In which the pond shares another Oreo, and sees no future or hope in attempting to reform the reptiles ...

Oh please miss, please miss, oh please, puh-lease miss, please pick me, pick me ...

Pick the pond ... you see, not so long ago, the pond discovered people rolling out brand new ancient thirty year old technology of the HFC kind in the neighbourhood, no doubt in due course ready to hook up with Queen Victoria's copper to deliver a splendid new age of intertubes connectivity ... so that all the HFC people can fuck each other up, and the speed slows and the complaints swell to a shrill chorus ...

Ah, it's as if rolling out pay TV was only yesterday ...

And so to an apology and an explanation.

Many years ago, the pond used to argue with the reptiles, copy down their points and rebut them, point out the errors in their ways, and suggest, in a polite way, the many alternative understandings of the world that they might consider adopting ...

It was useless, worse than futile. A bit like expecting the seventy year old Donald to change. He's a deeply corrupt businessman, accustomed to bankruptcy and to stiffing creditors and sundry wives, and he's never going to change.

It's like arguing with fundamentalist religious kooks. No matter what you say, they'll keep believing. If Malcolm Roberts believes he's not British with all his heart, that's his reality. And it works with climate science too ...

So it is with the reptiles. They operate at such a deep paranoid level of conviction that to expect them to engage in sensible discussion involves a level of optimism that's way beyond the pond's experience. 

They're driven by personal demons and mad, compulsive, irrational faith, or, at the basic level of the ordinary reptile grunt, by a pay cheque from the chairman to drink the kool aid and sing the corporate song.

There's nothing in the business model of a Bolter which would recommend moderation and sensible discussion. His entire persona and public presence depends on a rarely repressed, completely irrational hysteria ...and so it is with the other reptiles who grace the pond's pages.

It's a bit like the pet python that used to be in the family. Set it loose from its hot rock and it would blindly blunder over the mantelpiece, knocking things helter skelter, and roam around leaving its waste and its smell everywhere (not the smooth dry sinewy snake skin, lovely to touch, but the vague smell of snake that the waste evoked). 

It was in its nature, and no matter how reproving and reprimanding the snake's owner might be, the reptile never listened ... and if the mantelpiece was cleared of things it might destroy, it would find fresh ingenious ways to wreak havoc and and destruction. Oh look, there's a hi fi system ...

So it is with the reptiles of Oz. Feed them a dead rat of the kind they love, and watch the jaws distend, and gaze in fascinated awe as the reptiles do their thing ... but don't expect them to change their ways.

Speaking of dead rats, this day was typical ... look at the way reptile DD was given a special treat, and away he munched, contented in his work ...

How they yearn, how they hate the ABC, how bizarre that they see this as the only way to fix their business model and keep the dead rats coming.

And did the recent heat produce anything other than a tepid note that it's been pleasantly warm?

Of course not. The reptiles love their hot rock and their merry Xmas in July, so all is well, because isn't winter warmth just as good as a Santa wonderland ... (sssh, that person who mentioned climate change, go to the back of the room and put on the dunce cap).

Now occasionally the senior reptiles do try to look balanced, as a way of seeming to be cute and appealing to those in search of non-alternative facts...

You see, this day, to balance the Oreo, there's a vow to vote on gay vows, and elsewhere in the digital edition, to balance the Oreo on the UN,  there's talk of the criminal Brexit shambles ...

... perhaps in the hope that we'd forget that for months the Oreo raged about the importance of Brexit ...just as we'll no doubt be asked in due course to forget how she loves the Donald so ...as the reptiles begin to run stories along the lines 'Republican White House shambles criminal' ...

But in the end, the reptiles want the Oreo to howl at the moon in the usual barking mad way. It's an essential part of the business model ...

It's the mother of all lies, because of course the reptiles rely heavily on 'facts' that are so alternative, so weird, so out there, that the use of 'fact' is deeply post-modernist and post-ironic ...

And it regularly produces even more irony ...

Okay, the first google listing is for the Oreo seven or so hours ago, and below it is another tirade, a hearty rant about the UN, which first popped up way back in January at the start of the year ...

Of course, of course ...

It's another reminded that the Oreo - as well as being a biscuit of little brain - can only produce so many variants, and frequently returns to the same dead rat to give it a good worrying. It's rather - to mix the metaphors - like the fox terrier that was once in the family that would take the dead rat out the back and bury it in the Tamworth sun, then every so often, return to drag the rat back out and gnaw away at it ...

Come on dead rat UN, it's time for that first gnawing ...

And that's probably been the longest introduction the pond has ever done to the latest Oreo, as she returns once more to savage her favourite dead UN rat ...

Now some will want to argue with the Oreo, but just watching the Oreo gnaw away is enough for the pond.

The sheer delight, the sheer fun of watching the Oreo have at the rat is enough. There's no point in arguing, there's no point in discussing ...

The pond might just add a footnote at the splendid irony in the Oreo fancying that she's remotely liberal ... but that's as far as it goes ...

You note the cleverness of the Oreo? The wicked UN dared to suggest that the Donald might be a worry, but he's determined to build walls and stop travel so that free societies might be free ... to live behind a wall ...

And so on and so forth. It's incredibly cute, a rich mixture of lemon tartiness and creaminess of the kind the pond commends to others every Monday ...

This is what Australian universities have conspired to produce ... the smartest of the smart, the best rat catchers in the world ...

Others might suggest that while the UN is deeply flawed it is perhaps good for countries to get together and have a chin wag, rather than deploy the nukes.

If the UN wasn't around, surely an alternative would have to be invented, and likely enough it would be riven by the same sort of compromises and wobbly structures designed to pander to powerful interests of the nuke-wielding kind ...

The League of Nations went nowhere, and the second world war erupted ... and the pond suspects that a similar result with the UN would deeply please the Oreo...

The Oreo doesn't seem much interested in sane international relations ... She likes to feud and fight and fuss in a deeply illiberal way ...

Like most of the rat-gnawing reptiles, the Oreo has a bee in her bonnet - actually it's more like a beehive and a swarm of bees - and by golly, she's going to buzz at some fair length ...

Actually the pond doesn't need to do anything. 

The pond doesn't need to acknowledge anything, and the pond especially doesn't have to argue with the Oreo, though the pond is freely willing to acknowledge that there's something deeply rotten and weird in the state of the Oreo's brain. 

But that's as far as the pond might go. It happens to have reptile watching as a personal hobby, and the more threatening the reptiles are, the more weird and barking mad, the more poisonous they are, the more the pond thrills to and marvels at the weirdness and the danger ...

D. H. Lawrence caught the ambivalence in his poem to a snake, which can be found in full here ... for in Australia, the reptile of Oz is of the venomous kind ...

And so on and so forth, and so on to comrade Bill up in a tree, as a HFC copper-loving toffy sheriff rides by in an open carriage, with more Robin Rowe of the AFR here ...