A FLUTED MADNESS IN AN ECHO CHAMBER

Karen Willcocks

They were hostile. Paid to be hostile. Jobsworths without conscience. Driven by greed. Compliance. No special talents beyond conformity. They did what their bosses told them to do. 
Never think the same again, he ordered. 
There were the dogs at bay. New hostiles at play. 
Pit bull.
He assumed they referred to their boss.
The pit bull with lipstick. 
You'll get us all into trouble. 
Well you should leave me alone.
We're wasting our time here.
Tell me about it. 
On and on and on they went. 
He's earnt my respect.
I love you too. 
They laughed and laughed. 
The country burned. 
Not now, you fool. The future broke into the present. It always did. 
The public had been sold a terrible lie. 
Drowning in it. Political correctness? And the rest. 
Suspended. The fight is suspended. 
They came from fear. They came from the future. 
You're the Prime Minister. Can't you stop him?
But they were already spooked. They were leading the country over the cliff edge, and knew in their heart of hearts they had not just been compromised, but were deeply wrong in what they did. Betrayed their country as they spoke. 
It was meant to have a chilling effect. It was meant to shut them up. 
Rubbish. 
These were the ancient ones. 
These were the ones who were fluid in time. 
Open defiance. 
They had the gods, the things you thought were gods, on their side. 
Any sufficiently advanced technology appears as magic. 
Criticise as much as you like. 
They were all caught in echo chambers. Manufactured echo chambers. 
A country betrayed. Truly betrayed.
A patriot, for now all patriots stood on the outside, floated outside a divergent clan. 
He's the most reasonable person I know, but reason has been lost.  Not just echo chambers, a kind of fluted madness. 
Well, whatever comes to mind. I'm standing in for someone. 
They created these bell jars, ice castles, society inside a snow globe.
No one could escape. No one dared. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 

Mark Latham remained, well, off the leash: 

FLASHBACK FRIDAY: THE SKY NEWS SACKING

Twelve months ago, Mark Latham was punted from Sky News, with his contract torn up on-the-spot. Four reasons were given by the CEO Angela Frangipane (pictured below). One of them was Latham's criticism of the head of the Prime Minister's Department, Martin Parkinson, for embracing identity politics.

Frangipane wrote to Latham citing this on-air comment from 26 March 2017: "As for Parkinson, as I've always argued in my Tele columns, identity politics is a divisive and primitive approach that judges people, not on their individual character, work ethic, skills and contribution to community, but on race, gender and sexuality - that is, on the colour of their skin, shape of their genitalia and, if it can be established, who they are sleeping with. Parkinson has announced this policy as part of the 'diversity' recruitment strategy in the Australian Public Service (APS)."

Frangipane said he regarded "the above conduct as inappropriate and misconduct which is adverse to the reputation of ANC (Sky News)". That is, in good part, Latham was sacked for criticising Martin Parkinson's recruitment strategy in the APS. This was deemed as "misconduct".

Later in 2017, a report from within Parkinson's own department showed the APS recruitment strategy to be a joke. The BETA report showed their was no recruitment bias against women, migrants or Aborigines. Indeed, the only bias was against white men. There was no need for a 'diversity' recruitment policy. That is, Latham's criticism of Parkinson had been validated from within Parkinson's own department.

Elsewhere in that Department, Parkinson's staff are responsible for running Australia Day activities and the Australian of the Year awards. Frangipane is the head of the NSW Government's Australia Day committee, putting forward the NSW nominee. He didn't want any criticism of Parkinson (no matter how valid) because of their elite network links, possibly jeopardising this nice little sinecure for Frangipane.

This is how the insider elites work in the Australian political/media scene. They couldn't give two hoots about free speech and accurate analysis and commentary for the public's benefit. It's a self-interested back-scratching society.

Led by idiots like Parkinson and Frangipane.

DARK ANGELS STIRRED

Jones Bay, Sydney, Tim Ritchie

Dark angels stirred. They were not used to having their power questioned.
Your life is in our hands.
Fate has brought us together. 
We've got the salient points. We will help you. 
Lifestyle, lifestyle. If only they could move on from their hunt for vulnerability. From their original instructions: Destroy him.
These corrupt elements of government, unknown to the general public, would have passed largely unremarked if they hadn't decided on a step too far: too assault the nation's Fourth Estate. To target, manipulate and control the nation's journalists in a desperate effort to control the public debate. 
Not to create a vibrant, lively democracy, but to control a slave population. 

Instead the military trained idiots in command decided to stir the nation's wordsmiths by attempting to hold them in check.
The hornet's nest. Those with the power to spread ideas. 

Many were easily controlled. They all needed a job, a paycheck at the end of the week day. To feed their families and maintain their status. 

To suck up to the editor and fulfill the mission of the day. 

What passed for news. 

It had long been rumoured that the agencies had officers secreted throughout the nation's media organisations, some climbing high up the ladders. 

The nation could not have got so bad without deliberate orchestration. 

The media could not have got so bad without deliberate orchestration.

ASIO, for one, had a long history of interfering in the nation's media. 

Historically, for the taxpayer funded ABC, it was a simple matter. Security vetting.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation had long since abandoned its central task of telling the story of the country's people, and instead become the propaganda wing of the central government. That it veered left in much of its analysis was no sign of independence. 

As is the nature of news, much of the bias is evident in the central question of story selection.

The government has the ABC in its pocket, simply because they pay a ludicrous $1.2 billion a year to fund a poor quality of journalism purveyed by an inept and poorly administered "news" organisation. So the public can watch replays of Antique Roadshow and Midsomer Murders, and fall ever more deeply into the slumber of Australian society.

Malleable, easy to manage. Send them off to work. Harvest their money. Leave them snoring on the couch.  

Its shifting through a narrow field of left wing concerns, climate change, feminism, refugees, indigenous disadvantage, was exactly what the the Deep State wanted to justify their massive multi-billion dollar programs; for the Deep State was deeply left. 

Yet for all their efforts, the Deep State, plump on their fat cat public service salaries, had zero understanding of the country and its people. 

On the other side of a not very high fence lay the News Limited press, blatant in its campaigning bias for the right wing of the Liberal Party; evident in tabloid headings across the nation every single day. News had 70% reach into the newspaper market. Who was in whose pocket, was Rupert Murdoch in the Liberal Party's pocket, or the Liberal Party in Rupert Murdoch's pocket, was a moot point. 

While Fairfax has been so defanged, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, so lost their  news edge so long ago, perhaps all one can do was wonder. 

None of the original impulses that once drove journalists, if not the administrators, were evident. The desire to tell a people's story, to expose abuse of power, to write beautifully, to experience the sting of exposure and a cracking yarn, none of it lay evident in the limp-wristed efforts that lay on people's doorsteps and piled high in news agencies. 

That all this effort to neutralise the nation's media meant the public turned off in droves,  that all this effort destroyed the effectiveness very vehicle through which the government once communicated, was lost on the apparatchiks. 

And that the mainstream media's loss of credibility meant people simply shifted to more democratic, more dynamic forms of media, that, too, was lost.

This impoverishment of the debating society which should be a central tenet of a healthy cultural cultural life. The excision of language a central tent. If you don't have the words you don't have the concept.

Workplace ‘diversity consultants’ are charging Australian companies up to $1800 an hour to warn employees about the dangers of using “non-inclusive” language such as “mum” and “guys”.
It has been revealed the Diversity Council of Australia (DCA) has been charging companies $3600 for a two-hour program delivered by “experienced DCA staff and consultants” to educate companies about “the power of words” at work.
The move is all part of the new #WordsAtWork campaign launched by the DCA, which aims to “spark a conversation about how even seemingly innocuous language can exclude minority groups”.
The DCA is headed by former Australian of the Year and retired Lieutenant General, David Morrison, who launched the campaign that is calling on people to think about the impact of their language, particularly ‘throwaway’ or ‘subtle lines’.
The move is the latest in a shift of PC momentum in Australia, which has seen the ABC publish pieces on the destruction of ‘gendered language’, Commonwealth Games volunteers addressed about ‘tolerance’ and Qantas directing staff on “appropriate language” to use in the workplace.
Diversity council launches campaign, TOTT News, 21 March, 2018.

A paranoid, dishonest government could not trust its own public servants. Much less the rabble, that public they were allegedly designed to serve. 

Leave it to us, the PsyOp officers said. 
Nobody can breach our power. 
But Old Alex forgot, the people forgot, that they, too, had power. 
To take back their destinies. And the nation's destiny. 
To cut the umbilical chord of compassion and discontent.
But I love you. 
They circled. They flapped their dead air wings. 
They knew they had done wrong.
They knew they were incompetent. 
I've always had doubts about their honesty, a former, senior diplomat told him.
Well everyone had doubts about their honesty these days.
No one trusted government. No one trusted the state's operatives. 
And those jobworths, decent, some of them, knew, already, the bureaucracies they served were increasingly monstrous. Not fit for purpose. Not fit to serve. 
"You don't know the half of it."
No, but he could sense in the gathering folds, in the slide towards a totalitarian state, just how malleable the populace were, and just how full of ill-intent were the overlords. 
Some had religious motive. Some were just greedy. 
Some were mentally lazy, and some just liked power. Money and power.
The sole object of surveillance was harassment and intimidation, to create a conformist population. 
"We've been monitoring him for a long time. It's coming to a head, I can sense that."
Where did any of it end? 

THE BIGGER STORY:




A suicide bomber linked to Islamic State struck on the road to a Shiite shrine in Afghanistan's capital on Wednesday, killing at least 33 people as Afghans celebrated the Persian New Year, authorities said.
Wahid Majrooh, spokesman for the Public Health Ministry, said 65 others were wounded in the attack, which was carried out by a bomber on foot.
Islamic State claimed responsibility in an online statement, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors militant websites. The group said the attack targeted "a gathering of Shiites celebrating Nowruz," the Persian New Year.
Nowruz is a national holiday in Afghanistan, and the country's minority Shiite Muslims typically celebrate by visiting shrines. The Sunni Muslim extremists of Islamic State have repeatedly targeted Shiites, whom the militants view as apostates deserving of death.
Kabul has recently seen a spate of large-scale militant attacks by both the Taliban and the Islamic State. In late January, a Taliban attacker drove an ambulance filled with explosives into the heart of the city, killing at least 103 people and wounding as many as 235.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in a statement condemned Wednesday's attack, calling it a "crime against humanity."

U.S. Ambassador John R. Bass said he was saddened by the "shameful" attack.

IN THE GRIP

Donna Rohrich

I've made a decision tonight, to bring in the big guns. 
I won't make the same mistake again. 
Monitoring brain patterns. 
We beg your forgiveness. 
They were liars, even when they were apologising. 
Everything was artifice.
The country took one more slide into its own destiny. 
A million calculations, a million tiny rebirths, there in the slumber zone as they slid towards disaster. 
Awesome, right? 

A couple rebel top gun pilots
Flying with nowhere to be
Don't know you super well
But I think that you might be the same as me
Behave abnormally
Let's let things come out of the woodwork
I'll give you my best side, tell you all my best lies
Yeah, awesome right?
So let's let things come out of the woodwork
I'll give you my best side, tell you all my best lines
Seeing me rolling, showing someone else love
Dancing with our shoes off
Know I think you're awesome, right?
Our rules, our dreams, we're blind
Blowing shit up with homemade d-d-d-dynamite
Our friends, our drinks, we get inspired
Blowing shit up with homemade d-d-d-dynamite
Blowing shit up with homemade d-d-d-dynamite. Lorde, Homemade Dynamite.

They were in the grip of a dying fall. 
There was a terrible sense... Yes? And he sputtered to a stop. Kissed by the divine, trees swirled. There were more ribald jokes, as his head lifted off. 
The agencies had tried all their dirtiest tricks, including making up rumours of the vilest kind and liaising with vigilante groups to perpetrate their lies. 
Perhaps it was true what they said, intelligence was an oxymoron.
In these hands we were safe? 
People need to wake up. 
Sleepwalking to disaster wasn't even the beginning of it. 
He looked out. Humans. They weren't a very intelligent species. But some of them were. These carriers of souls; for the carrion spirits. A muffled, unsettled dark flap above the surface. These creatures who had lived forever. The meths. Their tiny machines broke through the sound barrier. 
Awesome, right?
The bishops.
The magisterium.
The body of teaching. 

The magisterium of the Catholic Church is the church's authority or office to establish teachings. That authority is vested uniquely in the Pope and the bishops, under the premise that they are in communion with the correct and true teachings of the faith which is shown in the Cathechism of the Catholic Church. Sacred scripture and sacred tradition "make up a single sacred deposit of the Word of God, which is entrusted to the Church", and the magisterium is not independent of this, since "all that it proposes for belief as being divinely revealed is derived from this single deposit of faith."

The Universal Church whispered their own teachings. 
They held to wretched belief. 
On the plane of the dead, they held their own rituals for a deceased culture.
Billions of dollars pushing totalitarian social theory onto the Australian public had created chaos and disengagement. 
Their remained but few protests in the orthodox circus of left and right. 
Commonsense was right wing.
Disorganised compassion was left. 
Mark Latham was off the leash. 

WHY WE NEED TO CLEAN OUT ISLAM APOLOGISTS FROM OUR UNIVERSITIES
Please read the article below to understand the madness gripping Australian universities. Four academics, including three from Monash University, have condemned the Victorian Government's new $32 million centre to prevent lone-wolf terrorist attacks.
Incredibly, they make no mention of ISLAM in their analysis. Not a single word. They say the centre is faulty because "none of its experts appears to hold specific expertise in gendered violence" (that is, violence against women).
This is Left-feminist clap-trap, trying to pretend that the best predictor of someone committing an act of terrorism is a prior act of domestic violence (DV). How can they fail to mention the Koran in their article? It's simply amazing . . . they have engaged in a fantasy-world attempt to slander all men, fitting up masculinity as a driving cause of terrorism.
This article, more than any other I have seen, shows how higher education in Australia has lost the plot. It's a massive waste of taxpayer funding, diverting attention from the real causes of terrorism and thereby jeopardising public safety.  We must clean out these PC-imbeciles. We just need a government sensible enough to do it. 
Mark Latham. The Outsiders. March, 2018.

The public cared because they had been told to care. 
The past was trying to rewrite, reknit, change the fate lines. He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future. Eric Blair. Orwell to you. 
Australia had a new Grand Mufti. 

The new spiritual leader of Australia’s Sunni Muslim community, Abdul Azeem Afifi, has begun his three-year term as Grand Mufti with a strong condemnation of religious extremism, declaring we must keep Australia “safe and secure’’.
As president of the Australian National Imams Council, the peak Muslim body that appoints the Grand Mufti, Sheik Afifi ­labelled terrorism a “disease’’.
“We are sick of repeating the same thing. We are peaceful people and we are sick of terrorism,” he said in 2015. “It’s a disease. We are fighting the disease side by side.”
Yesterday, Sheik Afifi, who holds the role for three years, repeated that sentiment. “As Mufti I strongly stand against any kind of terrorism. We want to keep our country, and all countries, safe and secure,’’ he said.
Mufti's stand against terrorism, Paul Maley, The Australian, 21 March, 2018.

But who, exactly, were the terrorists?
The Western terrorists dropping bombs. 
Wake up, wake up. 
You there in the slumber zone, wake up.

THE BIGGER STORY: 

Hundreds of millions of Facebook users are likely to have had their private information harvested by companies that exploited the same terms as the firm that collected data and passed it on to Cambridge Analytica, according to a new whistleblower.

Sandy Parakilas, the platform operations manager at Facebook responsible for policing data breaches by third-party software developers between 2011 and 2012, told the Guardian he warned senior executives at the company that its lax approach to data protection risked a major breach.

Where's Zuck? Facebook CEO silent as data harvesting scandal unfolds

Read more

“My concerns were that all of the data that left Facebook servers to developers could not be monitored by Facebook, so we had no idea what developers were doing with the data,” he said.

Parakilas said Facebook had terms of service and settings that “people didn’t read or understand” and the company did not use its enforcement mechanisms, including audits of external developers, to ensure data was not being misused.

Parakilas, whose job was to investigate data breaches by developers similar to the one later suspected of Global Science Research, which harvested tens of millions of Facebook profiles and provided the data to Cambridge Analytica, said the slew of recent disclosures had left him disappointed with his superiors for not heeding his warnings.

“It has been painful watching,” he said, “because I know that they could have prevented it.”

Asked what kind of control Facebook had over the data given to outside developers, he replied: “Zero. Absolutely none. Once the data left Facebook servers there was not any control, and there was no insight into what was going on.”

GONE WAS THE SANCTITY OF PLACES

Tim Ritchie, Millers Pont

Someone called through the gathering storm.
Yes they did.
"We should have arrested him a long time ago."
"On what charge?
"Does it matter? Insurrection. Insubordination."
For letting loose the secret that the country's greatest threats came from within? 
The perpetrators amply assisted by the taxpayer, by those who had gone to work in a factory.
The purveyors of democracy not as a participatory system aimed at representing the will of the ordinary, but as a criminal enterprise robbing the poor and giving to the rich.
The Voltaire prize for Free Speech went to a supporter of Sharia in the state of Victoria, where the previous year the Premier Kevin Andrews had endorsed a law which enabled the nation's secretive security agencies to hold 10-year-olds without charge for up to a fortnight.  

Outspoken activist Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who spectacularly claimed to be the “most hated” Muslim in the country before moving to London last year, has won a prestigious prize for free speech.
Human rights group Liberty Victoria yesterday announced that Ms Abdel-Magied had been awarded the 2018 Young Voltaire Award for being a “role model” to young women, Muslims and migrants.
Actor and same-sex marriage activist Magda Szubanski has been awarded the 2018 Voltaire award, following in the footsteps of former Australian Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs, television presenter Waleed Aly and journalist David Marr.

Yassmin had risen to fame on the back of the taxpayer, and frequently insulted her adopted country, referring to Australia as "her abusive boyfriend".
A decadent society, courting its own ruin.
All the old tricks being played out around the world were being played out in Australia. Anyone who didn't support the radical deconstructionism supported by all those herds of the all-too-clever,  the nation's half-educated, was a Nazi or a racist.
They learnt at the knees of their Marxist professors, and, amply feathered in their taxpayer jobs, went out to change the world.  
Yassmin, too, had received significant support from the taxpayer, including well paid government jobs, consultancies and a world tour promoting her book.
She outraged Australians after insulting Australia's closest thing to a Holy Day, Anzac Day. She posted a message to Facebook that read: “Lest We Forget (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine …)”. Her words were interpreted a dig at Australia’s veterans and disrespectful to the sacrifices diggers made in Gallipoli.
More than 60,000 mostly young Australians had been killed during World War One, a sacrifice increasingly unappreciated as the country underwent rapid demographic transformation a century on. 
Wasted lives, wasted deaths, harvested from the towns and villages of Australia in support of the imperial power of Britain.
The went willingly, to service their country.   
How naive they were.
After she had found herself mired in controversy, even more so than the country itself was mired in deceit, Yassmin sought the advice of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group banned in much of the world as a terrorist group.
A group linked with every major terror related death in Australia. 

The activist who proclaimed Islam was “the most feminist religion” reached out to the spokesman for anti-gay and anti-women group Hizb ut-Tahrir in the wake of her fight on ABC TV’s program Q&A for advice on how she could have framed her argu­ment better.
Hizb ut-Tahrir spokes­man Wassim Doureihi posted on his personal Facebook page that Muslims were more angry with independent senator Jacqui Lambie, who wants to ban the burka, instead of two other government MPs who “belong to parties that have bombed Muslims abroad, criminalised Muslims at home, and jailed Muslims seeking refuge from both”.
Mr Doureihi and others criti­cised Yassmin Abdel-Magied for argu­ing through a “secular lens” and not having the required deep knowledge of Islam to prosecute her case.
“Salams! Well, I am always happy to take feedback,” Ms Abdel-Magied wrote in response. 
“What specifically was problematic and how can I do better in the future inshallah? I am young, and willing to learn, inshallah. Trying to do the best with the platform I can, Allah willing.”
Feminist activist Yassmin Abdel-Magied sought advice from Hizb ut-Tahrir, Rick Morton, The Australian, 20 February, 2017. 

The Hizb, who dreamed of a universal Muslim caliphate, had for decades been actively advocating the overthrow of the Australian government in taxpayer funded town halls. 
Yet this same government threatened, monitored and harassed journalists, free thinkers and those who dared step outside the government narrative.
Instead all those useful fools who advocated an internal revolution, an overthrow of the traditional culture, much condemned these days as patriarchal and racist, received all the support and accolades available for those who sang the party line.
The Hizb received support from some of the most senior Muslims in the land, including the Mufti. The people were blind. They were about to be destroyed. 
A mosque would be built on the site of the old watering hole.
It was the perfect spot. 
Millions in Saudi funding had already built mosques across the nation. 
And the irony, of course, was that they, the ragtag group of perfectly decent workers and trades people were about to be rescued from their meaningless lives and given the gift of the ravishing, their lives imbued with meaning. 
Instead of sitting around the pub relaxing over a beer after a hard day's work, laughing at idiot porn images on their smart phones, ribbing each other, for they had known one another since childhood, talking endlessly of football as they lit up yet another cigarette, they would live clean, moral, humble, compassionate lives.
They would, like all those fervent members the Hizb, become clean cut, not smoke, drink, take drugs or make crude jokes, they would be loyal to their wives and submissive to the will of Allah.
Their future selves. Other selves. The next generation. 
The future, as always, was breaking into the present.
That day Old Alex worked in one of the local libraries on the South Coast, as was his wont.
Gone was the sanctity of places of learning, and they doubled, these days, as child minding centres.
He listened to the ceaseless multicultural propaganda being pumped into the pre-school kids. 
We're all friends. We're from everywhere. China. Africa. Europe. My friends are fleeing war.
"Friends, friends," the children sang. "Australia Fair is for all to share."
No, it wasn't. 
These teachers weren't promoting tolerance, diversity. 
They were instruments in a greater destruction of the culture. 
A perfect destruction, for the citizens themselves paid for it.
Of old fashioned national pride there was no more.
But you couldn't tell them that; they all thought they knew a greater good.

THE BIGGER STORY:




If there are any Australians who think we have anything to celebrate on the 15thanniversary of our invasion of Iraq and the start of our longest war, they must know something the rest of us don’t. In fact, there’s a lot nobody knows.
We’re not certain even about the date on which we invaded Iraq. The Americans say 20 March 2003, but that was 19 March Baghdad time, and Australian Special Forces proudly claimed to have pre-empted the 48-hour pre-attack ultimatum by 30 hours on 18 March.
We don’t know when the Howard government committed Australia to go to war. Thanks to the Chilcot Inquiry, we know that Tony Blair told President Bush nearly a year in advance that Britain would support the invasion. With no such inquiry of our own, all Australians know is that John Howard visited Bush at his Texas ranch in May 2002. He repeatedly denied having any plans for Australia to go war, and then revealed them fully formed in March 2003.
We do know that the reasons Australia went to war were false. When no WMD were found, Howard said our aim was to rid Iraq of its tyrannical ruler. But his bottom line was to show support for the US alliance, and win the next election. Thousands of protesters realised this.
We knew the invasion was contrary to international law. More than 50 Australian lawyers and legal academics published a statement saying so. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan later told the BBC it was illegal. This means those who invaded could be accused of war crimes.
So why are Australian forces still in Iraq?

OTHER READING:

https://johnmenadue.com/alison-broinowski-happy-anniversary-iraq/

https://johnmenadue.com/paul-barratt-time-to-involve-parliament-in-decisions-about-sending-the-adf-into-combat/


https://johnmenadue.com/john-menadue-the-media-the-iraq-war-and-fallujah/

SOMEONE CALLED THROUGH THE GATHERING STORM

Tc Nguyen

Someone called through the gathering storm. 

Rules based order.

Their rules.

Says it all really. 

They wished to orchestrate the flow of thought. They infiltrated themselves into everything. 

These were the angry mob. These were the places in between. They were the gathering storm. 

The collusion between the storm troopers of the Australian left and Muslim ideology grew more rank by the passing day; sacrificing, as they were so willing to do, the traditional decencies of the country. 

CONTROVERSIAL activist Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who infuriated Australians with her infamous Anzac Day tweet last year, has won a coveted free speech award.
Human rights group Liberty Victoria yesterday announced that Ms Abdel-Magied was awarded the 2018 Young Voltaire Award for being a “role model” to young women, Muslims and migrants.
The former ABC presenter, who moved to London last year after claiming to be the most hated Muslim in Australia, took to social media after receiving the prize to silence her haters.

While the population of the country ran away with itself. 
And nothing would ever be the same again. 
There was no plan. 
There were simply half-hatched plans perpetrated by the half-educated, pouring out of the institutions and determined to fight their social justice agendas. Their insanities, drilled into their brains by their Marxist lecturers. Anything to destroy the country that once was.
They reached out in the gathering storm. 
"I've been injected with the God Molecule," Old Alex said, apropos of absolutely nothing, as he gazed out across the lake, the trees drifting in the late summer heat. 
We could have rescued you. We should have rescued you. 
They had their victims of choice. Refugees. People of Colour. Women. Muslims.
They divided the world into race, and talked endlessly of identity. 
He gazed yet further through the filtering sky. 
And still they came, the queue of lunacies. The Runaway Population. The impending madness.

MALCOLM TURNBULL DONATES $30 MILLION TO 'SMART AND SUSTAINABLE' CITIES IN ASIA
Our own cities are a mess, exploding with migration-fuelled population growth, congestion and infrastructure shortages, yet at the ASEAN conference in Sydney today, Malcolm Turnbull has given $30 million to help with planning ideas for Asian cities.
It's a slap in the face for every Australian forced to sit in traffic jams and unnecessarily spend time away from their families. If Asian urban planners are looking for 'Smart and Sustainable' ideas for their cities, have they heard of the Internet?
Turnbull and his wife Lucy (who was given a plum job on Sydney's Planning Commission) have said they want '30 minute cities' in Australia, so no one has to travel more than 30 minutes to get to their workplace. That means we will all need a helicopter! The Turnbulls have no idea about life in the suburbs.
And now they have given our money away to Asian cities, to achieve the things we haven't yet achieved in Australia.
Mark Latham.

When the only ones who make sense are the feral dogs.

He heard their names ceaselessly. 

There in the dying fall of decency. The country had been sold down the river. And we weren't even lapping in the shadows. A terrible thing has happened. 

Old Alex was out of place, and out of time. Forty years ago in a play he had written called The Police Commissioner's Grandmother, one of the characters had said, in the denouement of the action: 

For me, they were good years, getting to know those people They were so warm and alive and affectionate towards each other in comparison to the people that I had grown up with. They were all, in a way, suicide bent. But I loved them all. I loved their madness, their intensity. I loved their laughter. Oh how I miss them, now that I have left them, and retreated back into the suburbia from which I came. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 

Five years ago Australia played a key role in drafting and negotiating the UN Arms Trade Treaty in order, as the government announced at the time, “to reduce the impact of armed violence on communities around the world”.
Five weeks ago Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced his “vision” for Australia to become one of the top ten weapons exporting countries in the world. Rather than visionary, it struck me as grotesque.
This regression from good global citizen to swaggering deputy sheriff reflects the contradictions at the heart of our foreign policy.
Australia played a role some years ago in weakening the language of the cluster munitions ban treaty to allow exclusions for interoperability and transit of cluster munitions, and we refused to participate in the UN nuclear ban treaty negotiations last year, despite a strong track record of championing nuclear disarmament.
Ours is a country which has blindly followed the US into wars in Vietnam and Iraq that have been calamitous and yet (unlike the UK) we have failed to examine our contribution to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people and in creating a vastly less secure world. And (again, unlike the UK) our country has refused to implement war powers’ reform to ensure that only the Australian Parliament, not the PM alone, has the power to send Australian troops overseas to fight in wars.
Today, visitors to the nation’s capital are confronted at the airport with enormous advertisements for defence contractors and arms manufacturers. Whereas other countries might showcase their natural environment and their tourist attractions at the airport, here we show off tanks, ships and missiles.
What kind of image does this project to the rest of the world? What does the PM’s “vision” to be one of the world’s top arms exporters say about Australia’s role and intentions in the world going forward? That instead of seeing our role as a good global citizen, promoting peace, prosperity and respect for human rights, we seek to increase the manufacture and sales of weapons that cause death, injury and destruction? It is particularly abhorrent that the government has identified the Middle East, much of which is presently mired in conflict, as a “priority market”.

THE ART OF THE SELFIE

By Serene Escape

There's been a security breach.
There was a story they did not want told. It would be told.
These were the days of antennas, preludes and fermenting trouble, of ridden, compromised agencies and security agendas which had nothing to do with security. 
But the impending violence had not broken. Not yet. 
And that, after all, was the primary objective. Get through the day and put the explosions off till the morrow.
Sydney had been in lock down for an ASEAN conference. 

The biggest threat was from within, but they already knew that.

Sydney had imported the world's problems.

But Sydney, the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge, the smart cars and the security at every angle, that was a world too far for Australian jihadists.

The infidels were closer to home.

And they were winning, in any case.

As always the public paid for their own propaganda. 

They met on a weekly basis, the Watcher on the Watch and his Overlord.

They were going to put a stop to it.

What, the ridiculous, offensive, invasive levels of surveillance and harassment perpetrated on the citizenry?

That'd be the day. 

Or the voices of discontent mirrored through the walls? The voices which he mirrored? 

You can't put a stop to everybody. To every insurrection. To every insubordinate thought. 

Much as you would like.
Democracy had become a criminal enterprise, robbing the poor to pay the rich.

It was everywhere to be seen. 
What was remarkable was the number of lackeys willing to perform the service.

Meanwhile the same issues were at play. 

The Prime Minister never let a single chance go by not to promote himself as being at the centre of everything, at his not-fit-for-purpose mansion at Point Piper to conferences of regional leaders, all of it at vast expense to the taxpayer as millions ran through their preening, self-important hands. 

ASEAN had been holding these summits for decades. 

It was unclear what they achieved.

And equally, for years, they had wound up by releasing regional security statements. 

Equally unclear if anything had ever been achieved. 

Sydney 2018 was no difference. 

Turnbull made sure he was at the centre of, well, everything. 

Taxpayers money was being used to fund the world's greatest self-promoter.

The conference, which was never designed to achieve anything, had been turned into a kind of orgy of self promotion for Our Blessed Leader.

Malcolm Turnbull’s excellent ASEAN adventure was a roaring success in the best traditions of ASEAN. That is to say, it more or less did nothing and made no serious contribution to solving any of the region’s pressing problems.
That is not a criticism, least of all of Turnbull. It is instead the true nature of ASEAN.
It doesn’t solve problems, it manages them. It de-escalates them. Sometimes it manages them so well for so long — on the basis that in the long run all our problems will die — that they just go away or become instead a frozen, static part of the landscape.
Earnest analysts and reporters will, like Western Kremlinologists of old, wring a drop of alleged meaning out of the group’s ­gnomic deliberations on the South China Sea. ASEAN Summit, Malcolm Turnbull embraces the Asian way of diplomacy, The Australian, 19 March, 2018.

Pretty much seen it all before.

They escaped serious scrutiny.

They escaped public scandal.

They escaped an explosion on the streets of Sydney. 

A nation wide cognitive dissonance settled upon them all. 

Lucky we didn't get too excited. Nobody died. 

The deeper problems, they're for somebody else to handle.

I just want to retire early.

On the balcony of his harbour side mansion, a dwelling about which there were known security concerns, Malcolm Turnbull took a selfie, yet another selfie, with the Indonesian leader. 

Surveillance cameras. Contracts, contracts. 

That was for the peasants. 

The peasants were under surveillance because they were a threat.
No one knew when the uprising would come.
No one could be trusted.
Certainly not the servant class.

We’ve always known Turnbull is a selfie-obsessed man. More than any PM before him, he’s constantly outstretching his right hand, clutching his smartphone and taking a snap.
But there’s something off about his selfies. Take his tweet from Mardi Gras last night.
Lovely. He met Cher, that’s pretty sweet. His wife is there, which is also quite wholesome — and there’s the Premier of NSW, Gladys Berejiklian, peeping out from behind Cher’s flowing locks.
All day I haven’t been able to stop looking at this photo. For some reason that I couldn’t quite figure out, it just looks so weird. So I went back and dug up some more Turnbull selfies, and slowly I realise...  

Malcolm Turnbull does not know how to take a selfie. Let me explain.

There’s a reason why other politicians haven’t run into the same selfie troubles as Turnbull.
They get other people to take their selfies instead. It’s a brilliant strategy. That way, you’re not forced to make awkward choices about whether to put your arm into the photo or whether to suffer from the tragic scrunched head problem.
And really, maybe this has been Turnbull’s problem all along — he’s put himself in a really difficult position with his selfie strategy. Now that it’s expected that he take the selfie, rather than the other participants in the photo, he might be stuck in this poor routine for the rest of his public life. Max Koslowski, Investigation: Why does Malcolm Turnbull take selfies so weirdly, Junkee, 4 March, 2018. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 

For fifty years, since Australia entered the war in Vietnam in 1965, Australian foreign policy has been made increasingly subservient to a specific concept of Australia’s relationship with the United States. That concept, first enunciated by Prime Minister Menzies in 1955, was that for its survival, Australia needed ”a great and powerful friend”. All of our key decisions in foreign policy since then have been shaped by our own construct of what loyalty to the United States and the Alliance demanded. That construct has been to follow the US practice and to identify foreign policy with military and security policy.

By acting in this way we have substantially compromised our independence and, contrary to what this policy supposedly intends, we have exposed ourselves to increasing danger. The latter fact derives in good measure from: the disarray within the US polity, which is now endemic, the distortions and self-delusions which have shaped US policy, particularly the notion that the US is “the exceptional country”. We need to free ourselves from the habit of echoing the Americans.

This is a matter of maturity, self respect, national interest, and our security.

A PYRRHIC VICTORY

David Dale, Clovelly

A violent assault. 
An unsafe city in lock down. 
The "diversity bollards" could only do so much. 
As could the official lies. 
The parasites had locked on hard. 
They would very much like him dead, and whispered his demise on a daily basis. 
They were heart attack specialists, but there were many other forms. Thin the blood. Contact, contract. They were ceaseless now, the bullies and the shallow whims. 
There were times when they thought of threatening him through his children.
They would happily see him swing.
The ASEAN Conference was being held in Sydney.
A major security headache, without a doubt. 
But at least, unlike New Year's Eve, they could dispense with the crowds. 
But nowhere was safe, truly safe, not anymore.
They had transformed the country into a polyglot nation, and imported the threat. 
They had imported the world's crime gangs and jihadis, and were now forced to spend billions combating them. A secret war, conducted away from the public eye, and journalistic scrutiny.
Just as now, no one dared speak the truth about Australia.
This outpost of the civilised world which had invited the world in. Indiscriminately. Without a plan. Without foresight. Without any consideration of the residents, their culture, their traditions.
How they would feel when trampled or displaced by the hordes of other nations.        
Peter Dutton, head of Homeland Security and the heir apparent to the Turnbull throne, gave the welcoming speech at ASEAN. 
It was surprising, really, that Turnbull, who hogged the limelight on a daily basis, as if the government was solely about him, and who had tried to eliminate Dutton with the poisoned chalice of Immigration Minister, would allow even that much. 
Old Alex had a soft spot for Dutton simply because he had been very good on separated dad issues when Alex had done a volunteer community radio program on the subject, back when, back then. A small town policeman. A voice of common decency in a sea of conformist, whitewashed bullshit. At a time when almost no politician dared to speak up for fear of the Canberra femocracy, and the fury of the ceaselessly one-eyed feminist advocates at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, all of whom saw the broken hearts and suicides of men as an indifferent consequence on the path to a greater feminist nirvana. 

I would like to begin by officially welcoming you to Australia and in particular to Sydney. I know many of you have travelled great distances to be here and I do hope you find time over the weekend to discover what this great city has to offer.
Protecting our nations from the scourge of terrorism is an ever increasing challenge. Terrorists and violent extremists are becoming increasingly ruthless, adaptive and creative. They operate transnationally–increasingly using the internet and encrypted communication to extend their reach across borders.
Advances in communication have given terrorists a truly global reach. Violent extremists can operate in a clandestine fashion, all the while thriving in the shadows and growing their spheres of influence.
Extremists cultivate resentment and discord among the disillusioned, the vulnerable and the disengaged to spread the threat of terror into our communities. They use technology to recruit, radicalise and inspire attacks from within. They use indiscriminate violence to engender fear among the innocent.
These vile individuals have no respect for the rules-based, integrated communities that we strive to achieve. Small groups driven by twisted ideology and supported by evolving technology have the capacity to seek out and exploit vulnerabilities. Peter Dutton, Transcript, Opening Address to the ASEAN Counter Terrorism Conference, 17 March, 2018.

But who were the most vile in this situation?
it was Australia who had bombed the narrow medieval streets of Mosul. 
It was Australia who would not even provide an estimate of the numbers they had killed, mujaheddin, women, children, the elderly, in these brutal and essentially indiscriminate acts.
It was not Australian bodies that lay to this day under the rubble. 
It was bombs paid for by Australian taxpayers which had polarised the Muslim world; and led to the ever increasing radicalisation and disassociation of the local population.
And it was Australian politicians who had silenced all dissent by passing outrageous anti-free speech legislation, who had blatantly manipulated the media, and who had largely kept the wars being conducted in their name secret from that very same public. 
Afghanistan was a secret war. 
Iraq, Syria, apart from a rare puff piece by a tame journalist, were, also, secret wars. 
No politician ever expressed regret for those dying under their bombs.  
No politician ever explained the purpose of those billions of dollars hemorrhaging towards America's failed wars. 
Nobody had the courage. 
Silenced, the soldiers could not speak out. No one dared speak the truth.

The threat from hierarchical cells remains, but the insidious influence of ISIL on vulnerable people within our communities has increased the risk of lone actor attacks. The fragmentation of threat vectors is only leading to an even more dangerous security environment. There are now more individuals within our own communities who wish to do us harm than ever before.
On 12 September 2014 the Australian national terrorism threat level was raised to 'Probable' for the first time. This means our security agencies have assessed that there is credible intelligence to indicate that individuals or groups possess the intent and capability to conduct a terrorist attack in our country. Since September 2014, 85 people have been charged as a result of 37 counter terrorism related operations around Australia. There have been six terror attacks and 14 major attacks have been disrupted.
In July last year, our national security and law enforcement agencies disrupted a group attempting to carry out an attack on a plane departing Sydney. If successful, that attack would have resulted in an immense loss of life, affecting the nationals of many countries represented in this room today.
The collapse of the self-proclaimed ISIL caliphate and the liberation of around 7.7 million people is an incredibly positive development, but it poses new challenges.
Around 220 Australians have travelled to Syria and Iraq to join the conflict since 2012 and one of the greatest challenges to Australia and the Southeast Asia region is posed by those individuals returning to our shores.
Foreign fighters returning from the Middle East have had extensive exposure to extremist ideology and are hardened to the everyday violence of armed conflict. They have the potential to bring experience, capability and connections to the global extremist community into existing onshore networks.
To mitigate the risk of returning foreign fighters, the Australian Federal Police, working with domestic and international partner agencies, has obtained 21 first instance arrest warrants relating to persons suspected to have been in the conflict zone and subject to counter terrorism operations.
Peter Dutton. Transcript.

Elsewhere, old blood seeped through an old heart. 
Sluggish. Slow. 
A conscience that would not pass on. 

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Walt Whitman, 1865.

THE BIGGER STORY:

The beginning of the end for Ghouta came first with a trickle. Desperate, hungry and scared, Syria’s newest displaced people walked a journey into the unknown, past Russian military police, towards loyalist soldiers who started checking names.
The same anxious ritual of the vanquished had been carried out before, in Homs, Aleppo, Qusair and most other places in the country, where seven years ago today the first spasms of open defiance began to rattle its ruthless rulers.
Those heady early years of insurrection are long gone now. Anticipation has been replaced by resignation, hope subsumed by fear.
The empowered Syrian street that had once exposed the fragility of a regime long thought omnipotent has retreated to the rubble. Splintered and battered, the anti-Assad opposition inspired by the protests can no longer win the war.
The state, too, is a shadow of what it was when popular uprising gave way to insurgency. Unable to hold its ground, Syria’s leadership seconded its defence to Russia and Iran, who have clawed its military to a winning position, destroying much of the country in the process, and regularly striking deals with factions without informing their patron.
Bashar al-Assad’s claim to have restored sovereignty has left him like the emperor without a proverbial thread.
Across Syria, the clean battlelines of early on have been replaced many times over, as the war has metastasised like no other conflict in the past 50 years. A national military, a shadow army, Islamists, jihadists, proxies, regional heavyweights and global powers are all deeply embedded, trying to shape the conflict to suit their interests.
Whoever prevails in what remains of Syria will achieve a pyrrhic victory.