In which the pond pays tribute to the bromancer for a Friday arvo special ...

The pond had resolved not to revisit missed reptile fodder, lost over the break, but decided that the bromancer's piece was so exceptional that the first new year resolution to be broken had to be the one about the Tamworth dog revisiting its vomit after a hearty meal of grass …

After all, as the immortal Lynyrd Skynyrd once sang …

Mr. Friday arvo special 
Bromancer's got a barrel that's blue and cold 
Ain't good for nothin' 
But put a blog six feet in a hole ...

Well it ran something like that - Ari Melber or Google would know for sure - but enough of childish justifications, because the bromancer needs no justifying …

If the pond had been asked to name three agents of chaos, it might have been Vlad the impaler, Fox and Friends and Chairman Rupert and his servile minions, but there you go, the pond always gets it wrong, which is why it always sits humbly at the feet of the bromancer and imbibes his infinite wisdom ...

Strange how the bromancer gets stuck into CNN … as if Fox and Friends had nothing to do with it.

Ah, but the Chairman owns Fox, which might help explain why the bromancer seems to lose all interest in objectivity, fairness, balance or proportion.

Perhaps a year watching Judge Pirro, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, with the odd dose of Ann Coulter for good measure, might be a suitable penance ...

It takes considerable cheek to compare the Donald with FDR - the bromancer is all cheek and front - but then Fox and Friends would probably think that it was insulting, since really when comparing the Donald with the imaginary friend known as God, how pale and worthless does that fictional deity appear...

And so all is well in the bromancer world, and how lucky that 2019 promises more of the same ...

If the pond might be so bold, all this talk of Leninism by the bromancer is a distraction. There's a direct line from emperor Qin Shi Huang - he of the famous mausoleum - to emperor Xi, and now thanks to the American love of presidential monarchy, there's a new emperor in town, as fickle and as off the wall as King George III, though this time, it isn't just losing a colony that's in play, it's losing a planet …if you happen to think that climate science is more than a cult religion …

But this is reptile holyday reading, so let's not have any talk of that sort of nonsense ...

And there you have the reason that the pond ran with the bromancer piece days after it was published …

The Western restoration under Ronnie Raygun, the Milk Snatcher and Karol Jozef Wojtyła  as the promised land …

Is that fucking weird, or is that weirdly mind-fucking, or what?

Some days the pond thinks it has dwelt too long in the land of the reptiles, wherein the one-eyed bromancer is king …

Then very circumspectly the pond began to climb. 
When sunset came the pond was no longer climbing, but was far and high. 
The pond had been higher, but was still very high. The pond's clothes were torn, its limbs were blood-stained, it was bruised in many places, but the pond lay as if at ease, and there was a smile on the pond's face. 
From where the pond rested the valley seemed as if it were in a pit and nearly a mile below. Already it was dim with haze and shadow, though the mountain summits around were things of light and fire... the little details of the rocks near at hand were drenched with subtle beauty — a vein of green mineral piercing the grey, the flash of crystal faces here and there, a minute, minutely-beautiful orange lichen close beside the pond's face. 
There were deep mysterious Trumpian, Murdochian shadows in the gorge, blue deepening into purple, and purple into a luminous darkness, and overhead was the illimitable vastness of the sky. 
But the pond heeded these things no longer, but lay quite inactive there, smiling as if satisfied merely to have escaped from the valley of the Blind in which the pond had thought to be King. 
The glow of the sunset passed, and the night came, and still the pond lay peacefully contented under the cold clear stars.

Or some such thing …the Wells' original can still be found here at Adelaide.edu.au, though the pond does wish that the university would fix up its site's certificates, so that they no longer played havoc with browsers ...

And so to the penalty.

For a moment there, the pond lay under the stars, and wasn't worried it had missed the Sexton's previous most excellent bigly bunch of insights ...

But today the Sexton is inside the cemetery again, and the pond's rules require that, after any detour into the dim past of reptile/bromancer thinking, there should be a burst of uniquely relevant up to the minute thinking...

 

Well it's not the same as the Sexton looking deep inside Mueller's mind and finding nothing, but it'll have to do, pig, it'll have to do ...

Indeed, indeed. The pond has long held the view that the Windsors and George Soros are deeply mired in a conspiracy with the Rothschilds and other Jewish bankers, and should be assassinated, the lot of them, and where's the harm in publishing that?

Why next thing you know, someone will be suggesting that limiting freedom of speech is limiting the rights of Daesh to radicalise young Islamics so that they might conduct a jihad against homosexuals, and where's the logic in that?

Simply put, it's perfectly acceptable for Catholics and evangelicals to demonise gays, but quite wrong for Daesh to ape them …that way lies anarchy and the decline of Western Civilisation, with perhaps only the Ramsay Centre surviving as an outpost in Wollongong … and where does that leave Port Kembla?

Clearly what's needed is an exemption for religious teaching, with an exemption that succinctly explains that some religious teaching full of bigotry and discrimination is preferable to other religious teaching full of bigotry and discrimination…

Or some such thing … because let's face it, schools must be made safe for the preaching of gay hate, but where to draw the line?

Should we allow for fundamentalist Islamic theology and Scientological insights? But then would we have to abolish all the intelligence agencies? After all, it seems you can get pinged for writing a notebook you didn't actually write (ABC here), or even worse, you can be made a citizen of Fiji, except that Fiji knows nothing about you being a citizen …(Graudian here).

It's all terribly confusing, but at least the mutton Dutton will guide the flock to safety.

And let's not forget that creationism should sit alongside that Darwinian fraud and nonsense in science classes …and perhaps there should be an hour a week dedicated to learning how to speak in tongues, surely much more important than speaking in climate science lingo …

But enough of the pond's perplexed confusion. The Sexton will sort it out ...

And so the pond begins the new year the same way it ended the old one, by suggesting that anyone can preach anything to anyone they like, and hire or fire according to their religious preferences … and for a very simple and very ethical price.

Do not preach like a Caterist, blathering about rent seekers and welfarists, while dipping the paw into taxpayer cash, but instead act like a true believer, and forsake the taxpayer dollar altogether …

And while being ethical, remember to pay up those proper and due taxes, as required for companies acting as a business, even if acting as a front for an imaginary friend or an E-meter …

And they asked him, saying, Master, we know that thou sayest and teachest rightly, neither acceptest thou the person of any, but teachest the way of God truly in Australian schools: 

Is it lawful for us to give tribute unto SloMo, or no? 

But he perceived their craftiness, and said unto them, Why tempt ye me? 

Shew me a penny, or better still, shew me a millennial who has ever seen a penny. 

Whose image and superscription hath it? 

They answered and said, SloMo's, honouring Gadfly's clever nickname, and not remembering it usually contained an image of the King or the Queen and a 'roo rampant. 

And he said unto them, Render therefore unto SloMo the things which be SloMo's, including taxes and an absence of bigotry and discrimination, and a forsaking of nonsensical fairy tales of the speaking in tongues kind, and render unto God the things which be God's, which is to say nonsensical fairy tales, bigotry and discrimination, preached upon in privately funded schools without a penny from SloMo. 

And they could not take hold of his words before the people: and they marvelled at his answer, and held their peace.

Held their peace?

How likely is that in this new year of the reptile …

And so to a cartoon  in honour of the bromancer, though the pond has already forgotten what was written ...