REVERSE TARGETING

"We don't do things that way in this country."
Too late, already done. 
"We're targeting him."
"You've done that before." 
Here in the reaches, the shires if you will, where everything appeared as plain as day. 
The crumbling decks.
Only one thing remained consistent: the steady decline and fall of the government. 
Lost credibility. Lost status. A lost standing in the world. Catastrophic collapse.
A failure to thrive. 
In his own life, their lives, the nation's life. 
Here on the edges, there in the glen. 
He heard their assessment. He's had a camera on him the whole time. 
He heard their laborious, glutinous wit. He stayed inside the Asperger's spectrum. There were shadows in the way. Set out to protect, he could no longer tell enemy from friend.
There were no friends, knucklehead. 
The crews are waiting, the synchronisation set. 
The old soldier's lament. A government which once had principle. A job which once had worth. Something they believed in.
They believed in nothing now; and became brutal in their persecution. 
We became the greater criminals. And all we had wanted to do was serve. Be with our comrades. Relax together after work. Do the right thing in life. Have a family that was proud. Be proud of ourselves. 
Now we served the dog demons, a collapsing, nervous government, preening masters. And the Dogs of War.
"I'm not ready to concede defeat." 
The hummingbirds ate out their brains.
He unsheafed a wing, beheading two of his pursuers with its cutting edge.
They could not survive.
He sounded the alarm bell long ago.
Dark Dark Policing. 
How AIs see the world. A broader spectrum. Hallucinatory. Old Alex followed all developments with interest. 
The government was gone into history, as farce piled upon farce. 
"People don't have much money," the butcher lamented. "You used to be able to make a decent return. Not anymore." 
"Nobody's got any money anymore," he agreed. "The government's hoovered it all up. And what's left, the energy companies get."
Faced with falling standards of living, a collapsing economy and a government which failed, utterly failed, to encourage individual enterprise, there was nothing for it but a slow flat fall into the sleeping dreams of neighbours. They dreamt of sex, advertisements for chocolates, a twinging love, courtroom dramas.
The population settled into a clearly diseased state. Into protective custody and prisons of their own making. 
Into a country robbed first, then destroyed. 
The base spiritual motives of the overlords would not save them, for the demons they harboured at the highest levels of power knew no loyalty.
The aristocrats and the robber barons of new wealth betrayed their country, and in turn were betrayed.
We thought we could get the link right. We thought we could install a control mechanism. He's malfunctioning. An orphan. The romantics call them outliers. We can eliminate upon request.

THE BIGGER STORY: 

If only we could afford to live the way we do, lamented Europe's entitled nobility as its privilege crumbled in the 1930s. Eighty odd years later, the Turnbull government might feel the same way. Trapped between the world as it should be, and the world that is.Its response is uncannily similar: spend more than it earns, and then wonder why it is unpopular.
And like previous governments, it is also engaging in the standard subterfuges, from proclaiming its low tax bona fides while increasing taxes, to invoking a higher national interest and seeking anything to distract from its own inadequacies.Not only have its circumstances failed to improve, this year has brought a new variable: the temporary emergence of a tri-cameral system as the High Court effectively becomes the third house, vetting the executive's extra-parliamentary postal plebiscite "camel", and ruling on the very legitimacy of its majority.
The more the government is slave to these externalities, the weaker it looks. Negation of its novel mail-in on constitutional grounds, followed by the possible ejection of one or more of its MPs, would fall somewhere between corrosive and explosive.

A heart-tugging television commercial celebrating Fath­er’s Day by promoting the ­special role of fathers in the lives of their children has been pulled after being deemed too “polit­ical” ahead of the government’s same-sex ­marriage postal ballot.
This year’s commercial — featuring a father singing his baby a lullaby — will not be broadcast after Free TV Australia, representing the free-to-air commercial networks, informed­ not-for-profit group Dads4Kids that its Father’s Day ads “likely contained political matter”.
After being told this week that its ad had been rejected, Dads4Kids released a statement to The Weekend Australian yesterda­y expressing its disappointment, as opponents and suppor­t­ers of same-sex marriage defended the commercial.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott said the development was the latest example of how the “thought police” would operate in the “brave new world of same-sex marriage” while gay marriage advocate and Victorian Liberal MP Tim Wilson slammed the Free TV determin­ation as “ridiculous advice that should be ignored”.
“If you don’t like being bullied by activists, vote no,” Mr Abbott told The Weekend Australian.
“If you don’t like political ­correctness, vote no, because it’s the best way you have to stop it in its tracks.”