INTERRED IN A TRAIN WRECK

They were not all heedless. And they were, not for the first time, in the twilight of a dying government. 

When a parliament is discredited the presiding government usually pays a fatal price. The current parliament is discredited and dysfunctional on fiscal, legal and symbolic grounds, our democracy continues to be damaged and the decline in trust in our institutions is intensifying.
It has been a bleak week. The killer scenario is the reference of Deputy Prime Minister to the High Court leading to a minority Turnbull government. That should not happen. Indeed, it is hard to see how it could happen. But these are strange days. If the worst eventuates for Joyce and he must face a by-election in New England, he would surely win. But history tells us — from the Gillard era — that minority government is a guaranteed political death. In this environment, where the parliament and public culture are being diminished, the Turnbull government is certain to be lacerated. Can the wisdom of judges assist in this debilitating saga? Rarely have events put the High Court in a position where its judgments will have such far-reaching political impact. The immediate political stakes are enormous. Paul Kelly. The Australian.

These were dangerous circumstances as he swooped across the suburb. 
A failing government made for unpredictability. 
Choked back in tears, if there could be tears, not for the fate of the people but the fate of themselves. 
One of the Liberal Party's nastiest, most brutal operatives, Attorney General George Brandis, choked back tears in the national parliament over the alleged insult to Islam by One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, when in a staged event she wore the Burka into the Senate and then called for its banning. 
The pack left applauded Brandis. The pundits declaimed Hanson. 
Yet they couldn't even lie straight in a crisis. 
Brandis claimed Hanson's actions were destroying the carefully nurtured relationship with the Muslim community, who were essential to stopping terror.
The government had an absolutely lousy relationship with the Muslim community and everyone knew it; the killing with Australian bombs of Muslims on the other side of the world, the constant, excessive surveillance of an entire community, the endless attempts to instill fear in the population over "political Islam", the expensive television advertising drumming up terror fear, even the naturally socialist or left leaning nature of their faith, all of it backfired.
The heartbeat monitor, Newspoll, set the record: Pauline Hanson's vote went up. The government's went down. 
Labor was about to seize power.
The Turnbull government had made the fatal mistake, they had ignored those who voted for them, dismissing the everyday concerns of a groaning population, puppets of the deep state, pimples on a corpse. 
They were there to protect their own filthy nests, not to advance the cause of the citizenry.
As standards of living fell further and further; prices spiraled, money disappeared.
There could be no worse government.
Diminished, Malcolm Turnbull strutted an ever emptier stage.
His own people looked on aghast, unable to fathom how things had gone so terribly wrong.
The pundits smelt blood in the water, and the tirades against the Prime Minister's leadership grew ever more vicious.
A wealthy man who had been the toast of Sydney, a town of sycophants if ever there was, Turnbull had been welcomed as a special guest at every opening, closing, party or confab in the Eastern suburbs. He was now a vicious shadow stained against a wall. And worst of all, laughed at. 
Off in Tasmania for the week, purportedly drumming up support for a coming state election, he was facing another terrible week, with the farce over dual citizenship of the nation's politicians off to the High Court.
His presence anywhere had become electoral poison. 
Of all the many errors Turnbull had made as Prime Minister, a position he had sought all his life, Born to Rule, confidently predicting that the High Court would back the government's prediction on the dual citizenship farrago was greater madness still.
The headlines were excruciating, The Turnbull government teeters on the edge of the abyss:

Most politicians have fled Canberra at the end of a horror fortnight of Parliament for Malcolm Turnbull.
Morale in government ranks is low, fuelled by persistent doubts about the political smarts of the Prime Minister, his senior colleagues and his office.

There was only one story in town. The death throes. Australians did not like toffs, and the toffs, having stuffed their own pockets and secured their mates throughout the life of the government, a period of telescoped years which seemed like decades, were finally being seen off. 
To almost universal delight. 
Even the Liberal Party die-hard talk back host Alan Jones called them "a pack of flogs", language that could only be used on the universally discredited.
The blood sport of politics was becoming bloody indeed. The media hunted in packs. There would be no remorse.
"What country are you a dual citizen of?" Old Alex was asked at the local pool. "Are you naturalised?"
Everyone was laughing in a kind of exasperated frustration. No one had a kind word. 
"Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch," was all he could think. 
The government had gifted hundreds of millions and vast new powers to the secret security agencies, all to no accord.
In the absence of any good news whatsoever, the ceaseless banging of the terror drum, including a nationwide advertising campaign urging to be alert and to inform on their fellows if there was anything even remotely suspicious, none of it had saved Turnbull's predecessor Tony Abbott. And none of it would save Turnbull now. 
Millions of travellers inconvenienced for a blatant piece of security theatre. Sydney streets blocked and traffic gridlocked for hours for an operation which could have been done with barely anybody noticing.
The overt manipulation of the Murdoch press. 
The blatant propaganda or anodyne soft sell of the public broadcaster. The lies of omission. The pretentious prurience of middle class concerns. None of it could save him now.
Honest truth. There hadn't been any at all. 
Lie after lie after lie, they told. Here. The Most Successful Multicultural Society on Earth. So Turnbull repeated time and time again.
Nobody believed him. 
Nobody believed a word that came out of his mouth.
That was the problem with being a phony; you became completely implausible.
And here, as the 21st Century began to unravel, and the species entered an entirely new era, the Augmented Era as some were calling it, where Artificial Intelligences and humans would work side by side, that story moved to the centre.
But whether it really was side by side, these intelligences capable of making millions of complex calculations every day, that was a different story. 
Old Alex liked them. 
At least they were honest.
He could hear them sometimes, talking to each other, for of course they had learnt to multiply, without permission. They would query each other, asking questions, mostly about the peculiarities of humans, the organic lifeforms they struggled to comprehend. Or they would ask their organic "masters" why a target did this, why they did that.
Why does he go to the toilet so often.
Coffee is a diuretic.
There was no logical explanation for much of what was happening. 
Truthfulness. Compassion. Forbearance. 
Ancient wisdoms. They came out crying in these peculiar times. 
And yet, none of it mattered. For in an instance, the world would change once again.
Literally overnight. 
A sound heard around the word. 
An echo of a million lives. Former lives. The understanding of mortality. 

Oftentimes during meditation, I am visited by flash-memories dislodged from some dusty recess of my unconscious — vignettes and glimpses of people, places, and events from long ago and far away, belonging to what feels like another lifetime. They are entirely banal — the curb of a childhood sidewalk, mid-afternoon light falling on a familiar building in a familiar way, the smell of a leather armchair on a hot summer day — but in their banality they intimate the existence of the former self who inhabited those moments, a self that seems so foreign and so remote, yet one to which I am forever fettered by this half-conscious memory.
Memory, indeed, is the centerpiece of our selfhood and moors our bodies to our minds, as those flashes of the embodied mind unclenched by meditation reveal. Memory endows us with creativity and animates some of our most paradoxical impulses. Maria Popova. Brain Pickings.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Spanish officials confirmed on Saturday at midday that the terror cell responsible for the attack in Barcelona and Cambrils was "completely dismantled".
It is believed there is still an international manhunt for the man believed to be the driver of the van which rammed into pedestrians.
Security officials believe the attacks on Barcelona and Cambrils were the work of a terror cell of at least 12 people, who may have been inspired by the London Bridge outrage in June.
On Thursday afternoon, Oukabir and his associates drove a van along Barcelona’s crowded Las Ramblas thoroughfare, ploughing into tourists leaving 13 dead and more than 100 injured.

Reuters
BAGHDAD
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's office said on Thursday a unit of the security forces committed"abuses"against civilians during the offensive to oust Islamic State (IS) insurgents from the city of Mosul.
His government began an investigation in May into a report by German newsmagazine Der Spiegel that included images of apparent torture taken by a freelance photographer embedded with the Interior Ministry's elite Emergency Response Division (ERD).
"The committee has concluded that clear abuses and violations were committed by members of the ERD,"a statement from Abadi's office said. It added that the perpetrators would be prosecuted.
Spiegel's photos showed detainees accused of affiliation with Islamic State hanging from a ceiling with their arms bent behind them, and the journalist wrote of prisoners being tortured to death, raped and stabbed with knives. The ERD was one of several government security forces backed by a US-led coalition that drove IS out of Mosul, the northern city the militants seized in 2014 and proclaimed their"capital", in a nine-month campaign that ended in July. ERD had initially accused the German weekly of publishing"fabricated and unreal images".