In which the pond is full of dread at the return of the onion muncher, and the Oreo turns out to be just the usual calcifying of the arteries ...

 

The pond's heart sank to the very bottom of the well this day, as if weighted down by lead. Its very eyes were in peril, as it minded the biblical lesson to pluck out that kind of offending organ if it offered offence (or a gate or whatever)...

It wasn't the war of words between dictator Xi and the brave bromancer that got the pond agitated - the pond had covered that yesterday, and was as full as a goog with bromancer thinking. 

Nor did the pond much mind the absence of the Caterist and Major Mitchell, apparently so downcast that they've felt the need to take a break.

No, it was the sight of the onion muncher, the bromancer's best buddy, munching away at the top of the digital edition early in the morn ... and the pond was compelled, knew what it had to do, and yet was full of revulsion at the deed, and perhaps might spend the rest of the day roaming the craggy corridors, trying to wash the blood from the hands ...

There it is: the comical boasting, the peacock preening, the cliché-laden text, not least the "people caught between two worlds" drivel, which might have worked in Kipling's day, but proves yet again what a cloth-eared clown he is ... though it might have been worse, they might have been caught between two stools, or two tools ...

And it didn't get any better ... with more "I convened here's" and "I wanted the system to be more hands-on", but strangely no mention of "being fair minded in a cliché-laden hands on way, I was a total fuck-up as a PM, especially when possessed by the clot notion that a week in the bush would help sort things out ..."

Was it only on Saturday that the pond reported that, of all the reptiles, the most extreme, the most intractable, the most inclined to bark or howl at the moon, the dog botherer, had delivered a different assessment ... including but not limited to ...

Importantly, a voice would be only advisory; all power would rest, as ever, with the parliament. The scare campaign from Turnbull and Tony Abbott about a “third chamber” of parliament, therefore, is erroneous and alarmist – there is no veto, no lawmaking or law-breaking capacity.

Barnaby Joyce employed the “third chamber” attack but later admitted it was wrong and apologised for using it. The recommendations of an Indigenous voice would carry great political weight, of course, but no constitutional power.

People on the conservative side of politics rightly eschew symbolism in favour of constructive outcomes. They should be reassured that the push for a voice was driven by a desire to achieve practical outcomes from the constitutional recognition process; Indigenous leaders argued that mere symbolic recognition would sell them short, while direct input into laws and policies concerning their welfare would deliver ongoing workable change.

There was more, and the pond was traumatised by the astonishing transformation, but knew the reptiles could soon defang it ...

All the same, to trot out the onion muncher a mere two days later was too brutal, even by reptile standards .. like a northman with gym and trainer daily to hand and pretending to be real ...

Oh the shame, the unendurable shame the pond must suffer in its study of the reptiles, compounded by that reference to Pearson.

It took just a nanosecond to discover that Pearson had been one of three cited by the Sydney Peace Prize, quoting him thus ...

As long as First Nations peoples remain unrecognised, then Australia is missing its most vital heart. The Uluru Statement was the answer to the Commonwealth’s desire to recognise First Nations in the Constitution. The evidence four years later is overwhelmingly that Australians will support giving us a Voice. It’s time.

What to do? Best forget about the many betrayals, the abundant treachery, the pious bullshit, and move along ... but to what? With no Major or Caterist there wasn't much to choose from ...

A reminder that someone like Brennan makes the onion muncher look like a speck of flyshit on a bootlace? No, no, that would just get the pond agitated. 

And the pond has always ignored simplistic Simon saying "look, no conflict of interest here Bid", in much the same way that it only breaks lizard Oz editiorialist glass in emergencies.

The pond checked out the bromancer, but sadly it was full of impotent fuming and raging, and a turning to Indonesia, and besides, after yesterday's special late arvo edition, even the pond had had a surfeit of bromancing.

Sorry, it had to be the reformed, recovering feminist, getting agitated about Liberal women ...

The pond does appreciate that reference to Judeo-Christian values, no doubt including the angry Sydney Anglican's endless search for complimentary women (what's gone wrong with in-store giveaways?) or perhaps the Catholic church's solution to power-sharing, which is to send difficult women to a nunnery where they might pray away the day ...

But then the pond looked at the tree killer edition and wondered what the stupid bloody woman was banging on about ...

You see, there on the far right of the far right rag, "Dutton makes way for women."

Now, actually, that doesn't mean that Dutton's made way and given up his position for a woman, or has done much beyond tokenism, but surely that should be enough to silence the petulant whining of the Oreo, always wanting more gruel ...

Not really ...

Sheesh, there's a click bait video of the mutton Dutton himself, announcing 10 out of 24. What more could he do, given the decline in numbers? Why is it that bloody difficult women want to make it hard for him? Has the Oreo forgotten that she's no longer a feminist, she's just a reformed, recovering feminist? Seems likely ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, after all that blather, that wretched whining and carping - bloody women - it's safe to say that Librul women are doomed ... but never mind, they can still fulfil a joyous Complementarian role ... perhaps help serve a nice cup of tea at meetings, together with scones and jam, though the fast modern set might like to clog their arteries with a serve of Oreos ...

And so to the Rowe of the day ...

And now the pond will admit, with remorse, to another failing. 

Apart from a modest outburst from the Angelic one, devoted to a mission from God, the pond has failed to mention the just passed jubilee, but points out that's because the reptiles stepped around it ...

The pond did however read Nick Cohen comprehensively dumping on aspirational Prince Chuck ... and thought it worth a celebration, as a premonition of things to come ... some strange beast slouching towards parliament ...

..Times change and aristocrats are no longer frightened. There will be no sense of caution about Charles III: only a sense of entitlement. Without self-consciousness, he denounced young people with ideas above their station in 2003. “What is wrong with everyone nowadays? Why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far beyond their technical capabilities? People seem to think they can all be pop stars, high court judges, brilliant TV personalities or infinitely more competent heads of state without ever putting in the necessary work or having natural ability. This is the result of social utopianism which believes humanity can be genetically and socially engineered to contradict the lessons of history.”

He showed no awareness that he was the beneficiary of, if not genetic engineering, for any half-competent engineer could produce a better product, a genetic fluke. In his mind he will be a self-made monarch who will succeed to the throne on merit rather than by luck...

And so on, and on ...

Greenish readers who believe that interventions from an ecological King Charles would be welcome should look at where his environmentalism comes from and where it leads. Charles’s widely unread Harmony: A New Way of Looking at the World is another book worth forcing yourself to plod through. It sets out an obscurantist vision that is so reactionary it opposes all aspects of modernity from the scientific revolution on. Hence his fondness for the dictatorial petro-monarchies of the Gulf. They may cause devastating environmental damage but at least they are free from the democratic constraints the Enlightenment put on European royals. Hence the belief in quack “alternative” medicines, the damage to health they bring notwithstanding.

His wide-eyed mysticism takes him far from the Anglicanism of his mother. One can only pity the archbishop of Canterbury when the next supreme governor of the Church of England explains how he has found the ”sacred geometry” of the orbit of Mercury sits “within the orbit of the Earth in such a proportion that it fits exactly over the pentagon at the heart of the five-pointed star”.

And then to a rousing end ...

When dominant prime ministers or CEOs retire after only a decade of achievement, their successors struggle to repeat their success. How much harder will it be to follow 70 years of a reign that even republicans concede has been an accomplished performance? The more so when an accident of birth has thrown up a silly, vain, zealous and fatally unself-conscious monarch, who, to use his own anti-meritocratic notions against him, doesn’t know his place. In other words, the UK is heading for a smash-up. Après ma’am, le déluge.

And in honour of all that, the pond found this Rowson irresistible ...