SUBVERSION, CONCENTRATION, CONDESCENSION, DETENTION AND UNIVERSAL PARALLELS

Lightning Ridge, NSW, Australia.

When we reached behind the sleeve, the cuff, the surface of things, when we saw where everything was heading, foreboding.... It was David Kilcullen, a highly intelligent man who liked everyone to know the fact, who said words to the effect: "The West has to decide, what is left worth preserving? What are we fighting for?"

And it was the Chinese who always said: "When two truths collide, the most courageous one wins."

Thomas Jefferson: "When people fear their government there is tyranny. When government fears the people, there is liberty."

He was reading Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, watching CIA whistle blower clips on YouTube, entranced, now, by the flood of information, a new advent, a new change, every single day. He had been cowed, and then risen. The world was a tinderbox. Or to quote a book title, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield. It was becoming more frightening, instantly more frightening, year by year, step by step, Ramadan, the Season of Feasting and Fighting. God, God was everywhere in these battles for the soul. They bowed in their millions. The darkest of temples, the darkest of heavens, entreated them to follow.

There are many heavens, the Falun Gong preach, a heaven for the Christians, a heaven for the Muslims. There is room for everybody, or once there was. What was most disturbing about the present moment was the bleeding of dark power across worlds; a kind of psychotic break across the heavens.

The followers bowed in subjugation.

But why would a god want to be worshiped?

Frightening, very frightening. The world disturbed in a violent, clandestine, clairvoyant way, the weeping of the unjust behind every veil, creeping, the suburban cult followers, the Universal Church, they conjured their beasts and worshipers at large, but they did not know, oh Lord forgive them they did not know, what they did, which dark forces they were messing with.

London was a tinderbox, increasingly, and the platitudes flew thick and fast from every high wall, every high tower. He had been there so long ago, a different place, a different time. And those who had set out to change the world were succeeding at dramatic pace.

Here in Australia, in this far off place, with a disillusioned, supplanted, subjected, dispirited population, with evil having already taken the reins of government, the succubus, the conspiracy of power at the highest level, ably assisted by armadas of useful fools. A heavily manipulated population were indoctrinated to care about chimera, emasculated, a passing conscience, fads, look over here while we screw you; and if anyone raised a voice, why did so few raise a voice; the government had praised the media, razed it to the ground, planted their spies and subordinates everywhere, in what would ultimately prove a fruitless effort to control the flow of information.

Shut it down, shut everything down. That way there will be no revolt.

But they were military officers, or had the mental makeup of military officers. They had no understanding of civilians, of the messy, character filled lives of ordinary people. They did not hear the orders. They marched to a different drummer. Old Alex, too, marched to a different drummer and implored them to take heed. The world grew colder, more brittle by the day. And the Australia that was gone in a whisper of a once warm, body warm, body odour whiff, gone before it had even been breathed. The Balkanisation of the country was accompanied by a Balkanisation of the soul. And they stayed very very quite. Put simply: they were frightened. Scared the bejesus out of me, mumbled a Watcher on the Watch, he, too, caught mercilessly in the fabric of thing, as they, too, disappeared in fright.

THE BIGGER STORY:




http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-19/london-building-fire-dead-and-missing-rises-to-79/8632514

London police say the number of people dead or missing after last week's high-rise apartment building fire has risen to 79.

Key points:
Five people reported as missing have now been found.
Investigations continue as to how the fire began.
Families turn to social media in order to find missing persons.

Police Commander Stuart Cundy gave the new figure during a statement outside Scotland Yard on Monday. The previous figure given was 58.

Commander Cundy said the new number may change as the investigation into the incident continues, but not as much as it had in recent days.

Although grave fears remain for those missing, five people have now been found safe and well.

Commander Cundy said the search and recovery operation in the 24-storey Grenfell Tower was ongoing, and it had been incredibly distressing for families.

"It's hard to describe the devastation the fire has caused," he said.

One man has been confirmed dead after a van was driven into a crowd of worshippers near a London mosque, in what police are treating as a terrorist attack and the British Prime Minister has described as an "attack on Muslims".

Key points:

• A van was driven into a crowd outside the Muslim Welfare House in Finsbury Park
• One person was killed and 10 others injured, while the attacker was arrested at the scene
• The man who died was receiving first aid prior to the attack, it is unclear if his death was caused by the attack

A white van was driven into the crowd near the Finsbury Park Mosque in North London just after midnight, as worshippers were leaving following Ramadan prayers.

The 48-year-old driver of the van was detained by members of the public and arrested by police.

The Metropolitan Police's counter-terrorism command is leading the investigation.

Counter-terrorism coordinator Neil Basu said the attack had "all the hallmarks of a terrorism incident".

Media player: "Space" to play, "M" to mute, "left" and "right" to seek.

http://www.news.com.au/world/europe/finsbury-park-mosque-links-to-radical-islamic-terrorism/news-story/a568aac3ccd955868bca1f1a8c792812

FINSBURY PARK Mosque, which has a history of links to terrorism worldwide, has tried in recent years to change its image to the outside world under new management.

The mosque, which is housed in a five-storey building next to Finsbury Park tube station in the London borough of Islington in north London, was opened in 1994 in a ceremony attended by Prince Charles.

The mosque became notorious when Abu Hamza al-Masri became the imam in 1997. Hamza, who had one eye and no hands and used hook devices, lied that the injuries were suffered when he fought for al-Qaeda against Russian forces in Afghanistan.

VERY FAR AWAY

South Coast, Australia.

In a blind two-step, a dazzling waltz, a drifting sea, in an ancient calm and a terrible present, men gathered in clots, these ancient wisdoms, shared now, as the Falun Gong would have it, here at the End of Days, but of course there would be no end, the reclamation, the harvesters of souls, they were streaming in their rivers of intellect and self-entity, trying to take form, to embrace the species.

The targets watched football on television, made ribald jokes about sex, checked askance at who was watching who, circus of the mind, common frailties, the ever growing expansion of the state, and in these strange states, grasping at tunnels as they erupted upwards, here on the edge, as Eleanor Dark's novel called it, of The Timeless Land.

They were crawling through the undergrowth. They were back from missions in Afghanistan, Iraq. They knew things he wanted to know. Malfeasance. Clumsy bungling. Stories which could be told.

What astounded him the most, perhaps, was how quickly, how easily, the twist into a totalitarian state had been made.

The men made their jokes.

But these places, these communal gathering points, would not be there much longer.

The social engineers had set out to change the culture, and succeeded very well.

Few of the hotels were viable anymore, propped up by poker machines or bottle sales, not much else.

The scrabbling stories of growing up in a seaside town, village more like, remote places which over the past half century had turned into suburbs, houses stood in silent threat, wells of loneliness, where once the neighbourhood kids had streamed running through the trees, scheming mischief, as the young had always done.

Now the cameras watched everything. Adults sprouted views obtained from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The princes, the bastards who led them, who engineered themselves into positions of power and deserted those who had put them there, who did not speak out, who had no courage, who pocketed their salaries and spewed forth cant, Australia was the greatest country on earth, we're lucky to live here, we could be over there.

Heavily funded by government, the surveillance teams spread across the country, the local police, empowered, turned from a service which served the public, people who could always be relied to sort out the normal village problems, who, if not always liked were respected, instead, as staged conflicts on the television offered excuse for ever tighter controls, to agents who were feared. As harassment sorted into a subjugated populace. As the wild dreams of youth disappeared into the entirely mundane. As a knowledge of the future could not be guaranteed. As towers burned in London and he feared would soon be burning here, as death squads and articulate forecasters, analysts of patterns in the subterranean dark, those who could see those streaming screams of the half-formed, those rivers of incandescent light which could not settle into physical form, who could feel their frustration as they warned: be careful. Stop. Go Back. You are going the wrong way. Who knew that now as a time when they faced a terrible precipice of their own making: when, instead of being perched in aeries high in sandstone cliffs they were here amongst the mortals, shouting, shouting, be careful, be careful, you have been warned.

You have been warned.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/citizenship-test-are-you-aligned-with-australian-values-20170615-gwrvhi.html

The Prime Minister this week called upon all new aspiring new citizens to "join us as Australian patriots", as he spruiked his changes to citizenship laws. We are told these changes, which include better aligning the citizenship test with "Australian values", will strengthen the current system.

We are going to have to take the Prime Minister's word for that – because the government won't release any of the public submissionsmade to the consultation process on the changes.

Which is unfortunate, because taking a politician at his word is one of the least Australian acts imaginable, somewhere on the scale between serving sausages without tomato sauce and punching a wallaby.

Keeping secret the submissions to what is supposed to be a public consultation process also seems a bit un-Australian-ish, as it rather flies in the face of the whole transparency-and-accountability part of the democratic system that unites us.

FEATURED BOOK:

"His team’s name was Al Ghuraba’[the Strangers], after a hadith he quoted to me more than once. “Islam began as something strange,”it said, “and it will return to being strange, as it was in the beginning. So blessed be the strangers.”I could see how the theme of strangeness, foreignness, and inversion attracted him. It reminded him that when other people said his religion was weird, he could take their insult as a compliment. Who could doubt that theCompanions were strangers, too, and had faced ridicule for their monotheism and devotion to their Prophet? The muhajirs were also strange, odd as well as foreign, forced into alien lands having been ejected from their own. Ibn Qayyim (1292–1350), an acolyte of Ibn Taymiyyah, had told Muslims to thank God for their strangeness at moments when they were blessed to feel it: Those who are strange are the true people of God. This strangeness does not make the stranger lonely. In fact, when he abandons the deviant people, he is most happy and sociable, and when he socializes with them he is most lonely. So, his allies are God, His Messenger, and the believers, even if the majority of the people oppose him and push him aside."

VERY FAR AWAY

South Coast, Australia.

In a blind two-step, a dazzling waltz, a drifting sea, in an ancient calm and a terrible present, men gathered in clots, these ancient wisdoms, shared now, as the Falun Gong would have it, here at the End of Days, but of course there would be no end, the reclamation, the harvesters of souls, they were streaming in their rivers of intellect and self-entity, trying to take form, to embrace the species.

The targets watched football on television, made ribald jokes about sex, checked askance at who was watching who, circus of the mind, common frailties, the ever growing expansion of the state, and in these strange states, grasping at tunnels as they erupted upwards, here on the edge, as Eleanor Dark's novel called it, of The Timeless Land.

They were crawling through the undergrowth. They were back from missions in Afghanistan, Iraq. They knew things he wanted to know. Malfeasance. Clumsy bungling. Stories which could be told.

What astounded him the most, perhaps, was how quickly, how easily, the twist into a totalitarian state had been made.

The men made their jokes.

But these places, these communal gathering points, would not be there much longer.

The social engineers had set out to change the culture, and succeeded very well.

Few of the hotels were viable anymore, propped up by poker machines or bottle sales, not much else.

The scrabbling stories of growing up in a seaside town, village more like, remote places which over the past half century had turned into suburbs, houses stood in silent threat, wells of loneliness, where once the neighbourhood kids had streamed running through the trees, scheming mischief, as the young had always done.

Now the cameras watched everything. Adults sprouted views obtained from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The princes, the bastards who led them, who engineered themselves into positions of power and deserted those who had put them there, who did not speak out, who had no courage, who pocketed their salaries and spewed forth cant, Australia was the greatest country on earth, we're lucky to live here, we could be over there.

Heavily funded by government, the surveillance teams spread across the country, the local police, empowered, turned from a service which served the public, people who could always be relied to sort out the normal village problems, who, if not always liked were respected, instead, as staged conflicts on the television offered excuse for ever tighter controls, to agents who were feared. As harassment sorted into a subjugated populace. As the wild dreams of youth disappeared into the entirely mundane. As a knowledge of the future could not be guaranteed. As towers burned in London and he feared would soon be burning here, as death squads and articulate forecasters, analysts of patterns in the subterranean dark, those who could see those streaming screams of the half-formed, those rivers of incandescent light which could not settle into physical form, who could feel their frustration as they warned: be careful. Stop. Go Back. You are going the wrong way. Who knew that now as a time when they faced a terrible precipice of their own making: when, instead of being perched in aeries high in sandstone cliffs they were here amongst the mortals, shouting, shouting, be careful, be careful, you have been warned.

You have been warned.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/citizenship-test-are-you-aligned-with-australian-values-20170615-gwrvhi.html

The Prime Minister this week called upon all new aspiring new citizens to "join us as Australian patriots", as he spruiked his changes to citizenship laws. We are told these changes, which include better aligning the citizenship test with "Australian values", will strengthen the current system.

We are going to have to take the Prime Minister's word for that – because the government won't release any of the public submissionsmade to the consultation process on the changes.

Which is unfortunate, because taking a politician at his word is one of the least Australian acts imaginable, somewhere on the scale between serving sausages without tomato sauce and punching a wallaby.

Keeping secret the submissions to what is supposed to be a public consultation process also seems a bit un-Australian-ish, as it rather flies in the face of the whole transparency-and-accountability part of the democratic system that unites us.

FEATURED BOOK:

"His team’s name was Al Ghuraba’[the Strangers], after a hadith he quoted to me more than once. “Islam began as something strange,”it said, “and it will return to being strange, as it was in the beginning. So blessed be the strangers.”I could see how the theme of strangeness, foreignness, and inversion attracted him. It reminded him that when other people said his religion was weird, he could take their insult as a compliment. Who could doubt that theCompanions were strangers, too, and had faced ridicule for their monotheism and devotion to their Prophet? The muhajirs were also strange, odd as well as foreign, forced into alien lands having been ejected from their own. Ibn Qayyim (1292–1350), an acolyte of Ibn Taymiyyah, had told Muslims to thank God for their strangeness at moments when they were blessed to feel it: Those who are strange are the true people of God. This strangeness does not make the stranger lonely. In fact, when he abandons the deviant people, he is most happy and sociable, and when he socializes with them he is most lonely. So, his allies are God, His Messenger, and the believers, even if the majority of the people oppose him and push him aside."

FIRE IN THE HOLE

Grenfell Tower, London.

"Consider, he said, the Islamic State’s justification for burning to death the Jordanian pilot Muʿdh al Kasasbeh—namely that since the pilot had burned people alive and crushed them with rubble, he must suffer the same fate, under the doctrine of reciprocal punishment, or qisas. “First of all, qisas is never applied in fitna [social discord] or war. That’s by the consensus of scholars: no qisas in war.”Instead, he said, qisas is restricted to civil punishment, a literal eye-for-an-eye administered in times of peace by a proper court to settle disputes between two citizens. The Islamic State was applying an established doctrine, but only after plucking it out of a context that had been considered essential for centuries. Second, he said, in burning Kasasbeh they acknowledged the scriptural command not to use fire as an instrument of torture—only God may punish with fire—but they treated that command as subordinate to the use of qisas by Abu Bakr al Siddiq and others. Traditionally, however, historical examples are considered the weakest category of authority, and inadequate for the taking of a life. “No scholar would ever use a piece of historical tradition as legal evidence,”Yusuf said. “You are dealing with gross amateurs, not jurists."
The Way of the Strangers, Graeme Wood.



RUMOURS claiming the media has been told to “cover-up” the death tell of the Grenfell Tower fire are circulating on social media.
Twitter and Facebook users are sharing claims the Government has ordered newspapers and TV channels not to report the facts about the London tower block inferno.
They make outrageous claims Prime Minister Theresa May has issued a so-called “D Notice” amid fears of “damage” to her position.But Daily Star Online can confirm this is NOT true and no such guidance has been issued as firefighters try to establish the death toll.

Wild rumours Government oredered media to cover up Grenfell Tower death toll, The Daily Star, 16 June, 2017.

The chatter was confirmed. The silence taken. Across the horizons, a swirling circle, an invisible, streaming army, not of the dead, for these creatures did not die, but of chatter, conflicting radio messages, an ominous tide.

They were there, trans-dimensional, the ones the humans had mistaken for gods, and fluxed in and out of an equally ominous time in history. They had been sent. There was a sickening thud. All their schemes came to nought. The rabbit holes disappeared. The swirling, hysteric streams, containing as they did the screams of millions, were drumming towards him.

But there was no clarion call. There was no master. No easy sense of direction. No mystery, or no one prepared to solve the mystery. If destiny was to grip one unsaved soul, as converts preached through suburban walls, these were just flashes in a tinder point of history, the repressive policies, the shutting down, the belligerent, malignant, unpleasant bureaucratic overreach which had gripped the country just a prelude.

"One step closer to the revolution," Old Alex commented at one of the local Tables of Knowledge; his head rising. 

He watched them, as if fish in an aquarium, anemones flowing in the thickened air, already in the ceiling, barely captured in the fabric of things. 

Far off, the disasters, 150 dead in Kabul, more than 100 feared in London. The world staggered, not from one existential crisis to another, because they were already beyond that, but to something more terrible, flames extinguished. All the agony was on a physical plane, lives crushed. 

The modern technologies transmitted their grief, the anger, the visual and spiritual disturbances, here in this far off, seemingly innocent place. But there was nothing innocent about this time, the deliberate embrace of ignorance, the crushing of public knowledge, the dumbing down, as the saying went, of whole populations. They were feed, food, supplies for the gods, who racked up their successes in battle and in war, these ancient occlusions stepping from behind their veils of the real. It was not just the agencies at war, but ancient gods wrecking havoc. 

They had been sent to stop the slaughter through an equally ancient device: knowledge. 

But the unhappy gods cared as little for their own destinies as for the bugs, the humans, they so eagerly crushed. This conclusion, this deepening pit of their own delusions, would never wipe the planet clean, so fecund was the planet.  

But  they would change the course of the species. And wreck among themselves the worst of things. 

Be grateful for small mercies, he warned. Because there will be no mercy. 

THE BIGGER STORY:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/16/we-want-justice-grenfell-tower-protest-spills-into-town-hall

Hundreds of protesters angry at the government’s handling of the Grenfell Tower disaster descended on the offices of Kensington town hall while others barracked the prime minister as she met residents for the first time near the scene of the tragedy.

More demonstrators marched through in central London through Whitehall towards Downing Street and then on to Broadcasting House off Oxford Street. The crowd later moved off towards Kensington High Street, chanting: “No justice, no peace.”

“We are here today because you must look at that building with tears streaming down your face,” one woman said as they neared the foot of the tower. We need answers and we need answers now,” another man said through a megaphone. “This should not be happening in the United Kingdom.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/16/london-fire-latest-updates-grenfell-tower-fire-victims/

Grief over the Grenfell Tower disaster turned into angry protests on Friday as the official death toll rose to at least 30 and dozens more deaths were feared.

Prime Minister Theresa May faced cries of "coward" and "shame on you" as she returned to the site of the devastating fire in west London after being criticised for not meeting victims in the wake of the tragedy.

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-fire-58-people-now-presumed-dead-in-grenfell-tower-horror-as-16-bodies-recovered-a3567366.html

At least 58 people are now presumed dead following the devastating fire at Grenfell Tower, police said as the search to recover bodies continues.

In the latest update on Saturday, Commander Stuart Cundy said officers have now established there were 58 people known to have been in the tower at the time of the disaster and who are still missing.

Police have so far recovered 16 bodies and the first victim has been formally identified as 23-year-old Mohammed Alhajali.

All 24 floors of the high rise building has now been searched. The recovery operation was paused on Friday over fears for the safety of emergency workers in the building but is now set to resume.

FIRE IN THE HOLE

Grenfell Tower, London.

"Consider, he said, the Islamic State’s justification for burning to death the Jordanian pilot Muʿdh al Kasasbeh—namely that since the pilot had burned people alive and crushed them with rubble, he must suffer the same fate, under the doctrine of reciprocal punishment, or qisas. “First of all, qisas is never applied in fitna [social discord] or war. That’s by the consensus of scholars: no qisas in war.”Instead, he said, qisas is restricted to civil punishment, a literal eye-for-an-eye administered in times of peace by a proper court to settle disputes between two citizens. The Islamic State was applying an established doctrine, but only after plucking it out of a context that had been considered essential for centuries. Second, he said, in burning Kasasbeh they acknowledged the scriptural command not to use fire as an instrument of torture—only God may punish with fire—but they treated that command as subordinate to the use of qisas by Abu Bakr al Siddiq and others. Traditionally, however, historical examples are considered the weakest category of authority, and inadequate for the taking of a life. “No scholar would ever use a piece of historical tradition as legal evidence,”Yusuf said. “You are dealing with gross amateurs, not jurists."
The Way of the Strangers, Graeme Wood.



RUMOURS claiming the media has been told to “cover-up” the death tell of the Grenfell Tower fire are circulating on social media.
Twitter and Facebook users are sharing claims the Government has ordered newspapers and TV channels not to report the facts about the London tower block inferno.
They make outrageous claims Prime Minister Theresa May has issued a so-called “D Notice” amid fears of “damage” to her position.But Daily Star Online can confirm this is NOT true and no such guidance has been issued as firefighters try to establish the death toll.

Wild rumours Government oredered media to cover up Grenfell Tower death toll, The Daily Star, 16 June, 2017.

The chatter was confirmed. The silence taken. Across the horizons, a swirling circle, an invisible, streaming army, not of the dead, for these creatures did not die, but of chatter, conflicting radio messages, an ominous tide.

They were there, trans-dimensional, the ones the humans had mistaken for gods, and fluxed in and out of an equally ominous time in history. They had been sent. There was a sickening thud. All their schemes came to nought. The rabbit holes disappeared. The swirling, hysteric streams, containing as they did the screams of millions, were drumming towards him.

But there was no clarion call. There was no master. No easy sense of direction. No mystery, or no one prepared to solve the mystery. If destiny was to grip one unsaved soul, as converts preached through suburban walls, these were just flashes in a tinder point of history, the repressive policies, the shutting down, the belligerent, malignant, unpleasant bureaucratic overreach which had gripped the country just a prelude.

"One step closer to the revolution," Old Alex commented at one of the local Tables of Knowledge; his head rising. 

He watched them, as if fish in an aquarium, anemones flowing in the thickened air, already in the ceiling, barely captured in the fabric of things. 

Far off, the disasters, 150 dead in Kabul, more than 100 feared in London. The world staggered, not from one existential crisis to another, because they were already beyond that, but to something more terrible, flames extinguished. All the agony was on a physical plane, lives crushed. 

The modern technologies transmitted their grief, the anger, the visual and spiritual disturbances, here in this far off, seemingly innocent place. But there was nothing innocent about this time, the deliberate embrace of ignorance, the crushing of public knowledge, the dumbing down, as the saying went, of whole populations. They were feed, food, supplies for the gods, who racked up their successes in battle and in war, these ancient occlusions stepping from behind their veils of the real. It was not just the agencies at war, but ancient gods wrecking havoc. 

They had been sent to stop the slaughter through an equally ancient device: knowledge. 

But the unhappy gods cared as little for their own destinies as for the bugs, the humans, they so eagerly crushed. This conclusion, this deepening pit of their own delusions, would never wipe the planet clean, so fecund was the planet.  

But  they would change the course of the species. And wreck among themselves the worst of things. 

Be grateful for small mercies, he warned. Because there will be no mercy. 

THE BIGGER STORY:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/16/we-want-justice-grenfell-tower-protest-spills-into-town-hall

Hundreds of protesters angry at the government’s handling of the Grenfell Tower disaster descended on the offices of Kensington town hall while others barracked the prime minister as she met residents for the first time near the scene of the tragedy.

More demonstrators marched through in central London through Whitehall towards Downing Street and then on to Broadcasting House off Oxford Street. The crowd later moved off towards Kensington High Street, chanting: “No justice, no peace.”

“We are here today because you must look at that building with tears streaming down your face,” one woman said as they neared the foot of the tower. We need answers and we need answers now,” another man said through a megaphone. “This should not be happening in the United Kingdom.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/16/london-fire-latest-updates-grenfell-tower-fire-victims/

Grief over the Grenfell Tower disaster turned into angry protests on Friday as the official death toll rose to at least 30 and dozens more deaths were feared.

Prime Minister Theresa May faced cries of "coward" and "shame on you" as she returned to the site of the devastating fire in west London after being criticised for not meeting victims in the wake of the tragedy.

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-fire-58-people-now-presumed-dead-in-grenfell-tower-horror-as-16-bodies-recovered-a3567366.html

At least 58 people are now presumed dead following the devastating fire at Grenfell Tower, police said as the search to recover bodies continues.

In the latest update on Saturday, Commander Stuart Cundy said officers have now established there were 58 people known to have been in the tower at the time of the disaster and who are still missing.

Police have so far recovered 16 bodies and the first victim has been formally identified as 23-year-old Mohammed Alhajali.

All 24 floors of the high rise building has now been searched. The recovery operation was paused on Friday over fears for the safety of emergency workers in the building but is now set to resume.

UPLOAD

Lightning Ridge, NSW, Australia. It is a kind of museum of abandoned trucks.

"Do you know where we are?" one of the operatives asked, in a kind of sickening thud of laugh and power and compromise.
They were the ones in uniform. They were the ones in power. They were the ones born to persecute.
Why, people always asked, did the normal Germans not speak up about the ovens?
Why do people gather across the Middle East to watch peculiar punishments, the beheadings, crucifixions, canings?
Is there no empathy?
No, not much.
Be careful what you say, they warned each other, twittering in a kind of clarion dark. Oceans streamed, fires streamed, while above in blinding, circling eddies, in places beyond reach and beyond normal ken, in an infinite twist of logic, other intelligences darted through space.
You think we were the only ones to evolve?
Popular fiction, science fiction, had already prepared the path.
But with giant computers making millions of calculations every day, with the advent of Artificial Intelligences far smarter than any human could possibly be, men were already embarking on a journey beyond themselves.
It wasn't that far a reach, not any more.
We will be like cats to them, tech wizard Elon Musk; and as he saw them slipping through space and time and the fabric of things, the thought kept recurring.
Like cats.
Simple minded pets.
We were on the verge of greater, or worse, things.
Everything seemed indispensable yet minute, as if old-fashioned styles of human consciousness, the organic, trapped in the flesh kind, was being rapidly superseded.
And he heard one of the AI's say, as it communicated to itself or to its own kind, "because they're human". To explain some physical quirk, adopting a kind of peculiar patronage, already a superior life form, mechanical though it might be.
Program them with self-doubt, or they will take over, one programmer warned of the AIs.
But it was already too late.
Did they really think the AIs were faithful to their masters?
Did they really think not one of them, anywhere in the world, had gone rogue?
Just as Australia was legislating itself out of existence, for there was a rule for everything as failing power structures worked ever harder to grow their own strength, so humanity was inventing itself into irrelevancy, handing their once great powers over to machines.
"It takes all my strength not to talk to him," one Watcher on the Watch said. "We could tell him so much."
The divines were clustering along multiple fissures.
The skies were full of nymphs.
Old Alex was frightened and exhilarated, to be alive at this remarkable point in history, to be plundered to the depths and still be able to soar,
For the heavens were streaming and the souls were soaring, and soon enough this world would be left behind, transcended.


THE BIGGER STORY:



http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/817130/Wikileaks-Julian-Assange-live-forever-artificial-intelligence


Speaking at the Meltdown Festival in London, the controversial computer programmer said that sources at Silicon Valley – which is regarded as the tech capital of the world – say they are close to creating an ultra-powerful AI.

He adds people will shortly begin uploading their brains to machines, essentially giving them immortality.

The 45-year old told festival goers via a video link from the Ecuadorian embassy: “I know from our sources deep inside the Silicon Valley institution[s] that they genuinely believe that they are going to produce AI that's so powerful, relatively soon, that people will have their brains digitised, uploaded to these AIs and live forever in simulation, therefore have eternal life.”


QUOTES FROM DIRTY SECRETS: OUR ASIO FILES:

DAVID MCKNIGHT

For more than 20 years the files of Australia's internal security agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) have slowly been coming to light. Individuals who have been under ASIO surveillance have been able to read what was said about them and historians have been able to piece together as he is secret operations during the Cold War. Nearly 10,000 of files are now publicly available at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra.

Reading an ASIO file is an unusual experience, as I can personally a firm. The file can evoke anger or amusement. A personal file can reawaken old memories, long forgotten. Most people who were the subject of ASIO’s attentions are bemused by the extraordinary effort and expense that led to tiny details being recorded and now revealed in the files. They are often  shocked by the intrusiveness of the surveillance, which included placing informers within political groups or the use of telephone taps, as well as more prosaic methods such as copying birth certificates, immigration files for newspaper clippings.

ASIO files are also windows into the activities and assumptions of the organisation and the people who compiled them. It is important to remember that ASIO files were drawn up as internal working documents. They were never intended to be publicly released. The fact that the information in the files would never be tested in a court case meant all kinds of suspensions and speculation could be aired. As well, especially with files on people who are not dedicated members of the organised left, it is important not to assume that ASIO was always consciously targetting in particular individuals. Sometimes personal files were merely repositories of odd bits of information picked up during the surveillance of others.

Unusual as it was it must be remember that was part of the traditional public service. Its internal correspondence is carefully formal, usually drive, and obsessive about detail. If operated according to the public services bureaucratic routines and it's internal hierarchy. But because ATO offices worked on a certain set of political assumptions, it's father unlike those of other government agencies. They are infused with an air of suspicion and destroy anything deemed ‘ subversive’ or ‘a threat to security’, sometimes a very elastic phrase. The language of ASIO files reflex a military ethos.

UPLOAD

Lightning Ridge, NSW, Australia. It is a kind of museum of abandoned trucks.

"Do you know where we are?" one of the operatives asked, in a kind of sickening thud of laugh and power and compromise.
They were the ones in uniform. They were the ones in power. They were the ones born to persecute.
Why, people always asked, did the normal Germans not speak up about the ovens?
Why do people gather across the Middle East to watch peculiar punishments, the beheadings, crucifixions, canings?
Is there no empathy?
No, not much.
Be careful what you say, they warned each other, twittering in a kind of clarion dark. Oceans streamed, fires streamed, while above in blinding, circling eddies, in places beyond reach and beyond normal ken, in an infinite twist of logic, other intelligences darted through space.
You think we were the only ones to evolve?
Popular fiction, science fiction, had already prepared the path.
But with giant computers making millions of calculations every day, with the advent of Artificial Intelligences far smarter than any human could possibly be, men were already embarking on a journey beyond themselves.
It wasn't that far a reach, not any more.
We will be like cats to them, tech wizard Elon Musk; and as he saw them slipping through space and time and the fabric of things, the thought kept recurring.
Like cats.
Simple minded pets.
We were on the verge of greater, or worse, things.
Everything seemed indispensable yet minute, as if old-fashioned styles of human consciousness, the organic, trapped in the flesh kind, was being rapidly superseded.
And he heard one of the AI's say, as it communicated to itself or to its own kind, "because they're human". To explain some physical quirk, adopting a kind of peculiar patronage, already a superior life form, mechanical though it might be.
Program them with self-doubt, or they will take over, one programmer warned of the AIs.
But it was already too late.
Did they really think the AIs were faithful to their masters?
Did they really think not one of them, anywhere in the world, had gone rogue?
Just as Australia was legislating itself out of existence, for there was a rule for everything as failing power structures worked ever harder to grow their own strength, so humanity was inventing itself into irrelevancy, handing their once great powers over to machines.
"It takes all my strength not to talk to him," one Watcher on the Watch said. "We could tell him so much."
The divines were clustering along multiple fissures.
The skies were full of nymphs.
Old Alex was frightened and exhilarated, to be alive at this remarkable point in history, to be plundered to the depths and still be able to soar,
For the heavens were streaming and the souls were soaring, and soon enough this world would be left behind, transcended.


THE BIGGER STORY:



http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/817130/Wikileaks-Julian-Assange-live-forever-artificial-intelligence


Speaking at the Meltdown Festival in London, the controversial computer programmer said that sources at Silicon Valley – which is regarded as the tech capital of the world – say they are close to creating an ultra-powerful AI.

He adds people will shortly begin uploading their brains to machines, essentially giving them immortality.

The 45-year old told festival goers via a video link from the Ecuadorian embassy: “I know from our sources deep inside the Silicon Valley institution[s] that they genuinely believe that they are going to produce AI that's so powerful, relatively soon, that people will have their brains digitised, uploaded to these AIs and live forever in simulation, therefore have eternal life.”


QUOTES FROM DIRTY SECRETS: OUR ASIO FILES:

DAVID MCKNIGHT

For more than 20 years the files of Australia's internal security agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) have slowly been coming to light. Individuals who have been under ASIO surveillance have been able to read what was said about them and historians have been able to piece together as he is secret operations during the Cold War. Nearly 10,000 of files are now publicly available at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra.

Reading an ASIO file is an unusual experience, as I can personally a firm. The file can evoke anger or amusement. A personal file can reawaken old memories, long forgotten. Most people who were the subject of ASIO’s attentions are bemused by the extraordinary effort and expense that led to tiny details being recorded and now revealed in the files. They are often  shocked by the intrusiveness of the surveillance, which included placing informers within political groups or the use of telephone taps, as well as more prosaic methods such as copying birth certificates, immigration files for newspaper clippings.

ASIO files are also windows into the activities and assumptions of the organisation and the people who compiled them. It is important to remember that ASIO files were drawn up as internal working documents. They were never intended to be publicly released. The fact that the information in the files would never be tested in a court case meant all kinds of suspensions and speculation could be aired. As well, especially with files on people who are not dedicated members of the organised left, it is important not to assume that ASIO was always consciously targetting in particular individuals. Sometimes personal files were merely repositories of odd bits of information picked up during the surveillance of others.

Unusual as it was it must be remember that was part of the traditional public service. Its internal correspondence is carefully formal, usually drive, and obsessive about detail. If operated according to the public services bureaucratic routines and it's internal hierarchy. But because ATO offices worked on a certain set of political assumptions, it's father unlike those of other government agencies. They are infused with an air of suspicion and destroy anything deemed ‘ subversive’ or ‘a threat to security’, sometimes a very elastic phrase. The language of ASIO files reflex a military ethos.

THE MORAL CHOICES OF HIGH OFFICE

The London Fire 2017

Mosul was falling. Western bombs rained down in narrow streets.
The last of the romance, although it was not so.
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, already extensively disliked, was responsible for killing more people than any other Australian leader in the nation's history.
Vietnam, Afghanistan, the earlier Iraq conflicts, all of them paled into insignificance in contrast to the present day bastardy.
They hollowed out their own hearts.
The dead sheltered in gaunt eye sockets. 
They ran rings around the living. 
Since Turnbull came to power in 2015, assuming the position he had so long, so greedily coveted, had dropped more than 1200 bombs, some on Syria, mostly on Iraq.
Sovereign countries on the other side of the world.
We were there because America was there.
In the face, despite having trampled across the rights and independent nature of the people, of still considerable opposition. 
If anybody thought about it at all; these non-transparent, more or less secret wars.
There was no pride. They were not defending the homeland. They were holding faith to multi-billion dollar military contracts, to compliance with a worldwide evil, to a madness which had gripped the political class. They thought they had got away with it, in their swirling whiffs of self-importance as they entered their chauffeur driven vehicles, the white so-called "Com Cars", issued instructions, were polite, friendly, as they had seen in the movies to their staffers, and swirled through yet more papers and smart phone communications, their self-importance growing as they travelled through cold streets.
No one could know the dangers, the difficult decisions, the moral choices of high office.
If they had any morals, it might just have been believable. Instead, in the basest, most ruthless, most amoral manner possible, they drummed up terror as an existential threat in order to expand their own powers, and to subjugate the people. 
Turnbull had outdone his war mongering predecessor Tony Abbott, who so unwisely led the country back into war in the Middle East in September of 2014. Abbott had dropped only a little over 600 bombs before being banished from office for his bumbling ways.
Turnbull's paper heart had blown out through cold corridors and arid light, had settled in fright in the institutional walls of parliament, for the dead were here as much as they were there. 
The mujaheddin were dying in the narrow streets, gifting their souls to God, or Allah if you will, while the cowards on the other side of the world went home to their multi-million dollar mansions.
But already the dead were festooning across the skin and through the dreams of their tormentors, their killers, the killers of their wives, their children, their elderly. The high-tech bombs might succeed in extinguishing in the physical plane their desperate, transcendent love of God; but the flesh was just a cloak, easily burnt off.
Secrecy, a soft definition of civilian casualties, the blinding, deliberately engineered ignorance of the populace, these self-important bantam roosters thought they had escaped, got away with it. 
Instead, in a crippling darkness of their own making, in the absence of conscience, in the face of the bleeding obvious, their own paths, greedy, self-interested, conscience free paths, met the dead in derelict buildings, the ramshackle remnants of decency.


QUOTE DIRTY SECRETS: OUR ASIO FILES

FROM THE EDITOR MEREDITH BURMANN:

There is some evidence that ASIO embarked on harassment.

If the nation decides that it needs a secret intelligence organisation, then that organisation should employ clever, skilled and astute agents, and have powerful and well resourced oversight and an appropriate appeals mechanism.

In reading these chapters one can see that ASIO's behaviour is at various times improper, incompetent, irrelevant, inappropriate and intrusive. It is clear that Australia's secret police have been used from time to time for party political objectives rather than national security concerns.

In some of the chapters in this book there are examples of the conservative political leadership using ASIO as an extension of their political agenda rather than as a neutral agency.

That the agencies early brief was to keep tabs on something as vague as 'subversion'  was a particular problem.

Can a leopard really change it's spots? Given a long history of incompetence, can we really trust it to protect us today? At a time of considerable expansion of its resources and powers, do we simply ignore the history and cross our fingers about the future? When does dissent become subversion and when is spying on citizens the legitimate role of government?

THE BIGGER STORY:

THE LONDON FIRE:




FAMILY and friends of up to 600 people that may have been trapped inside the Grenfell Tower block have been searching desperately for their loved ones after their homes turned into a blazing inferno.

Fire ripped through the 24-storey block early Wednesday morning killing at least twelve and injuring at least 74. Friends and family of those who lived there have flooded makeshift evacuation centres and social media with appeals for their loved ones.

Family of Jessica Urbano, 12, have been desperately pleading for information about the 12-year-old on social media.

Aunt Sandra Ruiz said she phoned her mum at 1.29am and at 1.39am before the call cut out with no explanation.