In which the pond plays "I spy" with "Ned", before spying the Bjorn-again man and the dog botherer ...

 

 

 

 

 

 

With the news from Afghanistan simply too depressing - watching barking mad fundamentalists triumph is never fun, a bit like watching the US cosy up to the Wahhabists of Saudi Arabia - the pond decided it would simply bore itself back to sleep, and there's no better way to do that than a cleansing dose of salts, or a serve of nattering "Ned" ...

The pond realises its few readers won't bother, and will simply stay under the doona ... but for those willing to embark on climbing Everest, there's a simple game to play, roughly equivalent to those old "I spy" games ...

You know, "I spy with my little eye something beginning with ..."

Here it helps to know that recently the reptiles reached "peak podcast player" with "Ned" genuinely nattering into a microphone, and the reptiles splattering the result in every column they could find, including "Ned's", of course ...

Armed with that reminder of how "Ned's" player was once the cockroach of lizard Oz columns, we can play the game of "I spy with my little eye, nattering 'Ned''s podcast player ..." with today's column ...

 

 

Uh huh, and it's not a race either, but more troubling was the news for the "I spy" players, there was nothing to spy ... perhaps the next gobbet would contain some joy as well as more of a serve of
SloMo, who attracted this serve from the trundling Rundle ...

 

 

... One wonders also what role Christian belief has played in this disaster. For two decades now, Christian evangelicals have been taking over the Liberal Party, and they now have a prime minister from the truly extreme end of it — the “go to the church your dad started in his garage” end, as I understand it.
Religious faith per se doesn’t predispose you to fatalism, but the literalist Christianity of Morrison and Co does, especially given literal notions of an afterlife. Death, in such frameworks, is merely a portal through which you pass to come out substantially as you were on the other side. Indeed, one wonders if that lies at the root of Scotty’s Star Trek obsession: the teleportation thing as a concrete image of life and death.
Because of course it was in response to things like disease that notions of an afterlife arose in the first place. Life’s bounty could not be so routinely foreshortened, so subject to caprice. There had to be something more. Has our prime minister been a bit too comfortable and relaxed about whether Australians live or die?
The mix of evangelism and dispensationalism swirling around Australian born-again Christianity also makes you wonder whether Morrison sees himself as a servant of the Australian people or a servant of God first and foremost. By definition, any Christian would have to see themselves as the latter, but a non-literalist Christian could see that as wholly mediated by, and expressed in, their public role. Literalist Christians don’t have that luxury.
Morrison’s speeches often contain some element of proselytising. “Science begins in belief,” he said, wrongly, at the National Science Awards, his first major speech after becoming PM. That should have been a clue. Not only about what he thinks science is, but about what he thinks of himself as called to. You can see what he was trying to do. It’s like the Moonies love-bombing lonely backpackers. You’re looking for the people in the crowd who feel lost, so you can hook them and reel them in — the whole “fishers of men” thing.
The point is, if you’re a literalist, evangelical Christian, you have to do this sort of thing. It’s your duty. The kingdom of God overrides the kingdom of men, which is why evangelicals stayed out of all politics for decades. Sooner or later that contradiction will be tested. Was that what happened in this case, this disaster that condemns us to months, maybe years, of disruptions that might have been avoidable? 

The pond just had to slip that in ... taking "Ned" straight without a dash of something is too much to contemplate ... 

 

Actually Sky News is a public menace ... it has run false and outrageous claims about vaccines and alternative cures, and assorted Sky pundits have denounced lockdowns, and the same might be said for assorted members of the lizard Oz stable, what with the likes of Killer Creighton and the killer dog botherer on the prowl.

But then "Ned" has always had a mote in his eye about News Corp, and besides, he's desperate for Scotty for marketing to win, apparently so that this deeply corrupt government might continue on its way ...

 

 

No option?

But billy goat, butt, in the lizard Oz this very day, there's a headline in the lizard Oz announcing that climate change is a positive thing ...

 

 

Okay, okay, it's only the Bjorn-again one, but what if SloMo were to read it? He'd probably think that exporting coal was saving lives, and then if he managed a second thought - always tricky - he'd probably think that anyway dying's just a fast track to heaven and an eternity of bliss with Jeezus ...

Sorry, sorry, keen players, the pond hasn't forgotten the "I spy" game, but all the pond could spot at this point was a snap of fool's gold standard Gladys ... 

 

 

Well if we're going to interrupt the game like that, why not do it properly ...

 

 

 

 

Now back to the "I spy" game because in the pond's world, a game of swings, even of the ball-breaking kind, is a tad genteel ...

 

 

Is it possible to read drivel of the "If Morrison is true to his word, this will be a plan and a half" kind without bursting into laughter?

Here the pond must pause to consider John Birmingham's discussion of whether SloMo is a bullshitter or a liar ...

...in the Prime Minister I suspect we have a feckless cove who long ago smirked fuckity-bye-bye to sweet vérité, clicking his heels as he performed a backflip through the open window of her boudoir, only to wake in fright years later, afeared that the endless twitching of his knob in the dark is a convulsive recoil away from the serrated kitchen knife of payback.
Here is a man in whom resides the liar’s careful weighing of every word lest one reckless slip bring down upon his head, every crashing slab and stone in a whole teetering tower of deceit.
And yet we have seen too that he can be a roistering motherfucking Falstaff of the gleeful bullshitter’s arts. Behold, in his naked shamelessness at now preferencing lockdowns as the only workable response to Covid outbreaks, after traducing the Labor premiers for ever having contemplated them, the champion bullshitter’s zero fucks principle.
How then to parse this uncommon duality?
I suspect the answer lies in another duality; the question of whether the defining feature the Morrison government is corruption or incompetence.
Because adorable little taco girl, this is not simply a soft-vs-crunchy conundrum. I will cede the point that this government is both jaw-droppingly corrupt and catastro-fucking-muntedly incompetent, but that’s akin to conceding that water is a little bit damp and Matt ‘Sooty’ Canavan somewhat ridiculous.

Jo Dyer captures the essence of it in a cracking good essay over at The Shot, a wafer thin slice of which I’ll steal here:

In this Government, not a single Minister has been held accountable for anything at all. Not one. For anything. A few may have retired hurt to the backbench for a while but they always return revived and rejuvenated. Some of the things for which Ministers should be held accountable (but weren’t) and for which one might expect to see lasting consequences (but haven’t): Brother Stewie ripping us off for internet connections, listing his parents as company directors for an organisation unknown to them, and masquerading as an official Government representative on a private business trip to China. Michaelia Cash refusing to talk to the police when they investigated her office over leaks to the media and then lying about it. Sussan Ley using taxpayer dollars to get her flying hours up to keep her pilot’s license and buying herself an apartment in the Gold Coast along the way. Bridget McKenzie, Senator Sports Rorts herself, now apparently in charge of a Bush Fire Relief Fund busily dispensing money to areas unaffected by the bushfires. Angus Taylor, where to start? A man whose list of scandals is so great, I had to add this extra clause to capture the last and actually least egregious, the monumental self-own that was his skirmish with Clover Moore. Christian Porter, an accused rapist, who moved on Witness K and Bernard Collaery, a whistleblower hero and the lawyer approved by the Inspector-General of Intelligence, fought to try them in secret, and then destroyed the Family Court. Porter’s wing-man, Alan Tudge sleeping with a staff member while promoting himself as a family man and, pre-election, flinging $666,000,000 of taxpayers’ money around in marginal seats for ill-conceived carparks.

There's more of course, if you follow the links, and that might be a wise move for the day, but meanwhile the pond must keep playing "I spy" with "Ned" ... 

 

 

Hmm, a snap of Barners, and nonsense about it suddenly becoming a race, and yet still no sign of anything turning up for the "I spy" players, and time and gobbets are running out ...

 

 

It's the old story - the premiers are still in change?

Oh the pond couldn't resist that one, the sign that the lizard Oz might yet become the Graudian ...

And while doing spoilers, the pond can announce the result of its "I spy 'Ned's podcast player" competition ...

There's nothing to spy. It's gone, it's disappeared, it's like it never was, as you might expect of the 'it's not a race, premiers are still in change' mob ...

 

The reality?

The reality is that, disgracefully, "Ned's" podcast player is nowhere to be seen, and the reptiles are still publishing the Bjorn-again man ...

 

 

 

 

 

 

This won't take long. After the nonsense in that headline and the snap of the poley bear in the street - always go with an animal snap, and poley bears are much cuter than your average LOLcat - the Bjorn-again has only time for a few fatuities ...

 

 

The pond usually plays the game of spot the Bjorn-again one's standard chant about the need to invest more in green technologies to save the day, but today, it's a game of spot the absurdly precise statistic ...

 

 

You won't hear that so far climate change saves precisely 166,000 lives each year?

Is that because the pond usually doesn't bother with bullshit figures?

And the reptiles have the cheek to complain regularly about the uncertainties inherent in climate models!

Remind the pond again why the reptiles keep publishing the feckless futtockry of the Bjorn-again man?

Never mind, only one gobbet to go and the pain will be over ...

 

 

Okay, okay, you could have spent your time with the infallible Pope, offering some splendid viewing ...

 

 

 

And so to the dog botherer, only because he's there, and he's a corrective to all the bullshit put out by nattering "Ned" ...

 

 

 

 

 

What do you do when you haven't got Killer Creighton around to rabbit on about a fear of masks, and celebrate the killing fields and such like? You bring on the dog botherer, hoping to kill a few more Australians, in the Gladys way  ...

 

 

 

You know for sheer callousness, cold-bloodedness and brutality it's hard to go past the reptiles ... which is why the pond found itself reaching for John Donne again ...

No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man
is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine;
if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe
is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as
well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine
owne were; any mans death diminishes me,
because I am involved in Mankinde;
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

Would that the bell tolled for the likes of the dog botherer and Killer Creighton, but no such luck ...

 

 

Uh huh, tell that to the mugs in Walgett ...

 

 

Stoicism? 

Stoicism is making it through a dog botherer column without actually using expletives, or urging the dog botherer to shove it up his arse, and thus far the pond has been incredibly stoic ...

Reptiles, a snap of a mask if you would be so kind, so if nothing else, at least Killer Creighton might have a toxic shock ...

 

 

Oh that's rich, coming from a Murdoch hack, that blather about expunging any sense of an egalitarian Australia.

Is that the IPA's sense of an egalitarian Australia, or Gina's mob, or deeply corrupt happy clappers with their paws in the cash till?

On second thoughts, just shove it up your arse, the pond is exceptionally tired of sounding stoic ...

 

 

Indeed, indeed, well there is a future dream, a future hope, one conjured up by the immortal Rowe, with more conjuring here ...