Dear reader, it is with some regret that we at pcbycp  are the first to break the tragic news. The Deep Cave rescue has been a dismal failure. Though it has been central to the 24/7 news cycle, the rescue operation team has finally admitted there is no hope. Speaking to the press outside the entrance to the cave mouth, the leader of the multi-national rescue team had this to say;

Tony, the leader of the group of boys. His scout master described him as “determined and slightly delusional about his own intelligence”.

Elon Musk demonstrates his mini rescue submarine, (“the Kiddie fiddler”) to an adoring press.

“We don’t know what drove these plucky little boys to venture into this cave, but whatever drove them, we can only surmise as being a misguided attempt to both find and secure the shibboleth of “Clean Coal”. Like Lasseters Reef, we all know there is no such thing. But I’m afraid little boys have wild imaginations, and sometimes I regret to say their ambition gets ahead of them. I can only surmise that if they refuse to come out, after all the help we’ve offered, the most up to date technology and I might add, the assistance of none other than Elon Musk, this operation must cease. 

Tony’s Mother Mary, urging him to come out and stop being silly.

A rescuer, overcome by clean coal fumes DIES!

Poetically, rather than accept the fact that clean coal does not exist, and may not (and I use this term advisedly) EVER be part of a National Energy Guarantee, they feel, like their belief in Tinkerbell the fairy in Peter Pan, that to recognise the facts would destroy their entire world view. We have clinical psychologists on hand who describe this incapacity to accept reality in any shape manner and form as “Cognitive Auric Adolescent Lapse Syndrome” (COALS) in which the respondent  via a process of self delusion and involuntary cognitive thought processing dissonance (common amongst Catholics and Queenslanders) actually believes that Coal is akin to Gold. The sufferer, actualy believes that all you have to do is hold a lump of coal in your hand, think about execution of gays, mass incarceration of First Australians, and the unquestioned principle of Manifest Destiny and the Coal will turn to GOLD. 

Major Farqueup decides to abandon the rescue attempt.

That’s what lured thise kiddies here, part greed, but moreover, to fulfil a delsuional sub-set of principles, a bit like the way the electorate think they still have a say in the running of government and the principle of privatisation. In the end, the urge to prove the correctness of their viewpoint is so overriding in spite of all the evidence to the contrary they’ll push themselves, willy nilly into a cave, a coalmine, a coal seam just to prove by association that they’re right and the rest of the world is wrong. 

In the end, we can’t help them. The Elon Musk miniature submarine will not be used, they rejected it out of hand as being “Renewable” and worried about a non refundable deposit. We have pleaded, cajoled, even sent Rolf Harris  and Cardinal Pell down there to frighten them and make them come running, but it hasn’t worked. They’re determined to stay and nothing we can do will get them out. In the end we are finished with this sad affair. They’ll be entombed for ever! Incarcerated by their curious ideology.

Last photo of one of the  little boys lost in the cave complex talking to a briquette.

Sadly, all that‘ll ever come out of this will be a sense of hopeless negativity. And that’s a burden we all have to shoulder. 

As a society it all comes down to a three letter word. 

NEG.