THE PLACES FLED

The weather was cold in just about every sense. Even when the sun shone, he felt as if there were too many spaces in between. Consumate act, false trails, warm places, and then this. The places he had fled. Michael was glad to see his children, glad to be back, for a while, in a non-confrontational place. But in between all those spaces, the gaps in the fabric of things, lay a horror whch would never die. They might call it normality; but for him it was a fear of mediocrity. If there could be such a thing.

Little had moved on in the years he had been away. The debates seemed much the same. The election issues were no issues at all. The few friends he had seen were old, cold and grumpy. His mother still whistled hymns, waiting for the ravishing. He missed company, as he would always miss company, as if in the bubble stream of bars and outrage there could be genuine communication; for someone such as himself.

He walked briskly; and people said good morning.

Michael wanted to be lost in some other, more silken clime.

It was the thing that struck him the most about returning to Australia; the ordinariness of it.

Earlier in the year, while in Nepal, he had watched footage of houses crumbling into swollen rivers during the monsoon rains. Hundreds of people had been washed down the Ganges; and in most cases people had no idea who the victims were. Bloated bodies decomposing in glacial waters. Rushing to the sea.

What felt here, as he looked across a placid ocean, to be infinite places where there was no acknowledgement, no anguish, where everything was contained in an infinite normality.

There had been little development since he had last been in the country; or little development in the territory he crossed.

Shops still bore the same signs. There were no new houses. There may have been family tragedies behind closed doors, but he could not see them. There was no more street life than before. Over-regulation continued to dampen all desire. Pensioners still huddled tighter over single bar heaters. The price of electricity had gone through the roof, as they complained. The price of a carbon tax. The cost of saving the planet from global warming. No one had warned them that it would be a price they would pay.

The economy was front and centre of the campaign; and the Labor Party, and its recycled leader Kevin Rudd, largely on the nose. Mirroring other campaigns, Rudd led off with the claim that the election was about trust, who did you trust to lead you into the future.

Next to the economy came assylum seekers, an issue that was not playing in the government's favour. Hundreds of ecnomic refugees had drowned at sea in what represented, yes, a human tragedy, but also one of the fastest boomerangs of government policy he had ever seen. Rudd had softened the stance on assylum seekers to pander to the vocal inner-city pro-refugee lobby groups; for all their activism representative of a minority view. That borders don't matter. That we are all part of the same seething mass. That we are all human.

Michael couldn't be boxed. Compassion ran every which way. People drowned or watched their children drown; immense amounts of tax payer resources were placed to leverage a political stance; and the drownings were on their heads. Which they held high and puffed: "Who do you trust?"

He didn't have any illusions that kindness ran in a cold climate; that there would be a warm place here for him; that there would be a future worth embracing in empty streets.

The euphoria some of his friends had felt during the Kevin '07 election had long since died; and now they dismissed it as a battle of millionaires, with their own complaints and tightening circumstances taking precedence. A man stood watching on a frigid shore, that famous, fatal, shore. And that, for the moment, was all that passed, cold wind, cold light. "Plausibile deniability." Michael repeated the phrase several times; as if it meant something.

The Silence Creeps, The Truth Will Out

Some 17,000 years ago, so it is believed, this point of land was 14 kilometres inland. The sea has risen and eaten the land; and the beaches are cold and everything is cold; and the fevers of his imagination were as calm as they could be under the circumstances. He didn't want to be free, he wanted to be possessed. Instead of obsessed. Yes, the beaches he had not wanted to see again were cold, largely empty of life. The occasional fisherman, the occasional jogger. But enveloped in a silence that was so far reaching, swept so deep down beneath the sands, that a million years could not have reached out and saved him. The images on the so-called Indigenous Walk at Bass Point, sponsored by the Shellharbour Council, weren't his direct ancestors, his having come from the inland of Australia and the coastal villages of England, each poverty stricken in their own ways, the strain of inconsequence, of outage, of deinquent deaths in stormy bars and scattered campshaving spilled down the generations like an ancient curse. 

But he could see the complexity of survival in an environment like this. In his dreams he was flung through other places, and fretted about past injustices. During the day he thanked them for the story and cast them back over his shoulder, those who had fed on a decaying corpse, who took what advantage they could, who stole from him so repeatedly. They thought it was funny. They thought it was in their perlieu. Their God given right to act with the masses. To rob a foreigner. To be here in the dense, fervent ignominy. He just wanted to say farewell to a story that should never have been, that he wished had not been.

We were of consequence and no consequence, longed for things that could never be, marched away all that was, and shouted: "Yes. Take me now." "Some people think you should be in jail," the policeman said, fishing him from of a potplant outside a Chiang Mai nightclub and sending him back to a guesthouse, where nothing but trouble and treachery lay. There would be no peace in the Land of Smiles. They would follow him everywhere. As if the truth was not allowed to exist in this hostile place; as if no one was allowed to express themselves. Or say what really happened. Or dare to suggest they were imperfect.

Even the Royal Thai Tourist Police had turned and robbed him; and lied and lied and lied to cover their own cooperation with the local police, and thereby the local mafia. Everything was treachery. Nothing was to be believed. He dreamt these things that wouldn't leave, while the "victors" moved on to fresher, naiver targets. And the sun came down. And the temple on the hill offered a way he never took. And he wished he was back in Nepal.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/we-are-being-exterminated-rebels/1158859/

The United Nations demanded Syria give its chemical weapons experts immediate access on Thursday to rebel-held Damascus suburbs where poison gas appears to have killed hundreds just a few miles from the UN team's hotel.

There was no sign, however, that they would soon be taking samples at the scene of horrors that have drawn comparison with the gassing of thousands of Iraqi Kurds at Halabja in 1988.

President Bashar al-Assad's opponents gave death tolls from 500 to well over 1,000 and said more bodies were being found in the wake of Wednesday's mysterious pre-dawn killer fumes, which the Syrian government insists were not its doing.

Talk, notably from France and Britain, of a forceful foreign response remains unlikely to be translated into rapid, concerted action given division between the West and Russia at Wednesday's UN Security Council meeting, and deep caution in Washington.

On Thursday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Syria must let the UN team already in Damascus investigate "without delay". French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said world powers must respond with force if allegations that Syria's government was responsible for the deadliest chemical attack on civilians in a quarter-century prove true. But even Fabius stressed there was no question of sending in troops on the ground.

http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2013/kevin-rudd-finds-his-form-in-brisbane-debate--but-is-it-too-late-20130822-2sd15.html

If Kevin Rudd could simply wipe away what's gone before and make the 2013 election a two-and-a-half week dash to polling day, it's a fair bet he would take it.

For Team Rudd, the real campaign effectively starts now, or more accurately, it began on Wednesday night at Brisbane's second leaders' debate peoples' forum.

Rudd's performance at the Broncos Leagues Club finally unearthed the feisty energetic persona he needs to project to have any hope of building excitement in what has been, until now, a surprisingly dull affair.

That Rudd knew what was required was obvious from the moment he opened his mouth in the debate - a format with far fewer restrictions than the first rigid debate, which more or less demanded woody performances.

And there was another key difference between the two debates. Where in the first one both leaders went in with the main aim of not losing, Rudd entered the second debate clearly trailing, and with his campaign showing the telltale signs of drift.

Low morale, breeding discontent, and ultimately transmitting that outwardly.

In short Rudd knew he could not win the election in Brisbane but he could easily have cemented a loss, if he bombed out.

It was a real possibility.

Observers of the campaign have noted a curious lack of focus from Labor and a powerful sense of its leader appearing flat, light on for detail and frequently distracted.

After the methodical way he went about things when he replaced Julia Gillard, ticking off in rapid succession longstanding problems such as the faceless men, the carbon price, and asylum seekers, the absence of a discernible program of announcements and the articulation of vision since calling the election, has left supporters mystified.

SILKEN DREAMS, CRAVEN PASTS

Courtesy Crowd Appreciation Society

In the dark, in silken dreams, in crowds long passed, in demons walking, in the assembled crowds outside his house chanting "buffalo, buffalo", places that haunted him still, darkness that enveloped everything, an isolation beyond reach, these were the people he had reached out to embrace; and had the worst time of his life. They couldn't have been crueller or more distant, or more invasive, sarcastiic, nasty, abusive. They harrassed him morning noon and night, and so he acted in ways to annoy them, and got lonelier and lonelier with each passing day. And went through his own nightmare of the soul.

They had moved on to newer, warmer bodies. He lived in the aftermath. There was everything to live for, and nothing. He couldn't stand what had happened, and remained haunted. Nasty thing for one gay man to do to another, one of the voices said. I couldn't believe how upset he was. Yes, in the isolating climate he had crashed and burned; with the jackels snapping at his heels and the derision growing at every turn. No one had reached out. No one had even said hello. And while they fed him poison, coureying it to his door, he grew more insane, less stable, and therefore more vulnerable. And nothing stopped, nothing stopped.

Why this happened he had no idea. The strange twists of circumstance and the fevered brow. The horror that had been his and there; that had taken clasps from the sky and fastened them around his throat; who still twirled through dreams as if they would never let go; and watched as others aged and died. Karma comes back quickly in this part of the world; the saying goes. And maybe it did. And maybe life was of so little consequence that they rose and fell like mushrooms on a forest floor, there one instant and gone the next, off doing sex shows and taking customers while he pottered around the house, waiting, waiting for what? For a brief illusion to envelop him, but nothing enveloped him. And all was gone.

There are some people in life you will always miss, he told a friend. And that was all. These things were cast on a barren sea. The police were so utterly corrupt he could not see how the country functioned. The journalists, willing to fan xenophobia, were so dishonest it was impossible to see how anyone could have faith in them. 

And then he left, just like that.

And they pursued, just like that.

For what, to ridicule kindness? To seek his death.

Every move they made backfired, but they would not stop. They became so predictable they tore every fabric of who he once was away; and he fell into the mud.

If you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas, his old mentor intoned. 

Well it was one way to look at it; a little harsh. But these distant fingers that crawled out through the ether still, there would be no remiss. There was no way back.

THE BIGGER STORY

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/obama-plays-us-intervening-syria-20052887

U.S. naval forces are moving closer to Syria as President Barack Obama considers military options for responding to the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Assad government. The president emphasized that a quick intervention in the Syrian civil war was problematic, given the international considerations that should precede a military strike.

The White House said the president would meet Saturday with his national security team to consider possible next steps by the United States. Officials say once the facts are clear, Obama will make a decision about how to proceed.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel declined to discuss any specific force movements while saying that Obama had asked the Pentagon to prepare military options for Syria. U.S. defense officials told The Associated Press that the Navy had sent a fourth warship armed with ballistic missiles into the eastern Mediterranean Sea but without immediate orders for any missile launch into Syria.

U.S. Navy ships are capable of a variety of military action, including launching Tomahawk cruise missiles, as they did against Libya in 2011 as part of an international action that led to the overthrow of the Libyan government.

"The Defense Department has a responsibility to provide the president with options for contingencies, and that requires positioning our forces, positioning our assets, to be able to carry out different options — whatever options the president might choose," Hagel told reporters traveling with him to Asia.

Hagel said the U.S. is coordinating with the international community to determine "what exactly did happen" near Damascus earlier this week. According to reports, a chemical attack in a suburb of the capital killed at least 100 people. It would be the most heinous use of chemical weapons since Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein gassed thousands of Kurds in the town of Halabja in 1988.

Hagel left little doubt that he thinks the attack in Syria involved chemical weapons, although he stressed there is not yet a final answer. In discussing the matter, he said, "it appears to be what happened — use of chemical weapons."

http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2013/second-poll-shows-rudd-facing-battle-for-own-seat-20130824-2si7r.html#ixzz2cvQVWPfQ

Kevin Rudd faces a fight to avoid becoming the third prime minister in the nation's history to lose his own seat.

A second poll in a week has shown Mr Rudd narrowly trailing his Liberal National Party opponent, Bill Glasson, in Griffith, prompting the Prime Minister to declare he was campaigning as hard as he could.

Long-serving prime minister John Howard lost his Sydney seat of Bennelong to Labor's Maxine McKew as part of the Ruddslide in 2007, the first time an Australian PM had lost his own electorate since Stanley Bruce in 1929. 

A Newspoll published by Saturday suggested Dr Glasson was leading Mr Rudd by 52 per cent to 48 per cent on a two-party-preferred basis. The poll was reportedly based on a sample of 500 voters in Griffith, in Brisbane's south.

It mirrored a Guardian Lonergan poll of 958 Griffith voters on Wednesday night that put Dr Glasson ahead of Mr Rudd 52 per cent to 48 per cent after preferences, with a stated margin of error of 4 per cent.

Mr Rudd attracted 58.5 per cent of the vote after preferences at the 2010 election.

Latest polling suggests Queensland will not provide the big boost that Labor had hoped for with Mr Rudd's return to the leadership. The party also faces losses in western Sydney.

Nationally, the latest Fairfax-Nielsen poll shows Mr Abbott's Coalition is poised to win the election in two weeks' time with a lead of 53 per cent to 47 per cent on a two-party-preferred basis.

BITTER DREAMS

The YMCA Clock courtesy Brain Pickings

There hadn't been much time in between.
Bitter Dreams: Foreigners in Thailand.
"Your problem was you didn't have anyone around you who cared about you," his wild mate said.
Well that was true. He had been surrounded by thieves who did nothing but thieve.
Fruit for the picking.
Pursued from one end of the kingdom to the other; hunted by every go-go bar with mafia links and protected by corrupt police. Which was all of them.
So they turned his life into hell, and laughed.
Only the Thais rob you with such malicious glee and then ridicule you for being stupid enough to be robbed.
Or, if you showed any signs of financial stress after being so repeatedly robbed, ridicule you for being "lek, lek", small.
The Thai government didn't just watch, weren't just criminal in their neglect, but were active participants in the pursuit.
And once they had become involved, would do anything to cover their tracks.
Preferably by bringing on his death.
Well he was still alive; and here, in a place he did not want to be.
But if he hadn't been there, he wouldn't be here, and it was impossible to stop what had happened running around in his head.
What doesn't kill us makes us stronger. In crisis, all the old cliches come true.
He didn't wonder any more what the point of it all had been.
They had hurt so many people in their pursuit of a foreigner, and they didn't care. Every organism protects itself. Except perhaps him; whose evasive actions, false trails, double meanings and triple blinds had all lead to nowhere of consequence, to a cold suburburb and frigid winds, to a place outside the story line.
Get down off the cross, we need the wood.
So many things would happen, had already happened. Some of the multiple characters in a confused story line were already dying, even if they did not know it.
Targetted for elimination.
Excess to requirements.
Frigid in a frigid place.
The only tunes were haunting.
"Bad boys," scribbled in black on cold brick. There was nobody about. No engagement. People nodded as he passed and that was it. There couldn't be a solution, not here.
He was here because he had been there; because he had allowed himself to be robbed, in a sense. A fool and his money are easily parted. Well, perhaps. But it was interesting to watch who did the robbing.
And so he exposed himself like some faithless martyr, dying for a cause not even he believed in.
While in the background ran the seething politics of Thailand, red shirts, yellow shirts and all the rest.
And here, in Australia, "Prime Minister" Kevin Rudd and Opposition Leader Tony Abbot slug it out.
Rudd, it is true, looks querelous and unconvincing. And far from Prime Ministerial. Shrugging off the hooh hah over the notes he had taken into the first televiised election debate between the two leaders; despite the rules against them. Rudd had laughed off the notes incident, the slug line at the bottom of the screen declared all day, as if he had a choice.
Abbott is just maintaining the course. Nobody, as he declared yesterday, is the suppository of all wisdom.
He might have meant repository, but the moment was gone.

THE PLACES FLED IV

Courtesy Cloud Appreciation Society

And then came the day. Let it go, let it go, the demons cried, and he just wanted to be somewhere else. He didn't know why he had let his guard down. Why you handed your will and your life over to a pack of low lifes  on a distant soi. Why he had been fascinated by things he should have ignored. Why everything came crashing down, and he was as instantly depressed as he had ever been. Hold your head high. He would rather hide. These things were made for lust, and envy, and ruin. Short lives. Futures destroyed. Paths not taken. These things that would never be. He continued to pine for places that were gone. Through stupidity, rank stupidity. And loneliness. If nothing else, that.

An unblinking gaze, he had written, but there was nothing unblinking about the way he felt. About the way things lingered, things that should never have been. About impossible things. He could still hear them, and wished he couldn't. Compound sentences, of love and lust. And brittle, frail people, and the mewling warmth. And smiles that came across a chasm. And lives that were lived too fast. 

He wasn't holding his head up high. He wasn't doing anythng but trying to hide. As if there could be a retreat back into nothing. As if oblivion was a safe place to be. As if depression, with its curling damp fingers, was a comfort; and the world would turn to glue again. But nothing was hospitable, nothing was a comfort. He slept more than usual, normally a sign he was depressed; and everything and nothing, and statements gone. These things couldn't provide the slightest bit of warmth. The coast was pretty. And cold. And empty. Traces of other things, of other lives, weren't traces for him. They rounded on him and were gone, a toss into the sky. He should have done something but didn't, just curled away into another place. Where he did not want to be.

THE BIGGER STORY

An Egyptian court ordered deposed President Hosni Mubarak released from prison on Wednesday, further deepening the sense of crisis one week after the country’s military-backed interim government carried out what human rights advocates say was the worst single episode of extrajudicial killing in the country’s modern history.

Leaving Cairo’s Tora Prison, where Mubarak was held and the court also convened, Mubarak’s lawyer, Farid Al-Deeb, told Reuters news agency that his client could go free as soon as Thursday. State prosecutor Ahmed el-Bahrawi told the agency Mubarak’s corruption case could not be appealed.

At one time, Mubarak’s release would have triggered massive protests from the revolutionary forces that ended his 30-year rule during the winter 2011 uprising. A June 2012 ruling in a separate court case over the killing of demonstrators in 2011 set off days of protests in Cairo and other cities after the court convicted Mubarak, but failed to convict senior security officials blamed for a deadly crackdown on demonstrators.

But today, Egypt’s politics operates in a different paradigm after the military removed Islamist President Mohamed Morsi from power on July 3 following another popular uprising on June 30. The military-backed interim government that replaced Morsi enjoys the support of many secular nationalists as it carries out a full-scale crackdown on Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups. A week ago, government forces moved in to crush protest camps set up by those calling for Morsi’s reinstatement, which led to the deaths of hundreds. The government blames Islamists for the current crisis and says it is carrying out a campaign against “terrorism.”

Read more: http://world.time.com/2013/08/21/egypts-revolution-comes-full-circle-court-orders-mubaraks-release/#ixzz2cdmR1OaC

Kevin Rudd has used the second Leaders' debate to breathe life into his flagging election campaign, attacking Tony Abbott's record as health minister and depicting the Liberal's proposed paid parental leave scheme as unaffordable.

Openly admitting that Mr Abbott was ''way ahead in the polls,'' Mr Rudd paced before the Brisbane crowd and repeatedly accused The issue prompted one of the most spirited exchanges of the night as Mr Abbott appeared to lose his composure briefly, as he interjected, ''Does this guy ever shut up?''

Mr Rudd responded that such statements were the standard response to losing an argument.

In an early sign that the Labor leader needed a punchier performance than he had put in at the first debate nearly a fortnight ago, Mr Rudd capitalised first on the more flexible format of the people's forum in Brisbane's Broncos Leagues Club to accuse Mr Abbott of having ''ripped'' $1 billion from hospital budgets and of planning further cuts. It was a charge Mr Abbott flatly denied after using his opening remarks to remind voters of Labor's record in office.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2013/kevin-rudd-breathes-fire-and-brimstone-into-campaign-20130821-2sbsz.html#ixzz2cdn6MwdHMr Abbott of hiding future cuts from voters.

THE HUNTING

Photograph Sydney ourtesy dreamtime.com

There was so much of the haunting that still ran through his brain; because he was here and not there; not where he felt he was meant to be. But the sense of dislocation was no worse than before; better perhaps. Things would go round in circles for a while, he knew that. He knew that things would sometimes be topsy turvy, that the haunting was over but his psyche was still readjusting; that the hurled abuse; or was it targetted abuse, of an election would wash over him, as it was washing over the nation, and sooner or later all would be well.
Or lost.
If there had been any fundamnetal psychological shifts, they hadn't come through his own doing. Geography changed everything, from crowded psychodramas and the constant haunting, the filfthy echoes which began and ended in over-heated lanes, which were swallowed almost as soon as they were emitted, which chirped just beyond the visual range and which he had studiously ignored.
Occasionally there had been a friendly echo, but they were rare.
Here the echoes didn't exist, or barely existed, and his brain searched for meaning when there was none. Sounds were just sounds. Traffic was just traffic. Friends were just friends, dampened in the cold.
He would always be scarred by what had happened, but stronger, wiser, too.
"Buffalo, buffalo," he heard it sometimes, but he knew it was no longer in the streets.
These walking machines, sterling examples of mob behaviour. Of the whipped up, deluded, manipulated masses. How far they could stoop he had never known. How low they could go had been beyond his comprehension.
And so he gathered his forces, and slept, strangely, in a way that was abnormal for him; as if he couldn't bear the long nights with his thoughts running in spirals; the encroaching dawn; the long walks.
As if Lumbini would always be with him; a place he would never have gone if he hadn't been through the scraifhying experience of Bangkok.
So there it was, a simple thing. One thing leads to another. One door closes and another opens.
All the old clices came true, at times of crisis and change. Do the best by the day. Corny things. When in crisis, deal with what's in front of your face.
All would be mounted and mounting; all would circle into scnees of loss and recovery.
The shadows would pass.
He would be whole again.
He did not have his enemies to thank, that pack of thieves from Soi Twilight, and their mafia cohorts throughout the Kingdom, but he did have the passing of time.
They were off hunting fresh meat. Easier, less consequence. Their stance was exposed, their actions there for anyone who wanted to see, and so they, in their simple classical way, ignored inconvenient truths, and moved on.
He sat next to the old mamasan or whatever he was, party promoter, from X-Size, at the bar outside a different bar in a different part of Patong, swapped pleasantries, never mentioned the go-go boy Aek who had robbed him so repeatedly, told so many lives, who had been the instrument the mafia used to stir up hatred against a foreigner, to discredit someone who dared to object to being robbed, and never even mentioned the things that had passed.
The times when he had shown up at X-Size demanding the money he had just been robbed of be returned.
They never mentioned the hundreds of other clients who had also, no doubt, been robbed. That foreigners, tourists only in town for a day or two, were easy targets. That the perpetrators would be dead if they targetted other Thais.
There was no explanation as to why the man had changed bars.
There would never be an explanation.
These things were not subjects that Thais shared with foreigners.
And that was that. The stream went unanswered. The swirl of victims aka customers continued on.
And no shape, no past, no future, tense or not, would ever be discussed.
They raised their glasses in a salute at nothing, and the night washed on.

THE BIGGER STORY

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/switch-of-leaders-creates-more-problems-than-labor-realises/story-e6frg74x-1226696603679

The moral is stark: despite the merits, switching prime ministers just before an election guarantees a pile of problems.

Rudd returned with a "fix it" plan on carbon pricing, boats and party reform. Now the truth is obvious: this doesn't constitute an election strategy. Rudd lacks a powerful narrative apart from jaw-boning about the future while running an anti-Abbott scare.

On the resources boom, Abbott said if it was finished then Labor had been pivotal in killing it. What else would he say? Rudd's line about the boom being over has dismayed the industry and provoked kickback from the opposition. Not smart.

It is true, of course, the reduction in resources investment demands the non-resource sectors seize the slack. It is equally true Australia would be mad to ignore escalating world energy demand over the coming 20 years including an expected doubling in global liquefied natural gas demand by 2030. If you want vision, why not talk about Australia as an expanding energy superpower? But such notions are not in Labor's political DNA, unlike same-sex marriage.

Labor must have a moral cause justified by voting demographics. Climate change once performed this role. Now it is unfashionable. Having just changed his mind on same-sex marriage, Rudd may be correct in judging this to be a voting plus, notably with the under-30s. But it is a risk. The risk is that Labor looks like a party that fails on the big issues but seeks to survive on progressive fashion. It will provoke much cynicism at a time when people feel Labor is failing on economic management, jobs and cost of living. Some will applaud Rudd; others will conclude this shows him as a phony.

The single most alarming aspect of Labor's campaign is the absence of any positive tactic to regain the lead from Abbott. Where are Rudd's policies to buttress his claim to best manage the economic transition? He rarely mentions them. Where does this leave his campaign?

The answer is heavily in negative territory. Rudd's resort lies in discrediting Abbott. It has been the default Labor position for years. The party remains in denial about its policy and intellectual failures. Such denials are rationalised by the delusion that Abbott is unelectable, and reinforced now by the sad reality that Labor probably has nothing else left.

THE PLACES FLED III

Port Kembla steel works courtesy www.beca.com

The haunting was over and yet his mind was still ill at ease. He knew the story was over and yet trails of it still ran through his mind, unhappily, for he did not want to be where he found himself; and the nation turned off the election in droves. Having flown too close to the sun; wings were in tatters. Kevin Rudd, who must be loved and admired at all times, was no longer the subject of infatuation, veneration, or anything much at all. The mob had rounded on a "loser"; and there would be no satisfying their lust for blood, their stinging contempt. Their "fed upness", their boredom, with  the techno-jargon about creating the jobs for the future. When the budget had blown out and there would be no resolve. When their own lives had not improved despite all the grand sweeping tours; statements; past beliefs.

Nobody mentioned reconciliation anymore. 

The "good folk of Australia", as Kevin Rudd was want to say, were no longer so easily fooled. Gone were the days when Rudd could paint himself as a progressive saviour of the planet; signing the Kyoto Protocol and leading a delegation of 114, or whatever it was, to the Copenhagen Climate Summit. A summit which, ultimately, made not one jot of difference to anything, except that it stoked the lingering or not so lingering contempt; a jot in the catalogue of past enthusiasms. Along with reconciliation; where the lives of not a single indigenous person had improved. Or now, gay marriage. As if anyone could really care. Why anyone would want to imitate a heterosexual institution, or why a piece of paper should mean anything, Michael had no idea.

But the past had gone, just as it had in the fetid heat of Bangkok's sois, and days followed days and there would be no others; and he was cheered by nothing.

The nights were cold; as were the beach walks. Assemblies of the lost, the frustrated. He could not fathom what had happened; but it had. There was no recourse; no way of saying sorry; of reaching back for forgiveness or reconciliation. There was nothing but a hard wall of laughter; the successful thieves. The bitter glint. He took time, as if for action, but this was a different action, a different intent. He had every intention of taking his time; of not running to some mad dream or someone else's time table. Of proving nothing. Of walking away quietly.

Because they weren't the audience; never were. And if he had briefly tried to prove something; it wasn't to them. "If I've been untrue, it wasn't to you." I hope you know. But there was no one there. No one waiting. No one watching. And all the silent dreams, the chirruping voices. "Perhaps he's telepathic." He can hear things he shouldn't be able to hear. Well say it, sandwich it, swallow it and die. There were brief moments when the story was more than the story should be; and then it was over, just like that. We made to discuss. We made to channel. We made to reach out. We were proved unworthy. And we died. That was all there was to it. Suicide by cop. The nights grew darker. The wind colder. The voices more distant. The drama less and less intriguing. 

And then he walked away, free at last.

"He insulted me, he hurt me, he defeated me, he robbed me." 
Those who think such things will not be free from hate.
~~~Buddha....

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/two-teens-charged-with-murdering-melbourne-baseball-player-chris-lane/story-fni0fiyv-1226700172461

Sarah Harper, 23, also told the Herald Sun that she didn't know what punishment would be appropriate of the three teenagers, aged 15, 16 and 17 years, accused of Lane's murder.

It comes as Duncan Police Chief Danny Ford said he had secured the confession of the 17-year-old who summoned investigators to his jail cell and claimed he and the younger boys were bored "so they decided to kill somebody".

"He said he was the driver of the car," Chief Ford said.

"They saw Christopher jog by the house they were at, they chose him to be the target, they got in the car, drove up behind him and shot him in the back.

"He said the 16-year-old fired the shot."

The three teenagers are being held in the Stephens County Jail in Duncan.

The trio were due to appear in a local court over the shooting at 1.30pm Monday (4.30am Tuesday AEST), but it has been pushed back a day.

A spokesperson for District Attorney Jason Hicks said the charges were still being reviewed.

The mother of the 16-year-old accused of firing the single bullet from a handgun into Lane's back said she didn't believe her son was involved.

The father of the 15-year-old admitted his son had been in trouble with the law, but described him as a good boy.

Lane, who grew up in Oak Park in Melbourne's north, had only been back in the US for three days after an eight-week break in Australia with Ms Harper.

"I don't want them to have any future that Chris wasn't able to have as well," Ms Harper said of the accused teenagers today.

"It's been pretty rough. It's been hard knowing he was taken so close to home, let alone taken in the way he was. To be pointed out like that …"

Ms Harper said she and Lane had joked about America's soft gun laws before he was shot.

"He wasn't a fan of guns," she said.

She fondly described Lane as a smart, kind and curious guy who would "do anything for anybody".

Ms Harper, also a talented sportswoman, said she and Lane just "meshed together" within weeks of meeting at college in Oklahoma in August 2009.

"It was more of a personality (we had in common), not so much interests. He was intellectual, into world news, and I found that quite boring," she said.

"He really wanted to travel more. He loved the idea of seeing the world."

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/a-desperate-kevin-rudd-hits-the-negative-button/story-fnh4jt62-1226700452898

KEVIN Rudd does not look himself.

The grand visions of hospital reform, talk of the moral challenges of our time about climate change and the positive campaigner are gone.

In their place is an increasingly negative and bitter campaign from Labor and Mr Rudd himself.

With no money for big policies and polls heading south, Kevin Rudd has hit the negative button.

His message: don't elect Tony Abbott, look what his LNP counterparts have done.

A government should be able to sell its own record.

Labor cannot.

Mr Rudd this week began warning of what Tory Prime Minister David Cameron has done in Britain.

Comparisons with Jeff Kennett and Campbell Newman may have bearing on voters but the UK Tories?

It sounded desperate.

This morning Mr Rudd suggested he would find his way back through people power.

QUIET, TOO QUIET

Flickr photo share South Coast NSW Looking Towards Werri Beach

There's an election on but you would nver know it; things have gone so quiet. There is no passion, it's quiet, too quiet. A phrase often used by an old party animal in Islington, London, in the days when Richard was still alive, in the days when the world was full of promise and our lives were only half lived. These times, now, were different in the dark, so cold, so lacking in life, that when sequences came by there could be no other; and the haunting he had received, gone now, as things wasted away into oblivion and there would be no hope. Crushed into a meadow. Fragments of films everywhere. And then nothng, nothing at all.

These will always be the times we wished for; the spaces in between. As if there could be no calm anywhere else. But the excitement was gone. There wasn't anything worth saying. The two party leaders had their say, back and forth, and the Weekend papers declared Kevin Rudd to be campaigning poorly; and falling behind. We were here or we were there, flickered past a hundred things. Taken time, taken a life. While they continued to thrive in their subterranean world, heart broken. Buffalo, buffalo. The spaces in between. If he could but muster, if he could but die. There were too many gaps. He rolled over, belly to the sun.

It was the quietness in between that was the most terrifying, the places when there weren't avalanches of thought, when seedy men in seedy bars made no advances, when the gaps in communication had eaten everything alive, and all that could be done, their wastage, was in another place. He was staunch. He was saddened by what had happened. He was angry at himself and others; flickering, because there was no point. An insane gesture. A triumph of love. A triumph of stupidity more like. Friutless, pointless; he still heard the murmurs, "perhaps he's not as well connected as we thought", and then he shrugged. He had spent too long playing to the tune of invisible taunters. If he couldn't see his way clear, it was a momentary thing. Others would take their place. Demons would play. Circuses would perform. 

And an ancient Christ, an invisible amalgam, would curl and dance. And more would be revealed. And lightning quake. And the fact that there were gaps in the fabric of things would come to seem unimportant, and in a thousand ways, in a thousand days, in all these brightly coloured places, there would come some kind of denouement, some passing of the guard, of one kind into another, of one fleeting pass on a football field into another life. No longer hunted, he no longer wanted to settle. He just wanted a base and a place, and that was it. No time like the present. No place he wanted to face. It was quiet, too quiet; and he remembered the sunny, mischievous face of the one who used to say it.

And they laughed. Quiet, too quiet.
   

THE PLACES FLED MACH II

NSW South Coast courtesy nswtrainlink.info

From here, there were so many things. He didn't think there would be peace behind a shadow, or comfort in a storm. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to be. Everything had been erased. "I get everything," a nasty little go-go boy jeers in a Bangkok soi. Yes, well they do that. He hadn't known, hadn't known anything. And now he knew. He knew things would run around and around in his head for a while, because he wouldn't be here if he hadn't been there. That was the way of it. There would always be compromise, there would always be consequence. And that was the way of it, like it or not.

And no, he didn't like it. The sky is high, you can fly. You can do many things, mostly steal from the passing parade, take what you will, care nothing for what you do. That was also the way of it, amidst a peasant class which would always steal. If the cap fits, wear it. They wouldn't be doing it again. He ran afoul of foul elements; and now was washed up on an ancient shore. There was little to do. Little to know. The peace he had felt wasn't here. Things would always be the way they were. And he would compromise; in his heart and soul and deep down where; while they made heroes of thieves; and assumed the customer was always wrong.

How they compromised on this; how they made hay. How everything worked. How he could walk from one place to another; fragile, febrile dreams, not bitter dreams, although that could be the title of another missive; he wasn't done yet. They buried what they had done and time coated everything. Except for him. They washed away the shallows of themselves; were clean in a circus meant for someone else, were cold in a space where there was no offering, jeered at by masses, a chorus of pain. That was all there was to it. Ancient lusts; gone shrivelling down into the core. There wasn't anyway to get to you. There was no redemption, salvation, a welcoming calm. He was hiding in an invsible space.

So it was that this period went down; and went away. It wasn't a revelation. It was a game that had been played out upon him. Everything went AWOL, and those he thought might care didn't care. They had their own chorus, their own fans. Their own families. They had profited and survived; and he had not. He wasn't even here any more. He watched some ground birds hopping off into the deep scrub of the littoral forest; and could hear their chicks chirping. No enemies here. He could see a marker stone in the centre of what had probably been a midden. It had a feel, as if it had been the centre of something. Just as there was no mistaking the marker stone at the centre of Buddha Park, where he was supposedly born. Rushing to be alive; just as he had not. 

There would be a chorus but they were distant things. Bad boy, he saw, inked on stone brick. And not long after, a callow, sad looking man with his domineering wife, sitting in a cheap car, staring mournfully out as the winter sky fell quickly into dark. And the same words, "Bad Boy", festooned across his t-shirt, spoke of greater optimism than what life had handed him. He hoped they weren't the one and the same, just for the sake of errant beauty. In which case all would be lost, if it hadn't already. Because nothing stirred here, there was nowhere to go. The cold shrank in around them; and they hid in the dark overhang of the forest, protected from the wind whipping off the frigid sea, protected from the other tribes, protected even from themselves, as they cuddled togeher for warmth. There wasn't going to be an easy solution, not in this lifetime.

THE SPACES IN BETWEEN

Tony Abbott ran in the Sydney to Surf, along with 80,000 others, and appeared relaxed and comfortable in the much vaunted first debate between the two leaders. It's probably not an experience Kevin Rudd will be eager to repeat, although he had been the one pushing for the debate. Because, behind in the polls, he had everything to gain and nothing to lose.
And what a disaster it was.
Everything shook, and when the leaves finally fell and the branches were bare, there was nothing there. The horror simply compounded.
"It's blasted a hole in the centre of his life," the last remaining fragment of a voice said; and he didn't know whether it was a chirp of his own subconscious, or still real.
They had pursued him for so long it took him a while to believe they weren't there anymore.
They survey your friends, they survey everything.
Well perhaps, but there was nothing to survey.
The hole in the centre of his life.
Yes, the job had gone. The kids had grown. His house had been blown. There were centres of activity and then there was nothing.
An aching heart that had simply been blasted to smithereens.
Documentary evidence of a taudry life.
He had a friend somewhere, but he didn't know who.
The cold beach, the nod of strangers, the quiet that had consumed everything.
There was no life here, nothing that he could find.
He hdan't wanted to come back to Australia, and he had been right in that perhaps, if nothing else.
He slept a lot, usually a sign of depression. But it wasn't that, if nothing else, he didn't know why he was here or where he was going or why.
What had happened had happened.
"I'd like a boyfriend but I guess I'm too old," he said in the Bangkok condo of his wild friend.
Only alcohol could fill the days; and yet he wasn't drinking.
Only time could cure what was the country's greatest angst, frustration.
He didn't want to be here, he didn't want to be anywhere. And so he gathered himself into some unfocussed ball. Glad to be here. Glad to be alive. A natural optimism.
They had corroded everything, and left him here.
"They're very dangerous people," Robbie said on the drive to Bangkok's Survanabhumi Airport. "I think it's good what you did, telling the story. But they are dangerous. You will always have to be careful."
For this the customer pays.
And he continued to pay. In a life that wasn't his anymore.
Come back to earth my friend, we will greet you like long lost lovers.
We will greet you as the darkest, lost love. And make as if to embrace. It was time for it to end. 

BLINDED BY THE LIGHT

David Hockey. Splash.

Michael had put a copy of David Hockney's famous painting Splash on his laptop as background while in Nepal. It was less confrontational, or disturbing, than the Francis Bacon picture which had preceded it, and created less consternation among the passing parade of hotel workers who viewed. In a strange way, he got up and went to work just as he had done in a previous life. He didn't really know what else to do. The strange transition from worker bee to self supporting mobile organism was only half complete; and the trees which filled Buddha Park, the flatness of the Terrai stretching towards the nearby Indian border, had all become a part of his life.
At this point in the election cycle the results seem pre-ordaned.
Everybody is expecting Kevin Rudd to be ousted.
They are sick of his carping, sick of his techno-babble, and sick of his "must be loved and admired at all times" personality.
The grand days of the reconciliation, when he was seen as the saviour of the nation's soul, reaching across the bitter historical divide to embrace the fallen, the indigenous population, were gone. The nation's conscience, cleansed of racism and hurt, could move forward into the blinding light of redemption.
But nothing happened.
Conditions on the ground remained as bad as ever, if not worse.
Redfern, where Michael lived at the time and which had its own unique Aboriginal problems, deteriorated still further. They now felt entirely entitled to abuse the European population. Reconciliation only ran one way.
Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on housing in the north of the country.
And not a single house was built.
Bureaucrats swallowed the lot.
The opposition claimed that Kevin Rudd had wasted more than 200 billion dollars of taxpayer's money.
It seemed entirely plausible, his ego was so huge.
They carried away a staunch reply: Get knotted.
Go waste your money somewhere else; your own money.
"It's the battle of the millionaires," a former devotee of Kevin declared.
For a long time Kevin could do no wrong. Now he could do no right.
Did he really care about "marriage equality" aka gay marriage?
Unlikely.
It was a popular issue amongt a young demographic; and that was it.
Why gay people would want to mimic heterosexual institutions Michael had no idea; and shrugged. The State should never have been in the nation's bedrooms in the first place.
And they should never have been in his.
He had behaved appallingly just to annoy them; and now wished he hadni't. But didn't much care. He'd made the point: fuck off. Fuck off out of my life.
Instead the jeers and the ridicule had simple escalated out of control. The Thais had tracked him even to Lumbini, Buddha's Birthplace, where, for a time, he had thought he was safe.
Nowhere was safe from the crawling reptiles who thought they ran Bangkok's underworld; who ran their businesses of thieving from tourists with impunity; besause unlike Michael most tourists only stayed in the metropolis for a few days and were left without redress over their stolen property.
The senior police who frequented the illegal casino at the bottom of the Twilight Soi knew perfectly well that the street tout Baw had stolen his laptop, his tool of trade, and flogged it at the casino for 7,000 baht. No one, police or not, had the decency to return it to him.
They circled around a wounded wilderbest, waiting for the final kill.
But the final kill never came.
Instead here he was in yet another time and place he had never expected to be, watching an election which was as distant to him as it was to most of the population.
The days when Kevin '07 had strutted the boards, had led a 100 plus officials to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, had signed the Kyoto Protocol to great applause, and had, again, been hailed as the saviour of the world from predatory industrialists spewing carbon into the atmosphere, were gone.
The days when he had been seen as finally bringing compassion to the refugees and boat people, aka illegal immigrants, coming to the country, were gone.
The sovereignty of the country was being eroded; as thousands landed on a vast shore line. Or died at sea.
And in Michael's own life other things too precedence, such as common sense.
He hadn't wanted to come back. He hadn't wanted to be anywhere.
But he took one foot in front of another; and began to solve the problems which had threatened to envelop him.
Pining, they said, of people who had cared. But pining for what? 
He was the one who pined the most, for a dream that never was, for people who never were, for a future that could not be. For happy days in a happy land.
Too old to learn, just want to live, had turned and bitten him just like a snake, as suredly as the people he had been generous towards had turned and robbed him, spread their nasty poison and survived, or thrived; at least for a time.
"You're out of control," a voice said, drobbing from just behind in the staggering heat of the Terrai.
And he knew the sharks of Soi Twilight had followed him even here; had no respect for people or for form. Wanted him dead.
Wanted him corralled into what they considered normality.
Wanted the foreigner to die.
Instead he returned to Australia, watched the election on television and marvelled at the massive size of the electricity bills.
If the public had been warned that their bills would soar, the price of everything escalate, their elderly relatives huddle over single bar heaters in freezing houses, that this would be their contribution to a dubious but fashionable effort to save the planet, they might have thought twice.
But they were not told.
And this time around, this election, Kevin Rudd and his "team" of backstabbers have barely mentioned climate change at all. They know the issue is out of fashion. That like so many passing fads, nobody believes anymore. 
Redemption is not so easy. Saving our own souls is not a matter of crossing a few palms, a few gestures; a few actions done for applause, not truth. And so we wander on; into another government. Indeed into another life.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324823804579011880172936694.html

CAIRO—Egypt's efforts to end Muslim Brotherhood protests turned deadly Wednesday morning, with more than 278 people killed across the country in violence set off when police, later backed by Egyptian soldiers, moved in against two antigovernment sit-ins in Cairo.

The move to clear supporters of former President Mohammed Morsi, which had been anticipated since his ouster by the military on July 3, set off violent upheaval across Cairo. Protesters tried to storm police stations across Egypt's capital, while entire neighborhoods succumbed to fighting between neighbors on opposite sides of the political divide, an early taste of the bloodshed that has been feared for weeks by many Egyptians. Several observers worried that the violence has spiraled out of control and taken on sectarian shadings.

Egypt's interim president declared a monthlong national state of emergency to start Wednesday afternoon.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/arrogant-kevin-rudd-hides-nbn-truth/story-e6frgd0x-1226696601734

KEVIN Rudd claims there is a conspiracy surrounding the NBN. He may be right. But it is not a conspiracy in which Rupert Murdoch seeks to bring down the Labor government to sabotage the NBN. It is a conspiracy to hide from the voters, until after the election, just how bad are the finances of the NBN. And the dire straits that the NBN is in can be sheeted back to the deals done by one man: the Prime Minister.

Rudd sketched out his grand vision for a Fibre To The Home network on April 7, 2009. The project was launched with a 1000-word press statement. There was no policy paper or supporting financial analysis because Rudd, who now demands the Coalition take its policies to Treasury and Finance, asked neither department for costings. And despite the fact that the first tranche of funding promised by Rudd was held in the Building Australia Fund and by legislation could only be disbursed following a cost benefit analysis, none was done. Instead Rudd plucked figures out of the air.

The initial headline $43 billion cost was not sourced nor was there any support for the extravagant claims that the project would generate an average of 25,000 jobs a year. Rudd also claimed it would be 49 per cent private sector funded although there was no indication the private sector would come to such a hare-brained party. On average over its first four years the NBN has supported 10 per cent of the jobs Rudd claimed and the revised $37bn cost has fallen fully on the government plus a further $20bn in taxpayer-guaranteed payments to Telstra.

EVEN WHEN

Jigsaw, Madrid

"You are fleeing, even when there is no one chasing you," the elderly woman said. He could read sub-texts as easily as anyone. There were cruel passages, but none of it was for the better. These sorcerers would make their toxic traces, and then disappear. The preposterousness of all that had happened still sloshed around in his head, because he wouldn't be here if he hadn't been there. The suburbs were so quiet. "I like it like that," a man said. "Since they've blogged off the street, after about six there's no cars."

"Quiet," he repeated.
And again came the response: "I like it like that."
"Nothing much to do."
"It's nice. Peaceful."

Well, there was a peace, haunting moments, transcendent flashes of time where God rained down from a moon bright sky, where young men hung in cars on the coastal ledge, and everything came full circle. He remembered them from his youth, the alphas, the subordinates. Like men everywhere, elaborate pecking orders, or not so elaborate. Bashed into place. Because it had always been like that, had to be like that. Or else everything would run out of control, and no one would know who was boss.

Yes, the haunting still haunted him. Yes, there were days when he would have gratefully disappeared, as if this place wasn't silent, distant enough for true safety. As if being tracked was an enduring symbol of oddity. As if it had always been, and they were on the high moral ground. What a peculiar, ungrateful place.

"Falung have no power."

The voices had ringed where he once had lived. Had hoped. Had fallen apart in a circle of derision.

And to this day, some mornings, he remained disturbed by the viciousness exposed. As if they cared, or had ever cared.

"You are fleeing when there's nobody chasing you."

Everything seemed to be falling, caught in mid-air. Under mango trees, in too-quiet streets. In nasty customers at local shops celebrating the fact that he had been robbed. Laughing at him, to his face or behind his back. Casting forth, the expelled who had never belonged anywhere. The sky came closer over the point, the ocean moved as if alive, and he cranked up the music even louder, drowning out the voices from the other cars.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Prime Minister Tony Abbott never ceases to confound with his volunteering and community work. Is he the tough individualist you'd expect a conservative prime minister to be or a collectively minded softie? The answer will help determine the sort of country Australia becomes.

Will it be one that encourages empathy and the selfless volunteering/community spirit we have seen during this bushfire crisis? Or will Australia lurch towards a rationalist ''what's in it for me'' ethos the political zealots around Abbott prefer?

Abbott's volunteering work is a great example of what the nation needs leading into a summer of fires, floods and cyclones. Through his actions and policies such as the Green Army and Auscorps for university students, he seems to stand for self-sacrifice for the common good. Contrary to my colleague Mark Kenny's view, I believe Abbott should keep volunteering - we need him to be a role model for community cohesion.

Yet Abbott also leads a party that worships individualism. He sits alongside those who, like Margaret Thatcher, believe there is no society; that ''people must look to themselves first''. He sits among many who, like American philosopher Ayn Rand, think altruism is wrong because the highest moral purpose is self-interest. And Abbott often joins them in crying ''nanny state'' when governments try to nudge citizens into pro-social behaviour.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/if-abbott-gives-in-to-his-better-nature-he-may-turn-out-to-be-the-ideal-leader-for-a-land-of-fires-and-floods-20131022-2vz6d.html#ixzz2iTtWrnGu