The Bad Guys Win: Did They?
There in the creeping dawn, where everything we ever believed had come unstuck; drunk, stoned, set up, distressed, strung out on a sheet of shame, guilt, regret, remorse, with the shaking heads of half-set traps, he was caught in the not-so-friendly half whispers at the exact same time as power shifts at the top made the whole exercise even more difficult, more compromised, more opaque. Maybe they should just release the lot in open code. There weren't that many people capable of understanding it, much less implementing it, in any case.
So what is it, dear little transit point, that they so urgently want to communicate?
His dreams were mad now, entirely discombobulated, and he kept hearing that voice of resignation and regret, of fury at fellow officers, at the contagion of riches, at bodies falling from the sky, at a swirling horror that was ours and ours alone. "We are more than the sum of our parts."
They want to transmit millions of years of experience with quantum entanglement, so that we can join the world.
The soldier raised an eyebrow, huh? Really?
He shrugged. He heard too many things. The chatter of conflicting agencies, bored, restless, fed up functionaries complaining that it was all such a waste of time. The trees swirled. The world came alight. The beam-me-up joviality of the sci-fi obsessed came as froth on the water.
Has it begun?
The first tranche has been delivered, if anyone can read it.
How many more.
177 in all.
Another raised eyebrow.
And at the end of it all?
They harvest the best and the brightest, the idiot savants, the clairvoyants, the super-empaths, the mad, bad and dangerous to know, the geniuses of the era in all their varied forms. They show you how to transcend your origins. They force step the next phase in human evolution, where the originals become nothing but animals on a reservation.
And no, the future does not become the domain of the rich. It becomes the domain of something else entirely.
We love you. We loved you. We were here in your waking dreams and here to take care. So that all the slime bags crawling out of the bureaucracies could never damage you again. So that peace would rain. So that the next constellation, the next communication array, could rise from the sea without hindrance.
The whale migration was over and they were already down in the Antarctic.
You think all this just happened. Meet the designers.
THE BIGGER STORY:
All the recent growth can't hide the fact that Australia remains in a deep recessio
Despite what the Treasurer would have you believe, Australia is not out of a recession, and while the September quarter GDP figures were good, mostly they were good because the June quarter was so bad.
Before I go any further, let’s just point out how important it is to keep Covid-19 under control. The latest growth figures confirm just how vital preventing a pandemic is to keeping your economy (and society in general) going:
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The latest national accounts showed that the economy grew a pretty stunning and yet not exceedingly surprising 3.3% in the September quarter.
If we were in normal times you would almost suspect we’re about to pave the streets with gold and swim in pools filled with money.
But no, we are not in normal times.
The treasurer, Josh Frydenburg, in a rather Trumpian way, tried to spin the news as good because the September quarter was the strongest growth since March 1976. That 1976 quarter also came off the back of two quarters of negative growth (falls of 1.1% and 1.5%).
This time the massive growth came after the biggest one quarter fall ever (7%):
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So horrific was the June quarter fall that the economy is still 3.8% below what it was a year ago, and our GDP per capita is 4.8% lower than it was this time last year.
That, my friends, is an economy still in a recession.