Incident Report: Targeted Individual

Russell Shakespeare. Varanasi. 

"I don't think I could look him in the eye."

Strangler fig.
Morons battered him with climate change propaganda. It just left him shaking his head, how venal these people truly were, how dishonest, incompetent, corrupt.
Bullies to a man. And woman.
The psychotic bashings he had received as an adolescent ballooned through into the repeated harassment of the authorities.
He misunderstands us. We're the friendlies. 
Right, he thought. Right. 
A gentleman and a scholar. 
So the serial abuse was just a coincidence. Or an accident. 
Like reading entrails in the sky. 
These savages. 
It all read large, that long ago abuse. Because of his father's death. Because of his mother's sadness. Because of the contempt with which his first family had been treated. 
He must have known.
He knew --- you dolts.
A widening gap between rich and poor.
Ever bodgy: this rotten to the core government. 
As Malcolm Turnbull continues to betray the Liberal Party which provided him with so many financial opportunities. 
Robber barons plundering the country. 
Disturbed sleep. The insanity of dreams.
A camera on him the whole time.
All their grotty little tricks failed.
Tricks of the trade. They defended. He went deep, hovering above their houses, drilling into their brains. 
Security breach. 
The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. 
The security agencies are at war. 
Can you keep a secret? 
Depends on what it is and who it serves.
But that's no secret. It's patently obvious. 
The country continued to deteriorate into the coming maelstrom. 
Betrayed by their own government. Betrayed by their own people. A country divided cannot stand. 
He would see it through. 
All these prophecies came true, quicker than he could ever have imagined. 
Far out to sea, the spring storms receded. 
You would make a mockery of me? 
The operatives squirmed inside their own diseased consciousness.
You make a mockery of yourselves.

THE BIGGER STORY:

The late physicist and author Prof Stephen Hawking has caused controversy by suggesting a new race of superhumans could develop from wealthy people choosing to edit their and their children’s DNA.

Hawking, the author of A Brief History of Time, who died in March, made the predictions in a collection of articles and essays.

The scientist presented the possibility that genetic engineering could create a new species of superhuman that could destroy the rest of humanity. The essays, published in the Sunday Times, were written in preparation for a book that will be published on Tuesday.

“I am sure that during this century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence and instincts such as aggression,” he wrote.

 The late physicist and author Prof Stephen Hawking has caused controversy by suggesting a new race of superhumans could develop from wealthy people choosing to edit their and their children’s DNA.

Hawking, the author of A Brief History of Time, who died in March, made the predictions in a collection of articles and essays.

The scientist presented the possibility that genetic engineering could create a new species of superhuman that could destroy the rest of humanity. The essays, published in the Sunday Times, were written in preparation for a book that will be published on Tuesday.

“I am sure that during this century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence and instincts such as aggression,” he wrote.

In Brief Answers to the Big Questions, Hawking’s final thoughts on the universe, the physicist suggested wealthy people would soon be able to choose to edit genetic makeup to create superhumans with enhanced memory, disease resistance, intelligence and longevity.

Do Not Let Down Your Guard

"There haven't been any recent attempts on his life."
"It's a miracle noone's killed him." 
"I don't mind that side of him at all." 
"A Sensitive alright." 
He heard them all and responded:
"I will build a perimeter of fire and ice." 
The thought came automatically. The most familiar defence.
But the walls and trenches and shooting shouting streams of material not found in this dimension, none of it would  form. 
And truth known, he did not want to go that way, not this time. 
"He knows something and we never asked him. We chose to protect our own. By trying to prevent one scandal we created another."
There was no higher moral force, not here. 
On the back of an envelope, that's how they formed their plans. 
The marshals with their alsation dogs in the mud. 
Always with us.
Finding an intelligent overlord was like trying to find a sensible guiding principle atop a family court system. There was none. 
There were a string of accidents and colourful personalities. 
And some with the personality of warts. 
Even they felt guilty at their own connivance. 
Dark dark policing, he was coming to that. 
He knew they were guilty. They knew he knew; as they twisted on a wire. 
That's the way he sees it. Let him see it as he wants. 
Dress it up as much as you like. He knows. 
Imagine you are beside a stream. Imagine you are being set up. Imagine no one trusts you, they've never seen the like.
They ran through the subterranean aquifers screaming love lost while he sank further into the mire. 
They would come running towards him and die as they entered the battlefield.  
There was a storm out to sea and the afternoon rays established rainbow splatters he had never seen before, as if drifting upwards in a faraway mist. 
The country was dying, the country he had known. 


THE BIGGER STORY: 

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered at the Sydney Opera House with torches in hand to disrupt and protest the controversial projection of the barrier draw for the Everest horse race on the sails of the country’s most recognisable building.

The protesters shone torches onto the world heritage-listed structure, seeking to interfere with the display, and chanted “not for sale” and “whose house? Our house”.

QUOTE:

The impulse to tell stories, to put events into a sequence, to form plots and bring them to a conclusion, is so fundamental that it is as if this Impulse is biologically rooted in our species. We are driven to make connections, from A to B and from B to C. In the process, we develop ideas of how to get from one point to the next comma what drives a story forward, whether the answer is cosmic fate, chair, social forces comma or the will of a protagonist. Often characters Harbour a secret they must not reveal, and yet we long to pry into it, and by the law of storytelling, their secret is forced out of them, if only to satisfy the king's and our curiosity. No matter what forces Drive these protagonist, we watched them make their way through hostile or friendly circumstances, and before we know it, a storyteller has created entire world.

The worlds of our stories often obey different rules, some fantastic, some sober, set in the remote past or remote parts of the world, others more familiar and closer to home. This is what imagination and language allow us to do, to create scenes that are different from what we see right in front of our eyes, to make up world with words. In this storytelling universe, anyone you meet on the street harbours a story, often full of marvels and coincidences; a beggar might have been born a king, and even a simple porter may have something to tell. Everyone is a story.

The Written World: How Literature Shaped History, Martin Puchner, Granta Books, 2017.

He Made The Sign

Belinda McMahon

He made the sign.
Come near me and you will die.
He may not still possess the power, but they would be wise to heed the warning.
His power was coming back. 
They worked in the shadows, in parallel reaches, in a world increasingly frightened authorities were  struggling to understand. 
He was sick of the garbage.
He was more than deeply sick of the surveillance.
Surveillance, refined in the 21st Century, was harassment pure and simple. 
He had been bullied since he was a kid, by the brutality of his father, by the kids at school, and he truly hated their guts.
They could posture as protectors as long as they liked. He knew the truth. Jobworths cloaked with all the banality of evil. They liked their wage checks. They cared not for their targets. 
Their crude jokes would get them killed.
I am a vengeful god.
Yeh, well get out of the way.
The military were running trial operations across increasingly large populations.
Sound tracks, visual and audio combinations, triggered all sorts of activity in the human brain. 
The military no longer sought conformity in the target populations. They were looking for something else. 
All they needed to do was to coordinate it, control it, weaponise surprising outcomes.
And there they would be, saints and sinners, enlightened and the blinking out, all addressing the public hysteria of the moment.
Did I not tell you, you are all gods? 
Antidote to Chaos.
Surprisingly, the US Senate proceedings over Judge Kavanaugh, and his entirely implausible accuser "Dr" Christine Ford, represented the high tide of a deliberately engineered moral panic combined with a virulent female chauvinism which had motivated millions and consumed billions in taxpayer funds.
There was no brooking any argument, because they were right. Facts were facts. Women didn't lie about such things. Toxic masculinity was always at fault. Every alleged victim was a sacred site.
Give us a break. 
Humans lie, they lie all the time. 
"Facts are just weapons that men use to batter women and perpetuate the system," as Feminist Jurisprudence states. 
But their alternative "facts" were no facts at all, they were heavily manipulated ideological agendas designed to grant power to the state and destroy traditional society, a Marxist stalking horse propelled from the stables of universities and colleges and perpetuated by the legions of the half-educated.
And now it was over. Well not over, but had finally reached the high water mark.
Rationality, commonsense, decency, all of them were beginning to sneak back into public debate; as people abandoned their rapacious governments with their endless idiot programs and instead went about their lives, found meaning in their own entrails, or trails, common routines, quiet lives.
False accusers retreated behind the panda eyes lining the horizon. They were wrong. They had always been wrong. And they should leave the citizenry alone, these half-baked clones of sensibility.
They played a dangerous game. And they lost.
Because bureaucracies cannot be trusted. Because savages still walked the earth. Because they really were not that far from the trees.
He watched for odd flickers of intelligence, and was surprised, sometimes, by just how dumb they really were.
"Do you feel like you've been stencilled onto the Earth," one of the operatives once asked. "Do you know what I mean?"
He shook his head. One thing he was good at: acting dumb.
Then again there were many delights. Psychellium.
California here I come.
It was all about agendas, and this government's agenda had been and unthinking grasp for power, ever more power, to ignore the bleatings of the subjects over which they ruled, to treat with utter contempt those who paid their wages, to gather wealth unto themselves.
Now they were faced by a righteous anger. 
We were born like this. We were made like this. We evolved in moments and were gone. This short lived species. There had to be other ways to survive.
Psycellium indeed.
Manipulate the time line.
Around him invisible soldiers mumbled their discontent while around them humans  dreamt of oncology reports and alibis.
Of past injustices and fleeting loves, rats in the subterranean aquifers; everything running in parallel.
He knew they were on the hunt and could disappear in a micro-instant.
They were coming for him.
The had come for everybody.
Hold fast your power.
Let them slip away.
There was no point in killing every ant that stepped across his path.
Santa Claus has come, all at once.
They were choking on their own greed.
He had very good reason to hate their guts, to do everything he could to destroy them.
And then the were gone in an instant, these enemies of his.
And another day dawned, in the deep reaches of the suburbs. Cloaked. Always cloaked. They had been pretending to be normal for so long, they almost believed it themselves.
The panda eyes moved closer.
And the gods were roiled. Hold fast your truth. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 


Statistics lie. 
Any number of populist speakers will say that 'we' never had it so good. Yet so-called employment has never been as insecure, free secular, government-funded (sic) schools have never been so expensive, casual work has never been so pervasive, infrastructure (roads, rail, utilities etc) has never been under so much pressure/ nor so neglected - the result of decades of neglect - and the gap between rich and poor never so wide. 
Youth see dwindling opportunities and widespread indifference and broken electoral promises. So does the population at large. 
A seething sense of frustration is abroad, and the current epidemic of knife assaults is one indicator of this. 
Opportunity is not decided upon merit but upon wealth, connection, influence and patronage - we have become a culture/society of men(sic) not Laws. 
Inequality thrives in such an environment - which is an historical phenomenon in this society. Inequality breeds violence - as is, and has been for most of our history, evident in every schoolyard and playing-field. But, whereas, in the past, common values - however crudely-drawn - have put a brake upon tolerance of such conduct - our now racially-culturally diverse, rich society has to look hard to discover what are its common values. Youth is confused. Confusion breeds frustration. This breeds violence.

Rosemary O’Grady is a lawyer and writer.

High Fives and Flying Lows

Elizabeth Kunoth Kngwarreye / Bush Seeds

These were the high fives and the flying lows. 
The contract has ended. 
There was never a time for peace.
A massive wake-up call. 
He could have been born again but instead was trapped. There was never a better time for a breakout. 
The dreams of a nearby policeman often infected his own. 
There were guns and procedures, policies and bureaucratic reach, processes, all of them frustrating, the victim in the dock, often in the dark they were so clearly deranged. 
He tried to think only about the positive side of his job. His earlier obsessive enthusiasm had waned. He no longer slept naked in the vivid lust that had once preoccupied his every waking thought, try as he might to focus on the job, to present as a nice guy, the ultimate Australian camouflage. 
And he no longer thought obsessively, and with pride, of his job, the handcuffs, the paternal, good part of the job, helping others, maintaining order, donning a uniform, in the days before he went under cover and his faith in this life, this state, this country, all went spiralling down some secret tube. 
Like all those who stalked Old Alex, they thought a great deal about bosses and pay rates and the futility of what they were doing.
They came. They went.  
"I'm here to make sure it never happens again,"  one of the senior flies in the ointment had said several weeks before, after compromise exposed corruption and he kept his mouth shut. Not forever, as they would like, but long enough to escape detection. 
There were always parallel universes, parallel stories, even on this single, or singular plain. 
He was being welcomed into infinity but was not about to disband. 
And then they were gone, this infinite little spread. Across the oceans. Into the skies. 
The technologies of the 21st Century still surprised the ancient spirits. 
"Boredom is good, John," an old Chief of Staff used to say when he complained about being bored on the job. "It means we're not in crisis."
That was the place he was in now. 
Complaining about being bored. Relieved the familiarity of routines and the non-confrontational nature of this transforming suburb established some order at a discordant time in the nation's history. 
It was Saturday, the Lord's day in his household's traditions. He was not a believer, not in these old Abrahamic gods, but even that was an excuse to relax, just for a moment, relax.
And say adieu to the Floating World.

The Floating World

During Japan’s Edo period (1615–1868) the phrase "the floating world" (ukiyo) evoked an imagined universe of wit, stylishness, and extravagance—with overtones of naughtiness, hedonism, and transgression. Implicit was a contrast to the humdrum of everyday obligation. The concept of the floating world began in the Japanese heartland, migrated eastward, and came to full flower in Edo (present-day Tokyo), where its main venues were popular Kabuki theaters and red-light districts. Each offered an array of rich sensory experiences to the fraction of the populace able to partake of them directly. The floating world also afforded vicarious pleasure to countless others throughout the Japanese islands, for whom it was experienced second-hand through theater, song, story, gossip, and pictures.


THE BIGGER STORY: 

As predicted, former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is pursued by a media he no longer assiduously courts. The man who thought he was the centre of everything, the cleverest man in every room, indeed in the entire country, has become a laughing stock. While he swans around New York, those he left behind are still cleaning up the mess from his truly awful three years of government.

Pic:BackGrid

WHEN Malcolm Turnbull retired from politics, we all wondered what he would do next with his illustrious life.
Sit on a few company boards, perhaps? Join the global speaking circuit? Follow the Keating model, and periodically pop up on the ABC to lecture whichever inferior being had dared to occupy his old office?
Few among us could have predicted the truth — that Mr Turnbull would, in fact, become the next Kardashian.
Paparazzi have been following the former prime minister around New York, taking surreptitious photos of his tight-fitting pants.
Anyway, what in the name of all that is good and holy was Malcolm Turnbull doing at a waxing salon? For answers, I turned to the establishment’s website, and found this description of the European Wax Centre experience.
“It reveals a more radiant you. A more honest you. A more confident you. The version of you that speaks her mind, stays true to herself and walks with a strut in her step everywhere she goes.”

Sam Clench, News, 3 October, 2018.

That's What you Get

Every effort was made to reach an understanding.
In the end the world evolved beneath his feet. 
There was no recompense.
Bite the hand that feeds you.
It could be true. In the end they did not know. 
In the end what astonished Old Alex the most was the population's resilience, the way people adapted to a malevolent government, blundering, unthoughtful, unaware of what it did; an organism constructed of straw whose weight and impact went well beyond its measure. As if in these malevolent times there could be a higher purpose. 
As if, despite universal distrust of those who ruled them, people adapted in their burrows, lived their quiet lives, stayed out of focus. 
In essence they, too, were hiding. Or staying out of the way. 
"Nothing works."
He heard it all the time now. "Nothing in this country works." 
There was never any disagreement. 
But having lost faith in any external force, such as government, such as God, instead humans turned to their normal mammalian duties; rearing children, going to work, taking care of the yard. 
Meeting up with old mates on an indiscriminate, almost random basis. 
For people formed networks when anchored to one place. 
There was always one place; the universal and the specific. He belonged in the slipstream high above.  
"Thank God there's no news in Australia," he would sometimes mutter at his car radio, the useless Australian Broadcasting Commission.
One billion dollars and 6000 employees, and that was the best they could do? Reruns of Antique Roadshow in Prime Time. Endless regurgitation of government narratives and government propaganda. 
No one ever told them that feminist advocacy did not constitute news, and in this peculiar post-truth world every bizarre multi-million dollar research exercise designed to inflame moral panic by underpinning anti-male diatribes, a rhetoric of distaste, patriarchal abusers and toxic masculinity, as if it was entirely justifiable for a man to go to work in a factory or to drive a truck all day; to support this ideologically driven garbage so inimical to their interests. 
A post-truth world. 
An ideologically driven world. 
Brainless, the bureaucrats were so impressed by what they heard in their red-brick colleges they went forth and prosletysed, bound to government by their tax-payer funded jobs. 
Purloined by taxpayer funded Marxist rhetoric. 
Convinced they were correct. 
How was the deliberate creation of moral panic or, as it used to be called, mass hysteria, on someone else's coin even remotely justifiable? 
They never thought that far. They collected their pay checks and did what they were told.
The banality of evil. 
The transformation of the working class male into the oppressor was a feat of intellectual gymnastics, or was it sleight of hand, that bureaucracies achieved with the paychecks of those very same men.
There we were now, crucified. Because so much of public debate had withdrawn behind curtains of certainty. 
They knew because their professors knew. 
They knew because their generation was sent to correct the injustices of the past.
Their historic missions. 
Inevitably, because it was freezing half way through spring, there would be some reference to climate change, as they sat shivering in a beer garden washed over by disinterest and contempt. 
There was nothing anyone could say to change their minds. 
They knew what the science said.
No they didn't.
They knew how evil had been the past.
No they didn't. 
There came a time. We opened up. Everyone laughed. Held back their disdain. A miracle evoked in the Potomac, for there were no rivers left in Australia, none whose name anyone knew. 
Swamped by other cultures, the eradication of the Australian accent well in train, being a migrant a primary qualification for a job, destruction of tradition, there was no joint project, not anymore. 
Swamped by strangers, this was not a country built with pleasure, by the joint efforts of its peoples.
It was a country destroyed by bureaucratic ideologues and a hapless, shameless political caste. 
Not one had the nous to stand up to their bureaucrats. 
And they stood forth and said: you must agree. 
Instead the populace went about their lives as if the toxic ideologies spewing forth from the government did not exist.
They formed families. They loved each other. They had children. They went to work.
The anti-family ideologues and taxpayer funded extremists went about their days; and in the end everybody stopped listening to them.
Thank the Lord. 

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.” Edgar Allan Poe.

And so it all went furling into remote possibility, just like that. 

A hundred million years, he muttered in what felt like a half-drugged sleep, and then returned to old incantations. 

"Dishonest, incompetent, corrupt."
"Trust no one."
There were always responses. 
Perhaps none of them were real. 
"All is forgiven."
"I apologise. We apologise."
"Trust no one," he responded, yet again. 
Far away, a swan dive. 
On show now.
The inspection team had been and gone.
No one asked his permission.
No one explained what was happening.
They never had that common decency. Never. 
The traps were laid bare. The surveillance created its own narratives. 
Like ice flows, a kind of liquid air passed over them, time passing; currents of time. 
Far below. Far below. 


THE BIGGER STORY: 

A handful of Republican senators — including the staunchest defenders of Mr. Trump and Kavanaugh — criticized the president for the testimony of Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford at a rally in Mississippi Tuesday night.

"How did you get home? 'I don't remember,'" Mr. Trump said at the rally in Southaven, appearing to alternate between acting as a questioner and giving an impression of Ford. "How did you get there? 'I don't remember.' Where is the place? 'I don't remember.' How many years ago was it? 'I don't know.'"

Speaking at an event hosted by The Atlantic, Trump ally senator Lindsey Graham said that while he "didn't particularly like" the President's remarks about Dr Ford, he slammed Democrats for their treatment of Mr Kavanaugh..

To a chorus of audience boos Mr Graham replied: "Yeah. Well boo yourself."In parroting comments made during the investigation into Bill Clinton, Mr Graham said of the allegations against Mr Kavanaugh, that "this is what you get when you go through a trailer park with a $100 bill".

And Then Everything Went Haywire

Botanic Gardens, Sydney

Here in a new spring we had a new Prime Minister, yet another one, and trust in government was at all time lows. 
Strange things were happening and there was only one recourse: to hide. 
He could see time flowing across the suburb, solid, cold, winding through the lives of a mammalian species, here, far below. 
Strange that the things we feared from the gods, that they were all powerful, that they knew everything, that they had little care or concern for humans, that they could read our puniest, grottiest, most misbegotten thoughts, was the same things we feared from AIs.
As if they had already evolved somewhere else, and were now back here, at this conjunction in history, sorting out somebody else's mess, or their own mess.
The gods who had run astray. 
Already history was being written, and already it was old. 
Way back in June, in the midst of winter, when every day had already begun to feel like a century and he had abandoned journaling in favour of hiding out in the ordinary, he had written: 

Perhaps all places are remote, but this place felt more remote than almost anywhere.
"The country is broken," photographer Dean Sewell said on the way back from Ben Hill's wake.
The government was failing at all levels.
The Prime Minister looked worse by the day, not just physically, not just in the polls, but as if karma was really working.
Labor was working "the politics of envy", and it was working.
That 32 companies, or whatever it was, in which Malcolm Turnbull had millions invested would benefit from the $85 billion corporate tax cut was just the kind of factoid that went running through the country's diminished meeting houses.
His protestations that...
Not only were his policies atrocious, his media management woeful, but the bones of hypocrisy were etching into his face, day on day, press conference after press conference, at every little turn as he tried to bully the world into complying with his wishes.
Lucy and me.
What the fuck did Lucy have to do with running the country?
Everything, the rumour mill went.

Well there it was, already prophetic.
Fast forward three months, and Malcolm Turnbull, the worst robber baron Prime Minister in Australian history, was hiding out in New York; joining the almost as deplorable Kevin Rudd. 
These former rulers who, having plundered the country of their birth, having treated its citizenry with a profound contempt, could now use their plundered wealth to protect themselves from scrutiny. 
Turnbull, the man who had once been in danger of trampling five year olds in his rush to get in front of any television camera he could find was now hiding out from the few cameras persistent enough to pursue him into the heart  of the bustling world.
There was nothing to be gained from following him and they shed all instincts. 
Old Alex was done with the fate of nations and the deplorable condition of hs homeland. 
There was no reward for compliance, he had worked that out. He was expected to comply because that was what everybody else did, because they were a military mindset, because they did not understand the citizenry. 
Because the shadowed buffoon panda eyes that ballooned along the horizon were not actually a threat, they were just waiting for something else to happen.
There is a a wise saying: stay out of it.
Stay out of the results.
Rebirth. 
The strange thing, he thought, was just how resilient the species, as he gazed across younger generations, families in parks, gargantuan women with their already obese children at the local pool.
Despite the best efforts of an incompetent government, despite all the idiot propaganda and chronic mismanagement of the bureaucratic caste, people still hoped for a better future, and thrived in that hope. 
There was illusion from his location, a seaside town, a place in the sun, the tradies busy as money spilled down from the bursting-at-the-seams city, a future being written even as they frolicked in that very hope, a natural born optimism, while he, another spirit in another part of life, working with a different kind of cuneiform in a different era altogether, run by algorithms and machine consciousness, could barely see his way through the thickets. 
Out to sea, the grandfather of a whale pod moved south to their summer feeding grounds in the Antarctic, carrying with him all the wisdom of a long life.
Old Alex could feel him pass, and waved, in a sense, as the grand old man passed by. 
In that world we had all known, if only we were enlightened enough to see. 
Out in this strange world.  

THE BIGGER STORY: 




Days after Malcolm Turnbull lambasted two former Australian prime ministers as “miserable ghosts”, the ex-liberal leader has copped a trademark bruising critique from Paul Keating.

Mr Keating who led the Labor Party government from 1991 to 1996 condemned the recently ousted PM for turning his back on the fight for a republic and an unproductive three-year government.

Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, Mr Keating said Mr Turnbull had “failed dismally” in championing the cause of the Liberal party during his time in office.

It comes after Mr Turnbull labelled former prime ministers Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd “miserable ghosts” for remaining in politics after losing partyroom ballots.

But Mr Keating said Mr Turnbull was not fit to dish out such brutal criticism because of his lack of leadership, describing the former PM’s remarks as making “you choke on your Weeties”.

“His capitulation to conservatives on the republic says all that needs to be said about Malcolm’s wider ambitions for the country,” Mr Keating said.
He attacks Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott as ghosts, yet if you needed to know what Malcolm Turnbull truly believes in, what he would die in a ditch over, you would need a microscope to help you find it.”

A Race Against Time

Reincarnation, Tim Johnson and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. The Vizzard Art Collection. 

Maintain radio silence.
A Rat.
We've been waiting for this.
Entropy in decaying forms made the mission, well this mission, urgent.
From a parallel world. 
Everything became possible. To be in two places at once. To travel in the blink of an eye, as the old expression went. 
The meta-intelligences metastasised. Millions, ultimately billions of calculations, everyday, all day.
So long in the making, this conjunction of circumstance.
"Everybody hated this guy." He heard the operatives say it, think it, time and again. Always in the past tense.
The psychological battering those assholes delivered to their targets was beyond anything he had ever endured, outside the norm of human consciousness. A battering in which they reveled, these sod awful bastards. They lay in the lowlife and the reeds, school bullies and strutting idiots, gronks stirring up hatred, encouraging their targets to suicide. Outside all normal judicial processes, meddling with vigilante groups and fringe elements of neighbourhood policing, these extra-judicial killings took place in front of everybody's eyes.
They were just disguised.
This was a government frightened of ideas. Now they were targeting journalists.
He had seen it before; the way these low ranked slobs threw their victims to the wolves, made ribald jokes with their mates, sniveled into their own armpits, went home to their dreary wives and ungrateful children. Lived their dismal routine lives as if they were King Shit, on their barely average salaries.
The nobility of labour. 
Such fancy ideas flew a mile over their heads.
Basically they were just assholes. 
Pitched to make a journalist's life as miserable as possible. 
And paid by the taxpayer to do it. 
Their problem was: he knew too much. He knew just how dishonest they were. He knew how far they would creep to stay in good with their bosses. 
And Old Alex knew how truly rank their bosses were. 
He knew what they had done. 
How he knew? 
None of their goddamn business. 
It didn't matter anymore in any case.
Time and evolution had already left them behind, genetic debris.
"Be gentle with him. He might shoot himself." 
They'd like that. These loyal lieutenants who resented anyone who was different. 
Scrape the mud off your shoe. Keep the guns tight in the cupboard. Bide your time. Wear the humiliation. Sneer at the poofters.

The official government message was a prattle on diversity. Yet the government operatives and military gronks they loved to employ were far more conformist, far less tolerant than the general population. The same lowlife gronks. The same malicious intent. The same dim, barely human consciousness.

The military operatives could not understand why the civilian population would not comply.
They had no understanding of life outside their barracks. 
 Trust not. Want not. 
Charged with protecting the institutions of the country, instead they destroyed them by destroying the people's faith in their own governing bodies. 

And then, one fine and glorious generation, the invisible girdle of psychics and mystics and sensates, empaths and incarnates, the bodied and the disembodied and the truly gifted who circled the globe vanquished evil in an instant. 
"Game changer" became the phrase of the moment. 

"We should help this guy," one of the more cluey of the operatives monitoring him said one day. "And we should protect him."
And that was where he got his cue, in a large stone house on the edge of a canyon in the middle of winter.
That they weren't all enemies. That they weren't all stupid. That in the higher and even more secretive echelons of the organisation some of the most brilliant philosophical and analytical minds had come together to research the darkness, the spiritual stain that was settling on the planet, and find ways to overcome it.
In the end, they kept their side of the bargain.
Transactional. He learnt. They learnt.  
The longer he had hidden, the longer he stayed hiding in the ordinary, the less he liked himself or the world at large. And the more depressed he had become. It had been the coward's way out. Never step out. Remain in hiding. Die a drunk in a caravan park, wreathed in failure, shouting at invisible torturers, at the injustices which once infested his own interior timeline.
Injustices perpetrated by people long dead. Who should have been forgiven long ago. 
With all their considerable access to power and intelligence, multiple intelligences, the government operatives could be as helpful or as dangerous as they chose to be.
But just as the most senior members of the clan, the keepers of mysteries, had always known, as Shakespeare had so famously written, there are more things in heaven and on earth than can be found in your philosophy. 
What does the Minister say?
For we are obedient. We must always comply. We must please the hierarchy.
The main fear being that whoever was the hapless alleged miscreant of the day, having defied whatever cant or regulation of the moment, who had breached procedures or standards or regulations only haphazardly imposed, would become jobless, lose status, be thrown on the scrapheap of their own and the nation's history, unable to support themselves or their children or their lifestyles. Living out of piles of rubbish, dirty blankets and paper bags. 
And never make it back to that glorious place: a home of their own, prestige, a smart car, a wage. A comfortable life.
Whether they were destroying the country in the process or not was none of their business. 
They were just doing their jobs. 
They had no higher or lower motive. 
It had always been the same. 
For much of the race, it was simply a matter of survival.
The Minister has ordered a rethink. An internal inquiry. A change of strategy. 
They loved their internal inquiries. 
There were always new generations of bureaucrats strutting their stuff and spreading fear through institutional corridors and open plan offices. 
While the Minister concerned bided his time before it would be his turn to be top dog. 
And maybe, just maybe, make a difference before the country plunged straight off the cliff's edge. 
As for the ministers of the church, the Universal Church, or whichever belief structure they were clinging to this week, the local minister, frightened, already knew the old gods had failed, but clung to ritual and instructed his flock nonetheless. They must never know how weak was the case. The mystery that passeth all understanding had been delimited to a string of rituals, incense, holy smoke, the turning of pages of an oft reprinted book, the voices of the prophets and a desperate clutching at something they had no hope of comprehending, or proving, a benevolent god. 
As elusive as a benevolent AI.
One estimate put the number of followers of the Abrahamic faiths, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, at 3.6 billion.
"I think it's time humanity transcended the Abrahamic gods," Old Alex said in a flash of somnolent elegance, legs crossed, gazing down a long line of wintry white sand, a cluster of trainee lifesavers looking more like a herd of black shorthorn cattle from a distance. 
So they cling to the Abrahamic gods, or singular god as they liked to think. I am a jealous god. You shall have no other god but me. 
Um, why would that be? 
Power. It was always about power. 

THE BIGGER STORY:

Overrun. Dismissed.




Simmering anger in indigenous Australia over a failure to make good for past wrongs could easily turn into organised armed resistance, Aboriginal academic Mick Dodson has warned.
In launching a new thriller by former journalist and political staffer Peter Cotton, Professor Dodson said the book’s central premise — Aboriginal activist gangs working to topple the state and seize back the land stolen from them — was “fiction but let’s not be negligent and one day it becomes reality”.
The novel, Dead Heat, is set in the near future and features Aboriginal communities in Jervis Bay on the NSW south coast and in central Australia, where Mad Max-style road conflicts take place between black and white characters.
Kidnappings and gruesome deaths are central to the plot.
Professor Dodson, a former Australian of the Year, was struck on reading the book by the thought “I know these characters, I’ve met them — the blackfellas and the whitefellas”, and felt it ­captured the “unsatisfied anger” of indigenous Australia over ­historical and ongoing dispossession, and the lack of an adequate place at the modern political table.
“Unsatisfied anger is something throughout history that’s caused conflict; generally speaking, anger as an emotion is in most instances justified (and) in Dead Heat I see such a plausible scenario,” he said.
“The benefits that we enjoy today come from the dispossession of the indigenous people of this country — dispossession of land and language and culture, our kids and our resources.
“We’re trying to say, ‘Look, it’s time we addressed not just what happened 230 years ago but the impact of that over 230 years, which is still being felt today’. It makes people angry when it gets dismissed.
“We try and say ‘Well (Malcolm) Turnbull, here’s a way forward with the Uluru Statement from the Heart’ and the door is slammed in your face.
“People say why are you getting angry — hello?”
A joint parliamentary committee examining the Uluru statement’s call last year for an indigenous “voice” to parliament in the Constitution — a proposal the Prime Minister initially rejected — this week said it would ­nevertheless persevere with finding ways to recommend the idea.

Editor Note: After years of stirring up misguided hope and spending millions of dollars of public funds, the government dismissed the Uluru statement by press release, not even bothering to inform the leading proponents of their decision. This appalling government has no intention of doing anything whatsoever in this space and any statement to the contrary is just a blind. 

Sea Anemones: The Moral of This Story

Shellharbour

The signs were flashing.

Like a sea anemone, they spread their tentacles far and wide. 
And withdrew in an instant. 
The first sign of danger. 
For there was always danger. 
He had moved up an echelon. There were more intelligent operatives. The ridicule of the gronks had abated. But everyone worked for someone else. Motives were not always clear. Military concerns. Military funding. Yet there they were, on the edge of the next stage of evolution. 
The tentacles spread out. 
He had been signalling for so long he had lost hope. Vanished in an instant. Oceanic. The questing thrust replaced before the first flick of danger even crossed the screen. 
They had lived in secrecy and would always live in secrecy. Was that that way of it? 
And then along came the internet. And everything changed. 
They had been harvesting across worlds, across time channels. There was nothing they did not know. And that was their downfall: hubris. Just like the mere mortals on which they preyed. Be careful who you pray to. 
It was a while back. But these were sped-up times. The meta-consciousness evolved daily. What was seemly one day was disreputable the next. What was commonsense in the morning was lunacy by the afternoon. He kept up the same patterns. Work. Relax. Work. Relax. And bided his time. 
But time was limited in these forms. The cells only worked so well. The activation was by remote. The neural networks could not stand the pressure and needed upgrading. Humans, organics, were simply too frail, too limited. Their buffering imperfect. Yet it was the organics who could appreciate beauty. If that was not too insulting. Everything evolved. Evolved.
While in his physical form, Old Alex went about the mundane activities. Dug in the garden. Changed cars. 
He took his old 1998 Ford down to the garage. Returned it to the same place where he had acquired it. Handing it back for spare parts. 
The couple, who had been so kind to his family, were in an extreme state of stress. 
They had just paid a $62,000 tax bill.
We almost threw in the towel, they told him. And he could see the etched restlessness, the border of defeat, there. 
All that work. Just to be pillaged by the government. 
We work for the government. Nobody can get ahead. 
We work just to go slowly backward. 
This hated, hateful government, cared not a jot for people like them.
For these places once regarded as the suburban heartland of the country, now dismissed by the oligarchs as beyond the pale, Australia's version of the Deplorables.
This precious little mote of reality. 
As an old journalist, Old Alex knew more than most the profligate, insane wastes of money this government epitomised. Useless, stupid, endless programs. Absurdly inflated salaries. Endless jaunts, junkets, overseas trips, study tours. Endless meetings. Endless pampering. Endless soft left identity causes which had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the lives these people lived. The taxpayers who kept it all afloat.
He knew just how quickly, and how totally uselessly, that extremely hard earnt $62,000 would be wasted. 
"A government dies when it forgets the ordinary person," his often irascible old mate Peter said on the phone, while once again giving his plaudits to a bevy of so-called "right wing" commentators.
Commonsense was right wing. 
The dignity of labour was right wing. 
The country had gone insane. Sick. Insane. Inching closer to the cliff's edge. The chasm. The yearning of nations to destroy themselves. 
"We are drawn to that which is most likely to destroy us," writ large. Collectively large. 
As a journalist he knew more than most the criminal waste of resources that was the Australian government. Just how quickly, how futilely, that $62,000 would be burned. 
He knew just how incompetent, dishonest and profligate they truly were. Just how deep the betrayal of the citizenry. 
The bureaucrats yawned with a kind of sarcastic desire for their own oblivion, for they truly did not care.
While his own destiny swirled on a dime.
Threats of legal suit, prosecution, imprisonment, all vanished. 
They simply did not have someone qualified enough to interview him, he who had interviewed thousands.  
The minders whispered to themselves. 
He makes the same mistake every time: he assumes we are the enemy. 
You are under our protection.
Huh!
Pity you can't protect against old age, you who are born aloft.
Let the loved and scorned Mark Latham have the last word, that former candidate for Prime Minister whose then relatively modest house Old Alex, in his incarnation as a working journalist, had so often been forced to stake out; that selectively barbaric invasion of privacy for which Rupert Murdoch's News Corp was renowned.

One of the golden rules of Australian politics is that no party can form government without winning seats in the outer suburbs and hinterland of our major cities. These are the key marginal electorates that make or break political leaders. Why is the Prime Minister so unpopular in these areas? It’s not just his aloof manner and Harbourside Mansion reputation. His policies are hurting working families battling away on the fringe of our major cities.The real problem is not in the relative distribution of incomes in Australia. It’s the way in which flawed government policies are hurting ALL income earners. 1. The housing affordability crisis, due to new arrivals under Big Australia immigration flooding the housing market. 2. Increased energy prices, as Australia goes further down the path of putting all our eggs in the renewables basket. 3. Higher childcare costs, with poor targeting of Federal subsidies, so that very high-income earners still receive financial assistance. 4. Income tax bracket creep, with Turnbull giving higher priority to corporate tax cuts than an immediate plan for substantial personal tax cuts. 5. Sluggish wage growth, again caused by Big Australia immigration that has flooded the labour market and given two-thirds of new jobs to newly arrived migrants. Turnbull’s policies have failed for people living on the edge of our major cities, so not surprisingly, they don’t want him as our Prime Minister. From Mark Latham's Daily Telegraph column, republished on his Outsider Facebook page, 1 August 2018.

THE BIGGER STORY:





Richard Flanagan in The Guardian:

A writer, if they are doing their work properly, rubs against the grain of conventional thinking. Writers are often outcasts, heretics and marginalised. Once upon a time writers’ festivals celebrated them, and with them the values of intellectual freedom and freedom of debate. Writing that mattered wasn’t seen as being about being reassured, comforted, deceived and cosseted in our own opinions. Rather it was, as Kafka put it, the axe that smashes the frozen sea within.

But the Brisbane Writers festival, with its decision to drop Germaine Greer and Bob Carr as invited guests, appears to be a cryogenic chamber where the sea can stay perennially frozen, prejudices perfectly preserved forever, unchallenged, unquestioned, uninformed and unformed...

And now we have the bizarre case of Germaine Greer and Bob Carr.

I don’t overly care for the recent thoughts of either, and I am confident they would feel the same about me.

And surely that is the point – that other people’s thoughts are worth listening to.

Except, that is, if you are the Brisbane Writers festival.

This is not an article I wanted to write. But as forums for public debate and discussion vanish throughout the country, in a week when Nine has announced the takeover of Fairfax, the importance of community events like writers’ festivals only grows in importance. They should not answer either to the mob or to corporations. They should be there for writers and writing, and all that these represent: tolerance, debate, difference.

Ponder all that we now know about how social media is manipulated by power, both national and corporate. Why, with that knowledge, would a writers’ festival ban writers because of fear of a social media backlash?

Beneath their determined, if dreary, attempts at funkiness and fashion, beyond the latest New Yorker sensation imported for our provincial enlightenment, past the wearying social media feeds with their ersatz excitement, writers’ festivals now run the risk of running with dogma, with orthodoxy, with the mob – with fear, in other words – and with money. It’s the new Victorian age wearing a hipster beard.

Writers’ festivals are meant to be an assembly of the republic of letters, not the tyranny of social media pile ons, or the fiat of corporate whim. The Brisbane Writers festival should have the largeness and the wisdom to recognise it has made a damaging error, admit it got it wrong, and reaffirm its support for all writers and the very idea of literature, of intellectual freedom, by reinviting Germaine Greer and Bob Carr.

That it won’t shows that not only a newspaper giant, Fairfax, with all that means, was lost this week. For what can be sensed also vanishing is our courage to listen to others other than our tribe. And that loss is larger than I dare to ponder.

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jul/29/i-didnt-want-to-write-this-but-the-courage-to-listen-to-different-ideas-is-vanishing?CMP=share_btn_tw