Yes, the pond is here to help the hapless reptiles, apparently too scared to speak their minds ...

The pond is, of course, here to help the reptiles with their short and long term-business planning.

First tip. If you claim to be the weekend newspaper of the year, don't leave Saturday's nonsense and silliness hanging around like quickly rotting fish at the top of the digital page on a Sunday.

The notion that George Christensen, Dennis Jenkins, Cory Bernardi and the rest of the hysterical ratbag pack - peace be unto Erica, the poodle and George, honoured be their names - are too scared to speak their minds, is the sort of gabbling from dotage that should be quickly spiked. It's okay to let elderly politicians and other folk out of the closet every so often - though the pond would listen to an exception for Jeff Kennett - but once it's done, they should be quickly wheeled out of sight.

Which is why leaving that Abbott 'coulda, woulda shoulda' piece - from Dennis 'the bouffant one' Shanahan, channeling a failed pug and wall-puncher - should also have had a replacement on standby.

The problem isn't that people are too scared to speak their minds, it's that some people just never shut up, with the Murdochian commentariat to the fore, because they're paid to lead regularly with blather of the mischief-making kind. Of course the pond's entire business plan - celebrating the likes of Akker Dakker, the Devine, and yes, even the Bolter - depends on that continuing ...

Which brings the pond to another business plan issue.

The pond has been campaigning to get the reptiles to remove their blogs. This ancient, mystical art has no place in the modern digital world, and is best left to doodling amateurs amusing themselves on the sidelines of life.

Look today at the Sunday Terrorists.

Now the subject matter is entirely predictable. It's just another bout of essence of Miranda the Devine Pellist Catholicism on parade (try to count the number of Melbourne Catholics who heaved a sigh of relief when Pell left town):

The pond could write the Devine's copy in its sleep, which is no surprise given the Devine's somnambulistic capacity for repetition.

But you don't have to click on to the page that urges you to subscribe. You can head off to the blog to score it in a plain text way:

The text itself is just the usual nonsense of a skewed kind:

Well the pond has heard that litany of excuses before.

So let us turn to the way that the litany is freely available, and even without a gold coin donation in the plate.

What do you get if you go in the front door, and slip the cash in the envelope in a legit way, as used to be the style when the pond attended church and no one wanted to see cash slipping into paws, in much the same way as some might be disturbed by the sight of table legs?

We should pay for a big photo of the Devine?

Or perhaps a snap of the long-suffering Pellist in party frock?

And how much do we have to pay to avoid these burdensome, confronting sights?

Nada, zilch, zip, nothing. You can head off to the blogs and avoid them for free.

So a couple of confrontingly large snaps and a better layout is somehow going to persuade the punters to flock to the digital page and cough up the readies in their digital envelope?

Of course the reptiles could have been more modest, in the manner of the lizard Oz, by defrocking the Pellist and presenting him in basic black ...

Ferguson makes a few points that never troubled the Devine as she waded, yet again, through her hagiographic exercises for the day.

Ferguson does the forelock tugging that's required for any reptile writing on these matters - the complicit Victorian police, and victim David Ridsdale himself being an offender, "a fact the Victorian media conveniently refuses to address", when in fact the reptiles of Oz address it all the time, and use it as some kind of exculpatory device ...

But at the same time, Ferguson himself is not above framing things in a tricky way ...

What, Nobody handed them out? Well if Nobody did that, then Nobody deserves to be severely punished.

The amusing thing is that this information is already known within News Corp. There's a journalist who wrote the story that set the hares loose who knows what informants she relied upon ...

As for quoting those who say there are unknown unknowns, what is Ferguson proving, except that even a barking mad pundit will give themselves an escape hatch.

Ferguson then proceeds to trawl through sundry newspaper reports searching for fragments of evidence against Pell, until he 'fesses up to the bleeding obvious - any sexual assault allegations will not be part of the questioning - and then he gets on to Ballarat and all the murk arising therefrom:

For what it's worth, the pond thinks nothing much will come of Rome, and the Pellists will wriggle away. There's too much at stake for the Catholic church to let a cardinal go down, especially one as skilled at climate science as the Pellist ...

But it's a measure of the nervousness of the commentariat that the likes of the Devine should sit down at the keyboard and recite their rosary, especially that one about Pell doing right by his victims when in reality he was trying to manage the problem and diminish the payout and in the process upset a number of people, and so became a part of the problem and an object for revenge, rather than a solution ... and that's before anything else is considered and mentioned.

The consequences of the unremitting support for Pell - a distant, aloof and patrician man with few personal skills - has had consequences, but you won't find any of that reading the Devine ...

As is the usual way for the reptiles, after exploring all the options and the alternatives, Ferguson has to put the bit to the mouth ...

Beyond belief? Barely a ripple? Limited coverage in the Murdochian rags? While the Devine and the Bolter and others wax lyrical about the righteousness of the Pellists ...

Only a reptile could scribble that, and not see the issue at hand, and only a Devine could prove that beyond belief is entirely possible within a belief structure driven by fundamentalist Catholicism ...

But what else is to be expected of a faith that, beyond belief, proposes that people eat flesh and drink blood ... of the human spirit kind ...

Meanwhile, the pond continues to be remorseful about attending to Tony Abbott at such length yesterday.

Who knows how many fragile minds might have been broken, and driven, demented, into the desert, howling in pain at the moon and the sun?

The only excuse is that it was a necessary preamble to the work of the meme-sters ...