Australia Day.

I was in a disabled taxi the morning of the 25th January, on my way to a physiotherapy torture session, when lo and behold came group of six or eight Police motorcycles, two abreast, lights flashing and sirens tootling passed us. They came out of Anzac Parade at a great rate of speed, turned into Oxford street, passing my taxi so close that it rocked and buggered off down Oxford Street at the same speed. ”Jesus,” said my taxi driver “it must be that cunt the prime minister.” We know each other well and have the same appreciation of archaic english language.

But it wasn’t! Fucking Scummo that is. Tailgating the group of motorcycles was a ten-tonne Army Truck, tastefully decorated to look as much like a speeding hedge as possible. And – fucking seriously – the speeding hedge was towing a seventy-five millimetre howitzer, which failed miserably in its disguise as a shrub.

Then! If that wasn’t enough, the shrub was followed by another group of motorcycles, another truck pretending to be a hedge and another one then a final group of police motorcycles to finish the whole parade off, and that was it, three big trucks, three howitzers, 18 Police motorcycles; no Scummo escaping bushfires to snatch a quick Hawaiian holiday in preference to doing actual work.

And off they all duly fucked-off, down Oxford Street towards the city, the largest collection of self-important wankers I’ve seen in many a long year. My Taxi driver was not at a loss for words. Neither was I. “What The Fuck was That?” we said in unison. This is where we diverged in character and mental makeup; after about a minute my Taxi driver said “Fucking Australia Day!” I had spent the time perhaps less constructively, in considering how much I loathe and detest Scott ”Projectile Vomit” Morrison.

But what I had witnessed stuck in my mind and started a very focussed train of thought in my head. ”How the fuck have the military got anything to do with Australia Day? They are, at best an exceedingly peripheral part of Australian Society, yet, by virtue of loud barking at strategically chosen times they have managed to cement themselves into the Australian zeitgeist in a wholly undeserved position of importance.

Look at it this way, the peacetime Australian Armed services do very little but sit around being paid, fed and clothed while waiting around for some national emergency, where, by participating in photo opportunities they attempt to make the incumbent regime look as competent as possible. (And handsome man in uniform standing to attention next to some pond scum in a suit is considered to make the pod scum look better). In the absence of a local natural disaster, the government of the day will search until they can find something, anything that they can boost their image with, and the troops on the ground will pop overseas for a nice all-expenses-paid-holiday where they get up to whatever misbehaviour they think they are entitled to, and, more important, that they think thy can get away with. For their part, the incumbent government hopes that their misbehaviour is not discovered until the voters have forgotten who deployed them there in the first place, because surely if the buck stops anywhere with war crimes, it stops with the governing regime in question. You need look no further than the mass executions of Nazi leaders in Spandau prison for that, or the hanging of Saddam and his cronies at the end of the gulf war. The recent war crimes committed by Australian SAS troops in Afghanistan are the direct responsibility of the government which deployed them there.

Indeed in the lack of a convenient war or national emergency, a person in the armed “services” amounts to little more than being the recipient of a kind of Social Security; fed and clothed from the taxpayers purse and for the most part providing far less value-for-money than the average dole ”bludger” who’s dole money supports the local community, as opposed to being spent within the armed services system. As far as it goes too, the average recipient of civilian social security can be trusted to find their own entertainment, and it must be said, in the overwhelming majority of cases this entertainment is harmless, and by dint of the paucity of the benefits in question, cheap.

Conversely an air-force pilot may be bought, with taxpayer funds, an airplane costing twenty billion taxpayer dollars – a plane which has no purpose other than killing foreigners to make the incumbent government look good- a technique beloved by despots throughout history and the world over, – which is why bad governments strangle education and stifle free media; an educated population is dangerous to a criminal government, in that it thinks for itself, and a free media can expose the lies of a government that has turned septic to even a poorly-educated population.

(c) Alex Rieneck, 2021

“I wish you all had one neck” (Gaius Caligula)

Massive election loss finally forced Donald Trump to show his true colours. What had been an article of faith to many for a long time has finally become a fact so glaringly obvious that it can only missed by those with their vision impaired by having upended buckets on their heads.

At at the end of World War Two, Hitler imposed a “scorched earth” policy of the land that would soon be conquered by the allies. To this end, crops were burned, bridges and factories blown up. When Hitler’s generals told him that this would result in mass starvation and amount to genocide of his own people, Hitler’s reply was that the German people had proved insufficiently strong and that they deserved whatever they got. Some weeks later when even Hitler’s superhuman powers of denying the obvious failed, fate forced the nasty creature’s hand, and, while the Soviets were kicking in the front door of the bunker, Hitler hid in his office and summoned up the courage to finally let go of his delusions.

The similarities between this story and the current disgrace playing out in American politics are, to my mind, lambently obvious. In the same way that Donald Trump won the last election by “A lot” (of imaginary votes), Hitler believed till the very end that imaginary troops could turn the Russian advance from the very gates of Berlin and throw them back across the Vistula. To achieve anything, you have to have a strong will. Sometimes the line between will and septic fantasy is as thin as the paper with an “enabling Act” drafted onto it.

It is worth remembering that Hitler was a democratically elected leader and simply manoeuvred himself into the position of dictator with luck and the right help from his super-rich backers in exactly the way that Trump could be seen to be setting himself up for – but with markedly less success. But now that the penny has finally dropped in Trump’s head, he’s happy to leave the American people – who did not vote for him, ”enough” to die of a virus which he appears to have only just noticed. And since he refuses to sign the assistance package – gives them the option to starve to death first.

Seem familiar?

stop press Trump has signed the bill, which is, in my opinion, roughly equivalent to Hitler poisoning his dog Blondie; we must now wait for his final concession to reality. The speech where he finally takes the metaphorical bullet and concedes to Joe Biden, admitting to what just about everyone else has known for many months, that he is politics personified all bluster and lies, held together by a skin of vindictive self-interest in an unsightly ambulatory body disguised in an expensive suit paid for with other people’s money.

(c) Alex Rieneck Dec 2020 All Rights Reserved

The Grand Illusion

What a month its been. First the fires went out when the ashes got rained on. Then the fires were replaced by floods. Our Prime Minister sneaked back into the country from his Hawaian bolthole and made sure to get himself photographed outside recognisable locations in Canberra to prove that while he may be scared of bushfires, floods hold no terror for him; he is made of sterner stuff.

But the bad news is he may not manage the budget surplus that they promised us. Frydenberg and Morrison both appear to be embarrassed by this failing despite the very respectable excuse of having had most of the country burn down on their watch, and like most of us, having little idea what a budget surplus is good for anyway. I mean the last time we had one followed eleven years of John Howard scrimping and cutting to the point where the country almost didn’t have an infrastructure. I suspect ,mainly in reward for his stinginess the electorate threw him out of office in 2007- just in time for the Global Financial Crisis. His replacements simply spent the miserly -collected surplus to keep the economy functional. He got to watch from enforced retirement in Ryde. Truly aPyrrhic victory.

So now we’re back to chasing a budget surplus at the expense of having a viable bushfire service- which directly results in half the country burning down and incalculable damage to the world’s biosphere. The human species is destroying the planet in search of “profit” and the chasing ofinfantile theories. Our country indeed, all countries are owned by rich profoundly immoral creatures who control every election, maintain the pretence of “democracy”(or whatever)- and continue doing whatever they want. It’s how the world works.

To be blunt the only slim hope for the future is that they may want to preserve their holdings into the future- their own children, or their own artificially prolonged lives for as long as possible, and who knows how long that might be?

Its been all over the news most of the week. The unsightly creature that somehow became POTUS has announced that the U.S will “walk away” from the INF treaty until Russia and China “Come to their senses.” This treaty which affected intermediate range nuclear weapons like cruise missiles (specifically the kind of shit one would be likely to use in a relatively contained battlefield situation or a specific blackmail / strong-arm scenario) has been welcomed as being a return to the cold war and the beginning of a new arms race. POTUS, approaching the mid-term elections, has done nothing to quell the hysteria; indeed he has attempted to fan the flames as best he can with his quite unimpressive appendage; after all right-wingers *LOVE* an enemy and this drama should stop them all watching incest porn on the internet and masturbating and get them all out to vote. So the idea goes, the saggy creature should get re-elected and if down the track some thousands of people get nuked-well, them’s the breaks.

No Care Taken No responsibility Accepted.

Of course it may well work. The saggy creature got elected once, why not twice? At least thats the plan of the saggy creature’s owners – as for repercussions, they don’t give a fuck beyond sucking as much money out of the country (and everywhere else) as quickly as possible. So in the short term their plan will probably work. The Republicans will probably do well in the mid-terms and the new arms race will enrich the industrialists who own Trump. Of course the plan has side-effects. The US simply can’t afford a new arms race. In the 1980’s the USSR went broke trying to keep up with the United States’ military threat. While across the pond, Reagan suffocated the poor with an horrendous tax burden in order to fund the nuclear deterrent that supposedly kept America safe. Now decades later, the US Government, already taxing as much as it can get away with, is regularly shut down by a complete lack of funds anyway. Now Trump and his cronies want to add a new massive expense to the pre-existing trillion dollar debt. They can’t even address the interest on the debt, let alone the capital but they want new nuclear bombs so they say, “not to worry mom, we can afford it.” 

Now Russia is broke. Trump, a man who is commonly assessed as having the same grasp of economics as a house brick, will send America broke too. 

What will happen then?

Putin will step in and take control and from a global perspective, I think that this will be the best possible outcome for the world.

Interzone agent; Alice dee

Yet another week of pants poopingly incredible news! All True!

As if last month, when Donald saved the world fro “Rocketman’s nuclear threat wasn’t enough ( and the sight of those two in skin-tight Lycra wis stillalmost too much)
*This* week, America’s favourite super-hero took on the most evilest boss baddy of them all! This week Captain Trump took on Mr Putin- in  fortress of danger in Hellishzinki!

It was just like Blusterus league in(c) In Drivel Comics 12(c)!

The world could barely summon the strength of character to totter to their habitual telvision consuming spot! The planet Earth itself faltered in its rotation as the Commander in chief of goodness and the  most evillest man in the solar system actually met face to face! It was as staggering, as eye-gougingly brain fucking as that tim that time General Buchalter caught Colenel Klink and Corporal Schultz doing bum sex in “Hogan’s Heroes”- while Fraulien Helga, in scanty lingerie flogged Corporal Schultz’s sweaty back with the cord from an electric fan! How we laughed! Corporally punished Schultz certainly knew something then! How they all deserved their load of Emmies that year. And this year the awards will arrive in a shipping container for the writer who managed to create the pretence that there was the slightest smidgen of doubt – a boson particle of suspense as to what would happen when these “two” great leaders met in deal- making mode.

Of course what we’re talking about here is the “Two most powerful men on Earth” -both “successful businessmen”- doing some dealing “for the good of us all”I feel sick. The outcome of the meeting was a forgone conclusion.

Donald Trump took a large inheiritance from his father (-) and through decades of business dealing grew it by slightly less than it would have grown under prevailing interest rates. In other words, if he’d just put it in the bank and had it earn interest- he’d be richer now than  all his “dealing” has made him.

Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, was a KGB colonel when his society, the Soviet Union fell apart over decades of shifty business he has made himself probably the richest and undoubtedly the most pwerful man in the world. Unlike Trump, Putin does not have to answer to *anyone*-not congress, not the Senate definitely not CNN and certainly not to Donald Trump.

The question was never who would come out ahead in the dealing but whether Donald Trump would even realise how seriously he’d been ass fucked, and as far as that goes, his performance, *since* the meeting says it all; Shambling around like a zombie and almost tripping over the queen, embarassingly confusing the words “wou’ and “wouldn’t” in the kind of way that had me wondering how long it would take him to forget Vladimir’s “would” and how he’d thought he wouldn’t.I’m rather ashamed to admit I laughed, and wondered how he’d go negotiating with Harvey Weinstein