Day 82 of MUC and day 35 of MOC, and the pond turns to a safe pair of prattling old hands ...

Being deeply conservative, the pond likes to start the weekend with safe, reliable old hands.

Expert sales folk selling the pond what it needs ...TruCoat ... copper wiring ... the Tandy 1000 ... why the pond wept to be reminded of DeskMate ...

And is there a safer, more reliable pair of hands than good old Prattling Polonius ... why he's just the old codger the pond needs to confront these wretched whirling dervishes and their Satanist ways ...

Tax the church? This will not, this cannot stand ...

Yes, the pond should have realised. Tax Scientology, tax the Islamics, tax the Spaghetti mob? 

Of course not, it's all about the Catholics. It's always about the Catholics in Polonius's world of prattle...

Indeed, indeed. What they do instead is keep blathering on about the sanctity of the church in the lizard Oz ...

Or perhaps they boldly strike out into the world of heresy, ignore the church's teachings in relation to faith and morals, and end up locked in hellfire for all eternity ...

Hmm, seems an easy enough choice ...

Let's see if the safe pair of hands picked the more walked road ...

It's a particularly sublime form of logic. You see, you make out like bandits, escape paying taxes, run all sorts of dodges and wheezes, stick your paw out for taxpayer funds, and then turn around and claim you do charity work for free ... on the basis that the one hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing ... and the incomings have nothing to do with the outgoings ... and it's all free, don't you see?

The Catholic church has been particularly adept at these tricks ...the Ellis Defence was a culmination of careful planning ...

In August 1996, Archbishop Pell discussed the idea of creating a special trust to "avoid an open-ended call on funding for counselling fees" for abuse victims, to only days later canvass suggestions of how the church could financially support three paedophile priests set to be released from prison. Meetings also describe plans for multimillion-dollar property deals and commissioning a new painting of the archbishop, while senior leaders were also expressing concern about "being seen to apply the maximum penalty" against paedophile priests, the protection of church assets and their own exposure to liability in sexual abuse lawsuits. (and so on at L'Age here).

As for poor old Polonius's point that no one has put up a 'tax the mosque' poster, it's the purest form of disingenuous dissembling, a master stroke from a safe pair of hands.

It works on the notion that a mosque is not a church, a truly classy example of specious humbug.

Here's the thing. Tax the church means tax the church which is to say, tax the church, tax the mosque, tax the temple, tax the synagogue, tax the tabernacle, tax the shrine, tax the abbey, the basilica, the cathedral, the chancel, the chantry, the sacellum, the house of prayer, the house of worship, the Lord's house, whichever Lord that might be, and if necessary, tax the suppliers of spaghetti so that worshippers of same are required to pay their fair share ...

As for trading off on Mary MacKillop and the Josephites ... even a cursory look at the history of the early days would reveal it was the church that financed the houses and schools for that order, and it was the taxpayer that let the church off the hook so that it might do so ...

That's the way Ponzi schemes have always worked ... leverage and acquisition and ducking and weaving and passing the bill to others ...

The pond always loves it when conservatives assure the pond that there's no such thing as a free lunch ... but there should be a free wafer washed down with a bit of free wine, thanks to the generosity of the taxpayer helping to keep things free ...

Does the Church of Scientology pay tax on the sales of E-meters?

Who knows, but it surely is a piquant sight to see good old prattling Polonius defending the right of scam artists to get away with a plum boondoggle ...

Of course in the United States they take it more seriously, but the more Polonius prattles his humbug, the more people are likely to take it seriously down under as times get tougher and people begin to wonder why the rorters should be allowed to go on with their rorting ways ...