HEMMED INSIDE A REVERSED WORLD

They were Countering Violent Extremism. 
They were telling a story about a world which no longer existed. 
Fractious and fractured, bored and marooned, flowing out across a world where the polyps were all closing, a startled place in rapid, magical retreat, the country shutting down as assuredly as the darkness was coming, they held to ritual, Normality Bias, but nothing was normal about what was happening now.
The creatures cried out for their Saviour, God abandoned the elderly, a cruel place, a cruel time, nothing, assuredly nothing, was as it seemed. 
That was the world they had inherited, created by his forebears, destroyed by his contemporaries. 
Nothing in the country worked. The world's highest electricity prices. The world's slowest and most expensive internet. Housing prices out of reach of ordinary citizens. Education standards declining. Public transport a mess. Sydney a grasping gridlock. The local community centres full of aging husks, the populace infantilised, the bars relics of a destroyed culture. A declining standard of living. Proscribed debate. Extreme censorship.  Incompetent security agencies harassing everybody. Zero social cohesion. Contempt reigned through every piece of bureaucratic machinery. 
Step by terrible step. 
The diversity agenda had failed. Those who preached tolerance were the most intolerant of all. 
Old Alex tried to keep the faith and saw nothing in a burnt out place. 
The sea had become calm in an instance. Nothing to see here. They were used to hiding. How was hell to be welcomed here? 
All at sea. All lost. A divine mission a carryover from a previous assignment. 
The triggering point had been achieved. He would never know, never understand, quite what it had been; but he had served his purpose and was gone. Nothing now but to layer in the victory. To make doubly, triply sure. But in this strange set of conflicting circumstance, victory did not assure hope. All was dying and he could hear them crying in the wind. These humans. There were days when he cared as little for them as they cared for him. The noble torment. Nothing. They would make way for newer, more fertile ground. Out of the ashes grew the greatest intelligences the planet had known, and they, too, already knew they were not alone. 
The species had superceded itself. Democracy had destroyed itself. Millions of calculations every night. Every rising an arc lost. 
The nobility of man was nothing in the face of a 21st Century in a rapid state of flux. There were some who still believed there was a guiding power. There was none. They were stepping out on an open plain. The magic was gone. The agencies which had done so much to destroy and manipulate the country's culture, using taxpayer funds against the taxpayers themselves, had become so caught in their own criminal contradictions, malfeasance, disgraceful conduct, that they had lost all credibility. Surveillance no longer worked when conducted by thugs. A military mindset only worked inside the military, or in a highly regimented society. The internal contradictions would destroy them. Old Alex, brooding in the gusty winds of a late winter, shivered and was gone. Stepping aside. Stepping behind the veil. 
They would see the consequences of their own bitter actions, the karmic curses they had brought upon themselves.
And in an instance, in the same way the troubled waters had settled and the anemones had reached back inside themselves in a barely visible fraction, so too, in a magical instant, everything would change; for him, for them, for the eternal sea.

THE BIGGER STORY:

PAULINE Hanson has admitted the stunt she pulled, where she entered the Senate covered head to toe in a burqa, was “extreme”. But she’s unrepentant saying any anger it may have sparked was fine as it started a debate about face coverings.
Hanson has also suggested “these people” who wear burqas “should go to a country that suits their needs”.
The incident on Thursday is the latest round in Hanson’s battle against the burqa.
Hanson said she wasn’t challenged as to her identity. Although she has conceded security may have suspected the One Nation leader was beneath the face covering.
Gasps of “what on earth?” could be heard from the Senate as she sat down. Attorney-General George Brandis looked bemused by the spectacle and later berated Hanson for “mocking” law abiding Australian Muslims.
On Sydney radio station 2GB she said the burqa was “un-Australian”.
Talking to presenter Ben Fordham, she said, “Is it extreme? yes. Is it getting my point across? I hope so.”

US-led coalition air strikes on ISIS’s remaining territory in Syria’s Raqqa city killed 17 civilians on Wednesday, including children, a monitor said.
The coalition is providing air support in the form of heavy air strikes for the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) militia as it battles to oust ISIS from its onetime stronghold.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor, said the deaths on Wednesday followed two days of deadly strikes.
Since Monday, the monitor said, 38 civilians have been killed in US-led air strikes on the city.
Wednesday’s deaths included five children, according to the monitor, which relies on a network of sources on the ground.
The coalition says it takes measures to avoid civilian casualties and investigates credible allegations of civilian deaths.
The United States has admitted that coalition strikes have killed 624 civilians in Syria and Iraq since 2014.
But rights groups and monitors say the figure is exponentially higher than that.