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IF there's one thing I've learned from the internet, it's that you can't stop progress.
Even if that progress sometimes seems backwards.
And here I'm referring specifically to my modem which inexplicably stopped working the other day.
I've learned in these situations that progress is not necessarily a direction, or even a call centre in India.
It's a state of mind.
And in that state of mind there is a call centre in India (they're pretty scarce in Australia).
And in that call centre they are getting quicker at resetting my modem.
And really, they are.
I rang late the other night and as I did, I positioned myself on a couch with a solid box of painkillers in preparation for the anticipated six-hour wait to get through to a human being.
Surprisingly, someone picked up almost immediately. Mark that time down folks - 11.20pm Sunday night - an express portal to the sub-continent.
Not sure if anyone's dinner was interrupted, but the problem was sorted out before dawn - allaying misgivings about accents, offshoring jobs and having to get a non-existent tech team round to my house.
That's progress, and state of mind was key.
Big wheels keep on turning.
As Tony Abbott found out the other day after a chat to his former supporters in the National Party. They turned right over him.
Showing a poll isn't so much a survey of what people think, as something you hit a person on the head with. Old school progress, complete with blunt trauma.
The truth really is "out there" when it comes to moving forward, because God moves in mysterious ways.
Look at the Pope who reversed maybe a millennia of bad press with a good news run through the US, check-mating faith critics who prefer to leave climate science to the scientists. Guess what, the pope has a Masters in chemistry. SNAP!!
Or China, wowing the crowds in the UN by signing up an army of peacekeepers, to help keep the peace many observers think China threatens.
Or Russia, which just can't put a foot right, because everyone suspects Russia can only do wrong. You get that when you annex countries, shoot down a commercial airliners, or start bombing Syria.
Not if you're the US though. Carte blanche there when shirt-fronting history, proving two wrongs can make a right - if you work for the CIA.
As for the flood of refugees across the Mediterranean, well, I guess we've got many rivers to cross. But not nearly as many as those refugees flooding across the Mediterranean.
Perhaps nothing highlights more where the "progress debate" is at than topless female protesters who recently interrupted a forum in France where speakers were debating the circumstances under which it is OK to beat your wife.
Malcolm Turnbull got on the front foot when he said domestic violence is un-Australian, despite what the stats suggest.
Hopefully he'll turn his un-Australian barometer to what's going on in Manus Island and Nauru sometime soon.
Oh yes, progress is a state of mind.
Look at VW drivers. For so long happy to pay a premium to save the environment with their eco-smugly cars.
Turns out it was all in their head. Well, actually, it was all in the atmosphere.
Some people took solace from this phyric victory. Mainly people who drive crap non-European cars.
But revelations from other auto makers suggest ripping off green consciousness may not have been so much an aberration, as an industry standard.
And that really gets people fuming.
Reminds you about the wars on drugs, and drugs in sport in particular, where they like us to think they always get their man.
Bad guys like Lance Armstrong, who'll go to his grave indignant he was the fall guy for a sports world perennially trying to give the impression it's on the up.
Up the drugs, if standard post-Olympic reports are anything to go by.
Progress is a state of mind indeed.
Where the essential component of communications is emphasising to the stakeholder the perception of value, as opposed to the lack of it.
And I'm not just talking talking about proposed UrbanGrowth NSW community consultations on revitalising Newcastle.
Or the fact two teams from out of NSW are contesting this year's NRL grand final.
Or even the Rugby World Cup.
"If you think it's good for you, it may as well be," is not just a mantra for splashing out on a private school education.
It goes for other things like chia, quinoa, the lemon-detox diet and light rail down Hunter Street.
They all help put the mind at ease in one way or another.
Like news sex doesn't contribute to heart attacks. If you don't do it right.
Talk about strangers in the night.
That's what progress can feel like in a backwards kind of way.
And redundant as that might leave you, heart attacks notwithstanding, people who say things can't be done should probably stop interrupting the people doing it.
And then, just maybe, you'll get some progress on your modem.