In which the pond prattles with Polonius, but goes elsewhere for the laughs ...

The reptiles never fail to please, astonish and delight.

Fancy paying genuine hard cash, for either tree killing celebration of progressives in white flight or digital outrage over gay protocols ...

The pond hands it to Rebecca Urban ... for maintaining the bigotry and the rage, she is the crème de la crème of reptiles, though the pond feels slightly nauseous at the thought of all that crème merde ...

Yes, there's a host of crème reading this weekend, in the usual reptile way ... just look at the bromancer as an inspiration ...

Best friends? Yes, if you wanted a friendly dog around the home, always wagging its tale, and with a moist noise, and ready to lick you all over at the drop of a salivating hat, surely a bromancer canine saying 'let's be best friends' would be your first choice...

Or perhaps we should use the metaphor of the school playground, where best friends and besties are all the go ... just think of the bromancer with his new bestie ...

Meanwhile, there was this poignant juxtaposition on offer ...

Everywhere progressives rampant, and leftists dominant.

Is there no end to the suffering of the reptiles of Oz? Oh long absent lord, why have you forsaken them? Why do you not relieve them of their torment?

It would of course be a form of soft bigotry, striking the harder blow, to ignore Noel Pearson, descending deeper into madness, but who could resist prattling Polonius in his hour of need?

Now right there in that splash the pond was consternated.

Do a Greg Hunt, and you'll discover in a post-truth way that "the contemporary origin of the term is attributed to blogger David Roberts who used the term in 2010 in a column for Grist" (with the usual warning about watching out for stray walri, you can join Greg Hunt here).

However you cut it in a post-truth way, from 2010 to 2016 isn't a couple of decades ...so the pond deemed it wise from the get-go to hunt out the Oxford definition here ...

Thus armed with a post-truth understanding of the truthiness of the word - Colbert really was within his rights to claim paternity in this post-Orwellian world - the pond plunged into its ponderous, portentous weekend pleasure of a rattling good prattling Polonius read ...

But before the pond began, it wondered whether this column might provide definitive proof of the complete and utter humourlessness which routinely grips the pedantic Polonius ...

Let us see ...

Well there's the answer to one question. Prattling Polonius is definitively bereft of humour in any form.

Even worse, Polonius is bereft of a sense of irony. How else to explain a goose who would rail at the use of 'objective facts' as a telling phrase, raising the spectre of the strange entity of 'subjective facts', only to go on, two pars later to talk of 'objective interests', as if this was somehow in contrast to the strange entity of 'subjective interests' and 'objective facts' ...

But it got even more seriously weird and bizarre in that final par of the gobbet, and Polonius daring to raise matters of theological belief and truth ... "the facts concerning which cannot be established on this earth."

It was at this point that the pond realised that Polonius was in fact a heretic, destined to spend a lifetime writhing in hellfire ...

As any theologian or that whore of Babylon, the Catholic Church, will tell you, it is entirely easy to establish the truth of religious beliefs on this earth ...

The Catholic catechism is littered with examples, as in this bit about social truth ...

Yes, the church receives the full revelation of the truth about man, and possibly even woman.

It just escapes Polonius ... (get your full catechism here, there will be questions, tests, and marks, and if you fall behind Kazakhstan, there will be consequences).

As for scientific matters, the Church knows the truth about such things ...

 

And naturally this leads on to a greater understanding of truth ...

Who would even try to argue that the truth can't ever contradict the truth? (and more such exquisite insights here).

Now perhaps the pond should clarify.

It is no feeble French relativist, nor on most days does it imagine it is but a component of a butterfly's nightmare, which will vanish when the butterfly awakes, or a minor component in a computer game which will cease its activity in a minor dimension (there being zillions of dimensions) when someone turns off the power. Sadly, the life of an organism and organic termination is a much simpler explanation ...and if you want to do a test for gravity, try jumping off a tall building to see if you're living in a comic book, or playing a character in a movie ...

In much the same non-relativist light, and without reference to progressives - the pond loathes the term - or to lefties - the pond has never regarded itself as of the left - it can be asserted that the campaign to do a Brexit was loaded with self-serving lies, untruths, distortions and fear-mongering of the Boris kind ...

That there were real fears - and that there was real pain, ready to be exploited - does nothing to hide the lies of the Boris kind ...

Similarly, whether talking objectively or subjectively, it can be safely said that the Donald is an exemplary bald-faced liar, a man who routinely, daily, hourly, tweets and spouts lies, fabrications, distortions, untruths, errors and stupidities in a way that makes the average politician's lies seem like the work of a child still in nappies or kindergarten ...

To say otherwise is to live in the world of Polonius, and so we must now, after this lengthy detour, return to the final gobbet of this relativist Satanist destined for an eternity in hell ...

Such a stupid man ...

That story at the Independent, here,  and the pond would be beavering away until the New Year to track all the lies that the Donald told in his path to power ...

But there is one truth to emerge from all this, and it's not Polonius's ability to be infallibly ponderous, portentous and silly.

It's his infinite capacity to be humourless and to refuse to see the funny side of all the lying that expert liars have been peddling (next week ... Polonius defends fake news stories as a way of getting to the truth of a matter).

For humour, and a bit of truth-telling, the last bastion of hope, the pond always turns to the clowns ...