In which the pond is saved from an Oreo-free day by the dog botherer, and a late-breaking Major Mitchell ...

Every so often the pond faces a major crisis, and one happened this morning.

No Oreo treat.

The pond couldn't believe it. How would we hear about the decline of the west and the collapse of western civilisation?

Oh sure, people could rush off to read Spengler, and the silly old grump scribbling about the winter time of Faustian civilisation here ... and observe how the clueless one didn't see Hitler about to loom up in his headlights ... in much the same way as the Oreo didn't have a clue about the Donald ...

But there's nothing like distilled essence of Oreo on a Monday to get the week off to a good start ...

And then an equally gigantic calamity struck ... no Major Mitchell, analysing how the weak and effete liberal inner city elite, or middle class or whatever, media are producing a collapse in western civilisation ... seemingly unaware that it was Fox News that did its level best to get the Donald into power, and has applauded the mayhem and chaos that followed ...

Regarding the Major, more of that anon - luckily the reptiles were just trying to mind fuck the pond, and induce a queasy feeling of uncertainty and despair, perhaps to make the sugar taste all the sweeter and addictive when it finally arrived ...

As for the Oreo, luckily, there's always a substitute reptile ready to step up to the plate, and in this case it's a rolled gold performer, and a minor war criminal to boot, still waiting to get his Order of Lenin medal for his services in the Iraq war (the pond thought it should tip off Major Mitchell so he could embark on a hunt for it), and look, for his diligent efforts, he was top of the digital opinion page ...

Now happily "love media" isn't a term that applies to the pond, which is a good hater, though it thinks the hate is best done by laughter, and what a richly paranoid comedy gem the dog botherer has produced this day ...

It reads as if he's gone as nutty as an Xmas fruit cake ...

There's much to pick from in this morass of mindless nonsense, but please allow the pond to start with the obvious. 

You see, it, and poor mugs on welfare, couldn't pour themselves a stiff drink because drinkies aren't allowed any more, thanks to mindless moralising and virtue-signalling going on from that notorious drunk, the onion muncher ...

As prattling Polonius might say, can you miaow it?

And what about that dog botherer line about Twitter being disrespectful, while talking in a snide and sneering way, like some infantile idiot on Twitter, about the "Love Media" ...

What sort of response does a gormless twit expect when he applies that broad tar brush to anyone who doesn't have the blinkered capacity to be a minor war criminal just like him?

It goes without saying that fuckwits who troll with that sort of line aren't really interested in respect, they're interested in combat, and then they go into a sulk when a Twitter storm ravages the shit out of their monumental stupidity and offensiveness ...

As for the rest, it's just more of the same old hate media shyte from the dog botherer, with all the usual talking points.

He's now such a grotesque travesty of himself and the routine reptile talking points that the pond likes to think of him as a cabaret artist in the Weimar republic ... like his old boss ...

Now that's the sort of clobber designed to clobber the Iraqis into a live and let live understanding of the world ...

The pond hopes that the talk of a centralised media clique will resonate long in the Surry Hills bunker wherein the centralised media clique of Murdochians somehow manages to infest the bulk of what's left of the tree killer media in Australia ... but there's no point talking sense to a paranoid apparently convinced he's in possession of the facts, or at least a decent pair of leopard-skin patterned high heels ...

Actually the pond needs the dog botherer, or more journalists of the Murdochian kind, like it needs a hole in the head or a dog turd on the lounge room rug ...

The pond has had more than enough climate denialism, religious fundamentalism, homophobia, bigotry dressed up as political incorrectness, and such like, to last several life times ...

Speaking of several life times of self-serving drivel for the ages, the Major Mitchell arrived late, but better late than never, because the parrot was in top form ...

Devoted followers of the Major will at last discover just why he's so obsessed with tracking Orders of Lenin ...

Now before getting on to the Major's skewed view of the world, the pond would just like to pause to contemplate the way that Stan Grant is labelled an "activist" journalist ...

Presumably this means that the Major is himself a passivist. And the Bolter is some kind of passivist too ...

Well the pond has no idea what sort of sex lives they have, and good luck to them whatever it is, but if  'activist' is going to be flung around like confetti as a term of abuse, perhaps the Major should consider his position. Does he really think he's a passivist? Is there so much wrong with being an activist screeching in the Murdochian press for your supper? Has he ever thought of becoming a genuine passivist to show Grant how it's done?

As for the causes of the American civil war, the pond was forced to do several units on this godforsaken waste of time, involving endless navel-gazing by American historians.

About the only thing to note is the way that white nationalists and supremacists always trot out economic arguments and Lincoln's ambivalent attitude to slavery and all the rest of the palaver designed to dismiss or diminish the issue of race.

By this accounting, you'd swear that the festering sore of race in America, which has consumed the country since slavery began, was just some minor irritant, and not a central issue in the civil war.

Still, it's good to know that the Major is comfortable amongst his white nationalist brethren.

It turns out that he's also a comfortable member of the "terra nullius" mob, and seems extremely comfortable with the notion that Captain Cook discovered Australia ...

And then comes the Major Mitchell master-stroke ... where else to go, what else to plug, than the Sky show Outsiders?

And what do you know, as we read on, we learn it's all fault of those uppity feisty useless middle class blacks, daring to speak up and even worse for having made their way in the world.

The pond's been caught before in this war between the urban and the bush mobs, and doesn't care to go there again, but there's a double bind here.

One moment the NT is worth an invasion, so dire is the situation, with all the drinking and the violence, and the next moment, anyone who's turned into a Stan Grant deserves a knee-capping.

Well we can't have any of that nonsense about successful blacks. We all know what that means.

Uppity.

If you can't get them for being useless welfare bludgers, you can certainly ping them for being middle-class navel-gazers, unlike passivist lumpenproletarians like the Major, who are resolutely outside the middle class and the AB demographic and certainly can never be found in a certain Surry Hills bunker deep in the heart of the privileged coffee-sippers...

We should all be mature enough to understand history? What, like Fox News and the Donald ...

Nobody's pretending that nothing happened when Cook turned up on his tour, or that Governor Phillip didn't establish a penal colony.

Nobody but a trolling fuckwit would use that line of argument. What was suggested was that Cook didn't discover the country, that there were actual people here before him and they'd discovered the joint, and the pond isn't just talking about the Portuguese ...

Moral vandalism? If the pond had led with the sort of arguments that the Major Mitchell trotted out, Russell Ward would have handed out a sound thrashing. Oh wait, didn't he have an Order of Lenin too?

So there it goes. Another day done and dusted, and if the pond wants any commentary on, or insight into, the government, or the media/political class, or history, it'll turn to the cartoonists who manage in a single image to make more sense than all the incontinent dribble the dog botherer or the Major offer up on a seemingly never-ending, relentlessly expanding basis ...

And so it's helpful to note that a cartoon can usually be found here each day at The Canberra Times, a regional rag ... a rag useful enough when compared to the crow-eating gazette once known as The Advertiser, before the chairman killed off his Adelaide tabloid, took over the 'Tiser, and blighted it with the likes of the dog botherer ... so that even the fish and the chips began to complain about being wrapped in the hate media ...

Think  of the result as Schrödinger's media, since like Malware's government, the dog botherer and the Major give every impression of being alive, while dead in the head...