In which the savvy Savva is blessed by Lobbecke ...

It would be totally wrong for the pond to avoid the savvy Savva on a Thursday …

She always offers a totally unique* experience …(*thanks to the ABC) …

There she is at the top of the digital page, and blessed with the cult status of a Lobbecke illustration … and with her direct line to Malware's bunker, the howls of pain and suffering are frequently uniquely exquisite …

Did the savvy Savva just call the onion-munching mad monk a gorilla?

By golly the pond hadn't realised just how gloomy it was in the Malware bunker … what with the onion muncher unhinged and off the reservation and never no mind that we all know, in these politically correct times, that it's right to keep the injuns on the reservation ...

Good faith negotiations with Barners? So there's someone still willing to consider the loon who betrayed Tamworth for Armidale capable of good faith or sensible concerns?

And so to the shame list of rat finks and traitors and ne'er do wells and slavish lickspittle puppets of the running dog ...

Instead of sharing the savvy Savva's unnerving gloom, the pond felt strangely light-hearted.

Sure, the pond has a hearty dislike of comrade Bill, but the sense that this flock of lemmings are going to rush off to the cliff seemed like a unique opportunity to observe the cruel neutrality of nature in action …

What a tiresome mob they are, and anyone who can work in a plug for Sheridan's "fascinating book" while performing ethnographic duties should perhaps endure four years in the wilderness with them …

Meanwhile, the pond had to forego the entirety of Dame Groan joining forces with Barners …

After all, if the savvy Savva is right, it's all a matter of rearranging the deck chairs, and the notion that Barners is really on to something might in time be viewed as mere quaint eccentricity …

Instead the pond turned to another reptile entry.

After saying that it wouldn't attend to attention-seeking wannabes, the pond decided to relent …  being a conservative gherkin is hard work, and sometimes they must be allowed out of the jar and into the world …

The pond realised immediately it had been dudded. It had been right to suspect that this Lehmann was just a wannabe, and even worse a Niall-citing wannabe doing the usual reptile litany, months after the rest of the reptiles had exhausted this litany by incessant repetition …

The pond felt the urgent need of a cartoon as an incentive to keep plugging away …

Yes, that'll do for presidential remarks and for lowering the bar on reptile columns whining about universities.

The pond had smelt a rat and suspected there was some ulterior motive for this bog standard litany of complaints, a wretchedly pale imitation of dashing Donners in full emotional flight about the fall of Western Civilisation …

Ah where stands the crusade for a degree in Western Civilisation? Why hasn't this been mentioned? Has the crusade been lost?

Ah there it is, there's the reason … it's just a chance, a ploy, for a couple of plugs …

The pond knew the inherent comicality of scribbling furiously about "echo chambers" in the echo chamber known as the lizard Oz had to have some other purpose than simplistic rhetorical stupidity of "what are universities for?" when everyone knows that degrees in sociology are vital for scoring grants from the Department of Finance …

Here, have a cartoon to celebrate the new world …

And so because this day the pond is determined to have that last after-dinner mint, there was another piece about conservatism to be devoured …

Once again, the pond immediately sensed it had stumbled into the wrong room, almost as if it had reached the end of 2001 …

  

What on earth did it mean Stanley?

"The idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by god-like entities, creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form," Kubrick explains in the tape. "They put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him, and his whole life passes from that point on in that room. And he has no sense of time. They choose this room, which is a very inaccurate replica of French architecture (deliberately so, inaccurate) because one was suggesting that they had some idea of something that he might think was pretty, but wasn’t quite sure. Just as we’re not quite sure what do in zoos with animals to try to give them what we think is their natural environment. Anyway, when they get finished with him, as happens in so many myths of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some kind of super being and sent back to Earth, transformed and made into some sort of superman. We have to only guess what happens when he goes back. It is the pattern of a great deal of mythology, and that is what we were trying to suggest." (here)

Okay, that means the pond is ready for a transformation ...

High civilisation? Waiter, please bring the pond a torch ...

Yes, around this time with jibber jabber about high civilisation, the pond always remembers Thomas Jefferson, and his humbuggery and fornicating hypocrisy … outlined at the Smithsonian here ...

Actually the Donald isn't that far from traditional Republicanism and come to think of it, he isn't that far from Jefferson either, always willing to turn a tidy profit from the blacks employed in his nailery …

It had long been accepted that slaves were assets that could be seized for debt, but Jefferson turned this around when he used slaves as collateral for a very large loan he had taken out in 1796 from a Dutch banking house in order to rebuild Monticello. He pioneered the monetizing of slaves, just as he pioneered the industrialization and diversification of slavery. 

Before his refusal of Kosciuszko’s legacy, as Jefferson mulled over whether to accept the bequest, he had written to one of his plantation managers: “A child raised every 2. years is of more profit then the crop of the best laboring man. in this, as in all other cases, providence has made our duties and our interests coincide perfectly.... [W]ith respect therefore to our women (and) their children I must pray you to inculcate upon the overseers that it is not their labor, but their increase which is the first consideration with us.” 

In the 1790s, as Jefferson was mortgaging his slaves to build Monticello, George Washington was trying to scrape together financing for an emancipation at Mount Vernon, which he finally ordered in his will. He proved that emancipation was not only possible, but practical, and he overturned all the Jeffersonian rationalizations. Jefferson insisted that a multiracial society with free black people was impossible, but Washington did not think so. Never did Washington suggest that blacks were inferior or that they should be exiled….

And here we are today, with a Jeffersonian conservative in the White House and the GOP doing what has always come naturally …

Yes, Dave, the pond did go into the wrong room ...

The party of Lincoln? In your Jeffersonian dreaming …