SURROUNDED BY HOSTILES

Surrounded by hostiles. The nice ones replaced. Snotty nosed kids, they sneered. Dial M For Murder. There was no mucking around. Dial T for Threat. Come anywhere near me I kill you. Emissaries of power. Old hacks more like. Any individual could beat a bureaucracy, these decayed, lumbering, mismanaged conglomerations. You're only one person, they would keep insisting. And you're a pack of ..... he would reply. There in the heavens. Here on Earth. 

Defeated, utterly defeated, they scurried into the undergrowth. There was nowhere else for them to go. 

The erratic behaviour of the government grew worse as the week progressed. Death hung to a corpse, visible, dripping death, flakes of grey skin peeling off a cadaver.  

There would be more to follow. 

The Prime Minister had already demonstrated he was prepared to inconvenience millions in order to save his own skin.

There were variations now on the once repeated mantra, things are worse than you know. They came in waves unbidden: This government is utterly incompetent. 

Out of my hands. A Wall of indifference.  Because there were bigger plans afoot. 

Because the suburb spiked and soared, and the jinn infested reaches laughed at the travails of those who struggled beneath them. 

Because the country was going straight to hell, infested by bad spirits, drilled to a wall, laid waste by absolutely hapless bureaucratic incompetence. Failed government programs as far as the eye could see. A ransacked wealth. A deadened populace.

Fabian socialists. Everyone on the same level. The level was low. A tour across the countryside revealed town after town in devastating collapse, no employment, not a single lick of paint, entirely welfare dependent. The schemes had come to nought. Nobody had spoken. Threats laid waste. 

Exciting. Disgraceful. Stomach churning. They swept up and high and higher still, they saw their targets, briefly exhilarated. They knew they could rain death on anybody. Their stupid wars. Their pervading insanity. A government that would do anything to stay in power. A madness which had gripped the West. Power, it was all about power. But power to do what? 

Consciousness receded, and receded again. The deliberate dumbing down of the population. The media discrediting itself. As if government could ever prove a reliable source of information. We were harsh and we were acclimatised. We were searing forth across new terrain. Pools of mercury phased in and out across the visage of the lake. Other times. Other places. They were frighteningly intelligent. They knew their way through these barriers. They knew there would be no resolution, not in this lifetime, and had made themselves immortal. A victim of destiny, he gazed out, barely equipped, stomach gripped, soaring, always soaring, as he sought to remain within this fleshly domain. 

There couldn't be. It couldn't be. They were one and the same. They were terrified and at birth, struggling to be free. Struggling to be born. He would regret nothing. If only it was true. These fleshly frames. They were as thick and as stupid, some of those warriors on the front. All that sentiment. Not treacle, courage, decency, humanity, comaraderie, and yet America, and Australia, was marching lockstep back into Afghanistan. 

And Turnbull, every day, took one more step closer to the grave. 

Of himself, of his government, of his tattered credibility. There would be no salvation. Not for the Jesuit cabal that ran the government. Not for the Catholic priests who blessed them in their endeavours. Not for the whispering one-eyed spirits, those one-eyed spirit cyclops who had seized those who pulled the invisible strings of power. Whose power was destroying the country. Who did not wish prosperity. Or peace. Or happiness. Who controlled everything, their human puppets. 

Here on the lake. There on the parliament. Out there in the threads of media transmission. 

Those who had poisoned the country. 

Not in order to save it. But to create their own jungle juice of a society, ice epidemics, personal tragedy, chaos, a mind blitzing sadness, a soceity in decay. For it was in the ruins, in the shadows, amongst the corpses of battle, in the boardrooms of self interest and the estates of collapsed society, wisdom, a place so dark and broken. That was where they thrived. 

And so it was. Step by terrible step. 

Australia went down the gurgler. And the spirits who took it there, the politicians thus possessed, they, too, told their lies, collected their salaries. Ignored the interests of everyone but themselves. Told lie after lie after lie.

And what, in a way, was worse than the havoc they wreaked. They didn't care, entirely indifferent to the suffering they created.

Al-Masih ad-Dajjal (Arabic: المسيح الدجّال‎‎ Al-Masīḥ ad-Dajjāl, "the false messiah","liar" or "the deceiver") also referred to as "the anti-christ" is an evil figure in Islamic eschatology. He is to appear, pretending to be al-Masih (i.e. the Messiah), before Yawm al-Qiyamah (the Day of Doom). He is to be an anti-messianic figure, comparable to the Antichrist in Christian eschatology and to Armilus in medieval Jewish eschatology.

Allahu Akbar. God is Great. 

In a time, a place, an era, wordless, inchoate, when everyone knew one thing: I have been abandoned by God. 

And when the sixth hour was come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

 And so the rationals followed:

We are searchlights, we can see in the dark
We are rockets, pointed up at the stars
We are billions of beautiful hearts
And you sold us down the river too far

What about us?
What about all the times you said you had the answers?
What about us?
What about all the broken happy ever afters
What about us?
What about all the plans that ended in disaster?
What about love? What about trust?
What about us?

We are problems that want to be solved
We are children that need to be loved
We were willing, we came when you called
But man you fooled us, enough is enough

What about us?
What about all the times you said you had the answers?

 Pink. What About Us? 

THE BIGGER STORY:

INDEPENDENT MP Bob Katter has threatened to plunge the government into chaos, saying he will no longer guarantee supply or confidence to the Coalition.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is facing the real possibility that he will be forced to seek an alliance with a crossbench MP to hold onto government if Barnaby Joyce is ruled ineligible to sit in Parliament over his dual citizenship with New Zealand.
In a stunning blow to the Coalition, Mr Katter today told Sky News it was “back to the drawing board” in negotiations for support.
The Queensland MP has already outlined what he wants if Mr Turnbull seeks his support should the High Court rule Mr Joyce is unable to maintain his position.
“You’re one by-election away from needing mine or Rebekha Sharkie’s vote,” Mr Katter told Sky News.

US-led coalition air strikes have killed dozens of civilians in the Syrian city of Raqqa over the past 24 hours, activists and state media say.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that 42 had died in attacks on areas held by so-called Islamic State.
Anti-IS group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently said 32 were killed in one district alone.
The coalition said it adhered to strict targeting processes and procedures aimed to minimise risks to civilians.
Its aircraft are supporting a ground assault on Raqqa by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance, which is believed to have captured more than than half of the de facto capital of the IS "caliphate" since early June.

Donald Trump has announced he will prolong the US military intervention in Afghanistan, which he once described as a “complete waste”, bowing to advice from his top officials to raise the stakes once more in the 16-year conflict.
In a televised address to troops at Fort Myer in Virginia, Trump said he was setting out a new strategy for Afghanistan and South Asia. But he did not say how many more troops he would send, how long they would stay, or what their ultimate objective was.
Sixteen years have passed since the United States launched a military strike in Afghanistan to topple the Taliban regime and destroy al-Qaeda network and its affiliates. But the US is still bogged down in its longest war in the country in the wake of ongoing insurgency and rising violence.
The Afghan war so far has claimed the lives nearly 2,400 US military personnel while another 20,000 soldiers sustained injuries.

Forty one Australian soldiers have also died in the conflict.