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.