In which the pond presents a triptych of reptile terrors for a Sunday meditation ...

It was good of the infallible Pope to set the mood for the pond this Sunday, because after this reptile serving, it's impossible for the pond to imagine some readers making it to the end ... without then building to a fully-blown SNAP!

It starts innocently enough, with the reptiles putting prattling Polonius cheek to jowl with the dog botherer ... but then almost immediately it spins wildly out of control, such that all Australia and democracy is under dire attack, and could well be at an end by next weekend ...

 

Note the way that the dog botherer's header transmutes, like gold into lead from "Enough! This is no way to live, leaving that dangling forlorn inverted comma at the start … to turn into Coronavirus: Suddenly, no one wants to call Australia home above the story …

And that's just the beginning of the march to Chickenlittle reptile hysteria …with much flapping and flap doodling ...

 

The pond thought that that the doggie fucker must have taken an hysteria pill before sitting down at the keyboard. The pond isn't that in to patriotism, the last refuge of reptile loons, but surely that's a bit extreme?

True, the pond doesn't want to call South Australia home, and given the temperatures, the pond isn't inclined to call Hobart home, and for the moment, the pond can't call Melbourne home, but where did the dog botherer drag out - apart from his arse? - the notion that no one wants to call Australia home?

And what? Move to the US and live with the Donald, or head off to the UK and live with Boris, or try to get into Europe, what with the way they're also experiencing a second wave …

Everywhere has its unhappinesses and woes, because that's what happens in a world pandemic …

But that's the way it is with the reptiles, as soon as you think they're settled, suddenly they're romping about the place like raving, ratbag loons …

 

The fragmented, fragmenting mind that the dog botherer carries around seems to be acting like a hollow-nosed bullet hitting a watermelon ...

"The essential truth is obvious"?! Well, essentially, no, not really ...  but the pond is eternally grateful that it wasn't the dog botherer up there on the Kokoda track when things got a bit sticky for the choccies ...

There it came again, suddenly no one wants to call Australia home? Well, speaking personally, the pond would like to keep on Australia home, but it's a tad hard to articulate that sentiment if you're six feet under in a cold, hard grave, or perhaps just blowing in the wind …

Truth to tell, there's nothing anything anyone could do that would satisfy the dog botherer … he's always a festering mass of unhappiness, discontent and bitterness, a man who thinks he's always in possession of obvious essential truths, and then is startled when some look at him and think that instead they detect the ravings of a gibbering loon who's been staring into the sun, or a Sky TV camera, for too long ...

Ah, the old rhetorical question trick, and yet it's clear enough what the dog botherer wants … lock the old farts in a gulag, keep them away from youff, apparently under the delusional impression that anyone under forty will emerge unscathed …

It's a familiar riff …

It's unfathomable to the pond how the reptiles fancy themselves as epidemiologists, and then chop and change, and blow with the wind, according to whatever has moved them in the past few days … such that suddenly the dog botherer fancies that he and Norman Swan are one …

Actually what the dog botherer is saying there, in flowery gibberish, with his talk of "sustainable" and "costs and benefits", is how many people the reptiles are ready to let die, so long as they and the economy keep ticking over, because, you know, things are pretty tough at News Corp at the moment … while handing the task, in best Pontius Pilate style, over to the politicians …

But we already know what the Bolter thinks …

Note: 40 per cent of aged-care home residents die within nine months. The average stay is just under three years.

So Victoria’s bans are doing huge damage to — essentially — save aged-care residents from dying a few months earlier.

The chief executive of the Council on the Ageing, Ian Yates, said Bolt’s argument was totally unacceptable.

“It’s an attitude that certain kinds of lives are disposable,” Yates told Weekly Beast. “Logically the next step would be to ask, ‘Why do we have nursing homes at all, why don’t we just bang them on the head?’”

Speaking of banging a doddering old loon on the head, out long after his proper bedtime, would that the pond could when it came to prattling Polonius …

Good old Polonius at least provides genuine comedy. Is it possible to mix, confuse and conflate the Victorian government's response to the virus to its handling of the Pell matter?

Of course it is. How could anyone doubt it? See the master conflationist go about his business, leading with a viral feint ...

See? A meister stroke, because virus and Pell go so naturally together (who knows, perhaps Pellism is a virus?)

Polonius really can't let things go, can he, and so it turns out that the virus is merely a pretext for a rant worthy of a fanatical Jesuit … and of course, once the cops dared to touch a hair on the head of the infallible papist Pell, they're guilty of all sorts of crimes designed to outrage the prattler, as he quickly moves into litany mode ...

And now, as anyone familiar with Polonius will realise, for the capper, which will establish that it's all the fault of those wretches at The Age, and even worse the ABC cardigan wearers deviant enough to turn up in The Age … in a way that only the vigilant vigilante understands ... 

 

A failed state? So much for the dog botherer's sanctimonious nonsense about Australia. When it comes to Victoria, Polonius would as soon chop it off as he'd do a Black Knight to his arm and leg.

But if it's all the fault of comrade Dan, where's SloMo? Does he have nothing to do with Victoria? Do not people themselves have a duty of care?

Some might even think that there, but for the grace of a non-existent god, go others …

And now for those who thought they'd seen all the usual tics and obsessions on display in that Polonial outing, the truth is, you've seen nothing, not when Dame Slap goes on IPA parade … because it's not just a disaster and a failed state, the whole country, democracy, the social contract, whatever else the IPA has got, is under dire threat and imminent threat, as if it's a disaster movie only the Rock might be able to solve ...

Hysteria? You bet, and the Dame isn't at all interested in containing the outbreak, not when it comes to the right of people to roam at will, and infect whomever they might encounter ...

Now to dress all this up, for some reason, the reptiles stuck in a few stats, to try to give the rant some foundation in fact, some basis in reality … and the pond includes them only for completists ...

Of course Crikey had a few words about the reptiles and their idea of data in a story ...

Warren noted that there was a reason for the reptiles going off half-cocked …

Who knows? The numbers might rise, the numbers might fall … but there's one thing certain at reptile HQ …

...as politics is the core of Australian media coverage, it’s become the dominant arena to play out the blame game. The pandemic has flipped Australian politics. Usually, all the big decisions come out of Canberra. The states have all care, no responsibility. Now? The Federal government has handed off day-to-day responsibility to the states, leaving Morrison free to be warm and cuddly. (Although both the Ruby Princess debacle and the aged care crisis could come back to bite him.)

For News Corp, this has had the added benefit of target premiers who are Labor, like Victoria’s Dan Andrews, or a woman, like NSW’s Gladys Berejiklian or, best of all, both, like Queensland’s Annastacia Palaszczuk.

Have each of these premiers made mistakes? Sure. Too slow. Too fast. Relying on under-resourced departments. Over-relying on policing and penalties. And some of the media called this in real time, although sometimes at risk of their own consistency, as what’s too fast today may prove to have been too slow tomorrow.

It’s an Australian journalistic imperative that the blame game frame quickly devolves into the hunt for the gotcha moment — one that’s free of any grasp of the provisional nature of the understanding we think we have about the pandemic and how to survive it.

And that's why the pond just loves hard data which doesn't involve the blame game ...

But now back to the blame game, and the expert advice of Dame Slap, world renowned not just as a climate scientist but as an epidemiologist, and pretty much anything else the IPA can brief her on …

Anyone interested might care to online how Dame Slap might spread the number of people leaving their homes for exercise or caregiving or shopping for food across more hours? Would it involve rationing? Number plates? Could it be done without infringing on liberties? You go here when I say, you stay there, and follow Dame Slap's time scale and orders or else?

The answer, as Arthur Fallowfield used to say, lies in the soil, or the drivel ...

Government diktat? The world wars? Liberty? Actually there was a curfew placed on all enemy aliens in Queensland, there was stringent rationing, there were blackout regimes, and not just during the Sydney submarine attack, backyards were turned over to air raid shelters, and many other restrictions were imposed on assorted forms of free movement.

But in those days people didn't whine and moan the way they do in these reptile times.

Get a grip, it's not the end of the world, unless you happen to catch a dose of the virus, and then it might well be, at least for the one who caught it ...

It is funny, is it not, that the great thought crime of the Labor government was to hire private contractors, when as every reptile knew, right up to that moment, that government isn't the solution, government is the problem, and what we need is a lot of private contractors …

It is also funny, is it not, that Dame Slap knows the result of the government inquiry before any report has been made, because the reptiles know … instinctively, intuitively, by sniffing the IPA air ...

And so to a final gobbet, and Dame Slap's hysteria finally going over the top and far away, and this from a supporter of the Donald, and someone who alleged that the UN would use climate science to introduce world government, perhaps by Xmas ten years ago … because yes, now, we're talking about the end of democracy as we know it.

Oh just take a Valium and settle down.

Actually if Victorians re-elect the Andrews government, that's what's called democracy. People might accept mistakes were made, but still want to vote the government back in. And if they kick the government out in a fair election, that too is called democracy. They didn't like the mistakes made, and they decided to punish the government. It's all pretty straight forward really ...

And while all this hysteria is going down, while comrade Dan is supposed to herald the end of democracy in our time, here's a story featuring the mutton Dutton which didn't even raise a Bewitched nasal twitch or a quiver or a shiver in Dame Slap's rigorously tuned IPA antenna …

There's a lot more here, and good luck to journalists already under threat from the mutton Dutton mob, and good luck to the rest of us trying to find out assorted aspects of shameful government behaviour …

But that's all too tricky for the pond, and after enduring three ratbags for so long, the pond decided to have a fainting fit over this: 

...On Thursday, Dutton told reporters in Canberra ASD has “a very unique set of powers” and is “the very best in the business” in operations such as stopping terrorist attacks.

A very unique set of powers?

FFS, will somebody tell Dame Slap about those very unique powers, which could signal the end of democracy as we know it?

And will someone please stop the ABC from talking about 'very unique' every day of the week? As Polonius himself likely understands, that means it's the ABC's fault that we're imminently facing the end of democracy as we know it … did the mutton Dutton even pay a licence fee for the usage, as the pond must do?

And so at last to the Rowe of the day, with more Rowe here, and with this one somehow relevant to the conversation ...