And Still You Wonder At It All

The Green Zone, as he had once thought of that old fibro working cottage in Oak Flats, had turned a vicious purple. The drunken revelers who had been partying for the past six weeks or so over the back fence and across the way were now caught, their voices, trapped in what had been the sterling whisper of the trees. Their cretinous monologues now reminded him of the PsyOp morons who had haunted his past few books and made his life so difficult. Taxpayer funded bastardry. Their derision, caught on the breeze, stirred through him in a kind of torment, and they would have their day. 

Everywhere was Covid insanity. There were ten new cases a day in the state with a population of 7.5 million, for a disease you statistically had a 99.998 per cent chance of surviving and almost no chance of catching, if he understood the figures correctly. But for this Australia's lunatic premiers and gormless prime minister had changed the entire country. 

He watched as an elderly woman tried to push a pedestrian light with her elbow, her mask no doubt giving her great discomfort in the heat. 

Submission submission submission. That's all he saw. 

In the Blue Mountains, where the government's propaganda arm the Australian Broadcasting Corporation was regarded as a credible news source, Covid mania was in full swing. 

Enter a shop without a mask and other customers would rear back in horror. 

There are few advantages to getting older, but one of them is you can act like an irascible old bastard and get away with it. Mostly.

At one establishment in Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, he struggled, as so many people did, with the QR code you were required to log for entry. 

As he struggled with it and his recently installed "app" he mumbled as loudly as he could about how dishonest and incompetent governments had put themselves front and centre of all our lives; and how stupid the whole bloody thing was. 

The bar tender, having already taken his order, snapped at him: "Do you want these drinks or not."

"No," he snapped back, storming out. 

"Fuckwit," the bar tender yelled at his parting back.

To which he responded: "Fuck off and die, you Covidian moron." Just as loud as he damn well could.

Queue luvvie shock; a rearing disregard for the rough and tumble world that lay just beyond their self-referencing lives. 

They lived in echo chambers. He stalked from place to place, now on war footing, the drunken dribble of the neighbourhood party disturbing every future that could have been, inflaming him and those who worked through him.

Everything was like that now. You couldn't enter a library or a sex shop or a bar or any bloody place without the government knowing exactly where you were. 

And everybody accepted it.

At the local watering hole in Oak Flats there were no longer pool comp nights. One of the tables had been removed. You had to produce a driver's licence in order to get a pool cue. 

And you were legally bound to sit down between shots. 

It was a madness. All of it a madness. 

As so often in Australia, everybody would have been better off if the government had done absolutely nothing.

Down at Bondi Beach, he liked to get around, even at his age, there was virtually no sign of Covidians at all. The somebodies who thought they were somebody, their taught figures having taken months of work to get them so picture perfect, weren't going to destroy it all with a bloody mask. No masks. No social distancing. Life went on more or less as normal. 

Except for a Council sign flashing a warning that beach numbers were being monitored.

No consistency. No sanity. No logic. No leadership. No coherence. No decency. 

All of it a madness.

He went about his duties. Courage. Strength. Determination. Good Health. High Intelligence. He asked for them on a daily basis. 

Soon there would be no question where all of this would lead.

HEADLINES

Vaccine rollout ‘on track for February’

A super-infectious variant of COVID-19 has been reported in three people linked to the Australian Open, due to start on February 8.

For the outrage machine, Trump will be a hard habit to kick

Much of America’s liberal-dominated media cast aside even the pretence of objectivity during the Trump era. Can the left recover from Trump derangement syndrome?

Canberra doctor returns OAM in protest against Margaret Court 2021 Australia Day honour

Ms Court, a minister in the Pentecostal Church, has been outspoken in her views against same-sex relationships and transgender people.

Clara Tuck Meng Soo has now written to Governor-General David Hurley informing him that she no longer wants her OAM.

"I do not want to be seen as supporting the values that the Council for the Order of Australia seem to be supporting with this promotion of Mrs Margaret Court," she said.

China labels Australia ‘racist’ after UN review finds human rights failings

China has slammed Australia for its “racism problem” and even offered five recommendations for Canberra to combat “violence” and “hate speech”.

'Inevitable' Google and Facebook will pay for Australian news, treasurer says

Josh Frydenberg says tech companies’ threats to pull services out of Australia did them a ‘big disservice’.

At a doorstop on Sunday, the treasurer said the Morrison’s government intended to become a “world leader” in regulating social media and search companies, who he accused of shifting the goalposts in their opposition to the proposed bargaining code of conduct.

What are my options if Google shuts down search in Australia?

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Google and Facebook are both fighting against legislation currently before the parliament that would force them to enter into negotiations with news media companies for payment for content, with an arbiter to ultimately decide the payment amount if no agreement can be reached.

On Friday, the pair escalated the dispute by threatening to remove the Google search engine from Australia and Facebook to remove news from the Facebook feeds of all Australian users.

The threats follow the revelation that Google has been experimenting with hiding some Australian news sites from search results, in a move media outlets said was a show of “extraordinary power”.

Nick Xenophon, one time Senate rebel and South Australian political outlier, has a Scott Morrison anecdote that hits the bullseye in one corner of the Prime Minister’s political world.

He told the tale to The Guardian’s Katharine Murphy and she related it in her Quarterly Essay, The End of Certainty. It starts with a recollection of a moment when the senator and the Prime Minister were together during a Governor-General’s address opening Parliament.

The opportunity is taken by Xenophon to ask the Prime Minister if he’d like to catch up for a coffee. Here’s what transpired, as told by Murphy:

“He looked at me askance and said, ‘What for?’ I said just to catch up and have a chat about issues.

He said, ‘No, mate. I’m purely transactional.’”

Xenophon laughs at the memory, but he wasn’t laughing at the time. “It was pretty blunt. It was a pretty terse response, basically fobbing me off. I thought, okay. I felt a bit chastised. I thought ‘this isn’t someone you want to shoot the breeze with’.”