In which the Major continues the Luddite narrative ...

Poor old Major Mitchell.

The notion that the reptiles are to be trusted is one of the funnier memes he persists with, even as he still hunts for that Order of Lenin medal …

His fear of the digital is understandable. Cruel people say naughty things about honest reptile attempts to drum up the hits …

Too cruel, really, but all this yearning for the analogue reminds the pond of its dear, long departed father.

When a VHS machine was introduced into the lounge room and sat above the TV, he treated it as a baleful intruder, a black snake that might deliver a nasty nip. He refused to go near it, and was never known to put a tape into it, with others having the duty of tape feeder …

He was a bit like a pond uncle who sagely explained he didn't go to the movies, not ever, because of the flicker, which would have put his last movie experience back in the silent days …

Yes, the pond lived amongst a veritable array of Steele Rudd characters, though these days it produces a hollow laugh, what with all the digerati doing the rounds, and the pond struggling to keep up.

The young do things differently, they're a strange, unknowable country, and while the Major rails and rants, they're already long gone … and deep down, the Major probably knows it, but must recite the litany, chant his Agnes Dei, in the hope against hope that the long absent lord will return the world to the true analogue way, while the cursed logarithms are sent into a vale of tears ...

It takes considerable skill to explain how the FAANG mob are mere platforms, full of thieves, charlatans and robbers, while at the same time, they are publishers ready for regulation and rule-mongering …

The Major seems to have forgotten that the reptiles' hero, The Donald, is against such nonsense as rules and regulations, though it's admirable that the Major wants to socialise the FAANGsters, and demand money from them, perhaps with menaces.

Well if governments can get into the coal-fired power station business, why shouldn't they command a shakedown of the logarithms mob? Or perhaps even fund the Murdochians?

Of course it's all been a tragic mistake, and a hard paywall is the way forward, though the pond wonders, if that's the case, why the reptiles still allow some of their work out into the world.

Is it because the world urgently needs more hard-hitting, trustworthy stories about "when he stops wanting sex?"

Or perhaps octopi from outer space, and how the Great Barrier Reef is really in pretty good shape ...

And there you have it. "This newspaper's new marketing campaign will be based on trust …"

Anyone looking for quintessential delusion will find it in that sentence.

Last week the pond noted that Mark Day was finding redemption in the reptiles' up-market supplement offering, and they're still at it …

 

And indeed, the pond can trust that the reptiles will seek to look to the rich, and to look after the rich, and to pander to the rich.

It's not much of a business model, but it's now all they've got … but to be fair, when the Major finally does find that Order of Lenin medal, the pond might learn to trust again. 

What's that, the faint sound of 12th of Never in the distance? Young folks wouldn't know the melody or the words, but they do know that the reptiles can give you a nasty nip …

And so to the usual promotion for the tree-killer edition, as if all those young people wandering around like zombies gazing at their phones have got it wrong, and will return to hard print, in the same way they all love vinyl and reel-to-reel tapes ...

Wait for advertisers to realise that highly engaged climate denialists and right wing ragbags are a valuable bunch of old dodderers who can make the cash register ring?

It truly is a wondrous, wonderful delusion, and hopefully the reptiles will keep making available the Major's deepest thoughts, fears and phobias to the outside world. 

Or not. They can stick him back behind the paywall, and not a jot or a whit of things will change, and the young will go on being the difficult, obdurate, perverse young things they are …

Meanwhile, speaking of trust, here's a couple of cartoons, including one the pond has run before, but irresistibly requiring to be run again as the Major blathers on about trust, featuring as it does a slum landlord …