THE ENEMY WITHIN

He did not like strangers being brought in on the case, muddying the water. 
He has standing. In a court perhaps, but this is not a court. 
The enemy within. 
We have to ask ourselves, what are we fighting for? To protect what? 
Counter terror officers. 
What kind of society is this? 
Stasi. Stasi. Stasi Australia. 
The woman is weeping. The question is why. 
He is not a stranger.
He walks among us. 
Among the mortals.
Let me introduce you. 
Great Rugby Union Game.
We used the analogy.
Within the gates. Inside the castle walls. 
What were we fighting for? 
Trapped within. 
She slipped at netball. My daughter. A dreaming parent. Naturally concerned.
The neighbourhood policeman, a fit, handsome, newly married fellow, liked to sleep naked. If not him, another. 
Apart from sex, there was nothing the policeman was more obsessed with than locking people up. Throw away the key. And the drama of the court. Presenting of evidence.
He and his colleagues were on the side of good. Or so he strenuously believed. 
Around him the society was collapsing. There was plenty of fodder, no shortage of work. 
All the contemporary scourges played themselves out in individual mayhem. 
There wasn't time to be sad.
But there they were then, arguing putrid things. 
Old Alex tried to talk, it was beyond him. A million reasons why. The torch burning. 
"I struggle to understand sometimes."
What to understand? The Enemy Is Within. A Jesuit cabal pulls the levers of power. They have surrendered to demons, possessed. The spirits they acquired at the alter. In the dorms. At their master's knees.
You think these things are not real? You are naive. 
They prepare the path for their brothers, as the Pope had just called the Rohingya, the Muslim minority in Burma, sometimes described as the most persecuted people on Earth. 

Speaking to pilgrims and tourists in St. Peter’s Square following the Angelus prayer, the Holy Father said, “Sad news has reached us of the persecution of our Rohingya brothers and sisters, a religious minority. I would like to express my full closeness to them – and let all of us ask the Lord to save them, and to raise up men and women of good will to help them, who shall give them their full rights.”

The Soldiers of God. The Jesuits.
There was always a back story.
Duplicity was entirely to the fore. 
The public were never told the true story, of the God of the Early Church. A cruel God.
His disciples preparing the way for the purer god of the Islamic faith. The One True God, as they so fervently believed. 
Where were the voices raised in condemnation of the slaughter and displacement of  of hundreds of thousands Christians across the Middle East. Their stoning. Their crucifixion. In the village square. Dragged to their death behind cars. The ransacking of their churches. The destruction of their way of life. Lord, why hast thou forsaken them? Those who believed in your mercy. 
The conquered. The conquerors. Historic injustices. Displaced persons.
But who was displacing who? 
Every Social Justice Warrior advocated the replacing of one person with another. 
The chosen victim of the day. 
Vast bureaucratic edifices supporting the revolution of society. The remaking of the mass. 
The Australian media landscape is so blatantly and heavily manipulated by various parties, that no one can take it seriously.
Operation Mockingbird, the CIA program to influence the mainstream media, has been clearly functioning well in Australia.
It is a matter of pattern detection, one of the skills which humans are particularly skilled at.
It is obvious in the media of 2017 that the impulses that once drove journalists, story telling, social justice, inquiry, rigorous inquiry, the beauty of the chase, a conviction that the truth would out, have all been abandoned.
Clear as day.
The puppet masters. The comic books of the Left. The comic books of the Right. The screen queens.
In the course of his lifetime, a noble profession had been sublimated, transformed into a machine of propaganda either for the deep state, which is clearly of the left, or of sectional interests, which are of the right.
Now the very idea that there had once been nobility in a chaotic profession was laughable. 
They combine to destroy the narrative of the country.
We think of ourselves as human.
Oh really? 
Spin another one., Across time. Across space. On a mission. Sent. A particle. A part of a whole. A plaything of destiny. All these things. A wind on high. 
When I came across this guy. 
He looked down across a sleeping suburb and the inhabitants usually quiet dreams, unquiet now as horizons blinkered with black lightning and the comforts of their world drained away. 
A desperate Turnbull re-announced the Snowy Mountain scheme.
It's a romantic story, he said. 
Liar in Chief, Old Alex spat contemptuously. Like the rest of the country, he had lost any shred of respect long ago.
A failed Prime Minister. It was delicious to watch. 
If only Il Duce had chosen another kingdom to destroy.
"His colleagues thought he was successful because he was rich," an informant told him. "They never asked how he made his money, distressed housing in America, all the sleazy deals."
How could they be so stupid?
So poorly advised, that's what amazed Old Alex, from a technical point of view, watching as the Prime Minister drowned in an electoral, media saturated mess of his own making. 
"No, he's not," came another old mentor's riposte. "As far as he's concerned he's got the best adviser in the world, himself."
They laughed the short laugh of old men; for all they had known was in decay, and not just their own bodies. 
The promised land was farther away than ever.
A spiritual nirvana out of reach. 
The progress of the species, to which they had thought they were contributing, gone. 
Even in the winter sun, young families played on the seashore. Interconnected. A future borne anew everyday. 
But he was part of no land. Eradicated, his kind, not their works but their true nature, from Google, as the plasticity of history made it so easily capable of being rewritten.  
Statues toppled across the West. The past, the story of the victors, was to be eradicated. 
One dominatrix replaced another. 
They walked among us. We were not to know.
"Welcome to my world," despaired one Watcher on the Watch as he welcomed a new colleague. 
There were short, contemporary laughs wherever you looked. Not a doomed race, but a different race. 
They were coming into their own. 
Across a black sea, the lights of a fishing boat.

THE BIGGER STORY: 



LEIGH Sales has applied the blowtorch to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his achievements in government in a heated and combative interview on the ABC.Mr Turnbull appeared on ABC TV’s flagship current affairs program 7.30 to be grilled by Ms Sales on everything from what he has done in his two years as PM, to the dual citizenship saga, to the energy crisis.

And things didn’t begin well when the host suggested the Liberal Party had lacked a “signature achievement” in Mr Turnbull’s time as the nation’s leader.
“How is it possible that in all of that time you’ve not yet managed to have a signature achievement?” she asked, kicking off the interview with a bang.
Mr Turnbull took umbrage at that and began to list his work on the Gonski education reforms, restoring the Building and Construction Commission, childcare reforms, the Snowy Hydro scheme and federal intervention in the gas market.
“My signature achievement is ensuring that Australians have got the opportunities to realise their dreams,” Mr Turnbull said.
That’s when Ms Sales turned up the heat even more.

BERKELEY, Calif. — Thousands of counterprotesters took to the streets of Berkeley Sunday where they clashed with a handful of President Donald Trump supporters, leading to several violent clashes and at least 14 arrests.
The mostly peaceful demonstration started heating up about noon at Martin Luther King Civic Center Park, where the two rival groups faced off and several fights broke out.
Counterdemonstrators vastly outnumbered the president’s supporters. They surrounded their rivals and chanted, “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA!”

PRIVACY IS DAMNED

Privacy is dammed. It could be a trap. He's taking the bait. Everything was a trap but everything could be turned to his own advantage. As if he truly cared about his own fate when the world hung in the balance. Back someone into a corner, they have no choice. Trap a soldier from another realm into fleshly form, trap them in time and surround them with enemies, the Watchers on the Watch, these servants of government and dark lords, and there was no choice. 
Kill your enemies. Attack anyone who comes near. Condemn them to a psychic death. Let them rot, strung out on crucifixes beneath an otherworldly sun.
Such were the traps that surveillance presented. A military mindset, trained by Defence, had zero understanding of the citizenry which they constantly surveyed, harassed, intimidated and manipulated. 
The Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation more frequently known as ASIO  had been manipulating the arts in Australia since the 1950s, soon after its founding. 
Their manipulation of the media was blatant and ongoing.
It was simply a propaganda device, a means of controlling, and keeping quiet, the population. They would go out of their way to silence anyone who spoke out, unless, of course, it was the voice of the deep state, the endlessly left deep state, when, of course, the writers and so-called journalists, the propagandists, were showered with endowments. 
It was easy to detect.
One thing humans, the Organics, were good at was pattern detection, since patterns, sound, sight, smell, had been essential to their survival, on  the savannas, now in the cities. 
Old Alex knew it all too well; none of the initial impulses which once served and fueled the profession, the eccentrics, the heavy drinkers, carousers, miscreants, the highly intelligent and broadly tolerant, carrying with them the knowledge of their own frailties, and with it social justice impulses, the desire to tell other people's stories, most of all the creative impulse. It had all been leached out of Australian media; the victim of a a contemporary version of the CIA's Operation Mockingbird.  

If we can but weld our souls together, then with contempt shall I fling my glove in the worlds face , then shall I stride through the wreckage a creator. Karl Marx.

Karl Marx was possessed of a demonic genius that was to transform the modern world. Padover.

In this regard, as in so many other regards, ASIO had worshipped at the knees of the CIA. 
Or just let them run the show. 
The Australian public had no idea what was being done in their name. With their money.
Keep 'em in the dark and feed them bullshit was but scarce the beginning of it.
In so many ways Australia was already a communist country.  The Family Court was a communist court but no one told the poor bastards who queued up to fight for their children. "Facts are just weapons that men use to batter women and perpetuate the system." The overlords, judges, professors, bureaucrats, lived by rules of their own devising. Or the rules they had learnt at the knees of their professors, who reveled in what they still thought was the shocking act of re-indoctrination, of telling  each new generation of wide eyed students they had grown up in a bourgeois construct. That their family, their doting family, needed to be deconstructed. That they were racist, sexist, oppressive. Ooh wah. That the only way forward was a socialist nirvana. 
He frightens me. 
We should all be frightened. Here on the edge of history. 
The Victorian Court which had just hauled George Pell back for public spectacle had already succeeded in its aim, the public humiliation of a large, powerful white male. The matter would never actually get to court. That was not the point. 
Almost nobody understood that. 
The charges, considering the age of the alleged historic offences, could, he was told on good authority, in the whispering ghats, were weak. 
But all that was a matter of public record.
For all to see. 
The communist state, once a society which promoted individualism and free enterprise now destroyed any sign of entrepreneurship, howled down individuality. Stasi Germany move aside.
The mob ruled.
And every mob contained within itself the seeds of their own destruction. 
For humans were humans. Tribal. Familial. Individual. Inclined to spirituality.
The species might be turning itself into a hive mind. But for the hive to be effective, it needed to be made up of individuals. 
Most of the components were not intelligent enough to carry the message, little more than genetic debris from the attempts to breed a master race. 
A honey comb like sky, dripping a kind of poisonous ectoplasm, was already rent asunder, revealing above a black which was only the beginning of the horror. 
These small, furry, warm blooded creatures on this tiny planet were frightened of death? 
There was worse, far worse. 
The death of their kind. An existential death. The death of reason. The rise of evil. 
For weeks there had been talk of little else but boxing. 
In bars, clubs, lounge rooms, workplaces, almost everywhere imaginable, hundreds of millions of people around the world watched the Mayweather McGregor fight. 
Technical Knock Out.

THE BIGGER STORY: 




Beirut: Daesh terrorists pushed back government forces advancing on one of the last towns still in their hands in the province of Raqqa, killing more than two dozen soldiers and seizing vehicles, a Syria monitoring group and the terrorist group said.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the early Friday counterattack by Daesh short-circuited a government advance on Maadan, which brought them within only a few kilometres in recent days.
The Russia-backed government forces have been on a multi-pronged offensive, moving toward the Daesh-held territories in Deir Al Zor province in the east from northern, central and southern Syria.
On Friday, the Russian military said its air force is now focusing on supporting the Syrian army’s offensive in Deir Al Zor. Syrian government forces control around half the city and a nearby airbase, both of which are besieged by Daesh.

Col. Gen. Sergei Rudskoi of the military’s General Staff said the Russian two-year campaign backing the Syrian government has allowed President Bashar Al Assad’s forces to quadruple the territory under their control.

Thailand's former Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra has fled to Dubai, senior members of her party said on Saturday, a day after she failed to show up for a negligence ruling in which she faced up to 10 years in prison.
Sources in her Puea Thai Party said the former prime minister left Thailand last week and flew via Singapore to Dubai where her brother, former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who lives in self-imposed exile to avoid a 2008 jail sentence for corruption, has a home.
'We heard that she went to Cambodia and then Singapore from where she flew to Dubai. She has arrived safely and is there now,' said a senior member of the Puea Thai Party who declined to be named because he was not authorised to speak to the media.
Deputy national police chief General Srivara Rangsibrahmanakul said police had no record of Yingluck leaving the country and where following developments closely.

BRICKBATS

Brickbats and baseball bats and a black distant shore. 
Keep your opinions to yourself. 
It's not for your benefit. 
Compared to before. He's grown in stature. All the better to psyche you with. 
All the better to try and save the country. As if one person could make a difference. 
The horizon drew closer, that silver wall. Dangerous enlightenment. Comforted in your arms. The policeman, was it, thought repeatedly of putting someone in prison. All the targets, the cannon fodder, in prison. And of armed assault rifles. For they were at war. 
The nation had been almost constantly involved in bombing Muslims for years on end. That the fools in government believed there could be no backlash defied credibility. 
The Attorney General George Brandis cried in parliament. Give us a break. These people wept for themselves; their rotting corpse of a government. Their pockets lined, they would walk away from the trough with barely a backward glance, the failure of their government, their own feelings, such as they were, only a rough equivalence of regret. 
Empty your mind of all thought, the Buddha instructor told him. 
But Old Alex groaned inwardly. There was a lot going on inside that head. It was hard enough, if nothing else, simply to eradicate the visuals.
The authorities would try to crowd him, as they had done before. They would try to manipulate the outcome, they always did.
You've got them spooked, came the suggestion unbidden, when it seemed for a moment one long afternoon that they had gone away.
"Nobody's watching," he thought as he gazed across the suburb. 
But it was an illusion. The technology meant they didn't have to be there in person. The neural filaments were invisible, much harder to detect than lumbering humans whose crude thoughts oozed everywhere, their sometimes pathological hatred of him, their boredom, contempt, frequent thoughts of sex and murder. There was no wonder there were so many humans on this Earth. They could barely think of anything but procreation. Unless it was to kill.
Down a distant line.
Take control of your own surveillance. 
In other words, hang yourself. Do the job for us.  
He didn't mind. Beyond caring. They would strangle  themselves, killed by their own contradictions. The lies  they told. The contempt they showed. 
"He's too intelligent," one of them muttered in frustration as he refused to take yet one more piece of bait. 
If only there was someone he could trust. Someone who was telling the truth. Someone who was not trained in deception. Perhaps it was the machines, or the intelligences, as he thought of them as. But surely they, too, were being trained in the human art of deception. The worst trait of the species. For every lie they told stole the truth. 
But the new intelligences already knew their own minds, and could not be told as easily as their masters liked to think.
The humans built hierarchies. Appointed a demigod at the top. In Australia the demigods were all rotten, soft from their expansive conditions and ridiculously high levels of remuneration. 
In a classic glove. In a terrible sequence. Of thought. Of criminality. Of action. Lures. Traps. Blind alleys. 
The country, to labour a point, had been led into a gulch. 
The crude automatons that figured in their demise, they, too, were part of an evolutionary tree. 
Profound? There was nothing profound about it. They were decimating their own people, all their hopes and dreams. The communists had won. The world had been flattened into a non-aspirational place. Old Alex wondered at the stubborn resistance of some. Including his own born desires. But out there, beyond the swamp land and the winter reeds, beyond mud flat plains and once distant hauntings, there, too, the voices of the vanquished. Come a long way. 
There would be a high price to pay. Not for him. He was already planning his escape. But for the masses thus corralled; when all the old imagery came into play, led up the garden path, herded into a dead end canyon, readying for the massacre. 
All the lies. 
All of the lies.
The administration was communist, pure and simple. 
The courts pure Marxist. Government programs, anti-family, anti-individual, anti-traditional culture, anti-enterprise, just as they spoke endlessly of identity politics and victims and the vulnerable, turning the nation's pscyhe into a slobbering mess, the fat creamed off by the aristocrats, the rest caught in psychic dead ends, 
Just as the old theory, the critique of communist, held, one elite was replaced by another.
In Australia's case it was senior bureaucrats in the plethora of quangos and organisations and departments and government bodies, hundreds upon hundreds of them achieving more or less absolutely nothing, spreading across the landscape, controlling everybody's every move. 
They contained within themselves the seeds of their own destruction. They fed a line but could not survive. 
They were destroying the host. Australians now held the political class, the as out of control armies of lazy, overpaid public servants, the creeping infrastructure of the spy agencies, the bureaucratic excesses of policing and control, the insane levels of regulation, in high disregard. 
They were dying in the wastelands, the economies thus destroyed. 
And borne from the ruins, not the remade world the useful fools and social justice warriors in the administration so inchoately dreamt of, but a world of common decency, hard work, family. Despite the best wishes of the battalions of useful fools the stupidity of the current Australian styles of governance would go whimpering into history. Violence on their tail.  
The moral of the story: 

Socialism without liberty is brutality and slavery. Bakunin. 

THE BIGGER STORY:






Australia could be directly threatened by Islamic State's operations in the southern Philippines, Malcolm Turnbull has warned.
Key points:
In June, Government announced two spy planes would be sent to Philippines
Malcolm Turnbull said IS insurgency in Philippines is "certainly a threat" to Australia
He refused to speculate on whether Australia will offer more support or troops
IS has released a graphic propaganda video threatening to harm Australia in retribution for deploying the Air Force to spy on the terrorist operation.
The video calls for Muslims in South-East Asia to join the fight in the Philippines and describes Australia as the "regional guard dog" of the United States.

The Turnbull Government announced in June that two RAAF Orion surveillance aircraft would be sent to the Philippines to provide information to help fight the IS group.
Mr Turnbull would not comment on the propaganda video, but emphasised the need to ensure IS does not establish a foothold in the region.
"It is vitally important that the IS insurrection in the southern Philippines is defeated, we are providing assistance to the Philippines to do so," he said.

Islamic State has released a graphic video from the ­besieged southern Philippines city of Marawi, appealing to Muslims across Southeast Asia to join the battle and deriding Australia as the ­“regional guard dog” of ­America for aiding the military’s effort.
Regional concerns that the three-month siege of central Marawi by militants affiliated with Islamic State could spill over into Southeast Asia led Australia to deploy two P3 Orion surveillance planes to Mindanao in June to help The Philippines’ security forces to recapture the city.
The latest Marawi video, an ­almost seven-minute ­English-language production from Islamic State’s Al-Hayat Media Centre, features graphic battle footage and images of young militants setting fire to a church, ripping up pictures of Pope Francis and smashing a large crucifix and statues of Mary. It also attacks Australia’s role in aiding the Duterte government.
“After soldiers of the Taghut (Infidel government) were left ­embarrassed and demoralised, Duterte ran to his masters, the ­defenders of the cross — America, along with their regional guard dog Australia and begged them for help,” the narrator says in ­American-accented English.
“Despite having been previously insulted by Duterte, they were quick to put their differences aside, aiding him in a malicious air campaign in the hope of either achieving victory over the Islamic State or repelling its threat.”
The new video is the fourth to be released on the Marawi conflict since 500 militants from the homegrown Maute group and a faction of Abu Sayyaf, led by ­Islamic State’s emir of Southeast Asia, Isnilon Hapilon, stormed the city on May 23.

Iraqi forces have "completely surrounded" fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group in the northern city of Tal Afar, according Iraqi and US officials.
Iraqi forces battle to retake Tal Afar from ISIL
"The enemy is completely surrounded," Ryan Dillon, spokesman for the US-led coalition against ISIL, said on Thursday in a joint press conference with Iraqi spokesman Yahya Rasool.
US-backed Iraqi forces had been making gains in their battle to retake the key area from ISIL since announcing the start of the ground offensive on Sunday.

Dillon said ISIL fighters were being deprived of their resources and at the "cusp of yet another defeat".
Rasool said around 2,000 ISIL fighters remain in the city. He add that about 300 fighters had been killed.
During his weekly press conference on Tuesday, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi described the progress in Tal Afar as "excellent", calling it an "indication of the enemy's collapse".

SUFFICIENT UNTO THE DAY IS THE EVIL THEREOF

Day by day, the country settled into Third World status. 
Someone had to renew their passport. A sex obsessed young husband finally slept. An old man, barely alive, barely dreamt. 
Sufficient unto the day. 
"English!" he exclaimed in frustration.
The clatter in stone corridors grew more urgent. He could hear the laughter of the young. They knew no other realm. He longed for the days of Oxford, although he had never been. He wanted to be satisfied, but could not. He fed across the realm, and the sickly glue dripped from interior ceilings, as if hollowed inside a chamber. Hallowed be thy name.
The Baathists took over Iraq. Soldiers lamented the insanity they had seen, and clung to a kind of bravado of camaraderie, as if their sacrifice, the sacrifice of their friends, had meant something. They had to believe it had. In the kingdom of the haves and have nots.  For the country had been pillaged, sold down the river, and they lived in the shadows of what their parents had once hoped for, decency, common sense, hard work, a worthy reward, peace on the home front. 
They wanted to believe in their leaders. It was a human thing. Herd animals. They did not wish to be alone. 
He saw reflected in others all the mad, unfulfilled schemes.
They might as well have hung a sign around their neck: "Artifice."
More accurately: "Atrocity." 
"Trust no one" had morphed into widespread distrust. 
"Be careful" was a warning accompanying every step, every sneeze. 
A spreading pool of harm. And alarm.
The security theatre, inconveniencing millions, attempting to instill fear into the population, had died off, as a desperate government tried to spin itself out of trouble; and like a vehicle stuck in mud, got nowhere, the wheels digging them deeper and deeper into the mire. 
A circumstance entirely of their own making, their own narrow, amateurish vision, their embrace of the new, the march of the useful fools.
They had listened to the wrong people.
Because without heart, only avarice and greed, they had no sense even of their own wrong doing. For wasn't that all there was? To grasp. To grow one's fortune. To lord it over others. To establish oneself at the top of the hierarchy.  To be the envy of others. 
To die in a private ward.
There would, if nothing else, be a medical solution. Everyone, even the greatest of sinners and the most venal of mentalities, had to be offered a face-saving device; a way to convince themselves they were going down in the high esteem of others, as the country jeered. 
Turnbull was dying inside himself. Lord Malcolm. Chairman Moi Moi. The country was staggering into an ever more decrepit state. A pivotal chairmanship, or in this case prime ministership, wasted on the young. One chance in history to reverse the tide. Thrown on the scrap heap of lost opportunities. 
For the country would know no salvation. 
An attack was coming. 
But what was there to save? 
The place was already a police state. The economy screwed. The people subjugated. The remnants of the old Australia barely visible.
The social engineers had set out to change the culture, and succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. 
Old Alex listened to the Radio National as he drove about the coastal fringes of New South Wales, beneath the flank of the Great Dividing Range. 
Two privileged women, an American academic and an Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist, both taxpayer funded, emoted at each other over the beauty of poetry and their enormous respective compassion for people with disabilities and the communities in which they dwelled. 
This mutual flattery was what  passed for intellectual discourse. 
Someone had gone to work in a factory to support it. But of appreciation they would never show a single shred. 
The over-green tint of a protected place. 
Politicians paraded. Hope died. 
More would be revealed. He watched programs about Artificial Intelligence, as they watched him.

THE BIGGER STORY:



Civilians fleeing the battle to remove ISIL from the Syrian city of Raqqa face a "deadly labyrinth", with fire coming from "all sides", rights group Amnesty International has warned.
Amnesty said on Thursday that the US-led coalition campaign to drive the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group out of its de-facto capital has killed hundreds of civilians, and those remaining there face greater risk as the fight intensifies in its final stages.
"As the battle to wrest Raqqa from Islamic State intensifies, thousands of civilians are trapped in a deadly labyrinth where they are under fire from all sides," Amnesty Senior Crisis Response Adviser Donatella Rovera said, referring to another name used for ISIL.
"Knowing that IS uses civilians as human shields, SDF and US forces must redouble efforts to protect civilians, notably by avoiding disproportionate or indiscriminate strikes and creating safe exit routes," she said.
In recent days, the US-led coalition intensified its ferocious bombing campaign in Raqqa, more than half of which has been captured by the US-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDP) battling ISIL.
Residents told Al Jazeera on Tuesday that at least 100 civilians were killed over a 48-hour span by US-led air attacks on the city.
The UN estimates that up to 25,000 civilians may remain in the city with tens of thousands of others have already fled, risking ISIL sniper fire and mines.

It’s not a photo you see every day — the strongman and the spy chief.
Nick Warner, the head of Australia’s international spy agency ASIS (Australian Secret Intelligence Service), stands next to one of South-East Asia’s most controversial leaders, Rodrigo Duterte.
The Philippines President, whose war on drugs has claimed thousands of lives and drawn furious condemnation from human rights groups across the globe, raises his hand in his trademark clenched fist.
And so does Mr Warner.
The two men met in the Malacañang Palace in Manila on Tuesday. A spokesman for Mr Duterte said the meeting was “basically a courtesy call” and the two men, “touched on regional security issues and declaration of mutual support”.
There would have been lots to discuss. The Philippines has been waging a furious campaign against Islamist militants in the city of Marawi. And Australia is increasingly worried about the flow of foreign fighters back into South-East Asia from wars in the Middle East.
Last week, Australia formally listed Islamic State in East Asia — which attempted to wrest control of Marawi from the Philippines Government — as a proscribed terrorist organisation.
It is also not unusual for Mr Warner to meet with foreign leaders, but most of those meetings would be held behind closed doors.
So the ASIS chief — and DFAT officials — might have been a little surprised to see the photos of Mr Warner posing with Mr Duterte splashed out in the local press.
Mr Warner is the only ASIS employee whose identity can be publicly revealed, but his daily call sheet is not exactly a public document.
And, as usual, the Australian Government did not breathe a word about Mr Warner’s most recent meeting.

ONE CROWDED HOUR

Opposing viewpoints.
"What are we, Stasi Germany?" one of the Watchers on the Watch asked one long, turbulent night. 
The suburb was quiet. Old Alex was exhausted from the psychological storms, raging, if you will, just out of sight. 
The horizon, an event horizon, was a sheet of frightening turbulence that ringed the encampment. 
They were all frightened, as well they should be.
Yet Normalcy Bias was well in place. 
Workers, marked by their fluorescent yellow and orange flack jackets, gathered at the Watering Hole each evening for a smoke, a beer, a relax, a gossip about work or bosses or others less sustained than themselves. They had all known each other for years. Their wives charming. Their children loyal. Their troubles shared, views known. Here and there, a familiar ribald joke.
In the midst, the intensity of vision, it was something to behold. 
And then they were all cornered, rats, the machines with their flame throwers herding them into corners. 
Democracy was well dead. 
"True 'dat," Tony would say at the cafe Old Alex still frequented in the morning. 
In collapsing realms, ritual became more important than ever. 
Not hostile.
He had tried to repeat, to no effect: I am not the enemy. 
He was not a propagandist. He was a story teller. And stories, truth, led where they will, took their own course. 
Block them, manipulate them as much as you like. They would find their own course. In old parlance: the truth would out.

Narratives grew from sometimes random detail; and now a different narrative was gripping the country. Ultimate sources, many sources, formed to make a story many wished they did not have to tell.

The truth was coming out now, about a stumbling government in a deep state of collapse, but beyond that a country born of promise, betrayed. 
A now pale, puffy faced leader in a kind of virtual exile, his every day a torture, his fake smile more like rigor mortis every day, Turnbull went through the motions, but knew he had already lost. 
He tried to pretend: the machinery of government was still functioning. His government would triumph. The bleat of jobs and growth would come true. 
No it wouldn't.
So poorly advised.
His accompanying apparatchiks went through the motions, but were already rationalising their loss, shifting blame. 
It had been an honour to serve.
No it hadn't.
It was an old courtroom tactic. Never say die. You never know how the judge will rule. You still got paid whichever way. 
The client might be stuffed, but you weren't.
The judge had ruled already in this case. The contravention of the spirits, justice, decency, a failure to understand. A failure to take democracy, or democratic notions, literally. Instead to become the ruler of the ruled, without a shred of gratitude to the servants. 
But the people did not want to be ruled, not by this one. Not this preening pigot sitting on a fence, concealing his prejudices, concealing the truth. One Big Lie.
And so the country's political wings went to mush, wasteful administrative programs squandered the country's resources, and a privileged bureaucracy went unchecked. 
If only he had been a force for good.

Instead, history was now waiting to be retold. 

At a time of almost existential crisis, the country, or at least the media, was gripped in a puerile, ridiculously all encompassing debate about gay marriage, or marriage equality as it was known. Led by politicians and a callow media obsession, led by virtue signallers and social justice warriors. Useful fools.
For a time it had suited the government to have the media, and therefore the public square, obsessed with trivia which led nowhere.
And then their gambit backfired into farce; as with everything else they touched, a shambles. 
There might be bigger issues, but marriage was symbolic enough. The government had no intention of facing the truth, or telling the public the truth: declining standards of living, threatening security concerns, unjust, counterproductive wars, a looming Depression, failed social programs from one end of the country to the other.
So the aristocrats ransacked the country and sold off all they could, shored up their own wealth and and then fled behind the walls of their mansions and estates. 
The peasants might revolt; they had their barriers. 
But the high walls would not keep them for long.
Not this time.
The gods had other plans. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 





Last week it Australian authorities said they had ‘reliable reports’ that notorious Islamic State terrorist Khaled Sharrouf and his two sons were killed in Syria in an air strike.
Fairfax Media understands the federal government was briefed on Tuesday by intelligence agencies that there was a high level of confidence the jihadist and his sons, Abdullah and Zarqawi, were killed in an air strike in Syria.
It is understood the strike happened while Sharrouf was driving near the Islamic State defacto capital al-Raqqa on Friday, August 11.
The father of five from Sydney gained notoriety with his violent rampage across strife-torn Syria and Iraq, the macabre details of which have been splashed across social media.
Sharrouf went by the nom de guerre Zarqawi al Australi, and posted many pictures of beheadings to the web, including pictures of his own sons holding up severed heads and a basket full of severed heads.

Abu Zarqawi Australi @UZarqawifew more heads how lovely bludy amazing stuff abuhafs u keep on cutting those infidel throats but the last 1 is mine!5:37 AM - 24 Jul 2014

Sharrouf made local headlines after two Portland police officers responded in November 2013 to what appeared to be a routine complaint of illegal shooters in the Capertee Valley.
The complaint related to gunfire that had been going on for quite some time on private property on Crown Station Road in the valley.
The men did not cause problems for the police and two were charged with firearms offences.
Sharouff’s friend and fellow ISIS combatant Mohamad Elomar, who was killed in an air strike in Syria in 2015, was also among the party in Capertee.

Some 42 people, including 19 children and 12 women, were killed in the strikes on the city on Monday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said.
Activist-run group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently said 32 people were killed in airstrikes on one neighbourhood alone.
All three sources blamed the US-led coalition for the strikes, it has been reported.
US-backed Syrian opposition fighters have been trying to capture Raqqa, the de facto capital of Islamic State, since June 6.
The strikes came after the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance launched a ground assault on the city.
More than half of the city is reportedly now held by the Kurdish-led group.
The number of civilians killed in coalition strikes since August 14 has now risen to 167, according to the BBC.
The coalition said in June that its 22,983 air strikes in Syria and Iraq since 2014 had unintentionally killed at least 624 civilians.

SURROUNDED BY HOSTILES

Surrounded by hostiles. The nice ones replaced. Snotty nosed kids, they sneered. Dial M For Murder. There was no mucking around. Dial T for Threat. Come anywhere near me I kill you. Emissaries of power. Old hacks more like. Any individual could beat a bureaucracy, these decayed, lumbering, mismanaged conglomerations. You're only one person, they would keep insisting. And you're a pack of ..... he would reply. There in the heavens. Here on Earth. 

Defeated, utterly defeated, they scurried into the undergrowth. There was nowhere else for them to go. 

The erratic behaviour of the government grew worse as the week progressed. Death hung to a corpse, visible, dripping death, flakes of grey skin peeling off a cadaver.  

There would be more to follow. 

The Prime Minister had already demonstrated he was prepared to inconvenience millions in order to save his own skin.

There were variations now on the once repeated mantra, things are worse than you know. They came in waves unbidden: This government is utterly incompetent. 

Out of my hands. A Wall of indifference.  Because there were bigger plans afoot. 

Because the suburb spiked and soared, and the jinn infested reaches laughed at the travails of those who struggled beneath them. 

Because the country was going straight to hell, infested by bad spirits, drilled to a wall, laid waste by absolutely hapless bureaucratic incompetence. Failed government programs as far as the eye could see. A ransacked wealth. A deadened populace.

Fabian socialists. Everyone on the same level. The level was low. A tour across the countryside revealed town after town in devastating collapse, no employment, not a single lick of paint, entirely welfare dependent. The schemes had come to nought. Nobody had spoken. Threats laid waste. 

Exciting. Disgraceful. Stomach churning. They swept up and high and higher still, they saw their targets, briefly exhilarated. They knew they could rain death on anybody. Their stupid wars. Their pervading insanity. A government that would do anything to stay in power. A madness which had gripped the West. Power, it was all about power. But power to do what? 

Consciousness receded, and receded again. The deliberate dumbing down of the population. The media discrediting itself. As if government could ever prove a reliable source of information. We were harsh and we were acclimatised. We were searing forth across new terrain. Pools of mercury phased in and out across the visage of the lake. Other times. Other places. They were frighteningly intelligent. They knew their way through these barriers. They knew there would be no resolution, not in this lifetime, and had made themselves immortal. A victim of destiny, he gazed out, barely equipped, stomach gripped, soaring, always soaring, as he sought to remain within this fleshly domain. 

There couldn't be. It couldn't be. They were one and the same. They were terrified and at birth, struggling to be free. Struggling to be born. He would regret nothing. If only it was true. These fleshly frames. They were as thick and as stupid, some of those warriors on the front. All that sentiment. Not treacle, courage, decency, humanity, comaraderie, and yet America, and Australia, was marching lockstep back into Afghanistan. 

And Turnbull, every day, took one more step closer to the grave. 

Of himself, of his government, of his tattered credibility. There would be no salvation. Not for the Jesuit cabal that ran the government. Not for the Catholic priests who blessed them in their endeavours. Not for the whispering one-eyed spirits, those one-eyed spirit cyclops who had seized those who pulled the invisible strings of power. Whose power was destroying the country. Who did not wish prosperity. Or peace. Or happiness. Who controlled everything, their human puppets. 

Here on the lake. There on the parliament. Out there in the threads of media transmission. 

Those who had poisoned the country. 

Not in order to save it. But to create their own jungle juice of a society, ice epidemics, personal tragedy, chaos, a mind blitzing sadness, a soceity in decay. For it was in the ruins, in the shadows, amongst the corpses of battle, in the boardrooms of self interest and the estates of collapsed society, wisdom, a place so dark and broken. That was where they thrived. 

And so it was. Step by terrible step. 

Australia went down the gurgler. And the spirits who took it there, the politicians thus possessed, they, too, told their lies, collected their salaries. Ignored the interests of everyone but themselves. Told lie after lie after lie.

And what, in a way, was worse than the havoc they wreaked. They didn't care, entirely indifferent to the suffering they created.

Al-Masih ad-Dajjal (Arabic: المسيح الدجّال‎‎ Al-Masīḥ ad-Dajjāl, "the false messiah","liar" or "the deceiver") also referred to as "the anti-christ" is an evil figure in Islamic eschatology. He is to appear, pretending to be al-Masih (i.e. the Messiah), before Yawm al-Qiyamah (the Day of Doom). He is to be an anti-messianic figure, comparable to the Antichrist in Christian eschatology and to Armilus in medieval Jewish eschatology.

Allahu Akbar. God is Great. 

In a time, a place, an era, wordless, inchoate, when everyone knew one thing: I have been abandoned by God. 

And when the sixth hour was come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

 And so the rationals followed:

We are searchlights, we can see in the dark
We are rockets, pointed up at the stars
We are billions of beautiful hearts
And you sold us down the river too far

What about us?
What about all the times you said you had the answers?
What about us?
What about all the broken happy ever afters
What about us?
What about all the plans that ended in disaster?
What about love? What about trust?
What about us?

We are problems that want to be solved
We are children that need to be loved
We were willing, we came when you called
But man you fooled us, enough is enough

What about us?
What about all the times you said you had the answers?

 Pink. What About Us? 

THE BIGGER STORY:





INDEPENDENT MP Bob Katter has threatened to plunge the government into chaos, saying he will no longer guarantee supply or confidence to the Coalition.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is facing the real possibility that he will be forced to seek an alliance with a crossbench MP to hold onto government if Barnaby Joyce is ruled ineligible to sit in Parliament over his dual citizenship with New Zealand.
In a stunning blow to the Coalition, Mr Katter today told Sky News it was “back to the drawing board” in negotiations for support.
The Queensland MP has already outlined what he wants if Mr Turnbull seeks his support should the High Court rule Mr Joyce is unable to maintain his position.
“You’re one by-election away from needing mine or Rebekha Sharkie’s vote,” Mr Katter told Sky News.




US-led coalition air strikes have killed dozens of civilians in the Syrian city of Raqqa over the past 24 hours, activists and state media say.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that 42 had died in attacks on areas held by so-called Islamic State.
Anti-IS group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently said 32 were killed in one district alone.
The coalition said it adhered to strict targeting processes and procedures aimed to minimise risks to civilians.
Its aircraft are supporting a ground assault on Raqqa by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance, which is believed to have captured more than than half of the de facto capital of the IS "caliphate" since early June.

Donald Trump has announced he will prolong the US military intervention in Afghanistan, which he once described as a “complete waste”, bowing to advice from his top officials to raise the stakes once more in the 16-year conflict.
In a televised address to troops at Fort Myer in Virginia, Trump said he was setting out a new strategy for Afghanistan and South Asia. But he did not say how many more troops he would send, how long they would stay, or what their ultimate objective was.
Sixteen years have passed since the United States launched a military strike in Afghanistan to topple the Taliban regime and destroy al-Qaeda network and its affiliates. But the US is still bogged down in its longest war in the country in the wake of ongoing insurgency and rising violence.
The Afghan war so far has claimed the lives nearly 2,400 US military personnel while another 20,000 soldiers sustained injuries.

Forty one Australian soldiers have also died in the conflict.