In which the reptiles take Pravda down under fully tabloid ...

Tragic.

The reptiles have finally jumped the shark and nuked the tabloid fridge, with an effort which makes the average front page of the Terror seem like a Warholian work of art … and after turning off all the folk at airport terminals looking for a free tree-killer read, they replicated the folly in the digital lizard Oz …

The poor old bouffant one was assigned the duty of writing the government's official reply to comrade Bill, with Dame Groan chipping in, glowering out at the world like some mad aunt who'd resented being dragged down from the attic.

The problem, it goes without saying, lies with the cartoon, which contains the sort of glib caricature and crude drafting that became part of the Leakian legend …

You can't begin to sound serious with that sort of obvious politicking.

It's so low rent, so naked and obvious and so misguided that the pond feared for the reptile business plan …because the ploy felt so desperate.

The pond has no time for comrade Bill, but didn't the reptiles understand anything about Robin Hood? He's meant to be a folk hero, you useless doofuses … why even our very own Rusty played the noble thief, and while it was a useless movie, at least Ridley Scott understood Robin was ostensibly the hero (why pick Rusty then?), and assigned the task of playing the villain to assorted rich barons and the Sheriff of Nottingham …

It fair ruined the start to the pond's Friday, it did, so in a petulant fit of the sulks, the pond reverted to the savvy Savva of yesterday … she was sure to be full of saucy doubts and fears, and be inclined to much brooding ...

Well yes, it was spinful, there was no actual surplus and that helps explain why the reptiles led with that wretched cartoon this day.

The pond understands that the onerous duties of Pravda down under reporters never end, but robbing the rich isn't a patch on robbing the surplus …

But enough of the budget. The pond is in ABTB, anything but the budget, mode. The poodle has left in tears, things fall apart, the centre will not hold, chaos is unleashed, and the surplus is but a butterfly dreaming …

Ah never mind the backflip and the spinning on a dime …

...speaking of climate scare campaigns, which reptile let this one through, an import from the "agencies"?

The "agencies"? Apparently they haven't swallowed the reptile kool aid, but there's a lazy acquirer of stories at the lizard Oz who's treading on dangerous climate denialist ground … there's filler, and then there's heresy ...

And in turn that reminded the pond of a disappearing Louisiana, a nicely observed story by Elizabeth Kolbert for The New Yorker, luckily outside the paywall for the moment, lengthy but actually worth the read - unlike anything the reptiles produce - and inter alia, building to this …(spoiler alert):

...McPhee included “Atchafalaya” in his book “The Control of Nature,” published in 1989. Since then, a lot has happened to complicate the meaning of “control,” not to mention “nature.” Choose just about any metric you want and it tells the same story. Through activities like farming, mining, and clear-cutting, people have directly transformed more than half the ice-free land on Earth—some twenty-seven million square miles—and we’ve indirectly altered half of what remains. As with the Mississippi, we have dammed or leveed most of the world’s major rivers. Our fertilizer plants and legume crops fix more nitrogen than all terrestrial ecosystems combined, and our planes, cars, and power stations emit about a hundred times more carbon dioxide than volcanoes. We now routinely cause earthquakes. (A particularly damaging human-induced quake that shook Pawnee, Oklahoma, on the morning of September 3, 2016, was felt all the way in Des Moines.) In terms of sheer biomass, the numbers are stark-staring: today, people outweigh wild mammals by a ratio of more than eight to one. Add in the weight of our domesticated animals—mostly cows and pigs—and that ratio climbs to twenty-three to one. “In fact,” as a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences observed, “humans and livestock outweigh all vertebrates combined, with the exception of fish.” We have become the major driver of extinction and also, probably, of speciation. In the age of man, there is nowhere to go—and this includes the deepest trenches of the oceans and the middle of the Antarctic ice sheet—that does not already bear our Friday-like footprints. 
Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the byproducts of our species’ success. Such is the pace of what is blandly labelled “global change” that there are only a handful of comparable examples in Earth’s history, the most recent being the asteroid impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, sixty-six million years ago. Humans are producing no-analogue climates, no-analogue ecosystems, a whole no-analogue future. At this point, it might be prudent to scale back our commitments and reduce our impacts. But there are so many of us—nearly eight billion—and we are stepped in so far, return seems impracticable.  
And so we face a no-analogue predicament. If there is to be an answer to the problem of control, it’s going to be more control. Only now what’s to be managed is not a nature that exists—or is imagined to exist—apart from the human. Instead, the new effort begins with a planet remade, and spirals back on itself—not so much the control of nature as the control of (the control of) nature. A Mississippi that’s been harnessed, straightened, regularized, and shackled can still exert a godlike force; it’s no longer exactly a river, though. It’s hard to say who, these days, occupies Mt. Olympus, if anyone.

Now there's a climate scare, and funnily enough, it doesn't involve a crude cartoon about comrade Bill, it involves a disappearing Louisiana … and so to the final savvy Savva gobbet ...

Poor old reptiles … even the Kudelka of the day could afford a joke about the bake-off …

And so, reluctantly, to the official government response to comrade Bill's budget speech … as provided by the bouffant one …

Dear sweet long absent lord, that's not the tone that the pond expected from a dutiful Pravda down under scribbler. There's far too much talk of comrade Bill's archery skills, and perhaps that's why the bouffant one felt the need to cut it short. No long ramble, nattering "Ned" style from him … just do it, and get off the stage quickly, exeunt far right ...

The bottom line? There's a serious mis-match between the bouffant one and that wretched, tone-lowering cartoon, which suggests there's something wrong with the larrikin attitude to Robin Hood …

And so to a story about the reptiles' chief love, which the reptiles have been pushing for a couple of days as an EXCLUSIVE …

They never give up, these the black knights of coal … take it away lesser Kelly and cohort …

So the savvy Savva was right. They do want to mount a climate science scare campaign from their bunkers in the deep north …

By the way, hasn't Rowe been strange lately?

 

More strangeness here, because there's no chance you'll see a Rowe cartoon top of the page in the lizard Oz …

Now back to the cold, clammy coal fear ...

And so, just when loyalty, strength, staying true is required …

… what do we get, but fudging and hesitation, saucy doubts and fears, and perhaps a realisation that coal isn't such a big seller outside the deep north?

What a pretty mess, what a wicked pickle the reptiles and their love of coal has produced for the coal-ition …

It sets the tone for the Pope of the day, with more infallibility to hand here …

And in honour of Dame Slap yesterday, here's a joke for Brexiteers …