In which the pond tackles petulant Peta and spares a moment to drive religious fundamentalism from the Devine public square ... or at least schools ...

The story so far this Sunday, at least stories not involving the commercial exploitation of mothers ...

Pett did a sequel to his cartoon, more Pett here,  and perforce the pond must now do a sequel featuring rabid Terrorist scribblers, with petulant Peta sounding exactly like Akker Dakker ...

Why this murmuration? Couldn't there just be one scribbler saying the same thing over and over again? Alas, it's not the reptile way ...

It's sublime to see the onion muncher's sock puppet out there socking it to ScoMo, and the pond delights in it, no matter if the splash is vertical or horizontal ...

See, it's not just the reptiles that can repeat themselves ...

And so to the great canard, that the boondogglers were great cutters ...

Google up John Howard and "middle class welfare", and there's a plethora of hits, with Craig Emerson at the top at the AFR here, but supported by Mark Crosby at The Conversation with Middle class welfare: terrific politics, but terrible economics ... and Mike Seccombe in The Saturday Paper offering non-subscribers their one free read for the week with Inside John Howard's legacy ...

There are many who, too young, or too busy chanting, remember nothing of Howard and Costello's cunning capacity to boondoggle, redistribute wealth and use fear as a political weapon ...

The onion muncher and his sock puppet learned the lesson too well, and produced that 2014 disaster, still lurking behind the blind (with more Moir here).

Back to the bitterness, barely concealed, as tear-inducing as biting into a raw chilli ... (the pond has a ripper garden of chillis) ...

There's nothing new here, not unless there's a big market for wine made out of sour grapes and sulks, so perhaps the pond should try to get rid of its glut of Trump cartoons ...

Now don't get the pond wrong. The pond is in favour of reptiles scribbling away thanks to the Murdochian welfare system. The fact that some game the system by repeating the same stuff over and over again shouldn't be held against genuine needfulness ...but that doesn't mean we should waste any misguided pseudo-compassion on the blatherers...

Contrast this ....

... with this ...

Of course the pond understands it's being gamed.

Each time someone like a petulant Peta or an Akker Dakker scribbles a tirade, it's almost as if we should be grateful that Malware is now at the helm ...

It won't change much, but at least it's a change from the nonsense dribbled by the onion muncher and his sock puppet, driven from power because of spectacular failure and remarkable ineptitude ...

And so, this being Sunday, to a little religious observance.

The pond was at first disturbed by that splash by Miranda the Devine about rising religious fundamentalism in schools ...

Being a secular atheist of the first water (though hopefully not too angry, even when confronted with an angry Sydney Anglican talking about complimentary women), the pond always gets agitated about religious fundamentalism, and especially any display of religion in school.

That's why the pond deplored the introduction of government funded chaplains, and gets agitated in proper French style laïcité.

Back in its Francophile Godardian days, the pond was big on laïcité, which can be Greg Hunted here, and which explains it is a French concept of secularism.

It encourages the absence of religious involvement in government affairs, especially the prohibition of religious influence in the determination of state policies; it is also the absence of government involvement in religious affairs, especially the prohibition of government influence in the determination of religion. Dictionaries ordinarily translate laïcité as "secularity" or "secularism" (the latter being the political system), although it is sometimes rendered in English as laicity or laicism by its opponents.[citation needed] While the term was first used with this meaning in 1871 in the dispute over the removal of religious teachers and instruction from elementary schools, the word laïcisme dates to 1842.

Well yes, there shouldn't be any displays concerning religion in state secularist schools.

So the pond was right onside at the notion of Islamic fundamentalist getting out of hand, in much the same way as the pond gets agitated about the Federal government funding scientology schools, Exclusive Brethren schools, evangelical schools that teach creationism as being a valid alternative to evolution, and climate science as just something designed to offend the pastie Hastie form of federal politician, or Catholic schools intent on persuading students that cannibalism, devouring actual human blood and flesh, was the way to salvation ...

Until the pond came to this ...

She was wearing a Christian cross around her neck? WTF?

Why on earth would you wear a cross? It's insensitive and inflammatory. It'd be like the pond wearing its "religion is the opiate of the people" T-shirt inside a church. The trick is to hide the way that a secular atheist stands looking at the stained glass windows in admiration, with none of the devout realising that there's Satan in their midst.

When the pond was briefly a teacher, religion of any kind was a no-no. There was the practical problem of some barking mad fundamentalist storming in to berate anyone who'd dared mix religion with teaching, but there was also the simple matter that it wasn't the school's or the teacher's business to ram any kind of religion, or atheism, down the throats of students ...

If they wanted to learn bigoted fundamentalism, they could head off to a state-funded private school for that, and in due course, turn into Devines of the rabid kind ...

Even worse, the Devine doubled down on the notion of cross-wearing as a good thing, and the reptiles supplied a gross, grotesque illustration ...

Forget the barking mad Islamic fundamentalists. The pond found that wearing of the cross, with bonus bible, grossly offensive and inflammatory, and quickly had lit a torch and was at the front of the crowd shouting "burn the witch" ... if you look closely, you can see the pond at an earlier outing when we were hunting Catholics of the fundamentalist Devine kind...

And so to another Trump cartoon, as the pond tries to clear excess stock at bargain prices ...