In which the pond howls along with Moorice ...

The pond immediately cleared the decks. Moorice! The stuff of Marxist dreams! Judeo-Christian civilisation!

Western society! Suddenly good old Maggie sounds like a useless git in Moorice's world ...

Indeed, indeed, fuck Margaret Thatcher and anyone who supported her ...

Oops, who could that be? Why it was Moorice announcing that public broadcasting was in its death throes, and good old Maggie was the gal for the job for a bit of Beeb bashing ... (and you can google if it you like, because it's in the lizard Oz).

Moorice is inclined to be erratic - he can turn up on any day of the week in the lizard Oz, whenever the muse inspires him and he's moved by impending catastrophe and complete and utter roon ... but whenever he does, the pond jumps to attention immediately.

Some days it's climate science, but lately not so much, even if he's one of the world's greatest climate scientists, thanks to sound investments in coal, and the google splash hints at the real cause of the problem ...

Gender free toilets! And dammit, there's the pond unwittingly using a gender free toilet every day of its domestic life ... no wonder the pond was rooned ...

Now whenever Moorice gets going, the pond likes to get in the right mood. Perhaps there could be a moment watching Burt Lancaster weave his magic as Elmer Gantry, pronouncing on the wickedness of the world, though it seems it's not nearly so much fun as hard liquor and a good fuck ...

Or what about this poem, a crazed, dishevelled thing, glassy eyed and rambling, and shouting at clouds ...

And so on and on, and some might even at this moment prefer to head off and read that Howl in full here ... but genuine Moorice addicts know it's just a warm-up exercise, in much the same way a soprano tickles the tonsils before taking flight ...

And right there from the get go is the reason the pond loves Moorice.

He's deeply aware of his proud status as one of the great memes, and in a referential, reflexive, post-modernist, post-ironic way, he's always willing to invoke his tinfoil hat status ...

Of course he doesn't need a tinfoil hat to see the destruction of western civilisation ... it comes naturally ...

Once people abandoned coal, what else could there be but wicked depravity? Or neo-Marxists, and radical feminists swarming like a pack of tormenting cards ...

Indeed, indeed, and at this point, the pond is always tormented. Should it show the suffering of a besieged Moorice?

Or should it show Moorice's intransigent, resolute defiance?

Oh the gatling might be jammed and the square broken and red with blood, but dammit Moorice will play on for the empire ... though what he might make of the truly weird Rhodes is never quite clear ...

For Greg Hunters here, there's delicious talk in the Rhodes' will of a secret society ...

To and for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire and, finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible, and promote the best interests of humanity.

Barking mad, and filthy rich to boot, all loot built on ripping off the blacks, so it's passing strange that the uppity blacks don't seem to have the first clue about the benefits he spread.

And it would be unseemly for the pond to suggest that Moorice's hero suffers from that which Moorice deems an affront to civilised imperialists and colonialists as they go about their work ...

Rhodes never married, pleading, "I have too much work on my hands" and saying that he would not be a dutiful husband. Some writers and academics have suggested that Rhodes may have been homosexual. The scholar Richard Brown observed: "On the issue of Rhodes' sexuality... there is, once again, simply not enough reliable evidence to reach firm, irrefutable conclusions. It is inferred, but not proven, that Rhodes was homosexual and it is assumed (but not proven) that his relationships with men were sometimes physical. Neville Pickering is described as Rhodes' lover in spite of the absence of decisive evidence." Rhodes was close to Pickering; he returned from negotiations for Pickering's 25th birthday in 1882. On that occasion, Rhodes drew up a new will leaving his estate to Pickering. Two years later, Pickering suffered a riding accident. Rhodes nursed him faithfully for six weeks, refusing even to answer telegrams concerning his business interests. Pickering died in Rhodes's arms, and at his funeral, Rhodes was said to have wept with fervour. (here for the footnotes etc)

Look, he was a manly man who preferred the company of men, and what's wrong with that? A manly man can weep and care for another man, and no one would infer that symbolised the end of British civilisation ...and if a manly man occasionally shared a little physical relief, a happy ending, with another manly man, surely no one would make a fuss and stamp about saying it was the ruination of everything?

It's a bit like Cardinal Newman and those "intense male friendships" ... manly men can have such things, which helps explain why the onion muncher loved to sniff the bums of other men while in rugger scrums ...

Sorry, the pond has drifted off into some kind of weird decadence, so it's time for another Howl from the heart ...

Ah Moorice, Moorice, you've done it again. Nothing happens by accident, not even the glass the pond sent to heaven last week, nothing is as it seems in this relativist world of quantum physics, and everything is connected, in a paranoid conspiratorial sort of way...

Just connect the dots and the entire gigantic conspiracy, the secret society that runs the show, will be unveiled ... put it another way ...

And so to the Pope for the day, celebrating another dream, that of Romaldo Giurgola, with more papal encyclicals here ...

Just another day in the death of a dream, with more here ...

Oh there's no confusion, sad or otherwise, Mr Giurgola, about the full message about openness and accountability ...

The full message is that there should be none, and instead to amuse the monkeys, we're offered peanuts and a paranoid Moorice ...