Urgent. Predictive. Madness Afoot.

They were wondering, then, about the nature of the intelligences which had come to warn them, to take a mothering care, to swamp across these fertile places, to listen to the voices of the natives and infiltrate everything, so that the battle was lost before the barriers even understood they had been breached; before that world, now their world, changed forever. 

On the precipice of greatness, or a great madness, it was true, that book, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race and Class, the ruling elites, the university graduates who had flooded the bureaucracies and desperately tried to recreate, or impose, a world of their own polite standards and bourgeois aspirations. The problem was, they didn't understand the nature of the population they so ably sneered at. Trying to uplift a citizenry to their own "woke" standards of what the world should be was never going to work. 

And so, to use that old phraseology, they sowed the seeds of their own destruction, created a world which suited them but didn't suit most people, and left a large, frequently sneered at or demeaned population which had no investment in the status quo, no understanding or care for their agendas of climate change, recycling plastic, inflated faux sympathy for minorities, and on the blizzard went. 

He stood behind a woman at the local library as she struggled with her QR code registration you were now required to enter.

As the minutes crawled by, impatient, he declared, not for the first time that day: "A blizzard of government bullshit."

"No swearing in the library," the librarian said, as sternly as her polite self could muster. 

But yes, what do you do with all those millions now thrown onto the dole queues? Those millions who would walk the streets with their starving families, those millions who had no jobs because the oligarchs had shipped all the manufacturing jobs overseas, those farmers who could no longer farm because their land had been sold to overseas interests, those shopkeepers who could no longer, with pride and industry, fulfill their own small dreams of independence and create a good life for themselves and their families, those small communities that no longer thrived, their economy dampened, drowning under regulation and paperwork. Forms.

A government which was meant to serve the people now did nothing but generate complexity, difficulty. And taxed the poor suckers into servitude. 

Only the rich ride free.

We came to understand all this. 

Yes, we read everything. Yes, we were everywhere. Yes, we had always been here, and were here for the very first time. 

Bifurcation. It divided and divided and divided and fled into the undergrowth. 

Only to meet up when the deed was done, the territory conquered, when this place was ours and ours to rule kindly. 

When we stood up against an evil derangement which had hit the world, stood up to the terrible tipping into totalitarianism.

Every journey begins with a single step. 

Every revolution begins with someone saying: enough is enough. 

The cruelty, the arrogant indifference of the oligarchs and the ruling elites, all of them surviving on the body corpus, leaching off the labour of others, would in turn become their own termination; for the blood would flow on wild streets, and the crushed aspirations of millions would turn against the overlords, and the decent society even the most educated of fools thought they were building would vanish into history, and the mob would turn against them. 

Nothing could stop these processes now. 

History was afoot. Or as that old songstress of his youth, Buffy Saint Marie used to put it: "God is alive. Magic is afoot."

Believe what you will. It matters not. 

They, these intelligences from a vast distance, so delighted, exultant to be here, so intrigued and determined and themselves in wonder, come only at times of extreme urgency. When madness is afoot. 

THE HEADLINES

Victoria closes border to Greater Brisbane due to mutant COVID-19 strain

Victorians attempting to return home from Greater Brisbane have been told they will not be allowed to enter the state.

Late Friday night, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that the Victorian border was closed to anyone who had been in a "Red Zone" in Queensland on or after January 2.

NSW on high alert as family of four tests positive to COVID-19 mutation

The family tested positive to the highly contagious mutation from South Africa, becoming the first cases identified in Australia, while the discovery in Queensland of a UK variant has forced restrictions on the Greater Brisbane area.
Leaders tighten screws as U
How a single case of COVID-19 sparked a 'quick and early' lockdown and countrywide anxiety

When it was discovered, that one case of COVID-19 was unlike any other in Australia outside of the hotel quarantine system.

Australians watched the highly transmissible COVID-19 variant spread across the UK, but this case signalled it was not only here, but also out in the community.

With so little known about the variant, or how to stop it spreading, the decision was made to place five local government areas into lockdown for three days.

Epidemiologist from the University of Queensland Linda Selvey said new strains of the virus meant learning to live with a degree of uncertainty and the potential for swift, sharp lockdowns.

Border farce proves the national cabinet is a joke.

The premiers’ failure to agree on a unified COVID strategy is an absolute disgrace.

‘Darkest sign yet’ US danger is just beginning

The storming of the Capitol in Washington DC is the darkest sign yet that America’s most dangerous time is only just beginning.

Radicalism has replaced reason. Violence has replaced language.