A FAILED STATE

Childers, Queensland

Australia had become a failed state. A place where the the ruling elites had entirely forgotten that they served at the behest of the people. A frightened place, ruled with fear. An oligarchy without conscience. An out-of-control bureaucracy. A place so heavily regulated there was a rule for everything, including what you could think. So the citizenry, those who dared to venture out, kept their thoughts to themselves.

The evening Table of Knowledge was as revealingly quiet as always. On a TV screen a woman complained that her cafe/restaurant was failing. People simply didn't have the money to go out anymore. 

The Overlord, Malcolm Turnbull, the first of the worst, placed himself in front of a camera at every opportunity. No one else got a word in. The voice of the people was entirely forgotten. 

"What did you think of what he was saying today?" Old Alex asked.
"What was he droning on about? I don't remember," came Bev's response. "I'm so tired. I worked 80 hours in five days this week."  

Nobody played the slightest attention to the self-serving antics of politicians anymore. A comic book character on a screen, the antipathy of silent stoicism, a mouth that never closed, an ego that knew no limit, a high farce figure who had flown too close to the sun, who mistook noise and fury signifying nothing for substance, that was their leader. A distant, disliked figure whose humanity so clearly lacked. If they could be bothered looking.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. William Shakespeare. Macbeth. Act 5. Scene 5.

Eternities on the screen did not mean dignity or process. 

Turnbull, as with so many of them, forgot that he was not a princeling in a medieval principality but a "democratically elected" leader. That he was there to improve the lives of individuals, and the life of the country. Fat chance.

Nothing democratic about the heavily manipulated electoral processes of the era. But that was another story. 

There was something, or someone, an ancient voice in a cathedral of voices, trying to talk to him. Disembodied. Spooked. Highly intelligent. From the future. Born of the past. A prophet. If only its voice had been clarion, easily understood. A message of hope or warning, with clear instructions as to actions to take. To avoid that future breaking into the present. To avoid the disaster that was to come. 

Instead it was Gandolf wrapped in morphing, shifting, out of focus mystery, with omens and potions and veiled signals, more a threat than warning. 

Telling them a story they were too vain or too ignorant to hear. That there was no hope. That the only thing an individual could do was secure their own path. Take refuge. Stop trying to tamper with the timeline. Stop trying to improve the lot of people who, in any case, cared not a jot for the likes of him.

We've been playing in the outer reaches, and we've come to warn you. 

Already modelling itself on Stasi Germany, with threats to jail journalists, the patriots, anyone who fell fowl of an insane level of regulation, those in despair at watching their own place in the world, their own traditions and culture, sold down the river to a left wing theory called multiculturalism. A creed designed to destroy the hegemony of the existing culture, whose purveyors never bothered to tell those left behind what it really meant. Vanquished from their suburbs. Vanquished form their homes. 

So the rapacious bureaucracies bled the citizens dry, and destroyed the society in order, so they thought, to rebuild it into a fairer place.

We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. But the royal terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, disdainful, and mean, in theory cowardly, secretive, and deceitful, and in both respects disreputable. Karl Marx.

They hadn't bothered to read their theory; that one oligarchy always replaces another. 

A socialist oligarchy replaces a capitalist one. A strong man rises to the top. The people are always sublimated. Fleeting moments of anarchy, of true freedom, were always swept aside by hierarchies. 

"There's nothing more frightening than watching your own country being sold out from under you," said Blair Cottrell of the United Patriots Front. 

Invariably called the ultra-right in the government controlled media, all these groups were now suffering under the yoke of uber-surveillance and destruction by court process. The government could destroy anyone it chose. They chose many. 

In the wake of all this, in a collapsing place, "we're done here, we've done with the targeting, we've done with harassing people Herr Leader disagrees with", people fled back to what passed for the comfort of their own homes. 

They fled to a place where they could not be found. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 

A major figure in Melbourne’s South Sudanese community promised political retribution yesterday against the Liberal Party for its handing of this summer’s African youth crime crisis.
South Sudanese Community Association spokesman Richard Deng has been the public face of Melbourne’s African community leaders during a month dominated by coverage of robberies, bashing and public brawls allegedly caused by African youth violence.
Mr Deng told a crowd outside Victoria’s State Library yesterday he would mobilise against politicians he said were playing up the threat of youth crime, including Malcolm Turnbull and Home ­Affairs Minister Peter Dutton.
“Peter Dutton and Malcolm Turnbull, you need to be deported,” he said at the No Racism: Stop Criminalising Our African Communities rally.
“We are all Australians ... if you do not stop what are you doing, we are going to send you back to where you come from.”

In the 109 years of the FBI’s existence, it has repeatedly come under fire for abuses of power, privacy or civil rights. From Red Scares to recording and threatening to expose the private conduct of Martin Luther King Jr. to benefiting from bulk surveillance in the digital age, the FBI is accustomed to intense criticism.
What is so unusual about the current moment, say current and former law enforcement officials, is the source of the attacks.
The bureau is under fire not from those on the left but rather conservatives who have long been the agency’s biggest supporters, as well as the president who handpicked the FBI’s leader.
Republican critics charge that the birth of the investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and agents of the Russian government was fatally infected by the political bias of senior FBI officials — and President Trump tweeted Saturday that the release of a memo on the issue “totally vindicates ‘Trump.’ ”
Bureau officials say the accusations in the document produced by House Republicans are inaccurate and — more damaging in the long term — corrode the agency’s ability to remain independent and do its job.