in which the pond does a huzzah with the Angelic one, spends time getting Bjorn-again, then pits the dog botherer against nattering "Ned" in an epic, tediously long fight for the ages ...

 

This weekend the reptiles are full of all kinds of helpful advice ...

There's the bromancer with an open letter on defence, there's our Gracie advising on deficit and debt, there's the oscillating fan helping out the Liberals ... and elsewhere in the triptych of terror a little higher up, Dame Slap was helping out with child care ...

The pond isn't much interested in helpful advice from the reptiles, and was disturbed, as well as astonished, to see that the dog botherer had been nobbled by Pearson and so talked grandly of a constitutionally recognised voice ...

Is it any wonder that the pond, in desperate search of filler before getting to the usual Everest of "Ned", the professional bloviator's bloviator, turned to the Angelic one for a little light queenly relief?

In the old days that 'holding of the ears' snap would have been front and centre on the lizard Oz, and all the Murdochian tabloids, as it was with the English tree killer papers, but the response has been strangely muted down under, even among the reptiles.

Still the Angelica one was blessed with an image that almost brought tears to the pond's eyes ...

Truly if you believed all this guff, you'd be astonished to have caught Steve Richards being a tad sceptical on Sky News on the Friday ... (if you missed it, it's on YouTube)... and you might also have missed Sky News reporting on assorted surveys in Scotland regarding the monarchy ... where it seems the institution is regarded rather lower than a badly cooked serve of parritch ...

But why should the pond rain on the Angelic one's parade, even when the gush turns truly bizarre ...

It's a vocation from God? Where has the pond heard that one before?

And so to another warm-up act for "Ned" - some Bjorn-again advice ...

Mindful that the Bjorn-again one is always in the lizard Oz to help, the pond did hope he'd be campaigning for the return of the much maligned DDT, when it still has so much to offer, together with solid sort for companies of the Monsanto kind, who have done so much to help farmers with their patents ...

The pond was depressed by all this: had the Bjorn-again one forgotten that, together with organic farming, climate science was the author of all the world's woes?

Sure plenty have scribbled about Sri Lanka's move to organic farming going wrong, but the pond relies on the Bjorn-again one to get climate science into the mix ...

Thank the long absent lord, fossil fuels still have a role ... and what's more the reptiles were still on song with clean, decent, pure, innocent Oz coal ...

And with that EXCLUSIVE offering hope to a troubled world, the pond had done its scatty preparation for tackling nattering "Ned" ...

Um, the pond will quickly skip by that dreadful graphic at the top of "Ned's" piece, and note there actually there has some public discussion, and what's more it came from the dog botherer in the very same edition of the lizard Oz ...

To say that the pond was astonished is an understatement, and so the pond had to do a quick pivot back to "Ned", who is of course not interested in solutions, so much as portentously pontificating about all the problems, wringing hands and sighing at the sky, and doing his usual Chicken Little routine ...

And yet the pond couldn't help but return to the dog botherer, even as it meant "Ned's" time in the pond sun would go on and on and on ...

The pond had to pinch itself! Was this some sort of dreaming, or just the usual reptile nightmare, dinosaurs struggling to tear each other apart while Raquel Welch looked on? 

The pond turned back to "Ned", knowing he'd explain how difficult, neigh how impossible it all was ...

The struggle? In the pond's time Aboriginal kids were sent across the oval to a portable, where they could mingle with their own kind, and not disturb white folks in their book larnin ... oh Tamworth High, it was a caring, sharing place ... though the pond's mother did warn of the dangers of going anywhere near the portable or Coledale for that matter ...

And still the dog botherer carried on ...

What a remarkable heresy, and it was with relief that the pond returned to "Ned" ...

Cynics such as the pond might suggest it has something to do with the dog botherer's fear and loathing for Malware ... and yet, and yet ...

Oh it was too much for the pond to bear ... fancy the dog botherer talking of Malware and the onion muncher was alarmist and erroneous.

Is it any wonder that the pond returned yet again to suckle on "Ned's" teat for comfort? (An image designed to provoke the sense of undiluted horror the pond was feeling).

And yet with all that said, there was still the dog botherer ...

A traitor in the ranks, and of all people the dog botherer ... and even worse, the reptiles decided to slip in a click bait video from the infidel, right in the heart of "Ned's" argument. Of course the pond had to neuter it, so that "Ned" might carry on explaining how everything was simply too hard ...

Indeed, indeed, and yet the dog botherer kept nagging at the pond, and at some fair concluding length ...

Nobbled, and it was left to "Ned" to throw a few more saucy doubts and fears on the flames ...

So the world turns, and if anyone had told the pond it would wake up this day and pit the dog botherer against the bloviator's endless bloviations, the pond would have said they were dreaming ...

What's even more astonishing, the reptiles seem to have completely forgotten the energy crisis ... preferring this culture wars territory ... perhaps for reasons suggested by Cam Wilson in Crikey ... (paywall affected)

Damn it all, the pond won't give up on the energy crisis. 

There's an old infallible Pope to hand, badly formatted because he's under strict guard these days, and an immortal Rowe, and the pond can't let them go to waste on mere culture wars ...

In which the pond is triggered by a hole in bucket man and a bubble-headed booby ...

 

What a relief to get to Friday, and young Henry, who as the saying goes, wears his learning heavily. 

Whereas the other reptiles can be a rough, coarse, crude and rowdy lot, our hole in the bucket man makes the pond eternally grateful for having studied Latin ...even now the pond is slowly making its way through Ryszard Kapuściński's Travels with Herodotus with the hope of discovering a bon mot or three it might drop into the conversation with this paragon of the 'leets.

But with all that preparation, the pond wasn't prepared at all for our Henry's stunning decision to go through an upgrade to 1.01 and discuss the travails of the NBN ...

It's a "both sides of politics", with a wretched illustration at the top? And no mention of all those many years of News Corp trying to degut it to protect their franchise, and Malware successfully carrying out the mission, such that to the pond's great embarrassment, some of the rellies in a remote location have recently turned to Elon Musk, and reported a great improvement?

It's not the pond's business to promote that ratbag, or Starlink, but it's come to a pretty pass when a ratbag manages to do something better than Malware ... and the News Corp mob.

Even now the pond still seethes at the total cock-up inspired by Chairman Rupert but must hold its tongue, because the learned hole in the bucket man, heavy in his larnin' might drop another 'leet bit of wisdom ...

Oh wait, of course, it's an of course, to be followed in due course by a couple of billy goat butts ...

Still no word of the role that mendacious Malware and his mob played in fucking the entire enterprise? Still no mention of the cost of replacing the complete mess with fibre to the home? Still no mention of his multi modal mendacity?

The pond kids not ... if you google the beast you can get Malware on 23rd October 2017 quoted as saying ...

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says that, in hindsight, the National Broadband Network project was a mistake and blamed the former Labor government for setting up a new government company to deliver the mammoth infrastructure project.

And Mr Turnbull, who was previously the Communications Minister in the Abbott government, admitted the giant project might never make back the money invested by taxpayers.

... to Stilgherrian reporting on 24th November 2019 Australia's NBN a hell of an achievement ...

Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull's effort to entrench his own narrative of Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN) into Australia's political history is truly fascinating.

"There is no country, comparable developed country, which has as ubiquitous availability of high-speed broadband as Australia," Turnbull told the StartCon conference in Sydney last Friday.

Freelancer founder Matt Barrie had just reminded the audience of the NBN's cost and performance.

"Despite spending AU$50 billion in Australia's largest infrastructure project ever, today we're ranked 62nd for global broadband speed, 40% slower than the global average," Barrie said.

Turnbull interrupted. "Those those statistics are absolutely BS, Matt. Absolute BS," he said.

Such a bullshit artist, with the foolish fop speaking out of both sides of his mouth ... and the pond began to resent the hole in the bucket man for dragging the pond back to the days when HFC was deemed state of the art by Malware's mob, or at least she'll be right, with the odd stocking and bit of barbed wire ...

But what do you know, with a "whether" which is as good as a billy goat's butt, our Henry is all in for Malware ...

Um, it fucked the entire enterprise, and now the pond's relatives are actually contributing coin to the Musk man so that he might buy Twitter and foist the mango Mussolini back on the world ... there must be an irony in there somewhere ...

The pond was beginning to get enraged, so it was handy that there was just one billy goat butt to go ...

Um, what the pond hears is that Herodotus, Malware and the coalition have much in common ...Of all the hole in the bucket man''s miseries the bitterest is this: to pretend to know so much and to have control over nothing.

And now before proceeding, the pond would like to honour the attempt by the meretricious Merritt to make the pond ...

A splendid bit of fear mongering, in keeping with the reptile blather this past week, showing they'll stop at nothing to get rid of these difficult, pesky, uppity blacks and their wretched desire for a voice ...

If the bromancer and Dame Slap hadn't already offered their own patented form of fear and loathing, the pond might have been tempted. But "the High Court is gunna get ya" simply wasn't competitive enough ...

You see, whenever the pond hears the siren song of "woke agenda", the pond realises a bubble-headed booby is hovering in the air, and must be given space to land ...

Now some might say this is just the usual tranny bashing and bashing of minorities beloved of the reptiles ... but it's important to note how a bubble-headed booby can manage to conflate and confuse "woke capitalism" with the "woke agenda" ... before turning to celebrate the mutton Dutton ... and truly there's a lot to celebrate ...

Sorry, the pond is in danger of being triggered, and so needs the odd cartoon to make it to the end ...

You see, there's the "woke agenda" as a match made in heaven. But what is the "woke agenda"? 

"Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations... oh and only indulge in tranny bashing once in a blue moon, better yet never, and recognise that the Uluru statement came from the heart and don't be such a bunch of asinine fuckwits ..."

Sorry, sorry, the pond is being triggered a lot this day, and it usually happens when maroons blather on about woke agendas, and all the pond can come up with is idle abuse, or the odd relieving cartoon .

Moir almost got it right. Oh the tragedy of Barners, the mourning in Tamworth, the endless suffering, but that portrait will surely linger in the mind ...

That's not to downplay that portrait of the beefy boofhead, distilled essence of prime Angus, but the pond is collecting versions of the mutton Dutton ...

And so to a final gobbet, which set the pond to thinking and wishing ... if only the pond had the sophistication of a bigot of the bubble-headed booby kind ...

Oh just fuck off ... the coalition government had many chances to show it cared for proper wages, and what it showed the workforce instead was a proper stiffy, and call the pond woke if you like, but it hates all that stiffing ... and has no time for bigotry dressed up in the finery of giving a flying fuck about the workers ...

That game was tried in Warringah and all the pond got for it was some teal-coloured curtains.

Meanwhile, the pond should not that the reptiles remain in.a panic about an issue that suddenly emerged just a week ago, and now requires the urgent attention of the newly installed federal government, which must fix everything in a week, because the catastrophe only came about last week ... 

Who in reptile la la land could have possibly known that winter was just around the corner? Apparently it's all the new government's entire fault ...

The pond only mentioned that so that the Rowe of the day might be enjoyed all the more ...

In which the pond almost gave the reptile game away for the day before embarking on a forced march with Wellington for the sake of the cartoons ...

 

The pond woke with the knowledge that the reptiles' talk of the woke is always minor key on a Thursday, but even so it was startling to discover how little was on offer...

Sure, the tree killer edition was powered up, continuing in a full flap, stepping on the gas ...

... and so was the digital edition, though surely the tree killers had the best of it, persuading some mugs to pay them cash in the paw to promote national reconciliation week. After the recent efforts of the bromancer and Dame Slap, how about an ad in Der Stürmer to help avoid the war?

Petulant Peta was out and about, and there was a little gloating about comrade Bill ...

But the savvy Savva seems to have gone missing in the Nine papers, thereby avoiding the chance to show us the human side of the mutton Dutton. Keep at it  Jacqueline Maley ... your work is appreciated because the comedy shouldn't be restricted to the lizard Oz ...

Reading Maley reminded the pond of a humour piece in The New Yorker by Ian Frazier (maybe paywall affected), which began this way ...

I do not have a bullshit detector. I used to have one, but I don’t even know where it is anymore—maybe out in the garage. It was an awkward thing, like one of those little roll-aboard briefcases, but made of bright-orange high-impact plastic, and it didn’t work very well. It was O.K. on ordinary, everyday bullshit, but it could not detect cant. It was also not too reliable on sanctimony or pomposity, and only so-so on hypocrisy. Supposedly, it could puncture self-importance, but I could never get that feature to turn on. Over all, the detector was more trouble than it was worth, so I quit using it.

I read recently about someone who had a “built-in” bullshit detector! I am completely unable to picture how that might work, but, then, I would not be the person to ask. Kids, I’m told, have built-in bullshit detectors, so maybe you need to be young. Like a lot of older consumers, I have not kept up on the technology.

Living without a bullshit detector can be peaceful and relaxing. As you know, there is a lot of bullshit out there, and I got sick of having the alarm go off all the time. On the other hand, I do feel a need for the ol’ detector occasionally.

The other day, I was at Ikea (as we call it) with my wife when we had a disagreement. We had been there for a while, looking for a piece of furniture for our living room. As I waited for her to make up her mind about one chair or the other, I checked my phone and saw that I had received a solicitation from something called the Flat-Ikea Society. For some reason, I clicked on it. The Flat-Ikea Society is made up of people who believe, in defiance of science and logic, that Ikea is flat. Now, everyone knows that Ikea is round. We take that for granted. But, rather than dismiss the group as crazy, I read on to see what it had to say.

According to these folks, Ikea is a huge flat thing surrounded on all sides by asphalt. If you continue far enough in Ikea, they say, you will go through a sort of portal, and then fall off the edge, or curb, of Ikea. You will then find yourself on a vast asphalt sea, where, they believe, there are monstrous S.U.V.s, many of them a spectral white, along with white and other-colored vans and enormous trucks with rubbery, finlike mud flaps. This asphalt sea rests, in turn, on the back of a giant turtle, or tortoise, that they have named the Planet. This turtle, or whatever, is a being of which they have only the fuzziest notion—so fuzzy, in fact, that they don’t even concern themselves about it...

And so on, but speaking of bullshit, the reptiles were depressingly short of it this day. Oh sure, there was simplistic Simon rabbiting on, 'look, Bid, no conflict of interest here' ...

But it was only of use to the pond so it could find a spacer for a Rowe cartoon dealing with bullshit in the Augean stables ...

If the pond might continue the scatological theme, there was some low comedy to hand at Current Affairs ...with Elizabeth Sandifer talking about The Strange and Terrifying Ideas of Neoreactionaries ...

There was some splendid abuse, with this just one of many examples ...

SANDIFER: It’s complete festering dogshit. It’s horrible. It is verbose. It makes a painful lack of effort to get to the point on the occasion when it actually makes a point. His argumentation aspires to shoddiness, because that would at least imply that there’s a degree of construction there. It’s absolutely awful. I take it apart in some meticulous detail in Neoreaction a Basilisk because in that book, I thought it was important to pay it as much intellectual respect as I could before I took it out back and shot it. But it was not hard to argue against and to find the flaws. You’re really playing on easy mode there.

ROBINSON: Your book does a public service. People don’t have to comb through thousands of pages to try to understand the things you’ve read. You’ve laid it out.

SANDIFER: I’ll make this fully explicit. I cannot encourage you enough not to bother reading this. You have something better to do with your life—clipping your toenails, perhaps. Staring at a wall. Many small crimes that only do a little bit of harm. Avoid reading him. Literally almost anything you can think of to do right now is a better idea than reading Curtis Yarvin.

The pond took Sandifer at her word, and so Yarvin will remain a complete mystery to the pond, save what turned up in the talk ... but the pond did pay attention when Tuckyo Carlson turned up ...

Carlson presented Yarvin as this fascinating intellectual who is silenced by the mainstream but who has really, really valuable and interesting ideas. The whole hour they spent was Yarvin expounding this theory that there is this kind of conspiracy of elites that he calls “the cathedral” that consists of Harvard and the New York Times and the government and all that. And he was explaining to Tucker how people who put Black Lives Matter signs in their yard, that the sign really says, “I love power and conformity.”

He talked about the red pill. He said, you’re going to take the red pill, you’re gonna see things for how they really are. And Tucker Carlson has his mind blown by Curtis. But, importantly, all of it is about the big woke conspiracy that rules the country. None of it is about the solution being fascism, even though that’s what Yarvin believes.

What made the pond realise that Yarvin was a complete loon?

Yarvin has been quite influential on a number of key people. He has a demonstrably huge influence on Peter Thiel. We know he’s got influence on Blake Masters and J.D. Vance, as that Vanity Fair articlee makes clear. We have very strong evidence that he’s had influence on Steve Bannon. He’s just a guy a lot of these people look to as kind of an intellectual light. He’s been on the Tucker Carlson show, which did a fair bit to mainstream him. So a lot of people look up to him as something of an intellectual light, which is interesting if you actually read any of his work, because, well… I call him outright stupid in my book, and I’m gonna largely stand by that.

I think that there is a long tradition of right-wing “philosophy” that’s really popular among right-wing nutters and as soon as it gets outside that little bubble, it gets absolutely shot to hell by other philosophers. And I think to describe Yarvin in terms he would probably take as a compliment—and I very much mean as an insult—he’s kind of a modern day Ayn Rand.

So his broad philosophical idea is he’s just really obsessed with order. He thinks that order is the absolute best thing that can happen. Chaos, unruliness, rebelliousness—all these things are inherently very, very bad.

And so his belief, as he expressed back in his Moldbug days—and he’s not really backed down off of it in any substantive way—is that basically, California should secede, become its own nation, and simply impose a CEO with monarchic, godlike powers. At the time, he suggested Steve Jobs would be a particularly good pick for the absolute monarch of California and that the purpose of owning California and running it as a corporate monarchy is explicitly for profit. That was also a part of Yarvin’s philosophical vision for what the world should do.

I don’t want to pin him too much with the slightly satirical and deliberately over-the-top clickbait-y idea of making Steve Jobs king of California—that is him using a rhetorical device to get attention. But he does very, very much believe that rich elites should be in absolute control of everything, and people who are not landowners and do not have a ton of money should basically be thought of as the equivalent of slaves.

Steve Jobs? If we're going to talk of a monarchy, how could the loon have gone beyond the Son of Rupert? It's the breeding, the genes that determine who should have monarchic, godlike powers ...

The pond could have stayed with this distraction the whole morning, but remembered its mission was to find reptiles aspiring to shoddiness down under ...

How disappointing was the search ...

A couple of lizard Oz editorials, Jim himself talking of dire difficulties, a dog collar type trying to redeem the bromancer and Dame Slap, and Hedley getting hot under the DNA collar?

The pond almost chucked it in, but it needed an excuse to catch up on the immortal, and lately prolific Rowe ...

So the pond decided on a forced march with Wellington ...

There's nothing like a moving plea for the big end of town to reduce the pond to tears, but as the pond wiped away some nasal discharge from the upper lip, it remembered that the point was to find spacers for the immortal Rowe ...

That was worth the effort, especially that portrait, which could be seen from all sorts of angles ...

Apologies to the master, and now back to that forced march with Wellington and more copious tears ... together with the sense that the pond was in the presence of a whiteboard, or perhaps one of those bloody Powerpoint thingies where everything was reduced to a few initials or acronyms, where BS might stand for Bull Shit, Bi Sexual,  Baking Soda, Business Studies or Business Systems ... or, if you will, ESG ...

By golly, this Wellington on his first forced march with the pond shows an astonishing capacity for verbal diarrhoea, including setting "clear parameters" and having a "fully rounded awareness", when surely a well rounded awareness is entirely the problem.

Surely just a "why don't you just shut the fuck up with all that woke nonsense" would have done the trick ...

Yes, if our noble Wellington has his way, any political slip into being woke by corporate clowns will see the mutton Dutton revert to form, as boofhead hard man head kicker, and won't that be a treat.

These party goers could do with a good kicking for starters ...

And so the final gobbet, with the pond feeling it might need a whack of ECT to stay awake? Is it proper to make that sort of joke? Perhaps only in dire circumstances ... or at a time when the steely threats are hidden behind a velvet glove of verbal bullshit ...

Yes, get with the mutton Dutton, and be bloody and brutal, or the IPA will be on your case, or Chapel Lane Advisory or whatever ...

And in that context, the immortal Rowe's awareness of what a lack of oxygen might do for the light headed is timely ...

By golly, there he is again, and that "Hug me" must be some kind of Napoleonic threat to the valiant Wellington ...

Sadly, beldatedly, the pond must note that the infallible Pope is now more securely locked behind a paywall, so only truncated versions leak out onto the full to overflowing intertubes ... but at least there's enough to show the synchronicity, with Pope also concerned with Everest ...

In which the pond walks a crooked mile with nattering "Ned", Dame Slap and the bromancer ...

 

If the pond might offer its tuppence worth - thruppence if you insist, but never so low as a ha’penny or a brass farthing - the news that Boris is taking the country back to the nineteen century hasn’t come a moment too soon …

How else could vulgar youff understand the meaning in this, and Scrooge’s incredible generosity?

"No, no," said Scrooge, "I am in earnest. Go and buy it, and tell 'em to bring it here, that I may give them the directions where to take it. Come back with the man, and I'll give you a shilling. Come back with him in less than five minutes, and I'll give you half-a-crown!”.

The pond would have gone a florin, no more, and to compound the problem of vulgar youff attempting to see the difference between a peck and a bushel, they simply wouldn’t understand the splendid advice offered by Micawber:

‘My other piece of advice, Copperfield,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the god of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and—and in short you are for ever floored. As I am!’

To make his example the more impressive, Mr. Micawber drank a glass of punch with an air of great enjoyment and satisfaction, and whistled the College Hornpipe.

The pond will whistle the hornpipe with the reptiles anon, but must pause to note sadly that some have seen the recent attempts as a matter of comedy, as with Zoe Williams in the Graudian, in full here:

What we’re witnessing is the hard limit of “dead cat” politics meeting nostalgia. In the Lynton Crosby school, where you explode the national debate with loaded, combustible but ultimately meaningless policy announcements, there’s often an element of longing for the past. “Why can’t we go back to a time when men were men, women knew their place, criminals were locked up for ever and migrants migrated somewhere else? Here are the ideas for people who feel that way.” Schools mustn’t “pander” to transgender people; let’s put gunboats in the Channel and lock up the Royal National Lifeboat Institution; death to the “woke warriors” of the National Trust, etc. These announcements are known as “red meat”, which isn’t inaccurate, since there usually is an element of spitefulness that only someone accessing their inner hyena would enjoy.

Imperial measures, though; it’s more Spam than red meat, isn’t it? Nobody’s pulse is going to race at the idea of having to do complicated conversions in order to buy the right amount of stuff. It might create a tiny fillip of superiority, the thought of watching a 20-year-old try to figure out what a yard is. Good luck with that when you need help removing your sim card.

This is an ultimately silly notion, whose only redeeming feature is that it’s not of very high consequence, and that puts it squarely in Dad’s Army territory, of faffing, busywork and self-importance. But the only reason people feel affectionate towards this Dad’s Army sensibility is that it is meant to be funny. The “dead cat” school of messaging relies on nobody having any sense of humour. The politics of unkindness simply cannot survive contact with a joke; it melts, like throwing water on a witch. But at least we might finally be reaching the endgame, where they have run out of mean ideas that can’t be laughed at.

But damn it, there are three countries that still stick to the imperial system - the US, Liberia and Myanmar - and under Boris, the UK is rapidly joining Myanmar so there’s a shilling for your trouble, as the pond turns to the reptiles this day …

First up is nattering "Ned", offering the mutton Dutton his marching orders if he wishes to retain the backing of the reptiles - and sadly "Ned's" advise is a shilling short of a ten bob note because it's remarkably brief ...

Dammit, that's easy for "Ned" to scribble, but a makeover is going to be hard, what with the reptiles seeing a bonanza of hate and fear in the matter of climate science and energy prices:

Poor Cathy Wilcox, fancy thinking the reptiles would move towards the light withLuke ...

Sorry, not likely Ms Wilcox, there's always a climate science denying apocalypse pending at reptile HQ, as the pond returns to doing the hard yards with "Ned" ...

Phew, it's going to be a tall order, when the reptile business model relies on natural aggression, dismisses empathy as woke nonsense, and routinely indulges in fear and hate as role models for the mutton Dutton ... 

See how all that smooth and smarmy talk, delivered in the usual pompous, portentous way, turns to a startled horse neighing and rearing as "Ned" shies away from the trap of that talk of consensus politics ...

All the pond can say about that is good luck with that, because Dame Slap is on hand to show how to renovate the Liberal party. Ditch all that blather about being inclusive and indulge in a bit of black bashing.

Yesterday, it was the bromancer, today it's Dame Slap, as crooked a sixpence walking a crooked mile as the pond can imagine, and it seems that the reptiles have found their new pet bête noire ...

There you go, after all "Ned's" blather, what Dame Slap wants is some bashing of difficult, uppity blacks, and if that means bashing those fruitcakes who believe in imaginary friends for fellow travelling with devious heretic secularists bound for eternal hellfire, then it's all good ...

The pond must admit whenever it's confronted by Dame Slap these days, it reverts to the mystery of whether Dame Slap remains chairman (no chairperson here, here no chairperson of the IPA).  

As previously noted by the pond, on one part of the IPA site, she's listed as chairman, but on another there's an entirely different chairman, and yet the reptile listing for her is entirely silent on the matter ...

Not to worry, back to the black bashing ... because a couple of centuries of it is surely not enough for any reptile visiting planet Janet above the faraway tree ...

Meanwhile, in New Zealand ... but isn't it grand to see Dame Slap going toe to toe with the craven Craven. Surely the mutton Dutton is on a winner following Dame Slap's advice, and smoting and smiting all those difficult, uppity blacks and their naive fellow travellers ...

Sure Wilcox might celebrate and dance at the demise of dinosaurs ...

... but anyone can be a beastly boofhead, as Dame Slap routinely proves ...

And there we have it, both the bromancer and Dame Slap stamping hard on overreaching conservatives, and the mutton Dutton can follow, and division will tear the lands apart, and the reptiles will be happy and bask in the glory of their work ... and there'll be no more talk of makeovers or being inclusive or all the rest of "Ned's" trey trying to be a zac advice ...

Speaking of the bromancer, he too was out and about today, but there's little to report. The pond includes it just for the bromancer record ... it's probably only worth tuppence ha'penny ... certainly not a tanner or sixpenny bit ...

The pond will only say one thing about this ... not to do with China, the Pacific, or the whole damn thing, but rather the shock of seeing the reptiles having to print a snap of a new, actual foreign affairs minister. It must have torn at the heart of the bromancer to see it ...

Indeed, indeed, and it will be with some difficulty that we stop them marching forward with their base in Darwin ... a sterling example of how to do dud business in pursuit of a golden guinea or three ...

Meanwhile, back to the startling sight of an aggressive PM pointing his finger, in a way designed to terrify the reptile readership ...

The pond was shocked by this survey of the reptiles, and the way they overlooked crucial advice from the mother country, home of the colonial black bashing dream. 

After all, it seems that Lynton Crosby was mentioned in despatches in relation to weights, measures, coins and such like, and if it's good enough for Lynton, it's good enough for a pond proud of Australian political strategists ...

Let the real makeover begin ...

And so to the infallible Pope for the day ...

The pond doesn't mind that reference to the dancing man, though it only takes the pond back to the end of the second world war, when we really should be returning to Victorian England ...

But which vision will remain supreme? Mr. Potato Head ...

... or the Gravedigger ...

... or can the body politic and the reptiles embrace both, for the humble price of half a crown ...