CEASE AND DESIST

Picture by John Stapleton Sydney scene

A flurry of figures were running towards their hideouts.
The nuclear flash lit up their forms in a black etching, burning their fleeing images on to the thick convulsing air. And then they were gone; in one brutal, infinitely cruel second.
Not one of them made it to their bunkers.
And then it all went quiet; the arid landscape kissed with the divine, a kind of liquid silver flowing across the cacti, burnt grass, rusting trucks and collapsed dwellings of the old mining camps.
Sydney seemed a long time in the past; everything had slipped away.
Storms swept across the comparatively well equipped camp where he was staying, positively bourgeois in contrast to some. Rain drummed on the roof. The tanks filled.
He was far away from the urban areas he had once so loved.  
"I am in receipt of no questions," he muttered into the long night. "I provide no answers. I transmit no information."
"What are you?" came a question from one of the Watchers on the Watch, different now, a more senior, more sensible, more intelligent voice.
As if commonsense was finally breaking through the blizzard of thuggish garbage which had come his way.
"And that question most of all, I will not answer," he responded; tired of the ridicule, the targeting, the viciousness that humans displayed towards those of their kind who were different, or they did not understand.
In Australia, the pack mentality of group think was worse than he had ever seen; and he reiterated the theme once again: the shutting down of debate, the narrowness of the prisms through which most of the population now saw the world, the official amnesia, as entire fields of controversy were excised from the public debate, all of it was poisoning the country.
"What can you do?" Boris would ask over coffee outside the Neighbourhood Centre.
Malaise was everywhere, and not just in the collapse of Australia's underclass.
The announcement came, the legendary Kidman properties, spanning three states and the Northern Territory, reportedly some 2.6% of the nation's land area, 101,000 square kilometres, was being sold to a Chinese consortium with Australia's richest woman Gina Rinehart as the the local component.
The sale was perceived by its critics as an insult to all Australian taxpayers, an insult to the indigenous whose sacred lands the properties had once been, and an insult to the generations who had built the country. 
The Foreign Investment Review Board approved the sale.
Fat cats hunkered down in their air-conditioned streets as they passed fashionable city restaurants, a glowing air of satisfaction wreathing their out-size bodies. What was the use of the Foreign Investment Review Board? They stood in the way of nothing. 
"Madness," Boris said,
"They've sold off most of the countries major ports, most of the electricity infrastructure, most of the prime real estate in the major cities. We're becoming a southern province of China. What sort of country does this, allows this to happen?"
"Madness," Boris said again. "What can you do?"
The "jobs and growth" rhetoric with which the conservatives had narrowly won the last election looked more and more irrelevant; that week the news the economy was contracting. One more such quarter and the country would officially be in recession.
In country towns and shopping centres across the country, in the extinguished hopes of millions, recession had hit long ago. 
Sometimes, in those long dream infested nights, it was as if someone was trying to contact him, sometimes urgently, sometimes just the puerile games Old Alex's now vanquished pursuers had indulged in.
An international competition, he heard someone say, perhaps a radio in one of the neighbouring camp, apropos of nothing that he knew of.
"What's the urgency?" he asked, and slipped back into a doze, dreaming of a wonderful party, crowded party at his old friend Michael's house.\Again, apropos of nothing. The skies were cloudless, the morning air clear and uncharacteristically cool.
"He's settling down," someone observed. "I wouldn't be so sure," he replied, but there was far less danger than there had been for a very long time.
If only it would remain so.
For months turning into years he had held one primary desire: for his tormentors to cease and desist.
Perhaps, at last, it was coming true. 

THE BIGGER STORY:



AUSTRALIA’S Treasurer Scott Morrison has approved the sale of Australia’s largest pastoral land holding, S. Kidman & Co, to a partnership involving local mining magnate Gina Rinehart and Chinese consortium Shanghai CRED.

Following months of speculation as to whether or not Morrison would approve a bid involving a foreign firm, the treasurer released a statement yesterday formally approving the sale of the cattle empire to Australian Outback Beef, a venture 67 percent owned by Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting and 33 percent by Shanghai CRED.Morrison had previously knocked back Chinese-majority bids for the empire due to worries over “national security” and “national interest,” but under the deal struck with AOB, Morrison said there would be no cause for concern.“Consistent with the recommendation from the Foreign Investment Review Board, I have decided that the acquisition of Kidman as proposed would not be contrary to the national interest and will be permitted to proceed as proposed,” he said.

FEATURED BOOK:

THE DAWN

Photograph by John Stapleton

The cactus flower one day a year, and flowered the day after he arrived.

At first, it did not seem that hope was being born anew, his life reinvented.

In his head life was running backwards, in every sense; across terrains of regret and embarrassment, remorse over little things, or what came to seem like little things in the grand suffering of the race. Stupid things he wished he could forget. The larger things, the torment of the authorities, their blizzards of false claims and abuse of process, that was just part of an adventure, as revealing to him as it was destructive to them.

That previous evening, with the last of the storms disappearing across the low treeline in the middle distance towards the East, that is towards the far off hinterlands of the coast, had been oppressive and he had felt fundamentally disturbed.  

Above the sky was an horizon to horizon bank of grinding machinery, slicing through the atmosphere as if the air itself was solid. Shards, each with a human face, rained down. Inch by inch, the grinding wall of steel edged machinery worked its way downwards, ever closer to the surface.

He had to survive. He formed into liquid mercury and slid away through the cracks in the rock; life would survive, he would survive.

Here in the Outback, with its flat, sandy soils, on the surface of what had once been an inland sea. 

On the surface of what often resembled Mars, or a future Mars, the struggling, haphazard outposts of mankind.

And then in the early hours: "We will speak at first light."

Old Alex could not decipher the stream of thoughts, confused as they were by dreams of those who slept in the surrounding camps, and then in a rush he got the message: Hope, Renewal, Kindness, Forgiveness. Warmth. We will take care and you will take care. The universe will provide. The unforced suffering is over.  The king tide is running out to sea. Commonsense has prevailed. Alertness will do you no harm. At last: optimism.

It did not come from the official media.

On the taxpayer funded Radio National the big news was a half percent contraction in the economy, which came as no surprise. Ever since he had returned, he had been shocked by the hapless state of local shopping centres, had begun collecting photographs of shuttered shops. Australian school children had fallen two years behind in educational standards. And a bevy of experts droned on about one of the ABC's favourite topics, climate change and emissions trading schemes, a debate which had curdled Australian politics for 20 years, justified the building of vast green bureaucracies, and achieved precisely nothing. Lo and behold a skeptic should be invited on to liven up the deadly debate; as one tax payer funded expert after another lined up to give their views. They knew where their grant money lay. An Australian delegation was heading to the Solomon Islands, where every Pacific Island leader worth their salt lined up with begging bowl for international grants to fight, of course, climate change. An island was born, an island disappeared. One place was hotter. One place was colder. China had just approved another 200 power stations. Nothing Australia did would make the slightest bit of difference to the world climate; but hot air blanketed the public space. 

Indigenous disadvantage. The empowerment of women. 

No countering debate was ever allowed to ruffle the walls of bureaucratic certitude.

The side mirror of his old blue Ford had detached, and he took it down to the local K&M garage in Lightning Ridge. It was fixed in an instant and cost $20; a bush savvy cheerfulness.

And there was a strange comfort in the ready practicability, the warmth of things. Perhaps, indeed, the therapeutic aspects of the desert, before, once more, the Gods became roiled. And decided to speak.

THE BIGGER STORY:




Syrian rebels have called for a five-day truce to allow the evacuation of civilians, after withdrawing from their last strongholds in Aleppo's old city.
They said civilians were in great danger and they would support any initiative to ease their suffering.
The US and five Western powers also put out a joint statement calling for an immediate ceasefire to allow aid into rebel-held areas.
The Syrian government has ruled out any further ceasefires.
President Bashar al-Assad told Syrian media that a victory in Aleppo would be a "huge step" towards ending the five-year civil war, though he admitted "it won't mean the end of the war".
"Terrorists are present elsewhere," he told the daily al-Watan newspaper. "Even if we finish with Aleppo, we will continue our war against them."Since it began in March 2011, the war in Syria has killed hundreds of thousands of people, made more than half of Syrians homeless, and created the world's worst refugee crisis.

FEATURED BOOK:

FLAYED BY THE PUTRID

Picture John Stapleton Lightning Ridge 7 December, 2016.

Storms circled the camp. He thrashed, feverish.
"It's very unusual weather, Lightning Ridge," he said. "Even for the Outback it stands out; as if some strange electro-magnetic resonance."
Lightning flashed across the low flung sky, squalls of rain in the distance.
The colour of everything changed.
"You're deliberately refusing to connect," someone said, there in those peculiar waking states he was doing his best to avoid.
"Yes," he mumbled into a sweat soaked pillow.
 What good would it do, simply to switch tormentors?
Most of his dreams seemed to be about complex efforts to find a home; large rooms, disappearing canyons, brief moments of comfort, where it seemed like there would be security, where he could establish himself; often he was with his children, sometimes not.
He had been hunted from one place to another to another, the authorities determined to make his life miserable wherever he went.
All because of things he had written, material which had embarrassed them.
And made perpetually homeless, for in the flight and fright state that was in his soul he would not stand and fight his ground, he could not ignore the endless manufactured ridicule generated by dark dark policing techniques of which the average punter had no ken.
But as a Targeted Individual, he knew just how bad they were.
And he kept asking: To What End?
There was only one answer: They wanted him off the mortal coil.
And as they hunted and hunted, he knew who the guilty were.
He knew that a former AFP officer had been directly involved; him and his charlatan mates protecting their own positions and their own misconduct at his expense; hunting and hunting, because that's what bullies do, without conscience, without character, without compassion.
He had been discrete about their identities in the past, the man who falsely claimed to have written a book that he had ghost written, and in those curdled, increasingly despairing dreams, and perhaps with a flair for the melodramatic, he wanted to write a last will and testament: 
In Case of My Death.
How the National Security Agencies of Australia destroy people's lives, Without Warrant, Without Judicial Oversight, Without Evidence. 
Vindictive, Vicious. 
The worst examples of the fringe elements of policing in the country.
Boofheads, Bully Girls, Tricky Dicks.
And he would begin with his own mutterings: "I have been very badly harassed for a very long time."
And so, in his dreams, yet another home turned out not to be a home; another refuge just another trap. 
And he woke up in Lightning Ridge, with storm clouds above a low horizon.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Click on this image to go to the Twitter account of a journalist working inside Aleppo, Ahmad Alkhtibb.

It is simply horrific. Nothing justifies this.

https://twitter.com/AhmadAlkhtiib




Syrian forces were on the verge of seizing a key rebel-held district of east Aleppo on Tuesday as Damascus and ally Moscow warned that rebels who failed to leave the city peacefully would be destroyed. After retaking control of about two-thirds of opposition-held east Aleppo over the past week, forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad advanced on the large residential district of Shaar. With the capture of Shaar, the army would hold nearly 70 percent of east Aleppo, four years after rebels first seized it and divided the ancient city. In Damascus, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried on the state SANA news agency that the government would not allow rebels a chance to "regroup and repeat their crimes" in Aleppo. On Monday, Russia and China blocked a draft resolution at the UN Security Council demanding a seven-day truce in Aleppo to evacuate the sick and wounded, and to provide humanitarian aid workers time to get food and medicine in.

FEATURED BOOK:

FORTY DAYS AND FORTY NIGHTS

Picture John Stapleton Lightning Ridge 6 December, 2016.



I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.
Deutronomy 18:18


"Barmy," said one of the Watchers on the Watch; and Old Alex launched into a lecture on protocol, common decency and respect. .

"Yes, it's barmy weather. Barmy weather. Don't ridicule me. I could easily be your father."

None of the more senior Watchers on the Watch wanted to be out here, in the gusting heat and barren lands, in harsh conditions and drying winds, amid the flocks of Apostle birds and the decaying machinery, the shuffling and the mad, the vacant stairs of the genuinely bewildered.

"I have been very badly harassed for a very long time," Old Alex said repeatedly, there on the border of sleep, on the borders of consciousness; referring to the ceaseless harassment by the incompetent, dishonest and vengeful authorities who had pursued the word of the mafia linked and utterly corrupt Thai police to make his life a misery. You don't find stories watering a suburban backyard, but that didn't seem to occur to the geniuses in Australia's national security agencies, and so he had been tarred by those he had brushed up against.

But an ebbing tide takes out the rubbish; and already the clutter of false allegations and those who had attempted to make their reputation at his expense were being flushed across the mud flats, down gutters and drains, into the tumbling glitter of the anonymous surf; and he could not be more pleased to never see them again. 

There were greater spirits abroad. They would find their way. They would help him.

"How did you fall to Earth?"

Out here on the edge of desert, on the edge of sanity, there were always the voices of the divine, unlikely moments propelled out of God's ragged army, peculiar wisdoms in the rough stone. Why here, why opal here? 

Once upon a time they were a children's toy for the indigenous, the coloured stones. Now fortunes were made, in secret. 

And he heard the cry: "We have come to protect you."

The personality that had once been Stapo had long since been overwhelmed; and there on the edge of the desert, he reached up into different layers of consciousness. There had been a swirl of rain through the night, a pounding on the roof, as the storms swept across some of the country's most marginal acreage. 

While many things in the overpowering heat; with the crushed houses and the squat, abandoned buildings, were far more prosaic. 

Just like that, he had become one of the IT experts at the local Lightning Ridge Neighbourhood Centre.

One of the more common questions was how to print something. Control P Click, he would respond.

"Control, what's that?"

The most startling, transformative technology in the history of man and yet out here, in the so-called Outback, the crawling state of the internet, the circling blue buffering symbol the most common of all experiences, was an insult to everybody who paid taxes; a connivance of government to further dumb down the population. 

Radio National's Breakfast show with Fran Kelly dedicated much of the morning to yet another learned questioning about emissions trading schemes and what Australia should do to stop climate change.

Retreat five years, ten years, there were the same conversations. Hundreds of millions, billions of dollars in funding and all that had been achieved was to gift Australians with the most expensive electricity in the world, in the case of New South Wales, unreliable supply, and vast green bureaucracies.

He frittered in annoyance, and went swimming at the local pool. There was no use being constantly annoyed by choosing to listen to the white noise the government decreed as news; and which in fact was nothing but propaganda and contrivance. There was no use wishing he could be the news editor. That wasn't going to happen.

The Lightning Ridge pool was one of the best public pools in the country; and there in the 100F heat, with the sun frying his skin, the splash of cool water was as delightful as ever.

"It's 60 degrees in the shearing shed," said one of the girls from one of the neighbouring properties. She was talking Centigrade.

"Is anyone working?" he asked.

"Oh yes," she said. "Me, too."

"Jesus," he said, and swam on.

"A crown of thorns." 

As if all had become suffering, in this degraded state. 

The First Noble Truth is that the suffering of birth, old age, sickness and death is unavoidable. Some fortunate people may now be enjoying relatively happy and carefree lives, but it is only a matter of time before they, too, will experience suffering of some kind. What is also true is that this suffering — whether it is a cold, an injury or a sad event — must be borne alone. 

THE BIGGER STORY:




The Russian government said on Monday it would start talks with Washington on a rebel withdrawal from Aleppo this week as Russian-backed Syrian forces fought to seize more territory from rebels who are struggling to avoid a major defeat.
The latest army attack, which saw fierce clashes around the Old City, aims to cut off another area of rebel control in eastern Aleppo and tighten the noose on opposition-held districts where tens of thousands of people are trapped.
Advances in recent weeks have brought Damascus, backed militarily by Russia, Iran and Lebanon's Hezbollah, closer to recapturing Syria's second largest city before the nearly six-year war and a prize long sought by President Bashar al-Assad.
The rebels are now reduced to an area just kilometers across.


FEATURED BOOK:

THE FINAL REFUGE OF GOD'S RAGGED ARMY

"Adventure Before Dementia" read the sign on the side of a bus passing the Neighbourhood Centre.

Just as he had done two years before, he had retreated to Lightning Ridge in the north-west of the state.

It had been a wet winter, and when he arrived the landscape had been remarkably green for a place that often looked more like Mars than Earth.

But now the gusts of hot wind dried out plant life into crackling sticks in an instant, the colouring went to pastel shades of red and brown and olive, and an ennui crept across the low slung buildings of the outback town. It was too hot to do anything. 

Except on this one day, when the sky was overcast and he could see the streaks of rain falling from overcast skies, far off across flat burnt plains. 

Lightning Ridge was a place of elderly orphans, Australia's largest open air asylum, as the joke went, the only place in Australia where four out of every two people you meet are schizophrenic.

It was one of the only places in the world where opal could be found, and so the harsh landscape was littered with old mines and rusting machinery, abandoned camps, homes that were no longer homes, repeated scenes of previous endeavour, everything a reflection of someone else's past hopes.

Everyone who comes to Lightning Ridge is escaping from something, the saying went, and certainly the town had its fair share of old jailbirds, with their cheap prison tats and in some cases puffed faces, they'd been smashed up so often. Something had gone seriously wrong in their lives, and they weren't coming back from whatever had destroyed him.

Just as before, he was escaping excessive, intrusive, offensive and abusive surveillance. Back then it was the mafia linked authorities of Thailand, incensed by what he had written and determined to destroy him. The PsyOps operations were running in full force.

This time around it had been the Australian authorities.

"Tell your bosses they are dishonest, incompetent and corrupt," he told one of the Watchers on the Watch.

"I'm not going to tell him that!" came the response.

But he was tired of it, tired of them, tired of the sustained abuse, the idiot boofheads who could not tell the difference between false claims generated by the Thai mafia and their Australian cohorts; whose powers of investigation were sub-zero and whose integrity was somewhere beneath that.

It was difficult, expensive and uncomfortable for them to continue the chase out here; and as he kept asking, "To what end?"

Indeed there seemed no end to it, no motivation but abuse and bullying, no rationality in the continued targetting, except, he assumed, a desperate attempt to cover up their own malfeasance, their own outlandish and vindictive abuse of public funds.

"Surveillance is abuse, surveillance is abuse," he kept muttering in half sleep, out there in that outpost on the edge of what was an even harsher, more dramatic, and emptier interior.

And so his life continued to run backwards, through triumphs and regrets, loves and disasters, visual tableaus and the deaths of old friends.

On the taxpayer funded Radio National he heard an earnest discussion from taxpayer funded agriculture and cooking experts on how climate change would affect the spaghetti bolognaise of the future, the upshot being that the carrots might be a different shape, Meanwhile, the bombardment of Aleppo and Australia's tacit and explicit support for the Syrian dictator Assad went entirely undiscussed.

And his head went round and round: Those who tormented him had no idea; these illiterate thugs. 

And he read apropos of nothing, a piece on the high death rate in Lightning Ridge:

The volunteers collect bodies from simple cottages in town, from canvas tents on the dusty pink opal fields and from trailers parked at the edge of pebbly mine shafts. Sometimes they retrieve bodies from the scrubby saltbush brush, where out-of-luck miners retreat to end their lives.
“Summer is the worst,” Mr. Molyneux said. Temperatures rise above 112 degrees, and stay there for days. “It doesn’t take long for a body to fall apart in that heat,” he said, recalling a dead miner whose arm fell off as he tried to pick up the body.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Syria's army and allied militia advanced towards rebel-held areas of Aleppo's Old City on Sunday in an attack which a military source predicted would be over in a matter of weeks.

Western and regional states backing the rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad appear unwilling or unable to do anything to prevent a major defeat for those fighting to topple the Syrian leader, whose campaign to regain all Aleppo has been backed by the Russian air force and foreign Shi'ite militias.

Rebel groups in Aleppo have told the United States they will not leave their shrinking enclave, a senior rebel official told Reuters, after Russia call for talks with Washington over a full withdrawal of opposition fighters.

But the rebels may eventually have no choice but to negotiate a withdrawal from eastern Aleppo, where tens of thousands of civilians are thought to be sheltering, in the face of relentless bombardment and ground assaults.

Why, why why are we involved? 

FEATURED BOOK

GOD'S RAGGED ARMY

The car rose slowly from the fetid plains. For days, in tormented dreams, he had been a soldier going around a battlefield, killing the wounded. Shot after shot after shot in those terrible scenes. Mostly the victims were already dead; and his bullets thudded into corpses beginning to rot in that terrible heat. Some, he knew, were playacting death, hoping against hope that they would be overlooked. Sometimes they begged for mercy, a final futile plea for life. Sometimes, their consciousness already slipping, they moaned as the bullets thudded into their flesh. Mostly, he was just firing bullets into corpses. He felt no regret.

In a different realm, he finally escaped the corner of suburbia into which he had been hunted.

The surveillance had been brutal, invasive, offensive, had repeatedly made him homeless, and the ordered houses which surrounded him as he finished Hideout in the Apocalypse might have been a comfort to some, but were of no comfort to him. He could hear the orchestrated derision. He was meant to suffer, cringe, withdraw. They hoped, more than anything, he would kill himself and save themselves the trouble.

He had made the same mistake before, assuming that somewhere in government run agencies there was reason, intelligence, compassion, that the treatment dished out to him had somehow been a mistake of the lower orders.

We seen in others what we see in ourselves.

Old Alex would not make the mistake again.

He remained continually astonished at just how bad Australian governance was, just how dishonest, incompetent and corrupt were the security agencies who hunted him, just how bleakly totalitarian, how utterly ignorant, had become the country he had once so loved.

Hunted back to the home of an elderly relative, he finished the book against all odds, in difficult circumstances, draped as the backdrop of his thoughts were with the carping hatred of the pig ignorant police and government agents who circled him, hoping to destroy.

They forgot: he heard everything, and he knew just how malicious they were.

The shifting personnel of the Watchers on the Watch contained few of any integrity; and he had become a zoo exhibit, someone to poke fun at, or simply to torment.

"They were selling tickets," one of the supervisors called in to clean up the mess would later say.

It was an instinct to hide, to pretend to be someone other than who he was. No one could act more stupid or unassuming than he could, if the situation required. But even in this latest circumstance, it was as if he had run down a rabbit hole, and they had continued to poke their sticks, the cruelty of mob behaviour, as they poked and poked and poked.

The government ran anti-bullying campaigns, but were the biggest bullies of all.

They forget: he learnt more about them than they would ever learn from him.

The car rose from the plains, and after visiting Glen, whose perverted duplicities, multiple treacheries and flagrant dishonesties were flowering into new extremes, he spent two nights in the stone house where he had been two months before, in the midst of that terrible winter during which he wrote Hideout in the Apocalypse.

This time there was a different, more powerful kind of wrath.

A Terradactyl swept high across the mountains, In his dreams it resembled more a giant sting-ray, except it was high high in the sky. He could see the suburban houses far below, and the seaweed thoughts of the denizens rising in little huddles. He no longer tried to listen. After months of persecution and harassment, which planet does he think he's from this time, he had lost all interest and all faith in the species. Whatever hope there may once have been, their tedious preoccupations were no longer of interest. There was a reason why the ancient Gods had been so cruel, their warriors so merciless. That was the nature of the species, blunt, disinterested, barbaric. He had once thought, with all the naivety of a new born, that people were mostly well intentioned. He knew better now..

Once his flying dreams had been a source of wonder and delight. Now he flew high and fierce, with piercing eye, and the cruelty that had been displayed towards him, the ceaseless bullying and harassment he had been subjected to by state agencies, all the attempts to silence a journalist, were folding out in the provisions of an ancient curse.

He knew more than he let on.

His enemies circled ever more frantically.

"Let's spell it out in Simple Language. We Will Kill You."

And then, out there in the desert where his mind could roam free, there was a shift in puzzling emphasis.

He performed the ultimate of modern insults, and unfriended Glen on Facebook, For his efforts he got sworn at, and Glen demanded to know why he had been wiped when he had been helping him with an ethical dilemma.

Glen could have been a friend, could have helped him with the abusive, unwarranted, unfair and invasive surveillance he had been enduring for so long.

Instead he had chosen to join the conga line of clever dicks; and further his own career.

The talk of an ethical dilemma was just another piece of vaulting gestalt about face, another lie among so many lies.

The only ethical dilemma was why the government agencies were so profoundly dishonest, why no one spoke up, why the supreme power of surveillance the modern technologies had gifted the very worst characters in the nation's secretive security agencies were not being properly monitored.

Why a government which was meant to serve the people, had instead become their enemy.

And why those who had so utterly mismanaged his case, and who had clearly wasted considerable government funds to hunt him and to try and intimidate a journalist, could still hold their jobs.

It was a good sign.

He was no longer participating in his own persecution.

Out there in the desert nights, with the stars feeding far above.


THE BIGGER STORY:






Tens of thousands of Cubans greeted Fidel Castro's funeral cortege on its journey across Cuba on Thursday, unflagging in their admiration for one of the towering figures of the 20th Century who is equally loathed by his adversaries.
Waving flags and singing the national anthem, Cubans thickly lined pastel-colored colonial streets to pay their respects to Castro. He died on Friday at age 90, a decade after stepping down as president but defiant to the end toward the United States, the world power he tormented from just 90 miles (145 km) away.
The government declared nine days of mourning for the man who built a Communist state, aligned Cuba with the Soviet Union and survived what his government claimed were more than 600 U.S. assassination attempts.

FEATURED BOOK:

WISER ANGELS

He slept deeply, away from the idiots who were always trying to contact him; as if he was some experiment, a live rat to be tortured, a curiosity to be examined. He had been able to hear all too much; and spent as much time pretending not to hear them as he did listening to the poisonous fronds of thought emerging from surrounding houses. For he did not know who he could trust.

And now he was away from suburbia, as the denizens of Lightning Ridge called Australia's cities with a shudder of dislike. 

Those who could cope with suburbia were a different species altogether. 

Much of what he had heard through that long, interminable, bitterly cold winter had been harmless. Lasagna for dinner. Medical concerns. Television programs and the endless drivel of government propaganda from the radio. 

Sometimes he would hear one of the operatives lying to new recruits amongst the Watchers on the Watch, expressing their distaste for him; and inflamed dislike which would never have been there in the first place if they had not mounted their prolonged surveillance campaigns, and attempted, time and time and time again, to encourage him to have a heart attack or to take his own life; to do their job for them, to relieve the world of his disturbing presence.

Old Alex was determined not to let them destroy him. 

The reasons for their being, for he did not regard himself as a singular, or ordinary person, the reasons why he, or they, with their image infested consciousnesses and trails of memory and wisdom and sadness from other lives, were beyond the ken of any of them, including himself. He could no more explain why he had been cast into this unhappy place, forced to listen to the tendrils of malicious thought which would whisper and curl through the long nights, then he could explain the meaning of life.

The frontiers of science were realigning the evolution of the species, and what seemed like magic, or like the voices of the Gods, was in fact an evolution of themselves, or people like themselves, cast forward, cast back. He, like hundreds of others, had volunteered for the sacrifice in an instant, as if it meant nothing; as if it would be an easy assignment, and he had never thought, in that defining instant which would confine him to this planet for so many years, through so many lives, of what it would be like to be so profoundly trapped for such a very long time.

The mistakes that had been made would not be made again.

As he lay away and listened to the occasionally supportive, mostly disparaging, voices of the Watchers on the Watch.

"I told you this guy could hear us."
"I told you he was extraordinary."
"Pigs might fly."

They no more understood a cluster soul, or cluster intelligence, than they understood their own confined fates, or their adopted, inherited Gods and belief systems.

Old Alex listened to the garbage of persistence, for they were on government or military contracts and had nothing to do but watch and wait, for abandonment or indiscretion or proof he was not what he said he was, while his own mind searched through the tedious fog for a friend, a sympathiser, someone of like mind, someone who understood. On the rare occasion when he found them, they were invariably hidden, and did not want their comrades to know. 

He kept his secrets of a different style of consciousness; as the Watchers on the Watch spilled their secrets; told him stories of the bureaucratic fiascoes and blind incompetence of government, and most of all, like workers everywhere, of the peculiarity, bastardry and arrogant blindness of their grotesquely overpaid bosses.

It had worked, those strange curses. "You will spend the rest of your life dedicated to exposing what you have learnt."

That is, the dark shapes and intent of government functioning, the ways the machinery set out to destroy their targets, the problem being, those targets were simply citizens who refused to comply with the government narrative of the day, and who not only had every ,right to express their views and to think in an independent manner, but whose very suppression was poisoning the society as a whole. The culture was being destroyed by the very people who thought they were transforming it into something better. They thought, or hoped, a natural idealistic impulse, that they were leaving the world a better place, that they were doing good. 

Instead they had come out looking like grubs.

He had stated the theory frequently in his work. That the suppression of debate, the derision of those who did not accept the tertiary acquired theories of tolerance and diversity, who dared to disagree with the government narrative, was leading to a lurch to the right; and straight into the arms of extremist views.

It was a bureaucratic tendency, to quash that which did not fit their narrative, their belief system. But as they worked for their enlightenment, executed the theories they had acquired at the knees of their professors, they destroyed the very culture they wished to save; as they worked for the betterment of mankind, they stirred its darkest forces. The thuggery of group think became the norm. 

And in a more mundane sense, as they probed him for a response, there in those long nights, he built his defences. 

And so sat last, they finally left. And as his mind wandered across the empty desert; he could finally relax. 

They probed him and he resisted. They watched him and he curled into a ball. Hazing only works if the target is vulnerable. He had been very vulnerable. He had clung to old beliefs that humans were essentially good. He had never truly understood, despite all those multiple lives, the base nature of the species in which he had been landed. Crude, barbaric, self-interested, they had no adherence to the truth, that curse, or trait, which had made his own life so difficult.

"Why didn't you allow me the chance for happiness?" he asked of a relationship possibility he himself had killed.

"Because we didn't want you to be happy. You would never have written that book."

All he knew was relief, that the final mustering was taking shape, packing their bags, moving on, afraid of the internal reviews of other bureaucrats with too much money, time and power; bureaucrats who would seize the opportunity to expand their own power and hopefully, in the end, to fix that which was wrong, to ensure that no other journalist would endure the prolonged harassment and intimidation which had been his terrible fate. 

Winter was over, and the heat of the Outback soaked through his bones.

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Russel Kiefel pic by Brendan Read

 













Former Neighbours star Russell Kiefel died over the weekend after being taken ill during a theatre performance.
The actor played Russell - the abusive father of the Brennan brothers - for a brief stint in the soap last year. He passed away last night after becoming unwell while performing in the play And I'm the Queen of Sheba at Brown's Mart Theatre in Australia.
The theatre has cancelled the rest of the season out of respect for Kiefel, with executive director Sean Pardy calling it a tragic and emotional time for the actor's family and everyone involved in the production.
Kiefel's co-stars - both old and new - have all rallied round to pay tribute to him, with Neighbours actress Colette Mann leading the way with an emotional Instagram post.

Colette Mann, who plays Sheila Canning, on the soap said: “I am very very sad to say that the wonderful actor, Russell Kiefel who played Russell Brennan in 2015 on @neighbours passed away yesterday.

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Kiefel's former Neighbours co-star Colette Mann paid tribute to the actor on Instagram

The late Russell Kiefel in rehearsal for Belvoir's The Blind Giant is Dancing (2016). Photo by Brett Boardman.

Russell Kiefel, whose career included roles in such landmark Australian films as Breaker Morant and Radiance, as well as work with many of Australia’s most significant theatre companies, has died.

He passed away on Sunday after falling ill backstage during a performance at Darwin’s Brown’s Mart Theatre on Friday night.

Born in 1951, Kiefel graduated from NIDA in 1974. His screen debut was Gillian Armstrong’s 52 minute film, The Singer and the Dancer, made in 1977 with Ruth Cracknell and Elisabeth Crosby in the key roles. He went on to appear in numerous other films including Neil Armfield’s Twelfth Night, telemovie The Leaving of Liverpool, and Children of the Revolution.

He joined Home and Away in 1993, and stayed in television through Heartbreak High, A Difficult Woman, Wildside, Water Rats, Blue Heelers, Stingers and Something in the Air. More recently he appeared in television productions Tricky Business, Neighbours, Childhood’s End and Secret City.

Kiefel also performed regularly on stage for many years, working with the likes of Belvoir, Sydney Theatre Company, Bell Shakespeare, Griffin Theatre Company, Queensland Theatre Company, and State Theatre Company of South Australia.

Colleagues remembered him as a versatile and truthful actor, and a warm and generous friend.  

Belvoir’s Artistic Director, Eamon Flack, said, ‘Russell’s theatre home was Belvoir. He is one of our legends, and his rough beauty as an actor and a person has inscribed itself in the ethos of the company.’

Kiefel performed in numerous Belvoir productions over three decades, including Ray’s Tempest, Stuff Happens, The Alchemist, The Tempest, Hamlet, The Power of Yes, The Spook, and Run Rabbit Run.

‘Russell’s last performance for us was in The Blind Giant is Dancing earlier this year, a play he performed in three times over three decades. The original production of that play at Lighthouse in 1983 pulled together the artists and ethos that later formed the foundations of Company B. Russell was part of that production, and of the legendary 1996 revival,’ said Flack.

‘He was one of the true stalwarts of our company and our profession. He is a great loss.’

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He had been harassed for so long, day in day out, month in month out, that in the end his head began to build narrative structures focused around extreme, sustained and taxpayer funded abuse. The surveillance was meant to produce its own madness, erratic and defiant behaviour, the chilling effect, and was left in the hands of uncompromising bullies. He had begun to act like any animal under surveillance, cringing, frightened, desperate to escape. 

Nobody, not one person, had the decency to talk to him directly. And so the narrative structures streamed half formed through his head, and he longed for escape. Forty days and forty nights. Seers throughout time had sought their time in the desert, where the voices of the spirits were clearer and sharper, where the spewing, crawling mass of thoughts that filled the villages could be escaped, where common self-interest was dispensed with, where they could find in the feeding deserts some respite.

It wasn't meant to be thus. He was instead meant to kill himself; that's what "they" would most have liked, the authorities so desperate to shuffle him off the mortal coil.

For his own case, as he had told them it would, lit up the chains of malfeasance and abuse otherwise hidden, and it became evident for any genuine inquiry where the devil lay. 

He was tired of it, tired of them, often angry, thrashing as he attempted to escape, the parsimonious rectitude, their extreme dishonesty, their frequent abuse of the power granted to them. Surveillance was a blunt instrument. It was meant to destroy. "How often did they encourage him to commit suicide?"asked one of the more recently recruited Watchers on the Watch.

"One hundred and sixty two times that we've counted," came the response. 

"More than that," Old Alex thought. 

And so his head swirled through the dry reaches, the tide had reached its full height, the seven years were up; and as he thought back across the social circumstances, the hotel rooms, the apartments, the various fleeting homes he had tried to establish, and the ceaseless government sponsored ridicule and abuse which had followed him everywhere; he thought, it was meant to be. He was meant to write a book called Dark Dark Policing, for no one should be exposed to the extra-judicial bastardry which had been so viciously used against him. 

These people, brutal, bullies by instinct, should not have the power to pursue journalists in the way they had pursued him. They should not, on contract, be allowed to intimidate, threaten and bully a citizen of the country. He was a far greater patriot than any of them; they acted out of self-interest, to climb their bureaucracies, collect their pay checks, gain the approval of the packs in which they hunted; he acted because he wanted to make the country a better place, people freer to express their views, a place where those who were different would not be hunted and bullied as he had been.

He longed, ever more feverishly, for a world where it was impossible to lie.

For in that transformational instant those who had so deliberately made his life a misery would be forced to recant. Or disappear. He didn't much care. He had no sympathy left, not for them. It was not by accident the ancient Gods had been so violent in their protection of the favoured ones. And so in the desert he could hear the stars feeding and the insect load scurrying under the trees, and he could feel, at last, the wheels changing direction. The Seven Years were up.

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VALE DES BALL:

Des Ball at the entrance to the controversial Pine Gap facility 1984

Des Ball was a lovely man; and always helpful to journalists such as myself.

Desmond John Ball, born May 20 1947; died October 12, 2016.
Des Ball arrived at the Australian National University in February 1965, as a 16-year-old fresh from Timboon in country Victoria. He was a scholarship boy who had earlier topped his home state in three matriculation subjects. Before long, Des was making his mark on ANU, academically and socially.
An early example was his arrest for "offensive behaviour" at an anti-Vietnam War rally. Des, while still a member of the ANU Company of the Sydney University Regiment, became implacably opposed to military conscription. He considered it antithetical to the values of freedom for which Australians were supposedly fighting in south-east Asia. Journalists loved the contrast: they never failed to call Des a "prize-winning economics student" when they reported his "offensive behaviour" charge. He eventually defeated the prosecution case, setting a precedent still often taught in Australian law schools.
In his student years, and beyond, Des remained a "person of security interest" to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. In one five-page briefing, the then director-general of ASIO, writing to the secretary of the Department of Defence, clusters Des with a group of academics "the majority of whom have radical tendencies". When Des began publishing material about the joint intelligence facility at Pine Gap alongside Robert Cooksey, an ANU international relations lecturer and one of Des's mentors, ASIO paid close attention.
Des, for his part, long disputed many of the inaccuracies in the security intelligence files, some of which he claimed were the result of confused identification with other long-haired young men. When asked in recent years about the ASIO surveillance, Des said he was surprised by "the extent of the resources that they had devoted to me. I think that ASIO had lost the plot by then."
After finishing his undergraduate degree with a whirlwind of academic prizes, Des made quick progress towards the completion of his ANU PhD, awarded in 1972.
It was that work, along with his studies of American intelligence facilities in Australia, and particularly A Suitable Piece of Real Estate published in 1980, which first made Des famous. Some of his great collaborations also began back then, including with Jol Langtry, with whom Des shared his many research trips to northern Australia. They measured rivers, mountains and beaches to determine how the vast Australian continent could be defended against invasion.

Professor Desmond Ball, academic, military strategist and author of more than 40 books on military intelligence, died today at 3:35pm Australian time.

Des work was impressive. He spent time inside US top secret nuclear and command centres, advising the CIA, the White House and the Pentagon, where he persuaded them that a limited nuclear war was impossible.

Former US President Jimmy Carter, in a recent book credited Des as the man who saved the world and said, “Desmond Ball’s counsel and cautionary advice based on deep research made a great difference to our collective goal of avoiding nuclear war”.

In recent years Des, despite battling cancer, never lost his love or focus for the ethnic people of Burma. For the last 20 years Des spent much of his time amongst Burma’s ethnic people and armed groups. Des Ball was a harsh critic of the generals who used the Burma’s military to trample on the peoples’ human rights. He used his acclaimed position as an accepted and acknowledged ‘expert’ to speak out against the oppression of Burma’s military dictators.

Major General Isaac Po of the Karen National Liberation Army acknowledged the help that Des had given the Karen and other ethnic groups over the years when he said in an interview with Karen News that “Des Ball has been a good friend to the Karen for many years. Des shared his knowledge and skills with us and we appreciate what he did for us.”

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Louis Herbier

There were steel buildings plunging upwards out of the sea. There were protective spirits clustering around him. In the great Dreaming of the Outback, there was the largest moon since 1948, that is, in his lifetime.

It was as if all the tension and outrage which had propelled him in the  preceding months came swelling over him like frothy surf; and he physically collapsed.

The long term stress had taken its physical toll, as had the crushing levels of surveillance and harassment.

He could feel sometimes, as the night swept across the empty opal mines, as if the healing might be about to begin.

In dreams great walls appeared out of desert sands.

In the wider narrative, in a world which needed exposing, the government gifted hundreds of millions of dollars to clandestine agencies able to conduct prolonged campaigns against any target they wished.

It was extra-judicial, had no checks and balances, and the weaponry thus amassed, secrecy, surveillance technology, hundreds of overpaid staff, legislation which made them almost impossible to prosecute, could easily be misused by any senior bureaucrat or politician with a vendetta.

People were always prepared to believe the worst, particularly those who failed to conform to the latest group think; the prevailing mob mentalities of the 21st Century.

Then the natural bureaucratic tendency to expend vast amounts of time and effort covering up mistakes took hold.

That, he was convinced, was what had happened to him.

In the background the sonorous tones of Radio National announcers continued to "unpack meaning", "explore diversity" and "empathise with difference".

Meanwhile the future of intelligence was breaking through into the present; his own self-destructive tendencies, his ability to clutch defeat from the jaws of victory, to act the loser when actually the winner, all of it was being rewritten; long overdue. Last Will and Testament. The Future was being Foretold. And the future was a brilliant one.


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While Hongkongers should be used to looking up to the night sky and not seeing a blanket of stars, our clear weather does mean that we're in for a very rare treat this very evening. You might not notice it immediately, but the sky tonight will be lit by a 'supermoon' – in other words, the moon will be 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter than it has been at any time since 1948. You won't want to miss it, either, because the next time the moon will be this big will be in 2034.

Intense air strikes have hit several rebel-held areas in Aleppo for the first time in more than two weeks, signalling the start of a major government offensive in Syria's northern city.

The ferocious bombardment of eastern Aleppo on Tuesday came as Russian armed forces also announced the launch of a large-scale operation against opposition targets in Syria.

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T.I. TARGETED

Robert Monaghan

The leaves shimmered ever more frantically, the mica light cutting shards through his peculiar headache. Treachery was everywhere. Dishonesty everywhere.
"I want to write a book called Dark Dark Policing," Old Alex said to Glen. "That's something you would know about."
"Don't know what you're talking," came the response.
These people hid within their own artifices.
"Bullshit," he responded.
Glen was easily within the top percentiles for human intelligence. But he lied to his bosses, he lied to his targets, he lied to the flash crowds he manipulated, and he held truthsayers in contempt.
In the end it wasn't so damn smart.
The surveillance, harassment which had gone on month in month out, year in year out, produced its own madness.
"Go harass somebody whose actually guilty of something," he told the microphone in the car, in between unhelpfully abusing them for incompetence and dishonesty.
He was angry, at the prolonged abuse he had endured, but it was an anger which led nowhere, its own rabbit hole.
Sometimes he even sought reconciliation.
"Apologies all round. Let's reset to zero. Let's start again."
But there were so many different agencies, so many different agendas, the goal posts shifted so constantly, that it no longer seemed possible.
In the Outback he listened to the Flat Earth News that was Radio National, with the Prime Minister making great play of a deal with America to take the refugees on Manus Island.
It was combined with a media blitz, including pictures of the Prime Minster Malcolm Turnbull, the ultimate face of Australia's moneyed class, parading for the media on various naval battle ships.
It was as an offensive abuse of power and manipulation of the media as it got; a dog whistle to the anti-immigrant lobby over a few hundred refugees; the deal being so widely broadcast and so unquestionably championed by the media highly unlikely to produce any tangible results.
Meanwhile the powers that be were selling off the country's basic infrastructure, farmland, ports and prize real estate to foreign interests willy nilly, while running legal immigration to anyone who could afford to pay at historically high and unsustainable levels; thereby creating massive social dislocation and enormous resentment over rising housing costs and high unemployment.
They were selling the country to the highest bidder, and using the misfortune of a few refugees to hide their real actions. 
It was an evil sleight of hand.
And as Turnbull strutted the HMAS Canberra, he thought he'd got away with it.

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Islamic State militants have forced 1,500 Iraqi families to march to Mosul from the village of Hammam al-Alil, where advancing soldiers have found a mass grave feared to contain dozens of bodies.
As Isis loses control of areas, summary executions and forced marches of civilians have become a grim feature of the military campaign to oust the militants from their last major stronghold in Iraq, now stretching into its fourth week.
Nearly 300 former members of the security forces and 30 sheikhs, or local leaders, had reportedly disappeared from other villages around Mosul, a senior United Nations official said.
Col Khalid Jaburi, a representative of the Iraqi council of ministers for rescuing Iraqis fleeing the fighting, said Isis had taken former police officers, former soldiers and civilians as they withdrew from Hammam al-Alil.

MALCOLM Turnbull ordered the largest ever maritime and air surveillance patrols off the Australian coast after concerns a deal to resettle refugees in the United States could be used as a marketing tool to ignite the people smuggling trade.

US President Barack Obama agreed to take hundreds of refugees stranded in Nauru and Manus Island during a meeting with Mr Turnbull in September but the announcement was delayed to allow Australia to increase its border patrols.

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PROLONGED BASTARDRY

Old Alex flew, or so car travel seemed to the ancient spirits, from the coastal lowlands to the mountains, a long unfolding swoop, and as arranged went to visit Glen at his new house in Katoomba; hoping, perhaps, to unload or debrief after a terrible winter.

They sat in the backyard, as always under surveillance, the favourite tool of government bastardry.

"I am an empath," Glen said, apropos of nothing. "I feel the pain of my friends."

It was obvious Old Alex wanted to talk about the sustained difficulties of that winter, and the torment that had been imposed upon him by government surveillance and the taunting cry of his pursuers.

Glen was an empath alright, and he had sold his soul. The Sellout had just won the Man Booker Prize.

Then Glen began showing him poetry he claimed he had been writing, continuing on the the already discredited story of himself as an aspiring young writer; as if nothing had changed.

In their own comfortable lives, inside their smart cars and Ikea homes, they regarded everyone else with contempt.

The poems were accomplished, intricate work, some of it with clashing styles; and nothing like the earnest poetry of a striving young writer. And nothing like the scribblings he he had previously seen.

"Original," Old Alex commented, as the conversation remained within narrow, ceremonial, dishonest bounds.

He compared some of it to the work of the celebrated American poet E.E. Cummings.

It was original, it just didn't happen to have been written by Glen.

He had no more written the collection of poems than he had written War and Peace.

It was some sort of stupid, bureaucratic test; what he would make of it. Did his literary knowledge and peculiar flashes of clairvoyance go so far as to detect plagiarism.

As before, Glen showed no actual interest in the mechanics of writing, or the great works of the masters. And no camaraderie or understanding of others toiling in the field. And gave himself, or his idiot supervisors, away.

It was just another deeply stupid, contemptuous trick amongst so many.

They had tried absolutely everything but to treat him with respect; and at taxpayer's expense were trying on another heist.

The leaves from the Japanese elms glinted in the cool sunlight, and soon enough he left the house feeling thoroughly cheated; which was exactly what had happened.

And found himself in wild dreams hunted into a cave, with the army of the dark snapping at him, determined to kill.

He was shape shifting rapidly in a corner; and in a frantic piece of magic opened up a deep fiery ravine between him and his pursuers.

They stood on the other side, trying to get to him. But could not cross; their anger and determination spitting barbs of black spite. 

He was changing form so quickly nothing could touch him. But he was frightened nonetheless.

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Leonard Cohen, the hugely influential singer and songwriter whose work spanned nearly 50 years, died Monday at the age of 82. Cohen's label, Sony Music Canada, confirmed his death on the singer's Facebook page Thursday evening.
"It is with profound sorrow we report that legendary poet, songwriter and artist, Leonard Cohen has passed away," the statement read. "We have lost one of music's most revered and prolific visionaries. A memorial will take place in Los Angeles at a later date. The family requests privacy during their time of grief." A cause of death was not given.
After an epic tour, the singer fell into poor health. But he dug deep and came up with a powerful new album
"My father passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles with the knowledge that he had completed what he felt was one of his greatest records," Cohen's son Adam wrote in a statement to Rolling Stone. "He was writing up until his last moments with his unique brand of humor."
Before his death, the songwriter requested that he be laid to rest "in a traditional Jewish rite beside his parents, grandparents and great-grandparents," his rabbi Adam Scheier wrote in a statement.
"Unmatched in his creativity, insight and crippling candor, Leonard Cohen was a true visionary whose voice will be sorely missed," his manager Robert Kory wrote in a statement. "I was blessed to call him a friend, and for me to serve that bold artistic spirit firsthand, was a privilege and great gift. He leaves behind a legacy of work that will bring insight, inspiration and healing for generations to come."

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