In which Polonius wanders down well-worn history as a Sunday meditation and distraction from the Trumpian pain ...

 

The wags had a field day with that green screen green dress, including Colbert, but the pond felt the need to begin with a little light relief, if a tad ancient, because as usual, prattling Polonius is on hand for the Sunday meditation, and that's always a grim way to start a Sunday ...

 

Why harp on a dress? Well Polonius has, as he usually done when under stress looking at the state of things in current times, has retreated into the past, and blathered on about symbols ... 

The pond can remember a time when such symbols were thought of as friendly fire ...

You know, in ancient times there were all sorts of oddities. Yesterday the pond featured Ming the merciless cosying up to Adolf, until it was decided that we should be cosying up to Uncle Joe, and never mind the millions he murdered ...

The trouble with the Polonial beef resides in the way anyone in the second world war would have been obliged to see the Soviets and Uncle Joe as an ally, and the hammer and sickle quite a friendly symbol ...

Life is a little fickle, not that you'd expect fundamentalist Catholics to remove the blinkers for any reason whatsoever...

As it so happens, the pond doesn't think much of any flag or symbol, since the notion that you can summarise things this way leads you straight to the Confederate flag, or saluting the British flag and pretending it's Australian ...

But back to the tongue clicking and the disapproving looks, designed to make Polonius sound like an old-fashioned, fuddy duddy pedant, with traces of Pooterism ...

Times change of course. At one time Ming the Merciless was cosying up to Adolf, and calling him a fair player, and at the same time, he was shipping pig iron off to Japan, so that it might be sent back in the form of munitions ...

It's strange how times and perceptions change ...

 

But all that's forgotten these days, and if remembered, the pond certainly wouldn't expect Polonius to recall it ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, did Polonius miss reading our hole in the bucket man Henry yesterday?

Why there was tyranny and draconian powers, and basic freedoms lost, and festering abuse, and no accountability and transparency, and no freedom of movement, and no right of appeal to an independent and impartial tribune, and talk of how such restrictions had played into facilitating the crimes of Hitler and Stalin, and all this in the lizard Oz, in exactly the same place as where the reptiles seated Polonius, and and yet, there he is, imagining it's all just social media-style chatter.

Does anyone at the lizard Oz actually read what the lizard Oz pundits say?

Well the pond can claim no superiority because here's two the pond won't be reading. Forget the war on China, the reptiles now want to begin their war on super in earnest ...

If Killer Creighton can't kill people with the virus, then he certainly can try to kill super, since the whole point is for it to be compulsory ... and the bouffant one is keen to turn it into a nest egg that can be dipped into, though once spent, who knows what people will be living on in their old age? The generosity of the federal government? Why the grasshopper might as well ask for a free pass from the ant ...

And here's another one the pond won't be reading ...

The pond is also going to ignore Dame Slap, doing her own version of our Henry's hole in the bucket routine and having another go at Comrade Dan.

The pond has long lost any interest in Dame Slap, and will maintain that lack of interest, as she carries on more like an IPA flack than a lizard Oz columnist ... at least until she finally summons up the courage to write about Donald Trump.

Years ago, Dame Slap donned a MAGA cap and stepped out into the New York night to mingle with the like-minded crowd (so she alleged), and ever since, she's avoided the Donald as much as she can ...

It's a cowardice unseemly even for a reptile in a ship where cowardice is an essential part of avoiding chairman Rupert's impersonation of Captain Bligh (yes, yes, they were all into rum, sodomy and the lash, and Bligh was just another captain, but carry on like that and you'll turn into Polonius and think British imperialism was a jolly good thing for all those wretched black chappies).

Never mind, because next to Dame Slap, was a story which was no doubt designed as another shot across the bows in the reptiles' ongoing war on China.

But if the pond had to select the most egregious, fucked-up decision in relation to China, in the last decade, poor old Comrade Dan and the universities and even lickspittle, fellow-travelling Twiggy, purporting to give a fig about human rights while dancing with oppressive dictators, were overshadowed by one singular, staggering CLP/federal coalition government feat.

It begins this way here ...

In 2012, the Country Liberal Party — long viewed by itself as the "natural ruling party of the Territory" — was brought back to power after 11 years in the wilderness, and while no gauge of public opinion was taken, decided all public assets were up for grabs.
The first was the port. Expressions of interest were sought in late 2014 and early 2015, with 33 respondents signalling their interest in acquiring it.

The pond should probably note that that consummate branch stacker Kevin Andrews was sworn in as minister for defence on 23rd December 2014.

And then a question was asked:

How did it get through FIRB and Defence?

And then it was answered ...

A 2016 Senate committee revealed that while the Foreign Investment Review Board had been contacted to look at the deal, it ultimately didn't formally investigate because, at the time, there was an exemption from scrutiny of a deal like this because it involved a private company and a state or territory government.
The head of FIRB admitted the entire process had undermined public confidence, failed to show a balance between economic gain and national security concerns and was finalised on an "ad-hoc" basis.
The committee called for greater transparency in the decision-making process and for more details to be publicly disclosed, and its report stated the NT Government failed to answer key questions around the details of the port deal to the committee's satisfaction.
The rules were ultimately changed to not let this happen again.FIRB chairman Brian Wilson told the committee he had become aware of the deal in late 2014 and asked for a response from Defence and intelligence agencies a few times in 2015, but was repeatedly told that Defence had no issue with the deal.
It was also later revealed that the Defence officials were only middle management, and that senior figures and the Minister of Defence only learned of the deal hours before the NT government announced it publicly.
"It was an inexcusable stuff-up by the federal government and various departments, but that doesn't excuse the NT government making this parochial, stupid decision in the first place," Mr James said.
"You can't mortgage the strategic security of 25 million — and in the future more Australians — just to make a quick buck for a local political problem you have at the time, and then lie about it, and lie about it consistently in your supposed defence of it.
"You may well find that future generations of Australians reading Australian history books will have the most scathing judgments about the idiocy of the decision-making.
"It's quite possible many decades in the future if there is a serious war, where this becomes a serious problem for us, people will wonder whether the decision wasn't just a stupid one, but whether the people doing it hadn't looked seriously at the concept and laws surrounding treachery."
Back in mid-December, when the current Labor Government was trying to explain how the NT was in the middle of a full-blown financial crisis that sees it borrowing $4 million a day to keep operating, Jodie Ryan was asked in a briefing what happened to the $506 million the NT received for the port.
She said it was put into general revenue and spent. It's long gone, with less than 96 years left.

And there you have it, the mouse roared, not a shot was fired and the CLP and federal coalition surrendered a significant strategic asset for a mess of pottage, quickly pissed against the wall ...

The pond suspects it was all comrade Dan's fault, double-dealing duplicitous Victorians being what they are...

Of course the pond could have been reading Marina Hyde in The Graudian here ...

Like me, you will have been transfixed to discover that failed former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott is being lined up for a senior role on the UK’s new Board of Trade. What a worthy exchange of assets between our two great nations – like learning that Theresa May had accepted a part on Neighbours, possibly as some kind of Mrs Mangelreboot. Suggested plotlines could include May driving round Ramsay Street telling any immigrant characters to go home. (Which, let’s face it, wouldn’t exactly require starting the engine.)
Then again, arguably something far more ridiculous has already happened: Theresa May is now paid £100,000 a time to make speeches, presumably at nihilist conventions, or in dedicated art spaces at avant garde parties. “Siegfried! Let me mist you with absinthe, then you must call into the installation room – Theresa May is performing ‘The Cough’.”

Oh what a bitch she is, how the pond loves her, how the pond wishes it could write like that ...

Or you could have been discovering that refugee News Corp recalcitrant Malcolm Farr can now be found in The Graudian here describing the same thing, but in more sedate prose ...

The appointment of former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott as a British trade envoy is not quite treason but certainly a further sign he has London written on his heart.
That is where Abbott was born in 1957. He went from Australia to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and remains a royalist who as prime minister gave the Duke of Edinburgh an Australian knighthood.
The bestowal baffled many Australians who couldn’t see what services to them warranted a tribute to a prince already overloaded with gongs. But Abbott was keen to do what British PMs could and dispense royal rewards.
And he probably wouldn’t reject a display of royal approval himself, should his services rendered to trade negotiation be worthy of honour. Perhaps he has been chatting to Sir Lynton Crosby.

Sir Onion Muncher, if you please, muh lord.

So much pleasure to see Farr escaped from the reptiles but so little time, and that left the pond with only a chance to briefly meditate on a lizard Oz editorial ... which remarkably, bromancer style, began with the notion that the Donald represented a vision of light over darkness ...

It was, of course, a chance to begin with a few cartoons ...

And then after a few pars of the very bromancer-like, delusional, lizard Oz editorialist tirade ...

... a chance to throw in a few more ...

... and then after the lizard Oz editorialist finished off with another par, still replete with bromancer-style delusions ...

 

... a chance to throw in a few more, and end up back where the pond had started, feeling the pain ...