LAID WASTE THE KEEPERS OF THE FLAME

The old proposition of Pascal (1623-1662) that man is a reed, but a thinking reed, might be taken with a different emphasis by the modern citizens of democracy. He thinks, but he feels like a reed bending before centrally generated winds.
Herzog. Saul Bellow.

"Can you believe some of the technology we're using was designed by his brother?" one of the Watchers on the Watch said. 
His brother, the smart one of the family, one of the world's leading designers of computer chips.
Surveillance technology invisible to the naked eye. 
But which could follow the eye.
They saw what you saw.
"Much of it is classified," Old Alex's brother had told him, when he wanted to write a story about him.
Ipads, iphones, Microsoft's holographic messaging, he had been closely engaged in all of them.
Many of the contracts were military.
Now they mapped what they thought was your mind, and watched the holograph instead. Uploaded you to their own web.
Old Alex was refusing to merge. The perimeter was now a boundary of rapidly erupting, metallic like sheaves, a barrier to thought, to transmission, to surveillance.
The technology was far more advanced than the public knew.
Already the citizenry was regarded as nothing but cattle. Neither a very reliable nor very profligate source. The richness, or not, of their interior lives nothing but a wan scan. 
The long march through the institutions was complete.
The social project to eradicate white male privilege, white rationality, from the system of government was complete.
They lived in the ruins of those who would remake if not paradise, a good fist of paradise for many, the highest living standards for the largest number of people in human history.
But that wasn't enough. 
That was One Dimensional Man.
Destroyed by the brutality of capitalism and consumerism, or so they had been taught, indoctrinated, by generations of the academy.
Entranced by the radical theories of their professors, the battalions of useful fools had marched out into the world, transforming government offices, government bureaucracies, policy, the society at large.
The Forgotten People truly did become the forgotten people.
True justice, true equality, could only be achieved by destroying the oppressive rationality of reason, the white male.
University professors now got up and told their students how they felt, how they were impacted on by the world, how they voted; and it was all regarded as legitimate academic discourse.
God forbid you should stray from the doctrine of diversity, the tyranny of tolerance.
F for Failure.
As a result, the society at large now battled not for personal success, fortune or resilience, but for victim status.
Ethnic. Female. Gay. Lesbian. Transgendered. Autistic. Disabled. Indigenous. Aged.
The courts became the weapon of choice to destroy those of privilege.
Men. 
The Family Court did a good job of that.
How was it even possible that the Family Court and the Child Support Agency, these lunar left institutions closely linked to the suicide and destruction of thousands of the citizenry, could continue to plunder?
"Facts are just weapons that men use to batter women and perpetuate the system." 
That's what feminist jurisprudence declared.
That's what these institutions took to heart.
Lie with impunity. The truth is irrelevant.
Yet hundreds of thousands had no choice but to face the withering scorn of the social engineers, as they appeared before them, begging for their children.
How was it that billions of dollars aimed at the indigenous disappeared into the desert sands and achieved nothing?
Energy.
How was it that billions of taxpayer dollars, raked off the working poor, disappeared into vast green bureaucracies that produced precisely nothing?
How was it that Australia now had literally the most expensive electricity in the world? 
That a primary concern of the citizenry, in a land of abundant natural resources, was how to heat their homes through the cold winters of The Great Southern Land.
How was it that Australia now had some of the most expensive internet in the world. And the slowest, ranked 60th, plunging towards 100th, and the government propaganda blathered about the information super highway of the future, the internet of things, at the same time it was forcing, by law, millions of citizens onto an inferior network, courtesy of the appalling waste of public funds known as the National Broadband Network, $61 billion and counting, the largest and single most mismanaged public infrastructure project in the nation's history.
And no one apologised.
No one explained.
The head of National Broadband Network awarded himself a $460,00 bonus, some eight times the average wage, on top of his $3.6 million dollar salary.
Job well done, the authorities clearly believed. 
Could it be that they wanted the population dumbed down?
Like so many others in senior public servant positions, he had done their bidding, and the masters were well pleased.
They did not want the surfs rising up. 
Could it be that they were perfectly happy to emasculate the transformative, magical power of the net?
How was it that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation had abandoned local programming, and ran reruns of reruns of reruns of Antique Roadshow in prime time?

How was it that the lunar right of the Liberal Party got away with appointing people to the top job of the organisation who knew nothing about journalism, but were loyal to the party? 

How was it that the publicly funded radio networks spread across the country, allowing their anodyne, one dimensional view of what constituted news to spread across the country, thereby creating a subservient, rote learning population whose idea of intellectuality was to parrot what they had heard on the ABC.

Old Alex sat at one of the local Tables of Knowledge, cold in the remnants of winter sun, barely anyone there anymore, the powers, in their mission to remake the society, having destroyed the traditional community gathering points.

The peasants could not revolt if they did not gather.

How was it that governments mouthed platitudes about small business being the heart of the nation, and local state and federal taxed them so heavily and wrapped them in so much regulation they could barely survive, the ordinary dreams to build, create, own, sinking day by day towards the dole queues?

How was it that Australia was dropping more than $30 million worth of bombs on the citizens of the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh, Mosul in modern day Iraq, and no politician spoke of it. No news outlet covered the country's direct involvement in committing the worst war crimes of the 21st Century.

As bad or worse as the savage destruction of Vietnam. 

There was no guilt.

Nor was there pride. 

The public simply did not know. 

Or gave up caring about the savagery of America's endless wars; and Australia's lockstep supplication.

Democracy was dead. Five minutes to midnight had become three minutes to midnight. And nobody cared. Nobody even knew.

THE BIGGER STORY:

IRAQI FEDERAL POLICE DANCE IN THE STREETS

MOSUL, Iraq – Iraqi Federal Police paraded and danced in the streets of west Mosul on Sunday. With the city largely under Iraqi control, security forces face the task of clearing many bombs and explosives left behind by ISIS.

“In the battle for Mosul, we have destroyed the barriers that ISIS worked on for two years. ISIS dug many trenches and planted many bombs. Thanks be to God we have removed all of these barriers and the city is returned to its people. We have promised the people and now we are declaring this good news to the people of Mosul, to you, and to all the people of Kurdistan as well. Returning Mosul to its own people is our Eid,” Colonel Rahim, head of the federal police bomb disposal squad, declared.

Final victory in the city has not been declared, yet. “ISIS is remaining in some alleys of Old Mosul, but we can say that the entire Old Mosul has been retaken,” noted Colonel Hamid Hussein, commander of the Rapid Response Force.

The celebration, however, brought a rare smile to the citizens of Mosul. Many children joined in the fun, dancing with soldiers in the streets.

http://www.nydailynews.com/newswires/news/world/civilians-flee-strikes-pound-is-held-mosul-article-1.3295437

MOSUL, Iraq (AP) — As airstrikes pound the last pockets of territory held by the Islamic State group in Mosul Sunday, hundreds of civilians are fleeing, many so badly injured they had to be carried over the mounds of rubble clogging the Old city's narrow streets.

The civilians — mostly women and children — are fleeing the city in waves of displacement as Iraqi forces push toward the Tigris River, according to Iraqi special forces Maj. Gen. Sami al-Aridi.

Iraq's special forces are now some 450 meters from the river's bank, al-Aridi said. He expects to reach the Tigris within days.

After a strike, groups of civilians appeared covered in dust. Dozens were injured with what appeared to be shrapnel wounds. One woman collapsed trying to climb through a destroyed home, apparently suffering from dehydration.