WE WATCH AND WONDER

Courtesy Camper Trailer Australia

The unrelenting barbarity of it all. 

It was easy to see Islamic State hadn't gone away. 

The West continued to bomb the Middle East.

There were announcements of more executions every day. 

Thirty Islamic State mujahideen killed in a cave in Iraq. Eleven women sentenced to death for partnering with Islamic State soldiers. 

Afghanistan remained a basket case. 

Ghouta in Syria inflamed the worst sentiment. Russia bombed. The West argued endlessly over the Oscars, sexual harassment, innuendo. Diversity. Abolishing the terms mother and father as not being inclusive enough. No more husband and wife. Only partner. 

As their bombs rained down, killing, killing, killing. 

Go back to your straw man. 

For here they lived in a kind of altered denial, a parallel universe where nothing happened. 

They watched a rotting houseboat in the dying wind, seagulls ate chips.

The spooks could construct a hologram of any target they chose, and study them during office hours. Anywhere in the world.

They could do all the harm they wanted and walk away. 

The birds, the ancestors, could be bothered to fly, and nestled along the shore.

Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.

When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky

Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.

Mark Strand. The End.

 The papers were full of the garbage of the hour. 

And everybody, well a lot of people, had been locked out of the Australian dream. 

Australia’s eight-year house price boom has savaged the living standards of poorer Australians while so far leaving the wealthy untouched, a new Grattan Institute analysis finds.
But the report warns of a “catastrophic” impact on all income groups should mortgage rates rise by more than a few percentage points. The institute’s chief executive, John Daley, said Australians who already owned their houses had been little affected by soaring prices to date because they had been “hedged”. If they moved, they could buy again for about the price they got when they sold. Property investors had done well out of the explosion in Sydney and Melbourne prices because they had always been planning to sell. But new buyers had been locked out. Home ownership had plummeted among Australians aged 25 to 34, sliding from 61 per cent in the early 1980s to just 44 per cent in the most recent census. Ownership among Australians aged 35 to 44 had plunged from 75 to 62 per cent. Housing risks 'catastrophic': Grattan Institute, Peter Martin, The Sydney Morning Herald, 4 March, 2018. 

He was stranded in some place where they could not communicate. 

I've been talking to him for years. 

They partnered on a different plane. 

Love your enemy. Love your empath. 

He had been left out long ago. 

They had let go the only intelligent one. The feuding agencies. The country just a mess, a taxpayer funded mess leaking billions.

The oligarchy, personified by Malcolm Turnbull, dripped their slavish poison through the country. 

Why, the commentators implored, has Australian politics hit its lowest level? Slime. Ectoplasm. Gossip. Sexual innuendo. Slur. Everything about accusation. Impropriety. 

"I can't wait to tell Malcolm Turnbull," one of the corrupt officers said last time Old Alex had been in the area of Oxford Street. 

The Asshole from the East who would do anything to preserve his own power. 

The sycophants who served him. 

The country that served him, dying on his watch. 

Among the hundreds of thousands attending the late night Mardi Gras festivities along Oxford Street on Saturday evening was one Malcolm Turnbull, who shared a photograph of the raucous festivities where he stood alongside Cher, and his wife Lucy, a smirk across his face. In an interview with SBS News, Turnbull drew attention to the 40th anniversary of Mardi Gras, saying “It's 40 years old and 40 years ago Lucy and I had our first date so our love affair is a result of Mardi Gras.”This is coming from the same Malcolm Turnbull who put gay marriage up for debate—traumatising countless members of Australia's LGBTQI community in the process—and held a nationwide postal-vote that ran up an estimated $100 million. Malcolm Turnbull Isn't fooling anyone, Roqayah Chamseddine, The Sydney Morning Herald, 4 March, 2018.

These people posing for photographs with Cher had done more to destroy the nightlife of inner-Sydney than anybody else; making a real estate grab for some of the best locations in Sydney. Shifting their putrid moralities across a subculture. Greed. Hypocrisy. Bullshit. It wasn't about anything else. 

Evie Santos, a queer IT professional in Melbourne, tells Fairfax Media that she can't think of a single person who identifies as LGBTQ who watched Turnbull and Shorten attempting to claim the victory of marriage equality for themselves “with anything other than contempt”.
“After everything that the present (and previous) Federal governments, of both stripes, have put the queer community through over the years since John Howard spitefully changed the Marriage Act, the absolute nerve of Malcolm Turnbull—an extremely straight, white, wealthy man who has likely never known any hardship born of political persecution—to turn around and take credit for the final victory on a day that belongs to the queer community is nothing short of an outrage," says Santos.
"Mardi Gras is a celebration of the personal and the political, our survival and our thriving, and the radical activists that made the world safer and more welcoming for us.
"Few politicians have ever taken action that put them at physical and emotional risk in the first place, and Turnbull's total cowardice in allowing a plebiscite won't ever be forgotten every time he tries to pander to us.” Ibid. 

Problematic at best, he struggled to bear it all.  We watch and wonder. 

THE BIGGER STORY:

How do these people do this? In the name of Allah, the All Merciful.

TEL AVIV — The Islamic State has released propaganda photos showing the execution of a man south of Damascus named Moussa Badawi, who was accused of cooperating with a rival organization called Ahrar al-Sham.
The human rights group Action Group for Palestinians of Syria confirmed that IS operatives had executed Badawi, a Palestinian refugee who also served as the imam of the Palestinian mosque in the Yarmouk refugee camp south of Damascus.
In the photos released by IS, armed members of the global terrorist organization could be seen leading Badawi to a specific point in the refugee camp where he was shot in the back of the head with a pistol.
IS continues to control most of the Yarmouk refugee camp. In other parts of the camp, battles are ongoing with the Tahrir al-Sham organization, formerly known as the al-Nusra front, the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda. As a result of the IS presence in the refugee camp, the Syrian army under President Bashar al-Assad continues to maintain a siege of the area, disconnecting the locals from electricity and water.