In which the Major does his usual galah "Volk" routine ...

The pond doesn't mean to boast … it goes about its street duties quietly and unostentatiously, but with due and proper diligence.

In the past week it has removed from the street several extremely dangerous examples of unexploded ordnance, which posed a grave risk to innocent civilians … sweet young things just wanting to be hip and trendy, social butterflies of the millennial kind …

Better still, the pond didn't just decommission Bob Katter's An Incredible Race of People … it also removed The Latham Diaries from prying eyes…

This is a dangerous business and the pond wears no special suits or gloves. And once the pond has confiscated the contraband,  it tucks the dangerous goods away out of sight, though the half-life of this sort of grenade means they must be stored for decades.

But at least that means that stray passersby will be spared the mental anguish of dealing with the incredible stupidity of someone who thinks Australians are a race, on the basis that some silly imported bit of royal fluff from Spain once gave the Katter the cue...

In 1988, Queensland politician Bob Katter Jnr was, at short notice, called upon to officiate and entertain the King and Queen of Spain. At dinner the three discussed Australian white settlement and our forebears, prompting Queen Sofia to remark, 'What an incredible race of people you are.' (No link, the risks are too high to bear thinking about).

What an incredibly stupid Queen Sofia, though perhaps she has an excuse that English isn't her first language and so she has no understanding of what 'race' might mean. But what of Bob? If whites make up the incredible race of Australian people, why then Americans and Russians are Australian too …

Never mind, the grenade is off the street, though people might wonder how - if the pond performs this sort of street service - a kind of human garbage sucking machine removing dangerous mind litter - it can in the very same breath turn around and foist sick garbage of the Major Mitchell kind on to the interubes …

It's a contradiction the pond can only embrace in a Whitmanesque way because the evidence is that Major Mitchell is much more harmful to the mind than anything the Katter might offer …

This is of course just a distraction offered up by the Major, since he still hasn't found that pesky Order of Lenin medal and he certainly wouldn't want to discuss the mote in the reptile eye known as the Bolter, though even Chip Le Grand from the Melbourne Oz bunker noticed …

So the Major could have furiously scribbled "allegedly mainstream Murdochian media and reporting of it are producing intolerance of a kind not seen since, inspired by Joe McCarthy, I went on a rampage about a mysterious non-existent Order of Lenin medal … and the best solution is to cancel your subscription" …

Never mind, it's now time for what is known at the pond as the litany of grievances section, whereby the one-eyed man draws up a list of complaints and grievances, without a nanosecond's reflection on the very large mote in his own rabidly intolerant eye ...

The Major is still banging on about the injustices suffered by the noble Donald, and that half-baked, fourth rate narcissist attention-seeking shit-stirrer from the deep north, Laura Southern?

It reminded the pond of Greg Jericho's recent lament in the Graudian, in full and with hot links here …

Of course the pond has its quibbles with Jericho …

To label the Major as merely a "dull thinker" is to let the festering hate monger get off lightly ...

Did the Major just let drop a Godwin's Law busting joke about the "Volk"?

So calling him a fascist-leaning fuckwit would now apparently be part of mainstream-acceptable reptile discourse?

If only Tasmania would provide "lebensraum" for reptiles so they might run wild and free ...

Of course the Brisbane writers' festival made a mistake, but that was to issue the invitations in the first place, in the mistaken delusion that Bob Carr - premier for setting all that's currently wrong with NSW infrastructure in motion - and Germaine Greer, increasingly bigoted and dotty in her senility - might have anything remotely interesting to say to a younger generation … when all they wanted to do was a little self-promotion, and sell some of their books.

And what would be the consequence of that?

All that would do was increase the need for the pond to go on vigilant street patrols to remove their unexploded grenades from the street libraries, or from the footpath after disgruntled punters realised they'd been dudded, and decided to put others in harm's way …

Never mind, there's only a gobbet of the Major to go, and the pond has promised itself a Rowe cartoon as a reward, along with a promise not to show the Major up against a galah, because really, it's totally wrong to defame galahs week in, week out …

Oh no, not the final indignity, not a defence of the IPA ...

Here's the thing about the IPA … it actively lies about its funding, and it is entirely duplicitous and double-dealing, as in the matter of death-dealing tobacco and in relation to climate science, and assorted other matters …

It's a supreme disgrace it keeps turning up on the ABC to peddle its sponsor's message.

And Julia Baird is a lightweight piece of useless floss - it must run in the family. The moment she comes on the telly is the cue for the pond to go and do something useful …

The pond was reminded of a response by Rupert Read to faux notions of "balance" …

...this Wednesday, when I was rung up by BBC Radio Cambridgeshire and asked to come on air to debate with a climate change denier, something in me broke, and rebelled. Really? I thought. This summer, of all times? So, for almost the first time in my life, I turned it down. I told it that I will no longer be part of such charades. I said that the BBC should be ashamed of its nonsensical idea of “balance”, when the scientific debate is as settled as the “debate” about whether smoking causes cancer. By giving climate change deniers a full platform, producers make their position seem infinitely more reasonable than it is. (This contributes to the spread of misinformation and miseducation around climate change that fuels the inaction producing the long emergency we are facing.) (Here for the rest and hot links, and more at Desmog here).

In that spirit, the pond offers as an alternative the sort of questioning that might be done of IPA fellow-travellers when Ellen Fanning suddenly discovered her old self …

Well the pond promised itself a Rowe, and what joy there are many more Rowes here for those who appreciate sanity, as opposed to the Major, but sssh, please don't mention climate science …