SCALING THE PEAKS OF INCOMPETENCE

East Coast of Australia.

The ground had been well prepared.
A cold sun setting behind a line of suburban houses,
Cars cruising slowly by, in a new era of uber-surveillance.
What, indeed, was worth saving?
Old Alex listened, tried to concentrate on the moment sufficiently to relax, laugh, enjoy the present company, while his head streamed through a setting sun and the warnings came thick and fast.
"We live in the best country in the world, you wouldn't want to be over there with all that's going on."
On the whole Australians, as their own fortunes contracted year by year, as once rich lives were hollowed out, still believed it.

The normalcy bias, or normality bias, is a mental state people enter when facing a disaster. It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster and its possible effects, because it causes people to have a bias to believe that things will always function the way things normally function. This may result in situations where people fail to adequately prepare and, on a larger scale, the failure of governments to include the populace in its disaster preparations.
The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since one has never personally experienced a disaster, one never will. It can result in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. They also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation. Normalcy bias is essentially a "desire for the status quo."

Old Alex looked across the ruins and kept his mouth shut.
The social engineers had set out to change the society, and had achieved their aims. It had been a long time in the making, but it was the speed of it, the remarkable speed of it over the past five years, which struck him the most.
The society was devolving as those long ago Marxist lecturers had dreamed.
There was no precise tipping point, not when perceived from the midst of it.
But social historians of the future, if there were any left to care, would look back at the early millennial period as the point when it all changed. When theory won out over fact.
When the wishes and dreams of the proletariat, to be proud of their work, their families, their friends, the lives they built for themselves, were all banished; became nothing but a whimsical, curious footnote.
Identity politics, the endless cheering of minorities, the crushing of dissent, the rise of Repressive Tolerance, the screaming barrenness of diversity, for those who preached diversity the most tolerated it least, all of it had come to pass.
The Cultural Marxists who had been spewing out of the universities since the 1970s now held all the positions of power within the judiciary and the bureaucracy. were the puppet masters of dangling politicians whose only function was to manufacture consent.
The Useful Fools had proved very useful indeed.
The traditional culture had been quashed.
Repressive Tolerance reigned supreme.
Heavily manipulated media and the Theatre of the Absurd he had inflicted on those who breached every boundary of decency, of respect, of privacy, turned the stomachs of those he had set out to deliberately annoy; the Watchers on the Watch who had so fervently wished him dead.
They exposed themselves.
Let them hang themselves.
While Old Alex kept up the same refrain: you've all been conned.
All the theories of the dominance of minorities had come true; and the media poured forth endless stories on vulnerability and oppression and the brutality of the ruling class. The vulnerable had become the sole source of news. Achievement was dominance, not to be admired.
A successful business, a small enterprise, an entrepreneurial achievement, a happy marriage, none of it was to be respected any more.
The government's propaganda arm, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, pumped out their Flat Earth News on a daily basis, having gained a stranglehold across multiple "platforms", radio, television, internet.
Their propaganda, their lies about what constituted social justice, mopped up and distorted the country's perception of itself.
Their news was no news at all.
The anti-capitalist pro-Marxist "intellectuals" infesting the highest reaches of the bureaucracy, clutching their Walmart degrees to their pretensions, convinced they were the intellectual superiors of the labouring class, now held the pulleys of power.
On the streets, Old Alex looked up to see yet another candy coloured police car drive by, bristling with all their latest technologies.
The helpers had become the enforcers.
The once comparatively benign keepers of social order now cruised the car parks of hotels checking registration plates, or timing how long people had been inside. Conversation repeatedly turned to the excessive zealotry of enforcement, compliance officers, inane, insane regulation.
There was a move to inspect and licence the kitchens of the grey-haired women who, only rarely now, sold for charity scones and cakes, pickles and preserves, everybody's grandmother. 
It now took six months of bureaucratic process to get a licence to light a wood fire.
The country's community gathering places, pubs, were being eliminated.
Step by terrible step, a culture destroyed.
A stroke of a pen, the excessive policing of ever lower alcohol levels in the blood, had destroyed the traditional watering holes, leaving the bare remnants, aging diehards, in increasingly empty beer gardens.
They had been places, held in much affection, where men, for it had been a largely male culture, exchange everything from commercial confidences to ribald tales, and established friendships.
For unlike women, men build their friends through what they do, working, fishing, drinking, watching sport.
Once those activities stop, the friendships fall away rapidly.
The social engineers had been perfectly happy to eliminate these bonds, these potential points of opposition to their own enlightened theories of a perfect society.
Justice was no justice at all.
Within a generation they would be all closed down, replaced with mosques or schools or government centres.
One thing could be guaranteed: there would not be one whisper of academic discourse. These scrabbling, funny, friendly places were being banished into a disappearing history which, having not been either recorded or written down, whose oral history had been devalued, whose significance, the ordinary struggles of ordinary people, were ignored by multiple layers of government, would promptly vanish.
The people paid for their own demise.
Strangling taxes, strangling regulation, why the government was so systematically, and so effectively destroying the culture of the country, could not be understood without reference to the theories behind it.
He had, at university in the 1970s, imbibed the same books as the Cultural Marxists now in control.
His philosophy lecturer would, year after year, demand essays on Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectics of Sex, a desconstruction of the family and of masculinity, and Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man, a treatise on the dehumanising effects of capitalism.
They were two of the bibles of the era.
But Old Alex, fortunately enough, known as he was for lugging piles of books around the university and spending far too much time at the bar, was more entranced by lyricism than deconstruction, and took it all with a grain of salt.
He wrote the essays and struggled across the line.
Fortunately, the philosophy of the Philosophy Department was that everything was valid; or he might never have got through.
Now, half a century later, the theories of those largely impenetrable tomes were playing out not on the campuses, but in the society at large.
Obsessed, possessed, by a creative impulse, the obtuse, heartless language of the texts had driven him to distraction through delinquent nights.
It had been the beginning of the deliberately obscurantist language of the academy which was to become an essential part of the elitism of postmodernism and cultural theory, the difficulty and lack of opaqueness of the discourse convincing generations of public servants spewing out of the universities of their own cleverness. They knew, having imbibed at the soda pop fountain of higher education, that the so-called working class were unfit to decide their own destiny, nowhere near intelligent enough to understand that they were being oppressed through the social norms of masculinity, family, work.
Now they were all trapped in an engineered future, living in the consequences of all those theories which had once seemed so exciting, so confronting.
It had all come to pass.
Step by terrible step.

EXCERPT

LEGACY OF ASHES: THE HISTORY OF THE CIA
TIM WEINER

The CIA's biggest gun running mission was it's global pipeline to the mujahideen, the holy warriors of Afghanistan, were fighting the 110000-man Soviet Army of occupation. It began under Jimmy Carter in January 1980. Because it was Carter's idea, Casey did not embrace it wholeheartedly - not at first. But soon he saw the opportunity at hand.

"I was the first chief of station ever sent abroad with his wonderful order: go kill Soviet soldiers," said Howard Hart, who arrived as the chief in Pakistan in 1981. "Imagine! I loved it." It was a noble goal. But the mission was not to liberate Afghanistan. No one believed that the Afghans could actually win.

From the start, the Saudis matched the CIA support for the rebels, dollar for dollar. The Chinese kicked in millions of dollars' worth of weapons, as did the Egyptians and British. The CIA coordinated the shipments. Hart handed them over to Pakistani intelligence. The Pakistani skimmed off a large share before delivering them to the exiled political leaders of the Afghan resistance in Peshawar, east of the Khyber Pass, and the rebel leaders cached their own share before the weapons ever got to Afghanistan.

"We didn't try to tell the Afghan Rebels how to fight the war," John McMahon said. "But when we saw some of the Soviet successes against some of the mujahideen, I became convinced that all the arms that we had provided will not ending up in Afghan shooters hands." So he went to Pakistani convened a meeting of the seven leaders of the Afghan rebel groups, who ranged from Parisian exiles wearing soft loafers too rough-hewn mountain men. "I told them I was concerned that they were siphoning off the arms and either caching them for a later day or, I said, 'God forbid, you selling them.' And they laughed. And they said, 'You're absolutely right! We're caching some arms. Because someday the United States will not be here, and we'll be left on her own to carry on our struggle.'"

The Pakistani intelligence chiefs who told out the CIA's guns and money favoured the Afghan factions who proved themselves most capable in battle. Those factions also happened to be the most committed Islamists. No one dreamed that the holy warriors could ever turn their jihad against the United States.

THE BIGGER STORY:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/22/rival-groups-vie-for-supremacy-as-fight-against-isis-reaches-tipping-point?CMP=share_btn_fb

Iraqi forces have advanced to the base of the toppled minaret of Mosul’s Great Mosque of al-Nuri, hours after it was destroyed by Islamic State militants, as the bitter eight-month battle to recapture the city reached a tipping point.

The destruction of the mosque marked a pivotal moment in the war against Isis, which declared its now withered caliphate from there three years ago. The terror group’s wanton act of sabotage was widely seen as a harbinger of its imminent defeat.

Across northern Iraq, only a portion of Mosul’s old city and a small adjoining neighbourhood remain under Isis control. The nearby towns of Tel Afar and Hweija, both of which are surrounded, make up the remainder of the group’s territory, a mere sliver of the lands over which it had lorded at the height of its power in mid-2014.

As its fortunes have turned, the group’s remaining members have fled Iraq for the deserts of Syria. So rapid has been their capitulation that plans are now being drafted for a decisive battle later this year, somewhere between the Syrian and Jordanian borders, areas far from those that Isis had coveted.

Lined up in pursuit are a range of players who had have staked claims throughout the fight with Isis, as well as parallel regional conflicts, and have waited for the time to consolidate. As the organisation crumbles, all sides have now started competing for an edge, who gets to define what emerges from the collapse of Isis is a prize bigger than winning the war itself.

Russia, Iran and the US are scrambling for supremacy, eschewing the brinkmanship that has peppered the war for direct clashes unprecedented in the region over recent decades.

The bewildering movements of five state militaries – Syria, Iraq, Iran, Russia and the US – as well as their various proxies seems likely to increase the number of collisions.

Each side faces a series of calculations that have little to do with how to defeat what remains of Isis, or to deal with the hundreds of thousands of refugees who are fleeing the latest fighting - the death throes of Mosul and Raqqa – and the looming campaign in Deir ez-Zorand Mayedin, where Isis looks set to make its last stand.

The human toll of the war for Mosul continued to emerge from the ruins of the city on Thursday, as Iraqi troops escorted haggard families from narrow lanes near the ruined mosque.


More than 860,000 people have now fled the city since the war to recapture it began on 17 October last year. Thousands of residents have returned to the now liberated east, but an estimated 100,000 more are thought to remain in Mosul’s old city, where vengeful, cornered members of Isis have been using residents as human shields.

“Three more weeks and we’re done with them,” said an Iraqi special operations officer, speaking by phone on Thursday. “We will push them into the Tigris river.”

Earlier in the week, hundreds of civilians streamed past destroyed buildings and into Iraqi controlled territory, their clothes tattered and bodies covered in dust. Mothers clutched malnourished infants across their chests while men carried the elderly on their backs. Some were dragged on makeshift stretchers and others hauled on carts. One after another they collapsed in exhaustion and relief when they reached safety behind Iraqi lines.