WISER ANGELS

He slept deeply, away from the idiots who were always trying to contact him; as if he was some experiment, a live rat to be tortured, a curiosity to be examined. He had been able to hear all too much; and spent as much time pretending not to hear them as he did listening to the poisonous fronds of thought emerging from surrounding houses. For he did not know who he could trust.

And now he was away from suburbia, as the denizens of Lightning Ridge called Australia's cities with a shudder of dislike. 

Those who could cope with suburbia were a different species altogether. 

Much of what he had heard through that long, interminable, bitterly cold winter had been harmless. Lasagna for dinner. Medical concerns. Television programs and the endless drivel of government propaganda from the radio. 

Sometimes he would hear one of the operatives lying to new recruits amongst the Watchers on the Watch, expressing their distaste for him; and inflamed dislike which would never have been there in the first place if they had not mounted their prolonged surveillance campaigns, and attempted, time and time and time again, to encourage him to have a heart attack or to take his own life; to do their job for them, to relieve the world of his disturbing presence.

Old Alex was determined not to let them destroy him. 

The reasons for their being, for he did not regard himself as a singular, or ordinary person, the reasons why he, or they, with their image infested consciousnesses and trails of memory and wisdom and sadness from other lives, were beyond the ken of any of them, including himself. He could no more explain why he had been cast into this unhappy place, forced to listen to the tendrils of malicious thought which would whisper and curl through the long nights, then he could explain the meaning of life.

The frontiers of science were realigning the evolution of the species, and what seemed like magic, or like the voices of the Gods, was in fact an evolution of themselves, or people like themselves, cast forward, cast back. He, like hundreds of others, had volunteered for the sacrifice in an instant, as if it meant nothing; as if it would be an easy assignment, and he had never thought, in that defining instant which would confine him to this planet for so many years, through so many lives, of what it would be like to be so profoundly trapped for such a very long time.

The mistakes that had been made would not be made again.

As he lay away and listened to the occasionally supportive, mostly disparaging, voices of the Watchers on the Watch.

"I told you this guy could hear us."
"I told you he was extraordinary."
"Pigs might fly."

They no more understood a cluster soul, or cluster intelligence, than they understood their own confined fates, or their adopted, inherited Gods and belief systems.

Old Alex listened to the garbage of persistence, for they were on government or military contracts and had nothing to do but watch and wait, for abandonment or indiscretion or proof he was not what he said he was, while his own mind searched through the tedious fog for a friend, a sympathiser, someone of like mind, someone who understood. On the rare occasion when he found them, they were invariably hidden, and did not want their comrades to know. 

He kept his secrets of a different style of consciousness; as the Watchers on the Watch spilled their secrets; told him stories of the bureaucratic fiascoes and blind incompetence of government, and most of all, like workers everywhere, of the peculiarity, bastardry and arrogant blindness of their grotesquely overpaid bosses.

It had worked, those strange curses. "You will spend the rest of your life dedicated to exposing what you have learnt."

That is, the dark shapes and intent of government functioning, the ways the machinery set out to destroy their targets, the problem being, those targets were simply citizens who refused to comply with the government narrative of the day, and who not only had every ,right to express their views and to think in an independent manner, but whose very suppression was poisoning the society as a whole. The culture was being destroyed by the very people who thought they were transforming it into something better. They thought, or hoped, a natural idealistic impulse, that they were leaving the world a better place, that they were doing good. 

Instead they had come out looking like grubs.

He had stated the theory frequently in his work. That the suppression of debate, the derision of those who did not accept the tertiary acquired theories of tolerance and diversity, who dared to disagree with the government narrative, was leading to a lurch to the right; and straight into the arms of extremist views.

It was a bureaucratic tendency, to quash that which did not fit their narrative, their belief system. But as they worked for their enlightenment, executed the theories they had acquired at the knees of their professors, they destroyed the very culture they wished to save; as they worked for the betterment of mankind, they stirred its darkest forces. The thuggery of group think became the norm. 

And in a more mundane sense, as they probed him for a response, there in those long nights, he built his defences. 

And so sat last, they finally left. And as his mind wandered across the empty desert; he could finally relax. 

They probed him and he resisted. They watched him and he curled into a ball. Hazing only works if the target is vulnerable. He had been very vulnerable. He had clung to old beliefs that humans were essentially good. He had never truly understood, despite all those multiple lives, the base nature of the species in which he had been landed. Crude, barbaric, self-interested, they had no adherence to the truth, that curse, or trait, which had made his own life so difficult.

"Why didn't you allow me the chance for happiness?" he asked of a relationship possibility he himself had killed.

"Because we didn't want you to be happy. You would never have written that book."

All he knew was relief, that the final mustering was taking shape, packing their bags, moving on, afraid of the internal reviews of other bureaucrats with too much money, time and power; bureaucrats who would seize the opportunity to expand their own power and hopefully, in the end, to fix that which was wrong, to ensure that no other journalist would endure the prolonged harassment and intimidation which had been his terrible fate. 

Winter was over, and the heat of the Outback soaked through his bones.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Russel Kiefel pic by Brendan Read

 













Former Neighbours star Russell Kiefel died over the weekend after being taken ill during a theatre performance.
The actor played Russell - the abusive father of the Brennan brothers - for a brief stint in the soap last year. He passed away last night after becoming unwell while performing in the play And I'm the Queen of Sheba at Brown's Mart Theatre in Australia.
The theatre has cancelled the rest of the season out of respect for Kiefel, with executive director Sean Pardy calling it a tragic and emotional time for the actor's family and everyone involved in the production.
Kiefel's co-stars - both old and new - have all rallied round to pay tribute to him, with Neighbours actress Colette Mann leading the way with an emotional Instagram post.

Colette Mann, who plays Sheila Canning, on the soap said: “I am very very sad to say that the wonderful actor, Russell Kiefel who played Russell Brennan in 2015 on @neighbours passed away yesterday.

INSTAGRAM

Kiefel's former Neighbours co-star Colette Mann paid tribute to the actor on Instagram

The late Russell Kiefel in rehearsal for Belvoir's The Blind Giant is Dancing (2016). Photo by Brett Boardman.

Russell Kiefel, whose career included roles in such landmark Australian films as Breaker Morant and Radiance, as well as work with many of Australia’s most significant theatre companies, has died.

He passed away on Sunday after falling ill backstage during a performance at Darwin’s Brown’s Mart Theatre on Friday night.

Born in 1951, Kiefel graduated from NIDA in 1974. His screen debut was Gillian Armstrong’s 52 minute film, The Singer and the Dancer, made in 1977 with Ruth Cracknell and Elisabeth Crosby in the key roles. He went on to appear in numerous other films including Neil Armfield’s Twelfth Night, telemovie The Leaving of Liverpool, and Children of the Revolution.

He joined Home and Away in 1993, and stayed in television through Heartbreak High, A Difficult Woman, Wildside, Water Rats, Blue Heelers, Stingers and Something in the Air. More recently he appeared in television productions Tricky Business, Neighbours, Childhood’s End and Secret City.

Kiefel also performed regularly on stage for many years, working with the likes of Belvoir, Sydney Theatre Company, Bell Shakespeare, Griffin Theatre Company, Queensland Theatre Company, and State Theatre Company of South Australia.

Colleagues remembered him as a versatile and truthful actor, and a warm and generous friend.  

Belvoir’s Artistic Director, Eamon Flack, said, ‘Russell’s theatre home was Belvoir. He is one of our legends, and his rough beauty as an actor and a person has inscribed itself in the ethos of the company.’

Kiefel performed in numerous Belvoir productions over three decades, including Ray’s Tempest, Stuff Happens, The Alchemist, The Tempest, Hamlet, The Power of Yes, The Spook, and Run Rabbit Run.

‘Russell’s last performance for us was in The Blind Giant is Dancing earlier this year, a play he performed in three times over three decades. The original production of that play at Lighthouse in 1983 pulled together the artists and ethos that later formed the foundations of Company B. Russell was part of that production, and of the legendary 1996 revival,’ said Flack.

‘He was one of the true stalwarts of our company and our profession. He is a great loss.’

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He had been harassed for so long, day in day out, month in month out, that in the end his head began to build narrative structures focused around extreme, sustained and taxpayer funded abuse. The surveillance was meant to produce its own madness, erratic and defiant behaviour, the chilling effect, and was left in the hands of uncompromising bullies. He had begun to act like any animal under surveillance, cringing, frightened, desperate to escape. 

Nobody, not one person, had the decency to talk to him directly. And so the narrative structures streamed half formed through his head, and he longed for escape. Forty days and forty nights. Seers throughout time had sought their time in the desert, where the voices of the spirits were clearer and sharper, where the spewing, crawling mass of thoughts that filled the villages could be escaped, where common self-interest was dispensed with, where they could find in the feeding deserts some respite.

It wasn't meant to be thus. He was instead meant to kill himself; that's what "they" would most have liked, the authorities so desperate to shuffle him off the mortal coil.

For his own case, as he had told them it would, lit up the chains of malfeasance and abuse otherwise hidden, and it became evident for any genuine inquiry where the devil lay. 

He was tired of it, tired of them, often angry, thrashing as he attempted to escape, the parsimonious rectitude, their extreme dishonesty, their frequent abuse of the power granted to them. Surveillance was a blunt instrument. It was meant to destroy. "How often did they encourage him to commit suicide?"asked one of the more recently recruited Watchers on the Watch.

"One hundred and sixty two times that we've counted," came the response. 

"More than that," Old Alex thought. 

And so his head swirled through the dry reaches, the tide had reached its full height, the seven years were up; and as he thought back across the social circumstances, the hotel rooms, the apartments, the various fleeting homes he had tried to establish, and the ceaseless government sponsored ridicule and abuse which had followed him everywhere; he thought, it was meant to be. He was meant to write a book called Dark Dark Policing, for no one should be exposed to the extra-judicial bastardry which had been so viciously used against him. 

These people, brutal, bullies by instinct, should not have the power to pursue journalists in the way they had pursued him. They should not, on contract, be allowed to intimidate, threaten and bully a citizen of the country. He was a far greater patriot than any of them; they acted out of self-interest, to climb their bureaucracies, collect their pay checks, gain the approval of the packs in which they hunted; he acted because he wanted to make the country a better place, people freer to express their views, a place where those who were different would not be hunted and bullied as he had been.

He longed, ever more feverishly, for a world where it was impossible to lie.

For in that transformational instant those who had so deliberately made his life a misery would be forced to recant. Or disappear. He didn't much care. He had no sympathy left, not for them. It was not by accident the ancient Gods had been so violent in their protection of the favoured ones. And so in the desert he could hear the stars feeding and the insect load scurrying under the trees, and he could feel, at last, the wheels changing direction. The Seven Years were up.

THE BIGGER STORY:

VALE DES BALL:

Des Ball at the entrance to the controversial Pine Gap facility 1984

Des Ball was a lovely man; and always helpful to journalists such as myself.

Desmond John Ball, born May 20 1947; died October 12, 2016.
Des Ball arrived at the Australian National University in February 1965, as a 16-year-old fresh from Timboon in country Victoria. He was a scholarship boy who had earlier topped his home state in three matriculation subjects. Before long, Des was making his mark on ANU, academically and socially.
An early example was his arrest for "offensive behaviour" at an anti-Vietnam War rally. Des, while still a member of the ANU Company of the Sydney University Regiment, became implacably opposed to military conscription. He considered it antithetical to the values of freedom for which Australians were supposedly fighting in south-east Asia. Journalists loved the contrast: they never failed to call Des a "prize-winning economics student" when they reported his "offensive behaviour" charge. He eventually defeated the prosecution case, setting a precedent still often taught in Australian law schools.
In his student years, and beyond, Des remained a "person of security interest" to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. In one five-page briefing, the then director-general of ASIO, writing to the secretary of the Department of Defence, clusters Des with a group of academics "the majority of whom have radical tendencies". When Des began publishing material about the joint intelligence facility at Pine Gap alongside Robert Cooksey, an ANU international relations lecturer and one of Des's mentors, ASIO paid close attention.
Des, for his part, long disputed many of the inaccuracies in the security intelligence files, some of which he claimed were the result of confused identification with other long-haired young men. When asked in recent years about the ASIO surveillance, Des said he was surprised by "the extent of the resources that they had devoted to me. I think that ASIO had lost the plot by then."
After finishing his undergraduate degree with a whirlwind of academic prizes, Des made quick progress towards the completion of his ANU PhD, awarded in 1972.
It was that work, along with his studies of American intelligence facilities in Australia, and particularly A Suitable Piece of Real Estate published in 1980, which first made Des famous. Some of his great collaborations also began back then, including with Jol Langtry, with whom Des shared his many research trips to northern Australia. They measured rivers, mountains and beaches to determine how the vast Australian continent could be defended against invasion.

Professor Desmond Ball, academic, military strategist and author of more than 40 books on military intelligence, died today at 3:35pm Australian time.

Des work was impressive. He spent time inside US top secret nuclear and command centres, advising the CIA, the White House and the Pentagon, where he persuaded them that a limited nuclear war was impossible.

Former US President Jimmy Carter, in a recent book credited Des as the man who saved the world and said, “Desmond Ball’s counsel and cautionary advice based on deep research made a great difference to our collective goal of avoiding nuclear war”.

In recent years Des, despite battling cancer, never lost his love or focus for the ethnic people of Burma. For the last 20 years Des spent much of his time amongst Burma’s ethnic people and armed groups. Des Ball was a harsh critic of the generals who used the Burma’s military to trample on the peoples’ human rights. He used his acclaimed position as an accepted and acknowledged ‘expert’ to speak out against the oppression of Burma’s military dictators.

Major General Isaac Po of the Karen National Liberation Army acknowledged the help that Des had given the Karen and other ethnic groups over the years when he said in an interview with Karen News that “Des Ball has been a good friend to the Karen for many years. Des shared his knowledge and skills with us and we appreciate what he did for us.”

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MOON STRUCK

Louis Herbier

There were steel buildings plunging upwards out of the sea. There were protective spirits clustering around him. In the great Dreaming of the Outback, there was the largest moon since 1948, that is, in his lifetime.

It was as if all the tension and outrage which had propelled him in the  preceding months came swelling over him like frothy surf; and he physically collapsed.

The long term stress had taken its physical toll, as had the crushing levels of surveillance and harassment.

He could feel sometimes, as the night swept across the empty opal mines, as if the healing might be about to begin.

In dreams great walls appeared out of desert sands.

In the wider narrative, in a world which needed exposing, the government gifted hundreds of millions of dollars to clandestine agencies able to conduct prolonged campaigns against any target they wished.

It was extra-judicial, had no checks and balances, and the weaponry thus amassed, secrecy, surveillance technology, hundreds of overpaid staff, legislation which made them almost impossible to prosecute, could easily be misused by any senior bureaucrat or politician with a vendetta.

People were always prepared to believe the worst, particularly those who failed to conform to the latest group think; the prevailing mob mentalities of the 21st Century.

Then the natural bureaucratic tendency to expend vast amounts of time and effort covering up mistakes took hold.

That, he was convinced, was what had happened to him.

In the background the sonorous tones of Radio National announcers continued to "unpack meaning", "explore diversity" and "empathise with difference".

Meanwhile the future of intelligence was breaking through into the present; his own self-destructive tendencies, his ability to clutch defeat from the jaws of victory, to act the loser when actually the winner, all of it was being rewritten; long overdue. Last Will and Testament. The Future was being Foretold. And the future was a brilliant one.


THE BIGGER STORY:






While Hongkongers should be used to looking up to the night sky and not seeing a blanket of stars, our clear weather does mean that we're in for a very rare treat this very evening. You might not notice it immediately, but the sky tonight will be lit by a 'supermoon' – in other words, the moon will be 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter than it has been at any time since 1948. You won't want to miss it, either, because the next time the moon will be this big will be in 2034.

Intense air strikes have hit several rebel-held areas in Aleppo for the first time in more than two weeks, signalling the start of a major government offensive in Syria's northern city.

The ferocious bombardment of eastern Aleppo on Tuesday came as Russian armed forces also announced the launch of a large-scale operation against opposition targets in Syria.

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T.I. TARGETED

Robert Monaghan

The leaves shimmered ever more frantically, the mica light cutting shards through his peculiar headache. Treachery was everywhere. Dishonesty everywhere.
"I want to write a book called Dark Dark Policing," Old Alex said to Glen. "That's something you would know about."
"Don't know what you're talking," came the response.
These people hid within their own artifices.
"Bullshit," he responded.
Glen was easily within the top percentiles for human intelligence. But he lied to his bosses, he lied to his targets, he lied to the flash crowds he manipulated, and he held truthsayers in contempt.
In the end it wasn't so damn smart.
The surveillance, harassment which had gone on month in month out, year in year out, produced its own madness.
"Go harass somebody whose actually guilty of something," he told the microphone in the car, in between unhelpfully abusing them for incompetence and dishonesty.
He was angry, at the prolonged abuse he had endured, but it was an anger which led nowhere, its own rabbit hole.
Sometimes he even sought reconciliation.
"Apologies all round. Let's reset to zero. Let's start again."
But there were so many different agencies, so many different agendas, the goal posts shifted so constantly, that it no longer seemed possible.
In the Outback he listened to the Flat Earth News that was Radio National, with the Prime Minister making great play of a deal with America to take the refugees on Manus Island.
It was combined with a media blitz, including pictures of the Prime Minster Malcolm Turnbull, the ultimate face of Australia's moneyed class, parading for the media on various naval battle ships.
It was as an offensive abuse of power and manipulation of the media as it got; a dog whistle to the anti-immigrant lobby over a few hundred refugees; the deal being so widely broadcast and so unquestionably championed by the media highly unlikely to produce any tangible results.
Meanwhile the powers that be were selling off the country's basic infrastructure, farmland, ports and prize real estate to foreign interests willy nilly, while running legal immigration to anyone who could afford to pay at historically high and unsustainable levels; thereby creating massive social dislocation and enormous resentment over rising housing costs and high unemployment.
They were selling the country to the highest bidder, and using the misfortune of a few refugees to hide their real actions. 
It was an evil sleight of hand.
And as Turnbull strutted the HMAS Canberra, he thought he'd got away with it.

THE BIGGER STORY:


 



Islamic State militants have forced 1,500 Iraqi families to march to Mosul from the village of Hammam al-Alil, where advancing soldiers have found a mass grave feared to contain dozens of bodies.
As Isis loses control of areas, summary executions and forced marches of civilians have become a grim feature of the military campaign to oust the militants from their last major stronghold in Iraq, now stretching into its fourth week.
Nearly 300 former members of the security forces and 30 sheikhs, or local leaders, had reportedly disappeared from other villages around Mosul, a senior United Nations official said.
Col Khalid Jaburi, a representative of the Iraqi council of ministers for rescuing Iraqis fleeing the fighting, said Isis had taken former police officers, former soldiers and civilians as they withdrew from Hammam al-Alil.

MALCOLM Turnbull ordered the largest ever maritime and air surveillance patrols off the Australian coast after concerns a deal to resettle refugees in the United States could be used as a marketing tool to ignite the people smuggling trade.

US President Barack Obama agreed to take hundreds of refugees stranded in Nauru and Manus Island during a meeting with Mr Turnbull in September but the announcement was delayed to allow Australia to increase its border patrols.

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LEONARD COHEN TRIBUTE I'M YOUR MAN

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PROLONGED BASTARDRY

Old Alex flew, or so car travel seemed to the ancient spirits, from the coastal lowlands to the mountains, a long unfolding swoop, and as arranged went to visit Glen at his new house in Katoomba; hoping, perhaps, to unload or debrief after a terrible winter.

They sat in the backyard, as always under surveillance, the favourite tool of government bastardry.

"I am an empath," Glen said, apropos of nothing. "I feel the pain of my friends."

It was obvious Old Alex wanted to talk about the sustained difficulties of that winter, and the torment that had been imposed upon him by government surveillance and the taunting cry of his pursuers.

Glen was an empath alright, and he had sold his soul. The Sellout had just won the Man Booker Prize.

Then Glen began showing him poetry he claimed he had been writing, continuing on the the already discredited story of himself as an aspiring young writer; as if nothing had changed.

In their own comfortable lives, inside their smart cars and Ikea homes, they regarded everyone else with contempt.

The poems were accomplished, intricate work, some of it with clashing styles; and nothing like the earnest poetry of a striving young writer. And nothing like the scribblings he he had previously seen.

"Original," Old Alex commented, as the conversation remained within narrow, ceremonial, dishonest bounds.

He compared some of it to the work of the celebrated American poet E.E. Cummings.

It was original, it just didn't happen to have been written by Glen.

He had no more written the collection of poems than he had written War and Peace.

It was some sort of stupid, bureaucratic test; what he would make of it. Did his literary knowledge and peculiar flashes of clairvoyance go so far as to detect plagiarism.

As before, Glen showed no actual interest in the mechanics of writing, or the great works of the masters. And no camaraderie or understanding of others toiling in the field. And gave himself, or his idiot supervisors, away.

It was just another deeply stupid, contemptuous trick amongst so many.

They had tried absolutely everything but to treat him with respect; and at taxpayer's expense were trying on another heist.

The leaves from the Japanese elms glinted in the cool sunlight, and soon enough he left the house feeling thoroughly cheated; which was exactly what had happened.

And found himself in wild dreams hunted into a cave, with the army of the dark snapping at him, determined to kill.

He was shape shifting rapidly in a corner; and in a frantic piece of magic opened up a deep fiery ravine between him and his pursuers.

They stood on the other side, trying to get to him. But could not cross; their anger and determination spitting barbs of black spite. 

He was changing form so quickly nothing could touch him. But he was frightened nonetheless.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Leonard Cohen, the hugely influential singer and songwriter whose work spanned nearly 50 years, died Monday at the age of 82. Cohen's label, Sony Music Canada, confirmed his death on the singer's Facebook page Thursday evening.
"It is with profound sorrow we report that legendary poet, songwriter and artist, Leonard Cohen has passed away," the statement read. "We have lost one of music's most revered and prolific visionaries. A memorial will take place in Los Angeles at a later date. The family requests privacy during their time of grief." A cause of death was not given.
After an epic tour, the singer fell into poor health. But he dug deep and came up with a powerful new album
"My father passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles with the knowledge that he had completed what he felt was one of his greatest records," Cohen's son Adam wrote in a statement to Rolling Stone. "He was writing up until his last moments with his unique brand of humor."
Before his death, the songwriter requested that he be laid to rest "in a traditional Jewish rite beside his parents, grandparents and great-grandparents," his rabbi Adam Scheier wrote in a statement.
"Unmatched in his creativity, insight and crippling candor, Leonard Cohen was a true visionary whose voice will be sorely missed," his manager Robert Kory wrote in a statement. "I was blessed to call him a friend, and for me to serve that bold artistic spirit firsthand, was a privilege and great gift. He leaves behind a legacy of work that will bring insight, inspiration and healing for generations to come."

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Hong Kong 1950s

Other journalists who wrote about some of the same areas as he did, Islamic fundamentalism, national security, received conciliatory visits from the authorities; who would advise them on safety procedures and how best to proceed. He got harassed, year in and year out, month in and month out. Tormented, bullied, ridiculed. 

That was the way of the grinding machinery that was Australian governance.

Piranhas, flash crowds of piranhas, had circled through the invisible air, feeding their careers and determined to torment, because, as someone masquerading as a friend had said to him only a few days before, "you're just one person". 

And Just One Person can be destroyed, is vulnerable, gets lonely, is beset by frailty.

And so the predators came out to play.

Be careful what you pray for, he warned them, as the bullies circled.


THE BIGGER STORY:



It’s 3:30 a.m. in the newsroom, and we’re in a state of shock. Donald J. Trump, against what we thought were all odds, collected swing state after swing state after swing state. Hillary Clinton has conceded the race. Mr. Trump has won.
So, what just happened? “We don’t know what happened, because the tools that we would normally use to help us assess what happened failed,” Ms. Haberman says. “The polling on both sides was wrong.”
Mr. Rutenberg had just finished writing about how the media had missed Mr. Trump’s wide appeal, and what that misfire says about journalists’ flawed understanding of major swaths of our country. “What we now know is that a huge part of the country is far more upset about the ills that he was pointing to and promising to fix than any of the flaws that we were pointing out about him as a candidate,” Mr. Rutenberg says on the show.
“I would say this is a failure of expertise on the order of the fall of the Soviet Union or the Vietnam War,” Mr. Confessore says. “What we are seeing is in part a revolt of the country that people had written off as the country of the past, against the country that most people thought they were living in: a country of the future, of a multicultural future, of a globalized world. This was a revolt of people who did not feel vested in that future America.”

WASHINGTON — President Obama and Donald J. Trump made a public show on Thursday of putting their bitter differences aside after a stunning election upset. The Oval Office meeting brought together a president who has darkly warned that Mr. Trump could not be trusted with the nuclear codes and a successor who rose to political prominence questioning Mr. Obama’s birthplace and legitimacy.
“I want to emphasize to you, Mr. President-elect, that we now are going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed because if you succeed, then the country succeeds,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Trump as the two sat side-by-side after the roughly 90-minute meeting. The president called the session “excellent” and wide-ranging.
It was an extraordinary show of cordiality and respect between two men who have been political enemies and are stylistic opposites — Mr. Trump a brash real estate executive and reality television star whose campaign was defined in opposition to the sitting president, and Mr. Obama, a cool-tempered intellectual who has pressed a progressive agenda in office.

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Brisbane floods 1893

"Do you think he can detect that we're here?" a voice asked in the Outback night, and he repeated the line.
Monumental stuff up.
His pursuit, the pursuit of a journalist, by government authorities had reached absurd lengths, and so he was here, in this distant place. He had exemptd himself from the game, their game.
There was no reason for them to stop, it was government funding.
There was no reason to apologise, that would involve acknowledging fault.
There was no cause for common decency, they didn't have it in them.
They destroyed lives with impunity; that's what they did.
Those paying taxes to fund the outlandish behaviour of the agencies had no idea what their money was being used for.
Psychologically exhausted from the last book, Old Alex went home early to watch the American election on television, a million miles from the wealth and power on display in New York City. It had been one of the world's longest running soap operas, and a reality TV star had gamed them across the finishing line.
All the pundits had been proven wrong; and Trump was triumphant. 
It had been one of the worst examples of pack mentality Alex had ever seen. All anyone had to do to prove they were an intellectual and a progressive was to call Trump a moron and away the hordes went, Like Like Like.
And in the morning after, they would blame everybody but themselves.
The same dynamics were in play in Australia.
The quelling of debate, ceaseless identity and gender politics, the ridicule and in his case hunting of anyone who didn't swallow the government narrative, all of it was coming back to destroy the very governments, bureaucracies and multi-media channels which perpetuated it.
He came, he saw, he observed.
They would try to kill him one more time.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Democrat Hillary Clinton has conceded the 2016 US White House race to Republican Donald Trump, offering to work with the president-elect who she said she hoped would be a successful leader for all Americans.
Mrs Clinton, appearing at midday (local time) after a bruising election loss to the New York real estate magnate, urged supporters to keep an open mind towards Mr Trump and give him a chance to lead.
"Last night I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country," Mrs Clinton told hundreds of supporters and staff at a Manhattan hotel.
"I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans.
"This is not the outcome we wanted or we worked so hard for, and I'm sorry that we did not win this election for the values we shared and the vision we hold for our country."

The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society. He seems a little unpredictable. Who knows but that he may arrive for dinner in a red shirt… appear unexpectedly bearded… offer, freely, unsolicited advice… or even ship off one of his ears to some unwilling recipient? However glorious the history of art, the history of artists is quite a different matter. And in any well-ordered household the very thought that one of the young men may turn out to be an artist can be a cause for general alarm. It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospect of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a good many devoted art lovers to rout.

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JUST SAY NO

Tim Ritchie

Old Alex pulled up by the side of the road, just past the Namoi River, struck by the sight of the river gums beside a classic Outback scene.

He just wanted it all to stop.

His career as a journalist had made him a POI, a Person of Interest, and he had become, as book followed book, increasingly haunted.

He tried to fight back, as sick of them as they were no doubt sick of him, but he had grown tired of abusing his tormentors through the microphone in the car.

"Never forget: I know how incompetent and dishonest you are."

He was sick of the absolute bastardry of government which had been turned on him after he had left full time work on the national newspaper; sick of the depths of dishonesty these people would stoop to in pursuing him.

Sick of the bureaucratic mentality: Just Say No.

Because to say no, to destroy someone, was safer than working with them.

The more barren the culture became, the more they liked it.

He was tired of demanding compensation for the previous three years of harassment, an acknowledgement, apology and financial compensation which was never going to come.

$27.3 million seemed like a good figure to him, considering the lengths the authorities had gone to destroy him psychologically and physically, to ruin his reputation, to hound him from one place to another, to another. And the vast amount of time, money and energy they had wasted.

"One day that man will kill himself."

What sort of person would do that to another?

Bullies. Government funded bullies.

The Prime Minister's Literary Awards had just been co-won gone by a book, The Life of Houses, about "hidden tensions in one of Australia's establishment families".

"Revolutionary art," he sniffed, as outside storms rumbled in the great skies of the Australian Outback.

This was the same Prime Minister, the same government, who had done much to destroy the Australian book publishing industry, and alienated authors across the country.

The tax payer funded Radio National broadcast Malcolm Turnbull's speech on his love of Australian literature. To Alex it was all preposterous. He simply couldn't stand the hypocrisy. Everything annoyed him. He was becoming a curmudgeon.

Alex was no longer employed by a multi-billion dollar news corporation, no longer confined by the corporate tedium of what Rupert Murdoch's editorial henchmen saw as news; those narrow confines of what they thought, or knew, would please their boss.

"I've never known someone so consistently depressed as you," someone had said to him downstairs in the headquarters of News Limited.

And it was true, he wasn't living the life he wanted to live, he wasn't writing what he wanted to write, and in those aging years when journalism, a young man's sandpit and and old man's quicksand, had become a curse; he simply showed up for work. He had children to support. He had no choice. A profession which once seemed full of excitement became tedium absolute.

The greatest talent required of a senior editor at The Australian had been the ability to please Rupert, not to generate stories, not to appeal to the public, not to create an exciting newspaper.

The Australian was an inexcusably dull vanity publication of Rupert's which lost more than $30 million a year. His escape had been both a liberation and a torment; he missed the camaraderie of fellow sufferers, and for a long time he had been completely lost.

Then he began to write what he wanted to write, and life promptly turned to hell as he became a Targeted Individual, pursued, harassed and under surveillance.

It had reached ridiculous levels, as he was hunted from one home to another, when he never felt safe and he became convinced, as paranoiac as it sounded, that the authorities wanted him dead.

"Heart attack, heart attack," "That man will kill himself one day."

They were standard tactics of PsyOps, or psychological operations, as he understood it.

And he came face to face with a world he had never encountered, or at least never understood; dark policing, government sponsored intimidation and harassment through surveillance operations.

The agencies were vastly over-funded; in secrecy corruption and malfeasance bloomed. Abused from dawn to dusk, he became increasingly ratty. It didn't matter what he did, what he said, how he behaved, what efforts he made to brush them off, the attacks were relentless and ongoing; and had frayed him to the remote edges of sanity; flayed by words and invisible demons and rippling consequence.

It would be so much easier to just comply, but the goal posts constantly shifted. He was not on their payroll, and the obvious solutions were duly ignored. It was easier to revert to type: to be a bully.

And so it felt as if the same bullies who had tormented him in the schoolyard now tormented him in later life; queuing up to kick him in the head.

As the car settled and the silence of the bush surrounded him, he tried to seek a power to turn events around.

And the only advice that came to him, in those crippling days, was: Stay Out Of The Results.

He started up the car, and quickly overtook a clapped out car.

"Drive by shooting," the words plunged through his head. He caught a glance of the car's occupants and they looked as guilty as hell.

They say, everyone who comes to the Ridge is escaping something.

He was escaping.

Welcome to the Edge.


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CLANDESTINE AUTHORITY: A FINAL BEAUTY

Picture of Wyndham by Richard Woldendorp

At last he was free.

He stopped chanting at the microphone in the car, and therefore to the authorities: "You are dishonest, incompetent and corrupt." Or: "Never forget, I know how dishonest and incompetent you really are."

The hell, the living purgatory, that had been inflicted upon him and which they liked to say he had inflicted on himself had gone.

His anger, his frustration, as counterproductive as it had been, was already washing away.

The Ridge, as it was locally known, was green from recent rains, unusual in that part of the country. The landscape often looked more like Mars. Now the inland rivers were flowing, and Menindee Lakes was full.

He had been coming to Lightning Ridge on and off for decades. It was one of the only places in the world where opal could be found, and had a peculiar resonance. Decades before, landing at the red dust pot hole filled airstrip had been a dangerous exercise. Now, there was even an asphalted tarmac.

Old Alex had last been here two years before, when, after a similar hounding, he had just finished writing Thailand: Deadly Destination. 

And then, as now, haunted and hunted for so long, felt an enormous relief.

He went, that first morning, to the Artesian Bore outside town, where, as the sign declared, the hot, mineral rich waters would soak away your aches and pains.

As so often, there were Europeans taking the water in this Outback place, and the air was full of the Yugoslavian language.

He liked the idea of bathing in million year old water, although in truth he had no idea how old it was and could find no easy reference.

It was the final month of spring, after what had been a hellish winter; with kidney stones and a fractured vertebrae leaving him in constant pain, and the targeting of him by the authorities, or under the purvey of the authorities, had made his life entirely miserable. 

If he had destroyed one opportunity by his flagrant fury, contempt or disregard, there would be many more. He was was the one bathing in the Artesian waters and watching the birds flock through the low scrub of the Australian Outback. He was the one whose mind could pick through the surrounding fields, at last, without being pressurised. He was the one who had survived.

And they would squirrel back into their useless jobs, no longer safe. For the wraiths unleashed were already out hunting their targets; and they would find their way,

If it was simply puerile revenge, they would never have done their job. It was more than that: a battle between the sacred and the profane. The desire of the ordinary to triumph over the extraordinary was a battle they would not, could not win.

And so he rose bare faced into the laughing sky, and was free.

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As the battle for Mosul proper begins -- a pain-staking and brutal process of clearing ISIS street by street -- cracks in the Iraqi government's planning and preparation are already beginning to show.

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NOT TO BE TRUSTED

Australia 2016 Kings Cross Nightclub raid

Old Alex left the large stone house on the edge of a Blue Mountain ravine, left the sight of parrots and pigeons squabbling at the bird feeder, and as previously arranged went once again to visit the surveillance expert.

In the early hours of the day he had heard Glen say: "I have no regrets." A piece of bravado ahead of conscience.

You people can go about destroying people's lives, because that's the only thing you're good at.

The arrangements had changed. Without explanation. Common decency had nothing to do with this game.

They sat on the back veranda, briefly, and once again the light glinted off the fresh spring leaves of the Japanese elms and things beyond ken swirled. Once again he had an instant, peculiar headache. This time the glints of light off the trees were sharp as knives, each knife fringed with a narrow, out-of-phase frieze of decaying gargoyle faces, the emblematic consolidation of corruption and ill-intent, bureaucratic decay and the relentless, brutally unfeeling machinery of government, where no one was accountable, no one apologised, and they ground away at free thought as surely as they ground away at commonsense.

"I feel like a thresher's been through my head," he said in a random piece of conversation later in the day, on the other side of the mountains, as his headache grew progressively worse.

As if the knives were still cutting. He felt some terrible swamp of sadness he hadn't felt in years, as if his children had just been stolen from him. Not because he expected the story to end any other way, he already knew the Fairy Godmother would turn into another fat f**k who wanted everything for nothing and thought they could get away with it. But because, at the end of one story and the beginning of another, he had hoped he would be surprised by kindness; not betrayal.

He had a very unhelpful trait for a journalist, he was always surprised when people lied to him. But the lies never stopped.

This time the sign in his head read: "NOT TO BE TRUSTED".

As in, not to be trusted under any circumstances.

He drove north-west, the rolling plains which had so delighted the early explorers drenched green from recent rains; and dropped by a household on the edge of the Liverpool plains. He had a habit of rolling by once a year or so, saying hello, crashing the night and moving on. But they were not there. A few days before, the mother had a brain aneurysm and had been helicoptered to a hospital in the south. The family were by her side. He kept on driving.

"Not good," was the diagnosis.

The sun was setting across the flat rich plains; in the midst of life we are in death.

In the long dark night he heard the voices of his pursuers rejoice: "You've been totally, completely screwed."

Their victory cry was short lived.

When a bee stings you, it dies.

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http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/11/advance-heart-mosul-slows-isil-fights-161106103351018.html

Iraq's special forces worked to fully push a fiercely resisting ISIL from neighborhoods on Mosul's eastern edge while bombings killed at least 11 people elsewhere in the country.

The current phase and slower pace highlight the challenges ahead for Iraqi forces as they press into more populated areas deeper inside Mosul, where the civilian presence means they may not be able to rely as much on air raids.

"There are a lot of civilians and we are trying to protect them," said Lt Col Muhanad al-Timimi. "This is one of the hardest battles that we've faced till now."



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BATTERED, BRUISED, SURVEILLANCE SURVIVOR

Aleppo, courtesy The Guardian

The country had sold its soul, and its greatest assets.

He was battered and bruised, having survived years of harassment and surveillance, intimidation; a nightmare.

A false nightmare which had wasted the time and resources of everybody involved.

A nightmare engineered or created by government and conducted with their full knowledge.

Yet there was no apology, no compensation. Not to him. Not to the taxpayers. Not to the well intentioned or the easily manipulated who had joined in the hunt.

Surveillance = harassment.

Tinpot bullies strutted in their air-conditioned offices, comfortable in their military mindsets, pouring scorn on anybody and everybody  they did not understand. They would destroy you as assuredly as they could. They would puff out their little man chests and laugh at the idea of the curse already creeping through their veins and distorting their lives. Little things were already starting to go wrong. Bigger things were about to follow. As assuredly as night followed day.

He put out extra food for the birds, and the Rosellas and the King Parrots came.

He laughed at the way things had so magically resolved in the household, and they were happy now, as he had wished upon them in those strange blessings which invariably came true; although they would never know.

He had forgotten, sometimes, in that long life, the power that he had sometimes had. A whimsical power perhaps; but power nonetheless. And they couldn't hurt him now. It had all coiled back upon them.

"You would think," he said, in one of those strange pieces of conversation that didn't really join the flow, "that they would have worked out that everything they do backfires, and escalates the price to be paid."

But they never did work it out. They didn't think that way.

So now, those who had tried to kill him, who told their lies and spread their poison, now they twisted uncomfortably in their chairs.

And still, they did not understand.


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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/03/aleppo-braces-russian-assault-rebels-vow-defy-putin-ultimatum?CMP=share_btn_fb

Syrian rebel groups in east Aleppo are planning to defy an ultimatum from Vladimir Putin to abandon the city by Friday night, insisting that promised safe passages out of besieged areas do not exist and that an imminent Russian blitz will not change the course of the war.

As the Russian carrier group expected to take part in the attack moved into their final positions in the eastern Mediterranean, opposition fighters made fresh forays into west Aleppo, the latest in a series of attempts to break a four-year siege of the rebel -held east, which is surrounded by Iranian-backed militias that support the Syrian leader.

Moscow has said that corridors for fighters and civilians will remain open until sunset on Friday, ahead of what it has warned will be a bombardment that will level what remains of east Aleppo. As the deadline drew near, however, opposition groups said they had little to fear, and could not escape even if they wanted to.

http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2016/11/australian-democracy-serious-jeopardy/

Australian democracy is in very serious jeopardy. China is making great strides towards it and its intentions are not benevolent. It’s obvious in local, regional and global trends and if we do not do something soon to protect our freedoms they are going to be sold into the burgeoning Chinese empire, as well as political hegemony, by a corrupt oligarchy.

Some of you will tell me to take off my tin foil hat for writing this. To you I say ‘listen up’.

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TREACHERY

And then, just when it seemed like there would be a solution, or absolution, he was stranded in a backyard full of glinting leaves, kissed by the divine.

Visiting a surveillance expert in the Blue Mountains, he wanted to pour out his guts about the nightmare winter that had just unfolded, the curse of his pursuers, the terrible abuses of authority he had witnessed and experienced, the tormented tunnel difficulties and strange inspirations which had gone into the making of the last book.

Instead the warmth of spring surrounded them, and he felt, despite a peculiar headache, if not absolved, relieved. The world was beautiful after all.

"I didn't realise how frazzled I was," he said.

But there was no resolution, because they were being watched, even here, and their conversation remained on a level keel.

"TREACHERY", a sign swung through his head after he had left, pulling up on one of the narrow mountain streets which crisscrossed the area.

But whether the treachery was directed at him, or at others, he did not know. There were grander plots afoot. The deliberate government targeting of a journalist of 30-years standing such as himself and the many breaches of public service protocol and legislation thus involved had handed the perfect ammunition to a new breed of operative, smarter, by far, less bound by military procedures, far, far faster on their feet. And it could only be for the good, that the old dinosaurs who infested the security agencies be swept aside, and a cleverer, better educated, better connected and more empathic generation took over. And cast the dinosaurs into the pit where they belonged, their bones to be discovered, if at all, many thousands of years into the future. When this strange stage in the evolution of the species was nothing but a curiosity in an arcane academic discipline.

And so he swung down the highway to a different place, a large stone house anchored on the edge of a deep mountain ravine, where at dusk he watched the descendants of thousands of generations of birds, Bronze Pigeons with their striking colouring, Black, white and grey Wonga pigeons, like fat little hens, pecking at the edge of the forest, Rosellas, Cockatoos, and he thought for an instant the world was safe; or at least safe for one more day.

The authorities had tried to kill him, and he was still alive.

"Why haven't these people charged with attempted murder?" he demanded to know of the microphone in the car.

There was no answer. There never would be.

But the invisible beasts, the voices cast abroad, were noticeably more kind than the last time he had been there, in the midst of that horrific winter. And he knew, all too well, some things were better left unsaid.

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Displaced families Mosul

https://www.rt.com/news/365299-assange-pilger-saudi-clinton/

In the second excerpt from the John Pilger Special, to be exclusively broadcast by RT on Saturday, courtesy of Dartmouth Films, Julian Assange accuses Hillary Clinton of misleading Americans about the true scope of Islamic State’s support from Washington’s Middle East allies.

In a 2014 email made public by Assange’s WikiLeaks last month, Hillary Clinton, who had served as secretary of state until the year before, urges John Podesta, then an advisor to Barack Obama, to “bring pressure” on Qatar and Saudi Arabia, “which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL [Islamic State, IS, ISIS] and other radical Sunni groups.”
“I think this is the most significant email in the whole collection,” Assange, whose whistleblowing site released three tranches of Clinton-related emails over the past year, told Pilger in an exclusive interview, courtesy of Dartmouth Films.

“All serious analysts know, and even the US government has agreed, that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIS and funding ISIS, but the dodge has always been that it is some “rogue” princes using their oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves. But that email says that it is the government of Saudi Arabia, and the government of Qatar that have been funding ISIS.”

Assange and Pilger, who sat down for their 25-minute interview at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where the whistleblower has been a refugee since 2012, then talk about the conflict of interest between Clinton’s official post, which held throughout Obama’s first term, her husband’s nonprofit, and the Middle East officials, whose stated desire to fight terrorism may not have been sincere.

John Pilger: The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis, particularly the first two, are giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation, while Hillary Clinton is secretary of state, and the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly Saudi Arabia.

Julian Assange: Under Hillary Clinton – and the Clinton emails reveal a significant discussion of it – the biggest-ever arms deal in the world was made with Saudi Arabia: more than $80 billion. During her tenure, the total arms exports from the US doubled in dollar value.

JP: Of course, the consequence of that is that this notorious jihadist group, called ISIL or ISIS, is created largely with money from people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation?

JA: Yes.

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