Mein Gott, there once was a golden age, and now there's an age of Peta lead ...

 

The pond has slowly come to realise that there are some hard core economists types who attend these pages in search of a reptile fix.

The pond says 'slowly' because years of reading the reptiles has reduced the pond's mind to a state of being comfortably numb. 

The pond's own relationship to the dismal art came to an abrupt halt many years ago, when the cry was always "get out your Samuelsons", as depressing a cry as "get out your Bembricks".

The pond has since ambled along with a Keynesian inclination, and no desire to go any further, but the pond's recent discovery of Mein Gott's contributions has whetted the appetite for more. 

Sure, he's only a reptile B team player, and had to get dropped this day when the bro and the rustic one sorted out defence, but still attention should be paid ...

The reptiles slipped in a couple of illustrations ...

... and it wouldn't be a proper lizard Oz piece without drawing attention to the shocking socialists in the deep south who are ruining the country, or with Mein Gott shrieking about a global house of cards which one day will fall down.

What is astonishing is that Mein Gott admits that he's completely clueless, and doesn't have an answer which would provide a different outcome, and so here comes the second great depression, possibly by Xmas (apparently it was postponed from the previous Xmas).

Would a humble 2008 do as an emetic and corrective? Nope, the whole global house of cards will, must, fall down ...

Ah, bloody Victorians, as bad, or possibly worse than Californians ... but the pond interrupted the pillar listicle, so we must quickly move on with MMT's second pillar ...

The pond has always enjoyed the notion of printing money, and in its younger day used to run off currency, though no one ever seemed to be fooled by the pond's artwork. Still printing money has its uses ...

And so to the final gobbet, with the hope that Mein Gott has stirred the juices in the economics junkie folks, even if this is a late arvo slot ...

With Mein Gott done, now to the bad news.

The pond doesn't like to give a reptile a singles outing. They must be on a date. This is a team effort. The simplest answer would be to cast around the full to overflowing intertubes and find a loon mate. There are plenty of them to hand...J.K. Rowling Adds ‘Holocaust Denialism’ to Her Transphobia (paywall)

But is this right, is this proper? There's no doubting the quality of the loonacy ... and some have fun engaging with the loon to hand...

But the pond must stay loyal to the reptiles. If there's going to be a tag team, it must be another reptile, and that's where the problem arises.

After looking at what the reptiles had on offer this day, the judges decided that only petulant Peta rose to a Rowling level of loonacy.

The pond can't argue with the judges, but this means that the pond must tag team petulant Peta with Mein Gott.

In a loose way they're both about the end of the world, though in petulant Peta's case, it's because vulgar youff aren't tough enough and need to harden the foggy fug up.

At this point, anyone with a faint heart can decamp. They've had the best with Mein Gott ... they've had the chance to potter about with the Nazis, and so there's no need to hang around for the worst ...

The pond understands and forgives, but must do its duty for the reptile empire... huzzah.

What astonishes the pond is how petulant Peta is clearly a bear with very little brain, and so how easily she slips into the old "golden days of yore" routine ...

It's the second refuge of the scoundrel, the first being patriotism, and shows a truly ancient way of thinking.

Amazingly there were two wikis on golden age thinking. One dressed it up as metaphor ...

The Golden age as described by Hesiod was an age where all humans were created directly by the Olympian gods. They lived long lives in peace and harmony, and were oblivious of death. The "Golden race" were however mortals, but would die peacefully and in their sleep unmarked by sickness and age. Ovid emphasizes the justice and peace that defined the Golden Age. He described it as a time before man learned the art of navigation, and as a pre-agricultural society. The idea of a Golden age lingered in literature and historical understanding throughout the Greek and Roman periods. It was partly replaced by the Christian Six Ages of the World based on the biblical chronology in the early Middle Ages.

The second applied a little history ...

The term Golden Age comes from Greek mythology, particularly the Works and Days of Hesiod, and is part of the description of temporal decline of the state of peoples through five Ages, Gold being the first and the one during which the Golden Race of humanity (Greek: χρύσεον γένος chrýseon génos) lived. After the end of the first age was the Silver, then the Bronze, after this the Heroic age, with the fifth and current age being Iron.

By extension, "Golden Age" denotes a period of primordial peace, harmony, stability, and prosperity. During this age, peace and harmony prevailed in that people did not have to work to feed themselves for the earth provided food in abundance. They lived to a very old age with a youthful appearance, eventually dying peacefully, with spirits living on as "guardians". Plato in Cratylus (397 e) recounts the golden race of humans who came first. He clarifies that Hesiod did not mean literally made of gold, but good and noble.

In classical Greek mythology, the Golden Age was presided over by the leading Titan Cronus. In some versions of the myth Astraea also ruled. She lived with men until the end of the Silver Age. But in the Bronze Age, when men became violent and greedy, she fled to the stars, where she appears as the constellation Virgo, holding the scales of Justice, or Libra

European pastoral literary tradition often depicted nymphs and shepherds as living a life of rustic innocence and peace, set in Arcadia, a region of Greece that was the abode and center of worship of their tutelary deity, goat-footed Pan, who dwelt among them.

Once you get into this syndrome, it's like being trapped in the front bar with some drunken bar fly oozing contempt for vulgar youff and yearning for the good old days. (The pond remembers once being trapped in a railway carriage with a drunk trying to light the cork end of his cigarette, while explaining how once he'd been a thugby league contender...)

Any topic allows the drunk to keep on rabbiting on about the failings of vulgar youff ...

Petulant Peta of course is up for skin cancer, heat stroke and whatever else because that's part of the macho tough guy persona every reptile is supposed to inhabit (except when it comes to actually enlisting in the armed forces. Better to stay behind the keyboard than actually get shot at courtesy a political whim? Hmm, is there a white feather in the house?)

For no particular reason, the reptiles inserted a shot of a bunch of plods trying to quieten down the streets, possibly inflamed by petulant Peta's tough girl John Wayne rhetoric ...

The problem with the macho routine becomes clear in the next gobbet.

"Take Covid", petulant Peta declaims, and these days most can take Covid, thanks to vaccinations, anti-virals and the rest of the treatments on offer. (It's still not that good for oldies and homes for the aged).

It's easy to forget that it was and still is a killer, and that in its day, influenza was also a potent killer, these days also blunted by vaccinations ...

In its day, flu was Killer's worst Freudian mask nightmare because they didn't have much else in the tool kit...

How blithe and carefree is petulant Peta ...

Of course that bit about transphobia featured a gigantic billy goat butt in the approved reptile house style.

The pond is well over standard reptile TG bashing, but when petulant Peta suggested "take Australia Day", the pond decided to draw the line. It's bloody March, this year's Australia Day has gone, and there's no need to get on the Australia Day bandwagon until December, or at least when the war on Xmas has been put to bed ...

Take Australia Day and shove it ...

That river to the sea routine is a reminder of how dumb petulant Peta is when it comes to repeating talking points. 

As a bit of low hanging fruit, she didn't fall far from the onion muncher tree. There's a new use for from the river to the sea ... (Rolling Stone paywall)

Yes, it's been around for yonks, with this in WaPo back in January (paywall) ...

Meanwhile,  the genocide continues apace ...

But petulant Peta is only interested in a set of listicle talking points and had moved on to blather about elite groupthink, always richly comic coming from a housetrained member of the hive mind payed handsomely for the pleasure of being a member of the reptile 'leet ...

At this point there was a snap ...

Then came a final gobbet of drivel, designed to produce sympathy in the pond for vulgar youff. 

There only consolation is that each generation has had to endure this kind of blather ... and managed to survive and inherit the earth ... though these days the likes of petulant Peta and the reptiles are doing their level best to make sure there will be no earth to inherit ... yes, we're back with pure clean virginal dinkum Oz coal ...

What a useless dickhead she is, macho posturing away as if she was up to eating onions ... but remember, it's all the fault of Mein Gott ... if he hadn't been around, there'd have been no need for a tag team featuring petulant Peta doing an Iron Claw routine. (Didn't that work out well).

And now, as in the old days, you always used to be able to walk away from the Tamworth show with a plaster cast trinket after pouring a fortune and many table tennis balls down a clown's throat, the pond would like punters who stayed the distance to walk away with a cartoon celebrating the result of shoving cash down a clown's throat ...

And here's a leet joke ...