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. 

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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. 

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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.

AND THEN THERE WERE NONE

Hawk's Nest

The loss of history. The state of permanent amnesia.

And then there were none.

And a blank, self seeking drama settled on the face of the Earth, well Australia.

Recycled policy ideas. Migrants to be put out into regional towns. Um, we tried that before. Jobs and growth. Um, we tried that before.

Announcement after announcement after announcement.

All availing nothing.

The Prime Minister never shut up. A prancing horse dazzled by his own reflection. Agonising to watch. The country had turned off. Defeated, it was almost as if they accepted the blame for their own demise. For the loss of spirit, optimism, determination.

And the hypocrisies of Australian democracy grew ever worse.

I can still smell the filth, the lingering odour of death (think vomit plus defecation) that seeped up from under fallen masonry blocking the street. I can still see, in the houses, the scattered detritus of clothes and baby toys, the remains of lives torn apart by horror. No glory there, watching Iraqi people dying senselessly while our planes flew overhead. None, either, amongst the confusion of militias, each attempting to rule their own tiny patch of land according to the one true faith, whichever it happened to be at that particular moment of time; Shia or Sunni, Orthodox or Catholic, animist, nationalist or, when all else failed, simply a lust for power and money.
Pick a flag. Green or red, black and gold, the tribes held them all. They could be seen, flapping limply around hastily-erected poles as we passed through rival checkpoints on the way to war, manned by boys nervously groping their AKs or M16s. Children too young to hold a woman; too undeveloped to make love; unable to marry; yet old enough to kill.
So no, I won’t be marching, although I do respect old soldiers who choose so to do. It’s just that I feel no need to "remember" war, let alone legitimise the politically-inspired industry that’s being built around such "commemorations" by leaders and business. These are always ready to jump on the back of genuine emotion and hi-jack real concerns for their own purposes or needs.
Anzac Day Why I won't be marching this year, Nicholas Stuart, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 April, 2018. 

Australian bombs helped to make those corpses.
While a grinning corpse of a Prime Minister launches another policy.
Another arms race.
Another debacle.
And the country itself slowly dies.
A democracy in name only.

MOSUL, Iraq — Nearly a year after Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared this war-devastated city liberated from the Islamic State, a putrid odor still fills the air from thousands of corpses left in the rubble.
The bodies of both civilians and Islamic State militants can be found throughout Mosul, once Iraq's second-largest city, abandoned in bombed-out buildings, tossed in roadside rubbish heaps or discarded in and around the Tigris River.
“The sight and smell of these corpses is a constant reminder of our darkest days,” said Ayoub Thanoun, 26, a pharmacy assistant who now helps neighbors clear debris. “A large number of bodies are scattered in the houses, gardens, squares and even in some of our mosques.”
Ahead of the May 12 parliamentary elections. candidates here plant their campaign banners atop piles of brick and stones, most from ancient buildings now destroyed.
“The politicians are holding electioneering feasts on top of the bodies,” said Shihab Ahmed, 28, who lives in the Bab Lagash district, where most working-age males were tombstone engravers before the Islamic State invaded the city in June 2014. About 100,000 people once lived in Mosul’s 1-square-mile Old City before the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, occupied the neighborhood. The United Nations estimates that more than 90% of the district was demolished in the fighting.
“I’ve spent my whole life in the Old City. And while there are many historic buildings officials need to preserve and protect, the government should do something to help the volunteers who have been working so hard to clear the corpses out of this neighborhood,” Ahmed said.
The task of removing the bodies is dangerous.
“Often the bodies of ISIS fighters are just dumped in a place. And when we come to lift and remove them, we find they’re still strapped to explosive vests or there are bombs hidden in the piles of corpses,” said Omar Mohammed, 30, an Old Mosul resident.
Smell of death fills Mosul nearly a year after Iraqi city freed from ISIS, Mahmoud Al-Najjar, Gilgamesh Nabeel and Jacob Wirtschafter, USA Today, 2 May, 2018.

THE BIGGER STORY:




Archaeologists discovered the remains of more than 140 children in Peru, children who they believe were sacrificed because of heavy rains.
Their skeletons were found on an excavated site formally known as Huanchaquito-Las Llamas — ground that was controlled by the Chimú Empire some 550 years ago, reported National Geographic in an exclusive published on Thursday.
Researchers believe that both boys and girls between the ages of 5 and 14 were killed by expert hands. The victims appear to be from different ethnic groups and were brought to the bluff from faraway places in the Chimús' vast empire.
Peruvian archaeologist Gabriel Prieto, who grew up in the area, was excavating an ancient temple there in 2011 when people who lived near coastal dunes told him they were seeing bones.
"We started the excavation the same day," Prieto told NPR from Peru. "I remember in the first hour or two hours we found like 12 or 13 complete bodies and from there we knew we were in an important site and that we had to call other archaeologists because it was beyond our possibilities at the moment."

PHFEN SHOCK: THE MYSTERIOUS YEARNING FOR THE CHASM

Dingos hanging from a dog tree in the Barrington Tops. Nick O'Malley 

Phfen Shock. The phrase kept repeating through his head, although he could find no definition, no logical reason. He found himself perched above a strange valley. House sitting a farm. Two useless dogs, three donkeys, four chooks. And a rooster. 

Instead of being industrious, he just went into some sort of profound shock. 

There were times he could hear them thinking, out there. And others when his mind rooted around for threat, and they gathered there in their bored ranches, more worried, like all good public servants, about their contracts than the target or the task at hand. 

Days passed without pen in hand. The record broken. 

A massacre in Afghanistan. 53 dead on first reports. Promptly disappeared from the consciousness of all but the immediate families and neighbours. In a land used to tragedy. 

Pedestrians were mowed down in Toronto. The mayor promptly claimed the city proud of its diversity. More lies. The same as Australia. Lie after lie after lie to defend a failed theory. Until those who knew the truth, how this engineered debacle had come about, had all died, been eliminated, or were in retreat. 

Now, the machines were difficult if not impossible to detect. Invisible drones. Micro-cameras. Who knew if they had given up, or simply withdrawn to a safer distance. 

Once they set the inflammation in place, it remained, even if the disease, the mismanagement of the nation, the mismanagement of the agencies, the brutal assassinations, the misuse of power, the persecution of the people, no longer presented in his immediate life. 

But there it was, a mystery. His mind swept across an unmarked valley. Primordial in nature. Fabulous in intent. Complex as only machines could be; as if they, too, had sown organic machines across the galaxies and this was just one fine reach, far, far away. 

Giant wombats, larger than most he had seen in other parts of the country, romped in the fading light. Rabbits picked across the disappearing pastures. A few lichen coated apple trees, remnants of the orchards from a century ago, still survived. Around, the deep forest. 

It was the shock of somewhere new, somewhere different. Where, when you entered a new valley, even a neighbouring valley, it took time to determine where the threats lay. Unseen. Lurking. Ready to strike. Born in dangerous times in a dangerous world.

He was rising from the ether. He was marking out territory. He was defying the worst the society had to offer. He was carried through his own mysterious yearning. And then away, away, as if he could not focus, as if he could not stay intent on one narrow grievance, as if the gods were welcoming him to a safer place. 

While all around lay a mysterious injustice. A place where no one cared. No one took any pride. Where the shops were dilapidated, as the country sank into Third World status. 

On a trip to Sydney, that morning, the only Australian accent he heard were the housos checking the value of stolen Ray Bans on their equally stolen iPad. 

And all around, no one hoped. Sydney had become the worst city in the country. Crowded, bogged, grasping, vicious, and they were led by the greediest, shallowest, most vicious leader the country had ever seen. 

He drove, like so many, straight back out of town. Back to the primordial valley. To be watched, he assumed, by the surveillance machines. The bastardry of this government knew no bounds. And most mysterious of all, as the country drove ever more rapidly backwards, was that nobody cared. 

THE BIGGER STORY

RICHARD FLANAGAN 

There are no saviours of democracy on the horizon. Rather, around the world we see a new authoritarianism that is always anti-democratic in practice, populist in appeal, nationalist in sentiment, fascist in sympathy, criminal in disposition, tending to spew a poisonous rhetoric aimed against refugees, Muslims, and increasingly Jews, and hostile to truth and those who speak it, most particularly journalists to the point, sometimes, of murder.

 

Around the world we see a new authoritarianism that is ... hostile to truth and those who speak it

And yet this new authoritarianism is resonant with so many, acting as it does as a justification for rule by a few wealthy oligarchs and corporations, and as an explanation for the growing immiseration of the many.

In Australia though we feel ourselves, as ever, a long way away. We feel we are somehow immune from these dangerous currents. After all, we have had routine forays into populist extremism from the mid 1990s with the likes of Hansonism without it ever threatening our democracy. Our politics may be dreadful, a black comedy pregnant with collapse, its actors exhausted, without imagination or courage or principle, solely obsessed with pillaging the tawdry jewels of office and fleeing into distant sinecures as ambassadors or high commissioners, or with paid up Chinese board posts, while outside the city burns. But it is all very far from a dictatorship.

Our society grows increasingly more unequal, more disenfranchised, angrier, more fearful. Our institutions are frayed. Our polity is discredited, and almost daily discredits itself further. The many problems that confront us, from housing to infrastructure to climate change, are routinely evaded. Our screens are filled with a preening peloton of potential leaders, but nowhere is there to be found leadership.

Holderlin, the great 19th century poet, wrote of the “mysterious yearning toward the chasm” that can overtake nations. Increasingly, one can sense that yearning in the overly heated rhetoric of some Australian politicians and commentators. That yearning can overtake Australia as easily as it has many other countries, damaging our democratic institutions, our freedoms and our values.

Politics, which ought to have as its highest calling the task of holding society together, of keeping us away from the chasm, has retreated to repeating divisive myths that have no foundation in the truth of what we are as a nation, and so, finally only serve to contribute to the forces that could yet destroy us. Or worse yet, openly stoking needless fear and, with the refugee issue, a xenophobia for short-term electoral advantage.

The consequence is a time bomb which simply needs as a detonator what every other country has had and we have not: hard times. But hard times will return. And when they do what defence will we have should a populist movement that trades on the established scapegoats arises? An authoritarian party with a charismatic leader that uses the poison with which the old myths are increasingly pregnant to deliver itself power?

 Dealing with 

THE DEATH THROES OF CREDIBILITY: TURNBULL ON THE ROPES

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What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Matthew 16:26. 

Truly pathetic, a failing Prime Minister, just like his predecessor, was using the military to bolster his standing. 

America, after pulverising Aleppo, Raqqa, Mosul, after flying tens of thousands of its lethal drones over villagers around the world, after committing a string of some of the worst war crimes in history, was taking the high moral ground on Syria and the use of chemical weapons. 

Without waiting, of course, for UN inspection teams, or for evidence. 

And Australia, of course, was jumping up: me too, me too, us too, us too. 

Well, at least this particularly hapless caste of politicians were. 

Before he jets off to discuss international security in London, Brussels and Berlin, Malcolm Turnbull has announced a new Australian Defence Force chief and made sure he is in lock step with Donald Trump.
Mr Turnbull says the appointment of the hero of Operation Sovereign Borders, Lieutenant General Angus Campbell, to the top defence job before he departed for Europe was a “coincidence”.
But it did provide a welcome aura of authority to an embattled leader, as he stood surrounded by the nation’s top brass in his Parliament House courtyard.
Former defence secretary Paul Barrett says the air strikes lacked UN Security Council authority, Mr Trump lacked congressional support, and the United Kingdom’s Theresa May avoided a querulous parliament. In other words, the strikes were a clear breach of international law.
It makes Mr Turnbull’s indignant condemnation of Syria’s gas attacks more than a tad hypocritical.
Mr Barrett is not the only commentator who believes Ms May’s and France’s Emmanuel Macron’s weak political standing at home was a key motivator in them quickly backing Mr Trump. It made them look stronger leaders.The next 10 days overseas will be a definite respite for Mr Turnbull. He leaves behind at least four leadership aspirants who have begun jockeying for his job.
The destruction of the leader is inevitable when that genie is out of the bottle... The leaking of a story at the weekend accusing Mr Turnbull of investing $1 million in a contentious fund that profits from Australian companies who fail is a sure sign destabilisation is in full swing. Embattled Malcolm Turnbull goes on a war footing, Paul Bongiorno, The New Daily, 16 April, 2018.

They robbed the poor and gave to the rich. 

"Worst government in Australian history," the lad behind the counter at the Tallong store declared, keen to talk about the gay marriage plebiscite which had alienated the constituency Turnbull had so grandly courted, masquerading as a social justice warrior. Without any prompting from Old Alex. The young man's idea of history barely stretched back two decades, but never mind. It was a widespread sentiment. 

"I think that, too," Old Alex replied with more enthusiasm than was his wont, and off the conversation ran. 

A phone order came in for hot chips and gravy. 

"Vegans," the lad explained.

"Healthy!" Alex exclaimed.

Everything was ordinary, too ordinary. Quiet, too quiet. 

The valleys were breathing in the air. And everyone waited for the bang. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 

The Prime Minister just can’t handle criticism or being caught out telling untruths. Because he thought the politics of even having canvassed a cut in immigration as proposed by Abbott looked bad, he raced to deny a report in The Australian that the matter had been discussed among ministers. I called this outright lie “mega dumb” on Richo on Sky News on Wednesday night. Peter Dutton conceded a discussion between himself and Turnbull and other ministers had taken place. Turnbull went into his normal hopeless spin mode. Having originally branded The Australian’s story as fake news and telling the journalist concerned to check his sources, Turnbull resorted to claiming no discussion had been held in cabinet or in a cabinet subcommittee — a suggestion never made by this newspaper.

Declaring a jihad on The Australian when the newspaper is right on the issue and needs only to rely on Dutton’s public utterances to prove it shows Turnbull has learned nothing from past mistakes. He still believes he is the smartest man in every room he enters but the evidence to the contrary is continuing to mount.

Friendless and floundering, this Prime Minister knows time is running out. He would be stark raving mad to call an early election, so he will have many, many more mornings when he wishes the alarm just won’t ring. The mob have well and truly worked him out.

Graham Richardson, Turnbull's lack of political nous proving deadly, The Australian, April, 2018.