My wife and I married on 7th June 1987, and on 24th September that year we bought a pleasant small old house on a large block, close to shops and a train station. It cost $101K, and we were proud of paying the mortgage off entirely by November 1989. Our son was born in May 1989, and daughter in Oct 1991. We were both earning well, held the title deed to our home in our hand, the land size was ample for expansion, we had two lovely children, and the future looked bright.

It was a simple unpretentious little place, but ours. I'd always rented before, and my wife had only arrived in Australia as a refugee from Cambodia a few years previously.

See that distant garage in the 1st pic? It's about half way to the rear boundary. The land is huge by Sydney suburban standards. We loved it.

Years passed, working hard and raising a young family. This isn't going to be a story about what went wrong, but it isn't going to pretend everything went well either. There were many sorrows, but in these years we persevered.

By 1998 the family was outgrowing that little old house, so we began a long-planned building saga — owner-building a temporary dwelling down the back (a 'garage', later to become my workshop), demolishing the old house, and having a bigger new house built in its place. This isn't going to be about that either, as its worth a story all on its own. Just a few pics here for background:

After the house was finished and we'd moved in, there were minor works like fitting out the rear owner-built 'garage' as a workshop, shelving in the house including my study, and landscaping the front garden.

We had different visions for the front yard, as with many things. Hers was to concrete half of it for parking up to four cars. Mine had a two car space, with the rest as a native bush style low maintenance garden, a pond with solar powered circulation pump, a little bit of 'rainforest' theme with small waterfall under shadecloth sail by the pond, and enough greenery for screening from the street and allowing the curved paths to provide visual surprises. After all there was always the side driveway and the huge back yard if we ever did need to park more than two cars. After showing her the drawings she agreed it would be nicer, and to go ahead with it.

By 2003 the fence, carport and paving were finished and I was working on the landscaping. By chance a few small eucalytus seedlings popped up in the back yard. Self-seeded from one of the other trees around, I supposed. Parts of the front yard were ready to begin planting, so I figured why not transplant these little seedlings? I wanted native trees anyway. The couple of pics in the bottom row looking down on the paths, show those small seedlings in place. That was February 2003.

Immediately afterwards all plans became moot. That too is another story; suffice to say that continued work on the landscaping project in the face of active irrational sabotage and future uncertainty became pointless. I'd been looking forward to having my study and the other front room look out into nice greenery and pond, with the sound of a small waterfall for natural music.

But it will never happen. Oh well. Thanks a lot Pol Pot, for your tender mass population relocation and genocide, and all its consequences. My wife was in first year university in Phnom Penh, studying medicine, when the Khmer Rouge evacuated the entire city at gunpoint. Most never to return.
Also more recently, thank you to our own Australian government for their own almost as deranged and evil proposed mass population relocation scheme that would have this area and many others bulldozed and built over with high density housing.

And by the way, back in the 60s and 70s the Australian government collaborated with the US government in causing those horrors in Cambodia and Vietnam. They were and remain as guilty as Pol Pot, and those involved have never paid for their crimes. They also learned nothing, and did the same again in Timor, Iraq, Quwait, Afghanistan and Syria. Not to mention the ongoing genocide of Palestinians.

Governments in general, when they are owned by the wealthy and/or psychopathic Elites, are the enemy of all private hopes and dreams.

This is a lapel badge of the Vietnam War Moratorium protests. I wore it in the anti-war demonstrations of the time.

Those trees though, boy did they grow fast. In a few years they were huge.

Jump forward to 2016. Many unfortunate things remain the same, except for the size of trees and their roots.
On Wednesday 20160629 I learned that our neighbors had been wondering for a week why their front yard was so waterlogged. At first they'd thought it was due to the recent rain, but it kept getting wetter after the rain stopped.

1, 2. Looking over the fence into our neighbor's yard that day, they now have a small unwanted pond. How ironic.
3. On my side, everything looks fine. But it isn't. It's our water leaking. Oh good, tree roots have broken the pipe. At that point I closed the valve on the meter, and for the rest of that day and night only opened it briefly when we needed water. Too late to do the digging today. Yes, those are some of the 'little seedlings.'
4. Thursday morning, starting the dig. Under the leaf cover, there's a secret stream bubbling up just inside our brick fence, then flowing into the neighbor's yard.
5. Our water meter at that point.

1, 2. Digging down to the pipe, through a solid mesh of small roots. Only had to cut one significant root, fortunately. In hindsight, planting a tree right there was pretty silly. It's exactly on top of a cluster of pipework. Apart from the copper water pipe, the orange conduit holds phone and cable TV/net, and deeper under it is another conduit for mains power. The old ceramic pipe is garden rainwater runoff to the street gutter. Really this tree should be removed, however it's there now, and big, and this land may not be ours for much longer, so I'd rather leave it if possible. The bastard developers will cut all the trees down anyway, let the bad Karma be on their heads. Anyway, where is the break?
3. Ah, there it is. With the main water valve turned on briefly you can see the water spray in that small side-hole. But I can't get to it without actually removing the tree. Hmm.... How about going around it?
4. So, more digging. This time through the root mesh of a palm tree just on the other side of the fence. Palm roots turn out to be much harder to dig through than eucalyptus roots.
5. Finally, there's the pipe.

1. Mounds of dirt. That brick pillar was intended to bear a sculpture. Another victim of the general Stop Work.
2. By now it was evening. With the water to the buildings still turned off, and now I can't turn it back on without flooding the trench. The pipe has to be fixed now, not tomorrow. But first, a portable light to have a look at the pipe break.
3. So that's it. As you can probably tell, I'm finding this whole episode rather allegorical.
4. Fortunately I happened to have a length of pipe in stock, that was just long enough for routing around the break. And it was juuuust possible to slide it into the channel I'd dug for it, under major roots I didn't want to cut, at the limit of bending of this hard copper.
5. First join. The tubes are heated up to red heat at the required bend points to anneal them, let cool, then an outside spring pipe bender slipped along the pipe to keep it round, and it bends easily by hand. The join is made by annealing and expanding one end, then silver soldering the other one into that sleeve. The soldering flux is fluorine-based, so afterwards it's unwise to drink the tapwater for a day or so till all the residue flux has disolved and flushed out.

1 - 3. Same at the other end of the bypass operation. Yay, water restored. Finished up around 8pm.
4, 5. Next morning, Friday, starting the backfill.

1 - 3. Backfill continuing.
4. All done. I wish several other problems of mine could be fixed this easily.
5. The required plumbing tools. Mouse for scale.

In recent months I've been doing another project that involves heavy digging type work, but only one day every week or two. Otherwise I lead a pretty quiet life, and along with being 60, this urgent pipe-fix digging really took it out of me. Saturday morning I woke up aching all over. Didn't get out of bed till late morning, then just tottered around taking it very easy. Didn't go up to the house even briefly till much later, and my ex-wife and daughter were both out. By choice I don't watch TV, avoid having one in the workshop, and today I didn't even feel like touching the net. It wasn't till around 9pm that I went online to check mail and news. Annnnd....

Oooohhhh... bugger. Today was the Federal Election, and I totally forgot to vote. Arrgh. I'd had it in mind earlier in the week, for reasons you'll see. But the urgent two-day pipe fix, and feeling like an invalid hermit on Saturday made me completely forget.

Voting Blues

The Australian voting system is preferential with compulsory voting. It's quite a good system, with paper ballots (no electronic voting machines, which will inevitably be rigged), ballot counting with public scrutiny and legislated requirement for honesty (unlike the USA where counting is handled by corporations and the media with no oversight or accountability or legal truth requirement, and hence has been outrageously rigged for decades.)

But the Australian system does have one serious moral flaw. As it stands, your ballot will be eventually allocated to one or other of the major polical parties, if no clear winner is determined before preferences are examined deeply enough to include yours.

But... what if you personally find all the major candidates completely unacceptable, and flatly refuse to allow your vote to support any of them under any circumstances? While there are candidates you wish to vote for, so you can't just vote informal (submit an invalid ballot paper.)

The way our voting system is structured, it's very difficult for the public to express a general (or individual) revulsion and rejection of the major parties. No matter how people vote, it will always appear that one of the two major parties was able to achieve a majority. Or at least near to 50%.

If the major parties were actually real, honest and well-intentioned groups, that wouldn't be a problem. But they aren't, and haven't been for many decades. In Australia, as with most countries with an entrenched two party system, it has become a tweedle-dee vs tweedle dum scam, totally owned and operated by the Elites and their mainstream media monopoly. The whole circus is run as a psyop, fooling the general public into the belief they have some say, while the two parties play Hegelian Dialectic games with events, the media and their policies, to achieve the outcomes desired by the Elites.

That Wiki article doesn't explain the political application of the Dielectic. Briefly: When you want to achieve an end result that you know would be unpopular, you manufacture some crisis that appears to occur all by itself, and which demands a solution. You then publicly propose a solution that appears less bad than the problem, and so people will accept it. But it's what you wanted to achieve from the start, or a step closer to it. If this is news to you then sorry to inform you of this unpleasant reality. This is the most powerful and effective political tool, and is how real politics actually works.

This is also called the 'false flag' technique. Commonly applied in the form of State-run 'terrorist attacks.' Google Operation Gladio for one such program that was absolutely proven. There are many others, more and more recently in fact. While you are conditioned to reject all such ideas as 'conspiracy theory'. A derogatory term which was invented by the CIA and injected into the public psyche via CIA plants in the media after the Kennedy assassinations, to stiffle public investigation into that Deep State run murder. Google 'operation mockingbird cia kennedy'.

It worked, they got away with it, and the US government has been in the hands of Deep State murderous bastards ever since. Whether you want to call them Criminals, Corporatists, Neocons, Zionists, Communist/Muslim Manchurian candidates, or whatever, there has not been one honest US President since JFK. The last several haven't even been validly elected. Meanwhile whichever Australian party is in power, they still suck up to the USA and turn a blind eye to (or actively endorse) actions that any moral person or country should utterly reject.

Anyway, without trying to write 3000 pages on why I find both major Australian parties (Labor and Liberal) impossible to support, I have that dilemma with voting. Similarly with voting for 'The Greens' party too, though I am a dedicated environmentalist. One word summary in their case: watermelons. Though I have a short personal anecdote I'll add at the end.

Then in the early 1990s, Albert Langer pointed out a loophole in the wording of the Australian Commonwealth Electoral Act. He advocated a method of voting which permitted preferences to be 'exhausted' at a point chosen by the voter, thus never ending up going to parties they disliked. This became known as a Langer Vote. It was simple — just number the voting paper squares like "1, 2, 3, 3, 3" where all remaining squares get a '3'. It was valid under the old legal wording (all squares were numbered) but after your first two preferences, there was no way to allocate your vote to remaining candidates. So it wasn't.

The first time I heard of this was a while before the 1998 federal election (which coincidentally was to be held on my birthday.) At that time the Langer voting system was rapidly gaining popularity, and starting to make it awkward for the two major parties to maintain public pretense of having general approval. So shortly before the 1998 election they changed the law to classify Langer votes as 'informal' (invalid, not to be counted at all.) Langer even served a short gaol sentence for continuing to advocate the method.

Well that sucked. For me it brought to a head my complaint with the requirement to ultimately vote for groups I refused to support, if my vote was to be counted. Effectively I was being disenfranchised. This was annoying enough for me to try to do something about it. I didn't have much time to prepare but made an effort. I arranged with a Justice of the Peace to witness my casting a Langer vote, that I felt should have been legally counted, but I knew wasn't going to be. I also prepared a Statutory Declaration, relating the circumstances and my complaint, witnessed and signed by the JP.

I'd hoped that with this I could find some international legal resource to sue the Australian Federal electoral system, for it's effectively directing votes to specific parties against the wish of the voters (and specifically me.) However after the election I was unable to find a way to do that.

Nonetheless, I feel I have documented that I am officially disenfranchised by the Australian electoral system, and this situation continues to the present. I still vote, but know my vote will not be counted since I refuse to indicate any preference for Labor, Liberal or Greens.

Incidentally I also believe Australia should implement easily initiated Direct Democracy via Citizen Initiated Legislation, aka Proposition Referendums that override all existing legislation, acts of parliament and legal precedent. I consider established 'centers of power' such as parliaments, legislatures, Presidents, Executive Offices, and the accumulating body of Law, etc to be easy targets for power hungry psychopaths and other tools of the Elite. And that as a result these structures originate most of the evils in the world, under which the people suffer and the progress of civilization is retarded. But that's beside the point here.

Here are a Langer pamphlet, newpaper clip of the election announcement, and my Statutory Declaration.
Click for larger images.

Well, that's it. No happy ending in sight in this story. The pipe is fixed, but everything else in my life remains in painful limbo. I have not even hinted at some of the worst personal logjams and troubles, creative, professional, financial, legal and medical. Then there's the state of the world, the economics craziness, political insanity, misdirected religious environmental fanaticism, and general social delusions beyond number.
Living with a voting system I find morally unacceptable is totally trivial compared to the rest of it; I mention it only for light amusement value.
I have no idea what the future holds, and am getting sick of even thinking about it.

Here's my story about The Greens

Some years before, in my 20's I'd attended one Socialist/Communist party public meeting, held at Sydney University. Actually I'd gone mostly because the girl who handed me a Socialist Workers Party paper on a street in the city had been cute, and I'd hoped to meet her again and see what it might be like to speak with a girl who had at least some political fire. Most people, women in particular, I found depressingly politically/intellectually dead. But anyway...

While sitting in the large lecture hall with maybe a few hundred others, listening to the speakers, I'd noticed a guy off the left side of the podium carefully photographing the entire audience. He was taking shots in scans, obviously zooming in on a few faces then slewing along to the next few seats. He couldn't have been more obviously collecting mug shots, if he'd been waving an ASIO flag. I decided I didn't like that, so contrived to have my hand in front of my face every time he tried to snap my area of seating.

Ha ha... and he noticed and wasn't having any of that. While carrying on with his audience scan he waited till a moment when I wasn't covering my face or paying attention to him, then quickly pointed the camera right at me and took a shot. Quite a practised action, like something he'd done many times before. All part of the job.

Oh well. I don't care if ASIO thinks I'm a potential Communist, more fool them. But the most interesting lesson in this event, was that camera-guy was clearly there in cooperation with the meeting organizers, and his job was to make damn sure he got every face. Which meant... that the entire organization was an Intelligence Services cutout. A honey pot, designed to gather in people with suspect political ideas and and put tabs on them.
OK, duly noted. It wasn't my first lesson in how this stuff worked, and wouldn't be the last.

Back to the Greens. I found out somehow (Newspaper ad? Mention on new radio station 2JJ/JJJ?) that the very newly formed Greens group were starting to hold public meetings in a hall in Balmain or Glebe. Can't recall which and if these were weekly or monthly, but I do recall I started going regularly, not missing any meetings.

Earlier in my 20s I'd been involved in a group that was trying to gather enough money to buy a large country property called Wytaliba near Glen Innes, to operate as a shared property. The land (a whole large valley) was up for sale for $100K. Seemed a vast amount of money then, how ironic my own home cost about that not so much later. Anyway, the initiator was a girl called Sherri, who hoped to get 100 people to each contribute $1000. The point of this was, that these meetings taught me how difficult (near impossible) it is to get a diverse bunch of random individuals to agree on anything practical. Such as how the property would actually be shared, what people would be allowed or required to do, and so on. Also most couldn't actually get $1000 dollars together. I'd managed to put in $300 by the time I realised that even if the property could be bought, sharing it with this bunch of freaks wouldn't be terribly workable. So I quit the project, letting Sherri keep the $300 and wishing her good luck. Many years later I went up there to see what happened. Sherri had managed to get a loan for the outstanding amount, bought Wytaliba, and was paying it off via a normal job. She and others were living on the property — which had been utterly trashed by the various hippies in the group. There'd been a fine old country timber home - now a ruin, partially burned out. Various old vehicles and busses used as living quarters, but overall, nothing organised or anything like a functioning farm property. It was a beautiful place though, too bad about the people.

In the context of that lesson, and the thing with the Socialists, those early Greens meetings were fascinating and astonishing. Because they actually worked! The meetings were all run along formal public meetings rules, that I learned were called Roberts Rules of Order. I suppose it also helped that literally all the people attending were intelligent, well-intentioned middle class professional types, who didn't have any nutty ideas like converting the whole project into a massive cat-farming operation or whatever. (An actual example from the not-a-commune saga.)

For someone who'd never seen a large group of people work together productively and sanely before, this was very heartening to me. Which was why I began going to every meeting.

Each meeting had attracted greater numbers than the last, and it was really starting to take off. Yay!
But then one meeting something tragic happened. This evening there was a really dramatic influx of new people. At least half the attendees were faces I'd never seen before. Ok, fine, that's good right?

Well, yes, except that... curiously, almost all these people seemed to have looked through their wardrobes before coming to the meeting, thinking "Hmm... what can I wear to look like a hip politically radical person?"
You may think I'm joking but no, absolutely not. It really stood out. Up to that point everyone attending the evening meetings were just wearing ordinary clothes. Probably whatever they wore to work that day, or around the house. Because they didn't dress up specifically to go to the meeting. Why should they, they were just going to a meeting, nothing special. No pretensions at all.

But these new people... the number of berrets, fat woven long scarves, Che Guevara t-shirts, Red Star and protest lapel badges, round John Lennon glasses, long dark overcoats, and so on, was ridiculous. Like all of them were dressed in that style. Far beyond any possible statistical synchronicity effect.

The meeting started. Minutes from the last meeting were read, as normal. And then, as soon as business of the meeting got underway, one of these Che-types stands up and proposes that to facilitiate things, greater efficiency, etc, something called 'consensus voting' should be adopted.

Then it turned out that many if not all of these Che-types could speak to the crowd very confidently and loudly. Gosh, it was as if they had all taken courses in public speaking. It was like a railroad — being railroaded anyway. The motion was seconded, etc, voted on, passed resoundingly because by some fluke every single one of this crowd of Che-types were unanimously in favor. While all the rest of us average Joes were sitting there in confusion going 'wait, what?' Because no one expects the Spanish Inq... um, I mean a sudden takeover by a cadre of trained meeting infiltrators.

Guess what? Go on, can you guess? What happens to a meeting at which an obviously cohesive bunch of new members acting on a prearranged plan, convert the proceedures to an undefined 'consensus voting'? I'm sure you can work it out without me telling you.
Yep, from then on they control the meeting process, because 'consensus' means 'voting by loudest shouting', and they are all very good at loud shouting in unison.

And that was the end of any hope of an effective Greens party, that actually cared for environmental issues rather than leftist/progressive political cant. I quickly withdrew, but so far as I can tell, The Greens ever since have been a 'controlled opposition' that never actually do anything much to rock the status quo. Nothing more than a few token pretenses, to keep up appearances of being useful.

Btw, if you are ever in a similar situation, where your group is running fine and then some new members propose switching to consensus voting, either immediately throw them out (if you can) and take measures to ensure those specific people can never come back, or walk away (you and all the known genuine earlier members) and reform the group without those arseholes. Also see if you can work out who paid them to be there.