Day 42, and the pond is all at sea with the Francophobe Bolter ...

Whatever else - and there's possibly not much else - the Bolter is a great hater.

And once he develops a phobia, a passion, the hate is relentless.

Anyone, anything in the path of the hate cops a hearty dose of collateral damage. Even as good a hater as Miranda the Devine is no match for the Bolter when his dander is up and his furious fur is flying ...

Which is why the pond must once more trudge through the wasteland of the subs that so rivets the Malware haters ...

Typically, the Bolter doesn't worry too much about any of the real issues.

Instead he lathers up a fine form of Francophobia, paranoia and fear-mongering ...

Now that bit about the French-built Mirage jets in Vietnam is worth a moment's cogitation, thanks to Trove - well at least thanks to Trove for the moment, while the Malware government slashes and burns one of the great contributions to Australian culture and history ...

Now the pond understands where the Bolter is coming from ...

But shouldn't readers of the Terror and the HUN expect a little better than farting, fear-mongering and tricolore paranoia?

What a remarkable conflation, and how disturbing that the Swedes should have so cunningly prevented the Collins-class submarines from participating in many wars ... as opposed to the under-performing, under-staffed, noisy subs not being up to much at all ...

The point of course is that the Bolter, as an ethnicist and a racist, always refracts policy issues through this particularly dark set of fieldglasses ...

Next week, he might just as easily have penned a piece about the perfidious Germans - ssssh, don't mention the war or Volkswagen, or the perfidious Japanese - ssssh, don't mention the war or the lurking Samurai spirit...

By concentrating on the perfidious French, in his own inimitable way the Bolter manages to miss the real point of the lengthy delivery schedule.

He wouldn't have needed to look very far afield to find real discussion starters, such as the Graudian's New Trident submarines doomed by drones of the future, says new report ...

And so on - there's links and more at the link - and that story concludes this way ...

Just as ASW technology evolves, so will measures to counter that technology. At worst, the UK could resort to the ‘bastion’ strategy followed by Russia, to deploy ‘boomers’ under extensive air and sea protection to make them as invulnerable as possible. Ultimately, the same questions will remain: whether the UK should have nuclear weapons at all given their huge and indiscriminate destructive power and the unlikelihood of ever being used, and whether the country can afford to put so much reliant on a weapon whose reliability can henceforward never be taken for granted.

One of the pond's favourite sayings - generals always fight the last war - comes into play here, but all the Bolter's got as his main card is ethnic bigotry.

There are bigger cans of worms around in the defence industry than ethnic bigotry ... but you wouldn't know it from the Bolter.

The hapless French are in fact just substitutes, bystanders, caught up in the Bolter's rage against Malware ... a rage that grows by the day and in relation to almost any decision that Malware's government makes.

The pond suspects that if the Germans had got the gig, the Bolter would have delivered a similar sort of rant ... only the Japanese, pre-approved by the onion muncher, would have escaped his wrath, and never mind that the same strategic, build and delivery questions would still have been on the table. Was it so long ago that the Pig Iron Bob tag did the rounds?

But once the Bolter takes a set, like a terrible two, he maintains the prejudice with a deep, fierce, unwavering hostility and anger ...

... almost any other likely supplier would be a safer bet ...

Is this dumb, or what?

It's that sort of profoundly stupid generalisation that gives the game away, and helps explain the reason for the ethnic bigotry.

How far will the Bolter go in his desire to destroy Malware?

The Bolter's rant is a weird opposite to the parochial, nationalistic way that the Malware government - and the poodle, in dire electoral peril - peddled the decision ...

Pin that twittering twit tweeting away!

Never mind, surely this is the last time the pond need consider the matter of the subs, in the context, thanks to the Bolter, of the perfidious French ...

Besides, only one more sleep and everybody has been promised all kinds of prezzies.

Thank the long absent lord all that reptile talk about how none of us needed any more prezzies has been forgotten.

Let the largesse and the pork barreling, in a seemly and stately way, begin ... and more Rowe here ...