise prattling Polonius, we should see a referendum for a model by 2100 and perhaps - let's not rush it - a referendum for the republic by 2150 - and if things are done smoothly and with skill, we should be able to usher in a republic just in time for the celebrations in 2188 ...

Even then, it will be quite a task, but the pond has every hope and expectations the future citizens of Australia will be up to the job, counselled by the wise prattling Polonius figures of the infinite future ...

Meantime, let us examine the many vexing problems which will produce inertia at least until the twelfth of never, thereby satisfying the milksop republicans, who pretend to be in favour of a republic but like Paul "magic water" Sheehan display all the strength, energy, courage and fibre of a slice of white bread ... (remember only the 'leets are allowed a slice of the upmarket Paddington sourdough):

Fortunately, Australia will never become a republic in prattling Polonius's lifetime. Happily, he may devote his attention to the doings of the young Royals with some diligent reading of the women's magazines.

No doubt the young Royals have "a certain attraction to Australians of all ages"; no doubt Polonius is amongst the smitten; no doubt he has a daily anxiety attack about the future of New Idea and the Australian Women's Weekly ...

It's good to learn that his aspirations lead no further than the latest news of which young Royal has donned a Nazi uniform for a party, and which one has committed the act of the two-backed beast and managed to breed, because such antics are as distracting and as welcome as two pandas getting it on in an Adelaide zoo ...

Think of the photo opportunities in these troubled times. 

That will lead Australians to focus on the attacks by radical Islamists, because when the going gets tough, we will certainly not rely on the United States. As we did in those glorious days of Singapore, we will turn to gaze towards Britain, and the guns pointed the wrong way, knowing that the Royals and Tony Abbott will be on hand to sort things out ...

It's such a splendid vision that the pond holds out hope that in some future era, some archivist will look back and discover the moment when prattling Polonius made his impeccable case for direct action on a republic ... no later than the year 2525.

Gad sirs and madams, why does the pond always feel like a Colonel Blimp cartoon after some quality time with Polonius?

Thank you ever so much kind sir, might the pond have another? Could we mention dogs, in view of the noble work done by Tamworth dogs?

Just give me my propers baby ... show me a little R.E.S.P.E.C.T. ... yeah baby whip it to me, and whip it to the war criminals too ...

The pond loves the smell of serendipity in the evening and the morning ...

The pond was heading off to check out the latest Trumpisms - yes for light relaxation, is there better entertainment and a necessary prelude to a viewing of Colbert celebrating teh Donald? - when for the first time in yonks it stopped at the local digital edition ...

That led inevitably to this ...

Which luckily led to this charming snapshot of two war criminals posing together, and a flurry of attendant abuse ...

The pond began to wonder why politicians allowed comments on twitter.

Of course it's impossible to take any of it seriously.

For all that Forster purports to care, how is it possible for anyone with a twitter banner like this able to stop laughing in an hysterical Dr. Strangelove way?

Dearie me, that's almost as creepy as that mugshot of the two war criminals posing together ...

Anyhoo, the next thing you know, the pond woke up to see that the reptiles of Oz had naturally decided to feature that simpering sod on the left - not with face grimaced in rictus grin as above, but with a grimaced rictus of threat and fear, as if posed for an ID photo for a career in the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation  ....

Now to get to this latest revelation of the bond between brother and sister, the pond had to turn up many great opportunities of the Saturday kind ...

There were the great minds of the dog botherer and prattling Polonius doing it for the republic ...

Yes, yes, because Islamic radicalism has got everything to do with an Australian republic!

There was the bromancer, nuking the opposition ...

And Springfield needs a monorail. Oh dear, what happened to that one in Sydney? Did we misplace it? But opportunity still knocks ...

And then there was the barking mad Bettina, running late to the party, but on arrival, determined to nuke everything in sight ...

And people still complain about the way the world deprives them of untold riches ... as if the sight of wacky Bettina baying about a mob rule mentality in the age of Murdoch isn't an intellectual pleasure far exceeding wasted time with Wittgenstein ...

Never mind, let's cut to the chase, and get on with the speech.

Of course the pond was going to celebrate the banality of weevils ...

It was around this point that the pond began to get nervous. That's it? The goose travelled half way around the world to say this?

Was it just so he could get a snap of himself posing next to war criminal Henry?

Did he really say "The next change is working out how they can express their fidelity and permanence, if that's what they want"?

He really has no idea what's already happened in many countries in the western world? He really is that completely, totally and uselessly out of touch?

So it seems, because the rest of the summary was equally fatuous ...

The pond turned away, disappointed. Oh sure there was the pleasure of a man who would still say "As prime minister", because that's really all he's got left, the clutching at the tattered dreams and the remnants of glory ...

But the rest was just idle, contemptible blather of the evasive kind, where he couldn't actually summon up the courage to admit the truth ... I find gays threatening ...

Why does he feel threatened? Why did he defame "most people" by saying they did too? Does he think everyone shares his Daesh, Talibanish fundamentalism?

The pond has always wondered about men who like to sniff bums in scrums ... not that there's anything wrong with that ... but you know what they say about hyper-masculine, hyper-Christian types. Always ready for a good turning ...

Never mind, whether you're in or you're out, you can always live in hope, and the pond is at all times tremendously optimistic, so it was a great pleasure to see that another wayward, used up politician was planning a trip to America ...

Please, hum Simon and Garfunkel's 'looking for America' song while thinking of Bernie as you journey with Kevin across the Pacific ...

Overnight, in the usual way of the intertubes, that jumped from 'Anger' to 'Fury':

You can read that story here, but there's no doubt the pond's optimism is justified:

Mr Andrews, who was dumped by Mr Turnbull as defence minister in September, has lately been calling for Australia to contribute more troops to the fight against the Islamic State – contradicting the position he took when he was minister. 
His speech will be titled "Australia's Global Security and Defence Challenges". 
It is understood that Mr Turnbull's office is not vetting or demanding to see advance copies of speeches given by MPs, including Mr Andrews. 
The National Prayer Breakfast is an annual Washington event hosted by Christian members of Congress and organised by a non-profit group called the Fellowship Foundation.

Because there's nothing like a gaggle of Christians getting together to moan about the dangers posed by Islamics to help promote the cause of world peace ...

Oh if only Richard hadn't fucked up the Crusades so badly ... but that leaves a job to be done by your modern Crusader, and is there any better qualified Crusader than Kevin?

And so, in the shocking absence of Rowe and the Pope - oh why have you forsaken us? - it's on to the meme of the day, and some meme-ster has been running a campaign against KPMG.

Well the pond is always willing to recycle anything about that mob and their coffee butlers ...

Oh and the pond is aware that another storm in an alcoholic's tea cup has even reached Melbourne, and believes Cathy Wilcox had the right answer, and more Wilcox here ...

It's tough being an addict in these days of social media. Back in the day, the pond's grandfather went on his binges with only the family to hear about the pink elephant and squirming snakes sitting next to the aspidistra on the what-not ... (you think the pond is kidding? It's amazing how those alcoholic dreams conformed to convention).

Oh and as we started on a quest for Trumpisms, which strangely had originally ended for the pond with video of the FBI shooting of a barking mad right wing terrorist - why not end with a Moir, and more Moir here ...

In which the pond at last manages to link Tony Abbott and Jane Austen, for their shared love of Sense and Sensibility ...

That meme above seemed dangerously like a breach of the pond's many patents and trademarks, but given it's 'looney tunes' rather than 'loony' is probably enough of a defence. 

Are truth and public interest also still a defence these days? 

But surely Bugs could sue. If wise-cracking, Elmer Fudd-befuddling Bugs - who always loved a good frock - had the slightest thing in common with Erica, then the pond's world would collapse in tears ...

Settle, Erica and rugby leaguers, she's only a bunny ...

Moving right along, today there's a full to overflowing feast at the pond.

It hasn't passed without notice the way that Tony Abbott only has to piss on a couch and the reptiles will record diligently and faithfully every aspect of the operation.

Well that looks good, that looks classy, that looks exceptionally refined ... a speech of sensibility, eh ... guaranteed to make people swoon into a state of delicate insensible sensitivity ...

But any punter who actually bothered to look at the story would surely have considered it short weight ...

That's it? A little wringing of the hands, as if the reptiles don't have a clue about the game that's being played, and the role they themselves are playing in it?

What a laugh and a joke. As any decent pundit would have noted - Laura Tingle amongst them - Abbott is now well down the path of dissent, defiance, white-anting, undermining and rebellion, with the reptiles enlisted as his able supporters. 

It also fell to the bouffant one to write up the speech ...

Not a mention in those opening pars of the fundamentalist gay-hate homophobic organisation at the heart of the speechifying ... just blather about UN diplomats and officials in New York ... and so, on it went ...

If there had to be a single word, it would be pathetic. That formula "one man and one woman open to children" is a weasel wording by a weasel still deep in his prejudice and bile ...

Which is why the pond turned immediately to another bright reptile star, continuing the war on another front ...

There are some might think that the surest way to wreck any military - western or eastern - is to have a reptile armchair pundit opine on ways to wreck the military, but of course Sheridan is exempt from those charges, courtesy of his tremendous stint in the military* fighting to preserve the dinkum way of life ...

This fantastic record gives him a tremendous insight into the military machine ...

It's going to be a rough year for Morrison. The reptiles are already jumping in with talk of sanctimonious lectures, in the sanctimonious, lecturing, hectoring way only zealots can manage ... with 'Zeitgeist' the new thought-bubble word of the day ...

Why else would the word be capitalised? Is it that momentous? The Oxford imposes no such obligation, but if it's the original German, shouldn't it be italicised in some way to draw attention to its strange foreign, mildly threatening, exotic origins?

Yes, the hive mind is tremendously excited about teh zeitgeist ...

Oh you can see the many ways the reptiles get the pond to consider the deepest issues of the times ...

True, once upon a time, if anybody approached the pond and deployed 'zeitgeist' with a flourish, they would have been thrown out as a wanker. 

No doubt the reptiles intend the reference to be satirical, but the way each of them have taken up the term suggests that they have their very own thought-bubble orthodoxy, and it comes bubbling up each time they try to grapple with the alternative universe that flourishes outside their bunker ...

Never mind, since repetition is the key art of reptile commentariat scribbling, it's time yet again to yammer on about the Australian of the Year, as the mortified reptiles discover that no one paid much attention to their own appointment ...

That's it? Muttered imprecations and a forecast of doom and wrecking, and that's the best he's got? 

It reminded the pond not so much of the zeitgeist as that old Woody Allen film, Zelig, with the bromancer cast in the role of the ultimate conformist ...

And yet,  by swimming against the tide, and back towards the fundamentalism that so enlivens the Taliban and Daesh, Tony Abbott and his bromancer chum are performing an important duty, reminding the world that stick in the mud conservatives will have no truck with music, dancing or alternative lifestyles ...

Because that's the way it is with the scorpions always ready to hitch a ride with the hapless frogs of the world ...

And speaking of scorpions, the pond must now pay obeisance to the mighty chairman of them all...

The pond has always been a big fan of the Chairman's twittering, but a recent burst went above and beyond the call of duty ...

Now some wags got upset, and launched into all the many obvious critiques that are currently available in relation to this form of wondrously hypocritical wittering twittering ...

But this misses the fun and ruins the sport.

The real fun is to click on the tweet and see how the senile old goat sets himself up for a hammering these days each time he twitters ...

The Chairman is in advanced dotage and a state of complete unawareness of how his company - and he himself - has worked over the years, and he now spends time broadcasting that remarkable ignorance to the world ...

How long before Jerry gets her pay day?

And in that spirit of joyous celebration ...

And so on ... the pond could go on reproducing the endless stream of abuse, but all good things must come to an end ... at least for the moment ...

* the pond, subsequent to typing these words, Greg Hunted Greg Sheridan here, and could find no actual reference to Mr Sheridan's military service. The pond profoundly regrets and apologises for what seems to have been an error. Is there a white feather in the house?

Mano a mano? That's nothing, not when we could have parrot a parrot ...

The pond was delighted when the matter of a republic briefly erupted...

Naturally the mischief-making reptiles raced off to check that the trouble-maker in chief, and leader of the opposition in exile, hadn't changed his views ...

Note the difference in the pitches ...

Yep, google features the "youff" angle - and their love of a good frock and babies and all the glamour, sigh, oh to be a prince and a princess - but the reptiles naturally framed it as Abbott v. Malware ...

Well there's no surprises there, and s0 the reptiles seized the moment to pile on and foment trouble by celebrating the schismatics and the splitters ...

In the usual reptile way, all of them piled in on the 'let's do nothing' angle.

The reptile editorialist was a safe pair of hands ...

And over at Fairfax, the magic water man was diligent in his duties, as you can read here ...

It's safe to say that the magic water man is just the chappie to recognise a shallow fraud built on zero substance ... just drink the magic water and you'll catch the level of his insight ...

Naturally the magic water man, while cheerfully criticising everybody else, didn't actually bother to come up with his own model, though posing as a milksop republican...

Talk is cheap, he blathered, but in fact subscribing to his blather is far too expensive for the pond ...

Never mind, the pond was most pleased because of the rumblings that were exposed ...

Now that story, with links, is here,  and it made the pond feel mortified and apologetic at the lack of quality time it gives to tedious old farts like David Flint,  though the likes of Flinty hardly - pace Tony Abbott - constitutes the "youff" side of the monarchist marketplace ...

The ACM abandoned its website some time ago - its corpse lies here, with its last entry for 8th June 2015 - so that they could spend time on the "youff"-orientated intertubes at Facebook here ...

It's easy enough to bell the political cats strutting that page - like Caleb Jones, who is presented as the Daily Telegraph's "youthful columnist", when in reality under the new regime at the Terror, the youthful Caleb is no longer the flavour of the month (Graudian it at the Weekly Beast here).

There are other indicators of certain tendency, a certain inclination. 

The page faithfully regurgitates Miranda the Devine delivering her hate of David Morrison, and Terry McCrann delivering his hate for Australian of the Year, and Paul Kelly delivering his hate for the Labor Party - it's all their fault - and then there's the thoughts of Ian Callinan  and lots about the doings of the mighty Flinty, and for a moment, the pond thought it had stumbled on a branch of News Corp ...

It seems that, to be a monarchist, you must belong to the wretched, backward-looking, navel-gazing, fluff- and lint-gathering tedious Murdochian school of deeply conservative commentariat politics ...

The best that Flinty could come up with as a balance for his tendency, his inclination, was Doug Sutherland, one time mayor of Sydney. That good old boy has always been window-dressing for balance for some time, but it's a gold chain, flowing robes parochial kind of balance...

Rival Australian Monarchist League has its headquarters here, and it plays a different kind of bat ... with the parrot on hand to greet visitors and make them feel most welcome ...

Of course the AML is a team player and rebuked the ABC here ... explaining that they were quite terribly bemused, rather than frightfully amused by talk of a War of the Roses amongst the monarchists ... (the pond recently enjoyed Simon Schama's description of that war as completely mysterious and incomprehensible in his televisual history of Britain).

What spoilsports.

The pond still lives in hope. Could this renewed debate see the end of Captain Flint, in an epic battle between parrot and parrot ...

Let's remember that Long John Silver called his parrot Captain Flint, and the bird even featured on the title page of some editions...

So it would be parrot v parrot, and may the best parrot win, though the pond would be devastated if all this ruffling of monarchist feathers led to the departure of one of its very special magnificis avis.

It's rare to be graced by the presence of such a preening bird-brain in such splendid plumage and with a marvellous call, and his absence would be a loss to all ...

One can almost sense, almost hear, feel and touch the Queen gently weeping into a discreet hankie ...

Let us remember the good times, when the birds lived in peace, much as it's to be hoped that apes and humans will eventually live side by side on the planet of the apes ...