In which the pond decides on a little Xmas cheer to help the Polonial pill go down, and settle the "Ned" nausea ...

Look, everybody knows the pond's Sunday routine ... a burst of Polonius whining about the ABC not giving him a gig, and so taking malicious pleasure in everything he can use to slander the joint, followed by a burst of nattering "Ned", designed to send everyone back to bed for a little more of a snooze, the whole enchilada laden to the gills with cartoons that have nothing to do with the matters at hand, but are better than opening the window and shouting at the clouds about being as mad as hell ...

So dammit, the pond decided it would get in an Xmas story just to keep the Romans happy ...

It comes in the form of Harrison Scott Key's tale in Long Reads, Christmas on the Moon ...

The pond isn't going to quote it in full, just the opening flourish ...

I have enjoyed many happy Christmases and plenty of disappointing ones, like the one I spent eating alone at a Waffle House due to an ice storm, or the Christmas my father accused all the unmarried relatives of being gay. But of all the sad Yuletides of my life, the one I spent guarding $100,000 worth of explosives on the surface of the moon tops the list. The year was 1996. I was 21 years old and, in a way, quite homeless. Home is one of the enduring themes of Christmas, the joy of being in its midst and the thundering melancholy of longing for it, wondering if you can ever really get that feeling of belonging back—if you ever had it in the first place.
At the time, I was a college student in Jackson, Mississippi, and rarely went home. I would only fight with Pop about why I stopped going to church or entertain questions from Mom about my sudden hair loss and what this did or did not mean about radon poisoning. I did love my family, or at least the idea of them, and took great pride in our being rednecks who lived far off in the Piney Woods, a lawless land where nobody would deliver a pizza. So many of my college friends came from civilized places with public parks and museums. When somebody asked where I was from, I would pull out the atlas to poke my finger at the unmarked point on a map of Mississippi, between Brandon and a subatomic little village called Puckett. “Traveling circuses wintered there,” I’d say, a detail I learned from the Rankin County News as a boy.
It was a nonplace, really. The boonies. The sort of place you only went if you were searching for an escaped convict or a coonskin cap. It did not feel like home. Nowhere did. Mom was from the Delta, Pop from the Hill Country up near Coldwater. “Mama and thems,” he called it, in a county where all the cemeteries had tombstones full of Scotts and Keys, which are two of my names. It felt nice to be in a place where so many of my family members had been embalmed..

Ah, Tamworth. Never mind, in this version, along the way came a vision from the Xmas holly ghost ...

I remembered my Bible, and all those hymns, too, so many songs about looking for a home you can’t quite put your hands on. In “We’re Marching to Zion,” we sang about the “beautiful city” that awaited us, reached via “The Gloryland Way,” a spiritual highway leading into a metaphorical Canaan’s Land where there exists a habitation on a hilltop for peoples of every nation with no war or passport requirements. Until then, we slouched through arid and inhospitable lands, filled with stumps and snakes. The message was clear: you could find a home—you just have to die first.
I drove through woods and up into town toward Jackson, wondering if God had a home for me out there, somewhere. He’d led the Israelites to theirs with a pillar of smoke by day and fire by night, but driving back to campus in the dark, I saw no burning signs pointing the way. All I saw was a great big billboard off the interstate, bathed in spotlight. In a blaze of fluorescent fire, the sign shouted with holy ghost power: fireworks!

Then there's the comedy ...

“Absolutely not,” Mom said, when I explained over the phone that I’d found holiday employment with Boom City, LLC, a subsidiary of The Hunan Group, Inc., managing Central Mississippi’s largest fireworks tent on a dark patch of highway just over the river from the Murder Capital of the New South. Death was rampant in the area: stabbings, execution-style shootings at the river or the strip clubs just over the hill.
“You’ll be robbed,” Mom said. “What kind of company hires a child to sell explosives?”
Something possessed me, a hunger to escape, to hurry up and exile myself and get it over with. Missing Christmas would be a hard stop, a clean death for the past. 
A few days later, during finals week, my father made a rare appearance on campus. Most of the students were gone already. 
“I brought you some things,” Pop said, opening the trunk of the car to reveal gun cases, ammo, and a machete wrapped in an army blanket.
“Your momma’s worried, son. The machete will make her feel better. I sharpened it,” he said, thumbing the blade.
Pop had brought along my old 12-gauge pump, my .30-.06 rifle, and three preloaded clips with 220-grain shot, in case the fireworks tent was attacked by a team of bison.
“And some pistols,” he said, handing me a bag of pistols.
“Thanks, Pop,” I said, transferring the arsenal to my trunk, a few parking spaces over.
Sometimes, when I think about my life, I think about the quiet moments that may have shaped me more than I could’ve known, like the time my father handed me a sack of guns in a dormitory parking lot because he didn’t want me to die...

And there the pond must end for fear of spoilers, with the hope that Key's tale brings to mind fond memories of doing Xmas without the usual family torment ... though perhaps not quite so armed to the gills, that being the American way.

Speaking of quiet moments, it's now time to turn to Polonius's bitterness at the ABC's stubborn refusal to give him a gig.

Every show on the entire network would be enlivened by his presence, and there would be no need for makeovers ...

The pond must skip past Polonius labelling anything or anyone other than himself "boring". It's too post ironic, too meta satirical, too avant-garde, too ancient ...

The pond does wonder at the monomaniacal obsessive compulsive navel gazing and fluff gathering, such that Polonius himself can, in a rare moment of lucidity, now make a joke along the lines "for eons I have described the ABC as a conservative-free zone".

Some might think Polonius is exaggerating, but "eons" is a classic Polonial understatement. As the Cambridge would have it, an eon is "a period of time that is so long that it cannot be measured", or if things geological, "a period of time of one thousand million years", or "the longest period of time in which the history of the earth is measured ..."

It's true, the pond was back with Polonius in the age of the dinosaurs, carping at the lack of decent conservative carnivores, with way too many grass-munching dinos, and all because he got kicked off Insiders, and the ABC has routinely refused to give him a gig, and by now, he realises he's way past it, and will never get one, so all that's left is snotty carping on the sidelines in the lizard Oz, and all the pond can think is why do they bother, and why isn't it time for a programming makeover at the lizard Oz ...

If they can get rid of The Drum, surely the reptiles could drum out Polonius, who must now only appeal to septuagenarians ready to come down from the attic and ruin the Xmas lunch ...

Oh that's right, irrelevant, distracting cartoons ...

Sheesh, there's no escape. Even that robotic cop reminded the pond of Polonius's robotic carping ...

What's truly bizarre is the amount of time Polonius spends obsessively devouring the ABC, just so he can scribble about how much he hates the ABC. This is the M in BDSM cranked up to eleven. 

The pond has noted for eons - and that's a very long time, as long as the 12th of never - how deeply weird it is, and wondered how he endured having that constant buzzing in his hive mind ...

Another distracting,  irrelevant cartoon? Of course ...

Polonius will never get an ABC gig. Boy is he gunna be disappointed on Xmas morning ...

Second thoughts, of course he won't. He doesn't want to be the dog that caught the car ...

These days he's content to carp and whine and moan from the sidelines ... and he loves to repeat himself, ad nauseam, with lines like "As I wrote last week", and as he wrote the week before that, and the month before that and the year before that and the decade before that and the eons before that ...

The Drum started in 2010, and so ran for 13 years, which in terms of television programming is an eternity ... you might almost say an eon  ... especially for a chat show designed to deal with issues in a soft touch way as a lead in to the news ...

You have to look to something like The Project for a rough equivalent. It began way back in July 2009, and has routinely gone through "major shake-ups", which largely consist of panel changes. When Ten recently axed its morning show, there were calls for The Project to be axed instead ...

These days FTA TV is constantly under the hammer, and reinvention is a yearly necessity, with many eyeballs having scarpered elsewhere, the pond among them. Unlike Polonius, ABC TV isn't high on the pond's entertainment list.

One thing's certain. If you put Polonius in charge of the ABC's network programming, the corporation would be dead within the year ...but then it's not clear that anyone's listening to him. 

Does anyone outside the pond show the slightest interest in this old fogey as remote from TikTok as an alien on Planet Janet ...

Oops, okay, that was vaguely relevant, the pond will do better with "Ned's" interminable Everest ...

In the meantime, the pond is proud to note that there has been some cutting back on the reptiles ... 

There's no garrulous Gemma ...

And there's no talk of nuking the country in an EXCLUSIVE...

Chiefs? Yet again the mob that rails at 'leets are off imbibing the wisdom of the 'leets.

The pond will concede these small deletions are no compensation. 

Nothing can help anyone walk around the "Ned" Everest ... but there are irrelevant cartoons ...

There are possibly some disappointed to see that John Quiggin has taken to lurking behind the Crikey paywall, ‘Progressive’ Labor is dead — supporting stage three tax cuts is pointless, but if you're cunning, you can just follow him on Substack, and see if it eventually turns up there, and if not there's plenty of other ways to Quiggin ...

The pond only mentions it for those banging their heads against the "Ned" wall, wondering if there might be something more interesting to read ...

Now for a little house-keeping, tidying up the reptile snaps ...

Banality, thy name is the remnants of the lizard Oz graphics department ...

An irrelevant cartoon? No, the pond hasn't forgotten the need for a little spicy girl on girl saucy action ...

It's not often the pond gets to talk about MILFs, but ain't it grand where "Ned" will take you. Now trust the pond, you can get through this.

You don't have to be a ne'er do well shirker and slacker, you can make it to the top ... just tri, tri anti wonti whatever ..,

Okay, time for another irrelevant cartoon, way better than the Kimmel elf routine...

Still wanting to slack off, still a quitter?

Don't make the pond call on Corporal Luke Townsend, doing an excellent Group Captain Mandrake impersonation ...

News of his plan has swept the country, Revolutionising ADF recruiting: an opt-out system.

...I propose a new approach that I’ll call the ‘opt-out system’. This system would have three steps.

In the first step, all Australians at the year 11 or 12 level would be mandated to sit an ‘Australian service questionnaire’. This digital assessment would use standard questions based on personality, IQ, values and preference. These sorts of questionnaires have been used in recruiting across industries and defence forces for decades. Young people even sometimes seek these types of assessments from a psychologist to help them decide what they may be good at for a future career. The answers to these questions provide an initial assessment of the young person’s aptitude for roles in the ADF.

In the second step, the young person would be made an ‘offer’ of four or five suitable roles on a digital form. Next to each role’s description and salary there could also be a link to a short video of someone who has been in that role for 12 months, explaining what to expect on an average day. Below the full-time positions, the question, ‘Are you interested in part-time work?’ could be presented, with the options for jobs with the local reserve unit. The young person can then tick which roles are of further interest to them—or at the bottom of the form can select ‘opt out’ for no further involvement in the initiative. (Other defence civil service jobs and, at local state level, the police could eventually be incorporated into the offer.)

In the final step, if the young person reacted positively to one of the roles in the offer, a date would automatically be booked for their medical, psychological and physical testing. The standard ADF recruitment process would be implemented from that point, with a start date for the person’s service recruit course provided on completion of testing.

There could be other times in an Australian citizen’s life that the Australian service questionnaire could be mandated—for example, at the completion of a university or TAFE qualification, when that person may be looking for options.

If slackers aren't up for "Ned" and want new options, the corporal and the pond have some grand ideas. Now pay attention ...

It's the old "when did you stop beating your wife" routine. Any sensible government would get rid of the unfair tax cuts, whatever election promises made, but the frightened "Ned", offering "frightening scenarios", would immediately scribble frightening and terrifying tales of the sufferings of the rich ... so you can get taken down in a terrified way if you do, and if you don't, you're a frightening scenario ...

Meanwhile, in Texas ...

Don't worry, the pond still has plenty of irrelevant cartoons to go ...

Oh FFS, the pond admits it's a mistake to read the actual text and come across blather about "diabolical dilemmas" ...

This is a diabolical dilemma, with bonus bubbles in the air ...

Okay, it doesn't help. There's still three gobbets of inanity to go, with much cussin' and cursin'...

Oh dear, that talk of the digital comedy almost ruined the pond's quest for irrelevant cartoons ...

Whatever else, the pond is determined not to be reduced to the level of "Ned's" Chicken Little routine, running about the chook yard screeching at clouds and yelling that the sky is falling ...

He's done it week in, week out, for eons, and nobody has bothered to look back and check him, or note his slavish devotion to assorted coalition government wreckers of the economy, because that way lies madness ...

"Ned" has been brooding this way from printed page days, without pausing to think that fish and chips shops no longer have any need for his scribbles, and the few delusionals that still bother immediately toss him into the recycling bin ...

Whatever he's got to offer will likely be overturned by events landing in the in-tray no later than January 2024 ...

With the greatest respect, blathering about the budget in a decade is meaningless up against more immediate concerns ...as outlined in A. B. Stoddard's piece Trump Said Too Much Too Soon:

Donald Trump has chosen to make “dictator” his brand. No one made him do it. But the fact that he did, eleven months before the election, is a good thing.

Trump’s plans to destroy our foundational checks and balances and rule as a king hadn’t penetrated much beyond political insiders and Washington think tanks until the last few weeks—when a front-page story in the New York Times, a collection of articles in the Atlantic, and an essay by Robert Kagan in the Washington Post all warned of the specific plans that allies of the former president are hatching to enable Trump to concentrate power in the executive branch, illustrating how the nation can “drift toward dictatorship,” as Kagan wrote.

The initial response from Trump was, naturally, So what? Asked by Sean Hannity on Fox News last week whether he would promise “never” to abuse his power by seeking retribution against his enemies, Trump said “except for day one,” adding that he wanted to close the border and “drill, drill, drill.”

Republicans, on cue, said Trump was joking. Donald Trump Jr. and his dad’s new favorite front man, Senator J.D. Vance, sent out tweets seven minutes apart explaining Trump’s genius sense of humor as a superpower no one else possesses.

Axios reported the following day that Vance is on the short list of potential running mates for Trump, and that the rest of his possible White House team and cabinet could be a dystopian nightmare. The possibility of Stephen Miller as attorney general, Kash Patel as CIA director, Steve Bannon as chief of staff, Ric Grenell as secretary of state, John Ratcliffe as secretary of defense, and Jeffrey Clark in a top Justice Department position suggest that there will also be a place for Michael Flynn—and that we’re screwed. These were no background musings from bit players: Tucker Carlson was an on-the-record source for the story.

Imagine someone with the secretive and awesome powers of the entire CIA using them to “come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” which Patel promised on Bannon’s podcast last week. “We’re going to come after you,” he said.

Patel and Bannon may sound like maniacs, but they are in the inner circle. And what Trump is saying about personnel picks to Carlson—someone he talks with frequently and himself a veep shortlister—is valuable information for the public to have.

So is the long list of authoritarian goals Trump and his allies have articulated already: invoking the Insurrection Act on his first day in office, pardoning the insurrectionists who sacked the capitol on January 6th in the deadly riot he incited, creating immigrant detention camps, prosecuting political enemies and members of the media, overhauling the civil service to fill as many positions as possible with political appointees who will carry out any order out of loyalty to him rather than fealty to the Constitution and the rule of law, and perhaps investigating MSNBC for what Trump called “its ‘Country Threatening Treason.’”

The aspiring tyrant has spared no detail or deranged desire. Recently, Trump promised a religious test for immigrants and asserted that if anyone doesn’t “like our religion,” then he doesn’t want them in America.

And so on ...

Forget 2034, forget Rudy, who's a lost, wayward, pathetic minnow on his way to bankruptcy, what about 2024?

And so the pond filibustered its way  to a final gobbet of "Ned's" latest anxiety attack ...

Yeah, yeah, but it could be worse, you could be looking down the sights of a sociopath intent on revenge killings in a massive killing field ...