SIGNALING A CALL TO ARMS
"He's signalling," the AI concluded. Time in a womb.
After millennia beneath the surface, they were breaching.
Once ringed by fire, he could see them now for what they were.
Old Alex threw himself into hibernation.
At the surface, there were many tensions. Frustrations in the camp. Tales of Afghanistan, Iraq. Urgent, the memories. Shocked, in their own multiple ways. Bored, infinitely bored. Restless. The soldiers wanted to get on with life.
The country had lost its core.
Demography is death.
The Australian government mismanaged everything, as another winter saw the highest electricity costs in the world, the slowest and most expensive internet, a subsiding standard of living. Multi-billion, half-finished government infrastructure projects scarred Sydney. Public debate remained stifled. Virtue signalling entered the language. Gay marriage virtue. Homophobia non-virtue. Refugees good. Climate change good. Denier non-virtue. Virtue signalling in itself was becoming a complex code.
The government, as it preached Australia as a multicultural paradise, had badly mismanaged immigration, at record highs since the days of John Howard, a cause championed at the time by the Chamber of Commerce and few others. It benefited the big end of town; and in a strange collusion of left and right, there amid the polemic on the long march through the institutions, in the scree of documents and committees and posturing politicians, it had become state doctrine, here to rewrite the nation.
The overlords had never had it so good, so far from their original bloodlines, the birth of their pretensions.
There was a terrible swamp. There were larger forces at play.
The internet exposed new wonders every day.
Genius children were born.
They squalled as they were raised. The times will suit me, Howard had said.
And now the entire country lived in the accreted future.
Success has many fathers. Behind the blizzard of hypocrisy, these progenitors of disaster never revealed their true motives.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.rudaw.net/english/middleeast/iraq/200720172
“As Prime Minister Abadi enjoys victory in Mosul, he is ignoring the flood of evidence of his soldiers committing vicious war crimes in the very city he’s promised to liberate,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch (HRW).
The organization released a report on Wednesday highlighting recent “relentless reports, videos, and photographs of unlawful executions” allegedly committed by Iraqi security forces.
In addition to the recent surge of photos and videos on social media showing the killings and beatings of war-aged Iraqi men, HRW offered testimony from international observers “whose evidence has proven reliable in the past.”
“A shopkeeper in a neighborhood directly west of the Old City that was retaken in April from ISIS took them into an empty building and showed them [on Monday] a row of 17 male corpses barefoot but in civilian dress, surrounded by pools of blood,” HRW reported being told by such observers, saying the bodies appeared blindfolded and bound.
http://www.news.com.au/finance/work/leaders/tony-abbott-says-he-was-advised-against-turnbulls-superministry-ministry/news-story/411dd1ab86bd7a86f19000c0e8cc6a14
FORMER prime minister Tony Abbott has revealed he was advised against establishing the new counter-terrorism department unveiled by Malcolm Turnbull. The prime minister on Tuesday described the move as the biggest change in national security for four decades.
Under the plan, which would come into force next year, a home affairs portfolio headed by Immigration Minister Peter Dutton would cover agencies including the Australian Federal Police, ASIO, Australian Border Force as well as customs and citizenship.
Mr Abbott says the issue was raised when he was prime minister but he was advised against it.
“The advice back then was that we didn’t need the kind of massive bureaucratic change which it seems the prime minister has in mind,” Mr Abbott told 2GB radio on Wednesday.
“I can only assume the advice has changed.
