Australia: Beta Testing The Apocalypse

Crisis? What Crisis?

If the LNP government has taught us anything over the Christmas period, it is how utterly incompetent it is when it comes to keeping Australia safe.

If it has taught us anything since the new year started, it's that they are utterly corrupt and refuse to be made accountable for their rorting of taxpayer's money.

It's not like Labor is much better. Albanese should be using this to effectively begin his campaign against the LNP toward the next election. They (the coalition) are basically scoring goals for them, and they know he could use it as a platform against them, which is why any press conference he gives is cut off by Morrison.

With no clear policy and no real commitment to transition away from fossil fuels, the ALP are maintaining the status-quo as the country experiences a "new normal" in extreme weather events and mass devastation of wildlife and flora. It is estimated that over a billion animals have now been decimated by fires, while other native animals have been struck down by hail from freak storms tearing up the eastern seaboard.

This bushfire season has shown us that it's the beginning of a new world, for better or worse. Tipping points have been pushed and it feels like the powers that be, whether corporate or government, are going full speed ahead to strip as much profit as they can from a continent now experiencing dangerous weather conditions.

I'm not saying the option is the Greens, either. Di Natale and co do nothing more than pointing the finger and engaging in their trademark absolutism. If they were a comic book character, at the moment they'd resemble Rorschach from Watchmen. No, that's a tad harsh. I'd trust Rorschach with anything sharper than a boiled egg.

The Greens have some good policies, but they think they are more important or have more power than they actually do, and to maintain any connection to their mission statement or ethos, they are bound to at least mostly vote in line with the ALP. Straying from this isn't an option under the LNP, as there's nothing that the LNP would give them that would make them compromise themselves. At least, not yet.

Policies of the past now need to be reassessed and rewritten.

Not even twenty years on from the September 11 attacks, and I will have seen the world change twice. It wasn't a change for the better after 9/11, and the way things are going, I don't think this is going to be something that brings people together under the leadership of a government that has the best intentions and safety of its citizens in mind. Instead it is cruel, duplicitous, and relies on the charity of people within our borders and beyond them to do the heavy lifting in the wake of devastation. How do we even begin to unpack these issues when more are piling up?

Crimes Of The Century

Charities now loaded with donations to help fire affected people and wildlife are holding onto the money after only dispersing a fraction of it. The Australian Red Cross are only allocating a third of the total $95 million in donations received to help those affected by the fires, then released a statement saying that the rest would be spent over a three year period. St Vincent De Paul similarly raised $12.5 million in donations and allocated $1.1 million so far.

Hillsong and ACCI have only spent $78,484 of over $2.8 million, with a portion of the remainder being spent to send "chaplains" into fire affected communities.

The cynic in me (or perhaps, the realist) sees this as nothing more than the most perverse exercises in proselytism; using a disaster to try and frame this as God telling them to repent and come to Jesus and all will be forgiven. It's a type of mission and conversion that's entirely perverse, as there would be the occasional person who would end up becoming a member of the church and being suckered in to the tithe deal, so they make back a portion of what's given over from the donations.

I'm sure I don't need to point out how this flies in the face of the ministry of Jesus. It's possibly the most disgraceful set of actions carried out by a political party claiming to be Christians Australia has seen in recent history.

As this was unfolding, questions started being asked about Georgina Downer and why she was handing out cheques for sporting grants issued by the LNP. Digging revealed that the 100 million dollars allocated for funding sports clubs around the country had been used as a pre-election slush fund to effectively buy the votes of marginal LNP seats, and other grants going to seats that politicians like Scott Morrison, George Christensen, and bigger sums of money going to places that absolutely didn't need it like Mosman Rowing Club. 

The justification for the rowing club's money being that girls didn't have to get changed behind trees or in their cars any longer. But the icing on the cake was when it was discovered that Bridget McKenzie, the deputy leader of the Nationals, was the one who coordinated the whole affair and even the rifle club she belongs to didn't miss out on any of the money from the trough.

At the time of posting this blog, there's been no indication yet that Prime Minister Morrison was involved in this; but it's a big enough orchestration for him not to be involved or even the one who ordered the use of the funds in this manner.

It's been three weeks into the new year, and I haven't even covered the character assassination of Bruce Pascoe over a 15 year old book, Murdoch's media hate machine running overtime on climate denial, Barnaby Joyce and his marvellous Christmas message, and Gina Rinehart's passive aggressive slapback in regards to whether she was contributing to the recovery of Australia.

Usually there is some snippy commentary or a few quips and a couple of gifs. I'll double up on them next time.

This girl is exhausted. 

We deserve better.

The Q, The Bad, and the Ugly - Part 1: A Beginner's Guide

The Internet is for...

The internet is responsible for a whole raft of things that we sometimes wish hadn’t become a thing. One of these things that I am sure anyone with a reasonable sense of social conscience could agree that 4chan may fit in to this category, and from this pit of sleaze and hatred came Q.

I was asked to describe 4chan once, and the only way I could articulate it with any degree of certainty or accuracy was like this: imagine that the internet was a person and decided one night to hit the town. Well, 4chan is the place the internet ends up after too many jaeger bombs, and lines snorted from the breasts of wannabe socialites. Semi-conscious, rolling around nauseated and about to purge everything that’s been consumed over the last 24 hours; 4chan is the corner the internet unloads in before falling asleep in its own mess.

You might be asking yourself “why is it so bad?” or “if it is that bad, has anything good come from it?”. To answer those questions (and because I kind of enjoy the tapping sound of my new keyboard), I shall elucidate.

4chan as an imageboard (or an extremely frustrating to keep track of forum) is, or used to be, home to a userbase that could post and discuss anonymously everything from anime, conspiracy theories, and horror stories right through to politics, social commentary, and child pornography. Now, it’s basically this list of things (minus the anime) that this post focuses on, but I will touch on a few important parts of 4chan’s history that might provide a clear track for how this got from problematic internet site all the way to potential domestic terrorist threat.

A Brief History of Shitfuckery:

•       Founded in 2003 by Christopher Poole (aka “Moot”)
•       Initially focused on anime content and “random” (aka /b/)
•       Suffers downtime after child pornography uploaded to site
•       Gave us cute captioned photos of animals or “lolcats”
•       Undertook “Project Chanology” where Anonymous identifying people from around the world united to protest, hack, and harass the Church of Scientology. The human rights violation was an afterthought, but gave Anonymous a brief window of social conscience to bring light to a cult that practiced abhorrent disconnection tactics and punishments that bordered on torture.
•      Whatever goodwill Anonymous would work to gain for itself would be very quickly undone with the resurgence of things like child pornography on the site, cyberbullying, hacking campaigns, trolling campaigns, and involvement in gamergate.
•       Q appears on 4chan’s /pol/ board in 2017 dropping information that is near gibberish in how cryptic it is, clinging to Trump’s comments about the “calm before the storm” made during the October 5 photo op with senior military officials.
•       Q and the supporters “QAnon” are kicked off 4chan for basically overrunning the site and turning it into a bigger haven for antisemitism and white supremacy than it already was.
•       Q appears on 8chan and continues the stream of cryptic nonsense to keep the right wing conspiracy breathing ferals amused.
•       8chan goes offline after the NZ mosque shooting and is later allowed to exist on a Russian server, because who else but the Russians would take advantage of something so politically divisive?

And now for something completely different...

To explain what the Q conspiracy is, you need make your brain shift gears. To do this, imagine you’ve just recovered from a self-administered lobotomy, because that’s the kind of territory we are heading in to. Nothing is unbelievable.

You’ve been warned.

First, there’s the scandal dubbed “pizzagate”, where the Clintons and Democrats are involved in a pedophile ring that has dungeons in the basements of inconspicuous buildings throughout the world. The pizzagate example in particular claimed that there were coded messages in the leaked Podesta emails “acquired” by Wikileaks in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.

Louise Mensch would later investigate Wikileaks, JulianAssange, and their connection to Russia, to conclude (like anyone else who hasn't drunk the Kool Aid) that there's little doubt at all that Wikileaks and Assange are assets used almost exclusively to undermine democracy in the United States. It's also safe to assume that Wikileaks as an organisation is nothing more than a tool to gather intelligence from other nations to benefit Russia's campaign of destabilization for its own ends.

As an aside, my citing this information doesn't mean I support what is happening to Assange since he was removed from the Ecuadorian embassy. There's rules for the treatment of prisoners that should be adhered to, and there are better ways to make an example of someone without stripping them of their basic human rights. 

Where this fits in with Q, QAnon, and 8chan is strange in the sense that for the most part QAnons wants Assange hung, drawn, and quartered for his role in the 2010 "Collateral Murder" leak. However, they refuse to acknowledge any involvement from him in regards to not just delivering the DNC email dump that helped hand Trump his election win, but also the Podesta emails that formed the basis for the longest running conspiracy theory surrounding satanic pedophiles who torture children and drink their blood in an "adrenochrome" harvesting ritual. Supposed video evidence of this is purported to be contained on the laptop of Anthony Weiner.

Like everything Q and QAnon circulate though, it either doesn't exist or it is fraudulently constructed. The hostility from Q and QAnon toward Assange and Wikileaks however? That's clever, if nothing more than for the sole purpose of now keeping two assets linked back to Russia from being connected among the fevered egos of the adherents already walking a precariously thin line between faux-patriotism and treason.