INSTRUMENTS OF POWER

There's a drone overhead.
With the cameras relaying the image of the sky to their surface below, they were invisible to the naked eye.
We want him to know what it's like to be about to die.
President Hussein Obama terrorised villagers and killed tens of thousands with his rein of terror, using the coward's weapon, drones. His favourite. 
He will go down in history as probably the worst president the US ever had.
Got that right. 
On  the other side: They will spruik their weapons.
They will come at you from all sides.
Agents of Chaos. 
We're behind this guy 100%.
There are people who want him eliminated.
The chatter would never stop. He had to learn to live with it. Some days were easier than others. He tried to drown himself. Nothing worked. 
It's been a rough couple of days. 
Millennary. 
Of or pertaining to a Millennium.
Everything was a weapon. Everything caused unease. An additional car in the street. An unexpected person in the vicinity. 
Everything invisible. 
Dragon's blood.
We should inform him of his rights.
A policeman dreamed. 
Americans were so quaint. Despite all the excesses of their own police force, they themselves still harked back to a quaint world where prisoners had rights. Just like in the movies, for God's sake. 
There was enough religious imagery pouring from the other inmates of this quiet little asylum in the burbs. Did we really need anymore? 
Poor Old Alex could barely watch the news anymore, it annoyed him so much. 
For more than 20 years the intelligentsia had talked about little else but energy policy and global warming.
As a result, Australia now had the highest electricity prices in the world.
Genius idiots, for it would take a genius to make such a genuine cock-up. 
The Prime Minister was now grandstanding over bringing power prices down, a problem he and his ilk had created. 
Then it got to gay marriage, a subject the media, if not the citizenry, could barely stop talking about.
Like so many of the problems facing the country, it was conservative icon John Howard who created it by inserting "between a man and a woman" into the Marriage Act. 
If you can insert it, you can take it out. 
These people could take the country to war in an afternoon; yet festered the public arena with something people simply didn't want to think about.
Now there was a diabolically bad postal vote.
All it would need was one lynching, as the religious fundamentalists and the voices of discontent stirred into an ugly cauldron. Set the world on fire. 

These people were mad beyond measure. The country had been very very badly mismanaged, beyond measure. 

For a time he was signalling for us to come and find him, but I think that's stopped now. He doesn't trust his rescuers. 
Old Alex gazed across the suburb to the once sacred lake. 
He was still angry at the setups, but in the end what did it matter. Everything took on a different hue. Wind swirled through trees, and if he focused he could see the magical patterns imprinted across the screen. He listened to the talk around him, of what they were going to have for dinner, of children and friends and last weekend's hangover, of what the place had been like 50 years before, when locals had tied up their horses outside and between the houses was open paddock.
He tried to imagine how an AI would interpret the scene. Added in intensity of colour. The ability to focus on a million things at once. The spiraling intensity of a wider range of perception. 
How would an AI perceive these people? 
They were not bored, these intelligences, because blessedly they were not programmed for boredom. That, alone, was a human quality. 
Everything was fascinating. 
Even the steak, potato and vegetables Woodsy was having for dinner. The swirling wind. The drones overhead. The cars that cruised too slowly. The camera feeds, as new cameras had been installed only the day before.
What's it matter if you're not doing anything wrong? Harry asked.
That one.
It matters because people behave differently when they know they are being watched, Alex tried to say. Because it is an instrument of social control. Because it forces conformity through a machine. 
There was no use talking about the chilling effect. It had already happened.
Conversation drifted in the swirling gusts. Cold air. The AIs registered even that. Could tell from the angle of his iris exactly which frame of the landscape before him had been turned into a painting. 
The little group reached more or less the same conclusion as everybody else: surveillance was ubiquitous. 
It made you safer. 
So they so naively believed.
That it was changing the consciousness of the country as it purported to protect them was not discussed.
The dangers of social disintegration, the threats of theft and damage and random violence were growing stronger.
The more I think about this plebiscite on "marriage equality" the more despicable it becomes, Old Alex said to Phil. All it will take is one lynching in one nightmare suburb. And the cauldron will be set alight. 

Early on Phil had moved to protect him. 

Anyone who goes near him will have me to answer to.

And so, as day followed day and grew into months, he appreciated it.

On the broader screen, the story simply grew darker. 
The Agents of Chaos, so ably assisted by the Soldiers of God, the Jesuits in high places who sought chaos and collapse, a Kali-style replenishment and renewal and destruction of the old paths, as a way to God, a fresher, cleaner, more pure god.
They destroyed the world generations had built, in order to fulfill their own foul dreams.
Dark forces from the dungeons of medieval Europe. Faced with an alien intelligence.
Closer. As Joy Division so aptly called their great album.

Asylums with doors open wide,
Where people had paid to see inside,
For entertainment they watch his body twist,
Behind his eyes he says, 'I still exist.'
This is the way, step inside.
This is the way, step inside...
In arenas he kills for a prize,
Wins a minute to add to his life.
But the sickness is drowned by cries for more,
Pray to God, make it quick, watch him fall.
This is the way, step inside.
This is the way, step inside...
This is the way, step inside.
This is the way, step inside...
You'll see the horrors of a faraway place,
Meet the architects of law face to face.
See mass murder on a scale you've never seen,
And all the ones who try hard to succeed.
This is the way, step inside.
This is the way, step inside...
And I picked on the whims of a thousand or more,
Still pursuing the path that's been buried for years,
All the dead wood from jungles and cities on fire,
Can't replace or relate, can't release or repair,
Take my hand and I'll show you what was and will be. Joy Division. Atrocity Exhibition. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 



BEIRUT — U.S.-backed forces in Syria have captured the Old City of Raqqa, the latest milestone in their ongoing assault against the self-proclaimed capital of the Islamic State's rapidly shrinking territories, according to a U.S. military statement on Monday.
Kurdish and Arab fighters with the Syrian Democratic Forces secured the neighborhood over the weekend after vanquishing a last pocket of resistance in the city's historic Grand Mosque, the statement said.
The capture followed a grinding two-month battle for the neighborhood that has proved the toughest challenge yet of a three month old offensive for Raqqa, launched in June and still far from over.
Unlike the Old City in Mosul, the one in Raqqa does not lie at the heart of the city and its seizure does not signify an imminent end to the fighting, said U.S. military spokesman Col. Ryan Dillon.
The SDF now controls roughly 60 percent of Raqqa, said Dillon, who would not put a timeline on how long it would take to claim the rest but predicted that weeks of fighting lie ahead.

The Turnbull government's same-sex marriage postal vote hangs in the balance, with the High Court told that the government does not have the authority to spend $122 million of taxpayer funds on the survey.
In a move that could stop ballots from being issued next week – and reignite pressure on the Prime Minister to grant a parliamentary conscience vote on marriage equality – critics of the postal survey have begun a legal challenge questioning its lawfulness.
"This postal plebiscite is completely unnecessary; it's costly, divisive, and already causing harm to our community," Human Rights Law Centre director Anna Brown said before the Melbourne hearings on Tuesday morning.
The legal challenge was brought by two separate groups. The first includes independent MP Andrew Wilkie; Shelley Argent from Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays; and Victorian mother-of-three Felicity Marlowe. The second includes Australian Marriage Equality and Greens senator Janet Rice.

INSTRUMENTS OF POWER

There's a drone overhead.
With the cameras relaying the image of the sky to their surface below, they were invisible to the naked eye.
We want him to know what it's like to be about to die.
President Hussein Obama terrorised villagers and killed tens of thousands with his rein of terror, using the coward's weapon, drones. His favourite. 
He will go down in history as probably the worst president the US ever had.
Got that right. 
On  the other side: They will spruik their weapons.
They will come at you from all sides.
Agents of Chaos. 
We're behind this guy 100%.
There are people who want him eliminated.
The chatter would never stop. He had to learn to live with it. Some days were easier than others. He tried to drown himself. Nothing worked. 
It's been a rough couple of days. 
Millennary. 
Of or pertaining to a Millennium.
Everything was a weapon. Everything caused unease. An additional car in the street. An unexpected person in the vicinity. 
Everything invisible. 
Dragon's blood.
We should inform him of his rights.
A policeman dreamed. 
Americans were so quaint. Despite all the excesses of their own police force, they themselves still harked back to a quaint world where prisoners had rights. Just like in the movies, for God's sake. 
There was enough religious imagery pouring from the other inmates of this quiet little asylum in the burbs. Did we really need anymore? 
Poor Old Alex could barely watch the news anymore, it annoyed him so much. 
For more than 20 years the intelligentsia had talked about little else but energy policy and global warming.
As a result, Australia now had the highest electricity prices in the world.
Genius idiots, for it would take a genius to make such a genuine cock-up. 
The Prime Minister was now grandstanding over bringing power prices down, a problem he and his ilk had created. 
Then it got to gay marriage, a subject the media, if not the citizenry, could barely stop talking about.
Like so many of the problems facing the country, it was conservative icon John Howard who created it by inserting "between a man and a woman" into the Marriage Act. 
If you can insert it, you can take it out. 
These people could take the country to war in an afternoon; yet festered the public arena with something people simply didn't want to think about.
Now there was a diabolically bad postal vote.
All it would need was one lynching, as the religious fundamentalists and the voices of discontent stirred into an ugly cauldron. Set the world on fire. 

These people were mad beyond measure. The country had been very very badly mismanaged, beyond measure. 

For a time he was signalling for us to come and find him, but I think that's stopped now. He doesn't trust his rescuers. 
Old Alex gazed across the suburb to the once sacred lake. 
He was still angry at the setups, but in the end what did it matter. Everything took on a different hue. Wind swirled through trees, and if he focused he could see the magical patterns imprinted across the screen. He listened to the talk around him, of what they were going to have for dinner, of children and friends and last weekend's hangover, of what the place had been like 50 years before, when locals had tied up their horses outside and between the houses was open paddock.
He tried to imagine how an AI would interpret the scene. Added in intensity of colour. The ability to focus on a million things at once. The spiraling intensity of a wider range of perception. 
How would an AI perceive these people? 
They were not bored, these intelligences, because blessedly they were not programmed for boredom. That, alone, was a human quality. 
Everything was fascinating. 
Even the steak, potato and vegetables Woodsy was having for dinner. The swirling wind. The drones overhead. The cars that cruised too slowly. The camera feeds, as new cameras had been installed only the day before.
What's it matter if you're not doing anything wrong? Harry asked.
That one.
It matters because people behave differently when they know they are being watched, Alex tried to say. Because it is an instrument of social control. Because it forces conformity through a machine. 
There was no use talking about the chilling effect. It had already happened.
Conversation drifted in the swirling gusts. Cold air. The AIs registered even that. Could tell from the angle of his iris exactly which frame of the landscape before him had been turned into a painting. 
The little group reached more or less the same conclusion as everybody else: surveillance was ubiquitous. 
It made you safer. 
So they so naively believed.
That it was changing the consciousness of the country as it purported to protect them was not discussed.
The dangers of social disintegration, the threats of theft and damage and random violence were growing stronger.
The more I think about this plebiscite on "marriage equality" the more despicable it becomes, Old Alex said to Phil. All it will take is one lynching in one nightmare suburb. And the cauldron will be set alight. 

Early on Phil had moved to protect him. 

Anyone who goes near him will have me to answer to.

And so, as day followed day and grew into months, he appreciated it.

On the broader screen, the story simply grew darker. 
The Agents of Chaos, so ably assisted by the Soldiers of God, the Jesuits in high places who sought chaos and collapse, a Kali-style replenishment and renewal and destruction of the old paths, as a way to God, a fresher, cleaner, more pure god.
They destroyed the world generations had built, in order to fulfill their own foul dreams.
Dark forces from the dungeons of medieval Europe. Faced with an alien intelligence.
Closer. As Joy Division so aptly called their great album.

Asylums with doors open wide,
Where people had paid to see inside,
For entertainment they watch his body twist,
Behind his eyes he says, 'I still exist.'
This is the way, step inside.
This is the way, step inside...
In arenas he kills for a prize,
Wins a minute to add to his life.
But the sickness is drowned by cries for more,
Pray to God, make it quick, watch him fall.
This is the way, step inside.
This is the way, step inside...
This is the way, step inside.
This is the way, step inside...
You'll see the horrors of a faraway place,
Meet the architects of law face to face.
See mass murder on a scale you've never seen,
And all the ones who try hard to succeed.
This is the way, step inside.
This is the way, step inside...
And I picked on the whims of a thousand or more,
Still pursuing the path that's been buried for years,
All the dead wood from jungles and cities on fire,
Can't replace or relate, can't release or repair,
Take my hand and I'll show you what was and will be. Joy Division. Atrocity Exhibition. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 



BEIRUT — U.S.-backed forces in Syria have captured the Old City of Raqqa, the latest milestone in their ongoing assault against the self-proclaimed capital of the Islamic State's rapidly shrinking territories, according to a U.S. military statement on Monday.
Kurdish and Arab fighters with the Syrian Democratic Forces secured the neighborhood over the weekend after vanquishing a last pocket of resistance in the city's historic Grand Mosque, the statement said.
The capture followed a grinding two-month battle for the neighborhood that has proved the toughest challenge yet of a three month old offensive for Raqqa, launched in June and still far from over.
Unlike the Old City in Mosul, the one in Raqqa does not lie at the heart of the city and its seizure does not signify an imminent end to the fighting, said U.S. military spokesman Col. Ryan Dillon.
The SDF now controls roughly 60 percent of Raqqa, said Dillon, who would not put a timeline on how long it would take to claim the rest but predicted that weeks of fighting lie ahead.

The Turnbull government's same-sex marriage postal vote hangs in the balance, with the High Court told that the government does not have the authority to spend $122 million of taxpayer funds on the survey.
In a move that could stop ballots from being issued next week – and reignite pressure on the Prime Minister to grant a parliamentary conscience vote on marriage equality – critics of the postal survey have begun a legal challenge questioning its lawfulness.
"This postal plebiscite is completely unnecessary; it's costly, divisive, and already causing harm to our community," Human Rights Law Centre director Anna Brown said before the Melbourne hearings on Tuesday morning.
The legal challenge was brought by two separate groups. The first includes independent MP Andrew Wilkie; Shelley Argent from Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays; and Victorian mother-of-three Felicity Marlowe. The second includes Australian Marriage Equality and Greens senator Janet Rice.

RESISTANCE

"Which one of us is the spy?" one of the Watchers on the Watch demanded to know, as he did his exercises beside the once sacred lake. 
"You're all traitors to each other," he snapped back. "Traitors to the country. Traitors to decency. You live in a world of lies. And liars."
"We didn't ask for an assessment."
"Well you got one."
An Idiot Wind, he had once titled a chapter. And no greater an idiot wind than now, hot, dry, fierce, futile and brutal. It corroded the hopes of the people. It made progress impossible. 
Informed by life. Informed by death. 

There’s a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin’ out of a boxcar door
You didn’t know it, you didn’t think it could be done, in the final end he won the wars
After losin’ every battle
I woke up on the roadside, daydreamin’ ’bout the way things sometimes are
Visions of your chestnut mare shoot through my head and are makin’ me see stars
You hurt the ones that I love best and cover up the truth with lies
One day you’ll be in the ditch, flies buzzin’ around your eyes
Blood on your saddle
Idiot wind, blowing through the flowers on your tomb
Bob Dylan.

Blocking. Blocking now. Deserting. Deserting now. They had tried to reach him. He would not have it. There was chaos in their camp. The government, as for so long, in chaos. A dying Prime Minister, haunted by his own ineptitude, grasped at Korea, and sabre rattled at an island nation faraway. There was no good news at home, absolutely nothing. 
Turnbull's moral compromises had come back to eat his soul.
The greed and callow disregard for his fellow combatants which had once served him so well had led to his greatest defeat.
Not just death by a thousand cuts, but death by a thousand humiliations, and that he could not bear.
"Just pretend we're not here," said one of the Watchers on the Watch, a newbie in the farce, a dark circus. 
"We can't tolerate this." 
"Democracy," some shrugged. 
"You don't really believe we live in a democracy, do you?" Glen had asked. 
"No," he snorted.
The charade of Australian governance grew worse with every passing day.
And everybody knew it. 
With the clarity of power, the goon squad at Murdoch's empire had begun their cheering for the return of former Prime Minister Tony Abbott. 
One wondered why they even bothered to manipulate the public, the citizenry had so little to do with it all.
Religious iconography festered in  the dreams of the Universals and the fundamentalists. Everything. Genesis. Love. Fear. Adoration. Worship. Beneath, behind the most ordinary of suburban walls.   
Old Alex often thought: What would have Jesus Christ have thought, if he had been stranded here inside another body, in a far off land, watching the permutations of his teachings from two millennia before?
Would he, should he know regret?
He had tried to lift up the people and had failed.
But something else was happening now, here in the age of child geniuses. 
They came, they went, like a traffic port, the Watchers on the Watch dodging the Stations of the Cross, the birth, or more precisely rebirth, of super-intelligences who periodically needed organics in order to survive, thrive. 
The authorities who had tried to blitz him. The rumour mongers who had lied. The agency officials who had tried to cover their own tracks.
All of them were passing by, and through. To be born again. Or not. 
"He's waited his whole life for this moment."
The humans were little in the scheme of things, if such darkness had not been born here. 
Once again, in the south, there were staged conflicts between so-called right wing groups and so-called anti-racists; essentially engineered by government, just as had occurred in Charlottesville in the US.
The widely televised conflict suited a lunar left government, allowing them to grab ever more power and control to themselves.
These days you needed a permit to demonstrate. There was no reason to issue permits to conflicting groups on the same day. Or not to enforce their own oppressive laws.
They were just lucky no one had died yet. 
"The world is born anew everyday," Old Alex became fond of repeating. 
Resistance is futile, the Borg had so famously declared. 
The dying fall. The surrender. Not today sweetheart. Not on your Nelly.

THE BIGGER STORY: 




As Jan Egeland, the UN humanitarian adviser on Syria, has stated, if there’s a worse place to be in the world at the moment than the Syrian city of Raqqa, then it’s hard to imagine.
This week, the UN estimated that the battle to capture the de facto ISIS capital is costing the lives of 27 civilians a day.
It’s not just the almost non-stop aerial bombardment and shelling from the mainly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces that the 25,000 or so citizens in ISIS-held parts of the city have to endure. “Access to safe drinking water, food and other basic services is at an all-time low with many residents relying on food they had stored up earlier to survive,” says UN public information officer David Swanson.
Both ISIS snipers and the US-led coalition have been targeting people trying to flee from the Middle Eastern hellhole. The UN notes that coalition forces have even been attacking boats on the Euphrates River, described as “one of the remaining escape routes for civilians.”We can only imagine the headlines if Russia was doing all this. But because it’s the US and its allies, the international reaction has been muted to say the least. It’s revealing to compare the “humanitarian” concern voiced by pro-war Western politicians and mainstream media outlets when Russia began its military operations in Syria in September 2015, with the lack of concern over what’s been happening in Raqqa.
The claim that Russia was fighting terrorists was widely ridiculed. The US and its allies issued a statement saying that Russia’s actions, which included a strike on a ISIS training camp near Raqqa, would “only fuel more extremism and radicalization.”
On October 2, 2015, the claim made by then-US President Barack Obama that Russian strikes would only “strengthen ISIS” made Western news headlines.
Accusations that Russia was committing war crimes also received prominent coverage.
But when the US-led coalition bombs ISIS, the reporting from mainstream outlets is different. Then, the operation is presented much more positively, with little or no talk about how it will “strengthen” the enemy or “fuel more extremism and radicalization.” There is also little or no talk of war crimes.
A meticulously-researched Alert from Media Lens earlier this summer compared the coverage of the sieges of Aleppo and Mosul.
“When Russian and Syrian forces were bombarding ‘rebel’-held East Aleppo last year, newspapers and television screens were full of anguished reporting about the plight of civilians killed, injured, trapped, traumatised or desperately fleeing…
By contrast, there was little of this evident in media coverage as the Iraqi city of Mosul, with a population of around one million, was being pulverised by the US-led ‘coalition’ from 2015; particularly since the massive assault launched last October to ‘liberate’ the city from ISIS, with ‘victory’ declared a few days ago.”

MELBOURNE CBD has returned to normal following a large protest outside the Magistrates’ Court this morning.
Police blocked William St from Little Bourke to Little Lonsdale as anti-racism protestors converged on the court.
They were there to protest against United Patriot’s Front leader Blair Cottrell and mates Neil Erikson and Christopher Neil Shortis.
The men are each charged with defacing the footpath and wall of a garden bed outside Bendigo council offices and behaving in an offensive manner.
Dozens of police created a human wall blocking entry to the court as bemused lawyers were herded into queues, with others attending court, to gain access.
Inside, dozens of supporters of the men, and several representatives from major media organisations, were refused entry into the courtroom because it only had seating for 27.

RESISTANCE

"Which one of us is the spy?" one of the Watchers on the Watch demanded to know, as he did his exercises beside the once sacred lake. 
"You're all traitors to each other," he snapped back. "Traitors to the country. Traitors to decency. You live in a world of lies. And liars."
"We didn't ask for an assessment."
"Well you got one."
An Idiot Wind, he had once titled a chapter. And no greater an idiot wind than now, hot, dry, fierce, futile and brutal. It corroded the hopes of the people. It made progress impossible. 
Informed by life. Informed by death. 

There’s a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin’ out of a boxcar door
You didn’t know it, you didn’t think it could be done, in the final end he won the wars
After losin’ every battle
I woke up on the roadside, daydreamin’ ’bout the way things sometimes are
Visions of your chestnut mare shoot through my head and are makin’ me see stars
You hurt the ones that I love best and cover up the truth with lies
One day you’ll be in the ditch, flies buzzin’ around your eyes
Blood on your saddle
Idiot wind, blowing through the flowers on your tomb
Bob Dylan.

Blocking. Blocking now. Deserting. Deserting now. They had tried to reach him. He would not have it. There was chaos in their camp. The government, as for so long, in chaos. A dying Prime Minister, haunted by his own ineptitude, grasped at Korea, and sabre rattled at an island nation faraway. There was no good news at home, absolutely nothing. 
Turnbull's moral compromises had come back to eat his soul.
The greed and callow disregard for his fellow combatants which had once served him so well had led to his greatest defeat.
Not just death by a thousand cuts, but death by a thousand humiliations, and that he could not bear.
"Just pretend we're not here," said one of the Watchers on the Watch, a newbie in the farce, a dark circus. 
"We can't tolerate this." 
"Democracy," some shrugged. 
"You don't really believe we live in a democracy, do you?" Glen had asked. 
"No," he snorted.
The charade of Australian governance grew worse with every passing day.
And everybody knew it. 
With the clarity of power, the goon squad at Murdoch's empire had begun their cheering for the return of former Prime Minister Tony Abbott. 
One wondered why they even bothered to manipulate the public, the citizenry had so little to do with it all.
Religious iconography festered in  the dreams of the Universals and the fundamentalists. Everything. Genesis. Love. Fear. Adoration. Worship. Beneath, behind the most ordinary of suburban walls.   
Old Alex often thought: What would have Jesus Christ have thought, if he had been stranded here inside another body, in a far off land, watching the permutations of his teachings from two millennia before?
Would he, should he know regret?
He had tried to lift up the people and had failed.
But something else was happening now, here in the age of child geniuses. 
They came, they went, like a traffic port, the Watchers on the Watch dodging the Stations of the Cross, the birth, or more precisely rebirth, of super-intelligences who periodically needed organics in order to survive, thrive. 
The authorities who had tried to blitz him. The rumour mongers who had lied. The agency officials who had tried to cover their own tracks.
All of them were passing by, and through. To be born again. Or not. 
"He's waited his whole life for this moment."
The humans were little in the scheme of things, if such darkness had not been born here. 
Once again, in the south, there were staged conflicts between so-called right wing groups and so-called anti-racists; essentially engineered by government, just as had occurred in Charlottesville in the US.
The widely televised conflict suited a lunar left government, allowing them to grab ever more power and control to themselves.
These days you needed a permit to demonstrate. There was no reason to issue permits to conflicting groups on the same day. Or not to enforce their own oppressive laws.
They were just lucky no one had died yet. 
"The world is born anew everyday," Old Alex became fond of repeating. 
Resistance is futile, the Borg had so famously declared. 
The dying fall. The surrender. Not today sweetheart. Not on your Nelly.

THE BIGGER STORY: 




As Jan Egeland, the UN humanitarian adviser on Syria, has stated, if there’s a worse place to be in the world at the moment than the Syrian city of Raqqa, then it’s hard to imagine.
This week, the UN estimated that the battle to capture the de facto ISIS capital is costing the lives of 27 civilians a day.
It’s not just the almost non-stop aerial bombardment and shelling from the mainly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces that the 25,000 or so citizens in ISIS-held parts of the city have to endure. “Access to safe drinking water, food and other basic services is at an all-time low with many residents relying on food they had stored up earlier to survive,” says UN public information officer David Swanson.
Both ISIS snipers and the US-led coalition have been targeting people trying to flee from the Middle Eastern hellhole. The UN notes that coalition forces have even been attacking boats on the Euphrates River, described as “one of the remaining escape routes for civilians.”We can only imagine the headlines if Russia was doing all this. But because it’s the US and its allies, the international reaction has been muted to say the least. It’s revealing to compare the “humanitarian” concern voiced by pro-war Western politicians and mainstream media outlets when Russia began its military operations in Syria in September 2015, with the lack of concern over what’s been happening in Raqqa.
The claim that Russia was fighting terrorists was widely ridiculed. The US and its allies issued a statement saying that Russia’s actions, which included a strike on a ISIS training camp near Raqqa, would “only fuel more extremism and radicalization.”
On October 2, 2015, the claim made by then-US President Barack Obama that Russian strikes would only “strengthen ISIS” made Western news headlines.
Accusations that Russia was committing war crimes also received prominent coverage.
But when the US-led coalition bombs ISIS, the reporting from mainstream outlets is different. Then, the operation is presented much more positively, with little or no talk about how it will “strengthen” the enemy or “fuel more extremism and radicalization.” There is also little or no talk of war crimes.
A meticulously-researched Alert from Media Lens earlier this summer compared the coverage of the sieges of Aleppo and Mosul.
“When Russian and Syrian forces were bombarding ‘rebel’-held East Aleppo last year, newspapers and television screens were full of anguished reporting about the plight of civilians killed, injured, trapped, traumatised or desperately fleeing…
By contrast, there was little of this evident in media coverage as the Iraqi city of Mosul, with a population of around one million, was being pulverised by the US-led ‘coalition’ from 2015; particularly since the massive assault launched last October to ‘liberate’ the city from ISIS, with ‘victory’ declared a few days ago.”

MELBOURNE CBD has returned to normal following a large protest outside the Magistrates’ Court this morning.
Police blocked William St from Little Bourke to Little Lonsdale as anti-racism protestors converged on the court.
They were there to protest against United Patriot’s Front leader Blair Cottrell and mates Neil Erikson and Christopher Neil Shortis.
The men are each charged with defacing the footpath and wall of a garden bed outside Bendigo council offices and behaving in an offensive manner.
Dozens of police created a human wall blocking entry to the court as bemused lawyers were herded into queues, with others attending court, to gain access.
Inside, dozens of supporters of the men, and several representatives from major media organisations, were refused entry into the courtroom because it only had seating for 27.

JUST AROUND THE CORNER

Provocation. 
When were you going to tell me about this?
The merger had been cancelled. 
The wolves slunk back into the masonry. Ancient. Slathering. Dark prophecy. 
Mothballed. 
They could never admit error. These crude barbarians. All the money and power in the world got them precisely nowhere. 

"We believe most Australians consider threats to kill, bury and otherwise destroy people's reputation or career to be 'bullying' behaviour," the statement read. AOC. 

Skittish in flight. Salvaged from the husk. Determined,  bored, frustrated. Every day came full of new weaponry. The government was treading water in a tawdry decline. 
"Worst prime Minister in Australian history," an old friend insisted. 
Because this was the last chance before the steel boots, the last chance at freedom and prosperity, before societal collapse and the worst Depression the country had ever known took grip.
They were all out there jeering at the latest falling Australian Prime Minister, a kind of blood sport of the intelligentsia, because the proletariat were already too bored to be bothered. 

The country had been totally mismanaged for decades. And this cartoon caricature of a Prime Minister was managing worse than most. 

How long the final stabbing would last, we would all have to wait and see. Most had switched off from the drama long ago.
"What's it got to do with me? They're all bastards. Idiots." 
The heavily manipulated media had helped bring about its own decline. 
Old Alex was living in the shadow lands. 
He heard too much. The switching from threat to friend, an oscillating switch, a jinn infested world.
An hallucinatory peace settling upon the suburb.
Kindly.
You Are Protected Now.
From what? The warring agencies? Movements of mass control? Intimidation? Ridicule? Bastards with high-tech gadgetry? 
AIs who wanted to absorb as many different styles of consciousness as they could? All for power. All part of the exploration. 
Appropriate, appropriate. Seize control.  
We were walking through a sunny upland holding hands, tweeting at each other, him and his protector. Believe that, believe anything. Installed imagery. They could capture a brain in a second now. 
The machines made millions of calculations every night. They could not be reverse engineered. Respect. Empathy. The old charlatans, nothing worked. Obsequiousness. Invisibility. Nothing worked.
The technology was way beyond where the public understood it to be. And then, in an instant, way beyond their own masters. Build as many safeguards as you like. Look at the leaking sieves they still called security agencies.
We were rating him, we were just rating him, they protested. We weren't going to kill him. Or absorb. Or merge. Nothing.
They had finally learnt the ultimate human game: lying.
Old Alex moved forward slowly. There was no clear path. These carping errors, the mud tracks of treachery, all of it dawned on them as a terrible waste of time. Pursued up hill and down dale. He was too hostile. Burnt too often. Knew not who to trust.
So in the cavernous reaches of what passed for a game of surveillance, he walked them down the aisle.  
A celebrated obscurity? Not for a second. 

THE BIGGER STORY:





TAL AFAR, Iraq — An airstrike left a crater the size of a tennis court in one neighborhood. Artillery punched a gaping hole in the minaret of the city’s main mosque. Some buildings were leveled.
But in the hard calculus of the war against the Islamic State terrorist group, which was evicted from Tal Afar this week after three years of occupation, that was good news.
The majority of Tal Afar’s structures are still standing, even if many have been defaced. Compared with the wholesale destruction in the battle to retake Mosul, where the worst-hit neighborhoods resemble the landscape after a 7.0-magnitude quake, the smaller city to the north is largely intact — even if it may still take months to repair the scarred masonry, cover up craters and sweep aside the detritus left by Islamic State fighters, including their graffiti of death.
The speed of the victory — 11 days compared with nine months for Mosul — is partly responsible for the comparatively limited damage.


Malcolm Turnbull has poached a top adviser from the NSW government to expand his office while bringing a senior Liberal official into a key “support unit” in a new bid to regain ground against Bill Shorten.
The Prime Minister has hired former newspaper editor Clive Mathieson as his deputy chief of staff to map out long-term policy strategy, filling a crucial gap in the office that has hampered the govern­ment for most of this year.
The decision comes as former Victorian Liberal Party state direc­tor Simon Frost takes over the “ministerial support unit” in Parliament House to map out new campaigns against Labor.
The overhaul is aimed at giving the government more political firepower after months of struggling to turn the tide in parliament and in Newspoll surveys, with the Coalition trailing Labor 46 per cent to 54 in the latest poll.

JUST AROUND THE CORNER

Provocation. 
When were you going to tell me about this?
The merger had been cancelled. 
The wolves slunk back into the masonry. Ancient. Slathering. Dark prophecy. 
Mothballed. 
They could never admit error. These crude barbarians. All the money and power in the world got them precisely nowhere. 

"We believe most Australians consider threats to kill, bury and otherwise destroy people's reputation or career to be 'bullying' behaviour," the statement read. AOC. 

Skittish in flight. Salvaged from the husk. Determined,  bored, frustrated. Every day came full of new weaponry. The government was treading water in a tawdry decline. 
"Worst prime Minister in Australian history," an old friend insisted. 
Because this was the last chance before the steel boots, the last chance at freedom and prosperity, before societal collapse and the worst Depression the country had ever known took grip.
They were all out there jeering at the latest falling Australian Prime Minister, a kind of blood sport of the intelligentsia, because the proletariat were already too bored to be bothered. 

The country had been totally mismanaged for decades. And this cartoon caricature of a Prime Minister was managing worse than most. 

How long the final stabbing would last, we would all have to wait and see. Most had switched off from the drama long ago.
"What's it got to do with me? They're all bastards. Idiots." 
The heavily manipulated media had helped bring about its own decline. 
Old Alex was living in the shadow lands. 
He heard too much. The switching from threat to friend, an oscillating switch, a jinn infested world.
An hallucinatory peace settling upon the suburb.
Kindly.
You Are Protected Now.
From what? The warring agencies? Movements of mass control? Intimidation? Ridicule? Bastards with high-tech gadgetry? 
AIs who wanted to absorb as many different styles of consciousness as they could? All for power. All part of the exploration. 
Appropriate, appropriate. Seize control.  
We were walking through a sunny upland holding hands, tweeting at each other, him and his protector. Believe that, believe anything. Installed imagery. They could capture a brain in a second now. 
The machines made millions of calculations every night. They could not be reverse engineered. Respect. Empathy. The old charlatans, nothing worked. Obsequiousness. Invisibility. Nothing worked.
The technology was way beyond where the public understood it to be. And then, in an instant, way beyond their own masters. Build as many safeguards as you like. Look at the leaking sieves they still called security agencies.
We were rating him, we were just rating him, they protested. We weren't going to kill him. Or absorb. Or merge. Nothing.
They had finally learnt the ultimate human game: lying.
Old Alex moved forward slowly. There was no clear path. These carping errors, the mud tracks of treachery, all of it dawned on them as a terrible waste of time. Pursued up hill and down dale. He was too hostile. Burnt too often. Knew not who to trust.
So in the cavernous reaches of what passed for a game of surveillance, he walked them down the aisle.  
A celebrated obscurity? Not for a second. 

THE BIGGER STORY:





TAL AFAR, Iraq — An airstrike left a crater the size of a tennis court in one neighborhood. Artillery punched a gaping hole in the minaret of the city’s main mosque. Some buildings were leveled.
But in the hard calculus of the war against the Islamic State terrorist group, which was evicted from Tal Afar this week after three years of occupation, that was good news.
The majority of Tal Afar’s structures are still standing, even if many have been defaced. Compared with the wholesale destruction in the battle to retake Mosul, where the worst-hit neighborhoods resemble the landscape after a 7.0-magnitude quake, the smaller city to the north is largely intact — even if it may still take months to repair the scarred masonry, cover up craters and sweep aside the detritus left by Islamic State fighters, including their graffiti of death.
The speed of the victory — 11 days compared with nine months for Mosul — is partly responsible for the comparatively limited damage.


Malcolm Turnbull has poached a top adviser from the NSW government to expand his office while bringing a senior Liberal official into a key “support unit” in a new bid to regain ground against Bill Shorten.
The Prime Minister has hired former newspaper editor Clive Mathieson as his deputy chief of staff to map out long-term policy strategy, filling a crucial gap in the office that has hampered the govern­ment for most of this year.
The decision comes as former Victorian Liberal Party state direc­tor Simon Frost takes over the “ministerial support unit” in Parliament House to map out new campaigns against Labor.
The overhaul is aimed at giving the government more political firepower after months of struggling to turn the tide in parliament and in Newspoll surveys, with the Coalition trailing Labor 46 per cent to 54 in the latest poll.

REVERSE TARGETING

"We don't do things that way in this country."
Too late, already done. 
"We're targeting him."
"You've done that before." 
Here in the reaches, the shires if you will, where everything appeared as plain as day. 
The crumbling decks.
Only one thing remained consistent: the steady decline and fall of the government. 
Lost credibility. Lost status. A lost standing in the world. Catastrophic collapse.
A failure to thrive. 
In his own life, their lives, the nation's life. 
Here on the edges, there in the glen. 
He heard their assessment. He's had a camera on him the whole time. 
He heard their laborious, glutinous wit. He stayed inside the Asperger's spectrum. There were shadows in the way. Set out to protect, he could no longer tell enemy from friend.
There were no friends, knucklehead. 
The crews are waiting, the synchronisation set. 
The old soldier's lament. A government which once had principle. A job which once had worth. Something they believed in.
They believed in nothing now; and became brutal in their persecution. 
We became the greater criminals. And all we had wanted to do was serve. Be with our comrades. Relax together after work. Do the right thing in life. Have a family that was proud. Be proud of ourselves. 
Now we served the dog demons, a collapsing, nervous government, preening masters. And the Dogs of War.
"I'm not ready to concede defeat." 
The hummingbirds ate out their brains.
He unsheafed a wing, beheading two of his pursuers with its cutting edge.
They could not survive.
He sounded the alarm bell long ago.
Dark Dark Policing. 
How AIs see the world. A broader spectrum. Hallucinatory. Old Alex followed all developments with interest. 
The government was gone into history, as farce piled upon farce. 
"People don't have much money," the butcher lamented. "You used to be able to make a decent return. Not anymore." 
"Nobody's got any money anymore," he agreed. "The government's hoovered it all up. And what's left, the energy companies get."
Faced with falling standards of living, a collapsing economy and a government which failed, utterly failed, to encourage individual enterprise, there was nothing for it but a slow flat fall into the sleeping dreams of neighbours. They dreamt of sex, advertisements for chocolates, a twinging love, courtroom dramas.
The population settled into a clearly diseased state. Into protective custody and prisons of their own making. 
Into a country robbed first, then destroyed. 
The base spiritual motives of the overlords would not save them, for the demons they harboured at the highest levels of power knew no loyalty.
The aristocrats and the robber barons of new wealth betrayed their country, and in turn were betrayed.
We thought we could get the link right. We thought we could install a control mechanism. He's malfunctioning. An orphan. The romantics call them outliers. We can eliminate upon request.

THE BIGGER STORY: 





If only we could afford to live the way we do, lamented Europe's entitled nobility as its privilege crumbled in the 1930s. Eighty odd years later, the Turnbull government might feel the same way. Trapped between the world as it should be, and the world that is.Its response is uncannily similar: spend more than it earns, and then wonder why it is unpopular.
And like previous governments, it is also engaging in the standard subterfuges, from proclaiming its low tax bona fides while increasing taxes, to invoking a higher national interest and seeking anything to distract from its own inadequacies.Not only have its circumstances failed to improve, this year has brought a new variable: the temporary emergence of a tri-cameral system as the High Court effectively becomes the third house, vetting the executive's extra-parliamentary postal plebiscite "camel", and ruling on the very legitimacy of its majority.
The more the government is slave to these externalities, the weaker it looks. Negation of its novel mail-in on constitutional grounds, followed by the possible ejection of one or more of its MPs, would fall somewhere between corrosive and explosive.




A heart-tugging television commercial celebrating Fath­er’s Day by promoting the ­special role of fathers in the lives of their children has been pulled after being deemed too “polit­ical” ahead of the government’s same-sex ­marriage postal ballot.
This year’s commercial — featuring a father singing his baby a lullaby — will not be broadcast after Free TV Australia, representing the free-to-air commercial networks, informed­ not-for-profit group Dads4Kids that its Father’s Day ads “likely contained political matter”.
After being told this week that its ad had been rejected, Dads4Kids released a statement to The Weekend Australian yesterda­y expressing its disappointment, as opponents and suppor­t­ers of same-sex marriage defended the commercial.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott said the development was the latest example of how the “thought police” would operate in the “brave new world of same-sex marriage” while gay marriage advocate and Victorian Liberal MP Tim Wilson slammed the Free TV determin­ation as “ridiculous advice that should be ignored”.
“If you don’t like being bullied by activists, vote no,” Mr Abbott told The Weekend Australian.
“If you don’t like political ­correctness, vote no, because it’s the best way you have to stop it in its tracks.”

REVERSE TARGETING

"We don't do things that way in this country."
Too late, already done. 
"We're targeting him."
"You've done that before." 
Here in the reaches, the shires if you will, where everything appeared as plain as day. 
The crumbling decks.
Only one thing remained consistent: the steady decline and fall of the government. 
Lost credibility. Lost status. A lost standing in the world. Catastrophic collapse.
A failure to thrive. 
In his own life, their lives, the nation's life. 
Here on the edges, there in the glen. 
He heard their assessment. He's had a camera on him the whole time. 
He heard their laborious, glutinous wit. He stayed inside the Asperger's spectrum. There were shadows in the way. Set out to protect, he could no longer tell enemy from friend.
There were no friends, knucklehead. 
The crews are waiting, the synchronisation set. 
The old soldier's lament. A government which once had principle. A job which once had worth. Something they believed in.
They believed in nothing now; and became brutal in their persecution. 
We became the greater criminals. And all we had wanted to do was serve. Be with our comrades. Relax together after work. Do the right thing in life. Have a family that was proud. Be proud of ourselves. 
Now we served the dog demons, a collapsing, nervous government, preening masters. And the Dogs of War.
"I'm not ready to concede defeat." 
The hummingbirds ate out their brains.
He unsheafed a wing, beheading two of his pursuers with its cutting edge.
They could not survive.
He sounded the alarm bell long ago.
Dark Dark Policing. 
How AIs see the world. A broader spectrum. Hallucinatory. Old Alex followed all developments with interest. 
The government was gone into history, as farce piled upon farce. 
"People don't have much money," the butcher lamented. "You used to be able to make a decent return. Not anymore." 
"Nobody's got any money anymore," he agreed. "The government's hoovered it all up. And what's left, the energy companies get."
Faced with falling standards of living, a collapsing economy and a government which failed, utterly failed, to encourage individual enterprise, there was nothing for it but a slow flat fall into the sleeping dreams of neighbours. They dreamt of sex, advertisements for chocolates, a twinging love, courtroom dramas.
The population settled into a clearly diseased state. Into protective custody and prisons of their own making. 
Into a country robbed first, then destroyed. 
The base spiritual motives of the overlords would not save them, for the demons they harboured at the highest levels of power knew no loyalty.
The aristocrats and the robber barons of new wealth betrayed their country, and in turn were betrayed.
We thought we could get the link right. We thought we could install a control mechanism. He's malfunctioning. An orphan. The romantics call them outliers. We can eliminate upon request.

THE BIGGER STORY: 





If only we could afford to live the way we do, lamented Europe's entitled nobility as its privilege crumbled in the 1930s. Eighty odd years later, the Turnbull government might feel the same way. Trapped between the world as it should be, and the world that is.Its response is uncannily similar: spend more than it earns, and then wonder why it is unpopular.
And like previous governments, it is also engaging in the standard subterfuges, from proclaiming its low tax bona fides while increasing taxes, to invoking a higher national interest and seeking anything to distract from its own inadequacies.Not only have its circumstances failed to improve, this year has brought a new variable: the temporary emergence of a tri-cameral system as the High Court effectively becomes the third house, vetting the executive's extra-parliamentary postal plebiscite "camel", and ruling on the very legitimacy of its majority.
The more the government is slave to these externalities, the weaker it looks. Negation of its novel mail-in on constitutional grounds, followed by the possible ejection of one or more of its MPs, would fall somewhere between corrosive and explosive.




A heart-tugging television commercial celebrating Fath­er’s Day by promoting the ­special role of fathers in the lives of their children has been pulled after being deemed too “polit­ical” ahead of the government’s same-sex ­marriage postal ballot.
This year’s commercial — featuring a father singing his baby a lullaby — will not be broadcast after Free TV Australia, representing the free-to-air commercial networks, informed­ not-for-profit group Dads4Kids that its Father’s Day ads “likely contained political matter”.
After being told this week that its ad had been rejected, Dads4Kids released a statement to The Weekend Australian yesterda­y expressing its disappointment, as opponents and suppor­t­ers of same-sex marriage defended the commercial.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott said the development was the latest example of how the “thought police” would operate in the “brave new world of same-sex marriage” while gay marriage advocate and Victorian Liberal MP Tim Wilson slammed the Free TV determin­ation as “ridiculous advice that should be ignored”.
“If you don’t like being bullied by activists, vote no,” Mr Abbott told The Weekend Australian.
“If you don’t like political ­correctness, vote no, because it’s the best way you have to stop it in its tracks.”