Patriot Realm

Many years ago, a beloved mentor told me a story—a parable, if you will—about a wife who came home one afternoon to find her husband in bed with another woman. She screamed and fled the room, sobbing.

A few minutes later, her husband emerged, still buttoning his shirt, and asked her what was wrong.

“I saw you with that…that…woman!” she sputtered.

“What woman?” replied the husband, calmly tucking in his shirttails.

“That woman you were in bed with!”

“What are you talking about? There was no woman.”

At the time, I found the story mildly amusing. I understood that my mentor was trying to convey some deeper truth, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I was still young enough to believe no one would really lie that blatantly and transparently when the truth was plain to see. 

Remember the olden days when you made a phone call on what is called a landline?  Or posted a letter and actually received one?  You took a photograph using a camera? 

Or had a conversation with a neighbour without someone taking a selfie?  Remember when a hug was saved in that hard drive called your memory ... not something that was uploaded to a cloud in cyberspace? 

Remember when you went shopping and interacted with someone who smiled as they took your cash and gave you change?  Remember that?  And when you actually trusted your government and you thought that your vote counted?  Remember that?  

Ahh, the foolish days of days of wine and roses. Or the Salad Days.  My, how times have changed. Now, we live in an era where a robot tells us to prove we are not a robot and satellites rule our lives. Our lives are controlled by robots.  Which brings me to DARPA..... and my. what a tangled web it weaves. 

If all satellites suddenly stopped working, the consequences would be widespread and significant. Satellites play crucial roles in various aspects of modern life, including communication, navigation, weather forecasting, scientific research, and national security.

Satellite communication is integral to global telecommunications networks. If satellites ceased functioning, communication channels relying on them, such as satellite phones, television broadcasts, internet services, and GPS systems, would be severely disrupted or rendered inoperative.

In other words, we would be, as our contributor Paddy would say, " fooked. " 

It was pointed out a few days ago, that GPS has become very important in today's world.  How our food is delivered, our packages make it to our homes and how we even get to visit Grandma; No one owns a map anymore. It is all GPS. 

So what would happen if satellites went down? It is interesting to drill down into history and see how it all started.  And it all started with the Space Race... 

A few nights ago, I watched a series on pay TV called " The Mill. " Like so many British period dramas, it was bleak, grim, disturbing and hard yakka to get through. 

It took me back to a time, sitting in my country school, back in the 1960's in New Zealand when my country teacher ( later my mentor and all round hero apart from my Dad ) asked one simple question. 

" Have you heard of Lord Shaftsbury? " he asked. 

Well, of course, I had not. Nor had any of my fellow classmates. After all, we were a class made up of children from widely diverse backgrounds. Most of my friends were Maori, Hindu Indian, Moslem, Chinese and Caucasian, from both sides of the financial divide.

I was fortunately on the kinder side of the line that divided poor white from my white. But my friends came from both sides of that curtain and both sides of the diversity curtain that now seems to hang like a shroud over what we once were.

I belong to the group known as Baby Boomers – the ones that were born in the post war years and lived through the “ burn the bra “ and early feminist days of the pill, the equality of the sexes and the general liberation of women from the kitchen.  

At the time, I did not realise that my life had gone from one of comfortable domesticity to one of 5 am starts, 10 pm finishes and a pay cheque that largely went to childcare providers.

As a woman, I was proud of what we achieved then. But now, I am not so sure we did anything other than bite ourselves on the bum. And in turn our menfolk into pawns, pansies and poofters.

'So we marched into the sea and when we got out to about waist level they then machine gunned from behind."

The words of the sole survivor of the horrific massacre of  Radji Beach on Banka Island off the coast of Sumatra. 

On 16 February 1942, Japanese soldiers machine-gunned 22 Australian World War II Army nurses and killed 60 soldiers and crew members from 2 sunken ships. 

From the 22 Nurses shot on that day, there was only one sole survivor, Sister Vivian Bullwinkel.