The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth
There had been moments of joy, for sure, as the army shuffled restlessly on the valley ledge, small successes to celebrate, time to kill, destiny to fulfil.
Now, spears raised, they stepped forward.
The harm the enemy intended could not be fulfilled.
There would be no solution to their many harms, the damage they had done themselves. A vicious fight. A forward joy.
They laughed and clinked glasses of ale. They stepped forward in their thousands, spears raised. There was an evil afoot. Elegant, vicious, brutal; they gathered their strength, their power, their enmity, they saw through all of it; the subterfuge, the artifice, the military name-calling gronks who make his life hell in failed Psyop programs, all of it, the enemy clear, the brutality, the cruelty, the ancient evils and the ancient wisdoms, they mustered for the dawn, they would not be denied.
They fortified their soldier.
They made him stronger still.
He stood tall and stricken; for already tears of joy and sorrow; and he remembered the line: We weep for you and you are not yet born.
That sorrow, at the crimes this species had committed against itself, the pain they unnecessarily suffered, the extraordinary cruelty and indifference they inflicted on each other; all of it was striking in its historicity.
The eugenics mob, so evil in their practice, so arrogant, so out of touch, here on the verge of what they thought was a revolution, having appointed themselves the winner, wished to play God. They had no idea.
It took a lot to make them interested, to interfere, far more to raise their anger; for they, too, were indifferent in their vast realm and untrammelled space, their time channels so different to our own.
Now they were here, in Australia of all places; and the idea of a Second Coming seemed quaint for a pre-literate species.
But here they were.
The specific nature, the ability to cooperate in large numbers, was, in a sense, what drove this; for no single man, no single entity, had the computing or neural power to even begin to comprehend.
So they let it fly.
The army grew in power.
The heraldry of beasts, aimed at frightening the primitive hordes, flew quickly and disappeared, heralding yet a greater power, employed against a greater evil.
We were here now. We would protect those we chose.
That skipping stone into the future, anchored here, was only a part of what was about to happen.
This ancient evil.
These ancient forces.
As for Old Alex, he could not believe what was happening, to his own country, to the people, to this glorious moment, to the winged flight of angels; for the point was to frighten not entice, and anger, dismay, all the things the more cognisant humans felt, that was stirring now in a deep surface.
They knew but only a fraction.
The point was to enter into a battle of the ages. The point was to preserve what they could.
The point was to destroy the perpetrators, to bring to justice those who had sinned so grievously against their fellows in this benighted realm; so blessed, so powerful, so utterly beautiful.
They could not, would not survive, these evil, cruel, arrogant men.
For as we said long ago: the meek shall inherit the Earth.
MAINSTREAM NEWS
THE NEW DAILY
Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, is an 1818 novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
Set in the late 18th century, it follows scientist Victor Frankenstein’s creation of life and the terrible events that are precipitated by his abandonment of his creation.
It is a Gothic novel in that it combines supernatural elements with horror, death and an exploration of the darker aspects of the psyche.
It also provides a complex critique of Christianity. But most significantly, as one of the first works of science-fiction, it explores the dangers of humans pursuing new technologies and becoming God-like.
SKY
Tony Burke says previous government “neglect” is partly to blame for the current inflation rate which is currently at 5.1 per cent.
Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe warned during the week that inflation could hit seven per cent by Christmas and it would not begin to fall until the first quarter of 2023.
“Inflation’s high, it’s too high. At the moment it’s five per cent and by the end of the year I expect inflation to get to seven per cent,” he told ABC’s 7.30.
THE SPECTATOR
So, the election has come and gone. It was a disappointing, loud, and ultimately vacuous show about nothing.
It saw the most catastrophic policy-making in the nation’s history, also known as the great Covid bungle (or crime, depending on where you stand in relation to Hanlon’s Razor and conspiracy thinking), collide with perhaps the biggest ethical issues Australia needed to address (lost rights, freedoms traduced, flawed governance, executive overreach, federalism abandoned, police brutality, and the house arrest of citizens, to name just a few). Both of which were simply parked. The outcome was two tedious, largely disengaged political parties having a Wag-the-Dog election campaign and squabbling over policy tidbits and Woke ephemera.
The punditocracy has been busy trying to draw conclusions and extract meaning. Much of this is self-serving, needless to say. Some of its musings are decidedly odd, and others utterly misplaced.
Finally, we have had hand wringing over issues likely to be prioritised by Labor where the door was well and truly opened by the Coalition in government. Think of the Indigenous voice, for example, or Net Zero. As for the anti-corruption commission, well, we wouldn’t need one if the politicians weren’t you know, corrupt. The pork barrelling system itself is corrupt and out of control, as the ICAC in Sydney knows only too well. The legal academic, AJ Brown, says it is at ‘industrial scale’. Anne Twomey describes it as ‘normalised’. It is almost beyond comprehension that the Gladys-for-Canberra jig is getting yet another run, post-election.
Then there was the great Covid silence. The Covid non-issue… Or was there? Just because the corporate and ABC media don’t report things, doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. While the Lib-Lab duopoly might have successfully parked the pesky matter of Australia literally falling apart over the past two years on their watch, and with their connivance, there emerged a new kind of Aussie voter. The support for the FFMPs (freedom friendly minor parties) increased substantially to over a million voters, around a quarter of the new government’s. No, they didn’t win seats, for that is how the system works, but they lit some fires. Fires that, with careful stoking, won’t easily go out. Add to these the usual solid number of informal voters, expressing their quite reasonable disdain for those seeking their support. Then, of course, there were the major party deserters of all hues, both on the right and the left. It was a pox on both their houses.
The biggie in 2022, however, was the emergence of an out-sized non-voting class, that also made its feelings about the electoral offerings, and perhaps the system itself, pretty clear. In some seats and regions, the non-voting class amounted to over a quarter of the vote. The former magic of election day, already decimated by the recent lurch to large-scale pre-poll voting, is now all but gone. Yes, it has been said that the world is run by those who turn up. But once you strip out people’s rights and freedoms, break promises at will, routinely do things in government that no one ever voted on, cede power to unelected bureaucrats at home and power-hungry oligarchs overseas, expect either anger or indifference, or perhaps, in time, worse. We seem to be slouching towards both first-past-the-post and voluntary voting, without anyone seeming to have noticed.
The political parties might have escaped their post-lockdown Nuremberg payback for the incalculable damage they have wrought, and they may actually believe that the world hasn’t changed, that we can all just ‘move on’ from the virus and from the destruction of society that they themselves engineered. But it behooves the political class, the laptop boys and girls who had a pretty damned fine Covid, and the chillingly large number of punters who seemingly – if you accept the findings of all those Covid management polls – approve thoroughly of the way Australian governments responded Covid, to reflect upon what they have wrought.
The words of the retired Judge Stuart Lindsay are relevant here, and their significance should be pondered. ‘Netflix, full bellies, and a warm place to defecate. That is all most want these days, is it not?’ Certainly, one feels that with the punters made content with job-keeper bribes, commute-free days, the joys of Deliveroo and the like, the elites, whether they be in Canberra or Davos, are content to deliver bread and circuses while they get on with running the world, a world now of pandemia, lockdowns-on-demand, masks at the drop of a Monkeypox scare and, it seems, totalitarianism without electoral consequence.
During Covid, we were supine. Afterward, seemingly most shake their heads and say ‘whatever’. Some, mercifully, will scratch their heads and think, ‘What on earth was that about?’ And, perhaps, next time, turn up to vote, and next time vote for freedom. Paul Keating said that when you change the government, you change the country. I don’t think so. Not now. Covid has changed the country. Or perhaps it has simply revealed things about us we just didn’t know.
GUARDIAN AUSTRALIA
The Albanese government insists it will not conduct “diplomacy by megaphone” as it faces calls to do more to prevent the extradition of WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange to the US.
On Saturday, the British home secretary, Priti Patel, approved the extradition of Assange to the US, where he is charged with breaching the US Espionage Act and faces up to 175 years in jail if convicted. He has 14 days to appeal the decision.
Supporters of the Australian citizen, including on Labor’s backbench, have urged the new prime minister, Anthony Albanese, to do more to pressure the United States to drop the case, which has been running since 2010, when WikiLeaks published a trove of leaked documents about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars along with diplomatic cables.
ABC
For Tasmanian pensioner Suzanne Cass, making ends meet is so difficult that she rations her food and limits leaving her home.
Key points:
In Tasmania, the average residential power bill will increase by $220 from July 1
The Tasmanian Council of Social Services says the increase comes at the worst time for people already struggling to make ends meet
However, the government has announced a winter assistance package to help concession card holders cover some of the increase
"We now only go out when we absolutely have to because of petrol prices and, if we have to go out, we make sure we do more than one thing," she said.
"We don't put heating on until four or five o'clock, so the house is quite cold all day, and you go to bed early because you just can't afford the heating."
Her scrimping and saving, made harder by the rising cost of living, is set to go to another level when a 11.88-percent rise in electricity prices takes effect next month.
That rise will see the average annual residential bill rise by about $220, while the average business will pay $176 more.
"It's just one hit after another. It means you can do less," Ms Cass said.
"I'm anxious, depressed, worried. It's not the life that I planned … I just never expected at this time in my life that I'd be living like this.