In which the reptiles yearn for the real start to the silly season, and so does the pond ...

 

 

 

Today the pond woke up to the realisation it was a victim of historical nihilism - perhaps Mao's son was making fried rice, perhaps Ming the Merciless did ship pig iron to Japan, perhaps petulant Peta would be the last warrior standing, perhaps the pond would weaken and sample the savvy Savva ...

The pond's nihilistic confusion wasn't helped by the compare and contrast front pages ...

 

 

The reptiles seemed lost and confused ...the waters muddied. 

What was this talk of gay kids in that other wretched rag? Hadn't the lizard Oz sorted that out yesterday?

And yet the best Pravda down under could come up with as its lead was blather about sharing the NDIS load ... and never mind the splendid sight as those coal towers tumbled down in slo-mo ...

The pond looked below the fold for comfort and found none ...

 

 

 

Who let that bloody animal into the tent, and then allowed him to begin pissing on?

 

 

Cartoonists were beginning to laugh and crack cheap jokes ...

The pond turned to the lizard Oz editorialist to see if it could clear the air and find salvation ...

 

Overly zealous, simplistic and hurtful outbursts? But as a happy atheist the pond is overjoyed it can tell Xians, Islamics, Hindus, they can bugger off and die ... because after all, that's just sending them more speedily to their own version of heaven ...

Here have a cartoon to celebrate with the faithful ...

Good old freedumb and a final lizard Oz ed gobbet ...

 

So it's off to committee for that one, and nothing for the reptiles to celebrate in the run up to Xmas ...

Instead they trotted out the Tudge, and the pond realised it would have to trudge a mile or two with the Tudge, because the sight of someone so clueless is always a splendid distraction ...

Not the old ivory towers routine. 

Someone spruiking that line must live in an ivory tower, or never been asked to take out a bloody big debt to get an education, and then carry the burden for a very long time ...

The pond just knew the opening salvo would have to be about publishing academic papers and developing innovative products ... because there's one thing a politician can't do, and that's scribble an innovative newspaper column ...

Oh come on, they're incentivised to fuck with the English language ... and as for the y'artz and history and such like, it seems all has been forgiven and forgotten ...

Now speaking of jargon, would you like to try on "a broader integrated system of collaboration", seeing as how that old suit featuring knowledge, understanding and insight simply doesn't fit any more ...  though really if the trudging Tudge had been on song, he would have demanded "a pivot to a transformational broader integrated system of collaborative actionable analytics on an augmented quantum scale"...

 

Oh fucketty fuck, from can do capitalism to Trailblazers ... and policies devised and conducted as a marketing campaign, and all the pond could shriek into the ether was, sanity. where the bloody hell are you ...

It's a good thing Liberal governments aren't in to picking winners, but instead let can do capitalism do ... because if Tudge was involved in picking winners, we'd get a right old fudge ...

And after that overindulgence in fudge, the pond got so desperate it did something it rarely does. It turned to the assiduous turd-polishing of the bouffant one ...

In the pond's defence, it was short and seemed mainly to have been devised as an excuse for a couple of click bait videos ...

 

 

 

Remain clichéd, and calmly carry on with the clichés? 

Weak and sneaky is the best the natural born liar could come up with as marketing slogans? There's a lot of Freudian projection involved in that choice of words ...

No wonder the reptiles felt the need to fling in a click bait video at that point, and the pond had to note it just for the record ...

 

 

What a plaintive, pathetic look ... and then the tour of Pravda down under was over almost before it began, with another click bait video  to wrap things up ...

 

 

So the silly season is already here ... just ten more days of cohesive attacks to go ... which is to suggest Albo is all insults and no ideas, and again we're talking Freudian projection on a massive scale ...

Have an infallible Pope to celebrate ...

 

 

By golly, this new riff on the natural born liar is a treat ... though the pond did wonder when the estate of Carlo Collodi might begin demanding royalties ...

And now, sine petulant Peta raised the issue of the war on China by Xmas, the pond felt its duty obliged it to end with the bromancer, still endlessly worrying ... seeking friends and allies, when perhaps he could have made friends and influenced people by celebrating historical nihilism.

What could be weirder than publishing a list of rumours in a bid to take the rumours off the table? 

Never mind, the pond must stop reading The New Yorker and things like Does Xi Jinping's seizure of history threaten his future? (currently outside the paywall).

 ...Xi’s party has taken to calling the great rejuvenation “an irreversible historical process,” a concept that echoes with some of the triumphant certainty that attached to Western liberal democracy after the end of the Cold War. But Geremie Barmé, a historian of China living in New Zealand, notes that, in the current case, the promise of inevitability is framed largely around the leader. “His works have been published in luxurious volumes; every speech he makes is celebrated as ‘important’—his every statement and quotation is hailed as ‘golden formulations,’ ” Barmé told me. “His activities, history, and personality are limned in terms that suggest an approaching apotheosis.”
At the moment, outside analysts see no major threat to Xi’s power, but the history of the Chinese Communist Party casts doubt on the prospect of a simple, certain future. “After all, since 1936 there has been only one peaceful transition of power within the Chinese Communist Party, and that was in 2002, when Hu Jintao, designated as heir by Deng Xiaoping, took over the reins as Party General Secretary from Jiang Zemin,” Barmé said. Far more often, the pressures of ambition and factionalism within the Party have given rise to sudden bids for power and dominance.
The more Xi closes down the routes for advancement, dissent, and individual success, the more he risks fostering a kind of political sepsis—a volatile, sometimes fatal, rot from within. It is a lesson contained in the past, but one has to be open to seeing it. In July, in a speech marking the Party’s hundredth anniversary, Xi addressed a hand-picked crowd of more than seventy thousand people. He turned, as he often does in speeches, to the power of history. “By learning from history, we can understand why powers rise and fall,” he said. “Through the mirror of history, we can find where we currently stand, and gain foresight into the future.” Perhaps, but only if the mirror is true.

Indeedy do, the war within might be much more interesting than the war without ... but the poor old bromancer doesn't have the wherewithal to go there ...

 

 

 

 

 

The poor old bromancer is reduced to celebrating an "important triumph" for the marketing man with the Pinocchio nose ...

 

 

Was it only yesterday that the pond was reading the bromancer saying ...

 

 

 

And the very next day he's rounding up allies for the war on China?

 

 

But what of the worm in the rose, what of the canker at the core, what of historical nihilism? Oh never mind ...

 

In all this triumphalism and bluster, had the bromancer completely forgotten what he'd written the day before?

The pond can report, with great pleasure, that finally, in the very last par, the bromancer did have a recovered memory session, and it all became clear, and he gave the mutton Dutton, and mindless simpletons of the petulant Peta kind a gentle tap on the wrist ...

 

 

The pond can't help but think that the bromancer is beginning to repeat himself ... what with the war on China being so exhausting and complicated ... but the pond is entranced by the notion of historical nihilism, and wondered if it had crept into the immortal Rowe's bed, as he celebrated SloMo's ability to lie straight in bed ... with more straight bedding, and much lying thereon, always to be found here ...