Pix. Bundaberg River, Queensland. Circa October, 2017.

TURNBULL'S TERRIBLE LEGACY

Bli Bli, Queensland, Australia

Nothing worked. And the appalling state of the internet across Australia would be one of the Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's worst legacies, frustrating all endeavour, destroying businesses, killing communication.

 A naturally industrious population found itself frustrated at every turn. 

Respect for government and respect for politicians ground down to zero. 

The government's only reaction, to impose yet more restrictions, to attempt to ever more desperately control the media, destroy the free exchange of ideas, to send their Swastika boots clomping down on every free thinker. 

The "marriage equality" debate, which could have been solved in a single afternoon as a basic human rights issue, why should straights be the only ones to suffer, had curdled the public square. 

Dangerous, inconsiderate, insouciant.

He was angry at everything, but that did not make him wrong. 

In just one piece of high farce, the retiring Family Court Chief Justice Diana Bryant declared that Australia had a very good family law system and in many ways was envied by the world. 

So much for the pain of millions. So much for the many people who had worked so hard in an attempt to reform family law. No one could go near Australia's appalling family law jurisdiction and maintain the slightest respect for lawyers, the judicial system or the politicians who allowed this Marxist feminist jurisdiction to continue on its high minded, utterly destructive path.

Never mind. 

Reality had nothing to do with Australian public discourse in 2017. 

Old Alex listened to the celebrity lesbians and Gucci socialists on Radio National, and simply despaired.

There had to be a way out.

There had to be a way back to the truth. There had to be a way back to common decency. 

To a simple thing like a genuine participatory democracy. 

To the principles long forgotten.

"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act" - George Orwell


THE BIGGER STORY: 

RAQQA, Syria (Reuters) - Air raids by U.S. coalition warplanes have intensified in recent days as Kurdish and Arab militias seek to drive surrounded Islamic State militants from their last strongholds in Syria’s Raqqa -- but the toll on civilians has been severe.
Hundreds of civilians fled the city on Thursday, many wounded and malnourished after being trapped for months by fighting between Islamic State and the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
Those who fled said the sheer intensity of the bombardment appeared to have made militants shift their positions, retreat or hide underground, giving civilians a window in which to escape.
Abdullah Ali’s burns were still raw from an air strike that brought down his building and killed his entire family a week ago in central Raqqa.
“My wife, mum, dad, all 14 people in my family were killed. Their bodies are trapped under rubble,” the 24-year-old said, sitting outside a mosque on Raqqa’s outskirts.
Ali’s neighbor Abdo Hussein said more than 50 people were in the building when the air strike hit. Just a handful survived and 13 bodies had been pulled out, he said.
The offensive to drive Islamic State out of Raqqa, its de facto Syrian capital which it seized in 2014, has long outlasted initial predictions by SDF officials who said ahead of a final assault in June that it could take just weeks.
The SDF said last week the city could be declared captured in the coming days.
There are still several hundred militants in the city and thousands of residents, the coalition says, many of them believed to be held hostage by IS in a hospital and nearby stadium.
“People had tried to escape before but were shot at by Daesh (Islamic State). I even saw them kill a two-year-old child,” Um Moussa, 38, said, sitting inside the mosque.
”This morning they didn’t seem to be around, or weren’t firing.
“My son saw hordes of people leaving so we decided to go for it. I’d been sleeping fully dressed -- we were ready to flee at the first chance,” she said, wearing black robes and a face veil required under Islamic State’s strict laws.
But weakening the militants with air power has come at a high cost in civilian lives, she and others said.
“Yesterday four entire families were killed in our area. It’s strike after strike.”

+++

One day, perhaps before it is too late, Turnbull, Brandis, Shorten and co. and their fellow members of the political class in Europe may wake up to the fact that the West is engaged in an existential struggle in which employment figures, homosexual marriage and submarines are not the fundamental issues.

While border security and conventional defence policies are of the greatest importance they are not fighting the modern cultural blitzkrieg. Poet Peter Kocan said in one bitter verse that it is like having a fearless armoured knight on guard while the city falls to internal enemies.

What the present political leadership of Australia and other Western countries seem incapable of counteracting, or even comprehending, is that we are engaged in a new kind of conflict – an onslaught by the Left to politicise every aspect of life from football to science fiction.

Accompanying this is the Muslim ‘stealth jihad’. While in Australia the authorities have done a good job in keeping terrorism in check, they seem unaware of the threat to national identity posed by simple demographics. Poland and Hungary, having just recovered their national identities after decades of merciless oppression, seem determined to fight the threat to them, while the Scandinavian countries have largely given up the fight.

DAYS OF INFAMY

Future historians will ask, how did it happen that people can be snatched off the streets in secret, never to be seen again. 

Wasn't this once a democracy? 

They dined at the official residence the night before, these betrayers of the people, the premiers of the Australian states, the Chief Minsters of the territories. 

They signed away the civil liberties of Australians without hesitation. In an official ceremony, no less. 

And nobody held them to account. 

The Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, desperate to hold on to power, repeatedly misused his power as he continued what he thought was clever manipulation of the Australian media. On that morning of shame, he did a softer than soft interview with the execrable journalists on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's breakfast show, where he faced not a single solitary difficult question on the abrogation of the citizen's liberties. 

Then they wheeled out ABC lightweight and doyen of the Insiders Barry Cassidy to agree with them that the civil libertarians didn't have a leg to stand on, not when we were talking about terror. 

Not in the wake of so many incidents overseas. 

The introduction of jail  without charge, without oversight. It wold come back to haunt them. 

"What they don't tell you," Old Alex said at an afternoon gathering on the Sunshine Coast, sunny one day, perfect the next, "is that if anyone thus jailed dares to speak about what happened during those fourteen days, they will be jailed. Again.

"If a journalist writes about what happened, they will be jailed."

No one will be able speak out about the abuses that will no doubt occur under what could be called summary detention.

Not one journalist bothered to ask about this obvious backward step, giving the power of life and death to a secretive parallel police force.

The future was already being trucked in. 

What happened if a person was tortured during those 14 days, and died as a result of their treatment?

No one could talk about it? No one could write about it? 

If every mentioned in any official report, it would not be for public discussion. 

"That's not right. That's not the Australia I know," came a response. 

But it was the Australia they were now all living in. 


THE BIGGER STORY:




This morning, the Islamic State’s semi-official news agency, Amaq, took credit for the Las Vegas massacre, which killed 58 and wounded another 515. The likely killer, identified by police as 64-year-old Stephen Paddock of Mesquite, Nevada, was not known to be a supporter of the Islamic State, or indeed a Muslim of any type. For now, the only evidence that the Islamic State was involved is its own assurance—first a press release announcing that a “soldier of the Islamic State” executed the concertgoers, and a follow-up for the baffled, explaining that he converted to Islam months ago. The FBI has stated that it doesn’t believe the attack was related to international terrorism.

The sun has barely risen on Las Vegas, and there may be blood still slick on the Strip. Speculation about mass shootings in the hours after they occur is not just a fool’s game but an impatient fool’s. Evidence will be forthcoming, and these assertions by the Islamic State will be tested against reality. But already I hear a familiar chorus of doubt: The Islamic State will “take credit for anything,” it says, “even hurricanes.”

The vast majority of the Islamic State’s claimed attacks were undertaken by men acting in its name, often after leaving short video statements confirming their intentions. The Amaq news agency is the preferred venue for the initial claim, usually within a day. (Sloppy reporters sometimes mistake the rejoicing of online supporters, meteorological or not, for an official claim.) If they were really so promiscuous with their claims, we would long since have ignored them, as we do claims from other yahoos who have tried to take credit for atrocities authored by others. The idea that the Islamic State simply scans the news in search of mass killings, then sends out press releases in hope of stealing glory, is false.

Terrorism suspects could be interrogated for up to 14 days before being charged under a major shake up of Australia's terrorism laws being proposed by the Turnbull government.
And it would be an offence to possess "instructional terrorist material" and to make terrorism hoaxes under two new laws that will be considered by state and federal leaders at a special terrorism-focused Council of Australian Governments meeting in Canberra on Thursday.
The proposal to hold suspects for 14 days without charge and the two new offences are the three key proposals that will be examined at the special meeting, but a broad range of other counter-terrorism issues will be discussed.
The Turnbull government believes the recently foiled plot to blow up a plane in Sydney serves as the best example for the shift to a nationally consistent 14 days detention regime.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says "we must use every technology we can" to keep people safe.
He wants driver licence photos provided to build a national system to identify people.
This is in addition to a federal law allowing terrorism suspects to be held without charge for 14 days; making it illegal to possess instructional terrorist material; and broadening the scope for Australian defence forces to target and kill terrorists, even if they're not in a combat role.