In which Polonius provides a safe pair of claws ...

By golly, the reptiles are in top form this day, in full loping stride, and what a feast awaits the unsuspecting gourmet ...

But it's not just the killing of trees in the righteous cause of listening to elder statesperson Tony Abbott, or marvelling at the reptile bromancer's concept of what "toning it down" means, look at the line up in the commentariat section:

And that's just a sample!.

Now in these crazed, confused, difficult and troubling times, the pond likes to go straight to a safe pair of hands, paws or claws if you will, someone adept at history, someone acutely capable of cutting-edge insights.

It's true that some young people might be inclined to consider the analysis of prattling Polonius as the senile ramblings of an irrelevant old goat, as useful as a moustache guard ...

But the pond knows for a fact that Newtown hipsters are urgently in need of moustache guards, which are a coming trend, an incipient new fad - try a virtual moustache guard app today - and so we must press on with prattling Polonius's latest set of insights ...

Now this is surely a splendid insight. There is simply no room for satire, irony, or humour in the world of desiccated coconuts ... and prattling Polonius. 

Pomposity certainly shouldn't be pricked, which is just as well, because that stops anyone approaching Polonius's balloon with a needle ...

Now pedants might note that Williams, by Polonius's very own quotation,  spoke generally about terrorist attacks in France, and indeed many of these have been based upon people coming out of Syria and Iraq ,and Turkey has been the key thoroughfare for many of these people.

The fact that the Nice attack was performed by a terrorist with Tunisian connections doesn't make the general statement untrue, unless one happens to believe that everything happens in the splendid ivory tower of complete isolation from reality (though this might be true of people who dwell in remote institutions such as the Sydney Institute).

Nor does being reminded that the Charlie Hebdo killers were born in France with an Algerian heritage remove Syria and Iraq from the equation.

It is, even within the pond's limited understanding, breathtakingly stupid to assert that the Nice attack had nothing to do with Syria or Iraq.

We know, for example, of the Nice killer that ... from 1 July, Lahouaiej-Bouhlel made more or less daily internet searches for verses of the Koran and "nasheeds" - jihadist propaganda chants. He also researched the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Fitr. Investigators found photos of dead bodies and images linked to radical Islamism on his computer, including the flag of so-called Islamic State, the cover of an issue of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo - attacked by gunmen in January 2015 - and photos of Osama bin Laden and Algerian jihadist Mokhtar Belmokhtar. (BBC here)

It might in passing be noted that the so-called Islamic State - Daesh to the pond - has some proximity to Syria and Iraq.

And speaking of Charlie Hebdo, we know, for example, about Charlie Hebdo killer Chérif Kouachi, 32, that he had worked as a pizza delivery boy and was a pot-smoking rap fan before coming under the influence of a preacher at the Addawa mosque where he lived near the Stalingrad metro station in northern Paris. In 2005 he was arrested before travelling to Syria, from where he'd intended to travel to Iraq to fight against US and coalition forces there. In 2008 he was convicted for involvement in a network sending fighters to Iraq. He told the court that he was motivated by US troops’ abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. (here).

Now however you cut it, it might be reasonable to suggest that some of these attacks had just a little to do with Syria and Iraq and Daesh and the whole damn thing, compounded by the wretched government of Erdoğan, which is rapidly turning Turkey into a failed state, and which has in the past provided easy passage for people wanting to join Daesh.

And yet somehow, as our insight for the day, we get the "Nice attack had nothing to do with Syria, Iraq or Turkey. It was the result of a murderous rage by a local Islamist" ...

... because local Islamists in a murderous rage act in splendid isolation, entirely cut off from the world ... like those who work in the Sydney Institute.

It was this sort of compelling insight that compelled the pond to go on ...

It was around this point that the pond felt compelled to head off to Q and A, a show it doesn't like and doesn't watch, to check the actual transcript, freely available online here and therefore something that Polonius could have reverted to at the drop of a hat or the click of a mouse.

In fact, she did say we haven't had terrorism on our streets before, and it's only in the last decade that we've experienced it, and so the pond's immortal invocation of the 1915 Battle of Broken Hill - two former camel drivers killing four and wounding seven in the cause of the Ottoman empire - becomes a mere academic sticking point.

The trouble for Polonius was that Jones wasn't just picking up on Hanson's immediate comments, he was also reverting to comments she had made earlier, too early it would seem for them to have been noted or registered by Polonius.

And so to a final gobbet ...

Now on the matter of Croatian misbehaviour, try Slackbastard's Croatian fascism in Australia (well a Collingwood supporter shouldn't automatically be described as a practising Satanist) and this at The Independent here. And there's a wiki here which handily lists major terrorism events in Australia.

Events surrounding Croatian terrorism remain very murky, as does the matter of the Hilton bombing, and all the pond can say with absolute certainty is that religion played a role, and that in Croatian matters, there was a healthy mix of fascism and Catholic fundamentalism... of a kind which even reached Adelaide, where the pond resided, thanks to a certain Despoja.

Indeed, indeed, rational argument is the only useful way of addressing contentious matters ... which makes the pond wonder why Polonius gets so irrational whenever the Catholic church is mentioned.

Is it because believing bread into flesh and wine into blood, and cannibalistic ritual drinking and consumption of same, strikes some disinterested observers as inclined to complete irrationality? As bizarre and as irrational as Islamic fundamentalists thinking they're heading off to paradise for an eternity of sex with ever-erect penises that never soften?

Stupid, stupid, stupid. How's that for a rational argument?

Never mind, the pond much prefers denial, ridicule or abuse, especially when it's Jon Stewart taking down Hannity, better known as Lumpy.

Hey Lumpy, and how the pond misses Stewart. Those days have gone, but what good days they were. The only reason Fox deserved to exist is so that Stewart might ... though the pond would trade Stewart enjoying retirement for the complete destruction of Hannity and Fox.