In which the pond forsakes the clickbaiters for the joys of the bromancer ...

Over the long, diligent years, the pond has slowly begun to understand reptile speak ... like Dr Dolittle, the pond walks with care amongst the creatures and occasionally manages to understand what they're trying to say ...

What Lloydie is saying has nothing to do with that line by Lord Alfred Douglas about the love that dare not speak its name ...

What Lloydie was actually saying was clickbait, clickbait, clickbait ...

Would you like some clickbait with that, of the purest, most shameless kind, as the google splash - spoiler alert - quickly revealed ...

None dare name nuclear energy?

They never shut up about it ...

Among his other regrets Mr Abbott listed not giving more consideration to a nuclear powered submarine ...

Lloydie included ...

And so on and on, but having wasted a nanosecond googling those - as you can too - and discovering dozens of examples, the pond decided it was easier to award Lloydie the pond's 'nuke the fridge' prize of the week ...

No doubt Lloydie included his usual healthy dose of climate denialism, but really the reptiles' very own Kudelka had already identified an alternative source of energy few dared to speak of, though it seems almost infinite in its possibilities ...

In much the same way the pond knew why the reptiles had elevated the dog botherer to the top of the digital fickle finger of fame page ...

... it's because endless monotonous repetition, rather like chanting a Latin mass, is what keeps the faithful happy ... and Kudelka in rich cartoon fodder ...

Actually the pond would like to nominate the dog botherer as the largest single contributor to the power crisis, though if he keeps writing columns about energy and climate science denialism, there might be a methane fart -ed recovery in the sector ...

But when it comes to the crunch, all these efforts are mere minor distractions from the main game ... for whenever there's a howl of existential pain from the bromancer the pond knows that a crazed dog stalks the moors, and it must blindly follow...

Now the pond has already noted that after war criminal Little Johnny's recent outburst, the reptiles raced to reassure the faithful that their man was on the case, and was deeply and truly focussed ...

This redemption should be kept in mind as the inquiring bromancer plunges into yet another seismic shift, yet another catastrophic chaotic week for Iberian Celtic culture, Catholics and white Christendom ...

Indeed, indeed. It is quite likely that Iberian Celtic culture will collapse completely, and by the end of the first week of SSM, as it has already done in such countries as Ireland, Spain and the Netherlands, where the main business of tourism these days is to show off the ruins ...

And yet, peculiarly and perversely, the bromancer insists on bringing about the complete and utter destruction of Iberian Celtic culture ... by suggesting he's going to vote in the very thing that promises to ruin the country, white Christendom and Catholicism...

What the pond loves is the way that the reptiles can reduce complex concepts and notions down to a single sentence.

There's a bunch of foolish wiki writers, doing their best for Greg Hunters, and writing hundreds of spurious words on the meaning and development of liberalism, with all its divergent and conflicting strains and tendencies, when all these foolish wretches needed to do was call on the bromancer for a breathtakingly simplistic one sentence summary ... followed immediately by a fatuous example ...

Indeed, indeed, that shocking and grotesque essay, up there with the bromancer's simplistic reduction of notions of liberalism to a sentence, still shamefully up at the ABC here, completely obscured one of the key questions for the ages ... WITRJ, or if you will, which is the real Jesus?

The answer is clear enough, and anyone who failed to nominate Jeffrey Hunter must go to the back of the class ...

As for the rest, the pond was completely befuddled ...

Sixty years ago, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan gave a wise answer to a fraught question. Brennan, who was Catholic, was asked at his confirmation hearing which would prevail in guiding him as a judge: his Catholic faith, or the law of the United States. He replied that he would be controlled by “the oath that I took to support the Constitution and laws of the United States and … that alone….” 
His answer has long stood as a gold standard for the judiciary. Today, Amy Coney Barrett, a Notre Dame law professor and Trump nominee for a federal judgeship, challenges that standard. Barrett wrote a law review article in 1998 entitled “Catholic Judges in Capital Cases.” In it, she and her co-author, John Garvey, took issue with Brennan’s famous statement, saying, “We do not defend this position as the proper response for a Catholic judge to take with respect to abortion or the death penalty.” ...
...Barrett herself once forcefully advanced an argument that a judge’s faith plays an instrumental role in determining how she does her job. It is entirely fair for a nominee to be questioned about her own relevant writings. 
That questioning should have become even more pointed when Barrett’s hearing took an unexpected turn. Having established that she believes recusal is the answer for a religious judge in a moral quandary, Barrett claimed in response to senators’ questions that she couldn’t “imagine … any class of cases” where faith would force her recusal. But Barrett has commented extensively about that very thing: cases that are morally difficult for a Catholic judge. The Judiciary Committee could have insisted on hearing how the same person who wrote that for Catholics the “prohibitions against abortion and euthanasia … are absolute” and that “Catholic judges … are morally precluded from enforcing the death penalty” could suddenly be at a loss for examples of cases she would avoid. Instead, the nominee was allowed to send mixed signals: Maybe she’d recuse, but more likely she wouldn’t. 
Meanwhile, Feinstein’s and other Democrats’ concerns about Barrett have generated a response from the far right that is both cynical and wholly predictable: bash progressives as anti-Catholic and anti-religion. (the full piece in the LA Times here).

But then the pond never really understood liberalism and the law. The pond always thought that the courts were designed to implement Catholic theology ... and save the cakes ...won't someone think of the cakes ...

And now because even great things must come to an end, a final gobbet from the bromancer ...

Now it's not the pond's job to identify where Catholics always go, and how they always go wrong ... the bromancer does that quite nicely without any help from the pond.

Even when he purports to be liberal or even when he breaks with the church on a matter such as SSM, even he attempts some kind of balance, the old prejudices kick in ...

The pond imagines that the effect is somewhat like weighted dice ... a gravitational tug from which there's no escape ...

Can the bromancer really believe he is helping any gay teenager who may feel psychologically vulnerable by falsely telling him or her or other that a large cohort of conservative politicians, led by the onion muncher, Erica, Cory and the like love them?

Who knows, but the pond always finds it interesting the way that bigotry can be constantly re-dressed so that it takes a different form ... so that somehow old-fashioned liberalism can end up in the same camp as fundamentalist deeply homophobic bigotry ...

But then Lloydie and the dog botherer is there to remind the pond that, in much the same way, climate denialism can be constantly re-dressed to take in new circumstances, but still helpfully point the way back to old denialist conclusions ...