PROLONGED BASTARDRY

Old Alex flew, or so car travel seemed to the ancient spirits, from the coastal lowlands to the mountains, a long unfolding swoop, and as arranged went to visit Glen at his new house in Katoomba; hoping, perhaps, to unload or debrief after a terrible winter.

They sat in the backyard, as always under surveillance, the favourite tool of government bastardry.

"I am an empath," Glen said, apropos of nothing. "I feel the pain of my friends."

It was obvious Old Alex wanted to talk about the sustained difficulties of that winter, and the torment that had been imposed upon him by government surveillance and the taunting cry of his pursuers.

Glen was an empath alright, and he had sold his soul. The Sellout had just won the Man Booker Prize.

Then Glen began showing him poetry he claimed he had been writing, continuing on the the already discredited story of himself as an aspiring young writer; as if nothing had changed.

In their own comfortable lives, inside their smart cars and Ikea homes, they regarded everyone else with contempt.

The poems were accomplished, intricate work, some of it with clashing styles; and nothing like the earnest poetry of a striving young writer. And nothing like the scribblings he he had previously seen.

"Original," Old Alex commented, as the conversation remained within narrow, ceremonial, dishonest bounds.

He compared some of it to the work of the celebrated American poet E.E. Cummings.

It was original, it just didn't happen to have been written by Glen.

He had no more written the collection of poems than he had written War and Peace.

It was some sort of stupid, bureaucratic test; what he would make of it. Did his literary knowledge and peculiar flashes of clairvoyance go so far as to detect plagiarism.

As before, Glen showed no actual interest in the mechanics of writing, or the great works of the masters. And no camaraderie or understanding of others toiling in the field. And gave himself, or his idiot supervisors, away.

It was just another deeply stupid, contemptuous trick amongst so many.

They had tried absolutely everything but to treat him with respect; and at taxpayer's expense were trying on another heist.

The leaves from the Japanese elms glinted in the cool sunlight, and soon enough he left the house feeling thoroughly cheated; which was exactly what had happened.

And found himself in wild dreams hunted into a cave, with the army of the dark snapping at him, determined to kill.

He was shape shifting rapidly in a corner; and in a frantic piece of magic opened up a deep fiery ravine between him and his pursuers.

They stood on the other side, trying to get to him. But could not cross; their anger and determination spitting barbs of black spite. 

He was changing form so quickly nothing could touch him. But he was frightened nonetheless.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Leonard Cohen, the hugely influential singer and songwriter whose work spanned nearly 50 years, died Monday at the age of 82. Cohen's label, Sony Music Canada, confirmed his death on the singer's Facebook page Thursday evening.
"It is with profound sorrow we report that legendary poet, songwriter and artist, Leonard Cohen has passed away," the statement read. "We have lost one of music's most revered and prolific visionaries. A memorial will take place in Los Angeles at a later date. The family requests privacy during their time of grief." A cause of death was not given.
After an epic tour, the singer fell into poor health. But he dug deep and came up with a powerful new album
"My father passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles with the knowledge that he had completed what he felt was one of his greatest records," Cohen's son Adam wrote in a statement to Rolling Stone. "He was writing up until his last moments with his unique brand of humor."
Before his death, the songwriter requested that he be laid to rest "in a traditional Jewish rite beside his parents, grandparents and great-grandparents," his rabbi Adam Scheier wrote in a statement.
"Unmatched in his creativity, insight and crippling candor, Leonard Cohen was a true visionary whose voice will be sorely missed," his manager Robert Kory wrote in a statement. "I was blessed to call him a friend, and for me to serve that bold artistic spirit firsthand, was a privilege and great gift. He leaves behind a legacy of work that will bring insight, inspiration and healing for generations to come."

FEATURED BOOK:

PIRANHAS

Hong Kong 1950s

Other journalists who wrote about some of the same areas as he did, Islamic fundamentalism, national security, received conciliatory visits from the authorities; who would advise them on safety procedures and how best to proceed. He got harassed, year in and year out, month in and month out. Tormented, bullied, ridiculed. 

That was the way of the grinding machinery that was Australian governance.

Piranhas, flash crowds of piranhas, had circled through the invisible air, feeding their careers and determined to torment, because, as someone masquerading as a friend had said to him only a few days before, "you're just one person". 

And Just One Person can be destroyed, is vulnerable, gets lonely, is beset by frailty.

And so the predators came out to play.

Be careful what you pray for, he warned them, as the bullies circled.


THE BIGGER STORY:



It’s 3:30 a.m. in the newsroom, and we’re in a state of shock. Donald J. Trump, against what we thought were all odds, collected swing state after swing state after swing state. Hillary Clinton has conceded the race. Mr. Trump has won.
So, what just happened? “We don’t know what happened, because the tools that we would normally use to help us assess what happened failed,” Ms. Haberman says. “The polling on both sides was wrong.”
Mr. Rutenberg had just finished writing about how the media had missed Mr. Trump’s wide appeal, and what that misfire says about journalists’ flawed understanding of major swaths of our country. “What we now know is that a huge part of the country is far more upset about the ills that he was pointing to and promising to fix than any of the flaws that we were pointing out about him as a candidate,” Mr. Rutenberg says on the show.
“I would say this is a failure of expertise on the order of the fall of the Soviet Union or the Vietnam War,” Mr. Confessore says. “What we are seeing is in part a revolt of the country that people had written off as the country of the past, against the country that most people thought they were living in: a country of the future, of a multicultural future, of a globalized world. This was a revolt of people who did not feel vested in that future America.”

WASHINGTON — President Obama and Donald J. Trump made a public show on Thursday of putting their bitter differences aside after a stunning election upset. The Oval Office meeting brought together a president who has darkly warned that Mr. Trump could not be trusted with the nuclear codes and a successor who rose to political prominence questioning Mr. Obama’s birthplace and legitimacy.
“I want to emphasize to you, Mr. President-elect, that we now are going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed because if you succeed, then the country succeeds,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Trump as the two sat side-by-side after the roughly 90-minute meeting. The president called the session “excellent” and wide-ranging.
It was an extraordinary show of cordiality and respect between two men who have been political enemies and are stylistic opposites — Mr. Trump a brash real estate executive and reality television star whose campaign was defined in opposition to the sitting president, and Mr. Obama, a cool-tempered intellectual who has pressed a progressive agenda in office.

FEATURED BOOK:

SURVEILLANCE EQUALS HARASSMENT

Brisbane floods 1893

"Do you think he can detect that we're here?" a voice asked in the Outback night, and he repeated the line.
Monumental stuff up.
His pursuit, the pursuit of a journalist, by government authorities had reached absurd lengths, and so he was here, in this distant place. He had exemptd himself from the game, their game.
There was no reason for them to stop, it was government funding.
There was no reason to apologise, that would involve acknowledging fault.
There was no cause for common decency, they didn't have it in them.
They destroyed lives with impunity; that's what they did.
Those paying taxes to fund the outlandish behaviour of the agencies had no idea what their money was being used for.
Psychologically exhausted from the last book, Old Alex went home early to watch the American election on television, a million miles from the wealth and power on display in New York City. It had been one of the world's longest running soap operas, and a reality TV star had gamed them across the finishing line.
All the pundits had been proven wrong; and Trump was triumphant. 
It had been one of the worst examples of pack mentality Alex had ever seen. All anyone had to do to prove they were an intellectual and a progressive was to call Trump a moron and away the hordes went, Like Like Like.
And in the morning after, they would blame everybody but themselves.
The same dynamics were in play in Australia.
The quelling of debate, ceaseless identity and gender politics, the ridicule and in his case hunting of anyone who didn't swallow the government narrative, all of it was coming back to destroy the very governments, bureaucracies and multi-media channels which perpetuated it.
He came, he saw, he observed.
They would try to kill him one more time.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Democrat Hillary Clinton has conceded the 2016 US White House race to Republican Donald Trump, offering to work with the president-elect who she said she hoped would be a successful leader for all Americans.
Mrs Clinton, appearing at midday (local time) after a bruising election loss to the New York real estate magnate, urged supporters to keep an open mind towards Mr Trump and give him a chance to lead.
"Last night I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country," Mrs Clinton told hundreds of supporters and staff at a Manhattan hotel.
"I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans.
"This is not the outcome we wanted or we worked so hard for, and I'm sorry that we did not win this election for the values we shared and the vision we hold for our country."

The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society. He seems a little unpredictable. Who knows but that he may arrive for dinner in a red shirt… appear unexpectedly bearded… offer, freely, unsolicited advice… or even ship off one of his ears to some unwilling recipient? However glorious the history of art, the history of artists is quite a different matter. And in any well-ordered household the very thought that one of the young men may turn out to be an artist can be a cause for general alarm. It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospect of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a good many devoted art lovers to rout.

FEATURED BOOK:

JUST SAY NO

Tim Ritchie

Old Alex pulled up by the side of the road, just past the Namoi River, struck by the sight of the river gums beside a classic Outback scene.

He just wanted it all to stop.

His career as a journalist had made him a POI, a Person of Interest, and he had become, as book followed book, increasingly haunted.

He tried to fight back, as sick of them as they were no doubt sick of him, but he had grown tired of abusing his tormentors through the microphone in the car.

"Never forget: I know how incompetent and dishonest you are."

He was sick of the absolute bastardry of government which had been turned on him after he had left full time work on the national newspaper; sick of the depths of dishonesty these people would stoop to in pursuing him.

Sick of the bureaucratic mentality: Just Say No.

Because to say no, to destroy someone, was safer than working with them.

The more barren the culture became, the more they liked it.

He was tired of demanding compensation for the previous three years of harassment, an acknowledgement, apology and financial compensation which was never going to come.

$27.3 million seemed like a good figure to him, considering the lengths the authorities had gone to destroy him psychologically and physically, to ruin his reputation, to hound him from one place to another, to another. And the vast amount of time, money and energy they had wasted.

"One day that man will kill himself."

What sort of person would do that to another?

Bullies. Government funded bullies.

The Prime Minister's Literary Awards had just been co-won gone by a book, The Life of Houses, about "hidden tensions in one of Australia's establishment families".

"Revolutionary art," he sniffed, as outside storms rumbled in the great skies of the Australian Outback.

This was the same Prime Minister, the same government, who had done much to destroy the Australian book publishing industry, and alienated authors across the country.

The tax payer funded Radio National broadcast Malcolm Turnbull's speech on his love of Australian literature. To Alex it was all preposterous. He simply couldn't stand the hypocrisy. Everything annoyed him. He was becoming a curmudgeon.

Alex was no longer employed by a multi-billion dollar news corporation, no longer confined by the corporate tedium of what Rupert Murdoch's editorial henchmen saw as news; those narrow confines of what they thought, or knew, would please their boss.

"I've never known someone so consistently depressed as you," someone had said to him downstairs in the headquarters of News Limited.

And it was true, he wasn't living the life he wanted to live, he wasn't writing what he wanted to write, and in those aging years when journalism, a young man's sandpit and and old man's quicksand, had become a curse; he simply showed up for work. He had children to support. He had no choice. A profession which once seemed full of excitement became tedium absolute.

The greatest talent required of a senior editor at The Australian had been the ability to please Rupert, not to generate stories, not to appeal to the public, not to create an exciting newspaper.

The Australian was an inexcusably dull vanity publication of Rupert's which lost more than $30 million a year. His escape had been both a liberation and a torment; he missed the camaraderie of fellow sufferers, and for a long time he had been completely lost.

Then he began to write what he wanted to write, and life promptly turned to hell as he became a Targeted Individual, pursued, harassed and under surveillance.

It had reached ridiculous levels, as he was hunted from one home to another, when he never felt safe and he became convinced, as paranoiac as it sounded, that the authorities wanted him dead.

"Heart attack, heart attack," "That man will kill himself one day."

They were standard tactics of PsyOps, or psychological operations, as he understood it.

And he came face to face with a world he had never encountered, or at least never understood; dark policing, government sponsored intimidation and harassment through surveillance operations.

The agencies were vastly over-funded; in secrecy corruption and malfeasance bloomed. Abused from dawn to dusk, he became increasingly ratty. It didn't matter what he did, what he said, how he behaved, what efforts he made to brush them off, the attacks were relentless and ongoing; and had frayed him to the remote edges of sanity; flayed by words and invisible demons and rippling consequence.

It would be so much easier to just comply, but the goal posts constantly shifted. He was not on their payroll, and the obvious solutions were duly ignored. It was easier to revert to type: to be a bully.

And so it felt as if the same bullies who had tormented him in the schoolyard now tormented him in later life; queuing up to kick him in the head.

As the car settled and the silence of the bush surrounded him, he tried to seek a power to turn events around.

And the only advice that came to him, in those crippling days, was: Stay Out Of The Results.

He started up the car, and quickly overtook a clapped out car.

"Drive by shooting," the words plunged through his head. He caught a glance of the car's occupants and they looked as guilty as hell.

They say, everyone who comes to the Ridge is escaping something.

He was escaping.

Welcome to the Edge.


THE BIGGER STORY:




Can Donald Trump win? It's possible, but certainly a long shot. On the eve of the election, Hillary Clinton still holds the edge over Trump, though her once commanding national lead now stands at 3 points and she's lost the advantage in several key battleground states. Once hopelessly behind in the electoral count, Trump has pulled within striking distance over the last two weeks, but will need a last-minute miracle to pull off the win. Real Clear Politics' electoral map based on state poll averages shows Clinton barely edging Trump 272 to 266.

Artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality will play a huge role as humankind heads to Mars and beyond, says the man overseeing NASA’s exploration systems. In an interview with The Australian, Jason Crusan, who is visiting Australia, discusses how NASA is leveraging newer capabilities of artificial intelligence as it undertakes 20 years of preparation for humans visiting Mars.
There’s also internet bandwidth we dream of that will beam 4K resolution images from millions of kilometres away to our headsets, and an upcoming capacity to snap high resolution photos of the entire Planet Earth daily, with each pixel representing a 3 to 5 metre slice.

FEATURED BOOK:

CLANDESTINE AUTHORITY: A FINAL BEAUTY

Picture of Wyndham by Richard Woldendorp

At last he was free.

He stopped chanting at the microphone in the car, and therefore to the authorities: "You are dishonest, incompetent and corrupt." Or: "Never forget, I know how dishonest and incompetent you really are."

The hell, the living purgatory, that had been inflicted upon him and which they liked to say he had inflicted on himself had gone.

His anger, his frustration, as counterproductive as it had been, was already washing away.

The Ridge, as it was locally known, was green from recent rains, unusual in that part of the country. The landscape often looked more like Mars. Now the inland rivers were flowing, and Menindee Lakes was full.

He had been coming to Lightning Ridge on and off for decades. It was one of the only places in the world where opal could be found, and had a peculiar resonance. Decades before, landing at the red dust pot hole filled airstrip had been a dangerous exercise. Now, there was even an asphalted tarmac.

Old Alex had last been here two years before, when, after a similar hounding, he had just finished writing Thailand: Deadly Destination. 

And then, as now, haunted and hunted for so long, felt an enormous relief.

He went, that first morning, to the Artesian Bore outside town, where, as the sign declared, the hot, mineral rich waters would soak away your aches and pains.

As so often, there were Europeans taking the water in this Outback place, and the air was full of the Yugoslavian language.

He liked the idea of bathing in million year old water, although in truth he had no idea how old it was and could find no easy reference.

It was the final month of spring, after what had been a hellish winter; with kidney stones and a fractured vertebrae leaving him in constant pain, and the targeting of him by the authorities, or under the purvey of the authorities, had made his life entirely miserable. 

If he had destroyed one opportunity by his flagrant fury, contempt or disregard, there would be many more. He was was the one bathing in the Artesian waters and watching the birds flock through the low scrub of the Australian Outback. He was the one whose mind could pick through the surrounding fields, at last, without being pressurised. He was the one who had survived.

And they would squirrel back into their useless jobs, no longer safe. For the wraiths unleashed were already out hunting their targets; and they would find their way,

If it was simply puerile revenge, they would never have done their job. It was more than that: a battle between the sacred and the profane. The desire of the ordinary to triumph over the extraordinary was a battle they would not, could not win.

And so he rose bare faced into the laughing sky, and was free.

THE BIGGER STORY:




As the battle for Mosul proper begins -- a pain-staking and brutal process of clearing ISIS street by street -- cracks in the Iraqi government's planning and preparation are already beginning to show.

This was chillingly illustrated by my colleague Arwa Damon's intense 28 hours embedded with one special forces group, as it plunged deep into Mosul's eastern neighborhoods. The terrifying experience revealed a force seemingly ill equipped and poorly trained for the task at hand.
ISIS fighters were lying in wait to ambush the unit Arwa was with as its commander ordered the convoy on without an apparent "Plan B" or reserve forces to back them up if they got into trouble.

Conventional wisdom is the radical Islamist terror group has had two years to prepare for this defense. Reality is in Iraq alone their fighters have spent more than a decade honing tactics and techniques for fighting an urban guerrilla conflict against conventional forces -- American first and now Iraqi.

US election: Hillary Clinton has wafer-thin margin over Donald Trump on campaign's final day
So who is going to win?
It is the question on the lips of every American as this volatile presidential election campaign comes to a close.
Republican nominee Donald Trump's supporters are bullish, and wildly optimistic as he rides a wave of improved polls into election day.
The backers of his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton are nervous, and simply want it to be over, and won.

FEATURED BOOK;


     

NOT TO BE TRUSTED

Australia 2016 Kings Cross Nightclub raid

Old Alex left the large stone house on the edge of a Blue Mountain ravine, left the sight of parrots and pigeons squabbling at the bird feeder, and as previously arranged went once again to visit the surveillance expert.

In the early hours of the day he had heard Glen say: "I have no regrets." A piece of bravado ahead of conscience.

You people can go about destroying people's lives, because that's the only thing you're good at.

The arrangements had changed. Without explanation. Common decency had nothing to do with this game.

They sat on the back veranda, briefly, and once again the light glinted off the fresh spring leaves of the Japanese elms and things beyond ken swirled. Once again he had an instant, peculiar headache. This time the glints of light off the trees were sharp as knives, each knife fringed with a narrow, out-of-phase frieze of decaying gargoyle faces, the emblematic consolidation of corruption and ill-intent, bureaucratic decay and the relentless, brutally unfeeling machinery of government, where no one was accountable, no one apologised, and they ground away at free thought as surely as they ground away at commonsense.

"I feel like a thresher's been through my head," he said in a random piece of conversation later in the day, on the other side of the mountains, as his headache grew progressively worse.

As if the knives were still cutting. He felt some terrible swamp of sadness he hadn't felt in years, as if his children had just been stolen from him. Not because he expected the story to end any other way, he already knew the Fairy Godmother would turn into another fat f**k who wanted everything for nothing and thought they could get away with it. But because, at the end of one story and the beginning of another, he had hoped he would be surprised by kindness; not betrayal.

He had a very unhelpful trait for a journalist, he was always surprised when people lied to him. But the lies never stopped.

This time the sign in his head read: "NOT TO BE TRUSTED".

As in, not to be trusted under any circumstances.

He drove north-west, the rolling plains which had so delighted the early explorers drenched green from recent rains; and dropped by a household on the edge of the Liverpool plains. He had a habit of rolling by once a year or so, saying hello, crashing the night and moving on. But they were not there. A few days before, the mother had a brain aneurysm and had been helicoptered to a hospital in the south. The family were by her side. He kept on driving.

"Not good," was the diagnosis.

The sun was setting across the flat rich plains; in the midst of life we are in death.

In the long dark night he heard the voices of his pursuers rejoice: "You've been totally, completely screwed."

Their victory cry was short lived.

When a bee stings you, it dies.

THE BIGGER STORY:



http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/11/advance-heart-mosul-slows-isil-fights-161106103351018.html

Iraq's special forces worked to fully push a fiercely resisting ISIL from neighborhoods on Mosul's eastern edge while bombings killed at least 11 people elsewhere in the country.

The current phase and slower pace highlight the challenges ahead for Iraqi forces as they press into more populated areas deeper inside Mosul, where the civilian presence means they may not be able to rely as much on air raids.

"There are a lot of civilians and we are trying to protect them," said Lt Col Muhanad al-Timimi. "This is one of the hardest battles that we've faced till now."



At least 27 people were killed on Sunday in a series of suicide bombings carried out by ISIL across northern Iraq.

The deadliest attack took place in Tikrit, a city halfway between Baghdad and Mosul, where an ambulance packed with explosives went off at a security checkpoint killing 15 people and injuring 35, a security official said.

FEATURED BOOK: 

100%:

https://www.darkmoon.me/2016/explosive-assangepilger-interview-on-us-election-expect-riots-if-hillary-wins/#more-52915
 

BATTERED, BRUISED, SURVEILLANCE SURVIVOR

Aleppo, courtesy The Guardian

The country had sold its soul, and its greatest assets.

He was battered and bruised, having survived years of harassment and surveillance, intimidation; a nightmare.

A false nightmare which had wasted the time and resources of everybody involved.

A nightmare engineered or created by government and conducted with their full knowledge.

Yet there was no apology, no compensation. Not to him. Not to the taxpayers. Not to the well intentioned or the easily manipulated who had joined in the hunt.

Surveillance = harassment.

Tinpot bullies strutted in their air-conditioned offices, comfortable in their military mindsets, pouring scorn on anybody and everybody  they did not understand. They would destroy you as assuredly as they could. They would puff out their little man chests and laugh at the idea of the curse already creeping through their veins and distorting their lives. Little things were already starting to go wrong. Bigger things were about to follow. As assuredly as night followed day.

He put out extra food for the birds, and the Rosellas and the King Parrots came.

He laughed at the way things had so magically resolved in the household, and they were happy now, as he had wished upon them in those strange blessings which invariably came true; although they would never know.

He had forgotten, sometimes, in that long life, the power that he had sometimes had. A whimsical power perhaps; but power nonetheless. And they couldn't hurt him now. It had all coiled back upon them.

"You would think," he said, in one of those strange pieces of conversation that didn't really join the flow, "that they would have worked out that everything they do backfires, and escalates the price to be paid."

But they never did work it out. They didn't think that way.

So now, those who had tried to kill him, who told their lies and spread their poison, now they twisted uncomfortably in their chairs.

And still, they did not understand.


THE BIGGER STORY:



https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/03/aleppo-braces-russian-assault-rebels-vow-defy-putin-ultimatum?CMP=share_btn_fb

Syrian rebel groups in east Aleppo are planning to defy an ultimatum from Vladimir Putin to abandon the city by Friday night, insisting that promised safe passages out of besieged areas do not exist and that an imminent Russian blitz will not change the course of the war.

As the Russian carrier group expected to take part in the attack moved into their final positions in the eastern Mediterranean, opposition fighters made fresh forays into west Aleppo, the latest in a series of attempts to break a four-year siege of the rebel -held east, which is surrounded by Iranian-backed militias that support the Syrian leader.

Moscow has said that corridors for fighters and civilians will remain open until sunset on Friday, ahead of what it has warned will be a bombardment that will level what remains of east Aleppo. As the deadline drew near, however, opposition groups said they had little to fear, and could not escape even if they wanted to.

http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2016/11/australian-democracy-serious-jeopardy/

Australian democracy is in very serious jeopardy. China is making great strides towards it and its intentions are not benevolent. It’s obvious in local, regional and global trends and if we do not do something soon to protect our freedoms they are going to be sold into the burgeoning Chinese empire, as well as political hegemony, by a corrupt oligarchy.

Some of you will tell me to take off my tin foil hat for writing this. To you I say ‘listen up’.

For the next few decades the global political economy will be a contest between post-cultural free moving capital and deeply cultural labour. This will mean ebbs and flows between investment and regulation in an overall trend towards de-globalisation.

After decades of stupidly pro-cyclical policy-making Australia is now little more than a southern province of Chinese economic policy. With the flick of a pen in an obscure public service department, China delivers tens of billions to our shores in coal revenues and our monumental trade deficit evaporates overnight.

There is no other economy on earth that I know of that works with this dependence. We call it lucky. And it is. But it also comes with strings attached and they have been on display for a decade or more. Australian policy attitudes towards China have morphed steadily from a middle power engagement that included dialogues on human rights and democratic process to today’s pragmatic “do what you like boss” attitude.

FEATURED BOOK:

100%:

THE INTERNET'S OWN BOY: THE STORY OF AARON SWARZ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCwjDuoJK0E

TREACHERY

And then, just when it seemed like there would be a solution, or absolution, he was stranded in a backyard full of glinting leaves, kissed by the divine.

Visiting a surveillance expert in the Blue Mountains, he wanted to pour out his guts about the nightmare winter that had just unfolded, the curse of his pursuers, the terrible abuses of authority he had witnessed and experienced, the tormented tunnel difficulties and strange inspirations which had gone into the making of the last book.

Instead the warmth of spring surrounded them, and he felt, despite a peculiar headache, if not absolved, relieved. The world was beautiful after all.

"I didn't realise how frazzled I was," he said.

But there was no resolution, because they were being watched, even here, and their conversation remained on a level keel.

"TREACHERY", a sign swung through his head after he had left, pulling up on one of the narrow mountain streets which crisscrossed the area.

But whether the treachery was directed at him, or at others, he did not know. There were grander plots afoot. The deliberate government targeting of a journalist of 30-years standing such as himself and the many breaches of public service protocol and legislation thus involved had handed the perfect ammunition to a new breed of operative, smarter, by far, less bound by military procedures, far, far faster on their feet. And it could only be for the good, that the old dinosaurs who infested the security agencies be swept aside, and a cleverer, better educated, better connected and more empathic generation took over. And cast the dinosaurs into the pit where they belonged, their bones to be discovered, if at all, many thousands of years into the future. When this strange stage in the evolution of the species was nothing but a curiosity in an arcane academic discipline.

And so he swung down the highway to a different place, a large stone house anchored on the edge of a deep mountain ravine, where at dusk he watched the descendants of thousands of generations of birds, Bronze Pigeons with their striking colouring, Black, white and grey Wonga pigeons, like fat little hens, pecking at the edge of the forest, Rosellas, Cockatoos, and he thought for an instant the world was safe; or at least safe for one more day.

The authorities had tried to kill him, and he was still alive.

"Why haven't these people charged with attempted murder?" he demanded to know of the microphone in the car.

There was no answer. There never would be.

But the invisible beasts, the voices cast abroad, were noticeably more kind than the last time he had been there, in the midst of that horrific winter. And he knew, all too well, some things were better left unsaid.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Displaced families Mosul

https://www.rt.com/news/365299-assange-pilger-saudi-clinton/

In the second excerpt from the John Pilger Special, to be exclusively broadcast by RT on Saturday, courtesy of Dartmouth Films, Julian Assange accuses Hillary Clinton of misleading Americans about the true scope of Islamic State’s support from Washington’s Middle East allies.

In a 2014 email made public by Assange’s WikiLeaks last month, Hillary Clinton, who had served as secretary of state until the year before, urges John Podesta, then an advisor to Barack Obama, to “bring pressure” on Qatar and Saudi Arabia, “which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL [Islamic State, IS, ISIS] and other radical Sunni groups.”
“I think this is the most significant email in the whole collection,” Assange, whose whistleblowing site released three tranches of Clinton-related emails over the past year, told Pilger in an exclusive interview, courtesy of Dartmouth Films.

“All serious analysts know, and even the US government has agreed, that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIS and funding ISIS, but the dodge has always been that it is some “rogue” princes using their oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves. But that email says that it is the government of Saudi Arabia, and the government of Qatar that have been funding ISIS.”

Assange and Pilger, who sat down for their 25-minute interview at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where the whistleblower has been a refugee since 2012, then talk about the conflict of interest between Clinton’s official post, which held throughout Obama’s first term, her husband’s nonprofit, and the Middle East officials, whose stated desire to fight terrorism may not have been sincere.

John Pilger: The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis, particularly the first two, are giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation, while Hillary Clinton is secretary of state, and the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly Saudi Arabia.

Julian Assange: Under Hillary Clinton – and the Clinton emails reveal a significant discussion of it – the biggest-ever arms deal in the world was made with Saudi Arabia: more than $80 billion. During her tenure, the total arms exports from the US doubled in dollar value.

JP: Of course, the consequence of that is that this notorious jihadist group, called ISIL or ISIS, is created largely with money from people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation?

JA: Yes.

FEATURED BOOK:

THE WORST POSSIBLE OUTCOME

Mosul courtesy LA Times

It was the worst of all possible outcomes.

They had created a journalist who knew how spectacularly incompetent they were, and how unethical.

He had been harassed, threatened, bullied and intimidated for years on end.

"I've had a great deal of difficulty dealing with the surveillance," he told one of the locals at his morning cafe. "It's been extremely intrusive."

He had hated bullies all his life, ever since being bullied at school and at home.

He had been to a high school reunion, and sat briefly looking at the beach where he had walked along as an adolescent after taking what he thought would be an overdose of aspirin, waiting to die. He was bashed when he got home for being late from school.

His life was rewinding backwards, and everything that had happened, every torment through that interminable winter, had compounded the feeling of destiny, of dark forces trying to extinguish him, of a kind of group madness which could not stand those who were different to themselves.

Who authorised the targeting of a journalist of more than 30 years standing?

Which head honcho, or head boofhead as he thought of them, had authorised the operation, the endless signs that he was being ridiculed, intimidated, yes threatened. They had tried to bring on an early heart attack. They had tried to encourage him to commit suicide. They had done everything they could to destroy him.

And in their insane pursuit they had destroyed themselves. For it would take only the most basic of public service inquiries to pinpoint the people responsible, and to use the information thus gained to topple them. Because if they couldn't handle a simple domestic operation aimed against a domestic journalist, how could they be handed the responsibility for the nation's national security? How could they be trusted to behave with dignity, to be beyond reproach, to justify their million dollar salaries.

The truth is even worse than you know, the Watchers on the Watch told him.

And he believed them.


THE BIGGER STORY:



https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/03/isis-leader-abu-bakr-al-baghdadi-no-longer-in-mosul

Western intelligence sources believe the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is no longer in Mosul, Boris Johnson has said.

In an unusual reference to intelligence, the British foreign secretary said Baghdadi’s audio recording issued on Thursday calling for the defeat of the Iraqi forces fighting to liberate Mosul was “cruelly ironic since some of the intelligence we have suggests he had himself vacated the scene himself and is yet using internet media to encourage others to take part in violence”.

Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi urges fight to death in Iraq, audio claims

Read more

In his first address for a year, Baghdadi called on his supporters to “wreak havoc”, saying the struggle was a prelude to victory. Isis fighters patrolled the Mosul streets broadcasting Baghdadi’s call.

Johnson said the battle to recapture Mosul, in the face of Isis’s “scorched earth campaign”, would take time and represented “the coalition’s greatest challenge”. He also insisted lessons had been learned from the aftermath of the 2003 Iraqwar, making post-victory stabilisation in Mosul as important as the military capture of the city.

There is widespread concern that, despite a year of planning, there is little agreement among the many ethnic groups in the region on the future political structure of Mosul or the surrounding Nineveh province.

 FEATURED BOOK

THEY WANT TO KILL YOU

Postcards of Rome Courtesy Michael Fitzjames

Something odd had settled into the house, the burnt smell of witch's brew, and it was no longer safe.

Someone, or something, was trying to communicate with him, or warn him, and he slept as if extinguished, to avoid all revelation.

"What do you want?" he demanded to know in the middle of the night.

And answered his own question: "They want to kill him."

Somewhere along the line he had adopted the Thai habit of talking about himself in the third person.

They want to kill him. They want to kill you.\

The surveillance had driven him beyond distraction.

In fevered, sweatless nights he woke up being interviewed on television: "What do you think of the Australian authorities?"

The national security authorities.

 I think, I know, from my own experience, they are remarkably dishonest, astonishingly incompetent.

He intoned. He intoned. They wept and swept the remnants of failed operations.

They tried to cover their own diseased tracks.

They tried to hide their own systematic abuses.

For surveillance in and of itself was an act of intimidation and abuse, and he had experienced the full weather of it, from one day to the next, one month to the next, one book  to the next.

There will come a time, he felt like saying to the microphone in the car, when you will wish I was just abusing you; because at least then you knew what I was thinking.

Extra-judicial, without conscience, fired not by justice or truth or emergency necessity, not by protection of the homeland, certainly not by common old fashioned decency, the harassment aka surveillance was targeted at individuals who did not tow the government line.

And those who did not tow the line they wished to kill, without warrant, without judicial oversight, without conscience.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And the power these secretive agencies had been granted by successive waves of gormless politicians had made them utterly, totally corrupt.

"Why are they so bad?" he had once asked.

"You've got to realise, there are some good people."

If only the good people were in ascendance, but they were not.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/02/middleeast/mosul-iraq-advance/

Karama, Iraq (CNN)The eastern suburbs of ISIS-held Mosul are in sight, but the Iraqi forces trying to liberate the city are still struggling to get there.
ISIS snipers, relentless gunfire and mortar shelling are still keeping troops from penetrating the city's border.
CNN Senior International Correspondent Arwa Damon, traveling with US-trained Iraqi counterterrorism forces, was just 200 meters from Mosul's eastern perimeter on Wednesday, with just a barren berm between her and more than 1 million civilians trapped in the city.

"There is no escape route. There have been no routes that anyone has established in fact for the civilian population to leave," she said.



FEATURED BOOK:

DARK DARK POLICING

Burning oil fields near Mosul

The staff had been smote into the ground.

The curse had been cast.

It would travel through the chains of command, from person to person, under doors, through wires. These ancient curses  did not like the air conditioning of modern offices, but would reach their intended targets nonetheless. The air would thicken around them; and one day, if they were lucky enough to live that long, they would realise that nothing at all was going right in their lives, their health was worsening, and would realise that all the normal pieces of fortune that flowed their way were instead flowing out to sea, that nothing in their lives worked anymore; and as their power weakened the jackals would strike.

There were the usual happenstance meetings. An unlikely Christian told him what it was like to be a lesbian at a Seventh Day Adventist meeting. A Nepalese migrant told him how you could make $40,000 living with a Nepalese girl for a year, in order for them to gain PR, Permanent Residence.

Of all the scumbags they've let into this country, he said, and shrugged. And here were people, willing people, who would have made good citizens.

One of them had been fined for walking across a quiet street against a red light; the latest abuse in the ever spiraling catalogue of abuses of  Australian authorities, who had so little to do and had become so numerous in number that now they were booking people for the way they crossed a street. An empty street.

He had been tormented year in and year out by the Watchers on the Watch, those forces aligned against anyone who dare to speak out, the idle cruelty of castoffs, the unthinking remorselessness of government funding.

"I wish I could see a counsellor on how to cope with government surveillance," he told his doctor; and they agreed, there was no such counselling available.

In the darkest reaches, in all those nightmare reaches, where fascists stomped and pig ignorance prevailed, where predators stalked and kindly voices were drowned out, where the government abused its own citizens and showed no respect, where the crushing of spirit was the aim, in these barren places the worst survived; and briefly thrived.

Before the curse took them, too, and they whimpered into premature old age, dreaming of what might have been.

If only they had been good.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/11/battle-mosul-direct-iraqi-assault-isil-fighters-161101070901154.html

Iraq's prime minister has urged ISIL fighters in Mosul to surrender as an offensive to drive the group from the country's second largest city continues.

A day after Haider al-Abadi appeared on state TV to order ISIL, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group, to give up its positions, troops opened fire with artillery, tanks and machine guns on the fighters on the edge of the Gogjali neighbourhood.

"They have no choice. Either they surrender or they die," Abadi said.

The fighters responded with guided anti-tank missiles and small arms to block the anti-ISIL coalition's advance on Tuesday. 

Al Jazeera's Stefanie Dekker, reporting from east of Mosul, said that the battle is intense as ISIL fighters are putting up stiff resistance against the approaching forces.

"We are being told by the Peshmerga forces that the black sky is the result of ISIL burning oil wells and tyres in and around Mosul," she said.

"Now we know this is one of their tactics to try to obscure their position from coalition air strikes and also to obscure the ground. The smoke is incredibly thick, so it is an intense battle."

If Iraqi forces enter Gogjali, it will mark the first time troops have set foot in Mosul in more than two years, after they were driven out by a much smaller force of ISIL fighters in 2014.

FEATURED BOOK:

NOWHERE IS SAFE

Vanessa Walker The Lost Cities

There they were in these nether-reaches of dark games, everyone paid but him.

"What do you do when you get home, puff out your little fat chest and say: 'I did good today. I harassed an old man.' "

They told him, there in those long nights, of magnificent tranches of malfeasance, of malfunctioning agencies and incompetencies on a grand scale.

He turned, exhausted, and wished leprosy into their eyes.

Rotting souls and smelly feet and malignant intent, he had seen it all now.

And he had seen the way power corrupted their bureaucratic little hearts, while out in the deserts the gods awaited. He had seen the dark forms dancing at the edge of liquid scapes, and had seen the wotst that men were capable of, or begun to understand. Here on the outer reaches of consciousness, when they, in their mundane lives, were chortling self-satisfied, he had set the hares running, as the saying went, and just as they had tried to kill him, now the hounds they had unleashed would turn.

They were fleeing through forests, European forests, and across sands, Eritrean sands, and they were all, yes, they were all now slouching towards Bethlehem, for they had stirred the forces that should have been left unprovoked, And the Lord would not forgive, for they knew not what they did. Their callow, dissembling hearts, their personal greed, none of it would serve them well in the harsh landscapes they now entered, their eyes dripping blood as they ran.

These were the demons they had so unwisely woken, and the land that should have been safe was not safe, and the villages that should have been safe where children ran and played and old grandparents watched with pride, wind swept through them, arid and hot, and doors banged in deserted buildings, and times of festivity never came.

It was the season of killing, the harvesting of souls, and even in this far off place, the dark lords stalked and manipulated, and the bombs that rained down half a world away, they shook through their temporal dreams as surely as they destroyed the flesh upon which they poured.

And so it was he looked up and said: Leave me alone. You know not what you do. And the interconnections of everything, they ran every which way to hide their own disease stinking guilt and barren consciences they themselves had betrayed, and stoked not flames but bitterness as they stunk and slunk into the reaches, never finding the courage they so desperately needed.

They would not be born again.


THE BIGGER STORY:

MOSUL

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/10/town-tal-afar-focus-en-route-mosul-battle-161030060800595.html

Iraqi Shia militia groups have launched an operation to retake the town of Tal Afar from ISIL and cut the armed groups's supply lines from Mosul to Syria, a spokesman said.

Michael Pregent, Middle East analyst and a former US intelligence officer who served in Iraq, told Al Jazeera the militias' move was not sanctioned by Iraq's government.

He said the hope by Baghdad and Washington was that ISIL would use the western route to flee Mosul for a "final battle" later in its Syrian bastion of Raqqa.

"The Shia militias are operating outside the control of the Iraqi government. They're not responsive to US requests not to participate," said Pregent.

"The military operation wasn't to encircle Mosul, it was to force ISIL out into Syria. The Shia militias are blocking that now. It sounds like a good military tactic but it's not synced, it's not coordinated. And the Shia militias remain a wildcard, based on what they've done in Ramadiand Fallujah."

The Mosul offensive involves tens of thousands of soldiers, federal police, Kurdish fighters, Sunni tribesmen and Shia militias.

FEATURED BOOK:

DANGEROUS FRIENDS: THE REAL CRIMINALS

Picture Warren Clarke

Idiot tipsy girls, overweight from their McDonald's diets and daubed in Halloween makeup, prattled on behind him. Australia had so few traditions of its own the youth were adopting customs they had seen on television. His car had broken down in Wilson Street in Newtown, leaving him stranded on the public transport system. There was much to be desired. His head swirled. Are you really from somewhere else? There were collapsing landscape and fleeting forms whenever he shut his eyes. His level of frustration was rising by the day.

How many countries is America bombing? Asked one post on Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=how%20many%20countries%20is%20america%20bombing

The number turned out to be seven, according to the reporter: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia.

And Australia, having surrendered its sovereignty to the United State, was right in there bombing away as well.

And just as in the United States, it was a war unapproved by parliament, or in their case Congress, who were never asked,

The reporter estimated the US had spent $4 trillion and killed 1.3 million people in the combat zones.

Exactly how much Australia had spent on America's wars and how many people it had been responsible for killing, the Australian public would never know.

Meanwhile, Old Alex had been harassed, bullied, threatened, intimidated and ridiculed, ceaselessly, for years on end. And the senior public servants who authorised the operations, on their million dollar salaries and suites of privileges, knew perfectly well they were targeting and encouraging to suicide someone who had a history of attempts or suicidal behaviour. Exactly how that did not breach the Public Service Act in the most grievous way, how these people maintained their jobs and were not sacked, poor Old Alex would never know.

And so he spat in their face. Or brooded out the window as the girls twittered gossip to mundane to keep track of, and he shut his eyes and the landscapes collapsed and the night fled ever darker.


THE  BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/inquirer/settling-in-for-long-campaign-to-free-mosul-from-islamic-state/news-story/c342010a8aea5a7254dd137750727799

David Kilcullen on Mosul

Besides their use of drones and chemical weapons, the defenders are making clever use of terrain. Mosul is bisected by the roughly north-south flow of the Tigris River. There are five bridges across the Tigris, one of which was destroyed in April by a coalition airstrike to prevent ­Islamic State moving supplies to the front. At least one other bridge has been damaged by airstrikes, and Islamic State fighters appear to have wired each remaining crossing point with explosives, placing a guard on each bridge and preparing to blow them up and fall back across the river as coalition forces approach.

They have also demolished key urban infrastructure including power stations and water supplies, and set fire to oil wells, a chemical plant and a sulphur mine, creating a poisonous smoke haze that has sickened ground troops and civilians and hampered coalition air operations. As assault units close in, Islamic State fighters have used smoke and the cover of darkness to pull out of outlying areas.

But far from fading away, they’ve tended to use temporary withdrawals as setups for aggres­sive counter-attacks, often launching multiple suicide truck bombs at once, working around the flanks and rear of attackers to strike headquarters or reserves. Ground that was cleared is often reinfiltrated by snipers who target ­advancing troops. Inside the city, the defenders have wired buildings with massive IEDs and laid deep minefield belts to channel the ­assault into prepared killing areas.

There are also substantial ­Islamic State forces outside Mosul, as shown by determined counter-attacks at Kirkuk and Rutbah over the past two weeks. 

FEATURED BOOK

CLOSER

Sydney Street Scenes 2015/2016 Picture John Stapleton

The book was finished.


Helicopters buzzed over the scene, each trailing a burning trawl rope.


He grabbed on to one, it disintegrated into his hands. He grabbed on to another, it too disintegrated.


The burning ropes cut arcing flames across the darkening scene; dank with fear. Everywhere around him cinders swirled.


He grabbed another rope and it held, lifting him above the scene, just as the ground beneath him buckled and blew. He hadn't expected to die that day, although what gave him such conviction he could barely say.


Swept away from the scene, the arc lines of burning ropes and flurries of ash behind him in an instant, he barely dared to look down.


Life was brief, but he wanted to hang on one more day, as his stomach screamed and the rotors above thrashed towards the horizon. There would be no peace, not that day.


Nine hundred Islamic State warriors had been killed in the fight for Mosul; announced one report. So many died, and this was victory? It was a victory that would taste like ash for decades to come, here in perilous times.


He was emotionally exhausted from the book, which had been written under difficult circumstance, just as had the previous two.


The harassment of the authorities, the psychological operations designed to destabilise him, never ceased. If there were Flaws in the Glass they would pounce. They never learnt, and he acted stupider than he was; a tried and true method.


They fumbled and gashed and lashed; and it wouldn't matter how major or minor the sin, they would pounce. He had been called everything imaginable, harassed month in month out. It was government money, there was no reason to stop. Under the ASIO Act journalists were classified as Persons of Interest, and they felt it was within their purlieu to harass, threaten, bully and intimidate journalists as much as they liked, to encourage them to suicide, to whisper heart attack heart attack, in the hope of bringing on an early death.


For of free thought and freedom on speech in the Australia of 2016, there was none.


The country was now a pale shadow of the boisterous, larrikin country he had once known and loved; a travesty brought on by years of poor governance and rank hypocrisy at the highest levels.


There was a price to pay for war, and they would pay it if they could. And they would silence him, if they could. The bully boys, the bully girls, the henchmen, the henchwomen, the agents of the state.


NEWS


http://www.iraqinews.com/iraq-war/isis-burns-nine-militants-fleeing-battles-mosul/


(IraqiNews.com) Nineveh – Iraqi media outlets announced on Tuesday, that the Islamic State executed nine of its members by burning for fleeing the battles in central Mosul.
Al Sumaria News stated, “ISIS terrorist gangs executed nine of its members for fleeing the battle against the security forces in Mosul, by throwing them in trenches containing a burning oil, after tying their hands and legs.”
“ISIS used the burning oil trenches to impede the visibility of the Iraqi Air Force and international coalition air force,” Al Sumaria added.


FEATURED BOOK:

Daughter Henrietta Graduate, Sydney University. 2016.

At the women's college.