A VICTIM OF SURVEILLANCE

Katoomba, Blue Mountains, Circa 1890.

"He's a victim of surveillance."
All time collects in one point.
Let me be your spirit guide. 
He descended from the swamps of the Blue Mountains to the swamps of Sydney. 
He revisited the inner-city suburb of Redfern where he used to live; and already, with the march of gentrification and real estate prices, the suburb bore little resemblance to the place he had known. 
Almost nobody was where they used to be. A dark, empty house. A big For Sale sign. With the yellow and red Sold sticker plastered across it. 
He went very quiet, trying to schuck off the oysters, psychics, psychopaths, experts, plain bored on-duty. 
All was evil when it came to that. 
The centres of power were far away; he liked it that way, or told himself so. A theatrical gesture in a cold corridor. These ponded lives. There is no more circumstance. We await your blessing. You are free to go. There will be no compensation.
Once a source of wonder, all grew quiet. A lunatic. A crazy man. A fading light.
The country was a sham and the wider world bewildered.  There was only one true source of wonder. Everything became minute. A thousand soldiers marched. A bag of rags had finished rotting. An empty vessel had arisen.
We're preparing to shoot.
Game of Thrones has nothing on the bureaucratic insanity of this case.
We warned him time and time again.
They were stifled, they were angry, they had been paralysed into dissent. Beyond the veil was the war. We could tell him everything. That was an absurd thing to say. 

THE BIGGER STORY:

 

The latest edition of Islamic State's propaganda magazine promises the fight for Raqqa will be "no picnic", warning deadly booby trapped buildings and a wave of car and truck bombs await the anti-ISIS coalition.

Rumiyah, Issue 12, released today, features an interview with Islamic State's military commander of Syrian city Raqqa, the group's de facto capital.

Elsewhere, though, the magazine is devoid of much of the regular insights and content that analysts and ISIS supporters track inside each multi-language online edition.


There is no mention of the recent arrests of alleged plane bomb plotters in Sydney, and a counter-terror analyst spoken to by nine.com.au ranked issue 12 something of "a disappointment".

Notably, there was still no official confirmation whether the group's leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead or alive, following recent speculation he had been killed in Syria.

If there was ever a doubt that Malcolm Turnbull is unfit to govern, the horror-clown circus of the past 24 hours settles the matter.

This bumbling coward needs to remove himself from the public realm for all time.

It is not because he opposes a simple and human recasting of the Marriage Act to bring it into line with current realities and the opinion of three out of four Australians.

It is because this spineless wuss tool serves no interest or agenda beyond prolonging the end-of-life suffering of what could laughingly be called his government, only if your idea of laughs was pulling the wings off butterflies.