a terrified little boy, Stormy Daniels, Hunter S Thompson, and the turducken of misery

 

Note the date...the following week, one term President George W.H. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis in a stonking great landslide, 426 Electoral College votes to 111...no-one has won bigger since...

Comrades,

Years ago, on my first reading of Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1973), I was astonished to discover that according to any number of Masters of the Dark Arts on both sides of the political divide, fully 20% of voters will vote on the basis of which of the banners and placards outside the polling stations they like the best on the day - that is their one and only criteria. Nothing else matters. Hard to believe, especially in a voluntary participation system - but true. That's why candidates take extraordinary steps and spend astronomical eye-watering sums on advertising to make sure their name is fully recognised at the polls. Name recognition is king. No one knows what the surge in mail-in ballots means for this, but it's still a huge chunk of The Vote; a bloc that any self respecting politician would walk over dead bodies for. So, in that sense, there are next to no informed "swinging voters" in America. It's all black & white, especially at the minute, with very little grey to work with.

Everything now, and it has been for months, rests on GOTV (Get Out The Vote). 128.83M votes were cast back in '16, but the pundits are saying, that with 70M ballots already cast in person or by mail, total turnout in this election could be pushing 150M votes or about 65% of registered voters - which would be the highest turn out since 1908. With the Grand Old Party's long and proud history of voter suppression and intimidation, about 20 million extra votes in play can only mean one thing for the Trumpovuvuzela....very bad news, very very crook indeed. The medico's are worried. It could be terminal. Folks have been glibly talking about a "blue wave" and even a "blue tsunami", but the way it is with the opinion polls (and they have made it their very particular business to considerably tweak and improve on the methods employed back in the 2016 debacle), Uncle Joe could be pushing close to 400 votes in the Electoral College, leaving The Dotard-in-Chief with a few more than 100. In the event of that happening, it'd be a no-brainer fait accompli result no-one could argue with, ever. He promised to drain the swamp and blow up Washington, but in that scenario DJ Trump! would be hoist by his own petard.  By almost any measure, the multitude of pathways to re-election for the current lunatic in the Oval Office becomes narrower and narrower by the day, but don't whatever you do count out the Orange Man from Twitter before all the numbers are in. The Miracle of Democracy is just that - a miracle - very strange, mystical, and totally unpredictable, unknowable things can, and do, happen.

DJ Trump!'s most outstanding achievement on the campaign trail has been his uncanny ability to convert the very considerable advantage of incumbency into a dead-set liability. In the present state of things with a pandemic on, the Democrats have clearly gone down the "give him enough rope" avenue, and told their ageing candidate to stay home, shut up, keep under the radar, do old man things, talk to a TV camera in the basement if you must, but never engage the Trumpotus until absolutely necessary, etc et al. That's while The Don stages rally after rally after Nuremberg-style rally and becomes the biggest and greatest unhinged and incoherent President of the United States that the world has ever seen  The more he preens his extraordinary narcissism and shouts himself hoarse for the rusted on, the more the slipknot in the noose tightens. The non-stop rallying is of course preaching to the choir and even his own people admit it's an entirely useless campaign strategy - it doesn't GOTV - it's more about the President's tremendous and really beautiful vanity and just jiving that thing he likes above all - lapping up the adoration - otherwise he might get in a funk and go off and play his 284th round of golf while in office. (Fun fact: That's cost the US taxpayer a very tidy $142M in security and transport expense alone.) He'll also find his henchmen further contaminating the Supreme Court at the last minute will back-fire on him, as droves of Republicans won't bother to vote now, because they're happy and relieved that "job's right, job's done". His coterie of enabler's weak failure to come up with any sort of meaningful COVID economic stimulus package surely is political suicide in itself. Never mind the slaughter or the pain and suffering of millions, the hard right-wing always seems to forget that the newly impoverished class have still got the vote. And of course the main showman himself neatly falls into another HS Thompson bon mot  "when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro".

I've heard it said that The Donald "sounds like he is running for the President of Talk Back Radio", but perhaps more to the point is "Trump and his family are not running for office, they're running from the law".

The Trumpotus is likely to face what I've heard described as "a turducken of misery" around Thanksgiving time. He certainly will not be left alone after he exits Washington DC in the depths of mid-winter. There are any number of people out there who want to to go him, and go him they will, and he knows it. It's only by a quirky legal convention that a President is immune from prosecution while in office except by Congress (that's right! he's been impeached in the House before being acquitted after a sham trial in the Senate. I remember now!). And there's even talk in legal circles of the DJ! pre-preemptively pardoning himself during the lame duck period and then trying to use that as a defence in any prosecution. Good luck with that one, son. Run it up the flagpole and see how it flies. Look! I'm innocent because I said so!

As it stands, it's highly unlikely The Donald will ever return to New York on his way to the balmier climes at Mar-a-Lago, Fl., as the NY prosecutors have a list of charges as long as yr arm that could see the freak flying up the creek to some upstate NY jailhouse if he ever set up shop in Trump Tower, again. He's already $400M in debt, so you can imagine it'll be running down his leg when the legal bills come in. But you can't imagine retirement in Florida will be all that comfortable either, as I've always reckoned from the moment I heard about her, it'll be Stormy Daniels who has the last laugh in all of this, as the Feds go him under the Campaign Finance Laws as they were back in '16, in which case he'd do a nice stretch in a Federal Penitentiary for the hardened. You just can't pay off a whore with hush money and put it down in the campaign book-keeping accounts as "extra cabbages". Most unfortunately for the big beautiful boss of buffoonery - who has almost three months of becoming a very sore loser ahead of him - he has no place to run, no place to hide. And you'd imagine his no-talent family, boot-lickin' cronies and brown-nosed toadies would be shitting themselves Scomo-at-Engadine-Macca's-style, because they'd be acutely aware that once they lose power, the game's up, they become slow moving targets and they stand to lose goddam everything they've ever had.

Lil' Donnie's niece Mary L Trump  (the daughter of Fred Trump Jnr; a hopeless wino who died of cirrhosis of the liver at 42, when she was just 16) perhaps put it best when she said "Don's just a terrified little boy, and has been his whole life". And you can't even apply the good ol' Aussie pub test here of "who would you rather have a beer with" as both The Donald and Uncle Joe are teetotallers. They both had/have alcoholic brothers, and Hunter Biden has been known to like a drink in a crisis, and is still going in and out through the revolving door down at rehab. Just imagine what The States would be like with DJ Trump! on the drink. Oh my Lord Joisus. But as my dear departed father was fond of saying "never trust a cold water man!".

I'll never forget stumbling out of a cinema the night the result was telegraphed through in '16 and going into a dimly lit bar across the road not knowing that Donald J.Trump had won, but there on the specials blackboard above the bar in a neatly written font of white chalk was "The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over" - HST. My heart sank and I hardly needed to ask. 

So, loose the bears on the midgets, and let the gaming begin!

 

 

pig wrestling

 

Comrades,

With the Miracle of Democracy set to get a mighty fine work out in The Race That Stops A Nation US-Style next week, just a quick one here to remind you of the complete & utter bats hit ridiculousness that is the United States of America:

“I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950).

"Nicknames of the States". 1908 advertisement for H.W. Hill & Co weaner nose rings, featuring hog caricatures. *Oklahoma, Arizona and New Mexico were yet to become States.

High resolution here:
https://i.redd.it/w9mvjq8yuwu51.jpg

    

who can rig the Electoral College the best?

 

 

 

Comrades,

For weeks now,  I've been trying to dash off a thousand words on American politics viz a viz The Miracle of Democracy, but it just keeps getting weirder and weirder by the day and overtaken by events, in what seems like carefully staged managed chaos that'd make any extremest right-wing froot-looped foot soldier a #proud boy (since hijacked by LGBT K-poppers). As the late great Hunter S Thomson remarked in his 1971 classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream..."when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro".

It all began innocently enough with the godawfully timed death of the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who was perfectly entitled to shuffle off this mortal coil given she was 87 year old and riddled with cancer. There comes a time when there can be no more, and she knew it. I mistakenly thought there'd be enough time to scribble something about RBG's illustrious career as a 'liberal' jurist and her strange pop celebrity in her well advanced years. And wonder why you'd never see that happening here, no matter how distinguished the judge.

Then the Trumpotus' people decide to nominate a Catholic mother of seven from New Orleans, Professor at Law, former People of Praise adherent and Federalist Society boosterist par excellence to the bench of the SCOTUS, where - you'd expect - she'd given Roe v Wade (1973) a good walk in the park. Never mind the howls of protest that the Supreme Court may be contaminated for a generation, or the outrageous and disgraceful neglect of the time honoured protocol of leaving the next pick to the next President, this late in the Election Cycle. There would have been a chance to bang on about Obama and the very hard done by Merrick Garland and discuss the fascinating filibuster rules in the Senate, which were developed and finely tuned through the centuries with the sole aim of trying to prevent a vote. But no.

Then came 'The Cacophony in Cleveland" in the opening stanza of three Presidential debates, allegedly on policy that used to be taken seriously - and what a jolly good show it was! The DJ Trump Show! The Donald loves nothing more than a good lectern, a magnificent rostrum from which to screech dribble and spray gobfuls of infected golly's. For good reason, the press felled forests to sprout forth on the slanging match and speculate on how far down and dirty in the gutter you can go. For the first time ever, the traditional trick of trying to pick a "winner" got turned right on its ear, and most of the usual pundits didn't even bother given the match-up's utter intelligibility. Even the well-versed native in the English language would struggle to offer even the slightest clue as to what it was all about; but it as sure as Hell looked like a poor advertisement for the schism in American society - as one "GOP operative" was reportedly heard to remark within earshot of someone from the Intelligencer, “At last! We've finally found something that the entire country can agree on: That debate was a complete fucking shitshow all the way around.” And that's from one of The Donald's own party apparatchiks.

Folks are saying the Miracle of Democracy is going through the S-Bend right now, but they forget that it's always been and always will be in clear and present danger (just ask Wiemar Germany, they'll tell you, ha!). And there's no need to say there's more that one or two modern day tyrants and despots using the Facade of Democracy to sneak in through the back door. Moscow, Minsk, Bejing, Hong Kong, Ankara, Warsaw, Damascus, Caracas spring to mind, not to mention crazy mixed up joints like Manila, Baku, or Kigali for chrissake; the list goes on and on. If it happens in Washington, everyone will know who to blame.

It could have been a chance for me to rabbit on endlessly about jealousy guarding not only the right to vote, but the right to turn out and actually cast a ballot. In any voluntary system, it's all about turning out the vote, but there are any number of ways to disenfranchise people. Millions of 'em. All the time. There are Masters of the Dark Arts working on it as we speak. Everybody knows Uncle Joe would win in a canter if he can just turn out the black vote like Obama did in '08. But blatant voter suppression and intimidation has been going on in the Land of The Free since the year dot and keeping the blacks from messing around near ballot boxes has been a long-standing tradition, particularly in unreformed areas of The South. And they don't even need mobs of violent Brownshirts.  Be that as it may, in the final paralysis, it all comes down to who can rig the Electoral College the best. And lucky for the Trumpotus - the fix was in - in '16.

In times of trouble in the Home of The Brave, I'm reminded of the former Senator from Indiana Birch Bayh - who died last year at 91. He was the No.1 cheerleader and staunchest supporter of the abolition of the Electoral College as the hopelessly gerrymandered unrepresentative swill it is, in favour of a winner-take all in the Popular Vote alone - first past the post with a simple majority. Never mind that Birch also authored the 25th and 26th Amendments to the US Constitution, setting out Presidential succession and establishing the voting age at 18 in every state. La de da, de da...I'm thinking. Poor ol' Birch, he dead now, and I can't see anyone who's taken up the torch.

Then The Donald goes and gets The Corona, and gets choppered off to the Presidential Suite at The Hospital, and everything's turned on it's head yet again, this time upside down and inside out. It's a promoters dream! This is what showmen live for. Even the best Hollywood writers couldn't make this crazy bat shit up. Or maybe they are? But if the all too predictable "October Surprise" comes this early in the month, then I give up. And I'd believe you if you told me "you aint seen nuthin' yet". The fear & loathing in the last four weeks on the hustings has been known to get pretty bitter, twisted and intense...so light the blue touchpaper, and stand well clear. Boom.

 

 

John Lee Hooker for President

 

Comrades,

Never mind the mind-boggling tax evasion (tax? schlax), with all the bruhaha surrounding DJ Trump's latest nomination for the SCOTUS in the now five weeks left on the hustings until that one day in November, I'm reminded of Ry Cooder channelling that great showman, John Lee Hooker, in his number John Lee Hooker for President.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqIOtr8SwRk

"Now, I want nine fine looking women sittin' on the Supreme Court.
Their big legs, their tight skirts, drive me outta my mind.
When I need a judgement, they're gonna give it to me, right on time.
They call me on the phone and say 'Johnnie, we disagree on which one of us you like the best?'
I say 'Honey, you're all equally fine, under the law'.
Yessir."

what's more to know about the US Postal Service shitshow?

 

Comrades,

It comes as no surprise that the Orange Guy from Twitter should order his henchmen to strangle the time honoured US Postal Service of funds to commit widespread voter disenfranchisement across every one of The Great 50 states. Never mind that the Post Master General is a "Trump mega-donor" in the form of the bald, beady-eyed, cat's-arsed Louis DeJoy. A third rate apparatchik who wouldn't know which way is up on a postage stamp. Anyone who's seen that first class movie about voting, Lincoln, will know that that particular Republican President wasn't averse to flinging the odd Post Master's comfortable life-time sinecure in the way of wavering voters in Congress on the slavery question. So if "The Party of Lincoln" has been into vote buying from day one, why should vote denying be any different? And this was back in the day when the Post Master General was a cabinet position, on the same level as say, the Secretary of War. It wasn't until 1971 that Richard "Tricky Dicky" Milhous Nixon decided that the PMG would no longer have a seat in the inner circle. Until now.

Everyone knows at least a little of the storied history of the mail in America - the Pony Express and all that - but never mind that the USPS is now a gargantuan, no doubt Byzantine, bureaucracy. The accusations by acolytes of The Donald that there is too much waste and mismanagement are probably true. How can there not be with 30,000 post offices, half a million posties, and a mind boggling 142 billion items delivered last year? Show me any other vast, complex public service that doesn't have the same problems. But to rob it of $25B in the Time of Corona is not only plain mean & vindictive, but the Fascista don't even bother to disguise the fact that it's all been carefully designed to prevent as many Black Democrat voters as possible from having their valid votes counted. Electoral hanky-panky knows no bounds, but this one's close to taking the biscuit for bald faced blatancy and bastardry.

And it's never been easy to vote in The States. Ever. Election day is always the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November after all. Schemes for voter disenfranchisement have been around since the Miracle of Democracy kicked off in the USA, it's all part & parcel of the caper. Every state has different rules. Some allow anyone to cast a "mail-in ballot", in other states (like Australia) you need a valid excuse to lodge a postal vote, while in six states postal voting is all but impossible because of the number of flaming hoops you have to jump through to get an exemption from turning up on the day. It's the same for in-person pre-poll voting - different everywhere. Voting in person is no less difficult - not enough polling stations is a common complaint. Sometimes the booths are all but inaccessible - you have to more or less hike there. Some Supervisors of Elections who may or may not be on the take indulge in simply not printing enough ballot papers for the number of registered voters - so polling stations close early when they run out. In some states you need photo ID to vote, others you don't. And, you can also casually roll up on the day only to find you have been struck off the electoral roll for not paying a fine or some other kind of minor misdemeanor, or indeed for no discernable reason at all. Some states even routinely pull tens of thousands of voters off the rolls simply because they haven't voted for a while. You have to be eternally vigilant that you haven't been rubbed out, as there's no obligation on the state to tell you.  Gerrymandering is rife and who knows how much ballot stuffing goes on - but the one thing that everyone knows is that co-ordinated postal vote electoral frauds are extremely rare. Vlad The Impaler of the Kremlin certainly swung a helluva lot more votes the way of his best pal DJ Trump! in 2016 than any postal voting scam will ever deliver to Uncle Joe in 2020. And in any case, it wouldn't come close to the 176,000 names (and counting) of Covid19 victims who are now very conveniently unable to vote on account of their deceasedness. Then again, dead people have been voting in elections since the Dawn of Time. What a shitshow.

And of course, there is nothing more to say about that dead-set opportunist snake and former Master of the Dark Arts, Steve Bannon, being yanked off a luxury yacht owned by some billionaire Chinaperson bobbing somewhere around the coast of Connecticut mid-week, and being cuffed for wire fraud by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. Fraud? Nice irony. For the love of Sweet Weepin' Jesus Upon The Cross it couldn't have happened to a nicer fraud.

It doesn't need to be this hard, but "it is what it is" - for every person, man, woman...

 

never again

Comrades,

Amid the panic and confusion of a world wide pandemic, it's very easy to forget that today is the 75th anniversary of the dropping of Little Boy on Hiroshima. My dear departed father, an RAAF fighter/bomber pilot at the time, went to Hiroshima in the early 1960's simply because he wanted to have a look. He held no animosity against the Japanese whatsoever, but certainly knew all about the power of a bombing run. He never spoke openly about the war, because I think as he got older he rejected it and was uncomfortable with his role in it. And they were still atmospheric testing at Maralinga when I was born in 1957 just 700 miles away, for Chrissake.

My views on The Bomb are well known - fascinated and repulsed by it, perhaps in equal measure. I've been banging on about it in these pages for decades. Someone was once looking at my bookshelves at home and asked me "I know you are utterly opposed to nuclear weapons and war in general, so why do you have so many books about it?" I replied "Know your enemy".

Of course, the horrors of Hiroshima - and then Nagasaki - were small beer indeed compared to what followed - the development of the H-bomb, 2,476 known nuclear tests, and of course the biggest muthafukka of al time...the Russian test that got way out of control...Tsar Bomba on 30 October 1961. That shocked the world into the realisation that "mutually assured destruction" (MAD) was right here, right now - and the concept of the end of the world at the push of a big red button would be with us forever.

Tsar Bomba was really beyond imagining at 1,500 times bigger than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined, and 10 times more powerful than all the munitions expended during World War Two.

Nuclear disarmament will never be achieved in my lifetime, but there was great joy for me when the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize "for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons."

Of course the Yoof of Today have no idea what it was like in the Cold War and have no fear of these things, but back in the day (late 1970's) when there were actually demo's calling for the world to be rid of this hideous scourge, I used to march proudly under the DRINKERS FOR DISARMAMENT banner as it was a natural fit for a reformed Trot and notorious pisspot. And even in my current teetotal status, I remain a fully paid-up member. I'm in there somewhere...

Hiroshima. Never again. Ever.

"clinging to the floating debris"

Comrades,

"Oh, my dear old Donald, what is it that you've done this time?" DJ Trump! is having paroxysms after being told he can't postpone his own re-election...I'll give him one thing, tho' - the Master of Spasticity is quite mesmerizing, which probably accounts for his enormous popularity:

https://64.media.tumblr.com/5c06b05cde6b1f2431a599918b864366/d54f502d9c2dde5e-a4/s640x960/6d90e0024f141e5a19d9aabdf8ca4d897a85a289.gif

It's a lucky thing for the Miracle of Democracy that the putrid red herring the Trumpotus threw out there was viewed with distaste on both sides of the aisle, who rejected out of hand the unprecedented - now there's an overused word in these uncertain and difficult times - idea of postponing a US Presidential election. Let's face it, it doesn't matter how crooked! rigged! fraudulent! dishonest! ridiculous! the poll is. In the all the history of all the world, all elections are, in one way or another. Vote buying, ballot stuffing, bagmen on the take, polling stations burnt to the ground, no ballot papers to be found, a legion of dead folks voting, strong arm tactics, ballot boxes found in dumpsters, endless arguments about counting irregularities, stand over men, one-armed voting machines, my God! even just the concept of mail-in-voting and every other electoral hanky panky in the book - and much more - are all par for the course here, and the Bozo in Chief knows it. At least there's no shady preference deals in this one, but it all goes way back. Even Ol' George Washington lost his first run for elected office, a seat in the Virginia Assembly in 1755, because he failed to provide enough booze to lure the required number of punters to the polling stations. He didn't make that mistake again, delivering 144 gallons of rum, punch, cider and wine to the booths the next time round, winning a vote for about every half gallon of lunatic soup. That's not to mention other candidates who were allegedly heard to thump tubs and shout "free hams for everyone!". So what if the pure fantasy of millions of people voting while ineligible comes true? There sure as hell are millions of eligible voters who can't/couldn't-be-fucked-to/won't-on-principle cast a ballot, with voter turnout historically pushing it to make 50%. It's trite to say that Uncle Joe will win in a canter, if only he can turn out the "black vote". We've all heard of Jim Crow, but ask any voter of colour in The South just how difficult it is to register and then find a way to get to and then be allowed into a polling station let alone anywhere near a ballot box, even to this day - widespread systematic black voter disenfranchisement is institutionalised in The South. There is no such thing as a Federal Electoral Commission, it's all down to each individual state while the actual mechanics of voting are handled on a county level of which there are 3,141, and they're all different. The POTUS has zero control over it. In theory. Chaos theory. And The Donald loves nothing more than chaos and control. The time-honoured divide and rule principal.

Never mind "Build That Wall", the Orange Bloke from Twitter campaigned in 2016 on a "jobs and growth" platform which has now long exited the poop shooter in a grand fashion and glooped down the s-bend due to the current difficulties. In a perfect world The Donald would be cactus three months out from the election, just on the strength of tens of millions of unemployed alone, who unfortunately for the DJ! - do still have the vote. By rights, a Drover's Dog could be the next President of the US if the 'Never Trumpers' had their way. But don't count yr chickens - stranger things have happened - and we all know what they are. Hillary? Is anyone listening to the deplorables? Fanatical supporters of The Donald are rusted on so hard even WD40 won't shift 'em. But it struck me the other day just how far up shit creek the paddleless incumbent is, with death, misery, and deprivation all around him when a news flash came through on the Bush Telegraph in the corner of the lounge room with the ticker-tape reading that California had become the first state to register more than half a million novel corona virus infections. To put it in perspective, Australia's only just gone past 18,000 cases. California has a population of 40 million, Australia 25 million - you do the math. If the great city of Melbourne, in all its glorious squalor and godlessness, is now considered a "disaster zone", what then of America? Pushing a quarter of a million fatalities by the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November? That's not at all fanciful thinking given the exponential nature of the plague. It's a massacre. The Boomer Remover has well & truly replaced the Grim Reaper. 

Nelson Mandela Memorial Lecture, 19 July, 2020.

too much confusion

Comrades,

It may just be me, but I'm fully befuddled over the internal plague borders - not to mention the borders within borders - that have come into effect since EOFY.

As far as can be ascertained, The Athens of the South, Victoria, Victorians, and anyone who has had anything to do with Victoria - ever - are now persona non grata. The gibbering premier of NSW, the Hon. Princess Ruby, has said of Victoria "just don't go there" and of Victorians "just don't come here". The fact that the joint is a hotbed of pestilence is beyond question, so it's best that we leave Dapper Dan to get on with belting the bandicoots over the head as they pop up out of the ground. Queensland won't have 'em, and South Australia won't have anyone. Nah, they have generations of experience at thumbing their noses and cocking their snoots at Victorians. What's more the Crow Eaters have taken great delight in fucking-up Melbourne footy, with whoever is left after all the sackings at AFL HQ pulling the hair out of their heads in great tufts and that becomes its own peculiar nightmare. Queensland remains leery, but under enormous pressure from the FNQ tourist trade, Beautiful One Day/Perfect The Next will welcome all - with not so open arms - later this month, except for the scabrous Victorians of course, who remain strictly banned until further notice.

No one has heard anything from across the Nullabor recently, as Western Australia is a law unto itself. Don't be surprised if the the long running secessionist movement in the Golden West makes a comeback. The way it is now, they could leave the Commonwealth and no one would even notice with the arse having fallen out of the mining boom - they're just too far away from civilisation anyway, and Perth is the most isolated capital city in the world. And they're very happy to stay that way. Northern Territorians are too busy getting on with the job of being alcoholics, letting off firecrackers, and going troppo to worry about a thing. The NT has always been a place for people wanting to hide or run away from something anyway. Not a single squeak has been heard out of Tasmania for weeks, but a closer look at their Govt. propaganda reveals that Tassy has no intention of letting anyone - not even Taswegians - back into the Apple Isle in the foreseeable future - if 'foreseeable' is even still a thing. There is no planned date for the island state to readmit anyone of any race, creed or colour in order to maintain their squeaky clean image. Nobody cares what the ACT is up to. In the famous words of DJ Trump! "it's a shithole".

Too much confusion. Federation is a wondrous thing, aint it?

The bumbling, stumbling New South Govt. has got mixed messaging down to such a fine art it should be put on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Never mind pubs being able to admit as many drinkers as they goddamn like from today (as long as they stay away from each other) - getting on the frothing viral beer taps right now is both an act of faith and a cry for help. In my lengthy and comprehensive experience, achieving "drunken distancing" is no easy feat. But as of today up to 10,000 spectators are permitted to attend sporting fixtures in NSW, and yet 'outdoor social gatherings' are still limited to 20 persons. Really? WTF? What are the pointy heads thinking? Utterly pointless. In any case, anyone intending to go to the football this weekend in Sydney with those sorts of crowds are not only fools to themselves and a burden on the community - they're out of their cotton pickin' minds. But heck, the Honky Dollar still does the talkin' (for now), and the show must go on.

The fishwraps are also saying that "hundreds of people" arriving on international flights today will be diverted from Victoria to other parts (if anyone will have them). That only begs the question - who the screaming bejesus are all these wally's? Where have they been, what have they been doing, and why do they want to come back now, when everyone who was an expat or on-tour was told months ago that they must repatriate immediately? Do they just decide "oh shit, I'm bored over here now, so I think I'll go home"? I thought international travel was banned? I thought 98% of the planes had stopped flying? Do they come by boat? Beats me.
 
As far as the Miracle of Democracy goes - or even applies at the minute - well, it's very problematical. The border closures mentioned above are clearly in murky legal waters as, prima facie, as they prevent free trade between the states as the Founding Fathers intended. There was a tremendous brouhaha when they tried to close the VIC/NSW border during the 1919 Spanish Flu Pandemic, and they never succeeded. The relevant words from Section 92 of the Australian constitution read "customs, trade, commerce, and intercourse among the States, whether by means of internal carriage or ocean navigation, shall be absolutely free". There's no mumbo jumbo or mixed messaging there. Perfectly clear.
Gawd, save us.

the stargates have re-opened as we return to karmic equilibrium...

Comrade Boffins,

It seems the Chinese Communist Party has got a bit antsy with Canberra lately, after ScoMo's knee-jerk backing of The Donald's demand for an independent international inquiry into the source and spread of the China Virus. Gone very quiet on that one now, haven't they? Not satisfied with cocking their snoots at our barley for their beer, it seems the Commies have gone in below the belt now, telling their citizens and students with give the Wide Brown Land a wide berth on account of the high risk of being attacked by seething mobs of rabid racists. Confucius say "it's not just the blacks, you know, mate". And these people are well used to being told what to do. Chinese tourists accounted for about a quarter of all visitors to the Land Down under back in the glory days of 2019 spending roughly $12B. Two hundred and sixty thousand (260,000) Chinese students used to be scattered about in various Ivory Towers on the Big Island every year, again generating revenue of about $12B. Without them a clutch of heavily exposed universities and the Great Barrier Reef will go broke. In simple terms, $24B is a lot of lazy cash, with another Great Depression looming. Don't they know down Canberra way it's the Mighty Yuan and not the Honky Dollar that does the talkin' from now on? Joisus. Didn't think that one through and got all muddled in the brain department in the midst in a global pandemic, didn't they? And because of these political amateurs running the show, there's now no furious backpedalling option left, because whenever DFAT gives Peking a ring, they won't even pick up the phone. That's really clever Foreign Affairs. I'm looking at you Marise. You should get out more, instead of poking the bear.

There seems to be a general consensus that The Corona turned up in a bushmeat market in good ol' down town Wuhan and a blood-sucking bat was probably to blame somewhere along the food chain. Bats have always had a bad press, so that's very convenient. But the Trumpotus White House believes that's just obfuscating hocus-pocus, and in all seriousness, The Covid was developed out of thin air in a sinister plot in some Frankenstein style laboratory, and then very quickly weaponised. Others have suggested it was merely the bloke who ate that armadillo he found somewhere in Hubei province that kicked things off. Or was it that freak who was caught fooling around with a pangolin and was sent off for re-education? It's even been floated that Patient Zero is that dude who fucked-that-goat in Mexico, but that theory has now been widely discredited.

No. It's none of those. Here's the most conclusive proof yet that 5G is without a shadow of a doubt the cause of The Covid spreading willy-nilly around the globe and killing more people than you've had hot dinners.  It's just like the well established undisputed fact that the houses are communicating with each other through AM radio waves while you and me are oblivious. No inquiry required. Simple. You know it makes sense...the stargates have re-opened as we return to karmic equilibrium...

what would Jesus do?

Comrades,

What would Jesus do?

Why of course he'd gas a bunch of dudes standing around holding placards, light 'em up with exploding chalk pellets and spray 'em with rubber bullets to clear a path for the Secret Service - who by this stage are freaking right out of their minds big time running around like chooks with heads cut off screaming "what the fuck does the Mad Muthafukka think he's doing now?" - so the Trumpotus can go steal a copy of the Holy Book and wave it around for the camera's in front of the 'Church of The Presidents', which has all the stained glass windows boarded up. The Donald then throws himself upon the mercy of The Lord, repenting his multitude of evil sins, so he can be graciously granted the ever-lasting eternal life of a martyr. Never mind the horror, what a fantastic, magnificent, hugely awesome photo op! A photo op like you've never seen before! In history. A God Fearing Commander-of-Nothing proudly on display, lined up with his Cronies-in-Chief, is just what the world needs now. Hooly Dooly! What crazy bat-shit is this? Having now, after three and a half years as Leader of the Free World, finally and beyond reasonable doubt reached The Mad Emperor stage, what next? Dropping the Big One? The nuclear solution?

At the risk of being labelled a pretentious up-himself know-all, when I came out of the hospital I had a prescient book waiting for me to read that I'd ordered in on the basis of trying to get some historical handle on the "interesting times" in which we live - and this before the plague and pestilence settled on the globe and the USA fractured down centuries old fault lines to find itself a once powerful nation now 'very weak' and spiralling in an out-of-control free fall to 'third world' status.

The hefty tome in question? Mark Kurlansky, 1968 - The Year That Rocked the World, (Random House, New York, 2005), 437pp.

Sure as hell some wild, weird and crazy shit went down that year - the Tet Offensive (25 thousand American casualties), the Prague Spring ends in a Soviet invasion, New York explodes in race riots in May and there's Bloody Monday in Paris, student protest movement in Poland brutally crushed, Martin Luther King Jnr takes a bullet, Bobby Kennedy gets shot up ans shot out of the US Election campaign, Chicago riots savagely repressed, Black Panthers at the Mexico City Olympics, Nixon wins the White House etc etc etc. And we think the current political difficulties are unprecedented? Think again. History repeats. Even at the tender age of 12, I remember '68 well, and it turned me into a committed Trot age 13-15. As everyone knows, I am now a nice well-mannered reformed Pinko watching the globe spinning on it's way to mayhem and catastrophe, while waiting for the New Great Depression to show up, which it surely will when we arrive at "the cliff" in September. What joy awaits. My current read? Studs Terkel, Hard Times - An Oral History of the Great Depression, (The New Press, New York, 2005 - 1st published 1970), 462 pp.

You'd have to fear for the Miracle of Democracy in the current climate. Despots the world over are using the plague as a pretence to crack down hard on dissent - just take a look at Honkers, Brazil and other joints folks have hardly ever heard of...it's a global phenomenon. Traditional election campaigning in the US has been killed stone dead by the plague, and in any case Democrats traditionally do poorly at the polls after race riots. Republicans are much better voters anyway; they turn out in droves at the ballot box, while the Dems for some reason always have trouble turning out the vote - never mind rampant voter suppression, disenfranchisement and outrageous wholesale gerrymandering against them. None of that really matters in the denouement. If the Presidential election result is close - and it will be - in favour of Uncle Joe, there is no way DJ Trump! will just graciously concede defeat. Why would he, when his entire agenda fully revolves around a single issue - his own self promotion and agrrandisment? Losing to him is worse than death, much worse. The Donald will claim voter fraud, vote rigging, ballot stuffing, he'll say millions of illegal immigrants somehow voted, dead people voted, federal felons and innocent black people voted, aliens in flying saucers were involved in making great bundles of ballot papers disappear and the illegal mail-in conspiracy was especially designed to engineer his fraudulent defeat. The Trumpotus will simply refuse to accept the result, stay put in the White House, shut down Congress with the stroke of a pen, and get the Supreme Court to confirm him as the Tyrant-in-Chief. We aint seen nothing yet. That'll be no ordinary Constitutional Crisis, its the template for Civil War Mk II, right there. Mr Ping of China and Vlad The Impaler of the Kremlin are having a quiet chuckle, knowing they need do nothing other than just watch the show, while quietly working out who gets the spoils of the New Word Order. So, the Donald worries the Commies might win? Well, sorry to tell you, son, but they already have.

hooly dooly

Comrades,

Hooly Dooly...here it comes...mass unemployment, widespread poverty, and food insecurity.

Never mind the New World Order or the clear and present danger to the Miracle of Democracy....The States is shattered. Monthly US unemployment figures are due out later today, and according to the NYT, it's expected 30 million jobs will be gone. Vanished. The worst month during the last recession was 800,000 jobs lost. And the worst ever on record was two million in September 1945, and that's only because there were that many men coming home from war with no work to go to. Did I read right - 30 million?! Yes I did. Real unemployment in many states - mostly in the God forsaken south - is now widely thought to be at least 25%.

Found myself quite taken aback on seeing roughly 30-40 folks in the queue at the Marrickville Centrelink when I went by this morning, and with socially acceptable distancing it snaked around the block....here's just the start.

And this in an area full of yuppies that's been gentrified-to-fuck. WTF?

In the meantime, the cascade of horrors knows no end. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization says food prices fell 4.3% in Feb, all of it driven by lack of demand. Sugar was down a whopping 19%, vegetable oil 12%, with cereals, dairy and meats taking smaller hits....deflation here we come. Yet another classic hall mark of the Great Depression. Economic growth dies in the arse, it feeds into more unemployment, and upends stability in the food chain - not for weeks, or months, but years. In other words, unmitigated woe.

Did rather like this paste-up seen in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania this week - replicating the slogans on health & hygiene posters seen in that city during the 1918-19 Spanish Flu Pandemic.

"in politics, stupidity is not a handicap"

"In politics, stupidity is not a handicap"

Napolean Bonaparte (1769–1821)

the fear, the phugoid cycle, and the price of onions

Half a million kilograms of Idaho onions being prepared for burial, 8 April 2020. Photo: Joseph Hayeberle/New York Times

Comrades,

This "flattening the curve" thing is nonsense, and whoever came up with it now has the false hopes of a nation resting on their shoulders. It won't be no curve at all, it will be more like a phugoid cycle (a fancy aviation term for the nose of an aircraft pitching up and down at a more or less constant altitude, which if uncontrolled, results in the flying machine going into an irretrievable nose dive, ending in a spectacular crash & burn). I aint no witch doctor, that's for sure, but as far as restrictions on human activity and contact go, it will be a case of relax, suppress, relax, suppress, relax, suppress ad infinitum - which is pretty much what happened in the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918-19, until effective herd immunity was achieved through the loss of tens of millions of lives and the virus died out. Given that the Boomers selfishly in their hoity-toity lofty high-mindedness object to that many of us being wiped out by the Boomer Remover, the end game only comes with an effective vaccine or therapy.

That 12-18 month time frame will end up looking like chicken feed in comparison to the tremendous economic and social fall out, which a little birdie has been singing privately will be worse than the Great Depression of the 1930's (which lasted for about two and half years) and could be more akin to the Panic of 1890 which devolved into the Depression of 1893 - that whole shooting match with unemployment rates peaking at 25 per cent ran for a full eight years, producing untold misery. Then, suddenly, everything was different. Flight was invented and motor cars replaced the horse. Students of Economics 101 will tell you that for every minute the economy is effectively closed, the "knock on" and "trickle down" effects will multiply exponentially just like a virus, and we'll be staring not into the abyss, but a life-sucking black hole. Whatever happens, it's a history making world changer.

Everyone is scared shitless of the Big "D" word, with good reason. But no-one at all is seriously talking in public about how we are all meant to live through this looming Great Depression that will dog us for years to come. All the economic boffins, from the IMF down, will only concede is that there will be some kind of "deep recession". Oh, really? Come on, guys. Fess up on this one. Or perhaps they don't want to alarm the population too soon in their cabin fevered stir crazed state. (Perhaps the best 'tweet' on this one: "Bored at home? Really? It's your place, you made it that way"). But soon enough there will be truth telling. If there are any journo's left to do the telling. Of course Snap Back ScoVo and his "National Cabinet" of entirely useless badass Tory ministers of the Crown and utterly hopeless state premiers way out of their depth, should be more appropriately called The Cruise Ship of Fools. Even Blind Freddy could see the Australian and US economies have been a charade of "let the good times roll" for years now. For us, that's only been possible with entirely stagnant wage growth for a full decade since the end of GFC, and exporting coal, to put it in its most simplistic terms. Treasury has been warning about this mirage for a long time now, and the Arch Conservative Govt. has done less than jack shit about it.

Perhaps a true indication of the sheer horror to come is the very sound prediction that up to 75% of small and family-run restaurants in the US of A will cease to exist. That's the end of an American institution - the diner. It's also the end of the national dish of America - the menu. You don't need me to tell you that in times of crisis, food - pure and simple - becomes the paramount consideration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic_on_the_restaurant_industry_in_the_United_States

The New York Times has been running disturbing photographs of huge tonnages of vegetables being moved by front-end loader into mass burial trenches, simply because Americans consume far more vegetables when they are dining out than they ever do eating at home - where it's all meat and carbs. So there is no market for them. And it's not exclusively an American problem. Wholesale onion prices in China have fallen by 70% since February. It's the same everywhere in the developed world. Producers, wholesalers, retailers go broke, left, right and centre, creating classic conditions for food shortages. In the short term, prices will go up, but as less and less money is being spent due to mass unemployment, deflation will set in, and prices will start to fall in a vicious cycle. No amount of printing free new money will help that, because there will be nothing to spend it on. Neither will near zero interest rates, as no one in their right mind will want to borrow or lend cash. "The Market's" hate uncertainty and instability. They are not only spooked; they have The Fear. The capitalist hurdy-gurdy knows no other way. God save us all, but here in Sydney, where the price of real estate is often the only topic of conversation, folks are totally screamingly terrified by talk of a slump in house prices of 20+%. And why shouldn't they be with horrifying mortgages in the millions? Credit crunch, anyone? Negative equity is where the GFC started after all, for Chrissake. When someone finally pushed the "panic!" button marked pandemic and they unilaterally closed all the pubs and called off the footy - three weeks and two days ago - Wall St. plummeted by a gob-smacking 10% in less then a week, and a brief price war in a massively over supplied market saw the arse fall clean out of oil. That might give you a couple of pointers to what's cooking in the "going forward" era. Bugger the virus, the number of lives ruined will be untold. The number of folks who die alone and uncounted in hungry abject poverty caused by this will far exceed any viral fatalities.

And that's just the 1st world. The poor joints with marginal food security as it is will wind up thoroughly rat-fucked. The entire existing food chain will come under severe challenge, and in the denouement will change forever. Never mind the big smoke, everything west of the Divide is under threat too. How are country towns meant to survive this? The monied will be no better off either, Lord help them. Fine dining - barely profitable at the best of times - will no longer be an option, so they might as well just pulp all the Good Food Guides and forget altogether about chef's hats let lone the constellation of Michelin stars. How miserable. People will have to find other ways of "having the long lunch". Restaurant chains were going broke at a rate of knots after illegally underpaying their workers for yonks just to survive, well before all this blew up, and many many more will now bite the dust. The huge international fast food conglomerates may just survive in considerably reduced circumstances, as their usual clientèle will no longer be able to afford to gobble their execrable offerings anyway. The closing of pubs and bars is another kettle of fish altogether, but it will see a major shake out in the craft and small batch brewery business at a bare minimum. Gastro pubs and obscure IPA's will vanish. Pokies will proliferate. There is no such thing as going broke graciously. Ironically, prepare for a return to times of yore; cottage industry pulp paper mills turning out the rolls and a boom in home brewing and the illicit distilling of moonshine. Amid all the doom and gloom, you have to find your jollies somewhere.

Perhaps it's worth remembering that during the 46 month Siege of Sarajevo (1992-96), only two businesses managed to remain operating on every single day without interruption: the radio station and the brewery. That was isolation and desolation on an epic scale, all the time being shelled by artillery fire. And we think things are dire? Never mind the war crime, there were a few long winters of bitter discontent involved there.

Lion Cemetery, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 2016. A former soccer field, now the final resting place of most of the 13,952 killed in the Siege of Sarajevo (1992-96)

The Donald does a first class impression of Nero - fiddling while Rome burns

Comrades,

Last word on the plague, promise. At least the bell tolling, anyway. Who knows where the Miracle of Democracy is going now? Democratic Pinkoness seems to be all the rage at the minute, so maybe there is hope for a more equitable future where the capitalist running dog is no longer bowed down to in reverence.

When everything old is new again - something look familiar here? Seven weeks of greatest prevalence, Spanish Flu outbreak on the east coast of the USA, August-September 1918.

(Source: Philadelphia Public Library)


This too shall pass, but eradication is terribly difficult, effective vaccine is the only long term solution, and then you've got a Great Depression to live through. That's unmitigated disaster. Just ask New York City.

Everything was changed and different after 1918-19 too, so bring on the Roaring Twenties! The well regarded Woodrow Wilson was POTUS at the time until ill-health forced him out of the 1920 election, and was succeeded by the dead-set hopeless Republican, Warren G. Harding - consistently ranked among the worst US President's, ever. Harding was a filthy pantsman and as corrupt as buggery (like someone else currently occupying the Oval Office), and served only one term. History might just well repeat on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November 2020. Who knows. Anything and everything is a day to day proposition at the minute. Time for re-imaging the world will come during the years-long Depression.

News is now only emerging via the New York Times that DJ Trump! was warned by his trade adviser Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade adviser, “The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil.” That was Jan 29; New York City is now a war zone, and the South is about to blow up, not to mention Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles all going to hell in a handbasket. In the meantime, The Donald does a fantastic impression of Nero - fiddling while Rome burns.

Who knew that your life could be turned upside down by a single sub-microscopic virion cell? Sneaky-as-fuck they are.
Shit happens - in this case - explosively.

relief of distress

Comrades,

The current Pando got me to thinking this must be the just about the first time they've closed all the Sydney pubs in the 222 years of white settlement?

Well, not quite.

Seems it's a one in 100 year event. They closed all the pubs back in February 1919, re-opened them in March, and then shut them again in April through to the end of May, to deal with the "Spanish Flu" pandemic. They even show down all the Sydney race tracks, heaven forbid! Then they closed the border with Victoria, which produced a Constitutional outcry and shit-fight over the right of free trade between the states: "that's not what we signed on for!" cried the Mexicans. After successfully herding the incoming infected into the North Head Quarantine Station for a few months producing 49 corpses, 'Patient Zero', known as "S.L." arrived unannounced in Sydney on 24 January 1919 and the last NSW town to report the appearance of the disease was Dorrigo on 27 September 1919, according to the NSW State Archives. That's a long time between drinks. More than six thousand died in NSW alone, when the white population of the entire continent was about where Sydney is now - five million. This, after Australia had just lost 60,000 war dead.

The current Great and Glorious Leader of the Great State of New South Wales, the Hon. Gladys Berejiklian, has been less than inspiring in her public appearances and utterances to date and of little, if any, practical help to anyone at all. (In all the acres of old growth forest that have been felled to fill the vast number of advice pages that have suddenly sprung up to give you no end of terrific ideas on how to do idling and go about biding your time - while panicking and going slowly insane at the same time - nothing's been written along the lines of "Tips from the 30's! How to live through a Great Depression! Survival of the Fittest!". That'd just be scaremongering.)

With everyone now furiously scrambling to heavily back the horse called Self Interest, don't know if the Preeemier of NSW has any flow charts, or even white-board mud maps going on this one, but Glad surely would sure be glad of one of these blueprints - whipped up by the Public Service back in '19...

CLICK TO ENLARGE (NSW Govt, Organizational Chart, Pneumonic Influenza Epidemic, 1919. Source: NSW State Archives.)

The arch-Conservative Fed Govt has suddenly become remarkably Pinko, giving away stupendous quantities of free, brand new, freshly printed cash left, right and centre and they're now even moving to effectively nationalise the country's payroll. In Canberra, that must feel like a cheese-grater being run all over the 'every man for himself while we look after our business' ideology of ScoVo and his pack of Capitalist running dogs. Next thing, they'll introduce a Universal Basic Income. Christ Almighty! Menzies is already revolving at 78rpm in his poor, shallow grave.

What's missing, of course, is leadership - let alone a Central Authority, so why not devolve the relief effort to a Superintendent of Relief and the Joint Local Committee's of Relief? You know it makes sense. It may sound a bit Commo, but it's not rocket science, and it works. It certainly made the authorities sit up and take notice of the true extent of existing poverty and destitution in Sydney back in 1919. Not a lot has changed. And as far as compo for businesses went in '19, only a fraction of the money set aside was actually paid out, while the rest were dealt with by a mysterious "adjustment for loss" achieved through creative book-keeping, and God-only knows there's a whole lotta that going on right now. They'd learnt their lesson from The Panic of 1890, which led to Australia's worst depression ever, lasting nigh on a decade. The economic set back from Spanish Flu was not terribly long lasting for that reason - but we don't learn, because no-one ever listens.

the global battle against The Fear of Covfefe

Comrades,

In these interesting times of confused mixed messaging it's hard to know whether a "lock in" or a "lock out" policy is in force at the minute. Never mind self isolation or social distancing, there is no time like the present to build a wall. Keeps the perilous plague-ridden yellow hordes out, and keeps the terrified, panicked local population in. In any case, it stops people from running around like chooks with their heads cut off. It's a win-win situation for everyone.

So, when the going gets tough, the tough get wiping; sanitising with the ever reliable Pine O Cleen (kills 99.9% of all germs) is a given...as everyone knows, all trace of turd must be expunged in the first instance. And here's the ideal equipment, worth it's weight in 24-carat rolled gold.

(Rough translation on the DJ Trump! quote bubble: "this is the wall you are going to pay for")

It didn't take long for the arse wipe industry to ramp up production to meet the stratospheric demand, so it's now very comforting to know that the Trumpotus is also ordering in some extra supplies in the global battle against The Fear of Covfefe...God knows, we all need some medical elements in our lives right now, don't we?

and that's even before the very likely event that the White House will be officially declared a hotbed of hideous diseases, and The Donald takes off on yet another 17 day "working lock-down vacation" at the heavily disinfected Trump National Bedminister, New Jersey, where they say it's nice at this time of year and a quite lovely round of spring time golf is in the offing.

And if worse turns to catastrophe, then there's nothing for else for it but to sit back and await your fate, while you pack up your troubles in your old kit bag (and smile, smile, smile) as you suck on one of these quart bottles of The Cure.

Good night, and good luck

the sinking of the General Belgrano

Comrades,

The first time I ever wandered into a commercial radio newsroom in 1982, there it was. A telex machine with a continuous roll of paper constantly chuttering out of the thing, and then folding itself - flip flop flip flop - into a neat pile on the floor. It was the AAP news wire. It was the middle of the night, and I was pulling the weekend graveyard shift in my first real job as a DJ, presenting the popular Country Music Hour from midnight-1am, then five tracks in a row of easy listening interspersed with ads, then a station ID and a time call, repeat until dawn. You could walk away from the microphone for 20 minutes at the time and the station would play by itself after you'd set up the tape cartridge machines to trip themselves off. I soon worked out how to read the wire - in it's grey coloured Courier New font - rip the paper off for the latest news, then pick it up like a scroll, and sift through the dross until you find what you want. And believe me, there was so much dross. How many reams of paper that telex machine used every day is anyone's guess, but it was plenty.

The AAP wire was the news. The be all and end all. And it was endless. The telex never stopped, ever, even when there was no news. It was the rock solid foundation of every news bulletin I ever read for the next 19 years.

A few months after I started, the Falklands War blew up and as it was on the other side of world, it happened overnight on our island. Listeners demanded to know what the fuck was going on. The AAP wire delivered. It also carried the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence-France Presse wires, so it was calling all the shots as the battle went on, and it was full of it. Mobile phones, let alone lap tops or an internet of things were fantastical dreams of science fiction, still. So it was no get stretch to start off reading mid-dawn rip'n'read news bulletins on the hour every hour, using AAP copy as it was. I had zero training in this, so not a red pencil went through it. The sinking of the General Belgrano in May was big news, if memory serves - Exocet missiles were all the rage back then - and month later it was all over as the Poms liberated a tiny bunch of sheep farmers in Stanley. But I continued to plough on with the rip'n'read service as I'd got the bug. Just threw together overseas news as it happened on the AAP wire. The breakfast news team loved me for sorting the wheat from the chaff. In down town Medellin, rival drug lords were quietly setting off car bombs in the car park's of the opposition's supermarkets, where they laundered their money. Nice way to scare off customers. Good old fashioned terrorism made for good news copy back then, and they slaughtered hundreds of innocents. From that point on I was hooked on news and never looked back.

The AAP wire was always the go to for "breaking news". I vividly recall sitting at the slot in the 2UE newsroom in Sydney on a very slow news day - Sunday 28 April 1996 - when the AAP wire chattered through a single line "Tasmanian ambulance service report responding to shooting near Hobart. Possible casualties. Unconfirmed. More..." That turned out to be a day and half as the world as we knew it exploded, but without the AAP wire, we would never have known, and neither would you. They seemed to have freelance reporters called "stringers" everywhere, and indeed they had. When I found myself working as an on-the-road reporter for the best part of a decade, anywhere anything was happening, you would always run into an AAP reporter; the only one holding a microphone without any signage on it. In Canberra, AAP had the minutiae of politics nailed down flat, with the sole reporter snoozing through late night sitting sessions. No one would have noticed the Independent member for Oxley, Pauline Hanson, making her maiden speech to an empty chamber, also in '96, if it wasn't for AAP. One year I covered a Federal budget. Afterwards lobby groups of every description line up to have their say into a phalanx on microphones, but time was of the essence. The AAP reporter sat on the floor with a stop watch, and after 30 seconds called "Time!", and that spokesman for whatever organisation was hustled out the way mid-sentence by another reporter from AAP to make way for the next. If you didn't have your sound bite ready, you were gone.

The AAP wire didn't come cheap but it was worth it's weight in gold, and many times it was out there in platinum territory. When I fell into a job running a little newsroom in Newcastle broadcasting integrated local/state/national news bulletins, the station owner was always onto me about the cost of the wire; 25 grand in '92 would have easily employed another journo. "Do you really need that fucking telex machine, Craven? You know the newsroom is the only department in this radio station that doesn't bring a penny in through the front door!". "Of course I need the fucking wire, without the wire, there is no news, none, we don't go to air, OK? Now go away". He did. Only ever worried by money, he couldn't be bothered with "editorial interference". AAP was an institution that commanded great respect in the trade as a straight down the line no nonsense scrupulously by the book reporter of accurate news. They only dealt in the truth - here's what happened - you make head or tail of it. Delivered to your plate, it was up to you to decide what tasted the best in that fuzzy but at the same time precise umami known as "news value". It was only ever rarely wrong, and corrections were always issued post-haste. The one, and most times the only constant in the bustle and churn of an ol' style newsroom. You know, when Olivetti typewriters were the tool of trade. Surely I can't be so old as to remember such a thing?

The AAP wire loomed very large in my working life, so it was deeply saddening to hear yesterday that facing insurmountable competition from the ramshackle make it up as we go along Google/Facebook fake news peddling duopoly, they are going to close - with 180 journo's to be thrown out onto the ever increasing pile on the scrap heap, as well as a back office of 120. To say it's the end of an era understates it. As an old hack and "blowie", it was like hearing of the death of a long lost former loved one. Things change, nothing ever remains the same, but there's a big chunk of decades of me making a living out the game right there, now forever consigned to the lil' history books.

After 85 years, it's finally the end of real news, as I came to know and love it. End of an epoch more likely.