SUFFICIENT UNTO THE DAY IS THE EVIL THEREOF

Day by day, the country settled into Third World status. 
Someone had to renew their passport. A sex obsessed young husband finally slept. An old man, barely alive, barely dreamt. 
Sufficient unto the day. 
"English!" he exclaimed in frustration.
The clatter in stone corridors grew more urgent. He could hear the laughter of the young. They knew no other realm. He longed for the days of Oxford, although he had never been. He wanted to be satisfied, but could not. He fed across the realm, and the sickly glue dripped from interior ceilings, as if hollowed inside a chamber. Hallowed be thy name.
The Baathists took over Iraq. Soldiers lamented the insanity they had seen, and clung to a kind of bravado of camaraderie, as if their sacrifice, the sacrifice of their friends, had meant something. They had to believe it had. In the kingdom of the haves and have nots.  For the country had been pillaged, sold down the river, and they lived in the shadows of what their parents had once hoped for, decency, common sense, hard work, a worthy reward, peace on the home front. 
They wanted to believe in their leaders. It was a human thing. Herd animals. They did not wish to be alone. 
He saw reflected in others all the mad, unfulfilled schemes.
They might as well have hung a sign around their neck: "Artifice."
More accurately: "Atrocity." 
"Trust no one" had morphed into widespread distrust. 
"Be careful" was a warning accompanying every step, every sneeze. 
A spreading pool of harm. And alarm.
The security theatre, inconveniencing millions, attempting to instill fear into the population, had died off, as a desperate government tried to spin itself out of trouble; and like a vehicle stuck in mud, got nowhere, the wheels digging them deeper and deeper into the mire. 
A circumstance entirely of their own making, their own narrow, amateurish vision, their embrace of the new, the march of the useful fools.
They had listened to the wrong people.
Because without heart, only avarice and greed, they had no sense even of their own wrong doing. For wasn't that all there was? To grasp. To grow one's fortune. To lord it over others. To establish oneself at the top of the hierarchy.  To be the envy of others. 
To die in a private ward.
There would, if nothing else, be a medical solution. Everyone, even the greatest of sinners and the most venal of mentalities, had to be offered a face-saving device; a way to convince themselves they were going down in the high esteem of others, as the country jeered. 
Turnbull was dying inside himself. Lord Malcolm. Chairman Moi Moi. The country was staggering into an ever more decrepit state. A pivotal chairmanship, or in this case prime ministership, wasted on the young. One chance in history to reverse the tide. Thrown on the scrap heap of lost opportunities. 
For the country would know no salvation. 
An attack was coming. 
But what was there to save? 
The place was already a police state. The economy screwed. The people subjugated. The remnants of the old Australia barely visible.
The social engineers had set out to change the culture, and succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. 
Old Alex listened to the Radio National as he drove about the coastal fringes of New South Wales, beneath the flank of the Great Dividing Range. 
Two privileged women, an American academic and an Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist, both taxpayer funded, emoted at each other over the beauty of poetry and their enormous respective compassion for people with disabilities and the communities in which they dwelled. 
This mutual flattery was what  passed for intellectual discourse. 
Someone had gone to work in a factory to support it. But of appreciation they would never show a single shred. 
The over-green tint of a protected place. 
Politicians paraded. Hope died. 
More would be revealed. He watched programs about Artificial Intelligence, as they watched him.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Civilians fleeing the battle to remove ISIL from the Syrian city of Raqqa face a "deadly labyrinth", with fire coming from "all sides", rights group Amnesty International has warned.
Amnesty said on Thursday that the US-led coalition campaign to drive the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group out of its de-facto capital has killed hundreds of civilians, and those remaining there face greater risk as the fight intensifies in its final stages.
"As the battle to wrest Raqqa from Islamic State intensifies, thousands of civilians are trapped in a deadly labyrinth where they are under fire from all sides," Amnesty Senior Crisis Response Adviser Donatella Rovera said, referring to another name used for ISIL.
"Knowing that IS uses civilians as human shields, SDF and US forces must redouble efforts to protect civilians, notably by avoiding disproportionate or indiscriminate strikes and creating safe exit routes," she said.
In recent days, the US-led coalition intensified its ferocious bombing campaign in Raqqa, more than half of which has been captured by the US-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDP) battling ISIL.
Residents told Al Jazeera on Tuesday that at least 100 civilians were killed over a 48-hour span by US-led air attacks on the city.
The UN estimates that up to 25,000 civilians may remain in the city with tens of thousands of others have already fled, risking ISIL sniper fire and mines.

It’s not a photo you see every day — the strongman and the spy chief.
Nick Warner, the head of Australia’s international spy agency ASIS (Australian Secret Intelligence Service), stands next to one of South-East Asia’s most controversial leaders, Rodrigo Duterte.
The Philippines President, whose war on drugs has claimed thousands of lives and drawn furious condemnation from human rights groups across the globe, raises his hand in his trademark clenched fist.
And so does Mr Warner.
The two men met in the Malacañang Palace in Manila on Tuesday. A spokesman for Mr Duterte said the meeting was “basically a courtesy call” and the two men, “touched on regional security issues and declaration of mutual support”.
There would have been lots to discuss. The Philippines has been waging a furious campaign against Islamist militants in the city of Marawi. And Australia is increasingly worried about the flow of foreign fighters back into South-East Asia from wars in the Middle East.
Last week, Australia formally listed Islamic State in East Asia — which attempted to wrest control of Marawi from the Philippines Government — as a proscribed terrorist organisation.
It is also not unusual for Mr Warner to meet with foreign leaders, but most of those meetings would be held behind closed doors.
So the ASIS chief — and DFAT officials — might have been a little surprised to see the photos of Mr Warner posing with Mr Duterte splashed out in the local press.
Mr Warner is the only ASIS employee whose identity can be publicly revealed, but his daily call sheet is not exactly a public document.
And, as usual, the Australian Government did not breathe a word about Mr Warner’s most recent meeting.