Armour

Deep within the forest the falcon stirred, arming itself, feathers transforming into a kind of armour plating. He didn't know what it meant. Presumably, preparing for battle in the outer realm. Somewhere, sometime. Nowhere, no time. They were calling to him, and he could not hear, or had not wanted to hear. There were too many marauding wolves circling the encampment, and there was no good will in that wider realm. 

Toughen up, they told him, and so it was that he began again, out of some terrible trial and error, out of a bout of oblivion seeking, out of dissolution, out of a fragmented despair; and so it was, and so it would be, that they would soar again. His dive into the ordinary had taught him nothing except why it was called ordinary, because there lay barely sentient human beings who, as he knew, could talk about food and trivia for hours on end; and counted for comfort what was mere familiarity. 

A million extra migrants were being dumped into Australia without any public consultation whatsoever, another of the highhanded and in the end immoral acts of the current loopy left government of Anthony Albanese, he of the man with silly hats and stupid launches of this that and the other, a Prime Minister with nothing better to do than attend one function after another, and repeat every lie and cliché the bureaucrats handed him.

Albanese was now widely regarded, if anybody thought about the prick at all, as even more slimy, deceitful and two faced than his despised predecessor Scott Morrison. It was all a lie, the entire public messaging of this rotting corpse of a government, an edifice creaking under the weight of its own artifice, and there they were crawling through the undergrowth of their own treachery, smelling of mud and faeces and the rotting slime of their own inner personalities; while outside the eagles soared and the sky beckoned and everything that had been and everything that would be coalesced into a single point, and the time lords swept through on their way to a greater future. 

Australia Day had been and gone; and the left, through its own artifice, had won that argument. Some 80 Councils had announced that they would not be holding citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day this year. A man was arrested in Melbourne for wearing the Australian Flag on his hat, on Australia Day, because Melbourne, the most left wing wing area of the country, thousands of pro-Palestinian marchers chanted their support, from the river to sea, and various half baked "aboriginal" identifying people declared their support for the people of Gaza.

The massacres continued on the other side of the world. The ancient spirits here, on the other side of the world, seemed to care little for the fire ants slugging it out in the Middle East.

And America, the Great Satan, was back at it again, dropping bombs in Iraq and Syria. 

And nobody, really, in the midst of the Great Australian Daze, seemed to care. We shudder in anticipation of a far greater cruelty.

No one stood up. No one, seemingly, cared; and the discontents who murmured in their own houses, all of it was gone, this country, this once proud country, 

AUSTRALIAN MAINSTREAM MEDIA

THE NEW DAILY

Iraq has warned of “disastrous consequences” for the region as the United States launched retaliatory airstrikes in Iraq and Syria against more than 85 targets.

The strikes ordered by President Joe Biden were the first in response to a deadly attack that killed three US troops at an American outpost in Jordan.

“This is the start of our response,” said US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin.

“We do not seek conflict in the Middle East or anywhere else, but the president and I will not tolerate attacks on American forces.”

The US aimed for sites linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) and the militias it backs.

More than 30 people were reportedly killed, including civilians.

The strikes included the use of long-range B-1 bombers flown from the United States.

More US military operations were expected in the coming days.

The strikes intensified a conflict that has spread into the region since war erupted between Israel and Hamas after the militant Palestinian group’s deadly assault on Israel on October.7.

SPECTATOR AUSTRALIA

No single artefact did more to launch the climate change scare than Professor Michael E Mann’s famous – or should that be infamous? – 1998 hockey stick graph, showing an unprecedented and sudden rise in global warming. Widely criticised on many scientific counts it is again under fire, in a Washington courtroom drama significant for both free speech and climate science.

A 12-year defamation battle between Mann and the witty and acute conservative Canadian pundit Mark Steyn is culminating in Room 518 in D.C.’s Superior Court, after Steyn wrote a piece in National Review in 2012 referring to Mann as ‘the man behind the fraudulent climate-change “hockey stick” graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus’. Scientist blogger Rand Simberg, quoted in Steyn’s piece, is also being sued.

For those who have followed the climate-change gravy train for decades, as I have, this will be a walk down memory lane. All the old stagers are there, either listed as witnesses or mentioned in despatches – Steve McIntyre (‘human filth’, according to Mann), Roger Pielke Jnr, Ross McKittrick, ‘Mike’s Nature trick’, Climategate emails, tree rings and bristlecone pines. Even the catchy harmonies of ‘Hide the Decline’, the cult hit song by Minnesotans for Global Warming, have rung through the court.

SKY

Questions raised after ‘pretentious, self-righteous’ journalist joins PM’s office

February 02, 2024 - 9:28PM

Journalist Katharine Murphy – who is set to join the Prime Minister’s office – has been the author of some of the most “pretentious, self-righteous articles” about ethics in politics, according to Sky News Digital Editor Jack Houghton.

Mr Houghton slammed the “hard left” reporter after she accepted to work for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s communications office.

Mr Houghton questioned how long the veteran Canberra journalist knew she was going to work for Labor.

“You might recall Murphy as being the author of some of the most pretentious, self-righteous articles about ethics in politics,” he said.

“Murphy has shamelessly barracked for one side of politics in a role which required objectivity.

“There are serious questions this raises about credibility within the Guardian newsroom and in Albanese’s own office.”