IF NOT NOW WHEN

Lightning Ridge

Those thousands of years, the annual migration. Breaching. The fabulous architects of song travelling up and down the coast. He could hear them still. 

And in this suburban place, he heard the Watchers on the Watch, the endless changing shifts of those on surveillance contracts, discussing a book he had once written, The Architect of Dreams, long lost. It must have ended up with Special Branch. For who else would know. Most of the players of the time, his friends, the people who he thought were everything, were dead now. Ian Farr. Russel Keifel. Lyn Hapgood. John Bygate. Shrouded in the dead as we were shrouded in the living.

Records, they want to destroy the records, one of the Watchers shrieked. If anyone knew. But someone did know. And when one knew, they all knew.

Old Alex was reading Legacy of Ashes, The History of the CIA. Seven decades scaling the heights of incompetence, coups, murders, manipulation, illegality, thousands, into the millions of lives lost. Sending their own agents to certain death. Sending those naive or desperate enough to cooperate across enemy lines, to certain death.

Now the enemy was everywhere; and they, the enemy within, were as much to blame for the collapse of democracy worldwide as anybody else. Their nefarious schemes, their slipshod work, their laziness, bigotry, simple minded prejudice. Boof-headedness. Oh how they loved to jeer. 

Here in the far reaches of consciousness aka Australia, the malfeasance, the personnel, sometimes kindly, mostly characterised by venal disregard. They tried all their old tricks. Heart attack. Heart attack. Poison Pill. They're coming for you. 

Every dirty, shoddy little scheme. They wanted the world to think, he's gone mad.

And the minute he says he's the sanest of the lot, we've got him.

The brutally infested elites manufactured consent in the broader, deliberately dumbed down broader population, while in his heart Old Alex manufactured kindly father-figures he could talk to, discuss the issues of the day, have a laugh.

The surveillance teams watched. They dreamed of sex. They vented their frustration on friends, colleagues, enemies alike. They were bored. They had never read a book in their lives. They had no concept of what they were watching.

In the wider realm, away from the bureaucratic little grubs who had been so determined to crush him, out there on the wide plains, the savanna grasslands, across the world where evil stalked, here, where evil stalked just as diabolically. 

At the event in the Sydney Town Hall, he saw the succubus which had seized hold of the former Prime Minister John Howard, highly intelligent, utterly malignant, the cold, one-eyed cold. It looked at him, startled someone recognised it, guilty almost, ashamed. This was their journey, their spiritual death, to serve only the dark lords.

Where the Jesuits and the Jihadis met.

The ABC poured forth its anodyne government propaganda, usually involving some minute bureaucratic progression in the endless debate over climate change, a distraction which had served to mop up the natural social justice instincts of the populace for more than 20 years while achieving precisely nothing but ever spreading bureaucratic over-reach, a tamed, distracted, sublimated population.

It was the manipulation, the deliberate creation of widespread ignorance, which incensed Old Alex as much as anything. You had a most precious resource. And you spat on it, ground it into the ground with thug-boot stiletto heels. You treated with contempt your fellow man, your fellow sufferers. You destroyed their potential with every waking breath, an act as despicable as murder. 

And every day, in every way, the country veered closer to a totalitarian state.

A democracy in name only. The manufacture of consent. It had all come to pass.

Australia had become a communist country. The Franklin School had wrought their theories, here on the edge of the great seas spreading down to the Antarctic.

"The world is so beautiful," Buddha is reported to have said on his death bed.

Myth would have it.

"We were there," his disciples said, laughing, even here, even now, more than 2500 years later. Even in this appalling, diabolical situation. 

Where humanity had embraced the dark lords. Where the poison was spreading through the veins of the society. Where he was forced to defend himself against the muggles, the mundanes. And to hide in the ordinary from their tedious, charlatan experts. 

Day followed day. They lived now, all of them, in the consequence not the act. They reaped what they sowed. Their path was crooked. They could barely see. The blizzard ate away at flesh.

At the local garage, the woman who ran the business with her husband and with whom he was on friendly terms, was clearly distressed, almost in tears, as she recounted how she had just had to find $16,000 to feed the tax office.

He told her of one of the latest grants from the Australian Research Council, of how an academic who had edited a book on dating had just been granted $940,000 by the Research Council to research whether or not "time really exists." 


And another Sydney University academic who had been given almost $1 million to another Sydney academic to study “the humanity of man and animal in ancient Greece’’.
It was an abuse of the citizenry beyond measure.

They ripped the money off the working poor and gave it to the elites.

Without conscience. 

Without even the courtesy of returning the calls from the journalist who had done the story.

On the radio they talked of low emission targets, of the coming Armageddon they had seized upon with their bureaucratic mindsets. And lied and lied and lied to the taxpayer. 

As if there was no bigger story afoot. Here between the ice ages. The epochs. 


THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/06/iconic-grand-al-nuri-mosque-iraq-mosul-blown-170621193402284.html

The landmark Grand al-Nuri Mosque of Mosul and its leaning minaret have been blown up, with the Iraqi army blaming ISIL for its destruction and the armed group accusing a US-led coalition air raid.

In recent days Iraqi forces have pushed deeper into the last remaining areas held by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group in the centre of Iraq's second-largest city.

"Our forces were advancing toward their targets deep in the Old City and when they got to within 50 metres of the Nuri mosque, Daesh committed another historical crime by blowing up the Nuri mosque," Staff Lieutenant General Abdulamir Yarallah, the overall commander of the Mosul offensive, said in a statement late Wednesday.

In a statement on its Amaq website, ISIL blamed US aircraft for destroying the mosque.

The US military denied the allegation. "We did not strike in that area," coalition spokesman US Air Force Colonel John Dorrian told Reuters news agency by phone.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-39339373

The Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul has been destroyed during fighting between government forces and the jihadist group Islamic State (IS).

The Iraqi military said militants had blown up the mosque and the leaning al-Hadba minaret, one of the most famous landmarks in the Old City, as troops advanced on it.

But IS accused the US-led coalition of destroying the mosque, which was also of great symbolic importance to both sides of the conflict.

It is where IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi made a rare public appearance in early July 2014 and gave a speech proclaiming the creation of a new "caliphate", only weeks after his fighters seized control of the city.

The Great Mosque was named after Nur al-Din Mahmoud Zangi, a Turkic ruler of Mosul and Aleppo who ordered its construction in 1172, two years before his death.

Nur al-Din is famous for mobilising and unifying Muslim forces to wage jihad, or war in the path of God, against the Christian Crusaders.

During his 28-year rule, Nur al-Din captured Damascus and laid the foundations for the success of Saladin, who served as his commander in Egypt before founding the Ayyubid dynasty and retaking Jerusalem in 1187.

Nur al-Din is also revered by jihadists for his efforts to make Sunni Muslim orthodoxy prevail over Shiism.

Despite its connection to such an illustrious figure, all that remained from the original mosque was the leaning minaret, some columns and the mihrab, a niche indicating the direction of Mecca.

On 4 July, Baghdadi delivered a Friday sermon from the pulpit at the Great Mosque of al-Nuri - his first public appearance in many years.

Dressed in a black robe and black turban - a signal that he claims to be descended from the Prophet Muhammad's Quraysh tribe, a crucial qualification for the office - Baghdadi said he had reluctantly accepted the title of "commander of the faithful".

"God, the Great and Almighty, has bestowed upon your mujahideen brothers the grace of victory and conquest, and has enabled them to do that after long years of waging jihad, showing patience, and fierce fighting against the enemies of God," he added. "They have hurried to declare the caliphate and empower an imam. This is the duty imposed on the Muslims."

Echoing the inaugural address by the first caliph, his namesake Abu Bakr, Baghdadi stressed that he was "not the best among you", adding: "If you see that I am right, help me. However, if you see that I am wrong, advise and guide me."

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

Half the harm that is done in this world Is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm - but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle To think well of themselves. T.S. Eliot.