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.

THE GREAT GREAT DEPRESSION

Blood sports. A pack of thugs. The agencies. 
A staggering level of incompetence. 
"There's a strong case for compensation."
"I bet there is. Or you do this to everybody? How is the crap you guys get up to even legal?"
"We can't be charged for illegal conduct."
Another gift of the current government to an out-of-control secret service. 
Thugs in uniform. Except there were no uniforms.

They had stopped whispering malfeasance. They were trying to keep their own secrets now. 

"What are they going to call the next Depression?" Old Alex asked down at the Lake View. "It's going to be worse than the last one. The Great Great Depression?"
"Oh I think so, you can see it, you can feel it coming."
"Jobs and growth," he snorted. Turnbull's mantra in his election campaign, the one that had barely got him across the line, with a dozen seats lost. The one that had been just as mismanaged as everything else on the list of announceables.  
The people should have been warned. Five million jobs were expected to disappear in the next five years to robots and automation. 
Nobody warned anybody. They didn't have the guts, the gumption or the common decency. They clung to their positions of power - all the better to pillage you with. 
It was daylight robbery what they got up to. 
And discontent swirled on every buttoned down street. In the remnants of every Table of Knowledge. In the dark past and an even darker future. 
The public square was cluttered with debate about gay marriage. 
That Australia had just been involved in the massacre and deaths of tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians in the Middle East was simply swept away in the wash. Ignored. In a heavily manipulated media environment, as the forces at play worked to turn the population into unquestioning donkeys.
Could the Prime Minister possibly be prepared to play with the lives, hopes, aspirations and emotional lives of the country's gay people, the LGBTQI "community", in order to distract the populace from what was really going on in the country? 
Of course he was. 
Was he prepared to expose the gay community to what would highly likely be escalating levels of violence against them, as people with the IQ of gnats were forced to think about things they simple didn't want to think about. 
Two men together. 
More sometimes, they'd heard.
Of course. 
It was putrid politics in a collapsing discourse. 
To gamble with people's private lives for personal gain. 
A desperate grab at holding on to power, for the privilege of siting atop a pile of wannabees. To stay in a charade of government.
For what? For why? 
It wasn't for the good of the people. It wasn't for a noble cause. It wasn't out of sustained, integral, honourable belief. It wasn't to bring good administration. Or to reflect in the wheels of the government the wishes of the people. 
What was it then?
Grandiosity and power. An ego beyond measure. 
"Worst Prime Minister ever, I heard them talking about it on the radio," said Kev, as depressed as anybody, a bitter laugh. "Worse than Rudd. Worse than Gillard. Worse than Abbott."
"There's fierce competition."
"We haven't had a good prime minister since I don't know when."
The cost of living out of control. The world's most expensive electricity. The most expensive internet. Among the top five most expensive places in the world to buy a home. The second most expensive place in the world to buy a drink. Among the world's most expensive petrol. It was all totally out of control, as standards of living crumbled and yet thousands more were thrown on the dole queues. 
"It's perfect Fabian socialism," Old Alex said. "Everyone on the same level." And he gestured at the aging tiles.
The election had left the country marooned in deceit. A lawyer's glib deceit. Instead of telling the people to prepare for what was coming, there were tax concessions to the rich. 
"They're so unhappy," he thought, as he sensed the humans around him. 
Everything had washed up on The Fatal Shore. 
"Have you been to a country town recently? Most of them haven't had a lick of paint since the 1930s. Since the last Depression."
On the other side of the world, Hurricane Thelma created havoc. 

THREE people were killed in car crashes, caught in Hurricane Irma’s destructive path as it made landfall in Florida, according to ABC in the US. Announcing itself with roaring winds, Hurricane Irma ploughed into the mostly emptied-out Florida Keys for the start of what could be a slow, ruinous march up the state’s west coast toward the heavily populated Tampa-St. Petersburg area. At least 1.16 million customers are without power, including more than 500,000 in Miami-Dade County. News. 

Australian news outlets, particularly the government propaganda outlet the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, were happy to lead with anything but news about Australia. 
The Great Great Depression. Coming to a mall near you.


THE BIGGER STORY: 

“As the forces of the Isis gangs collapse and the terrorist organisation nears its end in Raqqa, . . . the Isis gangs have been attacking the (SDF-held eastern areas) of Shadadi and the eastern countryside of Deir Ezzor in a desperate attempt to raise its forces’ morale in Raqqa,” the statement by the SDF’s Deir Ezzor Military Council said. The battle could create new flash points between US-backed forces fighting Isis, and Russian and Iranian-backed forces also fighting in the region. Already, Washington has fired rockets at Iranian-backed forces and shot down a Syrian warplane in Raqqa, when it deemed this rival alliance to be operating too close to fighters it supports. 

Isis’s self-proclaimed caliphate has been crumbling as the two rival international alliances beat back its territorial hold over Iraq and Syria. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s forces, with Russian and Iranian support, earlier this week broke a long-running Isis siege on their foothold in Deir Ezzor city, the provincial capital, meaning the two internationally backed Syrian forces are now both ramping up campaigns in the area. 

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has urged Australians to say yes in the postal survey as thousands packed out Sydney's CBD to rally for same-sex marriage.
Thousands gathered for a march from Town Hall to Hyde Park in support of a change to the Marriage Act, with the gathering causing significant crowd congestion in the city centre.
Organisers have declared the rally the largest LGBTI demonstration in Australian history as thousands more took to Brisbane streets to show their support.
Speaking earlier at the NSW Liberals and Nationals for YES campaign launch in Sydney, Mr Turnbull said the question facing the nation was one of fairness.
"Throughout my public life I've sought to ensure same-sex couples are not discriminated against and their entitlements, be it in respect of medical benefits, taxation, superannuation or employment, are no different to those afforded to heterosexual couples," he said.
"Why then shouldn't those same rights now be extended to marriage?"

THE TERRORISTS WITHIN

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” Oscar Wilde.

Incompetent government, from top to bottom, from year to year. 

Old Alex heard it all, from the ignorance of the populace to the connivance of government agents. 
"You have no idea how bad things are" morphed into a channel of horror, soon to be a river. 
Might as well pack it up. 

Strategic withdrawals were just for show. They would never leave. 
Just another security agency cock-up.
They were used to unlimited power. Data dumps. To concealing their efforts; papering over yet another travail. To getting away with murder, literally.
We would wait and see. 
He heard the Americans in the midst of everything. The agents kowtowed to them as if they were a superior species.
Everything was a farce. 
In the dreaming reaches of the southern villages compulsory local council elections were on for the Saturday and there was the usual clutter of Labor, Liberal and Independent spruikers outside government buildings.
"I voted early," one denizen declared. "I hate queuing up with a pack of assholes to vote for another pack of assholes."
The houses, the streets, everything in the lakeside suburb looked squashed by too-heavy air as they drove down to the polling booth.
"What's this for again?" Gaz asked as they pulled up outside the school, its front festooned with placards of local politicians nobody ever saw except at election time. "Is this the gay marriage thing?"
Old Alex explained it was the local council elections. Having already performed his civic duty, he sat in the ute waiting for Gazza to vote. 
"It's just disgraceful politics, completely disgraceful politics," Old Alex began upon Gaz's return, referring to just about every useless thing the federal government in particular was doing, launching crackdowns here, phony wars there, stirring nationwide discontent with an idiot postal plebiscite on gay marriage, wasting tens of billions of dollars of public monies on everything from the disastrously mismanaged National Broadband Network to Defence contracts nobody even pretended were value for money.
"I just drew a cock and balls with splurry coming out on one, and You're all a bunch of cock suckers" on the other," Gaz said, referring to his efforts on the local ballot papers. 
In the broader medium there were learned essays on the nature of disgust surrounding homosexuality.
Did the world really need academic essays, taxpayer funded of course, on the nature of disgust? 
Scuffles broke out in Brisbane.
The Muslim community remained largely quiet, the dirty little secret of the marriage equality left, that thanks to the multiculturalism they had so fervently chanted there were now tens if not hundreds of thousands of people in the country who sincerely believed they would be doing Allah's duty if they killed homosexuals. Crucified them. Tossed them from buildings. Saved them from themselves.
The Orlando preacher had been an honoured guest. 
It was a triumph of diversity. 
They got their diversity alright. 
Crackdown on dissent. Widely disillusioned populace. Resentment everywhere. Ethnic tensions rising, everywhere. No one had a good word to say. Not about the government. The soaring price of everything, cigarettes, petrol, electricity, all of them had jumped in price in the previous few days. 
Toss them from buildings. Crucify them. 
Nothing could be a greater anathema to the Muslims than gay marriage, nothing more specifically designed to convince them they had fallen amongst the infidels than the sight of two men or two women holding hands, kissing. That they were right to send their children to Muslim schools and the sooner Sharia law was instituted the better. 
The country was already becoming a tinderbox created by profound mismanagement. 
All it would take was one Muslim gang to bash one emboldened tranny, an entirely plausible scenario, and it would be on, the clashing creeds, a dissolving country.
Spit on them.  
He knew. He could hear the danger through the walls, in the fabric of things, a terrible maladjustment, stunted psycho-social-sexual development, a crying shame, a bashed body, a bloodied stranger staggering down a blind alley. 
It was an obscene failure of public policy. 
A dog barked tediously on a suburban shooting range. 
Drunken shouts. Degraded lords. Their own curriculums. Hate-filled morons. The truth would out. The national security agencies were in league with the fringe elements of neighbourhood policing, organising their hunting packs, their whispering campaigns, their denigration of anyone who disagreed with the government narrative. We're the best country in the world. We're luck to live here. 
Their attempt to control all artistic endeavour, to bend it to their will.
In a land where terror was an instrument of control, fear of strangers used to instill social conformity while at the same time the diversity brigade destroyed the traditional culture with a self-righteous gusto, as if they, too, had been caught up in an historic movement. The only one the gods would grant them. The greater good.

The schoolmaster of Darjeeling said
He saw you by the Tengboche monastery
You were playing in the snow
You were banging on the doors
You climbed up on the roof
Roof of the world
You were pulling up the rhododendrons
Loping down the mountain
They want to know you
They will hunt you down
Then they will kill you
Run away, run away
Run away. Kate Bush Wild Man.

 THE BIGGER STORY: 



Observers of the same-sex marriage debate will have noticed the voice of one particular community has been largely missing from the fray: Muslims.
With few exceptions, including a statement from the National Imams Council, almost all of the talk of religious freedom and opposition to the bill on the grounds of faith has come from Christian leaders, particularly from the Anglican and Catholic Churches.
But now one Muslim leader has offered an explanation.
Last night on ABC's The Drum, Ali Kadri, spokesman for the Islamic Council of Queensland and the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, said his community was stuck with the choice of offending allies or siding with critics, and the result had been silence.
"Unfortunately, in the current climate, the right and conservative side has attacked Muslims as terrorists and extremists, and naturally the left side has been allies in defending us for a long period of time," he said.
"We are afraid if we come out with our opinion then the left may abandon us for going against their view and we can't be friendly with the conservatives because they have been bashing us for 15, 20 years every chance they get … and that includes some Christian sects as well."

THE debate over same-sex marriage turned ugly last night when a protest by “yes” campaigners erupted into violent scenes.
Protesters outside a Brisbane church claimed they were attacked with cars as they gathered to oppose a meeting they described as a “homophobic forum”.
Police attended the gathering at St Michael’s Dorrington Catholic Church at Ashgrove and at least one woman was treated by paramedics.
Jessica Payne, who was injured at the scene, said the crowd was aggressive and “extremely violent”.
“I suffered an injury because people drove their cars nearly at full speed into the yes campaigners here today,” she told Nine’s Today.
“It was extremely scary, extremely irresponsible, and police actually tried to help the people in the cars get through the crowd of protesters.”