In which the pond lets off a double-barrelled blast of onion muncher and Moorice ...

Of course the pond had to clear the decks. How could an Oreo or an Order of Lenin hunter of the Major Mitchell kind compete with the two heaviest hitters in the pond pantheon of pleasures?

And it goes without saying that as soon as any huckster or hustler starts spruiking a golden age, he's talking classic racism of the ancient Greek kind ...

The term Golden Age comes from Greek mythology, particularly the Works and Days of Hesiod, and is part of the description of temporal decline of the state of peoples through five Ages, Gold being the first and the one during which the Golden Race of humanity (Greek: χρύσεον γένος chrýseon génos) lived. Those living in the first Age were ruled by onion lovers, after the finish of the first age was the Silver, then the Bronze, after this the Heroic age, with the fifth and current age being made of iron and filled with onion haters ... (well that's what imaginative Greg Hunters would find here).

Yes, there'll be pie in the sky in the sweet bye and bye, and we'll all live in a paradise, and in the meantime, there's always the deep thoughts of the onion muncher to chew on ...

Rhodes eh? Was there a course in what Rhodes really stood for?

That full story at the Beeb here, and that link to the Guardian obituary of 2002 here, where a number of wretched matters are discussed and it ends this way...

...It may be left to the future historian who shall have access to the documents to determine his share in the guilt of the Raid. Certain it is that he vacillated long in sore perplexity, and it may be that his message to Jameson had been misunderstood by that unlucky strategist. But the fact remains that when, in November 1895, the British Government gave control of the southern portion of Bechuanaland to Cape Colony and the northern to the Chartered Company - a sinister act, giving colour to many imputations - the Johannesburg agitation boiled up afresh, and Rhodes gave Jameson his orders to collect the Company's troops and prepare for an expedition with Maxim guns. From that unscrupulous beginning there was an unbroken sequence of evil.

Indeed, and it can be argued that both apartheid and the likes of the dictator Mugabe are the children of Rhodes, with all the consequent unhappiness produced ... and that if the onion muncher is the best a Rhodes Scholarship can produce, what an unhappy outcome for Rhodes and scholars ... second rate minds earning weak punch-drunk degrees abroad while imagining they were British to the bootstraps ...

In much the same way as the onion muncher was determined to create unhappiness in gay lives, Rhodes was a barking mad megalomaniac determined to produce unhappiness throughout the world ...

At his death he was considered one of the wealthiest men in the world. In his first will, written in 1877 before he had accumulated his wealth, Rhodes wanted to create a secret society that would bring the whole world under British rule.[9][page needed] The exact wording from this will is: 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. (Greg Hunt the details here)

Never mind, back to the onion muncher for a final gobbet and the stock-in-trade blather about the glories of western civilisation and the British, and the wonder is, if he loves the Poms so much, he doesn't go and live there and dwell amongst them, and thereby save us all much misery and nattering negativity ...

The golden age of the onion muncher? It's not before us, and the pond hopes fervently that it is behind us, though it's never wise to second-guess ruffians ...

Raise the tone of our civic conversation? Is that what saying "no" like a broken clock chiming all day long is supposed to do?

Links as in the cartoon, because now it's time to turn to Moorice, and once again, it seems that Moorice is determined to deprive the pond and the world of his astonishing insights into climate science ...

Speaking of broken clocks, as one often does in the company of the onion muncher and Moorice, is it possible that the pond might find itself in the rare position of agreeing with this broken clock at least once this day?

The most shameful political episode since federation?

So much for the dismissal. So much for the 1932 constitutional crisis in NSW ...

In fact in the usual wiki way Greg Hunters might find delight in a list of Political controversies in Australia, and use them to assess Moorice's tendency to hysterical exaggeration and myopic unawareness of the political history of the country, up there with his ability as a climate scientist ...

Even on his own side, has he so little time for Petrov and the DLP?

Never mind, there's more Moir here, and as for other matters, it's clear that the pond can agree with the broken clock that the Constitution makes for more plain reading than attempting to fill out a Centrelink document online, and the politicians and their parties have only themselves to blame, and now it's time for a final Moorice gobbet ...

Go on Moorice, sic him, sic that wretched Malware and his presumptuous, arrogant and foolhardy instructions to the High Court on what they should find ...

Phew, thank the long absent lord duty has been done, and now it's time for weddings, parties or anything really, with Mark Knight twittering here and showing how difficult it is in Northcote with all those green lawns ...(though in time that reference will seem like nothing but a midsummer's dream)