The Ancients in a Surprising Spring
There was Skynet and the Generals and a realm beyond the realm. There, out on that frozen southern town valley, across the winter fields and the grazing cattle, a Mesopotamian realm of palm trees and luxuriant valleys; of a time long ago. What, exactly, were the Mesopotamian gods doing here, in this remote place? So far from their origins.
The Assyrians were a book or a literature obsessed culture; and if the beginning was the Word then these spirits or entities were sustained or brought to life; the chants, the obsessions, the all encompassing nature of it all.
One minute the Generals. The next the Mesopotamian richness overlaying that frozen valley.
Australia itself, in a sense, had become frozen; the mean spirited overlords, the absolute disconnect of the bureaucratic caste, the divorce from all that was real.
We mustered for another try. We gathered in triumph and adversity; and, of course, We Come At The End of Empire.
In this case, the American Empire.
He had said these things before, but in some strange sense it was happening all over again.
They mustered, the foot soldiers. They stepped into visible realm. They brooked no opposition, with all the artifice of those rulers of long ago.
In the realm of the aristocrat; breathing in the ruling houses, mustering for another break in destiny; common as muck, they purred, but in the end the scribes performed a sacred duty.
It's ectoplasmic he said, when the spirit realm came up for discussion. All is connected, the former army officer said in a reflective moment down at the Lakeview; and what was once the domain of philosophers and fantasists was now, with the rapid evolution of the technologies, provable, capable of being understood. They are prayed into life, whispered into life, they function out of the souls of millions; their power real, their visitations realer still.
And so it was. And so it will be.
There had been an upbeat in the country's mood after the departure of the much reviled Pentecostal Scott Morrison and his replacement by Anthony Albanese.
All that praying, showering with riches, prosperity theology, looked pretty damn grubby about now.
Your false gods, your feeble hands, your abuse of the citizenry, your pillaging of the public purse. You and your ilk.
Australia's latest Prime Minister had quickly earnt the Albanese Overseasy title for his propensity to spend much of his time grandstanding on the world stage; sandwiched between Hollywood star Sean Penn and Boris Johnson on his tour of Ukraine, while everything for ordinary Australians continued to fall apart. Mirrored in a million things. The price of gas aka petrol over $2. The lengthy wait on the phone for almost anything, as staff shortages and insane mandates continued to destroy or disrupt multiple businesses and institutions.
The political class had been warned by some of the sharpest minds in the country, and ignored them all, throwing all common sense to the wind. The mainstream aka legacy media were producing news programs which were little more than advertorials for Pfizer, there was no conscience at the stoking of fear and the derogation of duty, the destruction of liberties and rights once taken for granted by the common people; traditional journalism had been destroyed, bought by government money and Big Pharma.
All of it was a derogation of duty; of common decency, a betrayal of their own intellectual credibility; a betrayal of their readers and their viewers.
An utter, total and complete betrayal.
An old journalist muttered darkly. Almost everyone felt powerless, or ignored what was happening around them.
That, as so many people were now commenting, was the most frightening thing of all, the behaviour of the mob.
We were gathering strength. We were in your realm. We come from afar and near, everywhere.
In times of crisis. At the end of Empire. And here, now, in these ordinary streets, where people went blithely about their lives, entirely unaware that some of the cruellest and most arrogant people on the planet were playing God. And destroying what they saw as "surplus men".
It was a frightening time. The fissures everywhere. It was a small thing; but there was a five week delay on Death Certificates, the Funeral Home had told them when the family were arranging the funeral of his mother. When did that happen?
She had been a loyal servant to God; even if her version was old fashioned and rigid, it was most sincerely felt.
The fervour gone. The insipid had arrived. The streets were quiet. And everywhere empty; the gasp of the raw, the dawning of the realisation, we're all f...ed. We've all been screwed.
How arrogant, how dismissive, how cruel, and truly, in the end, how extraordinary how little they cared for each other; how limited their cognitive capacity.
It was not up to them to play God.
MAINSTREAM MEDIA
THE NEW DAILY
Fast-mutating variants of the Omicron COVID-19 strain have made rapid tests for the virus much less accurate and liable to provide an inaccurate diagnosis in four out of 10 cases.
Doctors say the development is a major health dilemma.
The federal government has announced that funding would be cut for subsidies to drop the price of rapid antigen tests (RATs).
The decision has drawn criticism from pharmacists and the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners.
But the vice president of the Australian Medical Association, Chris Moy, says taking steps to offset the tests’ falling accuracy and prevent them from being overused was far more important than ensuring they could be easily accessed.
Dr Moy said the false negatives were now risking vulnerable patients’ access to potentially life-saving antivirals and inadvertently exacerbating the spread of the virus.
He says the government must account for the decline of a testing method Australians had become reliant on for reasons of convenience, and look to campaigns encouraging patients to isolate until they could access a reliable test.
Accuracy in decline
“The RATs have been useful at various stages of the pandemic, but they now have reduced sensitivity,” Dr Moy said.
“As the variants have grown worse the efficacy has really dropped off.”
Dr Moy said RATs had always been presumed to deliver negative results with 80 to 90 per cent accuracy.
“I think they are 60 per cent [accurate] now,” Dr Moy said.
“But the other issue is that they are now picking [Omicron COVID strains] up late.”
SKY NEWS
Member for Fowler Dai Le has appealed to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for government support, claiming Western Sydney has been hit hardest by the cost of living crisis.
The Independent MP has written to the Prime Minister demanding the cut to the fuel-excise be extended fearing families would be unable to cope with the price hike in September.
Speaking with Sky News Australia's James Morrow on Tuesday, Ms Le referred to Western Sydney as "the forgotten people" and urged Mr Albanese to "make right the years of neglect our community has experienced.”
“Communities like ours really suffer because we can’t afford to pay high prices in rent, to pay high prices in food,” Ms Le said.
"I really call on the government and the Prime Minister – who we know was raised in a single-parent household…in a low-socio economic household.
“We want to ask the Prime minister and the Government to actually make sure there is some support to supply us with some relief short-term.”
Ms Le claimed her electorate of Fowler - which includes areas Cabramatta, Liverpool, Warwick Farm and Fairfield East - was already facing an unemployment rate more than double the national average.
“In Fowler in particular, we have about 10.5 per cent unemployment rate, that’s double the national average,” Ms Le said referring to 2016 ABS figures.
SMH
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has blamed the Greens political party for a decade of inaction on climate change, and challenged them to back Labor’s target of a 43 per cent emissions reduction by 2030.
Albanese has also left the door ajar to the federal opposition being invited to the jobs summit in September, promising to “consider those things in the fullness of time”.
The prime minister said Labor had a mandate for the 43 per cent target to be legislated, that it would consider sensible amendments to the legislation, and ultimately “every member of the House and every member of the Senate should vote for it. If they don’t. They’ll be held accountable for it”.
But it was his criticism of the Greens, who want 75 per cent emissions reduction by 2030, that will potentially reignite the political fight over climate change policy – even as Labor insists it wants to end the climate wars.
“We have a mandate for our position on climate. We announced it in December last year, we announced 43 per cent by 2030. We announced 82 per cent renewables as part of the national energy market by 2030. It will create 604,000 new jobs,” he said.
“It will result in Australia rejoining the world effort to tackle climate change. If the Greens party haven’t learned from what they did in 2009 – that was something that led to a decade of inaction and delay and denial – then that will be a matter for them.
“We have through the last national cabinet meeting received the unanimous support of states and territories for our plan going forward. It’s time to end the climate wars.”
Back in 2009, the Greens twice voted with the Liberal and National parties to oppose then-prime minister Kevin Rudd’s proposed carbon pollution reduction scheme as they argued the scheme was not ambitious enough.
A price on carbon emissions was subsequently introduced under Julia Gillard’s government in a deal with then-Greens’ leader Bob Brown, but the scheme lasted less than three years.
THE GUARDIAN
When Anthony Albanese touches down in Suva on Wednesday to attend his first Pacific Islands Forum, he will be walking in to a regional meeting that is putting on a brave face.
While it had been thought that the forum would be focused on the growing influence of China and as an opportunity for Australia to showcase its new climate credentials, Albanese will arrive to a group wrestling with other problems.
What was hoped to be a joyful event – the first time the Pacific Islands Forum has met in person since 2019 – now feels somewhat strained, after two countries left the forum in the last week.
The group was rocked on Sunday by a letter to the secretary general from the president of Kiribati saying the Micronesian country was leaving the region’s most important diplomatic body, unsatisfied with the attempts made to heal the rift that has rocked the forum for nearly 18 months.
That dispute – which began as unhappiness among the Micronesian states that their candidate for secretary general of the Pacific Islands Forum had been passed over – was thought to have been healed in a flourish of diplomacy from Fiji prime minister Frank Bainimarama last month, which saw a raft of offers made to Micronesian countries, including the promise that the top job would go to a Micronesian candidate next time. But it appears that Kiribati was not satisfied.
THE SPECTATOR
In the lead-up to the federal election that resulted in him becoming Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese made a speech in Parliament where he said the following:
‘If I’m Prime Minister, I won’t go missing when the going gets tough, or pose for photos and then disappear when there’s a job to be done. I’ll show up, I’ll step up, and I’ll work every day to bring our country together.’
As Prime Minister, he has already broken these promises, leaving Australians high and dry (well, not so much ‘dry’).
The day after he was elected, Albanese exited the country to attend the Quad Leaders’ meeting. He returned to Australia for a little while until petrol prices soared and the cameras started to circle. Then he hopped back on a plane and left for what could be likened to a ‘world tour’.
In addition to his departure, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, Foreign Minister Penny Wong, and Minister for the Environment and Water Tanya Plibersek all headed off on overseas trips, leaving Australians scratching their heads wondering who the hell was running the country…
When they are not napping in the VIP lounge, ministers in the Albanese Labor government pose for photos as a sort of ‘proof of life’ that they are actually working. The Minister for Climate Change, Chris Bowen, appears particularly fond of ‘Instagrammable moments’ during his ‘Climate Change’ work.
If you’re not seen to be working, are you actually saving the planet?
Albanese has visited many nations including Indonesia, Spain (for a Nato summit), France, and Ukraine. On his trip to Kyiv, he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, posing for a photo (of course), and announced Australia would be giving Ukraine another $100 million.
Meanwhile in Australia, parts of New South Wales were busy vanishing underwater in what was later declared a natural disaster.
While Albanese gave astronomical amounts of money to a country that has already been given billions by the world, his country – the one he is supposed to be leading – has urgent economic woes of its own that aren’t improved by politicians throwing public money away abroad.
Australia is struggling through a cost of living crisis with inflation driving prices up, petrol costs climbing, and food insecurity nibbling at the edges of supermarket chains. Seeing this mess, the Reserve Bank of Australia has, counter-intuitively, raised interest rates in a futile bid to stall and reduce said inflation. This is set to trigger another financial disaster as the (unusual) cause of inflation is being made worse by interest rate hikes – not better.
All the while, Australians have been asking the same question – where’s Albo?