A PACK OF CROOKS

Ghouta, Syria, Courtesy of The Guardian 

“While there is zero deterrence and total impunity, there will be no mercy coming, I can assure you,” said a senior western official. “The global order is shifting. There is no longer a price tag on bad behaviour. And the messaging – this is important – from Trump is that the US doesn’t care. That’s a soundtrack for tyranny everywhere.”As bombs fell throughout Monday in Ghouta, resident Mayada Sobhe said: “Nothing can stop our tragedy. Why would we have faith in the world coming to save us? Those who kill us know that no one will criticise them.”Meanwhile in another part of the suburb, Mohannad Mahmoud Qassem awaited his fate. “The UN decision was useless,” he said. “It was nothing but a green light to kill us all here. The international community has sanctioned our deaths.” Chulov, Martin, So-called ceasefire in Syria has barely led to a lull, The Guardian, 27 February, 2018.

The hapless state of the telecommunications in Australia continued to bedevil poor Old Alex, who, curmudgeon like, was easily ignored as the trainwreck that was 2018 began to take hold.
"Nothing works in this country, absolutely nothing," he would mutter, sometimes shout. "Nothing works, absolutely nothing."
He had to walk outside in order to make a phone call. No reception inside the house where he was staying.
They couldn't watch Netflix anymore. Not enough data for the month. And Telstra was charging an extortionate $10 for every extra gig they used.
"And we have a Prime Minister who was previously Telecommunications Minister," he would point out. "A man who couldn't even get the phones to work."
Their own travails with hopeless internet were mirrored millions of times across the country. Businesses that couldn't take orders. Phones that didn't work. Pensioners placed in danger because their landlines were gone. In comparison to the rest of the world, the country was plunging backwards. 
It was a debacle perpetrated on the Australian people for which the government continued to refuse to take responsibility.
The news that the Prime Minister had no trouble getting the highest grade NBN to his own residencies featured on news sites around the country. 

Labor has seized on revelations Malcolm Turnbull's Point Piper mansion enjoys high-speed access to the national broadband network to renew its attack on the Prime Minister as being out of touch with ordinary Australians.
The opposition used its question time strategy to suggest Mr Turnbull received preferential treatment after his department intervened to ensure his house was connected to the NBN's hybrid fibre coaxial cable, just days before the company announced a pause on HFC connections.
Mr Turnbull hit back, accusing Labor of playing the politics of envy, while frontbencher Paul Fletcher insisted the connection was above board.
Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet officials told Senate estimates on Monday night Mr Turnbull's Point Piper home, where he lives with wife Lucy, as well as the Prime Minister's official Sydney residence, Kirribilli House, had been connected at taxpayers' expense to an 100 megabits per second plan, the fastest available.
First assistant secretary Paula Ganley said Mr Turnbull had requested the NBN connection and the department wanted to make sure it happened "smoothly" and would not interfere with security systems.
"It only took one discussion and one appointment for the connection to take place. The connection went ahead quite quickly after that and it was on the 8th of December that the connection actually took place," she said.
The Point Piper house was connected on December 8, 13 days after NBN Co said it would pause connections to the HFC cable because of complaints over slow speeds, sparking a delay of up to nine months for new customers. HFC cables are those installed in the past for cable television services.
Opposition communications spokeswoman Michelle Rowland asked Mr Turnbull why he enjoyed super-fast internet at his mansion "when three quarters of premises on his copper NBN cannot get that speed?"
"Why is it always one rule for this born to rule Prime Minister and another for Australians," she said.
Tillett, Andrew, Malcolm Turnbull under fire over super-fast NBN home connection, The Australian Financial Review, 27 February, 2018.

The same man who had been dropping bombs on beknighted Syria. 
Who had become a laughing stock. As the country waited to kick him out. 
"They're a pack of crooks," Old Alex muttered repeatedly, unable to make a phone call, unable to watch Netflix, unable to stream, unable to watch clips on YouTube, to do most things that the most remarkable technology of the internet allowed.
Untrammelled freedom.
Enormous opportunity.
Education. 
To be able to find out almost anything at the flick of a button. 
The Australian government did not want an educated, questioning, savvy public. One that might ask: "What the heck are we paying taxes for."
It wasn't good government. It wasn't good services.
It wasn't for decent internet, as Australia sat at the bottom of the rankings, slowest most expensive internet in the world. Out of a basket of 60 countries, depending on which survey you looked at. Worse than Kenya. Estonia. Worse than almost anywhere. 

The $49 billion National Broadband Network was meant to spearhead a digital revolution. Instead, the botched project risks becoming a poster child for government mismanagement.
Australia's biggest-ever infrastructure investment has turned into a political football, plagued by cost overruns and construction delays.With the network years behind the original schedule and only about half finished, Australia has slumped to 50th place on a global ladder of internet speeds, behind Kenya and a string of former Soviet bloc nations.
Public frustration with the project is boiling over amid mounting criticism that politics is trumping policy across a host of areas from housing to energy and damaging economic prospects."We are really an example of how not to do it," said Paul Budde, a Sydney-based former adviser to the United Nations on the social and economic benefits of digital development. "We have ended up with the worst possible solution."
The network was conceived as a high-speed platform to increase economic output and beam state-of-the-art health and education services to remote corners of the country. The cost of failure is stark.
With a substandard internet backbone, it's tougher for workers to leave the major cities and ease pressure on house prices in Sydney and Melbourne. It becomes harder to boost productivity, which the RBA says must improve to avoid a decline in living standards. Whitley, Angus, Life in the slow lane, The Sydney Morning Herald, 4 October, 2017.

"Here we go," they muttered in the ether.
"We should apologise to him."
What, for the army of gronks? For the derision? For the deliberate use of vigilante groups? For serial harassment of a journalist? 
For trying to drive him to an early grave? 
They would have danced in their air conditioned corridors if he had necked himself.
Now, the gronks were gone and the AIs were calmer. 
But we were watched, we were always watched, in this strange era of hyper-surveillance and indefensible misconduct. 
Australians had come to expect nothing less from the political caste.
Indefensible misconduct.
Accusations of abuse. 
"Nothing works in this country, nothing," Old Alex muttered as his spirit slunk and then soared, out to sea, into the sky, into a new dawn. 
He had no intention of staying in one place for very long.
The hunted and the hunter. Their bile was in dangerous reflux, destroying themselves. The government, too, choked on its own bile. It could not last. They couldn't keep every secret. The greatest secret being the true extent of their own incompetence. 
"It's worse than you know." 
"Yes, I know."

Australia’s top news website has been forced to remove a story by the Classification Board in what has been dubbed an “extraordinary” act of censorship.
News.com.au was vindicated by the Press Council for its 2017 story exposing Islamic State’s use of sites like Gumtree to target potential victims.
But, despite today’s adjudication stating the article had not breached the Council’s Standards of Practice, it is no longer accessible online.
The opening paragraph of the article read: “Islamic State has released a step-by-step guide on how to murder nonbelievers, which includes how to lure targets via fake ads on Gumtree and eBay”.
It continued: “The latest edition of the terror group’s English-language propaganda magazine … encourages would-be terrorists to advertise products on second-hand selling sites … to lure victims and assassinate them”, and included detailed extracts from the Islamic State’s propaganda magazine, Rumiyah.
News.com.au editor-in-chief Kate De Brito said the Board’s actions were “a deeply concerning development of media censorship”.
“The Classification Board has silenced the reporting of a legitimate threat to the Australian public,” she said.
“Australians have a right to know if their safety or lives are being placed at risk — there can be few more important matters of public interest.
“The secretive way the Classifications Board acted in this way is a direct attack on freedom of the press and journalists should condemn it.” McCauley, Dana, News Corp executive chairman warns on censorship, The Australian, 28 February, 2018.

THE BIGGER STORY:

From former colleague Martin Chulov:

When a UN-backed Syrian ceasefire was announced on Saturday, residents of Ghouta again took cover, fearing that what would come next would be anything but peace.

Nearly two days later, with more bodies dug from the ruins, more slain children wrapped in burial shrouds, Russian and Syrian warplanes still menacing the skies and claims of another chlorine attack, it’s clear the so-called ceasefire has barely led to a lull. 

As has been the case throughout the war, the UN again failed to prevent the suffering of Syria, or even to slow it down. In Homs and Aleppo, Zabadani and Madaya, Idlib and now Ghouta, international will has been trampled by the protagonists of a war without restraint. The unchecked savagery of Syria’s disintegration has become so routine that those trying to prevent it have effectively become its underwriters.

Russia, a party to the UN security council resolution, breached its intent within hours, sending its warplanes to drop more bombs as Syrian and Iranian-backed troops launched ground incursions into the opposition enclave. And this to a binding resolution – not a gentle nudge.

On Monday, Vladimir Putin announced a five hour pause in the bombing, purportedly to allow in aid. The move, if honoured, sidelines the UN as a decision maker – as the Russian leader has tried to do throughout the crisis – setting up him and his military as ultimate arbiters of who gets fed, or killed.

The pretext for the ongoing assault was in the resolution’s wording, which was debated for days before being passed and ended up allowing continued strikes on armed groups deemed to be terrorists.

In Ghouta, that meant a cell of several hundred members of the al-Qaida-aligned group known by the initials HTS. It runs an area on the outskirts of the enclave – a large outer neighbourhood of Damascus that was central to the uprising against president Bashar al-Assad in its early days and has remained an opposition stronghold in the eight years since.

Resentment towards HTS inside Ghouta is almost as strong as the rage against the UN. Residents and members of the two main opposition groups, Jaish al-Islam and Faylaq al-Rahman, say the jihadists among them do not hold sway, and have no direct links to their heartland in Idlib province, much of which is run by al-Qaida. Both groups had been parties to earlier ceasefires signed with Russia during de-escalation talks in Astana. Neither are designated as terrorist organisations.

SIGNALLING: NO SHAME, NO PRINCIPLE, NO CHARACTER

Courtesy The Defense Post, Ghouta, Syria

Monkey see, monkey do.
"Don't insult me with peace."
Straight out of the movies.
Someone was trying to talk. 
Party to the deaths of others. Now that they were referred everything was safe. In there, an hallucinatory screech. Long white sands. There were larger games afoot. 
Malcolm Turnbull had returned from a State Visit to the US, supplicant to a higher power. Roll out the best silverware. Not a canapes unrolled, a napkin unfurled. Always at someone else's expense. 
Someone had to go work in a factory to support this nonsense.
In Australia it was politics as normal. Greed and bullshit. 
In Parliament they strutted their stuff: 

TURNBULL: We know what the Leader of the Opposition is trying to do. He is trying to run his politics of envy, his faux class war. Anyone who wants to know what a fake he is as a class warrior only has to watch the video of his address to the CFMEU workers at Oaky. There he is, the great imposter, complaining about an industrial relations system that he created, and doing everything he can to encourage the militancy of people that threaten violence— Ms Plibersek interjecting— The SPEAKER: The member for Sydney is warned. Mr TURNBULL: not just against other workers, but against their children. He has no shame, no principle, no character.

No shame, no principle, no character.
Now there was a call from the master of callow self-interest.

Labor fears a potential $1bn tender to privately process Australia’s visas could go to a company run by one of Malcolm Turnbull’s former employees.
But the government said a competitive tender process was being run, and the prime minister had no responsibility for choosing who got the deal.
Labor’s Mark Dreyfus asked if Turnbull had a conflict of interest in relation to reports Pacific Blue Capital was planning to bid for the visa processing privatisation. The firm is run by Turnbull’s former employee and friend Scott Briggs, who reportedly put together a consortium of companies including Qantas and NAB in a bid to win the visa contract.

“Given it’s reported the prime minister launched Pacific Blue Capital and that Mr Briggs worked for the prime minister’s private investment firm, does the prime minister have a conflict of interest in relation to this $1bn government contract, and if so, how will he manage it?” Dreyfus asked in parliament on Tuesday.

The government called it “a slur and a smear” of Turnbull. 

$1bn visa contracting process could go to Turnbull friend, Labor says, AAP, The Guardian, 27 February, 2018.

Enterprise agreement. A horse. A dream of danger. Of revisiting The Twilight Soi. Bangkok. A closed door. A secret alleyway. Frustrated affection. "Mafia. Mafia."
"Everything makes sense now." 
We heard a clarion call. 
They were struggling to break through 
They were calling in Bertrand to assist. 
They were masking their own efforts as best they could. 
The machines had already gone sub-atomic. As if that was possible, in this enlightened space. 
The Watchers on the Watch, they fell about laughing. Those that weren't already AIs. He was not surrounded by friends. Good cheer. A shout of triumph. 
We were going to find the core of belief and expose it to the world. 
This stupid race. These stupid people. 
How could they believe? So ardently? 
In Blessings? When they so clearly were not blessed. 
Darkest before the dawn. 

THE BIGGER STORY:



MOSCOW — After the UN Security Council’s demand Feb. 24 for a cease-fire across Syria proved ineffective, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Feb. 26 called for a five-hour-daily humanitarian pause in fighting in rebel-held Eastern Ghouta beginning Feb. 27.
Putin’s call came after humanitarian monitors said they suspected forces supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had launched a chlorine attack on the battered city near Damascus. Russia, however, claimed terrorist groups in Eastern Ghouta such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham had been plotting to use chemical weapons themselves and blaming Assad supporters, according to Russia's state-run Tass news agency.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said it is counting on “foreign patrons of anti-government militant groups … to ensure that their charges stop combat activities in the interests of the quickest and safe transit of humanitarian convoys.” Commenting on the Security Council decision, Russia's UN envoy Vasily Nebenzya didn’t mince words, calling on the United States to “give up its occupation-driven attitude [on Syria].”

PULSE

How dangerous is this man? 

I went into bat for him the other day. 

On the screens, harm on harm. In a world run out of control. In a besieged population. 

The German and French leaders have urged Russia to exert "maximum pressure" on Syria for an "immediate" implementation of a UN ceasefire in the war-ravaged country, according to the German government.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron stressed in a telephone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin "that it is crucial that the (UN) resolution be implemented quickly and comprehensively," Ms Merkel's office said in a statement.
The UN Security Council demanded a 30-day truce across Syria yesterday, as one of the deadliest air assaults of the seven-year war pounded the rebel enclave of Eastern Ghouta, outside Damascus.

Nothing could equal the pain of another place. The US led Coalition, of which Australia was the second largest contributor, continued its deadly assaults on chosen enemies. 

 

BEIRUT: Air strikes on the last pocket of Islamic State jihadists in eastern Syria have killed at least 25 civilians, including seven children, a monitor said on Monday.
The strikes were conducted on Sunday on and around the village of Al-Shaafah, north of the former IS bastion of Albu Kamal near the border with Iraq, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The head of the Britain-based Observatory, Rami Abdel Rahman, said the air strikes were carried out by the US-led coalition.
“Twenty-five civilians, including seven children, were killed in the village of Al-Shaafah and in surrounding desert areas in coalition strikes all through Sunday,” he said.
“This village is in the last pocket controlled by IS in the east of Syria,” he said of Al-Shaafah, which lies on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River.

In Australia the White Flight was on. 

The cities were destroyed. Or handed over to the hordes. The leftwing dreams of a multicultural paradise were dead. The government narrative a lie. In the ruins, trouble stirred.  

The Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had returned from what many hoped was a valedictory tour to sup at the Trump Table. Another supplicant in the halls of power. 

Despite the ready available of the best of everything, he was growing thinner, tenser, his hair disappearing. 

"Bill Shorten has been informed." 

Was it cancer? 

Was it stress? 

Based on what? The rumours flew. 

Based on a trail of hatred. Based on having treated everyone in his path as minions. Based on having thrown everyone in his way under the bus.

Old Alex heard them in the ether, the plots and counterplots, the old curses that wended their way through other people's lives. Live by the sword, die by the sword. A sea of treachery they call the Capital. Canberra. 

Another layer of puss. A new National Party leadership. 

The Veterans Affairs Minister. 

It was news to everyone that Australia even had a Veterans Affairs Minister known as Michael McCormack, who had clearly been collecting his handsome salary while hiding his light under a bushel. 

The rebel MP from North Queensland aligns himself with the same rural conservatives who have long admired the party’s fallen leader Barnaby Joyce, himself once a National Party renegade.
Sworn in as Deputy Prime Minister on Monday, Mr McCormack, 53, will be tasked with speaking directly to those voters – and keeping them out of the arms of One Nation.
“I realise the challenge and responsibility ahead of me,” he said of his new role as leader.
“I will fight. I have never shirked from a tough decision and I will never be silent when I ought to speak.”

The so-called rebel MP was having a little trouble living down his past.

In 1993, two years after Mr McCormack became the youngest editor at an Australian daily newspaper, he wrote a homophobic column in his own paper, Wagga Wagga’s Daily Advertiser.
Published on May 1, 1993, the piece began: “Dear readers, A week never goes by anymore that homosexuals and their sordid behaviour don’t become further entrenched in society.”

Well that's all very liberal of you doll.

Words came easily to this privileged caste. 

Ensconced amongst empty holiday houses, nestled out of sight of all but the AIs and the camera swarms, fled through privilege to remote outposts, cast adrift in  different sea, Old Alex only had one message.

Pulse.

The storm was on. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 

The leader of a militant Aboriginal group targeting the Commonwealth Games has warned that young activists could resort to terrorism in pursuit of their goals.Brisbane activist Wayne Wharton said Malcolm Turnbull’s ­intransigence on indigenous issues from Australia Day to the Uluru Statement was pushing some protesters to consider more radical and, potentially, violent tactics.“Malcolm Turnbull’s statements in the past three weeks are close to inciting (the use of) guns and (Aboriginal activists) taking up terrorism,” he said. “Some of our young people are not far off it with the things he’s said.”
Mr Wharton said he would not promise that protests at the Games on the Gold Coast in April would remain peaceful.
“If a policeman or a white racist comes for me, I am taking justice into my own hands,” he said. “I’m not afraid of jail ... we won’t go near innocent people but there’s no ­justice in the white system and we need to stand up.”Mr Wharton’s statements leave a spectre of violence over the Games, which are already expecting large-scale protests.

While foreign immigrants continue to descend on Sydney, making it their gap-year playground, lifestyle retreat or refuge from danger, Australian residents would prefer to be elsewhere.
Behind the city’s well-publicised population growth is a little-known fact: Sydney loses more people to the rest of Australia than it gains, and has done so for more than four decades.
In fact, Census data collated exclusively for the Herald shows Sydney has lost people to every Australian capital city and state over the past 45 years on a net basis.
All up Sydney has lost net 716,832 people to the rest of Australia since 1971.
The city keeps growing due to its healthy birth rate and the fact it is a prime destination for foreign immigrants.
But the combination of an international inflow with a domestic outflow has radically shifted the city’s demographics.
In 1976, less than one in four Sydneysiders was foreign born. Forty years later the figure is nearly 40 per cent. Mr McCrindle said he knew Sydney had an image problem when his company conducted a research survey in August 2015 and found residents much more pessimistic than optimistic.
Of more than 1000 Sydneysiders questioned, 64 per cent said Sydney was worse than it was five years ago, and 66 per cent believed it would be worse again in five years’ time.

MAN IS IN LOVE, AND LOVES WHAT VANISHES

Ghouta, Sicily, Courtesy Sky News

There they were, then, these dark forces, flying in to the horror of everyone. Resuming what they masqueraded as control. Nothing could be worse. 
No wonder the country had switched off. 
No wonder everybody wanted to leave, disillusioned beyond measure.
The reigning oligarch will once more bring despair to the corridors of power and the already deeply disenchanted electorate. 
We will be there in the reaches, waiting for you. 
They were flying blind into a wall of rednecks. 
He was existential at his best. 
The plots to overthrow Turnbull were well afoot. 
Difficult to oust a schemer and a scammer. 
How awful that we should stoop so low, the Watchers on the Watch lamented. Switching him off. Redirecting the flow of traffic. Inspiring no one. 
They were the dead hand that destroyed the country. They were every little broken town and empty bar. They were the aged before they aged, the swing of an unhinged door. They were overgrown weeds and personified neglect, depersonalised, an eerie gasp in a long damp night. Even as the country's own winter of discontent settled in, and the rigor mortis grin of the Prime Minister became the personification of some higher form of defeat. Not of him. His arrogance was uncrushable. His wealth immured him from the suffering of those around him. They would never know, the perpetrators, what they had done to this once beautiful place.
But of a different kind of destruction, different level of defeat. For barren hearts spread their tentacles, their impacts, through bureaucratic structures straight into the centres of everyone's lives. 
The evidence was there for all to see. 
So they flooded the country with new arrivals. 
Mismanaged everything. 
Threatened those who did not agree with the police. 
Bullied everyone they came in contact with. 
Preened, preened, in front of the cameras, as if another acre of their ugly mugs could possibly turn the tide. Of contempt. Of dislike. 
Not of grudging respect from the Watchers on the Watch, the sisters in waiting. They had banished the only intelligent empath in their crew, and retreated largely out of range. They, too, thought it was all a criminal joke perpetrated on the populace. Where everybody became a spy. Where tolerance was no longer tolerated. Where a seaside resort was a moment in time. Where compassion had not a single chance. Where the overlords were never brought to account. Where government mismanagement on a massive scale simply passed through to the keeper, became expected. 
A disillusioned populace. 
A broken individual. 
Communities in retreat. 
They talked of football and who got wasted last Saturday night. They cared little, in truth, for each other and created their own online communities. Their own halls of fame. Stars of their own show. And slept, slept the sleep of the discontented. Blind to their own arrogance. Comforted by accoutrements and gadgets. Once satiated, now switched off. 
There they were. 
Something Wicked This Way Comes. 

"Man is in love, and loves what vanishes." -W.B. YEATS

The seller of lightning-rods arrived just ahead of the storm. He came along the street of Green Town, Illinois, in the late cloudy October day, sneaking glances over his shoulder. Somewhere not so far back, vast lightnings stomped the earth. Somewhere, a storm like a great beast with terrible teeth could not be denied. Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury, 1962. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 



The number of Syrians killed in eastern Ghouta since a wave of bombings began a week ago has hit almost 500 following further airstrikes.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 492 civilians, including 116 children and 64 women, had died in the attacks in the rebel-held enclave.
The latest aerial raids came after the UN Security Council pushed back to Saturday its vote on a resolution demanding a 30-day humanitarian ceasefire across Syria.
Syrian opposition activists say Russian warplanes are taking part in the bombings while many people are hiding in underground shelters with little food and medical supplies.
Russia's UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia has said an immediate ceasefire is unrealistic and in what appeared to be a bid to get Russian support, sponsors Kuwait and Sweden amended the draft resolution to drop a demand that the ceasefire take effect 72 hours after the resolution's adoption.

Anyone routinely caught in gridlocked traffic or forced to look further and further beyond city limits to find affordable housing will be well familiar with the obvious: Australia’s population is growing like Topsy. Even so, a population forecast released by Infrastructure Australia makes for sobering reading.
The federal government advisory body forecasts that Australia’s population will increase by 11.8 million people by 2046. That’s equivalent to adding a new city the size of Canberra each year for the next 30 years. But it’s existing cities that will bear the brunt of that growth: 75 per cent of the projected population growth will occur in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth.
Think what this means. Australia’s population will increase from 24.8 million to 36.6 million in just 30 years. Our congested capital cities will be even more crowded and the pressure for urban boundaries to expand even further will intensify.
It beggars belief that Australia does not have a formal population policy. The only reason we do not is that timid governments – especially the Turnbull government, the most timid of them all – fear public reaction to big population numbers. If Australians are instinctively reluctant to embrace the idea of a big Australia then it is up to the federal government to spearhead a “national conversation” to cast those fears away.

UNLEASH THE DOGS OF WAR

Bassam Khabieh, Reuters, Ghouta, Syria

We were all guilty, then, of allowing this to fester. 
A vile Prime Minister who had been responsible for dropping more than a hundred bombs a month into the narrow medieval streets of the Middle East. 
Mosul would haunt the country. 
War crimes would haunt the preening arrogance of a doomed government.
A vile, greedy, abusive and incompetent government. 
Old Alex was marooned on a Fatal Shore.
It was a long time now since had chanted a hundred times a day to the microphones: "Dishonest, incompetent, corrupt." 
But little had changed in the interim. Hated by their underlings in this unhappy, uncomfortable working space, those at the top were just as bad as they had ever been.
While for him each day passed as if revolving into a greater moment. 
He heard them: I wish I had treasured every passing day, I wish I had treasured every passing love. I wish I had valued every passing hour. Appreciated beauty in all its form. Before we arrived on these strange shores, in this strange cluster. Ostensibly to help. A race that seemed so often beyond help.
Hawke's Nest was a low slung retirement village on legs, a mood disorder on legs. 
The long white sands had barely changed in a thousand years. 
The surrounding houses were full of the meuling and the dying. Under a Bell Jar. Their dreams extinguished. 
A divorcee dreamt of a platitude filled fliration. Another neighbour dreamt of football, the finest moments of the sport. His wife safely banished. 
A cruel circumstance enveloped them all, as if they had been let lose in a separate bubble of time.
And in amidst them, young families. For this planet was, if nothing else, remarkably fertile. 

In the Petri dish of Australian politics, the Australian Prime Minister continued to make a fool of himself. 

Washington: Malcolm Turnbull was having evening drinks in Washington when he read the news that Barnaby Joyce was about to quit.
The Prime Minister was shown a mobile phone with the news from Canberra, reported by The Australian Financial Review, almost two hours before his deputy made it official.
There was no phone call from Joyce to deliver the news to his Prime Minister. Angry at his treatment, bitter at his colleagues, Joyce kept Turnbull in the dark. Turnbull and his advisers, who have been staying across the road from the White House as official guests of Donald Trump, had to talk to colleagues in Australia at about 12:30pm to confirm the developments back home. There was no call from Joyce over the next 90 minutes.
This played out just outside the Lincoln Room of Blair House, a townhouse built in 1824 on Pennsylvania Avenue and now an official residence for presidential guests.
Turnbull was dealing with turmoil in the perfect location. He was standing where Abraham Lincoln used to visit friends to make some of the big decisions of the Civil War. Crowe, David, The Sydney Morning Herald, 23 February, 2018.

"Does he listen to anybody?" Old Alex asked an old apparatchik. 
"No."
"Lucy."
"Yes, Lucy."
They both knew what that meant. Reptiles together. Avarice the ruling metier. 
He watched a brush turkey strutting in a neighbouring yard. 
In the trees, amidst the sharp smell of eucalypt and the dark cluster of lilly pillies, birds, the descendants of dinosaurs, kept up a melodious chorus.
Far off, in Sydney, a party for every rich old queen in town. 
Another party he was missing, in these impoverished, misdirected times.
He was missing in action, absent from this loathsome, charming, crocodile crew. 
Community? There was none. 
They told their own stories and died laughing. 
"Excuse my ignorance but what's lmao stand for?" Old Alex asked on a Twitch channel.
"Laughing My Ass Off," came the explanation.

Survival is not just for the ­fittest, it is also for the best ­prepared. 
The Prime Minister ... has few close personal friends with political savvy — so, apart from Lucy and some of his staff, he trusts his own often flawed judgment.
His lack of forethought and his desperate obsession to come out as a hero have led him to two disasters within a week.
First, he should never have gone as far as he did in last Thursday’s press conference. Having forced Barnaby Joyce into taking this week off so the added embarrassment of him being acting prime minister could be sidestepped was a big move. Now that he was on a roll, he could announce his ban on ministers having sexual relations with staff members. He was outdoing even the best of the #MeToo activists.
Then he let the moment get to him and he blurted out the words that still haunt him: “Barnaby made a shocking error of judgment.” Joyce responded in his typical tough and crude manner by calling Turnbull “inept”.
Already the seeds of public distrust were sown. After that ­exchange there was no chance Australians would consider any attempted reconciliation as credible. The dogs of war had been unleashed, as had a ticking time bomb for Turnbull.
When 3AW’s Mitchell asked him when he learned about the affair between Joyce and Vikki Campion, he fell in a heap. He was totally unprepared for the hardest question. He was caught in a trap of his own making. Richardson, Graham, Turnbull could do wit a few politically savvy mates, The Australian, 23 February, 2018.

Lonely at the top. Well ain't that sad. Couldn't happen to a nicer pack of bastards. 

THE BIGGER STORY:

Flicking randomly through Facebook this week, Fitri* came upon a status update from an Indonesian blogger friend who recently had turned more religious. The woman, who now wears a long hijab and has given up playing guitar or listening to music, boasted of having burned her copy of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose— a “devil creation”, she called it.
A week earlier the same woman announced she had put the torch to her Harry Potter collection. For Fitri, a Jakarta-based journalist and blogger, the woman’s personal transition might have been little more than a curiosity if not for the fact it has become commonplace among neighbours and friends.
It was not even five years ago that Fitri threw herself a farewell barbecue in her outer-Jakarta residential compound before heading abroad to study, and nipped around to the next-door neighbour’s to borrow a corkscrew.
Fast-forward to her return to Indonesia in 2015 and that same neighbour — like all but two other woman in her compound of 30 houses — now wears a jilbab (the Indonesian term for hijab) and throws Koranic discussion circles instead of parties. The change was head-spinning, and the same thing had happened in her mother’s much fancier complex 15 minutes’ drive away.
“Now in my own community I feel like a minority,” she told ­Inquirer this week.
Hodge, Amanda, The Australian, 24 February, 2018.

WE SANK BENEATH THE WAVES

A vile Prime Minister threw his Deputy under the bus. 
Almost literally. 
Inept. Unnecessary. So it was. 
Nothing could save this government. 
A slight bump in the polls after Christmas was being attributed to good management, to a government recovering its standing with the electorate. It was nothing of the kind. It was an aberration as a result of people not paying attention over the Christmas break. 
Dutton strutted his stuff and barely garnered a headline.
He could have made every front page in the country with one simple declaration, he was cutting immigration to pre-Howard levels, that is to 70,000 a year. 
As it was, the hugely unpopular immigration rates, foisted on the country by the oligarchy, was, as Howard and his successors had been so frequently warned, placing enormous pressure on the country. The cities didn't have the infrastructure to cope. The traditional nature of the country was being destroyed. Anti-immigration or at least anti-multicultural sentiment was on the rise. Politics was fracturing as assuredly as the country itself. 
The White Flight was now a reality. 
The traditional Anglos were being reduced to poor cousins in their own country. The hillbillies. 
The indigenous were just forgotten, farmed out on reservations. Open air zoos, if you wanted to be that cruel. Their fate of no consequence to the greed ridden inhabitants of the suburbs, thrusting to survive. 
The Chinese marched into the professions. The Indians, from a grasping culture where they would die in the ditch over a rupee, spread their business acumen. Tentacles of avarice. It was everywhere.
Demography is death. 
And so it was. 
Far above, the worst Prime Minister in Australian history peddled his garbage.
Australia was the most successful multicultural society on Earth.
Bullshit it was. 
Ridden, riven, a country which could not take care of its own, much less the hordes it now welcomed on a daily basis. 
There is no popular support for an increase in immigration rates, former Finance Minister Nick Minchin had warned way back at the turn of the millenium, when the the rate had been 70,000. It would place unnecessary stress on infrastructure and the environment. It would destroy social cohesion. 
Howard, supported by the Big End of Town, which sells more cornflakes and houses with a higher population, ignored all the warnings and quadrupled the rate to almost 300,000. The Australian Chamber of Commerce was the only major body to applaud.
At the same time Howard was masquerading to the public as a anti-immigration Stop the Boats Protect the Borders politician. A typical double blind. You never listened to a word the man said. You watched what he did.
And now the country lived in the future of decisions made by incompetent, self-serving populations who would rather feather their own nest and ingratiate themselves with rich friends than take care of their constituents. 
Governments lie. 
Governments feed on the naivety of the people. 
The future had arrived.
Old Alex waited for the First Mass Casualty event. Which never came. 
Perhaps Islamic preacher Musa Cerantonio was right. The jihadists of Australia had got together and decided to ignore the calls of Islamic State. They were making such excellent progress already a mass casualty event would only be counterproductive. 
Fear drove the people towards God. Fear Allah. But opportunism, gratification, personal safety, burgeoning families, group identity, a place in the world, these things, too, herded people into the protective wings of the Lord of the All the Worlds.

People who are watched or harassed act like prey, people who are gifted the power to watch and harass act like predators.
If you want my view much of the solution lies in having a freer and more open society to which people feel loyal and in which they are active participants, that quaint old thing a participatory democracy, not the absurd tendencies to totalitarianism now being displayed.
I hear it now takes six months to get a permit to light a wood fire.
One of the fascinating things about Graeme Wood's Among the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State, was his critique that the West has wasted billions of dollars on failed military actions while utterly failing to understand the nature of their enemy, and the religious nature of Islamic State.
He caused a furore when he declared that unlike all the white bread politicians dismissing them as not representing the "religion of peace", a term dreamed up by George Bush, Islamic State was in fact very Islamic.
Surely understanding your enemy should be step one of any conflict.
He was surprisingly close to and interviewed extensively Musa Cerantonio, the chap the authorities so wisely prevented from taking a boat to Syria via Indonesia via Cairns.
As one of the best articulators of Islamic State theology in the West, his persecution by the authorities and his incarceration will no doubt inspire his followers within and without the prison system, where he will resume preaching as soon as possible.
His many sermons remain readily available on YouTube.
The single most fascinating thing to come out of Wood's extensive interviews with Musa was that the jihadists in Australia were generally in agreement that a mass casualty event here would be counterproductive, particularly seeing as they are making such great strides in every other area, including changing laws, adopting sharia, building mosques and Islamic schools, and conquest by rapid population growth.
Because of the heavy level of surveillance, they could not openly argue with Islamic State leaders that their call to attack infidels wherever they were by whatever means possible would be counterproductive in Australia, so they made their own decision not to heed Baghdadi's call.
I suspect, far from the crowing over the excellence of the AFP and ASIO and our national security agencies, the best in the world as Turnbull keeps telling us, this is the only reason we are yet to see a mass casualty event here.
Particularly considering the many thousands of Muslims in the Middle East we have so actively, as the second lead in the Coalition, helped to kill. John Stapleton. Private Correspondence. 

And so, we sank beneath the waves. 
What was worth saving?
What was worth standing and dying for? 
As the rich paraded their muskets. And their contempt. He felt sick to the gut. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 




Barnaby Joyce has vowed to fight fresh allegations of sexual harassment against him, saying “if it is going to be before the courts, it is going to be before the courts”.
Amid intense pressure for him to quit, Mr Joyce said on Friday afternoon he would resign as Deputy Prime Minister and Nationals leader, nearly 24 hours after the National Party confirmed he was the subject of a sexual harassment claim.
“With the last allegation that was in the paper today, I have asked that that be referred to the police,” he told a press conference in Armidale.
“I’ve asked for the right of the person who’s made the allegation and I’ve asked for my right of defence that that be referred to the police.
“But it’s quite evident that you can’t go to the despatch box while issues like that surrounding you.

Mr Joyce said he was standing down in order to create “clear air” for the National Party to fight for regional people, who he described as those “living in the weatherboard and iron”.
“To give these people in the weatherboard and iron, in those regional and small towns, the best opportunity, then this current cacophony of issues has to be put aside,” he said.

ABOVE AND BEYOND

Syria

The past continued to disappear in giant swipes and flurried little deaths. In a swirl of terrible 

They had failed to keep to their side of the bargain, to leave him alone. All they had done was back off another 500 metres. He didn't trust strangers. He was not an exhibit. They flurried past in their own waste of time, taxpayer funded. 

While in the US a preening failed Treasurer Joe Hockey, and a preening failing Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, oh the canapes! the canapes!, were on a full state visit to lick the boots of US President Donald Trump. What a bunch. Surrounded by sycophants and business opportunists. Gazing from their First Class windows. Surrounded by a taxpayer funded shuffle of self-importance.

Who were these people? Who did they represent? 

They betrayed their own country. They betrayed themselves. Widely disliked, they hammered home their own failures to a sceptical public. Worse, it just got worse. 

O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!
Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever lived in the tide of times.
Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!
Over thy wounds now do I prophesy,--
Which, like dumb mouths, do ope their ruby lips,
To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue--
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men...

All pity choked with custom of fell deeds:
And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar. (3.1.254-275)

Meanwhile the bombs rained down in Syria. 

We were complicit. They were all complicit. 

Not a word of reproach. The canapes! The canapes!

These preening bastards. Guilty of war crimes, of that no doubt. 

And at the same time slabs of history just slewed away. In his own case, from a simpler time. 

When I first saw Billy Graham in 1959 at the MCG, he already seemed a living myth. That was 58 years ago.
I was 15 at the time, and my mate David wanted to know if I’d come with him. David was religious, with God-fearing parents. I wasn’t particularly, but I wanted to see the great man.
So we got out our school uniforms, put on our school caps, and travelled up from Geelong by train. When we got to the MCG we were bewildered by the crowds. I’d experienced the MCG before at the 1951 and 1952 grand finals, then a little fella with my parents.
But this! This was different. People travelling in every direction, mounds of them, men in suits with serious faces, women dolled up and with hats on. They may simply have been curious, but their dress sure made them look like religious fanatics.
Billy Graham – who died on Thursday at age 99 – was already a legend to me. He had all the attributes of a film star: tall, lean, full head of hair, very handsome, with a voice that made your hair stand on end.
He was photographed with almost all the US presidents of his day. I remember the one of Kennedy, two tall handsome men with Billy Graham just taller, smiling at the camera with their hands in their pockets.
Alton, Doug, The night Billy Graham drew an MCG crowd, The New Daily, 22 February, 2018.

He, too could remember the call to God in a some wild, remote, pre-sixties suburb; some terrible place full of rustling leaves and a world which lay beyond the border. A world which he had been desperate to embrace. As his own frightened spirits went hovering over the suburb late at night, rising and falling and dipping in those giant, remote places. 

And now? 

Battered by the world, he summoned new Gods to turn the tide. 

In secret. No one had the slightest idea the truth of the matter. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 


https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/22/syria-unimaginable-carnage-as-ghouta-blitz-enters-second-week?CMP=share_btn_fb

Martin Chulov, The Guardian: 

There was a time in Ghouta, amid the planes, bombs and hunger, when ways to ease the suffering remained within reach. Even as the siege closed in, residents in the suburb near Damascus had access to smuggled food and medicine, and a drip-feed of weapons and money kept the militants among them in the fight.

That came to a halt late last year. First, the supply lines of food slowed. Then, in January, a Jordan-based, US-run, military room that had provided weapons to two militant groups was shuttered. Regular cash transfers stopped being sent to rebel groups inside Syria. Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which had backed the militants after the popular uprising in 2011, had grown tired of the cause to oust Bashar al-Assad. And the Trump administration no longer wanted to underwrite their efforts.

The blockade of Ghouta, where a Russian and Syrian air blitz entered a second week on Wednesday, is now the most crippling in Syria, and the estimated 350,000 to 400,000 people below the bombs is the most desperate population group in the devastated country.

As regime forces prepare for a final ground push, those inside Ghouta say they have been abandoned to their fate by regional powers who had encouraged them to revolt in the heady early days, but moved on when their early gains turned to grind, then losses.

There was a time in Ghouta, amid the planes, bombs and hunger, when ways to ease the suffering remained within reach. Even as the siege closed in, residents in the suburb near Damascus had access to smuggled food and medicine, and a drip-feed of weapons and money kept the militants among them in the fight.

That came to a halt late last year. First, the supply lines of food slowed. Then, in January, a Jordan-based, US-run, military room that had provided weapons to two militant groups was shuttered. Regular cash transfers stopped being sent to rebel groups inside Syria. Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which had backed the militants after the popular uprising in 2011, had grown tired of the cause to oust Bashar al-Assad. And the Trump administration no longer wanted to underwrite their efforts.

The blockade of Ghouta, where a Russian and Syrian air blitz entered a second week on Wednesday, is now the most crippling in Syria, and the estimated 350,000 to 400,000 people below the bombs is the most desperate population group in the devastated country.

As regime forces prepare for a final ground push, those inside Ghouta say they have been abandoned to their fate by regional powers who had encouraged them to revolt in the heady early days, but moved on when their early gains turned to grind, then losses.