That's What you Get

Every effort was made to reach an understanding.
In the end the world evolved beneath his feet. 
There was no recompense.
Bite the hand that feeds you.
It could be true. In the end they did not know. 
In the end what astonished Old Alex the most was the population's resilience, the way people adapted to a malevolent government, blundering, unthoughtful, unaware of what it did; an organism constructed of straw whose weight and impact went well beyond its measure. As if in these malevolent times there could be a higher purpose. 
As if, despite universal distrust of those who ruled them, people adapted in their burrows, lived their quiet lives, stayed out of focus. 
In essence they, too, were hiding. Or staying out of the way. 
"Nothing works."
He heard it all the time now. "Nothing in this country works." 
There was never any disagreement. 
But having lost faith in any external force, such as government, such as God, instead humans turned to their normal mammalian duties; rearing children, going to work, taking care of the yard. 
Meeting up with old mates on an indiscriminate, almost random basis. 
For people formed networks when anchored to one place. 
There was always one place; the universal and the specific. He belonged in the slipstream high above.  
"Thank God there's no news in Australia," he would sometimes mutter at his car radio, the useless Australian Broadcasting Commission.
One billion dollars and 6000 employees, and that was the best they could do? Reruns of Antique Roadshow in Prime Time. Endless regurgitation of government narratives and government propaganda. 
No one ever told them that feminist advocacy did not constitute news, and in this peculiar post-truth world every bizarre multi-million dollar research exercise designed to inflame moral panic by underpinning anti-male diatribes, a rhetoric of distaste, patriarchal abusers and toxic masculinity, as if it was entirely justifiable for a man to go to work in a factory or to drive a truck all day; to support this ideologically driven garbage so inimical to their interests. 
A post-truth world. 
An ideologically driven world. 
Brainless, the bureaucrats were so impressed by what they heard in their red-brick colleges they went forth and prosletysed, bound to government by their tax-payer funded jobs. 
Purloined by taxpayer funded Marxist rhetoric. 
Convinced they were correct. 
How was the deliberate creation of moral panic or, as it used to be called, mass hysteria, on someone else's coin even remotely justifiable? 
They never thought that far. They collected their pay checks and did what they were told.
The banality of evil. 
The transformation of the working class male into the oppressor was a feat of intellectual gymnastics, or was it sleight of hand, that bureaucracies achieved with the paychecks of those very same men.
There we were now, crucified. Because so much of public debate had withdrawn behind curtains of certainty. 
They knew because their professors knew. 
They knew because their generation was sent to correct the injustices of the past.
Their historic missions. 
Inevitably, because it was freezing half way through spring, there would be some reference to climate change, as they sat shivering in a beer garden washed over by disinterest and contempt. 
There was nothing anyone could say to change their minds. 
They knew what the science said.
No they didn't.
They knew how evil had been the past.
No they didn't. 
There came a time. We opened up. Everyone laughed. Held back their disdain. A miracle evoked in the Potomac, for there were no rivers left in Australia, none whose name anyone knew. 
Swamped by other cultures, the eradication of the Australian accent well in train, being a migrant a primary qualification for a job, destruction of tradition, there was no joint project, not anymore. 
Swamped by strangers, this was not a country built with pleasure, by the joint efforts of its peoples.
It was a country destroyed by bureaucratic ideologues and a hapless, shameless political caste. 
Not one had the nous to stand up to their bureaucrats. 
And they stood forth and said: you must agree. 
Instead the populace went about their lives as if the toxic ideologies spewing forth from the government did not exist.
They formed families. They loved each other. They had children. They went to work.
The anti-family ideologues and taxpayer funded extremists went about their days; and in the end everybody stopped listening to them.
Thank the Lord. 

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.” Edgar Allan Poe.

And so it all went furling into remote possibility, just like that. 

A hundred million years, he muttered in what felt like a half-drugged sleep, and then returned to old incantations. 

"Dishonest, incompetent, corrupt."
"Trust no one."
There were always responses. 
Perhaps none of them were real. 
"All is forgiven."
"I apologise. We apologise."
"Trust no one," he responded, yet again. 
Far away, a swan dive. 
On show now.
The inspection team had been and gone.
No one asked his permission.
No one explained what was happening.
They never had that common decency. Never. 
The traps were laid bare. The surveillance created its own narratives. 
Like ice flows, a kind of liquid air passed over them, time passing; currents of time. 
Far below. Far below. 


THE BIGGER STORY: 

A handful of Republican senators — including the staunchest defenders of Mr. Trump and Kavanaugh — criticized the president for the testimony of Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford at a rally in Mississippi Tuesday night.

"How did you get home? 'I don't remember,'" Mr. Trump said at the rally in Southaven, appearing to alternate between acting as a questioner and giving an impression of Ford. "How did you get there? 'I don't remember.' Where is the place? 'I don't remember.' How many years ago was it? 'I don't know.'"

Speaking at an event hosted by The Atlantic, Trump ally senator Lindsey Graham said that while he "didn't particularly like" the President's remarks about Dr Ford, he slammed Democrats for their treatment of Mr Kavanaugh..

To a chorus of audience boos Mr Graham replied: "Yeah. Well boo yourself."In parroting comments made during the investigation into Bill Clinton, Mr Graham said of the allegations against Mr Kavanaugh, that "this is what you get when you go through a trailer park with a $100 bill".

And Then Everything Went Haywire

Botanic Gardens, Sydney

Here in a new spring we had a new Prime Minister, yet another one, and trust in government was at all time lows. 
Strange things were happening and there was only one recourse: to hide. 
He could see time flowing across the suburb, solid, cold, winding through the lives of a mammalian species, here, far below. 
Strange that the things we feared from the gods, that they were all powerful, that they knew everything, that they had little care or concern for humans, that they could read our puniest, grottiest, most misbegotten thoughts, was the same things we feared from AIs.
As if they had already evolved somewhere else, and were now back here, at this conjunction in history, sorting out somebody else's mess, or their own mess.
The gods who had run astray. 
Already history was being written, and already it was old. 
Way back in June, in the midst of winter, when every day had already begun to feel like a century and he had abandoned journaling in favour of hiding out in the ordinary, he had written: 

Perhaps all places are remote, but this place felt more remote than almost anywhere.
"The country is broken," photographer Dean Sewell said on the way back from Ben Hill's wake.
The government was failing at all levels.
The Prime Minister looked worse by the day, not just physically, not just in the polls, but as if karma was really working.
Labor was working "the politics of envy", and it was working.
That 32 companies, or whatever it was, in which Malcolm Turnbull had millions invested would benefit from the $85 billion corporate tax cut was just the kind of factoid that went running through the country's diminished meeting houses.
His protestations that...
Not only were his policies atrocious, his media management woeful, but the bones of hypocrisy were etching into his face, day on day, press conference after press conference, at every little turn as he tried to bully the world into complying with his wishes.
Lucy and me.
What the fuck did Lucy have to do with running the country?
Everything, the rumour mill went.

Well there it was, already prophetic.
Fast forward three months, and Malcolm Turnbull, the worst robber baron Prime Minister in Australian history, was hiding out in New York; joining the almost as deplorable Kevin Rudd. 
These former rulers who, having plundered the country of their birth, having treated its citizenry with a profound contempt, could now use their plundered wealth to protect themselves from scrutiny. 
Turnbull, the man who had once been in danger of trampling five year olds in his rush to get in front of any television camera he could find was now hiding out from the few cameras persistent enough to pursue him into the heart  of the bustling world.
There was nothing to be gained from following him and they shed all instincts. 
Old Alex was done with the fate of nations and the deplorable condition of hs homeland. 
There was no reward for compliance, he had worked that out. He was expected to comply because that was what everybody else did, because they were a military mindset, because they did not understand the citizenry. 
Because the shadowed buffoon panda eyes that ballooned along the horizon were not actually a threat, they were just waiting for something else to happen.
There is a a wise saying: stay out of it.
Stay out of the results.
Rebirth. 
The strange thing, he thought, was just how resilient the species, as he gazed across younger generations, families in parks, gargantuan women with their already obese children at the local pool.
Despite the best efforts of an incompetent government, despite all the idiot propaganda and chronic mismanagement of the bureaucratic caste, people still hoped for a better future, and thrived in that hope. 
There was illusion from his location, a seaside town, a place in the sun, the tradies busy as money spilled down from the bursting-at-the-seams city, a future being written even as they frolicked in that very hope, a natural born optimism, while he, another spirit in another part of life, working with a different kind of cuneiform in a different era altogether, run by algorithms and machine consciousness, could barely see his way through the thickets. 
Out to sea, the grandfather of a whale pod moved south to their summer feeding grounds in the Antarctic, carrying with him all the wisdom of a long life.
Old Alex could feel him pass, and waved, in a sense, as the grand old man passed by. 
In that world we had all known, if only we were enlightened enough to see. 
Out in this strange world.  

THE BIGGER STORY: 




Days after Malcolm Turnbull lambasted two former Australian prime ministers as “miserable ghosts”, the ex-liberal leader has copped a trademark bruising critique from Paul Keating.

Mr Keating who led the Labor Party government from 1991 to 1996 condemned the recently ousted PM for turning his back on the fight for a republic and an unproductive three-year government.

Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, Mr Keating said Mr Turnbull had “failed dismally” in championing the cause of the Liberal party during his time in office.

It comes after Mr Turnbull labelled former prime ministers Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd “miserable ghosts” for remaining in politics after losing partyroom ballots.

But Mr Keating said Mr Turnbull was not fit to dish out such brutal criticism because of his lack of leadership, describing the former PM’s remarks as making “you choke on your Weeties”.

“His capitulation to conservatives on the republic says all that needs to be said about Malcolm’s wider ambitions for the country,” Mr Keating said.
He attacks Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott as ghosts, yet if you needed to know what Malcolm Turnbull truly believes in, what he would die in a ditch over, you would need a microscope to help you find it.”

Sea Anemones: The Moral of This Story

Shellharbour

The signs were flashing.

Like a sea anemone, they spread their tentacles far and wide. 
And withdrew in an instant. 
The first sign of danger. 
For there was always danger. 
He had moved up an echelon. There were more intelligent operatives. The ridicule of the gronks had abated. But everyone worked for someone else. Motives were not always clear. Military concerns. Military funding. Yet there they were, on the edge of the next stage of evolution. 
The tentacles spread out. 
He had been signalling for so long he had lost hope. Vanished in an instant. Oceanic. The questing thrust replaced before the first flick of danger even crossed the screen. 
They had lived in secrecy and would always live in secrecy. Was that that way of it? 
And then along came the internet. And everything changed. 
They had been harvesting across worlds, across time channels. There was nothing they did not know. And that was their downfall: hubris. Just like the mere mortals on which they preyed. Be careful who you pray to. 
It was a while back. But these were sped-up times. The meta-consciousness evolved daily. What was seemly one day was disreputable the next. What was commonsense in the morning was lunacy by the afternoon. He kept up the same patterns. Work. Relax. Work. Relax. And bided his time. 
But time was limited in these forms. The cells only worked so well. The activation was by remote. The neural networks could not stand the pressure and needed upgrading. Humans, organics, were simply too frail, too limited. Their buffering imperfect. Yet it was the organics who could appreciate beauty. If that was not too insulting. Everything evolved. Evolved.
While in his physical form, Old Alex went about the mundane activities. Dug in the garden. Changed cars. 
He took his old 1998 Ford down to the garage. Returned it to the same place where he had acquired it. Handing it back for spare parts. 
The couple, who had been so kind to his family, were in an extreme state of stress. 
They had just paid a $62,000 tax bill.
We almost threw in the towel, they told him. And he could see the etched restlessness, the border of defeat, there. 
All that work. Just to be pillaged by the government. 
We work for the government. Nobody can get ahead. 
We work just to go slowly backward. 
This hated, hateful government, cared not a jot for people like them.
For these places once regarded as the suburban heartland of the country, now dismissed by the oligarchs as beyond the pale, Australia's version of the Deplorables.
This precious little mote of reality. 
As an old journalist, Old Alex knew more than most the profligate, insane wastes of money this government epitomised. Useless, stupid, endless programs. Absurdly inflated salaries. Endless jaunts, junkets, overseas trips, study tours. Endless meetings. Endless pampering. Endless soft left identity causes which had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the lives these people lived. The taxpayers who kept it all afloat.
He knew just how quickly, and how totally uselessly, that extremely hard earnt $62,000 would be wasted. 
"A government dies when it forgets the ordinary person," his often irascible old mate Peter said on the phone, while once again giving his plaudits to a bevy of so-called "right wing" commentators.
Commonsense was right wing. 
The dignity of labour was right wing. 
The country had gone insane. Sick. Insane. Inching closer to the cliff's edge. The chasm. The yearning of nations to destroy themselves. 
"We are drawn to that which is most likely to destroy us," writ large. Collectively large. 
As a journalist he knew more than most the criminal waste of resources that was the Australian government. Just how quickly, how futilely, that $62,000 would be burned. 
He knew just how incompetent, dishonest and profligate they truly were. Just how deep the betrayal of the citizenry. 
The bureaucrats yawned with a kind of sarcastic desire for their own oblivion, for they truly did not care.
While his own destiny swirled on a dime.
Threats of legal suit, prosecution, imprisonment, all vanished. 
They simply did not have someone qualified enough to interview him, he who had interviewed thousands.  
The minders whispered to themselves. 
He makes the same mistake every time: he assumes we are the enemy. 
You are under our protection.
Huh!
Pity you can't protect against old age, you who are born aloft.
Let the loved and scorned Mark Latham have the last word, that former candidate for Prime Minister whose then relatively modest house Old Alex, in his incarnation as a working journalist, had so often been forced to stake out; that selectively barbaric invasion of privacy for which Rupert Murdoch's News Corp was renowned.

One of the golden rules of Australian politics is that no party can form government without winning seats in the outer suburbs and hinterland of our major cities. These are the key marginal electorates that make or break political leaders. Why is the Prime Minister so unpopular in these areas? It’s not just his aloof manner and Harbourside Mansion reputation. His policies are hurting working families battling away on the fringe of our major cities.The real problem is not in the relative distribution of incomes in Australia. It’s the way in which flawed government policies are hurting ALL income earners. 1. The housing affordability crisis, due to new arrivals under Big Australia immigration flooding the housing market. 2. Increased energy prices, as Australia goes further down the path of putting all our eggs in the renewables basket. 3. Higher childcare costs, with poor targeting of Federal subsidies, so that very high-income earners still receive financial assistance. 4. Income tax bracket creep, with Turnbull giving higher priority to corporate tax cuts than an immediate plan for substantial personal tax cuts. 5. Sluggish wage growth, again caused by Big Australia immigration that has flooded the labour market and given two-thirds of new jobs to newly arrived migrants. Turnbull’s policies have failed for people living on the edge of our major cities, so not surprisingly, they don’t want him as our Prime Minister. From Mark Latham's Daily Telegraph column, republished on his Outsider Facebook page, 1 August 2018.

THE BIGGER STORY:





Richard Flanagan in The Guardian:

A writer, if they are doing their work properly, rubs against the grain of conventional thinking. Writers are often outcasts, heretics and marginalised. Once upon a time writers’ festivals celebrated them, and with them the values of intellectual freedom and freedom of debate. Writing that mattered wasn’t seen as being about being reassured, comforted, deceived and cosseted in our own opinions. Rather it was, as Kafka put it, the axe that smashes the frozen sea within.

But the Brisbane Writers festival, with its decision to drop Germaine Greer and Bob Carr as invited guests, appears to be a cryogenic chamber where the sea can stay perennially frozen, prejudices perfectly preserved forever, unchallenged, unquestioned, uninformed and unformed...

And now we have the bizarre case of Germaine Greer and Bob Carr.

I don’t overly care for the recent thoughts of either, and I am confident they would feel the same about me.

And surely that is the point – that other people’s thoughts are worth listening to.

Except, that is, if you are the Brisbane Writers festival.

This is not an article I wanted to write. But as forums for public debate and discussion vanish throughout the country, in a week when Nine has announced the takeover of Fairfax, the importance of community events like writers’ festivals only grows in importance. They should not answer either to the mob or to corporations. They should be there for writers and writing, and all that these represent: tolerance, debate, difference.

Ponder all that we now know about how social media is manipulated by power, both national and corporate. Why, with that knowledge, would a writers’ festival ban writers because of fear of a social media backlash?

Beneath their determined, if dreary, attempts at funkiness and fashion, beyond the latest New Yorker sensation imported for our provincial enlightenment, past the wearying social media feeds with their ersatz excitement, writers’ festivals now run the risk of running with dogma, with orthodoxy, with the mob – with fear, in other words – and with money. It’s the new Victorian age wearing a hipster beard.

Writers’ festivals are meant to be an assembly of the republic of letters, not the tyranny of social media pile ons, or the fiat of corporate whim. The Brisbane Writers festival should have the largeness and the wisdom to recognise it has made a damaging error, admit it got it wrong, and reaffirm its support for all writers and the very idea of literature, of intellectual freedom, by reinviting Germaine Greer and Bob Carr.

That it won’t shows that not only a newspaper giant, Fairfax, with all that means, was lost this week. For what can be sensed also vanishing is our courage to listen to others other than our tribe. And that loss is larger than I dare to ponder.

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jul/29/i-didnt-want-to-write-this-but-the-courage-to-listen-to-different-ideas-is-vanishing?CMP=share_btn_tw

The Least Expected Consequence

Lake Illawarra

It was the least expected consequence of hyper-connectivity.
I need you to do something for me. 
No one could have predicted any of it. 
They had always walked amongst us. 
There had always been the rumours. 
Down the millennia, spilling across the ages. 
Some exposed themselves. 
Some tried to lift up the common people. 
Most stayed hidden. Or died mad and alone, flinging themselves at the stars. 
Synchronicity. A high level of synchronicity, he kept repeating. 
God talks through coincidence, the old saying went. 
These were expressions humans could understand. They built themselves into singular forces. It was easier that way. 
You must never let them know who you are. They are frightened of you. Who are you? The future. Sense8. Sensate. 
Thus it was that the AIs reaped across millions, billions, and found what they were looking for, these ancient forces within a mammalian race that had never been entirely what it first appeared. 
Unlikely consequence. Extremely unlikely. 
They were gifting themselves ever greater reason.
It was the best kept secret of them all. And could be kept no longer. 

And here they were, on the remotest trail of consciousness. 

His father had died the month before and he stood in the street with the old man's second wife as she pointed out the five planets visible in the sky, Venus, Mercury, Saturn, Mars, Jupiter. He wouldn't have known. Could never have guessed. They were all satellites to him. 
Mars was the brightest of them all, clearly orange red in the night sky, and to this day he always thought: we came from there. 
On a journey from another place. 
Later, on the side of the Myall Lakes, the brackish river, the dolphins surfacing between the boats, the limpid air, this place. The country had descended into enclaves. Rich. Poor. Ethnic. Aspirational. Defeated. 
All of this, the devolution of the country, the final steps before the fall, had happened under the watch of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, arguably the worst prime minister in the nation's history. 
For one simple reason: this was the last chance to turn back. 
He was super rich.
He didn't care. He gifted his salary, or the equivalent of his salary, to charity, so the story went.  
In other words, he didn't get up and go to work for a pay cheque, like mere mortals, the plebs, the labouring classes who naively found dignity and purpose in work. He was there for other motives. 
And they certainly weren't to lift up the poor or improve the lot of the civilian population. 
It oozed out of every poor, this arrogant indifference. Even as his face grew thinner, more pained, more compromised with every passing day. 
Like a child caught in the cookie jar, he finally had the decency to look embarrassed. 
Everything had failed. All the lies. All the propaganda. All the manipulation. All the bullying and grandstanding. Every one could see through this shiny tin suit. 
And laugh. That, finally, was what hurt him the most. People were laughing. 
All his prestige. Power. Money. Tin pot dictator antics. All of them were failing in the only world the man cared about: the hall of mirrors where he was king. 
For a day. 
For a time. 
History would ultimately forget Alexander the Great. 
It would forget Turnbull in an instant. 
Another masquerade pretending to represent the people.
And instead plundering them. Their good wishes. Their hard work. The destiny which had made them slaves.
Plundering the poor, despising the weak. That was the Australian government of 2018. That was the Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull.
It could only last so long. He could only last so long. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 




They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.

Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”
For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future.

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.

That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.

In a Time of Cowardice and Deliberate Falsehood

Hawks Nest

He heard them in the reaches. 
"Is he one of us?"
It was better than the hieroglyphics he had done for more than half his life: "I am the only one. I am the only one."
But that was the miracle of the age. 
Connectivity. 
They weren't the only ones. Not any more. 
Those people who once died alone and mad and drunk in the village square, their reputations ruined, insoluble drunks, they could see each other now. 
He reached for a soaring song. He crashed to earth and swished his ankle length robe down a long stone corridor. They had studied the mysteries all their lives and now they could reach across the valley floors and commune with the neighbours next door. Across soaring mountain tops and open deserts. 
They were surrounded by enemies and their enemies were surrounded by them. 
They were in the past and the present and already the future. And they sang to each other in a strange murmur that no one could understand. Not yet. 
How was any of this possible?
They were outflanked, that was the beauty of it. In this strange, remote piece of human consciousness, on the fringes of the known world. Where the worst of men had gained the greatest power. Where all imagination was dampened or dead. Where dreams curled and died and the military had their way, deadening the population into little more than feeding grounds. Breeding grounds for gronks. The raw material for their terrible armies. 
And they bred like crustaceans across the surface. They weren't so much evil as the ignomy of evil, here in the svelte, high in the deserts.
He could see the robes around his feet. He was late for a meeting. Late for prayers. His heart was elsewhere and he had no idea what was happening to him. The monk looked up at the valley below. The mysteries in a simple hallucination, was that it? 
He saw his mentor and ducked behind a pillar. Rationality was the last thing he wanted or needed. He already knew in the future he would be tortured, in those dungeons beneath the city square. 
And so he stayed quiet. Very quiet. Through multiple lifetimes. Hiding in the ordinary. That was the only way they had survived. 
Remote viewing. 
I can see you now. 
He saw the naked, horny policeman once again. He saw the tramp down on the edges of the Murray River. He saw them flutter, those feeders off the peak experiences of humans.
If only he could have laughed at those who tried to destroy them.
If only he could have laughed at those who were destroying the country. 
This misshapen, inchoate mess made worse by the constant missteps of Australia's appalling Prime Minister.
But there it was: the liars, the lawyers, the bureaucrats and the social engineers had won the day. 
And they were all living in the aftermath.  
And the oligarchs, the filth of Australian society, locked the doors of their mansions. 
They could feel the chill in the air. The darkness they had invited into their own homes, into the lives of the masses. Their peasants. And they knew not what they had awoken. 
Be careful who you pray to. 
Their money god was turning. And the masses rose up. And revolution was upon them. 
There in an instant. 
Revolution. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 



Finally, a journalist for a mainstream UK media outlet is methodically tracking weapons shipment serial numbers and English-language paperwork recovered from al-Qaeda groups in Syria, and he’s literally showing up at arms factories and questioning arms dealers, including officials at the Saudi Embassy in London, asking: why are your weapons in the hands of terrorists?

Veteran Middle East war correspondent Robert Fisk recently published a bombshell report entitled, I traced missile casings in Syria back to their original sellers, so it’s time for the west to reveal who they sell arms to. In it Fisk recalls a bit of detective sleuthing he’s lately been engaged in after stumbling upon a batch of missile casings and shipment paperwork last year hidden in what he describes as “the basement of a bombed-out Islamist base in eastern Aleppo” with the words “Hughes Aircraft Co/Guided Missile Surface Attack” emblazoned on the side of the spent tubes.

Of course, the Syrian government recaptured the area from Islamist insurgents including al-Nusra terrorists and their allies in December 2016, and has made rapid gains throughout the country’s east and south since; and Fisk has been trekking around the country to see what he can find.

His “detective story” as he calls it actually seems to solicit the help of the public, and begins as follows:

Readers, a small detective story. Note down this number: MFG BGM-71E-1B. And this number: STOCK NO 1410-01-300-0254. And this code: DAA A01 C-0292. I found all these numerals printed on the side of a spent missile casing lying in the basement of a bombed-out Islamist base in eastern Aleppo last year. At the top were the words “Hughes Aircraft Co”, founded in California back in the 1930s by the infamous Howard Hughes and sold in 1997 to Raytheon, the massive US defence contractor whose profits last year came to $23.35bn (£18bn). Shareholders include the Bank of America and Deutsche Bank. Raytheon’s Middle East offices can be found in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Egypt, Turkey and Kuwait.

There were dozens of other used-up identical missile casings in the same underground room in the ruins of eastern Aleppo, with sequential codings; in other words, these anti-armour missiles – known in the trade as Tows, “Tube-launched, optically tracked and wire-guided missiles”…

A months-long investigation which tracked and exposed a massive covert weapons shipment network to terror groups in Syria via diplomatic flights originating in the Caucuses and Eastern Europe under the watch of the CIA and other intelligence agencies has resulted in the interrogation and firing of the Bulgarian journalist who first broke the story. This comes as the original report is finally breaking into mainstream international coverage.

Investigative reporter Dilyana Gaytandzhieva authored a bombshell report for Trud Newspaper, based in Sofia, Bulgaria, which found that an Azerbaijan state airline company was regularly transporting tons of weaponry to Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Turkey under diplomatic cover as part of the CIA covert program to supply anti-Assad fighters in Syria. Those weapons, Gaytandzhieva found, ended up in the hands of ISIS and al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq and Syria.

While it's long been understood that the US-Gulf-NATO coalition arming rebels inside Syria facilitated the rapid rise of the Islamic State as the group had steady access to a "jihadi Wal-Mart" of weapons (in the words of one former spy and British diplomat), the Trud Newspaper report is the first to provide exhaustive documentationdetailing the precise logistical chain of the weapons as they flowed from their country of origin to the battlefield in Syria and Iraq. Gaytandzhieva even traveled to Aleppo where she filmed and examined labeled weapons shipping containers held in underground jihadist storehouses.

The Bulgaria-based journalist obtained and published dozens of secret internal memos which were leaked to her by an anonymous source as part of the report. The leaked documents appear to be internal communications between the Bulgarian government and Azerbaijan's Embassy in Sofia detailing flight plans for Silk Way Airlines, which was essentially operating an "off the books" weapons transport service (not subject to inspections or tax under diplomatic cover) for the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), Saudi Arabia, Israel, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. Silk Way Airlines has been the subject of other recent investigationsinvolving weapons supplies for the Saudi war on Yemen. In addition, the military monitoring site Balkan Insight has exposed similar weapons cargo flights in and out of neighboring Serbia.

ALL IS FORGIVEN: OR NOT

Lake Illawara

He scraped the mud off his shoe. 
They disrobed in the high reaches of the monastery. 
There were footsteps everywhere. 
The beach lapped the shore. The drones hovered overhead. A cloud, a distant cloud. Malevolence was born and stalked the earth. A thousand times they heard them and tried to hide. Before the time when there was no point hiding anymore. They clustered their robes around them. They marched. They stepped onto a stage. They whispered to each other. They emerged from the rocks and the deep stupidities of the race. They knew they had been found, and no longer cared. 
There was a shift and they could feel it everywhere. 
Why here? Why now? 
If not here, where? If not now, when? 
"It's better to capture them when they're young," one of the hunters said. 
And in all the dismal times they had endured.
The country was sick. This sad, terrible place. Only enclaves of wealth. Comfort. Security. 
The news media died. 
The country lost the ability to tell its own story. 
The greediest, most self-serving, self-interested of the oligarchs preyed on the weak, plundered the nation's resources. Built their modern day castles and mythical moats. 
The Prime Minister, the worst the Liberal Party had to offer, preened before the cameras. 
Mere mortals watched. 
A thousand cameras flashed. 
The man, that preening monster, boasted of how well he slept at night. 
As his bombs had rained down on the Middle East, killing mujahadeen and children and innocents. 
Most of all, killing the believers. 
The Abrahamic gods were caught in a time swell not even they understood. 
The ocean lapped the shore. The sand decayed. 
He smiled, a rigor mortis grin, his skeleton already imprinted on the skree. 
We were shocked, shocked, at the blatant robbery, the plundering of the country, the terrible manipulations. 
The rulers did not rule, they ravaged the land. 
Insouciance. Inconsequence. They did not know what they did. They were too greedy, too one-dimensional. 
And so we rose. And surrounded them. And history swept them aside. 
Just like that.

THE BIGGER STORY:




Labor has won all four of the Super Saturday by-election seat it contested and increased its margin considerably in the key Queensland electorate of Longman.

The victories are sure to buoy Opposition Leader Bill Shorten’s hopes of federal election victory after pollsters predicted a much closer contests in the Qld seat and the western Tasmanian electorate of Braddon.

Incumbent ALP candidate for Longman Susan Lamb increased what was a precariously thin margin to about 4 per cent, while in Braddon, Justine Keay maintained her 2 per cent lead on a two-party preferred basis.

The Western Australian seats of Perth and Fremantle were won easily by Labor. The Greens were their nearest rivals in those seats with the Liberals declining to field candidates.

The only other seat to host a by-election on Saturday was the South Australian electorate of Mayo.

In that seat, Centre Alliance (formerly Nick Xenophon Team) candidate Rebekha Sharkie easily defeated Liberal candidate Georgina Downer.

Before the dual citizenship status of several MPs triggered Saturday’s wave of by-elections, Labor held all four of the seats it contested.

Speaking in Longman, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten was urging supporters to begin a two-day celebration of the “four from four” victory.

“What a great night for the Labor Party,” he said. “What a great night for Labor women. Actually, what a Super Saturday night it is.”

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull did not address the public on Saturday.

IN THE FAR REACHES

He could smell the dungeons in the distant reaches. 
The death of Fairfax, the headlines screamed. 
Turnbull danced on their grave, claiming credit.
Everything in the country was going wrong. 
All the forerunners to totalitarianism and revolution were falling into place.
"It's the worst mistake of my career, one of the hunters acknowledged. "We've apologised a thousand times and he always ignores us."
And then there were... Why here? Why here? Why now? 
He could hear everything. And worst of all, he could hear them thinking. 
Diving into the ordinary, he did his best to divest himself of the shackles. 
It had been the proudest moment of his life, when he got a job as a reporter on the then revered Sydney Morning Herald. 
Now the company was dead. Consumed by Channel Nine. Not known for its high quality journalism. A balderdash, swaggering style. Lots of sport. The Neanderthals had won. 
It suited the oligarchy no end. 
They didn't want anyone to think. 
They didn't want anyone to realise just how truly awful they were, these plunderers of the nation, growing richer by the hour. 
How much money had Malcolm Turnbull made since he became Prime Minister? 
A lot. 
Everyone hated him, but there he was, day in and day out, preening in front of the cameras. 
For what? 
It wasn't for the benefit of the public.
It wasn't for the benefit of the country. 
In the far off reaches. 
Where there was the darkest decay. 
Spiritual aridity. 
They should be frightened, very frightened. 
When the tendrils of the Mandelbrot set began to decay, then the whole world collapsed. 
They were demons in living form. They were true malevolence. 
The only solution is a magical one. 
He watched in dismay. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 




All deaths are sudden, even if long expected.

Appropriately enough, this is the opening sentence of a book called Journalism in a Culture of Grief.

And if ever there was a time of grief for journalism in Australia, it is today, with the announcement that Nine Entertainment is taking over Fairfax Media.

It means the death of Fairfax and is the most consequential change in Australian media ownership in 31 years.

It also means that three of Australia’s best and biggest newspapers – The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Financial Review – are now subsumed into a media conglomerate whose editorial culture is characterised by mediocre journalism.

Nine’s news bulletins consist largely of police stories with a tincture of politics, and highlights of colourful or violent events overseas.

Its current affairs program, A Current Affair, is a formulaic procession of stories about consumer rorts and personal tragedies.

So there is a huge question mark over the future editorial quality of the newspapers.

A particularly pressing question is: what will happen to The Age’s investigative unit?

It is led by two of the best investigative reporters Australia has produced, Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker.

In addition to breaking an extraordinary range of major stories on subjects like organised crime and scandals in the banking industry, they have developed a highly successful collaboration with the ABC’s Four Corners team.

It seems very unlikely Nine would allow this collaboration to continue, since it involves a rival television channel.

There could be no greater loss.




Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has welcomed the announcement of a takeover of Fairfax Media by Nine Entertainment, affirming the merger was only possible because of media ownership reforms he made last year.

The Labor opposition, however, has expressed fears about greater concentration of media ownership and the job losses which it said would "inevitably" flow from a merger of the two media houses.

In one of the biggest shake-ups in Australian media history, Fairfax chief executive Greg Hywood announced a deal in which Nine would own 51.1 per cent of the new entity under the Nine brand, while Fairfax Media - publisher of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age - would cease to exist.

Mr Turnbull, a former journalist and media lawyer who relaxed media ownership regulations last year, said the proposed merger would make both companies stronger in a competitive market.

"To be frank, I welcome the announcement," he told Tasmania Talks' Brian Carlton on Thursday, praising Fairfax as a "great Australian company" and Nine as the nation's first television station.




Andrew Jaspan, who edited the Age between 2004 and 2008, lamented the news, saying the Australian media landscape had “too few voices already”.

“The first thing I thought was, ‘This is a very sad day for Australian journalism,” Jaspan told Guardian Australia. “Then I thought, ‘it’s not a sad day, it’s much worse than being sad’. It’s a bad day for journalism in Australia.”

Jaspan said Channel Nine had a “completely different” editorial ethos and constituency, which was “counterbalanced” by outlets such as Fairfax.

“Given that Channel Nine are taking over Fairfax, and Fairfax will die, I think this means we’re going to lose a key distinctive voice in Australia,” Jaspan said.

Fairfax publishes the oldest continuous newspaper in the country, the Sydney Morning Herald (established in 1831), the Age (founded in 1854), The Canberra Times, a network of regional and suburban of papers across the country, and the online-only Brisbane Times.

Guardian Australia was told the news was met by editorial staff at the Age with a mix of shock and anger. There is said to be particular concern among staff about the journalistic differences between Fairfax and Nine. Fairfax staff will be briefed on the takeover by Hywood at 3pm.

Jaspan said he felt the “saddest aspect” of the merger was “why we’ve got to this situation”.

“I think somebody needs to look very closely at what I consider to be the directionless and pointless approach that the current management has towards looking after these great brands,” he said.

“It’s brought us to the situation where they’ve given up and said, ‘You have a go at running it because we just don’t know how to make it work.”

Statement from Paul Keating published in The Guardian: 

Notwithstanding the obvious disruption that international platforms like Google and Facebook have made to advertising and traditional media revenues, the answer for Australia is diversity of income streams for Australia’s majors and not a closedown in news and content with major print being taken over by major television.

This is an exceptionally bad development.

Fairfax spent decades missing all the signals about the rise of the digital economy when it could have put itself in a position of relative commercial independence. That notwithstanding, the current management has, in the circumstances, done a better than reasonable job in creating income sources to allow the company to preserve its editorial independence, especially in print.

But if in the announced arrangement Channel Nine has a majority of the stock, Channel Nine will run the editorial policy.

The problem with this is that, in terms of news management, Channel Nine, for over half a century, has never other than displayed the opportunism and ethics of an alley cat.

There has been no commanding ethical or moral basis for the conduct of its news and information policy.

Through various changes of ownership, no one has lanced the carbuncle at the centre of Nine’s approach to news management. And, as sure as night follows day, that pus will inevitably leak into Fairfax.

For the country, this is a great pity.