In which, in a TGIF, the pond is grateful for nodes, kitchen cabinets and kitchen gadgets, cute puppies and climate science handed back to Moorice where it belongs ...

Things are always slow on a reptile Friday.

Oh sure, there's always the possibility of reading the Swiss bank account man explaining how he came to understand that locking children up in gulags was the best way forward ...

No, that's not weakness, because gulags are strength.

Let's not have idle chat chat about being generous towards a few children, not when we can have strength through support of the gulags.

Now back to checking the credit balance in the pond's Swiss bank account.

Naturally after that, the pond turned elsewhere in the news for sustenance and a serve of fibre, and found this story in the Graudian ...

Oh that's okay. If you thrash someone with a baseball bat in private, provided you do it in public too, then everything's hunky dory.

Sure the NBN might still be shitty, but at least the ABC's been taught a lesson ... in public, and in private ...

And have they learned their lesson well. Marvel at the truculent defiance embedded in that allegedly free spirit Patricia Karvelas as she played a solid bat in Labor calls for inquiry into Turnbull's role in ABC 'gagging' NBN reports ...

Of course if you head off to the Graudian story, you'll cop a link to The ABC is like a victim trapped in an abusive relationship - with the government.

Now to be fair, the pond should reveal its bias. The pond loathes Kitchen Cabinet. The pond doesn't need humanised politicians. The pond does need sensible policies.

The notion that Kitchen Cabinet provided genuine insights into Scott Morrison, for example, is a nonsense. If the show had caught Morrison in church in the act of speaking in tongues, and he'd explained what he was up to and why he believed in speaking in tongues ... well maybe then, but which ABC show would dare to go there?

Or maybe, if he explained why he no longer spoke in tongues, we could have had a "so when did you stop beating your wife and speaking in tongues?" moment ...

Instead ...

Imagine, if you will, Crabb, her basket crammed with scones and jam, rapping on the security gates at Eddie Obeid’s sprawling residence and then exchanging witty repartee while he works the stoves. The effect would be much the same.  
Crabb’s convivials with Morrison over a Sri Lankan curry were not just infused with turmeric but also with the ABC’s survival strategy. The ensuing controversy can be banked for now by the ABC and deployed, as needed, when next the crusaders’ cries of “bias” ring out. One episode of Kitchen Cabinet with Morrison is worth at least two years of the former Liberal party senator Amanda Vanstone broadcasting on ABC radio – and far less eye-wateringly dull. 
In 2016, the ABC will feature a reality television show about the debate concerning the constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians. The show will provide star billing to Andrew Bolt, another crusader who wants the ABC abolished, who argues that the climate has been cooling and who has been found by the federal court to have racially vilified Aboriginal people. 
Like a victim trapped in an abusive relationship, there is no way out.

The ABC isn't the only one trapped in an abusive relationship where Malware can feel free to ring up and abuse anyone who answers the phone ...

Even the reptiles noticed what its correspondents had much desired ...

Moorice must be delighted as his reign of the world's greatest climate science can now continue unchallenged ...

With infallible ability, the reptiles managed to dig up a chap speaking in support of the move:

Peter Tangney, a science ­policy lecturer at Flinders University, said political influence might have triggered CSIRO’s latest move, but a longstanding emphasis on “the production of more and better climate change science” had delivered little return.

Indeed, indeed. At least the space program brought us non-stick frying pans.

What's climate science ever done for us? All that doom and gloom ... little return in all that crap and fear-mongering.

And so the ghost of Tony Abbott lives on in the nodes and in the death of science ... though there were predictable reactions from others who thought the point was to understand what was happening to the world around us ...

Larry Marshall surely has a point about rejuvenating organisations and solving new challenges, but I worry about his statement that there is no further need after the Paris climate summit to understand climate change since we now know it is real. Effective action requires detailed understanding. For example, Marshall speaks of contributing to the proposed agricultural development of the Northern Territory, but we don’t know for how much longer this region will still support agriculture or even human habitation as the Earth keeps warming, nor how much drying (if any) Australia’s existing agricultural regions will experience. The groups that would help provide answers are the ones he says we don’t need any more.
- Steve Sherwood, ARC Laureate Fellow and Director, Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales 
It is always disappointing when science is cut back, especially when we need to be more innovative to overcome the economic problem of falling commodity prices. It is particularly bad when the cuts are in such areas as Oceans and Atmosphere, Land and Water and Manufacturing, as these are critical to our chances of a sustainable future. More worrying than the cuts is the language used by the new chief executive. There won’t be scientists sacked, there will be “reductions in headcount”! And these aren’t research areas, they are “business units”, headed not by top scientists but “business leaders”. The cuts are “something that we must do to renew our business”, according to the CEO. The language reveals that the government is trying to sabotage our public science body and turn it into a consulting business. 
- Ian Lowe, Emeritus Professor of Science, Technology and Society, Griffith University

Oh dear, good prof, clearly you haven't understood an agile, innovative response to renewal ...

Climate science? Bah humbug. Couldn't even produce a decent return ...

Please, get back to the pond when you've produced a decent gadget for its magic science oven ...

Naturally the likes of little Timmie Bleagh understood what it really meant ...

Yep, Larry Marshall has managed to reduce the debate to the level of "settled" and "solved" ...

Understanding the future?

Please just settle down to enjoy a nice dry Clare riesling with the pond's one minute egg, and we can discuss the ineffable stupidity of a CEO announcing climate science has been answered ... did he tell Moorice, the Bolter and little Timmie and their cohorts, including the Chairman himself?

Could the pond gain any deeper insight?

Perhaps something put into 140 characters or less?

Oh sweet long absent lord, not the cute puppy gambit.

On a day of mass sackings, they go the cute fucking puppy gambit as the four o'clock fact?

Now there's a deeply disturbed organisation ...

The pond actually thought it was a spoof site, and perhaps it is ...

Well that's enough havoc with venerable institutions for the day.

After all, we have the new Murdochian head of the ABC yet to arrive.

How splendid will the Kitchen Cabinets be after that ...?

And how marvellously well the Malware months are playing out ... 

How adept and agile he is at maintaining the wall-puncher's agenda ...

And so to a Pope, and more papal insights here ...

By golly that portrait of the poodle is worth its weight in woodchips, and how sweet of the Pope to make a joke about babies trying to escape the gulag ...

...behold, the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him.
When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt: 
And was there until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son. 
Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men.

Bloody useless refugees, and ditto people who read the bible and purport to understand it. 

And so a terrorist was saved and the world has lived in terror ever since. If only Peter Dutton had been around at the time to do the right sort of job for Herod! Well at least he can do it for Malware and Orstralia, you bloody beaut gulag nation, you ...

(More Moir here, if Fairfax gets its act together)

There was something eerily reminiscent of Truffaut's Farenheit 451 in that mutton uniform ...

But perhaps Pope was just thinking of the nets in Planet of the Apes.

And so to a bonus cartoon from Cathy Wilcox, and more Wilcox here ...

Good old thugby league. And yet what a fine example it provides for ways to deal with the ABC. Bash it around the head enough, and you too might score a gig on Kitchen Cabinet ...

Let the nodes run wild and free ... well, not to free, and not too useful either ...