In which the pond takes an elaborate detour through the Index before landing with the bromancer in Afghanistan and taking in the standard Tuesday groaning ...

 

Before getting on to the reptiles, the pond would like to recommend another article, this time a review in the NYRB by Erin Maglaque of a book by Robin Vose, The Index of Prohibited Books: Four Centuries of Struggle Over Word and Image for the Greater Glory of God. 

The lede provided the temptation: Robin Vose’s new history of the Index of Prohibited Books shows how Catholic censorship was, despite its totalizing ambitions, often incoherent and contradictory. (Sorry, possible paywall).

Then came the great temptation, currently afflicting the Ron DeSanctus's of the world:

In the beginning was the Word. The trouble came afterward. How to teach the Word of God, how to translate Scripture, how to gloss and explain it: these were problems of grave concern to premodern Christians, and getting them wrong was beyond life-and-death. A bad reader’s soul was endangered for eternity. Angels didn’t have this problem. As Dante put it, angels “make themselves…completely known to each other,” communicating directly from divine spirit to divine spirit: a kind of transcendental laser beamed between celestial heads. But humans misunderstand; we grope for meaning; we struggle to be understood. From the beginning of the Catholic Church as an institution, churchmen sought to control the power of words—to shape good readers and eliminate bad ones. This meant censorship.

Oh the many and varied ways of the temptations:

At first, Catholic censorship was a relatively straightforward matter: all Protestant books, and all Protestant authors, were banned. So were books printed anonymously or without specifying a printer, date, or place of publication: these were too suspicious. It didn’t actually matter what books said; there were already too many for the Roman censors and theologians even to skim them all. By the end of the sixteenth century censors were simply copying titles from the Frankfurt Book Fair catalog into the Index. Soon, most regions—and many individual cities—had created their own indexes of prohibited books. They each had their own local persecutory flavor: in Spain, for example, the inquisitor general banned Islamic and Jewish writings, especially the Talmud. Local inquisitors in Mexico City banned books that inquisitors in Madrid found permissible...

Then the temptations widened ...

As the initial upheavals of the Reformation settled, the congregation widened the scope of its censorship. The Index transformed from a catalog of heresies (in Oxford, librarians used the Index as a collector’s guide to the best Protestant scholarship) into an attempt to censor everything everywhere across the early modern Catholic world: literature, politics, art, history, and science. All came under the purview of the overworked and understaffed censors. In 1575 one Vatican official wrote in a letter that he wished “that for many years nothing be printed” so that he could catch up. Crushed under the tide of new books, censorship could be scattershot: books were censored when they happened to be translated into Italian or Spanish or French, when they happened to be sent to the congregation by an offended reader in Brussels or Paris or Lima, or when the censors happened to have a spare moment to look over the title page. Many books escaped unnoticed: the censors missed the conniving Moll Flanders, the outrageous exploits of Fanny Hill.
The church did, famously, take an interest in the new experimental science. In The Index of Prohibited Books, Vose traces the gradual hardening of scientific censorship across the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, even as Rome itself became a home for scientific experiment. Copernicus was not placed on the Index until 1616, more than seventy years after he died. Galileo was both a victim of these more stringent attitudes and an example of the church’s leniency toward elite thinkers. (He was placed under house arrest, not burned at the stake like a common witch.) Throughout, Vose—a professor of history at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, Canada—laments the unguessable damage done to the history of human thought by Catholic censorship, while also showing that the church’s theologian-inquisitors sometimes took more moderate, scholarly approaches to the suppression of knowledge.
Censors concerned themselves with all genres of reimagining the world, from science and political ballads to vernacular literature. Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s novel The Year 2440: A Dream If There Ever Was One (1771) tells of a Parisian who wakes up in a future society ruled by a philosopher-king, with no priests or monks, no slavery, no pastry chefs, no dance teachers, and no tobacco. (There is no accounting for utopian tastes.) It was, of course, included on the Index; Charles III of Spain was said to have burned a copy with his own hands. Other such fantasies, from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) to Tommaso Campanella’s Città del sole (written in 1602 and printed in 1623)—which imagined a city whose walls were painted with all of human knowledge in images that “render learning easy” to its citizens—were banned too.

The promise of learning without mediation was as utopian as free love. Early modern works of transgressive fiction, from Ariosto’s Satire (1534) to Richardson’s Pamela (1740), often used sex to imagine new ways of living, and they too fell afoul of the censors. Sometimes the censors’ choices are not easily explained. Several of Nicolas Restif’s erotic works were banned, but Le pied de Fanchette (1769)—a kind of extended foot-fetish fantasy in which a pretty orphan girl with shapely feet gets into all kinds of sexy scrapes—was not. Narrative literature, chivalrous romance, the erotic stories of Boccaccio: all were seized by authorities from ordinary Italians’ homes and stored in inquisitorial archives until they could be appropriately emended. The Florentines were so reluctant to trespass against their beloved Boccaccio that it took them until 1573 to come up with a copy that satisfied the censors: monks who smuggled girls into their cells were replaced with students sneaking girls into dormitories.

Pamela!? As dull and tedious a book as ever written ...

The pond could go on quoting all day, it's a ripper read, and likely the source book is too, but the obvious question comes. Why does the pond ban some reptiles and not others?

It's easy. The pond can afford to be fickle. Anyone wanting to stew in the cesspool of a Dame Slap column can do it at their leisure, but sometimes the pond prefers the charms of a decent groaning ...

There was Dame Slap this day acting as both reporter - often with a sidekick to help with the dirty work - and commentator, and the pond could feel nothing but contempt ...

The pond might avert eyes, but it doesn't insist on plucking or gouging out the eyes of others, in classic biblical style  ...

The closing couple of pars ...

More difficult to account for is the toll of self-censorship: the art and literature that was never made, the religious and scientific ideas that remained unwritten—unthought, even—because of the existence of the Index, the congregation, and the Inquisition tribunal. This counterfactual European history is a history of the obscure, the impracticable, the unrecorded. It is so elusive as to remain nearly unimaginable. But for every erotic novella or psalm-inscribed jewel on the Index, a crack appears in the edifice of our historical imagination. Some light gets in. The censor is crowded out by the apparition of what might have been.
In 1574 inquisitors came to the door of Domenico, a cobbler in Spilimbergo, in the far northeast of Italy. They seized and destroyed the only three books that Domenico owned: Orlando Furioso, the Decameron, and the New Testament. Domenico responded: “I swear I shall never read again.” This was the tragedy of censorship, an unbearable narrowing of the spiritual and cultural lives of ordinary people. But I also hear in Domenico’s words his own intolerance: an intolerance of suppression, a disobedience of power. Domenico would not be told how to read. He would rather not read at all.

Some days the pond would rather not read at all, and when it comes to the bouffant one blathering about the Voice in classic reptile doomsaying style ...

... the pond is inclined to pass. There's only so many times the pond can be bothered with the Catholic Boys' Daily, and the ritual cant of "creeping uncertainty".

How much religion has to answer for, whether it's the role of the Russian patriarch in the war on Ukraine, easily bought and steady in support of a sociopath, or the rise in suicides of women and girls in Afghanistan ... (the pond woke up to the news from the BBC).

Speaking of Afghanistan, and before doing its routine duty with a Tuesday groaning, the pond couldn't help but note that the bromancer was out and about and offering excuses ...

Ah the wonders of moral equivalence and moral relativism, as the bromancer wonders if his crack squad is going to be up to his war with China by Xmas.

As to suffering in Afghanistan and the comprehensive mess that was left behind? Don't you worry about any of that, it's the bromancer's suffering that counts and should be attended to ...

Around this time the pond is usually inclined to do a trawl through the past, and that's how the pond landed on Jeff Sparrow's One pundit's deadly war: from Afghanistan to Vietnam ...

Oh that's so dispiriting, please sir, could the pond have another ...

There's more, but the pond couldn't resist adding this tidbit ...

...it’s less that Sheridan’s changed his mind, and more that he’s changed his history, brazenly ignoring the very arguments with which he once bludgeoned everyone else.

Politicians, by and large, do not have a good reputation. But for all their faults, they are mostly held accountable for what they say and what they do. Think of Julia Gillard and how her feet have been held to the fire for her changing statements on the carbon tax.

But what about journalists?

Well, being a pundit evidently means that you never have to say you are sorry. You don’t have to stand for election; you don’t have to justify your positions. Instead, you have a bully pulpit from which you can agitate for a particular policy – and, then, when everything you say turns out to be nonsense, you can tip-toe away without even the pretence of a mea culpa.

And so here we are again, with the bromancer blaming everybody else, but never ever beginning even the pretence of a mea culpa ...

Some days the gorge rises in the pond, and the feeling of contempt for the reptiles, individually and collectively, is palpable. A correspondent has already noted this story, Poland: hundreds of thousands march against rightwing populist government, but the pond was waiting for the chance to run it cheek by jowl with an actual bromancer story. Just a reminder he's always at it, comprehensively getting it wrong and never a mea culpa in sight ...

That's why it was a relief to turn to Dame Groan and a standard groaning. All she was doing was playing Jeremiah (or perhaps the bullfrog), and doing her usual jeremiad, as expected of a "weeping prophet" ... or perhaps to mix metaphors and references, she's doing a John O'Brien and channeling Hanrahan as she announces yet again we'll all be rooned ... (won't someone keep Santos shares on the surge?)

Here there was no need to worry about Dame Groan's groaning sounding remarkably like nattering "Ned", with the pair both inclined to run about in Chicken Little circles announcing the sky was falling in ...

The pond could instead opt for a cartoon-led recovery ...

Back to the suffering of Dame Groan, and her deep anxiety ...

Ah, the usual talk of coal-fired planets and so on and so forth.

As for the planet? Well for that the pond must turn to the infallible Pope for an update ...

Oh sheesh, we are doomed, though Dame Groan can be relied upon never to mention items outside her narrow purview ...

Difficult economic times? How about difficult planetary times? Is it as tough for Dame Groan as for those living in Ukraine, Afghanistan and sundry other places?

Never mind, instead of censoring the reptiles, the pond will turn to the immortal Rowe for solace and a closing thought ...

In which the Major goes AWOL and the pond gets stuck with the cratering Caterist and the craven Craven ...

 

There's no need to read Major Mitchell whining about the mejia, not when there's a chance to read Tim Alberta's piece for The Atlantic, Inside the Meltdown at CNN. (Use your free clicks wisely).

It's some 15,000 words long, but it's a riveting read, with the lede setting the tone: CEO Chris Licht felt he was on a mission to restore the network’s reputation for serious journalism. How did it all go wrong?

The usual American narcissism, and egotism, and allowing a journalist what reads like 24/7 access, is the short answer.

As for the clue that Alberta's reporting hit the Lichtian mark? There's reporters reporting on the reporting, as in The Graudian's ‘Extra Trumpy’: Atlantic profile of CNN chief Licht details town hall disaster.

The line the pond loved in that one?

Bill Grueskin, a Columbia Journalism School professor, said: “It wouldn’t be fair to say a trained seal could do a better job running CNN than Chris Licht. It’s just that, after reading this piece, it feels like we should give the trained seal a shot.” (he was tweeting here).

All sorts piled in, from The Hollywood Reporter and Variety to Vanity Fair (just google - naturally Brian Stelter couldn't resist), but if the pond had to select another quote, it would come from Business Insider:

I spent the last couple days at a conference in a fancy resort town with current and former bosses of news organizations. We shared notes. We tried to figure out how to survive a world where AI models are vacuuming up everything we write without giving credit, and Facebook has basically stopped serving news links.
Most of the details would bore you.
But then, yesterday morning, over coffee and chia seed pudding, I sensed a change in the air. Something had happened.
Then I heard someone say, "I couldn't keep reading it. It was like watching a snuff film."

And then the hapless captain of the Titanic got lumped with a COO, who has been his boss's sidekick, David C. Leavy Named COO Of CNN Worldwide

Talk abut an epic distraction from the usual reptile fodder, but as we're speaking of trained seals, or watching snuff films, time to note that the Major went AWOL this day, and so there were other badly trained seals to note ...

The pond selected that snap of the smirking Malware, because it was the only way that the pond could avoid the reptile obsession with Higgins and Wilkinson featured in the reptile rotating fickle finger of fame. 

As usual that story began with a lie. When it said "five minutes ago", it really meant to say "8.26 pm last night", with the pond taking a screen snap some 21 minutes after the reptiles first ran with it. 

Why do the reptiles lie with their date stamps? Because they can. Why do reptiles rabbit on about commentators pretending to be journalists and vice versa and how that ruins everything? Because they can, and because they never notice the blatant hypocrisy of the bizarrely obsessed Dame Slap, one day "reporting" (the pond uses the term loosely), and the next day ranting (the pond understands the word is an understatement) ...

Moving right along, the Lehrmann Daily - never a day without a report from the lad - had a genuine triptych of terror ...

Some days the pond can't take the reptile circus, but then a correspondent steps in with a winning line - Amazing! The Liar from the Shire has literary aspirations and Murdoch has a Christian publishing division, yet more evidence that there is no supreme being that would deliver Devine retribution - and the pond can carry on ...

No need to add anything to that, simply too Devine, and instead the pond plucked up the courage to look at the rabble below the fold ...

Slim pickings and with the Major AWOL, perforce the pond had to run with the Caterist.

The pond had actually lined up a tidy climate denialist theme for the Caterist on the off chance the floodwaters in quarries whisperer was in his usual form ... 

There was a story How climate change is causing housing market chaos, Climate change is making it harder to build houses in Arizona or to insure them in California and Florida:

...“Climate risk is driving insurer decisions like never before,” Benjamin Keys, a professor of real estate and finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, argued last month in a New York Times op-ed. “From insurers’ perspectives, it’s ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once,’ with heightened risks of floods, droughts, wildfires and more. To have the necessary buffer to pay out claims after catastrophic losses, insurers will need more reserves and more reinsurance, and they will pass those costs on to policyholders in the form of higher premiums.”

There was a link to a story in the NY Times, Your Homeowners’ Insurance Bill Is the Canary in the Climate Coal Mine, (possible paywall), where there was more of the same:

The government should manage expectations through better disclosure and better assessment of climate perils. An easy first step would be to make detailed risk data more accessible and interpretable. Potential property owners deserve loud and crystal-clear warnings of climate-related risks, especially if prices are not yet providing a sufficient signal on their own.

Private insurers are sending a warning signal about heightened climate risks that homeowners and potential buyers need to receive. Insurers’ decisions are leaving households with fewer choices, less protection, and more financial distress. Homeowners should understand the potential hazards and find the right insurance policy or policies to protect them from harm. And they need to be aware that the costs of living in harm’s way are going to rise in coming years.

An era of complacency is ending. If you decide to buy that condo where you can hear the ocean’s waves, realize that you are likely to pay more for that privilege — one way or the other.

Just the pond's usual bad luck that the Caterist would for once forsake his usual desire to nuke the country and possibly the planet, and instead fly into a woke frenzy about PwC ...

Indeed, indeed, and when on the topic of self-serving hypocrisy, and grubby cash in the paw, the pond always likes to report on the Caterist, railing at big government, and yet ready to take a nice little earner, and whaddya know there was a recent nice little earner to hand ...

Does the Caterist ever feel any shame? 

Tip to PwC: feel no shame or embarrassment whatsoever ... there is absolutely no need to make any claims about higher ethical standards. Just shove your paw in the government coffers and make off with what cash you can ...

At this point, the wretched and despondent remnants of the lizard Oz graphics department decided to throw in a couple of very large snaps, as if to add weight to the Caterist's blather ...

That feels better suitably downsized, and the downsizing cleared the way for the Caterist to do a Ron DeSanctus and take on the house of mouse and other businesses attempting to appeal to as wide a base as possible...

Is there any upside to the Caterist going full MAGA? Well there's a chance for a few cartoons ...

And then it's back for a final gobbet of Caterist drivel ...

Indeed, indeed, here's how to do it. 

Pretend to be appalled by hypocrisy and then stick snout in government trough like a starving pig ...

On the upside, the pond was spared another lesson on how to nuke the country ...

And so to the bonus, and here the pond must break its Voice ban, but in a good cause ... because any chance to slag off the craven Craven should be seized ...

Why has the pond such an enormous contempt for the craven Craven? Well that link was to a lofty pile of condescending Craven doing the two face quick step ...

Smug? Always with the projection, yet here was the craven Craven in the Daily Snail on 23rd March 2023 (sorry, the pond doesn't link to the Snail, but it's easy to google as Law expert slams Anthony Albanese's Voice to Parliament as a 'ruthless con job' that's far worse than expected) ...

A constitutional law expert has slammed Anthony Albanese's Voice to parliament as a 'fatally flawed ruthless con job'. 

On Thursday, the PM finally released details of the referendum and the question Australians will vote on.

Mr Albanese appeared on the verge of tears on at least five occasions as he announced the question, while emotionally calling on Australians to 'get this done'. 

However, Professor Greg Craven, a constitutional lawyer who was one of the experts behind the original proposal of an Indigenous Voice, has slammed Mr Albanese's proposal as a 'con job'. 

He said: 'I think it's fatally flawed because what it does is retain the full range of review of executive action.

'This means the Voice can comment on everything from submarines to parking tickets. 

'We will have regular judicial interventions,' he warned.

Speaking to Ben Fordham on 2GB, Prof Craven explained how the Voice had been 'colonised' by 'left-leaning ideologues'.  

'It was originally a conservative proposal,' he said. 'It was really designed to recognise indigenous people without risking judicial activism. 

'Over the past year, it's really been colonised by left leaning ideologues from this community, trying to turn it from a model that was not run by the judges, to one that absolutely guarantees judicial intervention.

'The reality is that you will have a situation where any person who wants to create difficulty for a government over its decisions can now end up going to the High Court.

'It will be very, very difficult for government to operate either because it will be constantly delayed and tied up in knots, or indeed because the courts end up intervening directly in decisions.'

Opinion polling has indicated Australians are very divided on whether to support the referendum, and Prof Craven thinks a 'No' vote is inevitable. 

Writing in the Australian, he said: 'It is a ruthless con job. It is aimed at the Australian people as a whole and an adoring media barely literate in constitutional reality.

'It puts the final bullet through the head of the referendum. The polls already show a sick referendum. It is now terminal.'

The professor also warned that the inclusion of 'draft principles' were another source of alarm as it could lead to Australians voting on the referendum without specifically knowing what areas the Voice could apply to. 

'The idea is that instead of actual detail or architecture for the referendum, we are meant to be assuaged by motherhood statements so vague that they mean nothing,' Prof Craven wrote. 

'Look at Albanese's enunciated principles: the voice will be proactive, representative, chosen by local communities, transparent and cooperative.

'What on earth does this actually mean? It could cover any commonwealth body from the Australian Defence Force to the ABC.'

Speaking to ABC, he added: 'I'm not pretty frustrated, I'm incredibly frustrated. I think the Government has made multiple errors of process here, one of which is a total lack of clarity. 

'So, this alteration was designed in a black box, we don't know who designed it, now it's been revised in a black box, there's been no attempt to engage wider opinion.

'And I think the total disaster is we've already got a referendum that's heading south in the polls, even before this it was describing the typical arc of a losing referendum. 

'Now with this, I think, firstly, you're gonna have a bad proposal and that's gonna be even worse for the referendum.

'But the most potent argument, surely for the 'no' side, will be, "Even your own Attorney-General and your own Solicitor-General said this proposal should not go forward in the words of executive government, and now you're trying to sell us that." I mean, if the 'no' case needed another argument, it's got an absolute humdinger.'

And here was the smug craven Craven back on 6th January on Sky News, again no link, but easy to google under Greg Craven expects Australians to reject the Indigenous Voice to Parliament 'in droves' - despite his support for it - due to a lack of detail...

Just a sample will do of the vain prating coxcomb doing his usual glib blabbermouth routine ...

It's easy to see why the pond must use screen caps. Anyone tempted to click on that offer might stray into the abysmal world of Sky News - not the UK brand, but the local form of appalling reptile stew ...

Free thinking? Do you get freedumb with that?

Okay, okay, no reason to blame the craven Craven for everything ... he's already got more than enough reasons to feel deeply ashamed ....

Why would anyone listen to this gherkin or take his advice? 

He's been nothing more or less than a pain in the billy goat butt from the get go, as in this yarn in the Graudian back in February...

He's been nothing but a quisling grandstander and self-regarding wrecker, and now he wants attention paid? Having done his level best to wreck the entire enterprise because he felt slighted, now he wants everybody to forget and forgive and get on board with the craven Craven?

What a wretched shameful loon. Of all people to scribble "Nor can we afford a campaign complicated, vexed, egotistical and divided", surely this craven Craven is the worst of the worst, a man who has done more to vex,  make complicated, flash ego and vanity and hubris, and divide than almost anyone on the 'no' side, down there with Captain Spud and Warren "have I got a party I haven't joined yet" Mundine ...

That left the pond feeling particularly tortured this day, and unfortunately the immortal Rowe provided no relief ...

UPDATE:

The pond rarely bothers with an update - what's done is done and then it's move on time - but a correspondent added into the record a tweet which simply had to be added to the post ...

And beyond the next level codswallop dragged from another universe, the source tweet ...

Well yes, 4.2% ABV and not that light with 110 calories per can (that's twenty minutes of suffering on the bike), but what fun to see a manly man like the Caterist - are all third rate sociologists so manly? - blather about Bud Lite when the beer in question is "Bud Light" ...

In which the pond sets out with a Polonial prattle, carries the Angelic one's cross for a yard, sticks a toe in fetid Dame Slap water, and then does the usual epic nattering "Ned" Everest climb ...

 

Week after week, the pond yearns to return to English sport of the Marina Hyde kind. Who wouldn't want to jump fences of the For a prime minister who phoned it in, Boris Johnson is having a lot of trouble handing over one mobile kind? And never mind little England, the pond can't keep up with required US reading, such as Trump’s Lawyers Can’t Find Classified Doc Mentioned in Damning Tape.

But the pond promises it will all come together in a climactic punchline or cosmic joke at the very end, and meanwhile, for some reason, the pond couldn't help but think of prattling Polonius when it read the opening line in the latest grundling, The ABC at its worst is vastly better than its competitors. Time to defend it without apology (paywall).

The lede ran Management need to stop the racial guilt trip and state the obvious: public broadcasting strives to represent Australia, while the commercial networks manufacture Anglo whiteness.

The opening line, almost worthy of Bob Ellis, ran ...

Remember the IPA? It’s still kinda going, even though it’s lost its direct line to government, and its megaphone, The Australian, is a ruin, gutted by cuts. Now Tim Wilson et al are in some weird crypto unit at RMIT (public) university, and bearded Senator James Paterson looks like the aromatherapist your divorced mother married.

There were a few other lines the pond liked ...

...I mean there’s something surreal in having a week-long harangue of the ABC for racism, in a mediascape that includes Channel Nine, Channel Seven and Sky As Dark AF. The latter has derisory ratings — Sharri Markson will be going ’round to individual living rooms to do her show in six months’ time — but the former are big beasts. They remain, as they have always been, white, Anglo, and racist, not least by who and what they omit.
Channel Seven, the runt of the commercial litter (Ten is youf; Nine is king) has always been casual about straying into a white Anglo chauvinism/racism; a “race-baiting horror factory” as Nadine von Cohen described it.
Watching Channel Nine, part of the conglomerate Faruqi has a gig at, is like watching TV in a world where the Germans won WWII. Married At First Sight? Despite a few recent additions, it looks like a blondes breeding camp... 

Not that the pond has anything against blondes, but it seemed like good, solid prep for the pond's weekly encounter with the ABC-bashing indulged in routinely by Polonius, with a short cut on his keyboard always ready to moan about the absence of conservatives of the Polonial kind (why didn't they give him his own show? If the likes of the swishing Switzer can get, and then amazingly keep one, where's the fairness? Where's the kindness?)

And then to the pond's horror came this ...

No ABC bashing? Just a re-run of a 1950s Ming the Merciless trade union scare? Had the pond's reading of the entire grundling been pointless (and he did wander off into byways and still managed to sound like a prize loon in places in the grundling way).

So it seems, because this week Polonius was all fired up about the wets and lovers of wets, and in particular the deplorably wet Bid ...

Talk about taking a firm stand and delivering a firm denunciation and making an astonishing prediction ...

"This may, or may not, be the case."

To be sure, or perhaps, to be sure not to be sure ... and then the reptiles snuck in a snap of Bid looking terribly glum - perhaps she knew that Polonius was determined to tan her hide ...

It was such a glum snap the pond couldn't find the heart to shrink it, and then it was off to Polonius for a final withering gobbet, and thus far only one feeble mention of the ABC, and then within a panoply of mortal enemies, including the Graudian and the Nine papers and the Saturday paper ... as if inviting the pond to provide a link to the rag and offer up yesterday's Kudelka ...

Yes, it was Bid and the Nine rags that had taken the heat away from the cardigan wearers....

That's it? "... it's unwise to make predictions about such matters"?! 

What's the point of having a pontificating pundit if he's lost his powers of prediction, and even worse, entirely forgot to mention that there's not a single conservative within the ABC?

At this point the pond began to hunger for some genuine old-fashioned Catholic bleating, and thought it could slip in the Angelic one, still with her Calvary cross to bear ...

So it doesn't smell to high heaven of theology? And what's the theology that's in play here? Well the pond isn't the first to note that the Catholic church loves its real estate. Go to any country town and you'll find the Catholic church has staked out some grand real estate, often high ground and with great views.

Bathurst offers a particularly splendid example - not just the cathedral, but the size of the land grab and the schools - and along with that theological positioning, the Catholic church has been adept at getting its paws on government money. The church managed to get along with Mussolini for a considerable time, and in Australia, schools, hospitals and charities have provided excellent ways to subsidise church funding. And once you've got something to hand, why give it up?

Go figure? There's not much to figure, but the pond loves the bleating and so hung around for the second bleating reason, as paranoia runs rampant...

Um, might not the Vatican sell off a few of the treasures the pond noted while touring the Vatican museum? 

The pond couldn't resist turning to a 2013 piece, The Vatican's Financial Empire, in Charts, which inter alia dealt with that vexed question ...

...Of course, these are small numbers compared to the overall size of the Vatican’s financial empire. In 2004, the AP estimated that the Holy See’s real estate, excluding St. Peter’s Basilica and the Sistine Chapel, was worth nearly a billion dollars. Then there is the untold quantity of priceless artwork, including world-famous works by Michelangelo and Raphael. The Vatican doesn’t even try to apply a fair-market value to its art collection — the price used to be listed on the church’s books as 1 lira — but it’s safe to say that if sold, even a fraction of the works could likely fetch billions more.

The new pope, whoever he may be, could solve all of the Vatican’s cash-flow problems for years by unlocking some of that value. But since the Vatican frowns on the idea of selling its art (“They belong to humanity,” a Vatican budget official told Fortune of the artworks in 1987), it’s highly unlikely he would ever choose to do so.

Of course, of course, and not just to humanity but to the Vatican's tourist trade, with the pond being just one of millions of suckers ...

And so to the bonus, and here the pond was torn. Sure the pond had red carded Dame Slap yesterday, but the alternative was nattering "Ned" and he was exceptionally tedious.

The pond put a cautious toe in the water with Dame Slap ...

It was befuddling for the pond. 

It goes without saying that the pond has no time for the likes of PwC, but the pond will say it, and the pond will also say that the notion that the pond has no time for News Corp is a truism.

But here's the perplexing thing, and it's always confused the pond. Berating virtue signallers always seems to imply that there's something wrong with virtue. Wasn't Christ himself, when not being a trans shape shifter, from god to person and back again, a virtue signaller of the first water? Wasn't he always blathering on about virtue?

The trick, it seems, is to sound righteous about the misdeeds of others. Thus we might say of News Corp that it behaves like a scoundrel behind open doors, and refuses to herald any virtue publicly ....

You only have to observe Dame Slap, carrying on like a pork chop about the voice and the Lehrmann matter on an almost daily basis to see how this kind of virtue works ...

The pond found discussing the concept tiresome and wearisome ...

Didn't 2 Peter 1 say ...

And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge;
And to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness;
And to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity.

So what's wrong with virtue? At least if you happen to purport to celebrate the lizard Oz celebrating white Xian nationalism ...

Well you won't find much kindness or charity in Dame Slap, just sanctimonious righteousness, while working for News Corp - of all the demonic corporations on earth, surely among the worst ... and so the pond cut out all the rest of the Slappian bitchiness, and went to the end ... and as always there was projection and a singular failing ...

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

It's a pretty big mote, splendidly ignored ...

So it goes, and so Dame Slap blithely remains unaware of the stench that surrounds her, from Sky after dark through Faux Noise to the lizard Oz itself ... but as ever she remains sanctimonious to the end.

And with Dame Slap's rant cut short, there was nothing for it but to go on that epic Sunday Everest climb with nattering "Ned" ...or perhaps just stay in bed ...

Right from the get go, the pond should say that it has no dog in this fight, and couldn't care less. If Low stays or goes, there'll be another to take his place, and likely of a similar kind, while the rest of us are tossed like corks on the economic ocean, as we beat against the tide.

The only reason the pond is going to hang around is for the cosmic coming together at the end ...

The pond also supposes there are some incidental pleasures, such as blather about the media indulging in a cult of demonisation and thereby debasing our public and political life, without the foggiest sign that "Ned" was describing the News Corp business model.

Demonisation is about all they've got ...

"Ned" is, of course, intent on using the Lowe stick to give Labor a sound thrashing ... you might almost think he was intent on demonising them ...

There also always comes a point where "Ned" runs out of things to say, but insists on his right to keep saying stuff, and so he turns to others to supply the padding.

This time it's Ross Garnaut, hauled in to help with "Ned's" word dump ...

Ah, that'd be the demonising of the unions, debasing reptile journalistic life on a daily basis. How many reptiles belong to the MEAA?

Never mind, we're building to that punchline promised so long ago at the start by the pond ... but first "Ned" has to rip off another scribbler to ensure that his tome takes on a stentorian quality ...

Say what? At the end of all that, "Ned" arrives at "The examples are the United States culminating in the Trump presidency and in Britain culminating in Brexit", and somehow "Ned" thinks that this might be a problem?

And so "Ned" manages to bring the pond back to a grand unifying theory of everything, featuring the mango Mussolini and Brexit, and yet without any memory of the role that News Corp played in those debacles? Not a whit, not a jot, not even an acid flashback to the days the reptiles cheered on the orange one and Boris ...

It would be too tedious to rehash all that ... and remind "Ned" that he's part of the problem, and certainly not anywhere in cooee of being part of the solution ...

Instead the pond will just close out with a vaguely relevant immortal Rowe ...

But to celebrate, the pond feels like adding a mango Mussolini cartoon...

And why not celebrate the best of Brexiting Boris, with more at the Graudian here ...