In which the pond celebrates western civilisation one more time ...

  

The window of opportunity for reptiles to maintain the rage about Australia Day is rapidly closing, so the pond was delighted that the Panahi was on the job, and that the lizards of Oz had specially imported an IPA civilisational specialist for the job ...

Of course the pond views this sort of campaign as being a bit like Xmas ...

Remember, preparations for the next Xmas should always begin on Boxing Day (if nothing else by picking up Xmas tree decorations at the sales), and so an article about the joys and wonders of the western heritage - including, but not limited to, two world wars and the odd Holocaust - should be made ready no later than the 27th January ...

As many are called, but few are chosen, the pond must reluctantly continue to boycott the Panahi, even if this means slighting and outraging Melbourne readers, who love their Rita meter maid as she metes out her meters meet ...

The pond doesn't quite know why it dropped in that Blake poem - perhaps it was the western heritage of building a hell in heaven's despite - but a click will enlarge it for anyone interested, while the pond will go on to attend to the d'Abrera ...

Now sadly the d'Abrera is alarmingly brief when it comes to pointing out all the many joys and virtues of colonialism and imperialism, but on the upside, while hunting up d'Abrera the pond came across this delightful reminder of the 1950s mind set ...

You see, if you'll pardon the pond lapsing into 1950s Tamworth speak, d'Abrera has a slightly woggish ring to it.

Even worse, the use of the nobiliary particle has a certain ponce quality ...a tainted Norman aspect, if you will ...certainly not Anglo-Saxon ...

The pond was vastly reassured by being reminded of d'Abrera's noble work for the IPA as the director, Foundations of Western Civilisation Program ..

Curiously she also turned up with a testimonial ...

“Love it or hate it, the internet is a powerful tool which, in the rights hands, can be employed for the glory of God. I cannot but help think that having just launched myself into the blogosphere, the fact that a copy of ‘How to Create a Catholic Blog’ landed in my inbox was nothing but providential...

Dr. Bella D’Abrera, Catholic Author and Historian (here)

Indeed, indeed, praise the long absent lord and pass the blogging ammunition ...

But the name d'Abrera being relatively rare, the pond was, for some peculiar reason, attracted to one Bernard d'Abrera, a fundamentalist Christian creationist, listed at Rational Wiki here, with this introduction ...

He is a signatory of A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism and a vehement opponent of evolution. He is a fellow at the pro-intelligent design organization International Society for Complexity, Information and Design. He owns Hill House Publishers, which is restricted to publishing his own lepidoptera books, Bella Wyborn d'Abrera's revisionist anti-English Reformation books, and facsimile reprint editions of John Gould'sWikipedia's W.svg works. Somewhat ironically, John Gould's island biogeography work was instrumental in the development of evolution and was cited in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

D'Abrera also has an ordinary wiki here, which cites a certain Arthur Shapiro, who sounded a trifle agitated in the quote ...

Arthur Shapiro, an evolutionary biologist and entomologist at the University of California at Davis, describes d'Abrera's books thus:
Attention should be paid to their stupidities, their errors, their pig-headedness, their bad writing. The thing is, as I say in my reviews, they're absolutely indispensable. There's nothing else like them. If you're trying to identify exotic butterflies outside your geographic area, the primary and secondary literatures are so scattered and relatively inaccessible, you're out of hope. Big coffee table picture books are the only way to go. But if you're going to do that, at least get input from the people in the areas you cover geographically so you don't make an ass of yourself.

Well that satisfies the pond's taste for arcana for the day, but it must confess to having completely lost track of the other d'Abrera's scribbling, so now it's time to return to the task ...

Of course d'Abrera passes herself off as a historian, which means her fatuous guff about the rule of law and the benefits of the British justice system - as dispensed to the hapless convicts who turned up down under, only to be told that Botany Bay was completely useless and they'd better head off to Port Jackson - was clearly designed to give the pond a deep belly laugh of the ironic Sierra Madre kind ...

But to be fair, d'Abrera is just, in her own way, doing an Akker Dakker ... and reminding us that the British were bringing truth, justice and land dispossession to the lawless, anarchistic, primitive, cannibalistic, stone age peoples, mere savages, without a flintlock to their name, who infested this continent like useless cockroaches ...so that they might experience the noble joys of being wiped out by the British by way of direct action and diseases of a European civilisational kind ...

Oh wait, weren't cockies and rabbits and sparrows and such like useless imports?

Never mind, in the d'Abrera spirit, the pond offers a few more examples of western civilisation at its finest ...