In which an old dodderer shouts at passing ABC clouds ...

Hmm, that name sounded familiar to the pond, but not being a specialist in Quadrant dinosaurs - an exceptionally difficult and tedious study for even the most diligent herpetologist - the pond had to resort to a google to refresh the fading memory banks … and what do you know ...

That immediately put the pond in a mood for what it had been assured was expert dumbfuckery from a thoroughly nasty, embittered old turd … and any passing reader who'd read that embedded quote about gays not being natural or normal, would have to admit this was surely not just a mammoth ignorant dumbfuck, but a thoroughly nasty turd ...

Hmm, that was tough going, plodding and ever so predictable. Perhaps a little additional stimulation could help the pond get through ...

A dill and a plodding dickhead, and black comedy at best?

Restored and revitalised, the pond plodded on ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, what a peculiar old fart… and just as the pond often needs a cup of tea to make it through the day, the pond knew it had to keep heading back to the twitter well to summon up the strength to carry on ...

The P76? 

Oh that's surely an impossible, deranged slur. You'd have to be a right royal fuckwit of the first water to confess anywhere at any time that you actually purchased a P76 …

Here … "I bought a P76", and at last the pond has found a likely target for its second-hand, reconditioned harbour bridge, a little beauty, still with plenty of miles in it …

And not only did he buy one, he really did write his MBA thesis about the car he bought …as anyone caring to read his thoughts for the lizard Oz can confirm by reading them reprinted in a pdf of the P76 Owners Club of Victoria magazine…

Sheesh, talk about more clueless than a movie called Clueless.

Who knew the alarming things you could discover on twitter … almost as frightening as what you can read in the lizard Oz ...

Indeed, indeed, and it is true that the ABC keeps playing nineteenth century music during the pond's walk as a lunchtime break, and while one day they tried to placate the pond with a dash of Bartok, another day the pond found itself switching over to 102.5 to listen to talk of Samuel Adams composing for iPhone.

Oh yes, it must be hard to placate all the old fogeys out in the streets shouting at passing ABC clouds, but of course, Luck has the same solution to hand that the pond employed … bugger off and watch the ratfuck shitfest known as commercial television…upon which, if the twitterati are to be believed, the immortal Luck made an immortal mark ...

But they never want to do that, do they, these whiners and moaners and groaners and precious snowflakes, they always want to re-shape the ABC in their boring old fart image, and then the pond has to put up with useless bits of doddery music from the nineteenth century …

Hmm, the pond needs to do a little twitter vaping before it can continue ...

Luckily, the last gobbet is a short one ...

And with that, hopefully the pond will never have to mention the P76 or Brahms at lunchtime again …

And so to a celebratory cartoon …

Yes, the bromancer too ...

The pond should commence proceedings by humbly suggesting that no one should consider paying a cent, or even a brass razoo, for any piece of work in any Murdochian publication anywhere in the world …

Well if the bromancer can talk boycotts, so can the pond, and a brass razoo in the hand is worth ten brass razoos in the bush … just ask anyone lost in Tamworth …

Why go the boycott? 

If you happen to support the Murdochian empire, you are supporting Trumpism, and there's been no greater threat to whatever is supposed to constitute Western Civilisation in a very long while … and yes, even the bromancer is, in his own peculiar flesh and blood devouring way, kissing cousin, kith and kin to Fox and Friends …

All the pond asks is that be kept in mind while reading perhaps the squillionth Murdochian treatise on the Crisis in Western Civilisation, an even more epic crusade than the climate denialism that has saturated the lizard Oz this past decade …

 

Now the pond isn't going to rehash the already interminable 'he said', 'they said', there's no 'she said because complimentary women don't count' arguments that have littered the lizard Oz for weeks.

It was inevitable, if a little late coming, that the bromancer would renew his love of the onion muncher and stand by his man and revert back to the sort of student radicalism which they once blessed university life with … you know, wall punching and childish boycotts and mindless activism and all that sort of thing …

The pond simply wants to use the bromancer outing as a Dame Slap teachable moment … 

There is no right or proper way for Australian philanthropists, or even ordinary punters who have accumulated a little extra money and want to donate it generously to a newspaper to make a difference to a free press, to support a Murdochian publications, without in the same breath supporting what is currently happening in the United States …

And hey nonny no, on we go, and the moment that the bromancer mentions Niall Ferguson as 

"one of the great contemporary historians" it's easy to understand why the humbugger feels the need to trot out big, fancy words of the "epistemological" kind …and why the pond had a wild-eyed desire to flee the building …because there's only so much doofus the pond can swallow as a way to begin the weekend ...

Thomas Aquinas? What, that devotee of an eastern religion?

Dante, that devotee of an eastern religion, who preferred it to the other eastern religion that came a little later to feud with the earlier eastern religions?

Only the IPA and your average Sunday cannibal would drag Aquinas into the conversation …when really as Gibbon knew, the best histories spent considerable time explaining how eastern religions had ruined our Graeco-Roman inspirations ...

Never mind, that's long done and dusted.

Here's a tip that proved very handy for all the thugby league louts in the days way back when. 

Confronted with the need to cope with Western Civilisation before going on to the field to bash the shit out of each other, there was a simple solution …

   

And to be fair, you'd possibly gain more insights looking at the pictures than reading the bromancer ...

Oh fucketty fuck, it's always the way … you can take the Catholic out of the church, but you can never take the church out of the Catholic …

Note how the discourse shifted from very arguable proposals - such as inherent and intrinsic militarism - the bromancer makes no attempt to explain away two world wars - or pervasive racism in power structures - cf the naked racism of the Trumpists supported by wild-eyed Murdochians - and such like, but instead shifts the discussion to the thoughts of Gregory of Nyssa ….as if anyone apart from the bromancer thinks that the thoughts of a 4th century bishop prevented the slave trade that helped make the Confederate states great at bigotry again ...

Well, it's true that nothing was sacred when it came to those classic comics … and the thugby leaguers tended to avoid literature they might be better off reading in the original ...

    

Yes, even Alice was for the turning …but at least the thugby leaguers could avoid the immense, inordinate stupidity, existential futility of reading the bromancer blathering on about gods and Genesis …

 

And the pond knows of at least one thugby leaguer, who, inspired by the comics, actually reverted to the original.

Who knows, instead of wasting time reading the bromancer blathering about western civilisation, some stray reader who strays into the pond might resolve to never waste their time again with a Murdochian publication, and instead devote their time to reading mind-improving graphic novels ...

And so, with that pious hope, to the last gobbet of humbug ...

Yes, it's better to recognise that, in the end, there's nothing useful to be found in the Murdochian empire, and to make a start somewhere else.

One way to make that start is to head off to the Pope here, for real lessons on moral and civilisational values …

A flashback for reptile specialists ...

Never apologise … never surrender …

Never apologise … never surrender …

Never apologise … never surrender …

A flashback …

If you know the enemy ...

If you know the enemy, form a vigilante squad and take action ...

If you know the enemy, take direct action … let the green shoots of success flourish ...

The green shoots of success … how they flourish ...

In which Giles returns to the Speccie mob ...

The pond did a little jig of joy … Giles was back, and with him came all the pond's favourites, not least dashing Donners, the onion muncher and the parrot …

At last a chance to put the lizard Oz's monomaniacal crusading obsessions away for a moment …

When I was a child, I spake as a reptile child, I understood as a child of the reptiles, I thought as a lizard child, but when I became gender neutral, I put away childish reptile things. For now we see through a reptile glass, darkly, but then face to face with Giles, will we see clearly now?

Or some such thing … the pond was always suss on bible studies …come on down Giles, preach to the pond, redeem the pond, cleanse the pond of impure thoughts ...

At last, a return to the 1950s, and the cold war … though the pond was a little worried by the use of the word "Brutopian", which the pond last recalled had been used by former Chairman Rudd in an entirely different context in The Monthly here …with idle talk of Howard's brutopia …

Contemporary British conservatives such as Michael Oakeshott have starkly warned against a "brutopia" of unchecked market forces. Equally, American conservatives such as the columnist George F Will have cautioned that capitalism unrestrained is a "solvent" that can dissolve the social fabric.

And now the dreadful Will has urged a vote against the GOP in November!!

The pond decided it had to put its trust in the Brutopian insights of Giles. All it had to do was kick back its heels, bring in a few cartoons celebrating the joys of Western Civilisation, US style, and have a jolly good time …

But then the pond began to grow a little bit nervous.

The reptile crusade about the Crisis in Western Civilisation wouldn't have been transmitted virally to good old Giles, with dashing Donners a notorious carrier of the disease, would it?

Okay, the Crisis in Western Civilisation made its way into Giles' rant, but it was such a splendid rant that the pond was put in a forgiving mood, so awestruck was it by the metaphor of termites brainwashing the woodwork.

And how pleasing to be reminded that children belong to their parents. Why every parent should have this sort of possession. Please don't stop with a handbag, consider having a child as an accessory …though as they grow up you might have trouble making them dress in the same style as you, resulting in discordant colours and most unhappy stylings.

And you, of tender years, 
Can't know the fears that your elders grew by, 
And so please help them with your youth, 
They seek the truth before they can die.

What a blast from the time when those bloody termite hippies were ruining Western Civilisation, in its finest hour in Vietnam no less, but the pond feels the need for another sustaining cartoon celebrating all that's good about Western Civilisation …

What a relief to know that Western Civilisation is in good, Speccie-approved hands, and so to another gobbet of Giles ...

Now here the pond must intrude and gently chide Giles, because surely he's missing a vital point …in essence, it was summed up this way for Mandrake (continuity script here):

Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face? ...do you realize that in addition to fluoridated water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake! Children's ice cream? You know when fluoridation first began? Nineteen hundred and forty six. Nineteen fortysix, Mandrake! 

How does that coincide with your postwar commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard core commie works.

I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love... a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I was able to interpret these feelings correctly: loss of essence. I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women... women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.

Phew, thanks for that important reminder General Ripper, and the pond feels another cartoon coming on, celebrating Western Civilisation at its best …

But all good things must come to an end, and so must Giles ...

Indeed, indeed, who tells the young about what happened in Cambodia?

Well that's the official version.

Put it another way …

Ah yes, young 'uns, that's what happened to Cambodia. The dominoes spoke to genocidal Henry and in the manner of the best of Western Civilisation, he bombed the country back to the stone age, and got the result Giles now purports to deplore ...

More at Salon here …

How quickly they forget, the hysterics and the chicken hawks, and the damage done …

I've seen the bombing

And the damage done

A little part of it in everyone

But every attempt to bomb the world to western civilisation

Is like a settin' sun ...

And so to a few more cartoons celebrating the best in current Western Civilisation, Speccie mob approved …

Dare the pond mention the reptiles' monomaniacal obsession with ANU without breaking into a crazed cackle?

The pond simply can't wait to get to the Speccie mob - the pond is so fucking awfully tired by the reptiles' obsession with the Crisis in Western Civilisation and ANU - and has reluctantly come to the conclusion that if she's not a cretin, then Rebecca Urban must indeed be a monomaniacal fuckwit of the first reptile water …

But - there's always a but, billy goat - who could resist that juxtaposition, that cluck-clucking and tut-tutting about class, race and gender, framed so nicely below the splash about the lyon at the helm of offensive sexist insults?

Another thing - why is it that the reptiles have selected that glum photo of Schmidt and run it every chance they get? As here …

There are other options out there …

But of course it gets a run at the top of the no longer considered urbane Urban's story …

The pond is so over this sort of nonsense …

Sexism?

There is, of course, a reason that the Ramsay Centre wants to coat-tail its way to academic respectability - by shamelessly trading off on ANU … (here)

It's so shameless, it's so pathetically obvious, it goes beyond the valley of the ideologically desperate …

That's the real reason they won't go off to the ACU or other second tier universities. They want the associated glory, they want the company of the 'leets the reptiles at the Oz routinely deplore.

But - there's always an Urban goat to consider - before we go on, the pond wonders if ANU has a course in cherry-picking? 

Urban certainly should be thinking of doctoral studies in the science, because this is what she produced as the capper to her beat-up…

Well yes, the pond would consider all these as meaningful contributions to the study of civilisation … the pond heeds that recent advice of the prof from the deep north that Christianity is an eastern religion, while Marxism is the product of the enlightenment.

And when the pond calls Urban a fucking idiot, it is merely expressing through language its identity as someone born and reared in Tamworth …though occasionally the pond wonders if "fucking" should be used as a term of abuse, when it might be better applied to the joyful sexual intercourse of people celebrating whatever gender suits them …

Meanwhile, if the pond wanted an undergraduate degree in history, here are some choices …

 

If that print is too small, its because the pond is so completely over it, it didn't want to waste the space.

It can be easily read at the ANU here, and anyone interested can follow the links and check out majors in other areas of the y'artz at ANU, and wonder just why the dingbat reptiles keep on keeping on with this culture wars crap.

What's remarkable is how unexceptional that list compared to the long-ago time that the pond once studied history, though there are a number of options that these days the pond would find more intriguing than the study of the hundred years war (go the Scots).

Never mind, at least there's one student of history the pond can always turn to, as a way of relieving the pain, and that's the infallible Pope - not the wretched Avignon papacy the pond once studied - with more papal pleasures always to hand here …