In which the pond offers nattering "Ned" as a chaser for a short hit of dashing Donners ...

After the morning's gloom, the pond felt the need for a little uplift ... and it's a curious thing, but the sight of a Donners' piece is always a chance for soul to clap hands, do a little jig and sing ...

Oh there were alternatives ... over at the Terror, Miranda the Devine was discovering her inner Julian Assange ...

Who could have imagined that the Devine would have felt so close to Assange and Vlad the impaler? But then there's really not that much difference between Hitler and Stalin when it comes to a breach of Godwin's Law ...

Oh it was tempting alright, but there's nothing like the sight of a gloomy despairing Donners blathering about barbarians at the door to lighten the pond's mood ...

For starters, what's with the talk about "barbarians at the door"? 

Everyone knows that the barbarians are at the gate ...

And it's not just that the barbarians were at the gate of RJR Nabisco; truth to tell, the barbarians have been at the gate for yonks ...

Dammit, not the Goths at the gate in 410! 

How sad it is that the goths of Newtown seem to have disappeared ... the pond loved to see the Goths at the gate of the local cemetery ...and still visits regularly but the sightings are few and far between.

But enough of this, the pond has teased and titillated long enough, it's on with dashing Donners ...

Say what? That's very disappointing, that's downright vexing ... 

It reminded the pond of that old Woody Allen joke, which it might mangle just one more time ...

“There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are in the airport lounge reading the free newspapers that fall around them like confetti, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the Donners column in the lizard Oz is really terrible." 

The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such a small portion of Donners." 

Well, that's essentially how the pond feels about life - full of reading Donners, loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, but reading Donners, and life, is all over much too quickly.”

Now it's true that Donners offers the usual fatuous nonsense - like at the get go offering the High Anglican,  neo-Catholic, barking mad conservative banker T. S. Eliot as some kind of liberal ... not to mention quoting the IPA or other notable loons ...

That always happens when tykes get to claiming classical Greece for themselves and blathering on about rationality and objectivity, while slipping off on a Sunday for a sumptuous meal of human flesh (albeit hidden in a wafer) and a hearty quaffing of human blood (can the pond recommend a Sevenhills  altar wine as the best way to hide the flavour?)

It's also something of a bloody cheek for tykes to talk of a doctrinaire understanding of the past, when the wretches still peddle a fundamentalist bigoted theology down there with your average Islamic fundamentalist (look at them indulging in the fun of gay-bashing together).

All the same, the pond found it vexing that Donners found so little to say about western civilisation ... how could blather about deep thinkers end up so shallow ... and short?

It reminded the pond of a recent experience with tree-killing newspapers. The pond's partner returned from the airport the other day with a gaggle of newspapers, and all of them were conspicuously lacking in content. The AFR even had on its back page a mindless column from the NY Times.

It led to a much-loved routine. After a quick flick through the lizard Oz, there came the line "how could anyone imagine anyone paying $3 for that?"

L'Age wanted three bucks too, while the AFR had a list price of four bucks, as did the Saturday Paper, while the Monthly wanted $12.95 for its October arts issue ... which was still brooding about the bloody Opera House ... as if they'd suddenly just discovered it wasn't the most suitable venue for an opera ...

Talk about short, light weight ...worse than a colt from old regret ...

It was hopeless and entirely against the spirit of the pond, which aims to bore any stray passing reader to death, in the hope that having been bored shitless, they might thereafter ignore the reptiles and go on to pursue a useful, meaningful life ...

Now dismal dashing Donners had failed that test with his mindless attempt at brevity - western Judeo-Christian civilisation for dummies - so the pond felt the need to wheel out the big guns ...

Please, don't worry ... the pond isn't going to have a debate, a discussion or even a knock-down argument with nattering "Ned" ... the idea is to bore, so that a reader might feel compelled to say, how much do I have to pay to stop reading this nonsense and get out of here with my mind intact?

You see by this point dashing Donners, with his blather about liberal Judeo-Christianity and the glories of western civilisation bunging on two world wars and a holocaust, had already given up, but nattering "Ned" was just warming to the hand-wringing job at hand ...

Would anything meaningful come of it in the next lengthy gobbet, given that the natterer is a coal-loving climate denialist of the fugitive, furtive kind, rarely willing to admit his innate denialism?

An investment uncertainty?

And there you have it, an object lesson to dashing Donners as to how he should have done his job. Bore readers shitless while arriving at nowhere in particular.

Deliver an epic amount of blather, wherein it becomes clear that, thanks to the climate science denying coal lovers of the lizard Oz, onion-munching kind, absolutely nothing will emerge of use to the planet, or by way of price discounting to the consumers, from the latest half-baked cobbled together bit of gutless wonder policy making from spineless old jellyback Malware ...

All they've managed to do is pretend to do something while kicking the can down the road to 2020 and points beyond ...

It reached some kind of wondrous marvel when "Ned" nattered about a "measured response"...

"... suggesting a degree of fresh investment in coal or upgrading coal-fired power stations beyond their expectations, but no talk of new coal-fired stations."

What the fuck does that mean? Why the jellybacked handwringer sounds just like the spineless jellyback.

But we've been here before ... it was almost a year ago that the pond ran this Pope, and we're still on the same dig (with fresher papal insights here) ...