In which the pond shares a laugh with the Major Mitchell ...

Speaking of facts, the pond immediately worried about the Major Mitchell's dating techniques ...

Did he use carbon to arrive at 1958? Isn't the media the massage? Like that particular typo and much of the fuzziness surrounding McLuhan, the pond was confused and wary.

"The medium is the message" has its own wiki here, which suggests The phrase was introduced in McLuhan's book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964.

That's the way it turns up in the "common questions" page of the author's eponymous website here ... that's the way it turns up in a pdf  excerpt from the book here, also dated to 1964.

Now the pond understands that a close follower of wikis might think the great southern walri were in danger of extinction,  but as we're invited to put facts before feelings, did it turn up in The Mechanical Bridge in 1951 or perhaps The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962?

It's true that McLuhan's wiki here makes reference to a source for McLuhan's invention of the phrase, in 1957, but the last time the pond checked, 1957 wasn't 1958 ...nor was it the actual phrase ...

The phrase "the medium is the message" may be better understood in light of Bernard Lonergan's further articulation of related ideas: at the empirical level of consciousness, the medium is the message, whereas at the intelligent and rational levels of consciousness, the content is the message. This sentence uses Lonergan's terminology from Insight: A Study of Human Understanding to clarify the meaning of McLuhan's statement that "the medium is the message"; McLuhan read this when it was first published in 1957 and found "much sense" in it—in his letter of September 21, 1957, to his former student and friend, Walter J. Ong, S.J., McLuhan says, "Find much sense in Bern. Lonergan's Insight" (Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987: 251). Lonergan's Insight is an extended guide to "making the inward turn": attending ever more carefully to one's own consciousness, reflecting on it ever more carefully, and monitoring one's articulations ever more carefully. When McLuhan declares that he is more interested in percepts than concepts, he is declaring in effect that he is more interested in what Lonergan refers to as the empirical level of consciousness than in what Lonergan refers to as the intelligent level of consciousness in which concepts are formed, which Lonergan distinguishes from the rational level of consciousness in which the adequacy of concepts and of predications is adjudicated. This inward turn to attending to percepts and to the cultural conditioning of the empirical level of consciousness through the effect of communication media sets him apart from more outward-oriented studies of sociological influences and the outward presentation of self carried out by George Herbert Mead, Erving Goffman, Berger and Luckmann, Kenneth Burke, Hugh Duncan, and others. 

Wikiquotes here doesn't manage anything earlier than 1964 and the pond began to think it might waste the entire day pinning down 1958, which just goes to show that a Major Mitchell "fact" is another way of saying a major waste of time and effort, the pond long ago having given up thinking about McLuhan.

After all, anyone who thought that the Virgin Mary spoke to him directly was surely in the grip of a delusion almost as potent as the Major's 'look at me' narcissism, now even more pathetic in its day to day irrelevance ...

So it was time to get cracking on the Major's message for the day ...

Say what? The pond wasted all that time worrying about 1958, and the Major Mitchell thinks that Understanding Media was published that year? Sorry, by carefully avoiding the walri, it's possible to establish that the book came out in 1964 ...

This is what happens when the pond wastes its time with a fuckwit obsessed with social media ...the Major might look bright eyed, but in reality he's just a galah, a cocky in his master's cage ...

Never mind, the pond understands that it will take all the Major Mitchell's skill to redeem this ...

(Images courtesy of social media).

Imagine if someone at the ABC had scribbled:

Life isn't fair and death less so. Had there been a shred of justice, that blast would have detonated in the Surry Hills bunker of the News Corp empire. Unlike those young girls in Manchester, snuffed out before they could begin, none of the reptiles' likely casualties would have represented the slightest reduction in humanity's intelligence, decency, empathy or honesty. Especially the Major Mitchell, on whose gravestone it will be written, "He never did find that fucking Order of Lenin" medal ...

Indeed, indeed, it would have been dismissed as tasteless, gratuitously offensive, a form of vile hate speech, encouraging violence ...

But in the land of the Major Mitchell such language, it seems, is merely "silly"...

He'd add Hollywood? Can we add the Chairman?

By the end of it all, the pond had to resist a sentimental sense of pity at an irrelevant old fart wandering in the outback like John Meillon in Walkabout ... and some of us remember how that ended ...

And so to the last Major Mitchell gobbet ...

Privilege facts over feelings? In a reptile tree-killing rag dedicated to rabid Oreo style Islamophobia and relentless Catholic Boys' Daily rhetoric?

Privilege 1958 as the date that sent the pond haring off down the rabbit hole with Alice?

The pond could feel a Sierra Madre moment coming on ...

Luckily there are some genuine comedians who know how to tell a joke, like the immortal Rowe, with more Rowe here ...

Well that's worth another movie quote ...

In which the Oreo declares war and all must now fight for the reptile empire ...

The pond was scandalised on the weekend. The Harris store at Broadway had knocked Oreos down to under a buck and they were thin Oreos at that ...

Talk about a five and dime approach ...

... to a crackerjack crackerbarrel philosopher ...

Okay, the pond will admit it just wanted to provide a little visual distraction before continuing the tour of rabid reptiles deep in the rhetoric of war-mongering from the comfort of a key board ...armchair warriors armed with white feathers.

After the pond's recent mega jumbo pack of seething reptile fear and loathing, it seemed impossible to add another morsel, but that was to reckon without the Oreo ...

To add to the ironic riches for the day, the Major Mitchell was also featured ...

But that's a treat for later. Put facts before outraged hysteria and deplore social media? Only in Major Mitchell la la land, which apparently sees the Major refuse to nibble on an Oreo ...

And no the pond has to announce with proper and seemly gravity that the Oreo has declared war ...

The pond was reminded of other great moments in history, and other great statesmen, though no match for the mighty Oreo ...

Oh how he struggled, oh how he hoped ...

And now it is the pond's grave duty to report the formal declaration ...

At 12.00 a.m. the Oreo had broadcast to the nation the following statement announcing that a state of war existed between the Oreo, the reptile empire and the world Islamic government: 29th May, 2017. 
 "This morning the Oreo Ambassador in Surry Hills handed the world Islamic government a final Note stating that, unless the Oreo heard from them by 11 o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from the world, a state of war would exist between them. 
The Oreo regrets to have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently the Oreo and the reptiles are at war with Islamics everywhere  You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to the Oreo that all her long struggle to win peace has failed. Yet the Oreo cannot believe that there is anything more or anything different that Oreo could have done and that would have been more successful. 
Up to the very last it would have been quite possible to have arranged a peaceful and honourable settlement between Oreos and Islamics, but the Islamics would not have it. They had evidently made up their minds to attack Oreos whatever happened, and although they now say they put forward reasonable proposals which were rejected by the Oreos, that is not a true statement. 
The proposals were never shown to the Oreos, nor to other reptiles, and, although they were announced in an Islamic broadcast, the Islamics did not wait to hear comments on them, but ordered their troops to cross the Oreo frontier and attack the baristas of Surry Hills. Their action shows convincingly that there is no chance of expecting that these people will ever give up their practice of using force to gain their will and their coffee. They can only be stopped by force...

Oh dear, once again the pond has muddled its history in a brave bid to provide a distraction of the Chamberlain kind here, but now the pond must press on ...

Please, just do the math to see how badly outnumbered the Oreos are, as they prepare for valiant battle ...

Being truly alarmed, the pond votes for conscription. Fortunately the only ones who can be trusted in a conscripted army are devoted Oreos, so the Oreo offer to be the first in the queue was an inspiration to the pond ...

An army of Oreos, much more trustworthy than tricky, concealing intelligence services, deceitfully hiding the true state of the jihadist threat, so that the valiant Oreos might be defeated in glorious battle...

Waiter, please tip the Wahhabists $110 billion in plain sight, if you please, and allow the pond to keep on reading ...

The pond's conclusion?

The Oreo is now so mired deep in barking mad paranoid delusion that howling at the moon will no longer suffice ...the warrior must take to the battlefield. It is the pond's confident hope and expectation that the next news of Oreo will filter back from Syria where she conducts a mighty jihad...

Meanwhile, the West hoped never to utter those words again? Remind the pond what's happening in Afghanistan right now? Remind the pond what happened in Iraq and is currently going down in Syria?

Please explain ... or at least explain why anyone would actually buy a copy of The Australian, and thereby encourage this sort of rhetorical madness, this fundamentalist cry for jihad ...let her pay her own way to the front line ...

Fortunately, speaking of Hanson as the Oreo did, this gives the pond a chance to run a cleansing sorbet of Hanson cartoons, thanks - the Major Mitchell will be pleased to know - to social media ...

In which the pond does a jumbo survey of reptile hate speech ...

The pond just wanted to start with that story - the full story is at Fairfax here  - just to show it's aware of the real world, and real disasters affecting many, many young people ...

The rorting in the sector is astonishing and unconscionable ...

But the pond doesn't deal in the real world, the pond deals in the paranoid, phobic, delusional world of the hate mongering, foaming and frenzied reptile commentariat ...

And this weekend shows what it's like when the murmuration of starlings swirls in unison ...

Now this isn't for the faint-hearted, this mega pond edition of fear and loathing ... and the pond, to help keep it short and not being into victim porn, has deleted images of those recent victims of Islamic terror who have suffered mightily, without being used in the various kinds of verbal jihads as some justification for extremism...

Nor has the pond bothered much with editorial comment. Being a jumbo pack of hate, the reptiles' words can speak for themselves.

Armchair warriors, verbal jihadists, all the usual comments apply, as we take the reptiles in the order listed by the holy Terror ...

Actually Roger Rogerson, and in the good old days, the Victorian police, went in with as much lethal force as they could muster. Some might yearn for the sort of police shootings and killings that litter the American landscape, but the pond is happy that local police value life and see one of their main aims as protecting it.

They botched Martin Place, they admitted it themselves in a moment of reflection. They should have taken the shot (the pond prescribes more Mark Wahlberg movies), but can we keep it to situations where a loon has a weapon and offers deadly force against a hostage, and similar life-threatening situations where threat and counter-threat must be taken into account? With better behind the scenes advice?

But a calm, measured, rational approach isn't of any interest to Akker Dakker. As with all featured in this day's festival of hate, they want blood, lots of blood ...

Uh huh, but that was there, and this is here. We should take lessons, but not lessons in hysteria, yet somehow talk of a reasoned approach is treated as sinister evidence of corruption. Is that weird or what?

If the Terror jihadists had their way, there'd be fighting in the streets, Christian v Islamic, while they watched from their Surry Hills bunker and sold heaps of tree killers thanks to the fuss ... so the more radicalised and alienated they can make Islamics feel, the better the business model ...

And that's where the fat owl of the remove gets truly appalling. To link Abedi with Monis in the one sentence is like linking the fat owl and fascist in the one sentence ...

Oh wait, that linking seems to work quite well...

Speaking of fascists, as the swear jar keeps swelling, the Devine has already featured once this day in the pond, but there's no reason not to give her more air time. 

Ugliness is an essential part of the Terrorist, and so the pond, business model ...

Indeed, indeed. At some point no doubt the Devine's family landed on these fair shores, and that brought a Devine verbal terrorist with them. Didn't the original Frank come from New Zealand, where they put not just pineapple but tinned spaghetti on pizzas?

Shocking, a genuine incitement to violence, but the pond promised little by way of editorial content and we're not yet half way through the journey, so on we plod ...

It's as good an imitation of hate speech as any ... it would have been so much more honest if the Devine had admitted to Islamophobia, as opposed to refugee phobia ...

The pond could go on about Australian terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, the pond could even confess to a certain phobia about Catholic fundamentalists of the Devine kind, loathsome and poisonous toads who would make Christ wilt on the cross with their venom, but time is pressing ...

And there it is, naked and unashamed, bigoted Islamophobia ...but at least it allows the pond cheerfully to suggest that the country would be a much better place if fundamentalist Catholics fucked off to Rome and left Australia with a bit less fear and despicable unChristian loathing ...

And so to the third in the fear and loathing trifecta ... gun-happy Peta the Petulant ...

By chance, the google revealed the nature of the petulant parrot's inspiration for this week's piece ...

What a predictable parrot, still squawking the same tune as her one-time owner ...

As for shoot to kill, as already noted, Roger Rogerson, and the Victorian coppers in gang war days, absolutely knew how to shoot to kill ...

Anybody interested can Greg Hunt the Walsh street shootings (no southern walri were involved or injured), and Terry Goldsworthy on the use of lethal force at The Conversation in 2014 here ... and Animal Kingdom's not a bad movie ...

It's obvious enough, but anyone wanting the official line can google this story at the lizard Oz ...

Well yes, in extreme circumstances, they can shoot to kill, but thank the long absent lord there's not that many gung ho crazies firing off guns at blacks as they're wont to do in the USA ...

But time is pressing and Peta wants her fantasy of gun slingers shooting it out in the streets ... naturally it's all the fault of that wimp Malware, who wouldn't have the first clue about how to eat an onion or how to demonise Islamics and make sure that crazed fundamentalists are used to tar everyone ... in much the same way as all Catholic priests should be mentioned as likely pedophiles, even the one in the extended pond family who wouldn't hurt a fly and is in a loving relationship ...

By this point, the pond feels a bit the same about fundamentalist Terrorist jihadists scribbling furiously for the rag. 

At some point, their screeching will be replaced by the screeching of another, and another and another, the only variation being that another might resort to squawking or howling at the moon ...

But time is pressing, so it's back to the fear and the paranoia ...

Of course what the hard liners want is the sort of police state that will match the perverse cruelty of fundamentalist Islamics ... cf the photo below of the ideal Peta police officer, a variation on the kind of militarisation of the police force that took place long ago in the United States, and now has reached a seemingly irreversible extreme ...

Well actually when anyone, such as the Devine, seeks to do a Donald, and exclude Islamics, it doesn't smack of Islamophobia. 

It is Islamophobia, and collectively this unholy trinity are completely phobic ... (at least the pond spreads its phobias amongst all the religions ...)

Okay, the pond won't be silent. The pond doesn't want a future Australia where petulant Peta, the hater Akker Dakker and the vitriolic Devine are the norm. That way lies madness. Each day the pond cheers or at least sighs with relief that the onion muncher and petulant Peta were tossed from power, and now mouth hate speech from the sidelines where they belong ...

And now for a pond cruel twist. The pond will understand if some have long wilted and left the scene of the verbal hate crimes, but as this is a jumbo survey of hate speech, the pond couldn't resist smuggling in Dame Slap, giving a good belting to Islamics a few days ago ...

There's nothing new to note here, so on the pond must go ... because there's the Donald to praise and the ABC to berate ...

Oh they're so angry, they're abandoning their work and racing off to enlist and to head off to Afghanistan right here, right now...

Sorry, the pond was just a little exhausted and nodded off into a restless dreaming, where angry Murdochians shouted at the world and the sky ...

Actually Christ muttered platitudes, though they were original enough at the time, and turned the other cheek, and encouraged civilised behaviour between people, but then the pond keeps making the mistake of thinking Murdochian reptiles are readers of Christ's words, when in fact the angry demagoguery and hate speech of sundry fascists is much more to their liking ...

And in all this did any of the reptiles - just one - mention the way that the Donald had recently flung $110 billion by way of an arms deal at Saudi Arabia, home of Wahhabism, the intellectual (and often financial) underpinning of the fundamentalist Islamic organisations beavering away around the world ...?

Did anybody mention the enormous stupidity involved? The sort of stupidity that's led even American conservatives to wonder about the sanity of their foreign policy?

Of course not. For that you have to turn to a Pope cartoon, which is why the pond always reverts here for more papal insights ...