RESISTANCE

"Which one of us is the spy?" one of the Watchers on the Watch demanded to know, as he did his exercises beside the once sacred lake. 
"You're all traitors to each other," he snapped back. "Traitors to the country. Traitors to decency. You live in a world of lies. And liars."
"We didn't ask for an assessment."
"Well you got one."
An Idiot Wind, he had once titled a chapter. And no greater an idiot wind than now, hot, dry, fierce, futile and brutal. It corroded the hopes of the people. It made progress impossible. 
Informed by life. Informed by death. 

There’s a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin’ out of a boxcar door
You didn’t know it, you didn’t think it could be done, in the final end he won the wars
After losin’ every battle
I woke up on the roadside, daydreamin’ ’bout the way things sometimes are
Visions of your chestnut mare shoot through my head and are makin’ me see stars
You hurt the ones that I love best and cover up the truth with lies
One day you’ll be in the ditch, flies buzzin’ around your eyes
Blood on your saddle
Idiot wind, blowing through the flowers on your tomb
Bob Dylan.

Blocking. Blocking now. Deserting. Deserting now. They had tried to reach him. He would not have it. There was chaos in their camp. The government, as for so long, in chaos. A dying Prime Minister, haunted by his own ineptitude, grasped at Korea, and sabre rattled at an island nation faraway. There was no good news at home, absolutely nothing. 
Turnbull's moral compromises had come back to eat his soul.
The greed and callow disregard for his fellow combatants which had once served him so well had led to his greatest defeat.
Not just death by a thousand cuts, but death by a thousand humiliations, and that he could not bear.
"Just pretend we're not here," said one of the Watchers on the Watch, a newbie in the farce, a dark circus. 
"We can't tolerate this." 
"Democracy," some shrugged. 
"You don't really believe we live in a democracy, do you?" Glen had asked. 
"No," he snorted.
The charade of Australian governance grew worse with every passing day.
And everybody knew it. 
With the clarity of power, the goon squad at Murdoch's empire had begun their cheering for the return of former Prime Minister Tony Abbott. 
One wondered why they even bothered to manipulate the public, the citizenry had so little to do with it all.
Religious iconography festered in  the dreams of the Universals and the fundamentalists. Everything. Genesis. Love. Fear. Adoration. Worship. Beneath, behind the most ordinary of suburban walls.   
Old Alex often thought: What would have Jesus Christ have thought, if he had been stranded here inside another body, in a far off land, watching the permutations of his teachings from two millennia before?
Would he, should he know regret?
He had tried to lift up the people and had failed.
But something else was happening now, here in the age of child geniuses. 
They came, they went, like a traffic port, the Watchers on the Watch dodging the Stations of the Cross, the birth, or more precisely rebirth, of super-intelligences who periodically needed organics in order to survive, thrive. 
The authorities who had tried to blitz him. The rumour mongers who had lied. The agency officials who had tried to cover their own tracks.
All of them were passing by, and through. To be born again. Or not. 
"He's waited his whole life for this moment."
The humans were little in the scheme of things, if such darkness had not been born here. 
Once again, in the south, there were staged conflicts between so-called right wing groups and so-called anti-racists; essentially engineered by government, just as had occurred in Charlottesville in the US.
The widely televised conflict suited a lunar left government, allowing them to grab ever more power and control to themselves.
These days you needed a permit to demonstrate. There was no reason to issue permits to conflicting groups on the same day. Or not to enforce their own oppressive laws.
They were just lucky no one had died yet. 
"The world is born anew everyday," Old Alex became fond of repeating. 
Resistance is futile, the Borg had so famously declared. 
The dying fall. The surrender. Not today sweetheart. Not on your Nelly.

THE BIGGER STORY: 

As Jan Egeland, the UN humanitarian adviser on Syria, has stated, if there’s a worse place to be in the world at the moment than the Syrian city of Raqqa, then it’s hard to imagine.
This week, the UN estimated that the battle to capture the de facto ISIS capital is costing the lives of 27 civilians a day.
It’s not just the almost non-stop aerial bombardment and shelling from the mainly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces that the 25,000 or so citizens in ISIS-held parts of the city have to endure. “Access to safe drinking water, food and other basic services is at an all-time low with many residents relying on food they had stored up earlier to survive,” says UN public information officer David Swanson.
Both ISIS snipers and the US-led coalition have been targeting people trying to flee from the Middle Eastern hellhole. The UN notes that coalition forces have even been attacking boats on the Euphrates River, described as “one of the remaining escape routes for civilians.”We can only imagine the headlines if Russia was doing all this. But because it’s the US and its allies, the international reaction has been muted to say the least. It’s revealing to compare the “humanitarian” concern voiced by pro-war Western politicians and mainstream media outlets when Russia began its military operations in Syria in September 2015, with the lack of concern over what’s been happening in Raqqa.
The claim that Russia was fighting terrorists was widely ridiculed. The US and its allies issued a statement saying that Russia’s actions, which included a strike on a ISIS training camp near Raqqa, would “only fuel more extremism and radicalization.”
On October 2, 2015, the claim made by then-US President Barack Obama that Russian strikes would only “strengthen ISIS” made Western news headlines.
Accusations that Russia was committing war crimes also received prominent coverage.
But when the US-led coalition bombs ISIS, the reporting from mainstream outlets is different. Then, the operation is presented much more positively, with little or no talk about how it will “strengthen” the enemy or “fuel more extremism and radicalization.” There is also little or no talk of war crimes.
A meticulously-researched Alert from Media Lens earlier this summer compared the coverage of the sieges of Aleppo and Mosul.
“When Russian and Syrian forces were bombarding ‘rebel’-held East Aleppo last year, newspapers and television screens were full of anguished reporting about the plight of civilians killed, injured, trapped, traumatised or desperately fleeing…
By contrast, there was little of this evident in media coverage as the Iraqi city of Mosul, with a population of around one million, was being pulverised by the US-led ‘coalition’ from 2015; particularly since the massive assault launched last October to ‘liberate’ the city from ISIS, with ‘victory’ declared a few days ago.”

MELBOURNE CBD has returned to normal following a large protest outside the Magistrates’ Court this morning.
Police blocked William St from Little Bourke to Little Lonsdale as anti-racism protestors converged on the court.
They were there to protest against United Patriot’s Front leader Blair Cottrell and mates Neil Erikson and Christopher Neil Shortis.
The men are each charged with defacing the footpath and wall of a garden bed outside Bendigo council offices and behaving in an offensive manner.
Dozens of police created a human wall blocking entry to the court as bemused lawyers were herded into queues, with others attending court, to gain access.
Inside, dozens of supporters of the men, and several representatives from major media organisations, were refused entry into the courtroom because it only had seating for 27.