With apologies to Gibert and Sullivan 
When I was a lad, I served a term at writing words in Murdoch's firm. 
I made the coffee and swept the floor, 
and polished up the handle on Rupert's front door. 
Yes I polished that handle so carefully, 
that one day I became the State's A-G 
(refrain) He polished that handle so carefully, 
and now he's here for all to see)

Ferchrissakes, the British version started under the name of the "Future Warships Project".  I've summed up how I see the situation in a wee letter published in the Adelaide Advertiser on Friday:

The dragon's flame lights up the night as it pours to the ground

while we can only run in fright as fire flays all around

Five hundred of our warriors to Paradise have gone

While we toil upon the earth till we can follow on

To me the Alpha state you get when sitting on a shitter

gives one the perfect mode of Zen in which to think up Twitter

It's easy since the implant hooked us all up to the net

Hi, just call me Cyberman- you haven't met me.. yet.

With eyeballs set to HD I take Foodies every day

Status updates bore me, so I've found a better way-

a realtime channel open that everyone can get

Hi, just call me Cyberman- you haven't met me.. yet.

The vote for Scottish Independance has reminded me to write a little of how my Mother's Ross family came to Austraila.  Basically we were booted out by the English so our crofts could become sheep stations.  We were told by the Church that we were being punished by eviction for the sins of our ancestors (Last time I went to the Church in Bonar Bridge, where the refugees camped before the international diaspora, you could still see the words "the wicked generation" scrawled in a window) and so we went... but not quite..

On hearing the news this arvo of how Tony's off to Inda to hand over our uranium, I dug up my notes here from exactly 8 years ago.  This reprint might contain useful background information for anyone keen on following what's (probably this time, maybe?) about to unfold:

When Halliburton CEO Dave Lesar and a "cast of thousands" of Australian dignitaries launched the Adelaide-Darwin in early 2004 everybody was talking about what a boon to Australian exports Mr Cheney's conquest of the Australian desert would be.  Of course, nobody was talking about uranium at the time....

Well, the inevitable has happened, and we're going to see boxcars of yellowcake trundling from Adelaide to Darwin within the next few years,   Immediately following the announcement of opening of a new Australian uranium mine (at Honeymoon in South Australia's far north east

"To work for the dole" The Abbott spake "you'll sail towards the stars.  

There's no job left for you on Earth, you'll have to go to Mars.

The driftwood is shifted as soon as you're lifted, there'll be no sympathisers, 

for long it's been known that the bad seeds sown make brilliant colonisers."

At a pub in Spaceport Woomera the Goverment insisted

that the folks departing offworld on vodka got quite plastered

For while their bodies travel stacked in cryogenic freezers

the antifreeze of Vodka to the soul is just like Jesus.

That pub had people drinking there from al across the world

drinking toasts to say goodbye to anything they'd loved.

"Last drinks!"the barman shouted as he banged upon a bell

So we formed in lines and marched toward our Interplanetary Hell.

On a celestial USB
the universe existed.
"I only saved this part" said God

You wouldn't say it a "nice" feeling to see proof of what you've suspecting for nine years, but it does bring a sense of vindication.  Since 2005 I've worried that Adelaide was being turned into a U.S. Navy refurbishment facility.  Late last year the South Australian Governent hired a Nashville based PR firm in order for such a thing to happen.

Just over a week ago Palmer Gibb published on blogsite The Sunlight Foundation of how Adelaide spent (at the end of 2013) over two hundred thousand dollars on hiring PR firm Fletcher Rowley on its behalf.  The comany's brief is explained its mandatory US filings as a "Foreign Agent":

It's amazing how much stuff that's unremarked on in Australia (let alone Adelaide) can be found by googling "defenSe" and not by our own spelling.  I can't find local reporting of a US Congressman serving on the Armed Services Committee visiting Adelaide last February, but the jaunt has raised eyebrows "back home".  It was written up in the Washington Examiner as "the most expensive privately funded trip on record".

On what was (across the dateline) Valentine's Day in the US, Congressman Mike McIntyre and his wife arrived in South Australia for a week-long visit.  The trip was paid for by South Australia's Defence Teaming Centre, an industry organisation that liases with the State Government run defence department DefenceSA.  DefenceSA is run by Mr Andrew Fletcher, who served as Halliburton's Global Vice President for Infrastructure during the early Iraq war years.

Way past midnight down the road he eloquently staggered

 with eyes half closed, a quarter-smile on a face dementedly haggard.

I asked him where he's going, he answered me "Fuck knows.

Depends on which direction that the cold wind blows."

An American defense system corrupted from within by an organisation planning to use cyberdata tracking for the purpose of eliminating 20 million people, thus bringing order to seven billion.  No, it's not the beginning of a new Michael Moore book- it's the plot for Marvel's dark new offering, "Captain America- The Winter Soldier".

Last year, on land set aside by a caring family who'd lost a loved one in World War Two, the RSL conducted (first time since the 1960s) an official remembrance ceremony. A few hundred turned up, many I talked to who'd come all those years ago and had returned to show that this was still their place for those memories.

I came to this site via the kindness of Margo Kingston, who saw me flailing about the cyberverse about Halliburton in Adelaide and offered me a spot here. My first blog became the only Australian blog linked from the pages of HalliburtonWatch.  My jokes about St Clair being a HAL-based project came true when KBR finally published their work on the gig as an ad on their website.  If what happened last year occurs again today, as I'm sure it will, then maybe the work of a War Company that's morphed into real estate is going to backfire because of their violation of a decades-long war tradition.

For a long time I've thought that blogging is recording History for the Future. I've acted online that way for a decade now.  Even from my little corner of cyberspace you can watch the  changes easlily.  The people who love words (who also tend to put more thinking time into stuff) are finallly getting a chance to show the Merely Verbal Folk that their minds are on an equal level.  I see it daily in the bar, and love it.

There's a young bloke who calls himself a "comedy hypnotist" who occasionally does shows at our family's pub.  It's been interesting to watch him over a couple of years and see his practice and confidence evolve him into a clever portrayalist of how easily many people's behaviour can be influenced.

Watching people who would need to have been extraordinarily consumnate actors to fake their behaviours do silly stuff like lose the number 7 from their counting, thinking that you're a genius but unable to remember your name, thinking your name is E I E I O and getting more quietly  pissed off every time someone"forgets"   I watched and giggled, kept watching as, in response to the implanted suggestion, one of the hypnotised blokes remembered what had occurred onstage by raising a drink to his lips- the play of emotions across his face said it all..