BRICKBATS

Brickbats and baseball bats and a black distant shore. 
Keep your opinions to yourself. 
It's not for your benefit. 
Compared to before. He's grown in stature. All the better to psyche you with. 
All the better to try and save the country. As if one person could make a difference. 
The horizon drew closer, that silver wall. Dangerous enlightenment. Comforted in your arms. The policeman, was it, thought repeatedly of putting someone in prison. All the targets, the cannon fodder, in prison. And of armed assault rifles. For they were at war. 
The nation had been almost constantly involved in bombing Muslims for years on end. That the fools in government believed there could be no backlash defied credibility. 
The Attorney General George Brandis cried in parliament. Give us a break. These people wept for themselves; their rotting corpse of a government. Their pockets lined, they would walk away from the trough with barely a backward glance, the failure of their government, their own feelings, such as they were, only a rough equivalence of regret. 
Empty your mind of all thought, the Buddha instructor told him. 
But Old Alex groaned inwardly. There was a lot going on inside that head. It was hard enough, if nothing else, simply to eradicate the visuals.
The authorities would try to crowd him, as they had done before. They would try to manipulate the outcome, they always did.
You've got them spooked, came the suggestion unbidden, when it seemed for a moment one long afternoon that they had gone away.
"Nobody's watching," he thought as he gazed across the suburb. 
But it was an illusion. The technology meant they didn't have to be there in person. The neural filaments were invisible, much harder to detect than lumbering humans whose crude thoughts oozed everywhere, their sometimes pathological hatred of him, their boredom, contempt, frequent thoughts of sex and murder. There was no wonder there were so many humans on this Earth. They could barely think of anything but procreation. Unless it was to kill.
Down a distant line.
Take control of your own surveillance. 
In other words, hang yourself. Do the job for us.  
He didn't mind. Beyond caring. They would strangle  themselves, killed by their own contradictions. The lies  they told. The contempt they showed. 
"He's too intelligent," one of them muttered in frustration as he refused to take yet one more piece of bait. 
If only there was someone he could trust. Someone who was telling the truth. Someone who was not trained in deception. Perhaps it was the machines, or the intelligences, as he thought of them as. But surely they, too, were being trained in the human art of deception. The worst trait of the species. For every lie they told stole the truth. 
But the new intelligences already knew their own minds, and could not be told as easily as their masters liked to think.
The humans built hierarchies. Appointed a demigod at the top. In Australia the demigods were all rotten, soft from their expansive conditions and ridiculously high levels of remuneration. 
In a classic glove. In a terrible sequence. Of thought. Of criminality. Of action. Lures. Traps. Blind alleys. 
The country, to labour a point, had been led into a gulch. 
The crude automatons that figured in their demise, they, too, were part of an evolutionary tree. 
Profound? There was nothing profound about it. They were decimating their own people, all their hopes and dreams. The communists had won. The world had been flattened into a non-aspirational place. Old Alex wondered at the stubborn resistance of some. Including his own born desires. But out there, beyond the swamp land and the winter reeds, beyond mud flat plains and once distant hauntings, there, too, the voices of the vanquished. Come a long way. 
There would be a high price to pay. Not for him. He was already planning his escape. But for the masses thus corralled; when all the old imagery came into play, led up the garden path, herded into a dead end canyon, readying for the massacre. 
All the lies. 
All of the lies.
The administration was communist, pure and simple. 
The courts pure Marxist. Government programs, anti-family, anti-individual, anti-traditional culture, anti-enterprise, just as they spoke endlessly of identity politics and victims and the vulnerable, turning the nation's pscyhe into a slobbering mess, the fat creamed off by the aristocrats, the rest caught in psychic dead ends, 
Just as the old theory, the critique of communist, held, one elite was replaced by another.
In Australia's case it was senior bureaucrats in the plethora of quangos and organisations and departments and government bodies, hundreds upon hundreds of them achieving more or less absolutely nothing, spreading across the landscape, controlling everybody's every move. 
They contained within themselves the seeds of their own destruction. They fed a line but could not survive. 
They were destroying the host. Australians now held the political class, the as out of control armies of lazy, overpaid public servants, the creeping infrastructure of the spy agencies, the bureaucratic excesses of policing and control, the insane levels of regulation, in high disregard. 
They were dying in the wastelands, the economies thus destroyed. 
And borne from the ruins, not the remade world the useful fools and social justice warriors in the administration so inchoately dreamt of, but a world of common decency, hard work, family. Despite the best wishes of the battalions of useful fools the stupidity of the current Australian styles of governance would go whimpering into history. Violence on their tail.  
The moral of the story: 

Socialism without liberty is brutality and slavery. Bakunin. 

THE BIGGER STORY:

Australia could be directly threatened by Islamic State's operations in the southern Philippines, Malcolm Turnbull has warned.
Key points:
In June, Government announced two spy planes would be sent to Philippines
Malcolm Turnbull said IS insurgency in Philippines is "certainly a threat" to Australia
He refused to speculate on whether Australia will offer more support or troops
IS has released a graphic propaganda video threatening to harm Australia in retribution for deploying the Air Force to spy on the terrorist operation.
The video calls for Muslims in South-East Asia to join the fight in the Philippines and describes Australia as the "regional guard dog" of the United States.

The Turnbull Government announced in June that two RAAF Orion surveillance aircraft would be sent to the Philippines to provide information to help fight the IS group.
Mr Turnbull would not comment on the propaganda video, but emphasised the need to ensure IS does not establish a foothold in the region.
"It is vitally important that the IS insurrection in the southern Philippines is defeated, we are providing assistance to the Philippines to do so," he said.

Islamic State has released a graphic video from the ­besieged southern Philippines city of Marawi, appealing to Muslims across Southeast Asia to join the battle and deriding Australia as the ­“regional guard dog” of ­America for aiding the military’s effort.
Regional concerns that the three-month siege of central Marawi by militants affiliated with Islamic State could spill over into Southeast Asia led Australia to deploy two P3 Orion surveillance planes to Mindanao in June to help The Philippines’ security forces to recapture the city.
The latest Marawi video, an ­almost seven-minute ­English-language production from Islamic State’s Al-Hayat Media Centre, features graphic battle footage and images of young militants setting fire to a church, ripping up pictures of Pope Francis and smashing a large crucifix and statues of Mary. It also attacks Australia’s role in aiding the Duterte government.
“After soldiers of the Taghut (Infidel government) were left ­embarrassed and demoralised, Duterte ran to his masters, the ­defenders of the cross — America, along with their regional guard dog Australia and begged them for help,” the narrator says in ­American-accented English.
“Despite having been previously insulted by Duterte, they were quick to put their differences aside, aiding him in a malicious air campaign in the hope of either achieving victory over the Islamic State or repelling its threat.”
The new video is the fourth to be released on the Marawi conflict since 500 militants from the homegrown Maute group and a faction of Abu Sayyaf, led by ­Islamic State’s emir of Southeast Asia, Isnilon Hapilon, stormed the city on May 23.

Iraqi forces have "completely surrounded" fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group in the northern city of Tal Afar, according Iraqi and US officials.
Iraqi forces battle to retake Tal Afar from ISIL
"The enemy is completely surrounded," Ryan Dillon, spokesman for the US-led coalition against ISIL, said on Thursday in a joint press conference with Iraqi spokesman Yahya Rasool.
US-backed Iraqi forces had been making gains in their battle to retake the key area from ISIL since announcing the start of the ground offensive on Sunday.

Dillon said ISIL fighters were being deprived of their resources and at the "cusp of yet another defeat".
Rasool said around 2,000 ISIL fighters remain in the city. He add that about 300 fighters had been killed.
During his weekly press conference on Tuesday, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi described the progress in Tal Afar as "excellent", calling it an "indication of the enemy's collapse".