In which there's a squillionth picture of satanic windmills to accompany the Caterist, and why not nuke the planet before we overheat it?

 

Richard Ackland had the pond from the get go, what with comparing Chairman Rupert to William Randolph Hearst and dragging in Orson Welles and one of the pond's favourite movies, Citizen Kane ...

It's all there in the Graudian, What sort of country are we? That’s the question implicit in Lachlan Murdoch v Crikey. 

Ah, memories. The pond once took the trip to Hearst Castle, if only to confirm the size of the fireplace featured in the film ...

In later times, the chairman and brood could only boast of a TV series, which has been very popular and was slickly done, but isn't quite on the same turf as Welles' masterpiece, or his persecution, or the film's narrow escape from destruction.

Still it remains a popular pond parlour game, working out who was the more heinous mogul. 

Hearst and his minions helped start a war, and destroyed many lives and careers, but having lived through it, the pond is always inclined to celebrate the deeds of the chairman ... surely contributing to the destruction of the planet and the destruction of democracy in the United States must be valued, and besides, Hearst showed an unnerving interest in show folk and other people, not least his mistress, Marion "Rosebud" Davies ...

It led to amusing anecdotes, where people were bumped down the table until they took the hint and left the table. 

Sure Chairman Rupert once owned a studio - it was obligatory for fashion-conscious moguls - but the chairman has only ever shown an interest in raw, unbridled power, and his behaviour is strictly transactional, and his marital follies (there have been a few) never quite measured up to Hearst's devotion to his Rosebud, or hers to him ...

Never mind, the pond will leave that game to others, because today is Caterist day and FUD is all the go ... as it always is, as reliable as Pinky's devotion to the Brain's endless quest to rule the universe ...

Please allow the pond to pause for a celebration. The pond hasn't kept an accurate account, but thinks that's the squillionth time the reptiles have published a snap of satanic windmills atop a fear-mongering story about renewables ... and how fitting it is that this milestone should have been achieved atop a Caterist tilting in Don Quixote fashion at windmills ...

Some might doubt the Caterist credentials for the tilting, having been so spectacularly wrong on the matter of the movement of flood waters in quarries, but that's the great thing about reptile science. You don't have to have expertise, you're just required to have a certain skill at FUD, and the right mindset ... which will see no mention made of climate change ...

It's all terribly impressive - few realised that as well as a wretched student of sociology, the Caterist was an expert engineer who might talk in a complex way of complexity and synchronicity, while atop the digital page, the reptiles could get excited about the greenies and a deep freeze ...

 

In such cases, it's always better to revert to the Graudian, which has the lake story and a story about the UK's current weather and the cold snap ...

What's more interesting to the pond is the way that the reptiles routinely talk about climate alarmists and climate catastrophists and snowflakes and such like ...

And yet each week we have a precious snowflake of the Caterist kind, peddling imminent complete catastrophe and total collapse, and alarmism and FUD ... anxiously doing a Chicken Little and crossing his fingers ...

Fifty years or more? So all that talk of the air war in the second world war was a nonsense? It seems that the main risk to the bomber squads making those epic trips to Germany and back wasn't the flak or the German fighters, but the lack of reliability in the aircraft ...

As for commercial aviation, might the price of the ticket have had something to do with it?

Or it could just be that as always the Caterist is prone to rhetorical flights of enormous stupidity ...

Before anyone reverts to nostalgia about the early days of flying, there was this about how global travel took off ...

In the pond's experience, if the rich find something expensive and perceive it to be relatively safe, and the common mob are kept away from the fireplace, then it will become extremely fashionable ...

Luckily there was a Rowe on hand to celebrate the landscape arising from the latest Caterist effort ...

And so to what the pond won't be covering this day ... because the Major went there ...

And Dame Slap was also at it again, yammering away in the reptile triptych of terror ...

The pond refuses to indulge in trial by media, though of course it's what Hearst ordered, and the chairman routinely orders, as a way to boost circulation.

Nor was the pond tempted by the Catholic boys' daily story about last rites - seeing as it involves imaginary places invoked by talk of a triptych of imaginary friends - or that ABC payback - if that's a "brutal reality check", wait until climate change really gets going on reality ...

But it left the pond short of a bonus, and below the digital fold, it was equally dire ...

Good old Eric, carrying the water for the industry, but the pond checked, and there were no snaps of satanic windmills, just a couple of snaps of power grids, which the pond must rate a spectacular fail ...

As for Frank's plea to stop the nasty, apparently he's completely clueless about the reptiles and their business model ... being nasty, especially about indigenous voices, is what drives them on, and soon enough there'll be a column berating Frank for blathering about bipartisan goodwill and everyone being respectfully heard ...

The reptiles don't do respect, they like to shout loudly at the top of their collective voice, so that only they might be heard ...

So the pond decided if we're going to talk about catastrophe, instead of climate change, why not an old favourite, the nuking of the planet in the old-fashioned Dr Strangelove way ...

There you go, there's nothing like talk of "the need for more strategic nuclear weapons" to get the pond excited ... it doesn't just bring back memories of the pond's favourite comedy (how many times can you talk of precious bodily fluids and fluoride? As many as you like!).

The notion that you can drop the odd nuke and nobody will much mind is a wonderful notion, extremely strategic, and it reminded the pond of the great days of MAD, and not just Dr Strangelove, but also films such as Lumet's 1964 Fail Safe, and the whole MAD syndrome ... (not to mention the talk of copyright infringement, as dire as any nuclear armageddon).

The pond doesn't often spend time with the Dibbster, but the pond found his talk of a renewed nuclear arms race immensely cheering. 

Instead of over-heating the planet, why not just blow it up? Or at least bung on a third world war and let the nukes fall where they may ...

Ah yes, the virtue of being practically continuously at war, and didn't the US teach the Taliban a lesson, and hasn't that been spectacularly good for Afghan women ... and then there was the lesson they taught Iraq, another sublime outcome, not to mention the lesson they taught Libya and the sort of lesson in Syria ...

So many lessons, so little time, but then the pond decided to abandon the Dibbster when he proposed that the thing that's needed are more serious studies in the public domain ...

Apparently he's unaware that he's scribbling behind a paywall, and that in reptile parlance, the public domain consists of paying a weekly shekels stipend to the chairman ... though it's unlikely he'll ever build a zoo of the kind Hearst did, because lashing his minions onwards is much more fun than caging wild creatures ...

It's good to see that the Dibbster and the bromancer are on the same page when it comes to erect missiles ready to blast off with a payload, and the urgent need to contemplate something short of a nuclear war ... but if needs must, a few nukes across the bow will soon sort the Chinese out, and we can all go out to the local Chinese restaurant to celebrate ...and you can always toss in a Slim Pickens' yee haw if you like ...

Meanwhile on another planet, Kudelka had a celebration last Saturday ... and it's as good a note as any to finish up this day's outing in the Murdochian fireplace ...