In which the pond starts a meditative Sunday with a serve of Shanahan ...

Here's the thing. Once the reptiles get on to a band wagon, they can never shut up about it. They bang on and on like a Tamworth dunny door in a stiff zephyr ...

The pond had to hold over the lesser complimentary Shanahan for a meditative Sunday, but what's with this "Let them eat cake" crap? And how did George Orwell get into the mix?

Orwell was a half-baked Anglican and had no time for Catholic nonsense ...

...Orwell never showed any interest in arguing about doctrinal detail, almost as though he understood the necessity of an act of faith. What did outrage his flinty integrity was that so many intellectual Catholics hardly seemed to believe in their own creed. ‘If you talk to a thoughtful Christian, Catholic or Anglican,’ he wrote in 1944, ‘you often find yourself laughed at for being so ignorant as to suppose that anyone ever took the doctrines of the Catholic Church literally… [Those] who cling to the letter of the Creeds while reading into them meanings they were never meant to have, and who snigger at anyone simple enough to believe that the Fathers of the Church meant what they said, are simply raising smokescreens to conceal their own disbelief from themselves.’ 
Similarly, in his review of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948), Orwell observed that among certain clever Catholics, the idea had taken root that there was something rather distingué about being damned. ‘When people really believed in Hell,’ he witheringly concluded, ‘they were not so fond of striking graceful attitudes on its brink.’ 
Not that Orwell seemed any more favourably inclined towards Catholics such as Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton, who most certainly did believe and uphold the doctrines of the Church. These were men, he maintained, who had prostituted their intellectual integrity in order to turn out propaganda for their faith. In particular, the solid Englishman in Orwell recoiled from Belloc’s and Chesterton’s idealisation of Latin countries, especially France, which they presented as ‘a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the Marseillaise over glasses of red wine’. 
With his penchant for seeing every question through a political eye, Orwell fastened upon what he discerned as a marked pro-fascist streak within the Church. In his mind religious dogmatics and right-wing dictatorships were indissolubly linked... (Spectator here of the UK variety).

Well yes, but then he was also anti-semitic and homophobic ...

'Top o' the mornin' to ye!' he called to Flory in a hearty matutinal voice, putting on an Irish accent. He cultivated a brisk, invigorating, cold-bath demeanour at this hour of the morning. Moreover, the libellous article in the Burmese Patriot, which he had read overnight, had hurt him, and he was affecting a special cheeriness to conceal this. 
'Morning!' Flory called back as heartily as he could manage. 
Nasty old bladder of lard! he thought, watching Mr Macgregor up the road. How his bottom did stick out in those tight khaki shorts. Like one of those beastly middle-aged scoutmasters, homosexuals almost to a man, that you see photographs of in the illustrated papers. Dressing himself up in those ridiculous clothes and exposing his pudgy, dimpled knees, because it is the pukka sahib thing to take exercise before breakfast—disgusting! (Project Guternberg Burmese Days here)

Or maybe he just loathed scoutmasters as well as Catholics, and who can blame him for that?

Here's the thing.

Where was the outrage of the religionistas and the reptiles about homosexual freedom in the days of chemical castrations, whippings, canings, hangings, stonings to death, jailings, criminal prosecutions and persecutions and all the other paraphernalia of bigotry, fear and loathing, shared amongst the likes of Daesh, Islamic and Catholic fundamentalism?

Sheesh, see how your average lizard Oz Catholic fundamentalist can get the pond whipped up into a meditative Sunday lather with just the splashes to contemplate.

Better to get on with the usual maundering nonsense, which the pond could recite as if in a dream or a nightmare ...

What the fuck. A wanker cake-maker wants to pretend he's an artist so he can dress up his homophobia with hundreds and thousands?

Not even Jeff Koons at his most vulgar and hideous could carry on with that sort of nonsense ... oh wait ...

Never mind, call it what you will, the pond will be buggered if it can be called art ... whether made of flour or plaster ...

Meanwhile, since Orwell has been mentioned, and we're already in 1984, how about this latest effort by the Donald, as reported at the WaPo here ...

Yep, that's the Donald at work, the very same Donald supported by Chairman Rupert and the reptiles of Fox "News" ...

From there it's just a short hop and a jump to a recent pond reading in the NY Review of Books, Ku Klux Klambakes...

...the Klan of the 1920s strongly echoes the world of Donald Trump. This Klan was a movement, but also a profit-making business. On economic issues, it took a few mildly populist stands. It was heavily supported by evangelicals. It was deeply hostile to science and trafficked in false assertions. And it was masterfully guided by a team of public relations advisers as skillful as any political consultants today... ...

...She ends her book by writing, “The Klannish spirit—fearful, angry, gullible to sensationalist falsehoods, in thrall to demagogic leaders and abusive language, hostile to science and intellectuals, committed to the dream that everyone can be a success in business if they only try—lives on.” One intriguing episode links the Klan of ninety years ago to us now. On Memorial Day 1927, a march of some one thousand Klansmen through the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens, New York, turned into a brawl with the police. Several people wearing Klan hoods, either marching in the parade or sympathizers cheering from the sidelines, were charged with disorderly conduct, and one with “refusing to disperse.” Although the charge against the latter was later dropped, his name was mentioned in several newspaper accounts of the fracas. Beneath the hood was Fred Trump, the father of Donald.

Ah yes, but you won't find any talk in the lizard Oz of the outrageous trampling on the right to free speech and liberty of conscience when a woman got flattened by a vehicle in Charlottesville ... suddenly there'll be good folk on both sides of the street ...

The price of eternal bigotry is to have only one eye ...

When the pond last checked, there was actually nothing in the air that prevented fundamentalist Catholics, fundamentalist Islamics or Daesh from consigning homosexuals to an eternity of hellfire ...

But the notion that someone can be able to discriminate conducting business ... well, next thing you know, Catholics might be out there refusing to do business with Mormons, because, after all, they're a bunch of heretics destined to spend an eternity in hellfire, while your average Anglican or evangelical might be boycotting and refusing to bake cakes for followers of that whore of Babylon, the holy Roman church ...

And so on and so endlessly forth, a miasma of spewing bigotry, fear and loathing, of the kind routinely produced by religious fundamentalists and for which they now crave an indulgence, rather than being tucked away in their boxes where they might preach and spew their hatred in the privacy of like minds.

Thank the long absent lord for the minimal amount of secularism there is out there in the land ...

And now since the matter of the Donald has been raised yet again, a few cartoons ...