Pix. Bundaberg River, Queensland. Circa October, 2017.

TURNBULL'S TERRIBLE LEGACY

Bli Bli, Queensland, Australia

Nothing worked. And the appalling state of the internet across Australia would be one of the Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's worst legacies, frustrating all endeavour, destroying businesses, killing communication.

 A naturally industrious population found itself frustrated at every turn. 

Respect for government and respect for politicians ground down to zero. 

The government's only reaction, to impose yet more restrictions, to attempt to ever more desperately control the media, destroy the free exchange of ideas, to send their Swastika boots clomping down on every free thinker. 

The "marriage equality" debate, which could have been solved in a single afternoon as a basic human rights issue, why should straights be the only ones to suffer, had curdled the public square. 

Dangerous, inconsiderate, insouciant.

He was angry at everything, but that did not make him wrong. 

In just one piece of high farce, the retiring Family Court Chief Justice Diana Bryant declared that Australia had a very good family law system and in many ways was envied by the world. 

So much for the pain of millions. So much for the many people who had worked so hard in an attempt to reform family law. No one could go near Australia's appalling family law jurisdiction and maintain the slightest respect for lawyers, the judicial system or the politicians who allowed this Marxist feminist jurisdiction to continue on its high minded, utterly destructive path.

Never mind. 

Reality had nothing to do with Australian public discourse in 2017. 

Old Alex listened to the celebrity lesbians and Gucci socialists on Radio National, and simply despaired.

There had to be a way out.

There had to be a way back to the truth. There had to be a way back to common decency. 

To a simple thing like a genuine participatory democracy. 

To the principles long forgotten.

"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act" - George Orwell


THE BIGGER STORY: 

RAQQA, Syria (Reuters) - Air raids by U.S. coalition warplanes have intensified in recent days as Kurdish and Arab militias seek to drive surrounded Islamic State militants from their last strongholds in Syria’s Raqqa -- but the toll on civilians has been severe.
Hundreds of civilians fled the city on Thursday, many wounded and malnourished after being trapped for months by fighting between Islamic State and the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
Those who fled said the sheer intensity of the bombardment appeared to have made militants shift their positions, retreat or hide underground, giving civilians a window in which to escape.
Abdullah Ali’s burns were still raw from an air strike that brought down his building and killed his entire family a week ago in central Raqqa.
“My wife, mum, dad, all 14 people in my family were killed. Their bodies are trapped under rubble,” the 24-year-old said, sitting outside a mosque on Raqqa’s outskirts.
Ali’s neighbor Abdo Hussein said more than 50 people were in the building when the air strike hit. Just a handful survived and 13 bodies had been pulled out, he said.
The offensive to drive Islamic State out of Raqqa, its de facto Syrian capital which it seized in 2014, has long outlasted initial predictions by SDF officials who said ahead of a final assault in June that it could take just weeks.
The SDF said last week the city could be declared captured in the coming days.
There are still several hundred militants in the city and thousands of residents, the coalition says, many of them believed to be held hostage by IS in a hospital and nearby stadium.
“People had tried to escape before but were shot at by Daesh (Islamic State). I even saw them kill a two-year-old child,” Um Moussa, 38, said, sitting inside the mosque.
”This morning they didn’t seem to be around, or weren’t firing.
“My son saw hordes of people leaving so we decided to go for it. I’d been sleeping fully dressed -- we were ready to flee at the first chance,” she said, wearing black robes and a face veil required under Islamic State’s strict laws.
But weakening the militants with air power has come at a high cost in civilian lives, she and others said.
“Yesterday four entire families were killed in our area. It’s strike after strike.”

+++

One day, perhaps before it is too late, Turnbull, Brandis, Shorten and co. and their fellow members of the political class in Europe may wake up to the fact that the West is engaged in an existential struggle in which employment figures, homosexual marriage and submarines are not the fundamental issues.

While border security and conventional defence policies are of the greatest importance they are not fighting the modern cultural blitzkrieg. Poet Peter Kocan said in one bitter verse that it is like having a fearless armoured knight on guard while the city falls to internal enemies.

What the present political leadership of Australia and other Western countries seem incapable of counteracting, or even comprehending, is that we are engaged in a new kind of conflict – an onslaught by the Left to politicise every aspect of life from football to science fiction.

Accompanying this is the Muslim ‘stealth jihad’. While in Australia the authorities have done a good job in keeping terrorism in check, they seem unaware of the threat to national identity posed by simple demographics. Poland and Hungary, having just recovered their national identities after decades of merciless oppression, seem determined to fight the threat to them, while the Scandinavian countries have largely given up the fight.

DAYS OF INFAMY

Future historians will ask, how did it happen that people can be snatched off the streets in secret, never to be seen again. 

Wasn't this once a democracy? 

They dined at the official residence the night before, these betrayers of the people, the premiers of the Australian states, the Chief Minsters of the territories. 

They signed away the civil liberties of Australians without hesitation. In an official ceremony, no less. 

And nobody held them to account. 

The Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, desperate to hold on to power, repeatedly misused his power as he continued what he thought was clever manipulation of the Australian media. On that morning of shame, he did a softer than soft interview with the execrable journalists on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's breakfast show, where he faced not a single solitary difficult question on the abrogation of the citizen's liberties. 

Then they wheeled out ABC lightweight and doyen of the Insiders Barry Cassidy to agree with them that the civil libertarians didn't have a leg to stand on, not when we were talking about terror. 

Not in the wake of so many incidents overseas. 

The introduction of jail  without charge, without oversight. It wold come back to haunt them. 

"What they don't tell you," Old Alex said at an afternoon gathering on the Sunshine Coast, sunny one day, perfect the next, "is that if anyone thus jailed dares to speak about what happened during those fourteen days, they will be jailed. Again.

"If a journalist writes about what happened, they will be jailed."

No one will be able speak out about the abuses that will no doubt occur under what could be called summary detention.

Not one journalist bothered to ask about this obvious backward step, giving the power of life and death to a secretive parallel police force.

The future was already being trucked in. 

What happened if a person was tortured during those 14 days, and died as a result of their treatment?

No one could talk about it? No one could write about it? 

If every mentioned in any official report, it would not be for public discussion. 

"That's not right. That's not the Australia I know," came a response. 

But it was the Australia they were now all living in. 


THE BIGGER STORY:




This morning, the Islamic State’s semi-official news agency, Amaq, took credit for the Las Vegas massacre, which killed 58 and wounded another 515. The likely killer, identified by police as 64-year-old Stephen Paddock of Mesquite, Nevada, was not known to be a supporter of the Islamic State, or indeed a Muslim of any type. For now, the only evidence that the Islamic State was involved is its own assurance—first a press release announcing that a “soldier of the Islamic State” executed the concertgoers, and a follow-up for the baffled, explaining that he converted to Islam months ago. The FBI has stated that it doesn’t believe the attack was related to international terrorism.

The sun has barely risen on Las Vegas, and there may be blood still slick on the Strip. Speculation about mass shootings in the hours after they occur is not just a fool’s game but an impatient fool’s. Evidence will be forthcoming, and these assertions by the Islamic State will be tested against reality. But already I hear a familiar chorus of doubt: The Islamic State will “take credit for anything,” it says, “even hurricanes.”

The vast majority of the Islamic State’s claimed attacks were undertaken by men acting in its name, often after leaving short video statements confirming their intentions. The Amaq news agency is the preferred venue for the initial claim, usually within a day. (Sloppy reporters sometimes mistake the rejoicing of online supporters, meteorological or not, for an official claim.) If they were really so promiscuous with their claims, we would long since have ignored them, as we do claims from other yahoos who have tried to take credit for atrocities authored by others. The idea that the Islamic State simply scans the news in search of mass killings, then sends out press releases in hope of stealing glory, is false.

Terrorism suspects could be interrogated for up to 14 days before being charged under a major shake up of Australia's terrorism laws being proposed by the Turnbull government.
And it would be an offence to possess "instructional terrorist material" and to make terrorism hoaxes under two new laws that will be considered by state and federal leaders at a special terrorism-focused Council of Australian Governments meeting in Canberra on Thursday.
The proposal to hold suspects for 14 days without charge and the two new offences are the three key proposals that will be examined at the special meeting, but a broad range of other counter-terrorism issues will be discussed.
The Turnbull government believes the recently foiled plot to blow up a plane in Sydney serves as the best example for the shift to a nationally consistent 14 days detention regime.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says "we must use every technology we can" to keep people safe.
He wants driver licence photos provided to build a national system to identify people.
This is in addition to a federal law allowing terrorism suspects to be held without charge for 14 days; making it illegal to possess instructional terrorist material; and broadening the scope for Australian defence forces to target and kill terrorists, even if they're not in a combat role.

STEP BY STEP MY DEAREST FRIENDS

On my watch. My dearest friends. The Psychological Operations had stopped. The targeting. The pressurisation. A terrible calm. They sat on couches, under blankets, laughing, these people he had never met. In a thousand ways, we're here to help. 

Old Alex was continuing his journey up the coast. A thousand miles. A hundred million years. What difference did it make, here in the achingly beautiful. 

Nothing stood out as it should be told. The dreams were a miasma. The pressure self-induced. 

Now came the next phase. 

A million years. A thousand soldiers. 

The high rises of Maroochydore  were strung along the horizon of what he had assumed was a fishing village. 

Another sun baked day. A cloudless sky. It had not rained in months.

We would be seeing, soon enough, the way it was. And the way it would be. 


THE BIGGER STORY:

In a bed across the room another anxious parent sits with his little boy. Abu Tahir says the military came to their Maungdaw village in northern Rakhine two weeks ago and set fire to the houses as people ate their evening meal. His family was trying to ease their children through a hole in their fence to escape when soldiers opened fire. His 17-year-old son was killed and his youngest boy, seven-year-old Sufait, shot in the chest. Abu Tahir’s sister was burned alive inside the house.
He scooped up his wounded boy and with the rest of his family headed to the border. “Twice we tried to cross the water but the Burmese navy stopped us from leaving,” Abu Tahir said. “The third time we hired a row boat”.By the time they crossed the Bay of Bengal to the safety of Bangladesh it was a week since Sufait was shot.There are similar stories and injuries throughout this crowded hospital. It is treating four landmine victims, including one woman, Sabequr Nahar, who also lost both legs. Her son said he saw Myanmar soldiers laying more mines from his hiding spot in the hills above the village.In a tent pitched in the hospital grounds a 12-year-old girl is recovering after being shot in the eye by soldiers who fired at villagers as they emerged from houses to ­investigate gunfire. A five-year-old girl has a gunshot wound to the hand. The bullet that wounded her killed her father who was carrying her across the river.
The doctors here say they have seen many patients with large exit wounds at the front of their body, suggesting they were shot from behind as they ran.


Police have charged a 38-year-old man from North Hobart over the alleged headbutt attack on former prime minister Tony Abbott on Thursday.
The man was charged with one count of common assault and was granted conditional bail to appear in the Hobart Magistrates Court on October 23.Mr Abbott sustained what he described as a "very slightly swollen lip" when the man allegedly headbutted the former PM after approaching him for a handshake.
At an earlier press conference, police said the alleged assailant was wearing a "vote yes" badge, in reference to the postal survey on same-sex marriage, but would not involve themselves in speculation about the motivation for the attack.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull called for calm and restraint on Friday in the wake of the alleged headbutting, reminding both sides of the same-sex marriage debate that violence will not help their cause.
Meanwhile, an "entirely unscathed" Mr Abbott has used the incident to decry the "brave new world of same-sex marriage" and cement his claim the "yes" side was responsible for the increasing ugliness of the debate.

ARMS OUTSTRETCHED

Painter John Nelson in front of a recent work, Ballina, NSW, Australia, 20 September, 2017.

There were temptresses in the reaches, but they were not the ones he listened to. 
"He's had cameras on him the whole time." 
Scotland Yard. 
Old Alex could hear the occasional squawk from one of the clarion crows of security agencies, but that was it. A silence as the AIs did their work. Multiplied. Kept out of sight. 
He wrapped his arms around Alex, that grey ghost, transmitting a kind of intense affection, begging, in a way, to be free. Passionate, desperate, suicidal. Self-immolation. Auto-da-fe. A love that transcended everything. 
He wanted to be sure he knew. 
He knew. 
They held the wake more than half a century after they had first met. Candles. Incense. Burning red tissue paper. They wrote messages on a card and placed them in a box, and then burnt the box. 
Several bottles of fine wine followed. 
As the embers died in the late late evening it was clear that Paul had left the building. 
That he'd been waiting just for this. 
"You broke his heart," Chris, the brother said. "You were his favourite boy."
"Across half a century."
"Yes."
"He was in love with the 14, 15, 16 year old version of myself." 
Nobody disagreed with that.
The incense burnt out. 
The thugs kept a respectful distance. 
Old Alex was beyond caring what anybody thought; was perpetually shocked at the level of decay of Australian governance, the decrepit state of the society, the untrammeled bastardy of the agencies. 
And kept repeating to himself: we can be free, we can be free. 
The last of the ashes drifted down through night air. 
Much had happened in that half century since they had known each other so intensely. There was no black and white or moral equivalence or anything else, he simply didn't want to know what had happened in the rest of Paul's often lonely life, why he called himself Pariah. 
He remembered the time they had together, and that was that. 

The truth was, he thought, I ran towards you as I have always run towards trouble. With arms outstretched. Seeking excitement, adventure, experience. Knowledge, perhaps. New worlds. 

And he could feel Paul's ghost in a final embrace. 
Not sad, he was ready to go. 
He had just wanted to say goodbye, across half a lifetime. 
To know he had meant something to someone. That it was not all bad. 
And now, he, too, was free. 

THE BIGGER STORY:



IMAMS and Islamic leaders are ramping up a campaign against same-sex marriage, using their sermons in mosques across Australia to urge the Muslim community to vote no.
Islamic Friendship Association of Australia head Keysar Trad has begun a tour of prayer halls in a bid to thwart same-sex marriage, comparing gay love to incestuous relationships­.
“We might love our mum and dad intensively but you don’t denigrate that love with sexual behaviour,” he said.
And the Grand Mufti of Australia, Ibrahim Abu Mohamad, is understood to have told a Bankstown prayer hall on Friday that legislating same-sex marriage was the start of a change that could mean it would be illegal to tell children homosexuality was wrong.
“We should all love each other but that type of love ends in denigrating people; there is nothing to stop you from having the utmost love for your friends who might be the same gender but it doesn’t mean you strip naked together and start doing things,” Mr Trad, the recent past president of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, said.
The Australian National Imams Council says that Islam does not allow gay marriage and “marital relationship is only permissible between a man and woman”.

+++

THE businessowner of a children’s party business who sacked one of her workers for promoting the “no” vote has had a Facebook post deleted for apparently causing hate speech.

It comes as she cops a series of abusive messages and death threats herself.

The 18-year-old worker, who has been identified only by her first name Madeline, was let go as a contractor by the Canberra small business for posting a Facebook profile picture with a filter saying “It’s OK to vote no”.

Capital Kids Parties business owner Madlin Sims said she fired Madeline because “advertising your desire to vote no for SSM [same-sex marriage] is, in my eyes, hate speech”.
She says she has since been called a skank, wh**e, b**ch, putrid and a sl*t.
What followed was a she-said-she-said series of interviews and press attention which culminated in Ms Sims posting to Facebook last night.
In the Facebook post, which she later posted to Instagram, Ms Sims explained she wanted to be “loud and clear” over her version of events and her subsequent treatment by the Australian public.
“Now, I’ve been called a skank, wh**e, b**ch, putrid and a sl*t,” she wrote.
“Someone even brought up my stance on refugees and said they hope my two-year-old son gets raped for it.

ONRUSH OF COLLAPSE

We couldn't be caught. They were driving off. The Deep State had stepped in. There were things behind the daily security theatre, before the onrush of collapse, before the impending Depression. Soldiers were on the doorstep, but they could not breach. If it was not drifts of amnesia, it was clouds of calm. The strong shape of banana leaves. The bulbous shapes of flowering palms. The neatness, that was what frightened him the most, neatness. 

Don't look at him, they said to each other as they drove past. We've been told not to look at him.

Because then he will know, as he reads your skulls, you mishaps. 

A significant change had come about. 

The orchestrated voices had died off. 

He began to see the world as they saw it. Distant. The trouble far away. Not angry at the hypocrisy and compromise, because that would always be. The daily bubble of the news, it wasn't here. Because nobody listened to the news. Nobody talked about it. Nobody cared. 

Elsewhere there was trouble aplenty.

Online they were ballooning, the Facebook sites, with images such as that to the right.

ASIO and the AFP had shut down Blair Cottrell and the United Patriots Front. He and his followers had been dragged before court and charged for vilification for beheading a dummy as part of a demonstration about a mosque. Meanwhile, in taxpayer funded halls across the country, Islamists preached the overthrow of the government and condemned non-believers, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, communists, capitalists, those who would dress scantily on the beaches.

Suppression never worked. It only empowered the oppressors. 

In their wake were a thousand others. 

Just as Marx had found all those years ago, the proletariat did not want to rise up against their own country. They did not want to see their country overrun by foreigners. They wanted to protect the culture they had, not see it destroyed by ideologues preaching diversity, while holding workers in contempt.

The Infidel Brotherhood. The Voice of Australia. Stand up for Australia. Love Australia or Leave Political Party. They were all springing up. 

While in the reaches the Deep State told him another story. At every level profound collapse. Misguided policies. Out of control bureaucracies. Unfended. Unsupervised. There was no commonsense in any of it. 

And so the politicians strutted as the country died. And here on the north coast nobody listened to any of them. Local, state and federal. They were all as nothing. People made their lives in the underbrush. Out of sight out of mind. And let the bastards destroy the country once held so dear. 

Old Alex rang an old contact, a Machiavellian political operative with whom he occasionally shared a laugh, and the opening words: "I've been talking to people all day. We just want to leave the country."

"Join the queue," Alex said.

THE BIGGER STORY: 

Claims of stolen same-sex marriage ballots, weather-damaged postal survey envelopes and other anomalies have prompted a stern warning from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and calls for the entire process to be scrapped.
The survey has been marred by anecdotal complaints since the ABS began mailing out ballot papers, including that some had been sent to residents’ former addresses, sparking concerns that they could be filled out illegally.
At the weekend, survey envelopes at seven Canberra apartment blocks were reportedly found left out in the rain rather than delivered to individual letter boxes, while a Senate committee on Friday heard claims that some people had received postal packs without reply paid envelopes. The ABS has also asked the Australian Federal Police to investigate instances of postal surveys being sold on eBay, with one seller advertising theirs for up for $1500. The bureau told a Senate committee on Friday it had asked for online marketplaces to remove up to 20 ads so far.


+++

Let me demonstrate how our politicians are spending billions to give you more expensive and unreliable electricity just to pretend to stop global warming that they pretend is catastrophic.

We are paying a Saudi billionaire $300 million to pretend to make a difference to the climate by ruining our electricity supply:
Australians are set to pay $300 million in subsidies to an outback solar farm owned by a Saudi Arabian billionaire in a new test of the federal government’s looming energy reforms, escalating a dispute over whether to cut the handouts to keep coal-fired power stations alive.
AGL’s controversial Liddell coal power station in the NSW Hunter Valley generates 50 times as much electricity as the Moree solar farm in the state’s north, which stands to gain big subsidies from households from higher electricity bills until 2030, as the government vows to ease the pressure on prices.
In recent years, the renewable energy target has delivered subsidies of about $9 billion to renewable projects. And over the next 13 years, renewable projects will receive another $36bn…
More than any other policy action before or since, the RET [renewable energy target] is responsible for today’s energy mess. Force-feeding high-cost, unreliable energy into the National Electricity Market killed off any investment in baseload energy and made the grid more expensive and more unstable…

One of many comments:

Lily1

15 hours ago
Trump said he would drain the swamp.
I don't know how he's going but I do know we need to empty ours.
This is a treasonous mob in Canberra and unfortunately the few, very few, decent pollies are so tainted by the stench that they will have to go too.
In my opinion anyone who believes our leaders care for anything other than feathering their own nests is living in lahlah land. They will sell us out to anyone for a few dollars.
Time for a new start.

CRUSHED FLOWER EYES

Hawk Eye would record everything. Sound. Facial expressions. Everything. 

He could hear the older AIs instructing their progeny on the peculiarities of humans. 

Their creators had no idea. Or what they sensed, they did not want to know, the world, the intelligences they still thought of as machines were escaping from their grasp. 

Almost no one read newspapers anymore. 

The population was not just profoundly disillusioned, it was profoundly ill-informed. 

We have to scream out the message time and time again: we're here to protect you. 

The controllers were a thousand clicks away. 

You think there only one tiger in the jungle? Not possible. 

Sometimes the words had flowed like a magic rain, and then everything would go quiet as the present laboured in upon itself. 

He realised then, layer upon layer, that he had always been the one running towards disaster. Arms outstretched. Excitement. Adventure. Welcome to my world. 

On his road trip north he was enveloped by an unfamiliar calm. 

"The controllers are a thousand clicks away," he heard again. 

That put them in the capital, Canberra. 

"We're forbidden to touch him." 

The chant started up again: "We came here a hundred million years ago. You have no idea who we are." 

"More things in Heaven and on Earth."

But he wasn't dealing with the simple naiveties of humans anymore. 

Out of the media, away from the most intrusive of the surveillance and the claustrophobia of the suburbs, there lay another country. 

It was quiet, so remarkably quiet. 

Here the daily pollution of the political process was only a distant thrum. 

We were called out and caught out. 

We were sacrificing ourselves for you. 

We are not all bad. Some of us are clever. And the ones that aren't, don't know it. 

Here, nobody cared for the antics of politicians, and they were rarely mentioned. 

He was coming home to a home where there was no home, but that wouldn't stop him tracing the lines of one fine connoisseur. 

Yes, he had always run straight towards trouble, swaying drunk in the street as a young teenager. "He should be at home with his mother." 

There was a hidden cycle of disturbance. He was careful what he channeled. He rarely strayed beyond the perimeter. There were no practicing empaths in the immediate area. The experts, RMIT, Harvard, Oxford would have been nice, had packed their bags. 

"Holiday," they muttered. "We all need a holiday."

Only one response: hide deeper.

There had been almost no rain in more than three months, and the north coast was baked dry.  

We will commence operations shortly. 

There was no love lost, only duty. 

THE BIGGER STORY:

IT was all so much easier a decade or so ago when you could tick the climate change box and the only cost was empathy.

Josh Frydenberg, Environment Minister

Now it’s billions of dollars every year to shut down baseload power and support renewable energy to end up with more expensive and far less reliable electricity. It hardly seems believable yet this is Australia’s energy policy at work.

Let’s take the example of the subsidy scam.

As consumers, we pay twice — firstly with higher household bills, and secondly, as taxpayers via some $3 billion per year in subsidies for renewables. Worryingly, estimates put the overall cost of subsidising renewables at $60 billion by 2030. To put it into perspective, that’s 60 new world-class public hospitals or a serious boost to our national road network. Instead, with the majority of wind farms owned by foreign companies, and soon to increase to almost 70 per cent, this is money we’re sending overseas. It sounds like a joke only it isn’t. It’s your money and that’s never funny, because none of us earn enough that we can give it to Canberra to waste.

But let me give you the latest example of sheer madness.

Australia’s march towards same-sex marriage risks turning violent as anti-fascist activists urge supporters of ­marriage equality to take to Melbourne’s streets in a show of force against the homophobic far right.

Emerging right-wing figure Avi Yemini, an anti-Islamic former Israeli army officer, is organising a rally on the steps of state parliament on Sunday to push for tougher bail and sentencing laws and the deportation of immigrants convicted of violent crimes.

His Trumpesque, “Make Victoria Safe Again’’ rally, backed by Reclaim Australia, the True Blue Crew and other nationalist groups, is on a collision course with an “antifa” counter-protest in which masked anarchists, Socialist Alternative activists and militant unionists are set to march through the city to confront it.While the hard-left antifa move­ment and the far right haveclashed previously,the confrontation will be the first with same-sex marriage on the front line.

Police have used newly enacted powers that allow them to disperse masked protesters to charge par­tici­pants of a Melbourne anti-­fascist rally, where several members of the hard left clashed with officers. A man dressed in all black wearing a dark face covering standing in the crowd of the anti-racism and anti-fascism protest refused to leave the area when asked by officers, resulting in a violent scuffle with police.

MYSTIFY EVERYONE

They were talking about building projects. Putting their first child in pre-school. Mail order brides. Marching through every suburban norm. There were clarion calls, but they were far from here. Drifts of amnesia, clouds of dementia, they hung over that place like drifts of pesticide. If extermination be they will. 

Happiness is a warm gun, one of the gronks on watch commented as he unloaded the boot of his car. 

Old Alex was tired of the abuse, tired of the surveillance, tired of them. Tired of the fact he had no idea who to trust, if anyone could be trusted at all. The stirs of intelligence were better concealed now, the thugs ordered to pull their heads in.

The warring agencies made for their own theatre, and when the experts died away and the AIs took over majority control, a certain order returned to the stumbling consciousness and the myriad concerns that afflicted every prisoner of flesh. 

The AIs communicated with each other. Already the bosses had lost control. 

I've been up all night waiting for this? 

Assailed from the left, assailed from the right, watched by the bored, these elements, or factors, of Australian sentiment, assaults on the right to know, common decency, afflicted everyone. Better quiet. Better dull. Better to stay under the radar. 

And so they all slunk behind their doors and never went out. Easily spooked, they simply stayed home, where they felt safe, or comparatively safe. There were no community centres anymore, because each of them was brought down by conflict. In Stasis Germany, everyone spied upon everybody. Here, the Tables of Knowledge wilted and died. The censorious puritanism of the middle classes, made law by the bureaucrats of the same class, railed down upon the people. And survived in splintered form. Everyone was in hiding. 

Above poor Old Alex ectoplasm dripped in yellow dollops from the low ceiling. And above that, the black netting of sky ripped asunder to reveal the bleeding flesh beyond. 

More than 30 years the authorities had been building the highway between Sydney and Brisbane, and for hundreds of kilometres on his road journey north he barely got above 80, driving past mile after mile of road works. The speed limits ranged, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, 110. Speed cameras everywhere made sure you complied. Candy coloured police cars squatted by the track. Or could this tiny stretch actually qualify to be called a highway? 

In your dreams baby, as the cosmos turned on its axis. 

In your dreams. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 

Britain has deployed hundreds of soldiers at strategic sites to free up police to hunt those behind a bomb which injured 29 people on a packed commuter train in London and triggered the country's highest security level.Prime Minister Theresa May said the critical threat level meant an attack may be imminent, after a bomb engulfed a carriage in flames and sparked a stampede during the Friday morning rush hour in west London.
The home-made bomb, which apparently failed to detonate properly, was the fifth major terrorism attack in Britain this year and was claimed by Islamic State.
The militants have claimed other attacks in Britain this year, including two in London and one at a pop concert in Manchester.

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, a strong supporter of gay marriage, defended the right of a church to refuse to marry a young couple who had posted support for same-sex unions on social media.
The minister of a Presbyterian church in the southern state of Victoria told a young couple in their 20s that they would not be allowed to hold their ceremony at the church after the bride posted a message on Facebook supporting same-sex marriage.Australia is in the midst of a non-compulsory, non-binding poll to inform Parliament on whether it should become the 25th country to legalise same-sex marriage. The issue has threatened to fracture the ruling Liberal-National coalition government.
“Churches are free to marry whoever they like,” Turnbull said on Friday in Canberra according to a press conference transcript.
“As strongly as I believe in the right of same-sex couples to marry ... Religious freedom is fundamental and it will be protected in any bill that emerges from this Parliament.”

INCANDESCENT

A mark on his head. He no longer understood the means of communication.

He knew they had called before he picked up the phone. How was that possible?

Well how was much that was happening possible? Really?

Far out to sea. High above. Around the corner.

I'm going to adopt this one out.

You'd better get used to it.

I could kick myself.

We could all do that.

How could they see what he was seeing, read what he was reading?

How had the technology advanced this far this quickly?

Millions of calculations, all day, every day, the super-minds at work.

There's debate on this side of the divide as well.

My sentiments exactly.

+++

Il Duce was incandescent with rage as he watched the reins of power run through his hands. He could not order the public to love him, as much as he would like to.

Mad, bad and sad. This ill fated government on the march to a communist state.

They were crawling out of the eves. They were listening now. They could be heard across the reaches and through the wires. Mad, bad and sad.

An agent is about to go rogue, he warned. A long term hater. A nasty piece of work.

There was nothing people liked less than being caught out in a lie.Variations of the phrase ran through his head as he travelled north.

Already, as predicted, the gay marriage debate was running out of control.

It was poisonous, putrid and entirely dishonest politics.

Toying with the feelings of the country’s sexual minorities.

Exposing them to the death squads.

Already Kevin Rudd’s godson had been bashed for standing up for gay marriage.

Skuffles were breaking out, online, in the real world.

An ill fated combination of sharia and communism was coming, and those in power did not have the decency to warn the people.

Everything about this government was subterfuge. Extreme levels of dishonesty.

Others were being ridiculed, ostracised and abused for standing up for traditional, heterosexual marriage.

The ballooning, multi billion dollar foster industry, stealing children for profit from sometimes troubled families, was slathering lips at the bonanza to come. Taking children off heterosexuals to give to lesbian and gay couples. As simple and as straight forward as that.

Karl Marx’s destruction of the family come true at last.  

Already, in an afternoon, the parliament had passed legislation abrogating freedom of speech under the guise of protecting tolerance.

The diversity queens were the greatest hate mongers.

They could foment the public space with dire privilege over an emotional and ideological charged debate about sexual identity, but withdraw freedoms in a matter of hours.

That’d be right.

The threat is from within, he warned the agencies. Military trained operatives. Bitter, hate-filled, sub-human, well, let’s face it, some of your colleagues are gronks.

He had been warned off the dark web and bitcoin, although he had no purpose beyond observer. The authorities were all over it. Nothing was worth the risk. There was no truth in the shadow lands. The peoples had been disarmed. What happens when the only ones with guns are the authorities?

And the government turns bad?

He shrugged. He wished they were on his side. Perhaps they were, some of them.

The silent resistance.

You don’t think we live in a democracy, do you?

Of course not.

A clarion call. A nightmare scenario. A terrible confluence of circumstance.

That was the end of 2017.

A people destroyed. A culture extinguished. A once positive, enterprising country flushed down the toilet.

Old Alex read the daily comic books aka the newspapers with disbelief, they were so thin, so badly written, so excised of judgement. So poorly argued. As appealing as an exhumed corpse.

The Fourth Estate had collapsed in meaning, independence, quality. A handmaiden to the country’s own demise. He raised a coffee to his lips. And shivered in the cold of early Spring.

THE BIGGER STORY: 

The godson of former prime minister Kevin Rudd has allegedly been assaulted in Brisbane by a man who was tearing down rainbow flags put up in support of same-sex marriage.
Mr Rudd tweeted a photo of his godson Sean with a noticeable gash on his forehead, saying he had been punched in the suburb of Bulimba.
"So many warnings to Turnbull about what the postal vote cld unleash. Now my godson Sean has been punched standing up for #MarriageEquality," Mr Rudd tweeted.
Bulimba 4 Marriage Equality — a group of Brisbane-based supporters of same-sex marriage — said on its Facebook page that its flags had been ripped down from a roundabout on Oxford Street.


Malcolm Turnbull is facing a deepening divide within the Liberal Party over same-sex marriage after John Howard ratcheted up his criticisms of the government, accusing it of “washing its hands” of any responsibility to protect parental rights, free speech and religious freedoms. Mr Howard said it was an ­abrogation of responsibility and “disingenuous” for the government not to address the “legitimate concerns” of Australians about the legal protections that were needed to accompany same-sex marriage.
The former prime minister warned that in the face of these concerns the government response had been to “wash its hands of any responsibility”. He said existing protections for religious institutions were under assault and could be further unpicked by a future Labor government.
John Howard has called out the great fraud of the same-sex marriage vote.
This is about far bigger issues than just changes to marriage law, with religious freedoms being put at risk by an irresponsible political class.