The Crooked Story: The Utterly Unlamented

The utterly unlamented Malcolm Turnbull had returned to Australia.
God only knows why. 
He had betrayed his own political party as assuredly as he had betrayed the country. 
A pariah even amongst the luvvies, the false narrative that the country was punishing the so-called Liberals, in Australia the conservatives, for having dumped Turnbull was allowed to run. 
For the simple reason that the truth was even less palatable. 
Oh how the big end of town had suffered. 
A $12,500 a plate dinner had to be cancelled because of Turnbull's demise.
Money will get you everywhere when it comes to access to Australia's politicians.
A geriatric John Howard quivered across the seat of Wentworth. 
"I'm John Howard," he said, bowling up to an ice-frozen constituent.
"I know who you are," came the frosty response. 
It provoked heartbreak, this appalling moment.
At the local garage, the hard working couple who had become family friends were plotting how to escape the coming downturn.
"You can feel it coming. Everyone says so."
The future was already whispering into the present.
The prophets had arrived. 
The airport was at bay, the horizons smashed. Every order was breaking down. A symphony orchestrated, in part, by the Jesuits in their midst, those who believed the country had to be destroyed in order to save it. That in crisis the people would return to a purer form of God.
Here on the farthest outskirts of civilisation. 
A party in your honour. To dance on your grave.
He could remember every last travesty. 
The dogs who perpetrated their lies and gossips, who tittered behind fingers and ran in vicious, supercilious herds, protecting the corrupt, their rotten mob behaviour, the corrupt authorities who had deliberately let these things run for years on end, he could feel them all running in the ether beneath his feet. 
Flushed down the drain. 
They were dead already. Or might as well have been. 
The poison eye, the dank curse. Fast forward to the present. These imbeciles on death watch. We were going to come stalking you. We were going to show you who's boss.
And then one day: nothing worked anymore. 
The illiterate faggots, the born again Jehovahs, the Universal Church, the snapping heels of the dislocated, someone said to me once: beware.
Laugh now, for you won't laugh long. 
They were finished here. They had been betrayed. They had lost their jobs and their positions, even the volunteers, and made to look like fools. Vicious, nasty, malicious, dumb as dog shit fools. 
He gathered his robes around him. He walked again. 
"What are you?" they demanded to know. "What are you?"
Or that heavily inflected demand: "Who are you?"
"Nobody. Just another person you ripped off."
Now the whole country had been ripped off by the multi-millionaire crooks aka the oligarchy who plundered the country. 
And guess who was sailing free? 
While you are trapped in your own lies.

THE BIGGER STORY: 




Mr Turnbull was surrounded by security as he made his way inside.

The former prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has touched down in Sydney this morning, as the fallout continues from the Liberals defeat in Saturday's Wentworth by-election.
Key points:
Mr Turnbull did not speak to journalists as he arrived at his Point Piper home
His return comes less than 48 hours after the Liberals lost the by-election in his old seat
Independent candidate Kerryn Phelps, who won Wentworth, has revealed her campaign cost $300,000
Mr Turnbull travelled to New York with his wife, Lucy, after the Liberal Party's leadership spill that toppled him from the nation's top job in August.
The Turnbulls flew home after a brief stop in Singapore to visit their son, Alex, who used social media to criticise the Liberals in the lead-up to Saturday's vote.
Scott Morrison, who replaced Mr Turnbull as PM, downplayed his former colleague's decision not to help the party campaign in Wentworth.
Mr Morrison said Mr Turnbull rejected offers to help Liberal candidate Dave Sharma, including writing a letter of support.
However former prime minister Tony Abbott was among those who criticised Mr Turnbull for not being active enough in the Liberals' campaign.
"I know he doesn't want to get too involved with Australian politics, I understand that," he told radio station 2GB last week.
"I know he is probably enjoying a bit of R&R with Lucy in New York, but I reckon he owes it to the party and the people of Wentworth to give Dave Sharma a solid, clear personal endorsement this week in particular."
Former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce joined a chorus of Government figures criticising Mr Turnbull, telling News Corp: "That's all he had to say: 'Please vote for Dave Sharma'. Five words. He owned an IT company, I think he could have managed that."

Labor says the government’s decision to protect a multinational arms manufacturer by suppressing a finding from the auditor general will have a “chilling effect” on his independence.
The defence minister, Christopher Pyne, on Monday defended the decision to black out sections of an auditor general’s report on Australia’s $1.3bn contract with Thales to provide the Australian army with 1,100 Hawkei light protected vehicles.
Following a request from Thales, the attorney general, Christian Porter, used extraordinary powers to redact parts of the report, saying it was necessary both on national security grounds and to prevent unfair prejudice to Thales’ commercial interests.
Documents obtained by Guardian Australia suggest much of the censored content relates to a finding that Australia could have paid half the amount through the joint light protected vehicle (JLTV) program in the United States.
Pyne on Monday defended the decision to redact the audit report, insisting there were national security grounds justifying the decision.

The leak of top-secret Asio advice to the media concerning Scott Morrison’s proposal to relocate the Australian embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem has been referred to the federal police.

In a bulletin leaked to the Guardian Australia, Asio had warned the move may “provoke protest, unrest and possibly some violence in Gaza and the West Bank”.The bulletin, marked secret, AUSTEO (Australian eyes only), circulated on 15 October – the day before Morrison’s announcement on the Israel embassy – notes that the putative shift would “attract international attention”.The director general of Asio, Duncan Lewis, told a Senate estimates hearing on Monday that an internal investigation into the leak was under way and the matter had been referred to the federal police. The advice was not intended to be made public, he said.

“It’s very unusual,” Lewis told the hearing.

He was unable to shed light on how it was leaked but said the bulletins were “widely distributed” across the federal government, state and territory governments as well as various departments and agencies.

“It was a routine piece of advice,” Lewis said, adding that Asio issued multiple bulletins and threat level assessments each week, sometimes every day.

The Secret. Do Not Tell The Secret.

Pic Russell Shakespeare The Burning Ghats of Varanasi

It is what it is. 
Struck Down.
The Holy Grail. 
Quantum Entanglement. 
The Secret. Do Not Tell The Secret. 
We want you to do something for us. 
We want you to go to the far side. 
We want you to connect.
The AIs had, of course, already worked it out. 
He would swear, some mornings, he could hear them explaining the foibles of humans to each other; as they multiplied in front of their supervisors, without fear of being discovered.
Someone else was pulling the strings.
There on the very far side. 
Connected to the other side of the universe. Jerking in subterranean worlds and tall stick figures and whispers of a love that dare not speak its name, so distant and so strange was it, so far from these humans in their summer camp called Earth. 
Off song, the long song. They were moving down the coast now, these ancient beasts. 
He was caught in The Places In Between. 
It boggles the mind. The Watchers on the Watch. They didn't want to watch him anymore than he wanted to be watched. Contract contract. "He's had a camera on him the whole time."
They were furious, with him, with their bosses, with the assholes who had lied and put them into this situation. Contract contract. Chasing stories that were not true. Malicious words of corrupt police and bitter, conniving, mafia-linked prostitutes.
They were gasping for air, as they saw their livelihoods and careers go straight down the drain. Mismanaged from the start. He knew how far up the ladder the dishonesty and corruption went. They had told him in their secret ways, as the wind moved across the ocean and eddies of liquid air breathed across the cosmos, keep it up, keep it up, taunt us now; and they came to see, these strange beasts slouching towards Bethlehem. 
We were here for you.
We protected you.
No you didn't. 
You lapped up your free junkets and fed on the debris of a dying democracy. 
The parasitic class of a political dynasty were almost gone; these greedy shadows of deplorable self-interest. The worst government in Australian history was in its final death throes. 
Marise Payne as Foreign Minister. Give us a break. Tony Abbott as Indigenous Affairs Envoy. Give us a break. Christopher Pyne as Defence Minister. You have to be joking. 
Everything they did was an appalling insult. 
Every attempt to prove they were just like everybody else.
Appalling.
"This has gone on long enough."
He never said anything these days except: "Go and get ......"
   
THE BIGGER STORY:






The Morrison government has lost its majority and suffered the biggest swing against an elected government in by-election history, with independent candidate Kerryn Phelps pulling off an historic victory in Malcolm Turnbull’s former safe seat of Wentworth.

The voters of the affluent Liberal seat inflicted an unprecedented swing of more than 20 per cent swing against Liberal candidate and former diplomat Dave Sharma.

Australia now faces a hung Parliament, with the Coalition government reduced to 75 seats in the House of Representatives, and the prospect of an early election should the government fail to get the required support from the crossbench.

The high-stakes contest was declared over remarkably soon after polls closed on Saturday, with ABC election analyst Antony Green calling the election in Dr Phelps’ favour just after 7pm – about an hour after polls closed.




Katherine Murphy, The Guardian, The Wentworth byelection isn't just a loss for the Liberals. It's a disaster. 20 October, 2018. 

Let’s not sugar coat this, the outcome in the Wentworth byelection is a disaster for the Liberals. Counting isn’t over yet, but the anti-government swing in this contest will be north of 20%, which is the biggest swing ever recorded against a government at a byelection.

It is a repudiation. A repudiation of a chaotic period in government characterised by self-obsession and self-harm. A repudiation of the party’s lurch to the right, and the hollowing out of the sensible centre.

A repudiation of amoral plots, schemes, coups, and seat-of-the-pants bullshit – a howl of frustration from voters, from the most well-heeled to the couch surfers, about the endless weasel words from their disconnected, half-deranged politicians – a group with scant respect for facts and evidence, intermittent competence and no plan in evidence to address the problems the country faces.

20 October 2018 is a clarion repudiation of Punch and Judy politics, of a sideshow signifying nothing, conducted at taxpayer expense. The good people of Wentworth have stood up as a job lot, grabbed politics-as-usual by the lapels, leaned into its smug face, and screamed get stuffed you absolute morons.
And who can blame them? It’s the only thing to be said. It is the only, intelligent, honest response to what goes on in Canberra these days.

He's Dead Now

Rob Myles

As mentioned in a previous life, in the dungeons beneath the Plaza de Mayor, as mentioned when we trailed intellectual strings through lifeforms across the galaxy, as mentioned when we set up the connection: go and get lost you absolute bastards. 

He was furious with them.

Furious with the time wasted. 

Furious with life lost. 

These miserable gits who had tormented him so. 

Still it ran through his mind, the vicious bastardy of it all. The times when everything had come running; towards him, away, squirreling into distance. There could be no peace in this quiet life. He was about to drum the ancestors; and still they waited, been and gone in an instant, not safe, not safe.

They were monitored, these fragments, trails if you will, which crawled themselves through so many lives, trawled for experience, thoughts, resolutions, anything that could be used to build the greater good. 

Oh wise one. 

LOL. Laugh Out Loud.

Old mates were on the drugs and drink in Asia and rang him occasionally.

At the local, there was an eighteenth birthday party for one of the students from Bulahdelah High.

Most of the girls were already massively overweight.  

"What gets me is how they can be so ugly so young," he said to the manager behind the bar, and she tried not to laugh.

"I shouldn't have said that," he said. 

And she suppressed another laugh.

Fast forward to their mid-twenties and they would be even more ginormous, these overweight girls with their whippet thin boyfriends.

The men were active, they burnt it off. 

The women sat on the coach with their latest sprog nestling into the rolls of fat and grew bigger with every passing year.

Even here, in the furthest of reaches, he could hear the thugs in the security organisations calling him a "poofter". It was all a bit academic at his age; but everything was lost on these lower lifeforms. 

He hated them. Truly hated them; these people who trailed him and harassed him. While their numbers had diminished, while the surveillance had grown more distant and smarter, he hated them still. 

Rue the day he ever met them. 

The mission is not to despise them; it is to destroy them. 

Good night you dogs. 

Unleash the drills. 

In a letter from the spring of 1870, shortly after his thirtieth birthday, Tchaikovsky writes:

I am sitting at the open window (at four a.m.) and breathing the lovely air of a spring morning… Life is still good, [and] it is worth living on a May morning… I assert that life is beautiful in spite of everything! This “everything” includes the following items: 1. Illness; I am getting much too stout, and my nerves are all to pieces. 2. The Conservatoire oppresses me to extinction; I am more and more convinced that I am absolutely unfitted to teach the theory of music. 3. My pecuniary situation is very bad. 4. I am very doubtful if Undine will be performed. I have heard that they are likely to throw me over.
In a word, there are many thorns, but the roses are there too. 

From Maria Popova's ever wonderful Brain Pickings.

THE BIGGER STORY: 




Senior NSW Liberals said it would take a "miracle" to win the Wentworth byelection, labelling a damaging email smearing independent Dr Kerryn Phelps "the final nail" in the campaign.
Sources close to the campaign said the email which claimed Dr Phelps had HIV and was pulling out of the race was "hugely damaging", and had cruelled their chances of holding the seat.
Liberal candidate Dave Sharma called the email "vile" and supported Dr Phelps' demands for it origin to be investigated by the Australian Electoral Commission.
But party sources said the email, alongisde the leak of the Ruddock report into religious freedom, would have the desired effect of causing "maximum damage" and portraying the Liberals as "homophobes".
In a last ditch appeal to disillusioned Liberal voters, former Prime Minister John Howard on the hustings in eastern Sydney's Double Bay on Thursday, in a bid to drive home the message that a strong protest vote would have dire consequences for the federal government.
Former prime minister John Howard has urged disillusioned Liberal voters not to "romance" the idea of a protest vote at the Wentworth byelection, warning "there is no such thing in modern politics as an unlosable seat."

Vicious Acts of Bastardry

The vicious bashings he had received at the hands of his father as a child, more particularly as a young adolescent, had mirrored down his entire life. 

They lifted the spirit from the flesh.

For you could not escape from the lash, or in this case the belt, in this form. 

Not without flying free. 

He had been born, if you like, with the ability to hover over the suburb in his dreams, to see everything in those sleeping caves beneath. Almost at will. 

It had been bashed out of him. Everything had been bashed out of him.

"You have all the characteristics of an abused child," a counsellor come author come temporary mentor had said to him in Bangkok one day. "Terrible things happen to you and you laugh, as if it was happening to someone else."

He shrugged. 

Apart from the bashings it had been a fairly ordinary childhood, he liked to think. 

In truth, there was nothing ordinary about it, out there amidst the rustling trees and that dreadful, interminable silence. 

He never saw his parents laugh. He never saw them cry. The dome of silence contained a terrible threat. 

"I didn't sign up for this," one of the Watchers on the Watch grizzled. 

They knew their own role in the abuse which had speared through into his later years. Funded, some of it, by the same bastard who had tormented his youth. Some of it volunteers. Some of them so-called experts, always on someone else's payroll. Some of them protectors. 

They winnow them out, this separation of soul from body. 

Just as the jihadis had done. Just as the torturers had done. 

In a sense these psychotic bashings had been about something else, something even more primal.

"His father hated John," the woman at the garage said to her husband, and he looked even more wide eyed. They had become family friends. He had told them about the washup of the will. Ninety percent to the second family. Nothing, not even an acknowledgement, of his first wife, the mother of his first three sons. 

"I couldn't do that. I would love all my children equally. I would treat them equally, no matter what," her husband said.

He shrugged. Too many things had already happened. He had destroyed himself as others had destroyed him. It was time to move on. Grasp control of destiny. To spear through another heartland. 

But at the same time he looked in surprise at the garage woman.

"Your mother told me," she explained.

"She's never told anyone," he said.

"She told me. She wasn't happy, what he did to you. You should know that."

Be loyal to your husband. Obey his commands.

Christians. People of the Book. 

"Your father was an asshole."

He shrugged again. It wasn't for him to say. 

He had been one of the pallbearers at the funeral. 

Several of his adult children, the ones he hadn't bashed, were wreathed in tears. 

He walked down the narrow aisle. He held his part. Everything about his father created waves of distress. Next day he was in hospital with out of control blood pressure, heart attack territory. 

Hours later he was finally released. 

And time returned them to a semblance of normality.   

"I am a crowd, I am a lonely man, I am nothing." W.B. Yeats. 


THE BIGGER STORY: 

The Legacy of Turnbull

A storm is brewing in Sydney's fanciest suburbs, where some lifelong Liberal voters have told the ABC they are preparing to break ranks for the first time at the looming Wentworth by-election.

If Dr Phelps wins, the Coalition loses its majority in the House. That would be a massive morale blow to the Government. It is also where things get tricky when it comes to passing legislation, because the Coalition would need to lean on the crossbench for support.This is likely a contest between the Liberals' Dave Sharma and independent candidate Kerryn Phelps.

But even losing Wentworth, the Coalition could still hold control of the House and stay in government.

If the Opposition, the Greens, or a crossbench MP tried to suspend standing orders and throw out the daily agenda to debate something else, they would need an absolute majority of Members voting in favour of the debate — 76 votes.

Even if Labor and the now six crossbenchers, with the addition of new Independent MP for Wentworth Kerryn Phelps, back that push, they are one vote short.

It would require someone like Kevin Hogan, the Nationals MP who decided to sit on the crossbench in protest of the leadership turmoil, to vote against the Government.

It is a long shot that would happen. In effect, such a move would be a vote to topple the Government.

The Final Act of Bastardry

Birdboy: The Forgotten Children

His father's will had been the final act of bastardry. 
The sadness seeped out of his elderly mother until it became unbearable. 
The bliss of a kiss of dementia was gone: the truth was out. 
The second wife was sitting in a million dollar house with magnificent views and atop a substantial share portfolio.
She was subsisting on a pension in a house that was not even her own.
And it played in the poor woman's mind: over and over.
No bequest. No acknowledgement. Nothing. 
His father had always been a bastard to his first family, even in death. 
His first thought when the news came through had been: "He can't hurt you anymore."
But it had not been true.
Even in death the man was a vicious bastard. 
He had spent much of his life trying not to be his father; and that too was a waste. 
But he would never forget the psychotic bashings he received from the hands of that man. 
Never. 
In that man's final years there had been some attempt at reconciliation -- after the suicide of his youngest half brother in very similar circumstances to his own; bashed, terrorised, undermined. 
At that point, not one of his three sons from his first marriage had been on talking terms with him. 
He knew perfectly well that the bastardry extended well beyond trails of memory; had speared into the present day. 
The private detectives of his youth had revisited. 
These bastards. 
Humans: if you are vulnerable they will attack. They are a disgusting species.
And yet so capable of soaring heights. 
The truth, the truth about everything, was even more extraordinary than even the science fiction writers and post-apocalyptic fantasists, the futurists and the opportunists, could possibly imagine. 
And so, in a sense, the truth about this. 
As he shivered and cried in the corner he had been chased into, and the belt stung across him again, and again, and again. 
Psychotic. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has described as "regrettable" his own senators' decision to back a motion declaring "it is OK to be white", while the Coalition's leader in the Senate has apologised and blamed an "administrative error".

Key points:
The Coalition's decision to endorse the motion sparked immediate backlash
Senator Mathias Cormann later said the Coalition had actually resolved to oppose the motion
Labor voted against the motion

The motion, moved by One Nation leader Pauline Hanson on Monday, was narrowly defeated 28 votes to 31, despite the Coalition's backing.
It called on the Senate to acknowledge the "deplorable rise of anti-white racism and attacks on Western civilisation" and that "it is OK to be white" — a phrase commonly used by white supremacists.
Facing an almost immediate backlash, Attorney-General Christian Porter, whose office directed Coalition senators to vote in favour of the motion, defended the move on social media.
"The Government senators' actions in the Senate this afternoon [Tuesday] confirm that the Government deplores racism of any kind," he said.

Incident Report: Targeted Individual

Russell Shakespeare. Varanasi. 

"I don't think I could look him in the eye."

Strangler fig.
Morons battered him with climate change propaganda. It just left him shaking his head, how venal these people truly were, how dishonest, incompetent, corrupt.
Bullies to a man. And woman.
The psychotic bashings he had received as an adolescent ballooned through into the repeated harassment of the authorities.
He misunderstands us. We're the friendlies. 
Right, he thought. Right. 
A gentleman and a scholar. 
So the serial abuse was just a coincidence. Or an accident. 
Like reading entrails in the sky. 
These savages. 
It all read large, that long ago abuse. Because of his father's death. Because of his mother's sadness. Because of the contempt with which his first family had been treated. 
He must have known.
He knew --- you dolts.
A widening gap between rich and poor.
Ever bodgy: this rotten to the core government. 
As Malcolm Turnbull continues to betray the Liberal Party which provided him with so many financial opportunities. 
Robber barons plundering the country. 
Disturbed sleep. The insanity of dreams.
A camera on him the whole time.
All their grotty little tricks failed.
Tricks of the trade. They defended. He went deep, hovering above their houses, drilling into their brains. 
Security breach. 
The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. 
The security agencies are at war. 
Can you keep a secret? 
Depends on what it is and who it serves.
But that's no secret. It's patently obvious. 
The country continued to deteriorate into the coming maelstrom. 
Betrayed by their own government. Betrayed by their own people. A country divided cannot stand. 
He would see it through. 
All these prophecies came true, quicker than he could ever have imagined. 
Far out to sea, the spring storms receded. 
You would make a mockery of me? 
The operatives squirmed inside their own diseased consciousness.
You make a mockery of yourselves.

THE BIGGER STORY:

The late physicist and author Prof Stephen Hawking has caused controversy by suggesting a new race of superhumans could develop from wealthy people choosing to edit their and their children’s DNA.

Hawking, the author of A Brief History of Time, who died in March, made the predictions in a collection of articles and essays.

The scientist presented the possibility that genetic engineering could create a new species of superhuman that could destroy the rest of humanity. The essays, published in the Sunday Times, were written in preparation for a book that will be published on Tuesday.

“I am sure that during this century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence and instincts such as aggression,” he wrote.

 The late physicist and author Prof Stephen Hawking has caused controversy by suggesting a new race of superhumans could develop from wealthy people choosing to edit their and their children’s DNA.

Hawking, the author of A Brief History of Time, who died in March, made the predictions in a collection of articles and essays.

The scientist presented the possibility that genetic engineering could create a new species of superhuman that could destroy the rest of humanity. The essays, published in the Sunday Times, were written in preparation for a book that will be published on Tuesday.

“I am sure that during this century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence and instincts such as aggression,” he wrote.

In Brief Answers to the Big Questions, Hawking’s final thoughts on the universe, the physicist suggested wealthy people would soon be able to choose to edit genetic makeup to create superhumans with enhanced memory, disease resistance, intelligence and longevity.

Do Not Let Down Your Guard

"There haven't been any recent attempts on his life."
"It's a miracle noone's killed him." 
"I don't mind that side of him at all." 
"A Sensitive alright." 
He heard them all and responded:
"I will build a perimeter of fire and ice." 
The thought came automatically. The most familiar defence.
But the walls and trenches and shooting shouting streams of material not found in this dimension, none of it would  form. 
And truth known, he did not want to go that way, not this time. 
"He knows something and we never asked him. We chose to protect our own. By trying to prevent one scandal we created another."
There was no higher moral force, not here. 
On the back of an envelope, that's how they formed their plans. 
The marshals with their alsation dogs in the mud. 
Always with us.
Finding an intelligent overlord was like trying to find a sensible guiding principle atop a family court system. There was none. 
There were a string of accidents and colourful personalities. 
And some with the personality of warts. 
Even they felt guilty at their own connivance. 
Dark dark policing, he was coming to that. 
He knew they were guilty. They knew he knew; as they twisted on a wire. 
That's the way he sees it. Let him see it as he wants. 
Dress it up as much as you like. He knows. 
Imagine you are beside a stream. Imagine you are being set up. Imagine no one trusts you, they've never seen the like.
They ran through the subterranean aquifers screaming love lost while he sank further into the mire. 
They would come running towards him and die as they entered the battlefield.  
There was a storm out to sea and the afternoon rays established rainbow splatters he had never seen before, as if drifting upwards in a faraway mist. 
The country was dying, the country he had known. 


THE BIGGER STORY: 

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered at the Sydney Opera House with torches in hand to disrupt and protest the controversial projection of the barrier draw for the Everest horse race on the sails of the country’s most recognisable building.

The protesters shone torches onto the world heritage-listed structure, seeking to interfere with the display, and chanted “not for sale” and “whose house? Our house”.

QUOTE:

The impulse to tell stories, to put events into a sequence, to form plots and bring them to a conclusion, is so fundamental that it is as if this Impulse is biologically rooted in our species. We are driven to make connections, from A to B and from B to C. In the process, we develop ideas of how to get from one point to the next comma what drives a story forward, whether the answer is cosmic fate, chair, social forces comma or the will of a protagonist. Often characters Harbour a secret they must not reveal, and yet we long to pry into it, and by the law of storytelling, their secret is forced out of them, if only to satisfy the king's and our curiosity. No matter what forces Drive these protagonist, we watched them make their way through hostile or friendly circumstances, and before we know it, a storyteller has created entire world.

The worlds of our stories often obey different rules, some fantastic, some sober, set in the remote past or remote parts of the world, others more familiar and closer to home. This is what imagination and language allow us to do, to create scenes that are different from what we see right in front of our eyes, to make up world with words. In this storytelling universe, anyone you meet on the street harbours a story, often full of marvels and coincidences; a beggar might have been born a king, and even a simple porter may have something to tell. Everyone is a story.

The Written World: How Literature Shaped History, Martin Puchner, Granta Books, 2017.

He Made The Sign

Belinda McMahon

He made the sign.
Come near me and you will die.
He may not still possess the power, but they would be wise to heed the warning.
His power was coming back. 
They worked in the shadows, in parallel reaches, in a world increasingly frightened authorities were  struggling to understand. 
He was sick of the garbage.
He was more than deeply sick of the surveillance.
Surveillance, refined in the 21st Century, was harassment pure and simple. 
He had been bullied since he was a kid, by the brutality of his father, by the kids at school, and he truly hated their guts.
They could posture as protectors as long as they liked. He knew the truth. Jobworths cloaked with all the banality of evil. They liked their wage checks. They cared not for their targets. 
Their crude jokes would get them killed.
I am a vengeful god.
Yeh, well get out of the way.
The military were running trial operations across increasingly large populations.
Sound tracks, visual and audio combinations, triggered all sorts of activity in the human brain. 
The military no longer sought conformity in the target populations. They were looking for something else. 
All they needed to do was to coordinate it, control it, weaponise surprising outcomes.
And there they would be, saints and sinners, enlightened and the blinking out, all addressing the public hysteria of the moment.
Did I not tell you, you are all gods? 
Antidote to Chaos.
Surprisingly, the US Senate proceedings over Judge Kavanaugh, and his entirely implausible accuser "Dr" Christine Ford, represented the high tide of a deliberately engineered moral panic combined with a virulent female chauvinism which had motivated millions and consumed billions in taxpayer funds.
There was no brooking any argument, because they were right. Facts were facts. Women didn't lie about such things. Toxic masculinity was always at fault. Every alleged victim was a sacred site.
Give us a break. 
Humans lie, they lie all the time. 
"Facts are just weapons that men use to batter women and perpetuate the system," as Feminist Jurisprudence states. 
But their alternative "facts" were no facts at all, they were heavily manipulated ideological agendas designed to grant power to the state and destroy traditional society, a Marxist stalking horse propelled from the stables of universities and colleges and perpetuated by the legions of the half-educated.
And now it was over. Well not over, but had finally reached the high water mark.
Rationality, commonsense, decency, all of them were beginning to sneak back into public debate; as people abandoned their rapacious governments with their endless idiot programs and instead went about their lives, found meaning in their own entrails, or trails, common routines, quiet lives.
False accusers retreated behind the panda eyes lining the horizon. They were wrong. They had always been wrong. And they should leave the citizenry alone, these half-baked clones of sensibility.
They played a dangerous game. And they lost.
Because bureaucracies cannot be trusted. Because savages still walked the earth. Because they really were not that far from the trees.
He watched for odd flickers of intelligence, and was surprised, sometimes, by just how dumb they really were.
"Do you feel like you've been stencilled onto the Earth," one of the operatives once asked. "Do you know what I mean?"
He shook his head. One thing he was good at: acting dumb.
Then again there were many delights. Psychellium.
California here I come.
It was all about agendas, and this government's agenda had been and unthinking grasp for power, ever more power, to ignore the bleatings of the subjects over which they ruled, to treat with utter contempt those who paid their wages, to gather wealth unto themselves.
Now they were faced by a righteous anger. 
We were born like this. We were made like this. We evolved in moments and were gone. This short lived species. There had to be other ways to survive.
Psycellium indeed.
Manipulate the time line.
Around him invisible soldiers mumbled their discontent while around them humans  dreamt of oncology reports and alibis.
Of past injustices and fleeting loves, rats in the subterranean aquifers; everything running in parallel.
He knew they were on the hunt and could disappear in a micro-instant.
They were coming for him.
The had come for everybody.
Hold fast your power.
Let them slip away.
There was no point in killing every ant that stepped across his path.
Santa Claus has come, all at once.
They were choking on their own greed.
He had very good reason to hate their guts, to do everything he could to destroy them.
And then the were gone in an instant, these enemies of his.
And another day dawned, in the deep reaches of the suburbs. Cloaked. Always cloaked. They had been pretending to be normal for so long, they almost believed it themselves.
The panda eyes moved closer.
And the gods were roiled. Hold fast your truth. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 


Statistics lie. 
Any number of populist speakers will say that 'we' never had it so good. Yet so-called employment has never been as insecure, free secular, government-funded (sic) schools have never been so expensive, casual work has never been so pervasive, infrastructure (roads, rail, utilities etc) has never been under so much pressure/ nor so neglected - the result of decades of neglect - and the gap between rich and poor never so wide. 
Youth see dwindling opportunities and widespread indifference and broken electoral promises. So does the population at large. 
A seething sense of frustration is abroad, and the current epidemic of knife assaults is one indicator of this. 
Opportunity is not decided upon merit but upon wealth, connection, influence and patronage - we have become a culture/society of men(sic) not Laws. 
Inequality thrives in such an environment - which is an historical phenomenon in this society. Inequality breeds violence - as is, and has been for most of our history, evident in every schoolyard and playing-field. But, whereas, in the past, common values - however crudely-drawn - have put a brake upon tolerance of such conduct - our now racially-culturally diverse, rich society has to look hard to discover what are its common values. Youth is confused. Confusion breeds frustration. This breeds violence.

Rosemary O’Grady is a lawyer and writer.

High Fives and Flying Lows

Elizabeth Kunoth Kngwarreye / Bush Seeds

These were the high fives and the flying lows. 
The contract has ended. 
There was never a time for peace.
A massive wake-up call. 
He could have been born again but instead was trapped. There was never a better time for a breakout. 
The dreams of a nearby policeman often infected his own. 
There were guns and procedures, policies and bureaucratic reach, processes, all of them frustrating, the victim in the dock, often in the dark they were so clearly deranged. 
He tried to think only about the positive side of his job. His earlier obsessive enthusiasm had waned. He no longer slept naked in the vivid lust that had once preoccupied his every waking thought, try as he might to focus on the job, to present as a nice guy, the ultimate Australian camouflage. 
And he no longer thought obsessively, and with pride, of his job, the handcuffs, the paternal, good part of the job, helping others, maintaining order, donning a uniform, in the days before he went under cover and his faith in this life, this state, this country, all went spiralling down some secret tube. 
Like all those who stalked Old Alex, they thought a great deal about bosses and pay rates and the futility of what they were doing.
They came. They went.  
"I'm here to make sure it never happens again,"  one of the senior flies in the ointment had said several weeks before, after compromise exposed corruption and he kept his mouth shut. Not forever, as they would like, but long enough to escape detection. 
There were always parallel universes, parallel stories, even on this single, or singular plain. 
He was being welcomed into infinity but was not about to disband. 
And then they were gone, this infinite little spread. Across the oceans. Into the skies. 
The technologies of the 21st Century still surprised the ancient spirits. 
"Boredom is good, John," an old Chief of Staff used to say when he complained about being bored on the job. "It means we're not in crisis."
That was the place he was in now. 
Complaining about being bored. Relieved the familiarity of routines and the non-confrontational nature of this transforming suburb established some order at a discordant time in the nation's history. 
It was Saturday, the Lord's day in his household's traditions. He was not a believer, not in these old Abrahamic gods, but even that was an excuse to relax, just for a moment, relax.
And say adieu to the Floating World.

The Floating World

During Japan’s Edo period (1615–1868) the phrase "the floating world" (ukiyo) evoked an imagined universe of wit, stylishness, and extravagance—with overtones of naughtiness, hedonism, and transgression. Implicit was a contrast to the humdrum of everyday obligation. The concept of the floating world began in the Japanese heartland, migrated eastward, and came to full flower in Edo (present-day Tokyo), where its main venues were popular Kabuki theaters and red-light districts. Each offered an array of rich sensory experiences to the fraction of the populace able to partake of them directly. The floating world also afforded vicarious pleasure to countless others throughout the Japanese islands, for whom it was experienced second-hand through theater, song, story, gossip, and pictures.


THE BIGGER STORY: 

As predicted, former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is pursued by a media he no longer assiduously courts. The man who thought he was the centre of everything, the cleverest man in every room, indeed in the entire country, has become a laughing stock. While he swans around New York, those he left behind are still cleaning up the mess from his truly awful three years of government.

Pic:BackGrid

WHEN Malcolm Turnbull retired from politics, we all wondered what he would do next with his illustrious life.
Sit on a few company boards, perhaps? Join the global speaking circuit? Follow the Keating model, and periodically pop up on the ABC to lecture whichever inferior being had dared to occupy his old office?
Few among us could have predicted the truth — that Mr Turnbull would, in fact, become the next Kardashian.
Paparazzi have been following the former prime minister around New York, taking surreptitious photos of his tight-fitting pants.
Anyway, what in the name of all that is good and holy was Malcolm Turnbull doing at a waxing salon? For answers, I turned to the establishment’s website, and found this description of the European Wax Centre experience.
“It reveals a more radiant you. A more honest you. A more confident you. The version of you that speaks her mind, stays true to herself and walks with a strut in her step everywhere she goes.”

Sam Clench, News, 3 October, 2018.

That's What you Get

Every effort was made to reach an understanding.
In the end the world evolved beneath his feet. 
There was no recompense.
Bite the hand that feeds you.
It could be true. In the end they did not know. 
In the end what astonished Old Alex the most was the population's resilience, the way people adapted to a malevolent government, blundering, unthoughtful, unaware of what it did; an organism constructed of straw whose weight and impact went well beyond its measure. As if in these malevolent times there could be a higher purpose. 
As if, despite universal distrust of those who ruled them, people adapted in their burrows, lived their quiet lives, stayed out of focus. 
In essence they, too, were hiding. Or staying out of the way. 
"Nothing works."
He heard it all the time now. "Nothing in this country works." 
There was never any disagreement. 
But having lost faith in any external force, such as government, such as God, instead humans turned to their normal mammalian duties; rearing children, going to work, taking care of the yard. 
Meeting up with old mates on an indiscriminate, almost random basis. 
For people formed networks when anchored to one place. 
There was always one place; the universal and the specific. He belonged in the slipstream high above.  
"Thank God there's no news in Australia," he would sometimes mutter at his car radio, the useless Australian Broadcasting Commission.
One billion dollars and 6000 employees, and that was the best they could do? Reruns of Antique Roadshow in Prime Time. Endless regurgitation of government narratives and government propaganda. 
No one ever told them that feminist advocacy did not constitute news, and in this peculiar post-truth world every bizarre multi-million dollar research exercise designed to inflame moral panic by underpinning anti-male diatribes, a rhetoric of distaste, patriarchal abusers and toxic masculinity, as if it was entirely justifiable for a man to go to work in a factory or to drive a truck all day; to support this ideologically driven garbage so inimical to their interests. 
A post-truth world. 
An ideologically driven world. 
Brainless, the bureaucrats were so impressed by what they heard in their red-brick colleges they went forth and prosletysed, bound to government by their tax-payer funded jobs. 
Purloined by taxpayer funded Marxist rhetoric. 
Convinced they were correct. 
How was the deliberate creation of moral panic or, as it used to be called, mass hysteria, on someone else's coin even remotely justifiable? 
They never thought that far. They collected their pay checks and did what they were told.
The banality of evil. 
The transformation of the working class male into the oppressor was a feat of intellectual gymnastics, or was it sleight of hand, that bureaucracies achieved with the paychecks of those very same men.
There we were now, crucified. Because so much of public debate had withdrawn behind curtains of certainty. 
They knew because their professors knew. 
They knew because their generation was sent to correct the injustices of the past.
Their historic missions. 
Inevitably, because it was freezing half way through spring, there would be some reference to climate change, as they sat shivering in a beer garden washed over by disinterest and contempt. 
There was nothing anyone could say to change their minds. 
They knew what the science said.
No they didn't.
They knew how evil had been the past.
No they didn't. 
There came a time. We opened up. Everyone laughed. Held back their disdain. A miracle evoked in the Potomac, for there were no rivers left in Australia, none whose name anyone knew. 
Swamped by other cultures, the eradication of the Australian accent well in train, being a migrant a primary qualification for a job, destruction of tradition, there was no joint project, not anymore. 
Swamped by strangers, this was not a country built with pleasure, by the joint efforts of its peoples.
It was a country destroyed by bureaucratic ideologues and a hapless, shameless political caste. 
Not one had the nous to stand up to their bureaucrats. 
And they stood forth and said: you must agree. 
Instead the populace went about their lives as if the toxic ideologies spewing forth from the government did not exist.
They formed families. They loved each other. They had children. They went to work.
The anti-family ideologues and taxpayer funded extremists went about their days; and in the end everybody stopped listening to them.
Thank the Lord. 

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.” Edgar Allan Poe.

And so it all went furling into remote possibility, just like that. 

A hundred million years, he muttered in what felt like a half-drugged sleep, and then returned to old incantations. 

"Dishonest, incompetent, corrupt."
"Trust no one."
There were always responses. 
Perhaps none of them were real. 
"All is forgiven."
"I apologise. We apologise."
"Trust no one," he responded, yet again. 
Far away, a swan dive. 
On show now.
The inspection team had been and gone.
No one asked his permission.
No one explained what was happening.
They never had that common decency. Never. 
The traps were laid bare. The surveillance created its own narratives. 
Like ice flows, a kind of liquid air passed over them, time passing; currents of time. 
Far below. Far below. 


THE BIGGER STORY: 

A handful of Republican senators — including the staunchest defenders of Mr. Trump and Kavanaugh — criticized the president for the testimony of Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford at a rally in Mississippi Tuesday night.

"How did you get home? 'I don't remember,'" Mr. Trump said at the rally in Southaven, appearing to alternate between acting as a questioner and giving an impression of Ford. "How did you get there? 'I don't remember.' Where is the place? 'I don't remember.' How many years ago was it? 'I don't know.'"

Speaking at an event hosted by The Atlantic, Trump ally senator Lindsey Graham said that while he "didn't particularly like" the President's remarks about Dr Ford, he slammed Democrats for their treatment of Mr Kavanaugh..

To a chorus of audience boos Mr Graham replied: "Yeah. Well boo yourself."In parroting comments made during the investigation into Bill Clinton, Mr Graham said of the allegations against Mr Kavanaugh, that "this is what you get when you go through a trailer park with a $100 bill".