New Year's Eve, Redfern Style

*



Ah, Sydney. In the summertime it can be an easy place to like. Yet there have never been more reasons to leave.

The average morning speed on our main roads is half the 60 kmh speed limit. When you try to escape for the weekend, it can take an hour just to get to Hornsby, Sutherland or Springwood. A taxi from the airport to the Hills incurs more than $15 in tolls and fees, making the cost of anything at the airport seem reasonable.

The only metro we will see in the next 10 years is the well-dressed male sort, and there are more than enough of those already. And we will never agree on whose backyard is the best location for a second airport.

This month in the Cities of Opportunity index, Sydney ranked behind Sao Paulo for transport. I have been to Sao Paulo. It's like the set of Bladerunner; I loved it. But the traffic is so bad the rich take helicopters to lunch.

No other Australian city does parking police, snobs, violent drunks, ice addicts, road rage and tossers like Sydney. Even Oscar Humphries, the erstwhile Sydney tosser-turned Australian Spectator editor, now has the insight to say this to Good Weekend: "I couldn't have done what I'd done - got all these pieces written about me - anywhere but Sydney, because really I wasn't doing much at the time, I was just there. This is a city that devotes an inordinate amount of space to, you know, launches for hair curling irons."

The baby boomers created the seachange phenomenon, coined the phrase and made the TV series, but there is now an unprecedented confluence of factors tempting Generations X and Y to make one themselves.

In the front yards of Avoca and Mollymook and Blackheath there is a new must-have garden feature - the For Sale sign. Judging by the sea of placards, holiday homes are the first ballast being thrown overboard from the asset portfolios of nervous bankers and child-care entrepreneurs blown about by the economic storm. With the first home owner's grant doubled to $14,000 and topped up to $24,000 by the NSW Government for new-built houses, it can only be a matter of time before a seachange becomes quite seriously affordable. Even food and culture snobs are running out of excuses: drive from Sydney to Orange and you pass seven chef's hats, according to the Herald's 2008 Good Food Guide.

About 25,000 Sydneysiders leave each year, making Sydney's net migration to other states (mostly Queensland) more than 50 times that of Victoria. But most of them are still 40-and 50-somethings with families...

Joel Gibson.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/opinion/between-sea-and-country-air-city-exercises-its-pull/2008/12/21/1229794242349.html




There was absolutely no explanation for what had happened. Colin is back in hospital; on his last legs. More than a hundred miles away, he was helpless to help. The wild thoughts that had ballooned out across the dank, over-heated suburb, the fetid air, all their thought bubbles coalesced together in a marching charade. He had wanted out, it was true. The profound depression he had brought upon himself lifted; inspired by the network of dysfunctional, caring people. Oh how much he wanted them to go. Was it true he had been planted here; and then his own coding wiped to hide the trace. Those balloons were almost impossible to describe; flushing out across the cars; rising over the terrace roofs, enveloping the rats which still ran up and down the tree outside his bedroom window.

Four a.m. on the first day of the year; and everything he had ever worked for had vanished and he was cosseted in a ball of laughter; watching the police banked across the top of the block. They were two, sometimes three deep. Opposite, the police cars were stacked along the road edge, outside Redfern Police Station. He was shattered inside; so shattered he knew he could never recover, not now, not this time, not ever. The music was fantastic, these master musicians playing for the tiny audience of stragglers who had shown up for Brigette's party. Bridge, as we all called her, was skinny from the alcohol, bubbling from ecstasy, marked at the frontier. We sat on her balcony and smoked cigarettes. Not many people had come; and she was disappointed. All dressed up and nowhere to go. We didn't point it out. Where is everybody? The little band of three or four, organised especially for the party, played well enough to have caught the rapt attention of hundreds, packed in country halls, applauding, purposeful, part of this glorious life, glorious nation, glorious city.

Except there was nothing glorious about this place, not any more. The Public Order and Riot Squad police were there, as were the Tactical Response Group. We could see everything, too frightened to go and check it out in person. He could hear shouts, the sounds of smashing bottles. Every now and then the police would go in a wave down to the block,, down and back, advance retreat. This very spot had been the scene of some of the city's worst rioting, and the police were taking no chances, not this time, not on the first day of the year. It was good to write again. He had so wanted to record everything, to create something beautiful, to make a difference. Even here, on this balcony, as the minutes clicked towards five a.m. and the police readied themselves for another foray into the Block, the words cascaded through his head, urgent, lyrical, driven with desire. Alongside the police party goers gathered in drunken little knots outside the station, waiting for the trains to start up. They were young, full of excitement, sweaty from their party drugs, make up and hair falling every which way, flushed with expectation they would finally get their rocks off when their trains arrived and, droppped at their destinations in the barely dawn, fell through their doors and embraced; fulfilling the pornographic movies which ran in all their heads.

Far off the world was splintering. Terrorism and the flavour of the Middle East was in all their living rooms, flickering on screens. Everything was open to us now. He couldn't breathe deep enough, sigh long enough. He couldn't find someone to love, not enough to wipe away all that had happened, the final gasps of pain as he was beaten once again. Now an old man, homeless at the base of giant billboards, he couldn't even protest at their indifference. It was New Year's Eve. They had a right to party. That his own life had fallen apart was not their concern. He was laughing at Bridge, who was chasing Gersch down the steps. Gersch was one of the princes of dysfunction, intoxicating, intoxicated, as she recovered from Mick telling her to bugger off and get a younger man, have babies, be happy, go live in the burbs. Instead she found Gersch, and completely adored him, could run her hands across his flat working stomach and kiss every sweaty, lovely little hair as she wound up higher and kissed him on the lips; and now chased him down the stairs in a barely mock attempt at capture.

There was a shrill whistle. The police were gathering again. There are left wing governments at local, state and federal level. All of the talk is of tolerance and diversity, compassion towards those who are different. On the streets the police raise their truncheons and tower over the hopeless gang of beggars and street alcoholics who are the public face of The Block. They don white gloves as they search their belongings, for fear of contamination. The sniffer dogs spread fear. The sky lightens. They daren't go near.

At work next day; amidst the general round of press conferences, the feeding of the pack, the manipulation of reality, the creation of an entirely false public discourse, the city officials crowed about the wonderful success of the night; New Year's Eve and the fireworks display on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, world famous not just for visual spectacle itself, millions of dollars burning as colours cascaded down from the bridge and the bobbing boats on the harbour were lit with the reflected glow of the fireworks, the red, the white and the blue, the crowds gasping in awe and appreciation. But its geographical location; as one of the first major cities to begin celebrating the New Year, made it world famous, picked up and relayed in packages around the globe. The mayor, Clover Moore, batty left, always politically correct, hands off ignorant of the brutality of the police, the oppression of the dispossessed. On her watch, under her nose. We live in the greatest city in the world, she declared.

Only 70 people had been arrested for public disorder, resisting arrest, affray, hundreds of tonnes of garbage had already been cleared from the streets by the 10am press conference, the Opera House glowed in too bright colours and the harbour was more glistening, more depth in its colouring, than ever. But these things were minor. She praised the public for their good behaviour, the police for putting their lives on the line, garnering considerable overtime as they went. She applauded the handiwork of the event manager, the handsomely paid artistic designers, expressed the city's gratitude for their success.

What was happening in Redfern between four and five a.m., he asked.

Well I live in Redfern, and nothing was happening that I am aware of. I have not been briefed on any major disturbance.

It was as if the riot police, those battle lines foraying down into The Block, the drunken shouts, the broken bottles, the aborigines running for cover in the network of broken streets, it was as if none of it had ever happened.

Later, at a police press conference held at the headquarters of the Roads and Traffic Authority, he asked the same question; what was happening in Redfern between four and five a.m.?

The Acting Commissioner, her future well assured and well promoted, looked him directly in the eye, surprised by the question in the midst of all of the talk of the event's success.

There was a minor altercation between two people, she said.

He raised an eyebrow. It took dozens of police for that, the riot squad, the vans.

She repeated her answer, said that it was a standard response, the police responded in groups for their own safety. There had been no major incidents.

The gap between the official versions and the scenes on the street could hardly be more stark. Where were we heading, communist Russia?

A minor altercation between two people?

The Commissioner clearly did not want to dwell on the subject; nothing must mar the official success story, the seamless event, the happy city. She pointed to the next journalist; and answered their harmless question in full. He knew not to persist, to let the official version ride.

And so the newspapers, the radio, the television, all reported on the glowing success of the event. He wasn't going to fight this one. He wasn't going to single handedly tear away the veil of secrecy.

He thanked the Lord for the creation of such a beautiful world. A new life, a new day, he had survived. Deeply dysfunctional, deeply inspired, he retreated back into the comforting network of crazies, he shrugged off the depression which had eaten at him throughout 2008; and he shuddered, deep down, at the gaps in reality, the increasing government control, the layers of fascism, the Soviet style world being brought to their door, in this glittering place, this glittering harbour, the multiple reflections on the shiny water, amidst the wealthy yachts and bobbing dinghies. All was not well. All was turning into a lie.

Everyone Else Was A Fool

*



The Hunting of the Snark
Lewis Carroll
Fit the Seventh - The Banker's Fate

They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap.
And the Banker, inspired with a courage so new
It was matter for general remark,
Rushed madly ahead and was lost to their view
In his zeal to discover the Snark

But while he was seeking with thimbles and care,
A Bandersnatch swiftly drew nigh
And grabbed at the Banker, who shrieked in despair,
For he knew it was useless to fly.

He offered large discount--he offered a check
(Drawn "to bearer") for seven-pounds-ten:
But the Bandersnatch merely extended its neck
And grabbed at the Banker again.

Without rest or pause--while those frumious jaws
Went savagely snapping around-
He skipped and he hopped, and he floundered and flopped,
Till fainting he fell to the ground.

The Bandersnatch fled as the others appeared
Led on by that fear-stricken yell:
And the Bellman remarked "It is just as I feared!"
And solemnly tolled on his bell.

He was black in the face, and they scarcely could trace
The least likeness to what he had been:
While so great was his fright that his waistcoat turned white-
A wonderful thing to be seen!

To the horror of all who were present that day.
He uprose in full evening dress,
And with senseless grimaces endeavored to say
What his tongue could no longer express.

Down he sank in a chair--ran his hands through his hair--
And chanted in mimsiest tones
Words whose utter inanity proved his insanity,
While he rattled a couple of bones.

"Leave him here to his fate--it is getting so late!"
The Bellman exclaimed in a fright.
"We have lost half the day. Any further delay,
And we sha'nt catch a Snark before night!"



He had been beyond exhaustion, in a place reserved only for the end of the working year, when nothing mattered, when he was truly exhausted. Shadows were frlickering across his soul. He was ashamed and discreet, hidden. He didn't want answers. He wanted comfort, perhaps the comfort of defeat. He wasn't sure of anything anymore. These curel echoes, these wasted days, this was all that was left of what had once been an heroic pioneer, striding out strongly along new paths, head held high. Now he waited in frustration for t he traffic to clear. He gazed in envy at handsome young men. He shuddered, and waited for another time.

At first he thought there would be renewed hope; just around the corner. Well, that wasn't the case. The darkness hadn't ended. He was without breath and without hope. The corrosion of his soul had crept across years, and was now complete. The vast darkness that had been his soul, that was gone. The hopes of a fresh start had been blinkered. Walk through the mirror into another life. Smile when there is no more to be done. Come willy nilly across the dark plains, and that will be our rescue. He didn't know the answer. Even to simple questions: Is global warming real or not?

These shadows, these orders from on high, they were taken breathlessly apart. He was callous, cold, shredded into the snarling dark; that was his relief. That these things were wrong. That he had made too many mistakes. That all along the road, in heaps by the side of the road, were other piles; things that could be of import. All these echoes passing through the mirrors; all these lightweight cruelties, all this that waited for the time to come. Those rotting piles of garbage were clearly visible.

It was the piles of garbage, all that was left from the prvious civilisation, that enabled him toi pour over the solutions to their problems; to find a way to survive. Their sneering smartness, their amorality, the utter arrogance of the Hooray Henrys, he had always wondered how it could be so. Why didn't they care? Why did they show no empathy for those who had fallen beneath them, for the masses starving in the square. They made stupid decisions and the world ground to a halt, the economy ceased to function. But they were alright, high in their tax payer funded castles; their glittering careers. Everyone else was a fool.

Couldn't they see the disaster they were inviting down upon the populace? Couldn't they see that they were wrecking the entire civilisation. Ten thousand people gather in Poland for a climate chnage conference. No one is happy. Tim Flannery, always Professor, emotes about the loss of great assets, The Great Barrier Reef. Others regard his predictions as absurd, but you never hear from him. A few blew the whistle. But no one heard. They were too caught up on their own stampede, towards righteousness, convinced of their own rightness, excited but comfortable in the midst of the pack.

These things were always strange, these turning points in history. No one listened. Sane voices were few. It astonished him how unreceptive the population was. He couldn't believe their bowed heads; their cowed faces. Well, not even cowed, just ignorant. The bigger concerns were of no concern. The rubbish that had become popular culture kept them entirely entertained; bread and circuses like civilisation had never seen before. More distractions, more frivolous wealth, more indoctrination. He had sighed, in his humble jobs, sent out secret messages to the world, and feared for the future. They hadn't listened, he should have known it would make no difference, and now he was in the middle of a giant garbage dump, foraging for his future family, with a baby on the way and the wreckage of the past all around him.






THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2008/12/02/will-the-un-chill-out-on-climate-change/

10,000 people from 86 countries have descended upon Poznan, Poland for yet-another United Nations meeting on climate change. This time, it’s the annual confab of the nations that signed the original U.N. climate treaty in Rio in 1992. That instrument gave rise to the infamous 1996 Kyoto Protocol on global warming, easily the greatest failure in the history of environmental diplomacy.

Kyoto was supposed to reduce global emissions of carbon dioxide below 1990 levels during the period 2008-2012. But since it was signed, the atmospheric concentration of this putative pollutant continued to rise, pretty much at the same rate it did before Kyoto. (Even if the world had lived up to the letter of the Kyoto law, it would have exerted an influence on global temperature that would have been too small to measure.)

The purpose of the Poznan meeting is to work out some type of framework that goes “Beyond Kyoto.” After completely failing in its first attempt to internationally limit carbon dioxide emissions, the U.N. will propose reductions far greater than those called for by Kyoto. Kyoto failed because it was too expensive, so anything “beyond” will cost much more.

The fact is that the world cannot afford any expensive climate policies now. Economic conditions are so bad that carbon dioxide emissions—the byproduct of our commerce—are likely going down because of the financial cold spell, not the climatic one. Indeed, a permanent economic ice-age would likely result from any mandated large cuts in emissions. If you’re liking your 401(k) today, you’ll love “Beyond Kyoto.”

Before proposing an even harsher treaty the U.N. ought to pay attention to its own climate science. It regularly publishes temperature histories from its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was formed in the late 1980s with the express charge of finding a scientific basis for a global climate treaty.

Since Kyoto, a very funny thing has happened to global temperatures: IPCC data clearly show that warming has stopped—even though its computer models said such a thing could not happen.

According to the IPCC, the world reached its high-temperature mark in 1998, thanks to a big “El Niño,” which is a temporary warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean that occurs once or twice a decade. El Niño years are usually followed by one or two relatively cold years, as occurred in 1999 and 2000. The cooling is, not surprisingly, called La Niña. No one knows what really causes these cycles but they have been going on sporadically for millennia.

Wait a minute. Starting an argument about global warming in 1998 is a bit unfair. After all, that’s starting off with a very hot temperature, followed by two relatively cool years.

Fine. Take those years out of the record and there’s still no statistically significant warming since 1997. When a scientist tells you that some trend is not “significant,” he or she is saying that it cannot mathematically be distinguished from no trend whatsoever.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15938.html

Climate change skeptics on Capitol Hill are quietly watching a growing accumulation of global cooling science and other findings that could signal that the science behind global warming may still be too shaky to warrant cap-and-trade legislation.

While the new Obama administration promises aggressive, forward-thinking environmental policies, Weather Channel co-founder Joseph D’Aleo and other scientists are organizing lobbying efforts to take aim at the cap-and-trade bill that Democrats plan to unveil in January.

So far, members of Congress have not been keen to publicly back the global cooling theory. But both senators from Oklahoma, Republicans Tom Coburn and Jim Inhofe, have often expressed doubts about how much of a role man-made emissions play.

“We want the debate to be about science, not fear and hypocrisy. We hope next year’s wave of new politics means a return to science,” said Coburn aide John Hart. “It’s the old kind of politics that doesn’t consider any dissenting opinions.”

The global cooling lobby’s challenge is enormous. Next year could be the unfriendliest yet for climate skeptics. Already, House Energy and Commerce Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.) has lost his gavel, in part because his peers felt he was less than serious about tackling global warming.

The National Academy of Sciences and most major scientific bodies agree that global warming is caused by man-made carbon emissions. But a small, growing number of scientists, including D’Aleo, are questioning how quickly the warming is happening and whether humans are actually the leading cause.

Armed with statistics from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climate Data Center, D’Aleo reported in the 2009 Old Farmer’s Almanac that the U.S. annual mean temperature has fluctuated for decades and has only risen 0.21 degrees since 1930 — which he says is caused by fluctuating solar activity levels and ocean temperatures, not carbon emissions.

Data from the same source shows that during five of the past seven decades, including this one, average U.S. temperatures have gone down. And the almanac predicted that the next year will see a period of cooling.

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2008/11/19/why-the-epa-should-find-against-endangerment/

November 19, 2008
Why the EPA should find against “Endangerment”
Filed under: Climate Politics —

Back in July, as a result of last year’s Supreme Court ruling on Massachusetts v. EPA, the U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an “Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking: Regulating Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air Act” and asked for public comment though November 28, 2008.

Aside from the massive bureaucracy that would be involved in trying to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act, the EPA primarily needs to determine whether or not greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are endangering the public health or welfare. The underlying analysis to support/deny an endangerment finding is provided in the EPA’s Technical Support Document for Endangerment Analysis for Greenhouse Emissions under the Clean Air Act (Endangerment TSD) which attempts to serve as review of the state to the science concerning the “vulnerabilities, risks and impacts” of climate change, primarily within the United States.

However, the Endangerment TSD is largely a dated document which relies heavily on the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC’s AR4 was published in the spring of 2007, but to meet the deadline for inclusion in the AR4, scientific papers had to be published by late 2005/early 2006. So, in the rapidly evolving field of climate change, by grounding its TSD in the IPCC AR4 the EPA is largely relying on scientific findings that are, by late 2008, nearly 3 years out of date.

And a lot has happened in those intervening three years.

• Global temperatures have declined (Figure 1a)—extending the current run of time with a statistically robust lack of global temperature rise to eight years (Figure 1b), with some people arguing that it can be traced back for 12 years (Figure 1c).
The consensus on past, present and future Atlantic hurricane behavior has changed. Initially, it tilted towards the idea that anthropogenic global warming is leading to (and will lead to) to more frequent and intense storms. Now the consensus is much more neutral, arguing that future Atlantic tropical cyclones will be little different that those of the past (e.g. Knutson et al., 2008; Vecchi et al., 2008).

• The alarmist notion that warming temperatures will cause Greenland to rapidly shed its ice has been silenced by new results indicating little evidence for the operation of such processes (e.g., van de Wal et al., 2008; Joughin et al., 2008).

These three developments should greatly influence any assessment of “vulnerability, risk, and impacts” of climate change within the U.S. Therefore, the extensive portions of the EPA’s Endangerment TSD which are based upon the old science are no longer appropriate and need to be revised.

In other portions of the Endangerment TSD, the logic is faulty and leads to unsupportable and ill-informed conclusions. Such is the case with the “Human Health” and “Food Production and Agriculture” sections. The TSD authors do not adequately factor in changing populations and changing technologies in projecting harm to health and agriculture from a shifting climate.

But perhaps the most glaring problem of all with the EPA’s Endangerment TSD is the nearly complete disregard of observed trends in a wide array of measures which by and large show that despite decades of increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (as detailed by the EPA) the U.S. population has triumphed over any changes in “vulnerabilities, risks, and impacts” that may have arisen (to the extent that any at all have actually occurred as the result of any human-induced climate changes).

A Voice Said

*
*



FRAGMENT OF A LOST POEM

O the clear moment, when from the mouth
A word flies, current immediately
Among friends; or when a loving gift astounds
As the identical wish nearest the heart;
Or when a stone, volleyed in sudden danger,
Strikes the rabid beast full on the snout!

Moments in never....
Robert Graves

A Question a poem by Robert Frost

A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth.
Robert Frost



If in the silent echo, he stood out, interlocking streets, shadows of the trees everywhere, he dreaded the silence but he dreaded his own dysfunction even more. Come on, buck up, the voice said, but the rhythms were the same, lost, lost, things undone, parties unattended, all kept in silence, fragments of lyricism, a quiet time. He could hear the sound of his unfortunate rooster, the crows drifting across the Paddington terraces, the handsome beast calling for his mate. But there were none. He thought he could find solace in the bars. There was none. Shadows flickered, and once again he found himself haunting the corridors of love.

These ancient times, these forgotten moments, had changed everything. But even so, they had been washed away by the torrents of history, the shifting times, events enfolding upon themselves, a network of streets which held invisible answers. These things were not what he meant. Shadows were calling; and he swirled to answer. Come quickly. Hold my hand. He was prepared to give up. He took those marks and he wouldn't answer the door any more. Your adventures, your heart, the ceaseless quest. Looking for love in all the wrong places. The clatter of obsession. The desolation of morn.

It's not right, nothing's right. You can congratulate yourself. They seem like nice kids. But children fly the coop. And there are only difficult people left, Shadowlands, only stern voices and out of control impulses. He could romanticise his own self destruction. He could recover in full swing. He could hear the voices of chaos in far off countries. He could hear the voices of amateur historians, recording history as if they had never existed. But they were the ones who were going to change the world, make it a better place, fairer, more equal distribution of wealth, the rising of the working class. He didn't know the answer.

He came back from his walk and the house was still silent. It was a shadow land indeed. He tiptoed past the bodies in the lounge room, the travelling theatre group, and he made recall of his gifts, he stood in his own backyard and watched the chooks, at odds with their city environment. They made him feel secure, as if nothing could go wrong. He didn't do things he should have done. Parts of the last nonsensical novel were pasted around the walls, trying to establish the proper thread. His guests couldn't make sense of the fragments either. It had become a very crowded world.

He wanted to be in a place that offered solace. He wanted to live peacefully and without conflict. All the acts of bravery would have to be internal. The bright brick colours of the seaside city never matched his interior moods. The sun splashed warmth on white walls, bougainvillea added splashes of colour. His longing for love would never be answered, not now, not ever. He had already lived several lives. There were so many mistakes, drunken nights, smashed days, too many cigarettes. He had neglected his own health and thought he would die soon. Already the gang was beginning to pass.

Ian's suicide attempts and the surrounding events, his behaviour, callous, dismissive, unknown, smashed glasses in the fire place, had destroyed his reputation. Callous, cruel, cold, once they had shouted out the windows of cars at him, murderer. Murderer. He died because of you. And he shuddered and drank and pretended he was in a different world, pretended not to care. A race to the end; and the end was coming for them all. The group disbanded, went their separate ways. Finally the house broke up and eventually it was sold, for a fraction of what it would be worth today. His was a heart full of echoes; and all he wanted was to disappear.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.euronews.net/en/article/29/11/2008/mumbai-attacks-a-blow-by-blow-account/

The carnage in Mumbai began on Wednesday evening as the heavily-armed gunmen arrived on shore in dinghies, possibly launched from an outlying vessel.

At around 21.20 local time there were attacks at a number of tourist locations.

Armed men stormed the Taj Mahal hotel, hurling grenades and shooting at guests.

At the same time, the assault on the Oberoi Trident hotel began and hostages were taken.

The Cama and Albless Hospital was also attacked and two gunmen were killed.

Nariman House, which housed the Jewish Chabad Lubavitch centre, was beseiged.

Leopold’s Cafe, a popular meeting place for foreigners, was stormed and diners sprayed with bullets.

At the city’s Chattrapati Shivaji railway station two attackers opened fire causing mass panic. There were many casualties.

As Thursday dawned, the Indian army was engaged in gunbattles with militants at both hotels. Small groups of guests begin to escape the mayhem.

As gunfire continued, it was announced that Hemant Karkare, head of the anti-terrorism squad, was dead and a group called the “Deccan Mujahedeen” was claiming responsibility.

The army embarked on a room-by-room search at the Taj, but explosions were still being heard at both hotels.

Meanwhile the Indian navy boarded a cargo ship it believed was linked to the violence.

The Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, addressed the nation, blaming attackers from outside the country and vowing they would not escape.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/world/asia/30mumbai.html?bl&ex=1228107600&en=95e0984e8f92cc7c&ei=5087%0A

MUMBAI, India — Death hung over Mumbai on Saturday.

At the end of a three-day standoff with militants amid a gunfight and a blazing fire Saturday at the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel, the removal of the bodies from the ruins of the 105-year-old landmark began.

At the main city hospital morgue, relatives clutched one another in grief as they went to identify their dead. By midafternoon, the morgue was running out of body bags, and by evening the death toll had risen to 172, a figure that was sure to rise once the dead from the Taj hotel were counted. Funerals went on throughout the day.

As the reckoning began after the siege here, troubling questions arose about whether Indian authorities could have anticipated the attack, taken better security precautions in a city as vulnerable as Mumbai, the country’s financial capital, or crushed the attackers more swiftly.

All the while, tensions swelled between India and Pakistan, where officials insisted that their government had nothing to do with assisting the attackers and promised that they would act swiftly if any connection was found within their country.

Perhaps the most troubling question to emerge Saturday for the Indian authorities was how, if official estimates are accurate, just 10 gunmen could have caused so much carnage and repelled Indian security forces for more than three days in three different buildings.

Melbourne Sun:

A PLANE-LOAD of emotional and exhausted Australians was safe on home soil last night after escaping the terror attacks in Mumbai, which claimed 195 lives.

Hours after the 60-hour terror siege ended, tears flowed at Sydney International Airport as a mercy flight from Mumbai reunited Australians with their distressed families.

There were similar scenes at Melbourne Airport, as desperate Aussies scrambled to get out of the teeming Indian city of Mumbai, which was stormed by up to 40 gunmen three days ago.

The heavily armed, well prepared and highly-trained terrorists carried out the attacks at 10 locations across Mumbai.

Two Australians, Brett Taylor, 49, and Doug Markell, 71, both of Sydney, have been confirmed among the 22 foreign nationals killed.

Two young Queenslanders were injured. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said last night all other Australians had been accounted for.

Reports last night said seven of the terrorists were believed to be British-born Pakistanis. Two of them have been arrested.

The Indian navy was investigating an abandoned trawler carrying a corpse near the coast off Mumbai.

About 40 heavily armed, well prepared and highly-trained terrorists carried out the attacks after storming ashore from inflatable boats on Wednesday evening.

US military intelligence sources suggested the attacks were masterminded by Pakistani militant group, the al-Qaida-linked Lashkar-e-Toiba.

Touching down in Sydney last night, Melbourne couple Matt and Emily Granland told how they had drunk beer in Leopold's Cafe, just days before the violence erupted.

The Great Silence

*
*


It's a Queer Time
Robert Graves

It's hard to know if you're alive or dead
When steel and fire go roaring through your head.

One moment you'll be crouching at your gun
Traversing, mowing heaps down half in fun :
The next, you choke and clutch at your right breast
No time to think leave all and off you go . . .
To Treasure Island where the Spice winds blow,
To lovely groves of mango, quince and lime
Breathe no good-bye, but ho, for the Rest West!
It's a queer time.

You're charging madly at them yeling 'Fag!'
When somehow something gives and your feet drag.
You fall and strike your head; yet feel no pain
And find . . . You're digging tunnels through the hay
In the Big Barn, 'cause it's a rainy day.
O springy hay, and lovely beams to climb!
You're back in the old sailor suit again.
It's a queer time.

Or you'll be dozing safe in your dug-out
A great roar the trench shakes and falls about
You're struggling, gasping, struggling, then . . . hullo!
Elsie comes tripping gaily down the trench,
Hanky to nose -- theat lyddite makes a stench
Getting her pinafore all over grime.
Funny! because she died ten years ago!
It's a queer time.

The trouble is, things happen much too quick;
Up jump the Boshes, rifles thump and click,
You stagger, and the whole scene fades away:
Even good Christians don't like passing straight
From Tipperary or their Hymn of Hate
To Alleluiah-chanting, and the chime
Of golden harps . . . and . . . I'm not well today . . .
It's a queer time.



We were caught in the shadows of a different time. Where the ferry waited at the flooded river. Where we were startled in our youth. At a time before the Great Silence descended. Before he got sick. There were so many imagined buildings, and he could hear the voices and the stories in each of the cubicle rooms. The ivy outside made the house look English. They looked up startled at his invisible presence; could feel something different in the air. He wanted to drape himself in everybody else's life. They could feel his shadow passing.

Without the divine river of alcohol and easy friends, he felt lost. There were always so many divine conspiracies. So much gossip. He was the subject of some of it. Before he became invisible. And sober. And the world didn't seem coloured in anymore. The gift that keeps on giving. From the soaring highs to the massive hangovers to the crushing depression. Keep on giving. Smeared against a wall. He didn't know who we was anymore. Then the feeling passed. Euphorica recall briefly took away perspective. And he pined for oblivion, as he walked past the drunk in the street, jealous of his freedom.

These days, these crucible, difficult days, were to last for quite some time, and came scurrying back often enough. His complete loss. The complete failure of belief. The desperate effort for so desperately little. He wasn't going to remember them this Christmas. There was going to be an agonisingly difficult time, he could feel it in his bones. Always this feeling of dread. But it couldn't have been for nothing. Would I abandon you now; at the end of your luck? He was going to rally. There was always a new dawn. And in simple phrases, simple language, find his heart, be true again; get away from his grimy, infiltrated soul.

We were up to all sorts of nonsense. We really were. Stepping over the bodies in the loungeroom late at night. Doing the dishes in the early hours, wired by excitement. He couldn't be more sure. The dankness had gone. He was going to hear Halleluyah and he was going to see the riot of angels, of colour, of event, of experience. These pasty dreams had gone on long enough. In that empty space. He was sure there was going to be an end. Cruel distinction. Flashes of the bars. How he sometimes longed for them. To be younger. To be someone else. He wasn't the deformed monster anymore, hobbling like a deformed dwarf, drunk, alcoholic, very bitter, very twisted, he wasn't that anymore. But you're going to get me, anyway.

The castles were giant and full of air, with their black chequered floors, etherial cathedrals; and he was able to find them if he so desired. The mistakes were so manifold, manifest, that he didn't know if he could ever climb back. Cruel shadows and a sick tear, the face in the pub house wall, the sneering voices of old queens who knew him when he was younger, slimmer, and the savage betrayal of everything and everyone, Bukowski, Ballard, Burroughs, betrayed by every hallucinatory dream and anguish, fantasy, to come crashing down while walking the fields of the abandoned nursery, picking daffodils for sale later in the day. A happy time.

Briefly, a happy time. Too many times he spent huddled in agony, watching the normal people flash past in their smart cars. That was the greatest disease. He could feel them creeping up now. And all was lost. Again. And he shook his golden locks for the sake of the security cameras. And he took up his old life in the park. Just as he had once watched the homeless with so much interest on his way to and from work, storing them up for future reference. Get out of the gutter and get on with it, he was told in no uncertain terms. The cold shower approach. Before the Great Silence set in like a frost, and he lost all heart.



THE BIGGER STORY:

MUMBAI, India (AP) — At first, waiter Joseph Joy Pulithara thought the blasts were rows of liquor bottles exploding for some reason behind the Mumbai hotel's sleek bar. Running to the scene, he found a woman screaming — and a young man spraying gunfire.

The gunman was a member of a team that was well-armed, well-prepared and had just begun a two-day siege that would shut down India's financial and entertainment capital, leave more than 150 people dead and 370 injured, and turn the city's ritzy seaside district into a scene of horror.

There was almost no time to escape. "Within two minutes, they were on us," Andreina Varagona of Nashville, Tenn., said from her hospital bed in the intensive care unit. Wounded in the right leg and right arm, her curly brown hair was still caked with a friend's blood two days later.

An Indian commando said the attackers were indiscriminate. "Whoever came in front of them, they fired."

There were 10 targets across the city, including two five-star hotels, a train station, a popular restaurant and an ultra-orthodox Jewish center.

Inside the Taj Mahal and the Oberoi hotels, with their hundreds of rooms, the gunmen often seemed to have the advantage.

"These people were very, very familiar with the hotel layouts and it appears they had carried out a survey before," said an unidentified member of India's Marine Commando unit, his face wrapped in a black mask.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5254262.ece

Commandos were tonight battling the last gunmen holed up in the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Bombay as one of the worst terrorist attacks in India’s history reached its bloody endgame.

The diplomatic fallout was just beginning, however, as India laid the blame for the attacks on Pakistan, its neighbour and rival, and an Indian official said that two of the militants were British Pakistanis.

British officials said they were investigating the possibility of such a link but had found no evidence.

India also faced criticism from Israel when five Israeli hostages were found dead inside a Jewish centre after a raid by commandos. An Israeli offer of assistance had been turned down.

Almost 36 hours after the attacks began, commandos from the elite Black Cats special forces unit abseiled on to the roof of Nariman House, one of the terrorists’ three main targets, which contains the Jewish centre.

Hopes of a swift and successful conclusion to the hostage crisis inside were dashed when three of those being held were killed as the commandos launched their raid with stun grenades and gunfire. Two more died as the forces tried to force their way on to the third and fourth floors, according to commandos’ leader.

Indian police said they had also taken control of the Oberoi hotel, killing two militants and freeing 143 people inside, mostly foreigners.

Their operations were tonight focused on the last one, or possibly two, militants who were moving between floors in the Taj, possibly with hostages.

India blamed Pakistan for the assault on its financial capital, in which at least 130 people, including 19 foreigners, died and 370 more were injured. “Preliminary evidence indicates elements with links to Pakistan are involved,” Pranab Mukherjee, India’s Foreign Minister, said.



http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24724306-12377,00.html

INDIAN commandos were battling to end an assault on Mumbai by suspected Pakistan-based Islamic militants that has left up to 155 dead, among them foreign hostages.

Security forces were fighting it out inside the city's historic Taj Mahal hotel, where a tiny group of heavily armed gunmen where engaged in a fight to the death as the more than 52-hour-old battle entered its final stage.

Earlier, elite troops abseiled from helicopters and stormed a Mumbai Jewish centre and killed two gunmen - only to find five dead Israeli hostages, including a US-based rabbi and his wife.

National Security Guard chief J.K. Dutt said the captives had been murdered by the gunmen during the commando assault.

The other five-star hotel that was attacked - the Oberoi-Trident - was declared clear of militants, with scores of trapped guests rescued and 24 bodies found.

"They were the kind of people with no remorse - anybody and whomsoever came in front of them they fired," an Indian commando leader said of the young gunmen who slipped into India's economic capital on Thursday morning (Australian time).

"We could have got those terrorists but for so many hotel guests," he said.

Indian media reports said up to 155 people were dead and 327 others wounded. Nine militants were confirmed dead and one captured.

Barbarians At The Gate

*



The Drunken Fisherman

Wallowing in this bloody sty,
I cast for fish that pleased my eye
(Truly Jehovah's bow suspends
No pots of gold to weight its ends);
Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout
Rose to my bait. They flopped about
My canvas creel until the moth
Corrupted its unstable cloth.

A calendar to tell the day;
A handkerchief to wave away
The gnats; a couch unstuffed with storm
Pouching a bottle in one arm;
A whiskey bottle full of worms;
And bedroom slacks: are these fit terms
To mete the worm whose molten rage
Boils in the belly of old age?

Once fishing was a rabbit's foot--
O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot,
Let suns stay in or suns step out:
Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale's spout--
The fisher's fluent and obscene
Catches kept his conscience clean.
Children, the raging memory drools
Over the glory of past pools.

Now the hot river, ebbing, hauls
Its bloody waters into holes;
A grain of sand inside my shoe
Mimics the moon that might undo
Man and Creation too; remorse,
Stinking, has puddled up its source;
Here tantrums thrash to a whale's rage.
This is the pot-hole of old age.

Is there no way to cast my hook
Out of this dynamited brook?
The Fisher's sons must cast about
When shallow waters peter out.
I will catch Christ with a greased worm,
And when the Prince of Darkness stalks
My bloodstream to its Stygian term . . .
On water the Man-Fisher walks.

Robert Lowell



Oh if only we could find the answer, if only the sheets of light held solutions, but he was disturbed and there was no way out. I come slithering through the dark. I make enemies on the way. I dedicate life to the Word, and find no solution. These random, chaotic thoughts plagued him; but in the record of peak moments there was no backing out. We are destined. He rang Colin, his old friend from the 1970s, surprised once again to hear his chirpy voice. Hello love. I'm thinking of interviewing people your age; nobody knows what happened back then, the doctor said. He laughed. No they don't.

They most certainly don't. Our blizzard was too strong for the human frame. High above the clouds, he could see the crystals dancing. It would have been beautiful if it had not been so frightening. If you think you're life will make a story, it won't. If you're thinking of recording your adventures, don't. Everything must remain anonymous. Do not admit guilt. The forces of self righteousness have never been stronger. How we used to long for a left wing government. All would be well then, all the hypocrisy and brutality and unfashionable views would be gone.

But instead there is an even more brutal, more hypocritical world view. The left don't hesitate to manipulate public opinion to their own advantage, to what they see as the greater good. Truth is even more irrelevant to the left than it is to the right. Eight out of ten they've given Rudd for his first year as Prime Minister. I'm living in a parallel universe, my mate Steve at the cafe says, if that was eight out of ten. Steve's the token conservative in the country's most left wing precinct. We exchange rapid fire views at our own Table of Knowledge.

They're not intended to deceive, but only a few have the bigger picture. The hysterical dishonesty and man bashing of the domestic violence industry makes me sick to the soul. Why am I the only one that cares? Well one of only a few, as a blizzard of propaganda hits the airwaves, double page spreads in the Sydney Morning Herald of convenient victims. All men are brutes, violent patriarchs. You can see the answer to the inquiries already; more male bashing, more lambs to the slaughter, more vicious hypocrisy. That was it, the dark ages, he couldn't be more pissed.

What is this world, now, where group think is the only think? Where sceptics are derided, where independent thought is ridiculed? Why are they so ridiculously dishonest? Why can no one see through this wall of garbage? Impenetrable? I don't think so. Sheet after sheet of vacuous crap; if it's not happening to you don't care. Useful fools, ignorant fools, willing fools, they regurgitate the propaganda of the left as if it really was news; as if these fashionable shibboleths really did exist. And any one who didn't think so was very unfashionable indeed; barbarians at the gate.

Fools come marching, waving spears, shouts at the gate. The excited, colourful babble was confusing to the sight, he couldn't work out who was who; why they were waving their spears. He could smell the smell of the humans even far off. They shouldn't be here, he thought; they shouldn't be polluting this place. But the answers were contained in a different place. He wasn't going to be exhausted by these impracticalities. He smiled; and he heard the clashing of metal and the confused shouts; and remembered now where it all came from, the expression, barbarians at the gate. The trouble was, in all the modern twists and propaganda, it was the individual thinkers who had been portrayed as the barbarians; and there was no way back or out; to a decent, more honest place.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.skynews.com.au/politics/article.aspx?id=281758

Oppn takes on Rudd government over budget
Updated: 05:28, Thursday November 27, 2008

The Coalition is battering the federal government over its admission that it may have to send the budget into deficit to deal with the economic crisis and its accelerating social costs.

Opposition finance spokesman Joe Hockey says he wants to know why the government is ready to to run a budget deficit when it's forecasting an additional two billion dollar in tax income.

And Opposition treasury spokeswoman Julie Bishop is questioning why the government can't keep the budget in surplus, given expected interest rate cuts and an estimated economic growth of two per cent.

But federal treasurer Wayne Swan says it would be irresponsible not to go into deficit if the economy and jobs are at risk.

His stance followed Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's statement to parliament yesterday that the budget may have to go into a temporary deficit to counter the effects of the global financial crisis.

To make things worse, a seniors' group is warning falling company dividends will force thousands of self-funded retirees onto the government pension and it says Canberra must stick to its promise to reform the aged pension, even it it means sending the budget into deficit.

http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/story/0,26278,24713525-10229,00.html

GORDON Ramsay has apologised to his wife Tana after admitting he met his alleged mistress at least four times.

The couple have now made a pact to keep their marriage together as they brace for more accusations in the coming days.

"I'm so sorry I've put Tana through this," Ramsay told a friend who was quoted in Britain's Mirror newspaper last night.

"I've apologised to her and feel absolutely dreadful. I feel I've been a fool. She really doesn't deserve all this grief."

The F Word and Hell's Kitchen star, 42, has been accused of having a seven-year affair with Sarah Symonds, the author of a book for mistresses.

Ms Symonds, 38, has declined to comment but there were claims yesterday that Britain's News of the World paid her as much as $238,000 for the sting on Ramsay in which he was caught leaving a hotel with her last week.

She was believed to be holed up in a hotel with the paper's representatives and further claims were expected this weekend.

The scandal is showing no signs of disappearing. One report called Ms Symonds a "sex crazed tiger" after a former lover came forward and detailed his bedroom experiences.

Former bouncer Mark Mendelssohn said he had once had sex with her nine times in seven hours.

"I was scared. I could barely walk out of the place," he said.

Ramsay and wife Tana, 33, who have four children, were said to have had a "heart-to-heart" over the crisis at their $9 million south London home yesterday.

"Gordon was honest with Tana," the friend told The Mirror.

http://www.paradisepost.com/opinion/ci_11065860

The number of global warming skeptics is expanding, largely because new data shows temperatures are not going up, but rather, " they're coming down!"

For instance, on Sept. 5 scientists in Southern Brazil reported, " their heaviest snowfalls ever! They are entering what has turned out to be their coldest September
Advertisement
in a century." It seems something called the, "Pacific Decadal Oscillation" has a lot to do with these phenomena.

This information comes from Brazilian Climatologist, Eugene Hackbart. He says, "El Niño's produce warmer climates, while El Nina's produce cooler climates."

Hackbart further points out periods of solar inactivity known as "solar minimums" magnify cold spells on the South American continent. According to Gunter, American scientist, Dr. Craig Locehle, who conducts modeling on global climate change, confirmed the findings, " the so-called Medieval Warm Period of about 1,000 years ago did in fact exist and was even warmer than 20th century temperatures."

New research confirms the warm period of 1,000 years ago produced temperatures higher than today's temperatures. The conclusion, confirmed by tree rings, lake and ocean floor sediment, ice cores, and early records written on climate, particularly in Northern Europe. Remember, there were no vehicles to create tons of hydrocarbons at that time.

This was the period when Leif Erickson and other Danish seafaring adventurers, discovered Greenland, Iceland, and Vineland, which is now part of Canada and the north eastern tip of the United States.

Gunter claims supporters of the Kyoto conference, which forecast global warming as a "threat" to our existence, had to bury information on the Medieval Warm Period in order to obtain credibility. That's a serious accusation.

Western Washington University geologist, Don Easterbrook says today's warm temperatures will drop, and we will enter a period of "global cooling," as the Sun enters a particularly inactive phase."

In addition, Easterbrook says he's studied temperatures and climate back 400 years and has found, "an almost exact correlation between climate fluctuations and solar energy received on Earth."

He believes there is virtually no correlation with increased hydrocarbons in the atmosphere and global warming (sometimes referred to as "climate change," a term now used by the press).

Also involved in this research are scientists, Dr. David Douglass of the University of Rochester and Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville. Last month they dealt global warming enthusiasts a stunning blow when they produced data that shows hydrocarbons produced by humans are not behind any warming of the Earth's atmosphere.

In a joint statement the two scientists concluded, " variations in global temperatures since 1978 cannot be attributed to carbon dioxide." These two scientists have been working together to produce a paper using data from weather satellites. They reportedly measured 300,000 temperature readings around the globe, and conceded our hydrocarbons may have a "slight impact, (but) variations in global temperatures since 1978 cannot be attributed to carbon dioxide."

In addition, their chart shows rising temperatures beginning in 1979 - have all but disappeared, largely due to reduced solar activity. Now, you would think the press would report on these investigations to balance what appears to be propaganda from the pro-global warming crowd including Gore, but it's not happening.

Gore has been silent about, climate change lately and the press certainly is not picking up on it either. Their silence is deafening! A growing database is showing exaggerated global warming fears in an effort to scare the public.

The press is not printing stories on accusations that Gore, along with social engineers on college campuses, may have reacted too quickly to early reports of climate change.

Smeared Against The Wall

*




Nautilus Island's hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son's a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village;
she's in her dotage.

Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria's century
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.

The season's ill--
we've lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet's filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler's bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he'd rather marry.

One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town....
My mind's not right.

A car radio bleats,
"Love, O careless Love...." I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat...
I myself am hell;
nobody's here--

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their solves up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air--
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

Robert Lowell Skunk Hour



We were there, in the final reaches, in the final dawn, at the end of days. Foreign images batter our eyelids. All else is lost. He was in memory, in dawn, in dusk, and his spirit rose flapping to embrace another place, and they sneered in their bourgeoise comfort zones at the street crazies, the would-be poets, at the unwritten stanzas and the forlorn hopes. An entire generation just disappeared, lost, seeping back into the general population, early deaths. These memories all that is left. Now we are in a different time. Amidst the hatred of men. The sneering age.

He knew the streets had been side-smeared, as if the posts had been planted from another time and various walls, sheets of reality, had been pushed into this world from a malignant place, sheets of grey. This displaced sense was all that was left. He was on borrowed time. So many mistakes, he cringed. They laughed. It was a point in life that he wanted to ignore, stepping fast. Everyone else progressed around him. That sad Christmas, that terrible time. He hadn't learnt to stop thinking, not yet, and every moment was a terrible assault. The cat story hadn't happened yet.

He heard the stories of desperation. The tranny who so wanted to die so much she reached down and picked up used syringes off the streets of Kings Cross, jabbing them into herself. Lying fragile in a hospital bed, pining to make friends with the hospital nurse, it was too late to regret what she had done, that she was dying. Too late to think about what was really happening. Too late to wonder why it was he wanted to join her, why the grey smudges that were blocking out his vision were so frightening.

There were other things that could be done, other forms of consciousness, but he couldn't find the escape route. He didn't know how to feel different. He could imagine himself, the deranged transexual, her make up completely awry, tears unaccountably flowing down her hagged face; and seeing the syringe lying on the ground, the bead of blood inside. What had it been, heroin, speed? Which of the local scumbags had used it? Were they sick, infected, already dying? She reached down and picked it up off the grimy pavement; shouted, an incomprehensible noise, and plunged it into her thigh.

She wanted to die, she wanted to escape, she just wanted to stop her cruel head. Tshere was no other way, no other life. Hello happy, her local shop keeper would say, sending her up for her melancholy stance, before she was dressed for the day, before the makeup was on, before she was shrieking "Daaaahhhling!!" in the bars, downing drinks, entertaining everyone. They didn't know how utterly forlorn she felt inside. They thought she really was fabulous, that their own self doubts could be cured if only they were more like her.

But she had got hopelessly drunk for a month and the bastards at Les Girls had sacked her. So much for all she had done for them over all those years. She had helped to build the place, was the place. And now they had dumped her. And she was broke and humiliated. Many of her friends were already sick from the new disease called Aids. Robbie, her only love, was already in hospice, a living skeleton. She wanted to join him, to follow his path. She wanted to find a world of great love, of triumph, of blessing; a place where she was normal and the pain was gone. And so she picked up the used syringe on the pavement; and plunged it into herself. Her shout died quickly in the muffled echoe of the surrounding buildings; she wiped away the tears, streaking her mascara. Where the hell was she going to get enough money for another drink?



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/february2007/130207globalwarming.htm

The Creeping Fascism of Global Warming Hysteria
Man-made orthodoxy is a dogma of coercion, bias, and junk science
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, February 13, 2007

The hoax of the doctrine of man-made global warming that is being foisted upon the world by decree, and the junk science that is manipulated to support it, represents a creeping fascism whose agenda to stifle open debate betrays the fact that climate change hysteria is a farce intended to crush freedoms and further centralize global power.

In an interview with a Czech newspaper, Vaclav Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic blamed the "whip of political correctness" for preventing more scientists and statesmen from going public with their skepticism on man-made global warming. This is precisely what we have arrived at, in a bizarre vacuum of common sense and without any attribution, the establishment and the controlled left have managed to squash reasoned two-sided debate about global warming by coating their argument with the nebulous claim that expressing disagreement is somehow bigoted, backward and even racist.

The very fact that the man-made advocates have to introduce such a far distant concept as race into a debate about scientific climate change makes it self-evident that their argument is inherently weak and vulnerable.

In an article we published in November about global warming being primarily caused by the sun, we commented somewhat tongue in cheek that people who express doubts about global warming would soon be compared to holocaust deniers by the media and other self-appointed cultural kingpins who demand total adherence to orthodox religion style beliefs about climate change.

Here's what we wrote:

The assertion that global warming is man made is so oppressively enforced upon popular opinion, especially in Europe, that expressing a scintilla of doubt is akin to holocaust denial in some cases. Such is the insipid brainwashing that has taken place via television, newspapers and exalted talking heads - global warming skeptics are forced to wear the metaphoric yellow star and only discuss their doubts in hushed tones and conciliatory frameworks, or be cat-called, harangued and jeered by an army of do-gooders who righteously believe they are rescuing mother earth by recycling a wine bottle or putting their paper in a separate trash can.

It's not longer a joke.

The Boston Globe's Ellen Goodman wrote an op-ed last week denouncing anyone who dares dissent against the God-like authoritative status of the IPCC UN report on climate change.

I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.

This assault betrays what's at the heart of the global warming agenda - a cadre of control freaks who can't respond to the overwhelming evidence that the Sun and other long term natural cycles are responsible for climate change and thus have to resort to vile propagandistic personality attacks to sway the court of public opinion.

During a debate on the BBC's Question Time program, a panelist's appeal for viewers to simply look at both sides of the argument and consider other causes besides the man-made explanation was met with boos and cat-calls from the audience and the speaker was shouted down. It's now treated as sacrilegious to even question the force fed dogma that leads the automatons to endlessly repeat what has been brainwashed into them by the establishment media like a broken record.

"We can't afford to have this debate," they scream, arguing that the end is nigh and unbelievers need to be metaphorically burned at the stake of public opinion in the interests of human survival.

But for those with memories and the nerve to actually think for themselves, the climate doomsayers have been proven wrong throughout the decades. In the late 60's and early 70's, the in-vogue hysteria about climate change and how it spelled the end for humanity as we know it revolved around the concept of global cooling. Again, this arose out of a misunderstanding of long term temperature fluctuations and the fact that the earth was at the end of the cycle of the Little Ice Age.

Writer John Bender has done an excellent job of compiling quotes from environmental "authorities" of past decades who told us that the sky was falling yet have been completely discredited with hindsight. Keep these dire proclamations in mind when you hear yet another "repeater" regurgitate the brainwashing that he or she has been indoctrinated with by the establishment.

The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population. -- Reid Bryson, "Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man", (1971)

The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer -- Paul Ehrlich - The Population Bomb (1968)

I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000 -- Paul Ehrlich in (1969)

In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish. -- Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day (1970)

Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity . . . in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion -- Paul Ehrlich in (1976)

This [cooling] trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century -- Peter Gwynne, Newsweek 1976

There are ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production - with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth. The drop in food production could begin quite soon... The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologist are hard-pressed to keep up with it. -- Newsweek, April 28, (1975)

This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000. -- Lowell Ponte "The Cooling", 1976
If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000...This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age. -- Kenneth E.F. Watt on air pollution and global cooling, Earth Day (1970)

The IPCC is a political body, not a scientific organization, therefore its proclamation is purely intended at achieving a political agenda. The document they released on February 2 that was devotedly afforded days of intense coverage by the compliant establishment media was a political manifesto based on a scientific undertaking that has not even been completed. How empirical is a "scientific experiment" whose conclusions are announced before tests have even been completed? The document immediately states that the "scientific" research is being edited to conform to the already released political summary.

“Changes (other than grammatical or minor editorial changes) made after acceptance by the Working Group or the Panel shall be those necessary to ensure consistency with the Summary for Policymakers or the Overview Chapter,” states the brief.

The U.N. has confidently announced "case closed" on man-made global warming because they are editing their own uncompleted report to mirror their pre-conceived conclusion. Hardly "independent" is it?

The IPCC report was piggybacked onto a bandwagon of public relations stunts that had nothing to do with the evidence behind global warming but were enough to leave an impression in the mind of the casual viewer that the man-made explanation was a global consensus. These included the Eiffel Tower's lights being turned off for 5 minutes and a ludicrous incident in which British primate expert Jane Goodall imitated the wild call of a tropical chimpanzee.

Czech President Klaus stated, "Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it's a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor. It's neither a forum of neutral scientists nor a balanced group of scientists. These people are politicized scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and a one-sided assignment."

Man-made advocates go to great lengths to highlight the fact that transnational oil giants such as Exxon-Mobil offer thousands of dollars for reports aimed at disproving the UN theory, claiming this taints any opposing viewpoint as biased, and yet conveniently ignore the fact that it was the U.N. itself and Ted Turner, a man-made devotee and advocate of drastic population reduction to save the planet, who gifted the organization $1 Billion which in part funded the IPCC report. Is that not biased? Is that not a example of scientists being lavishly bankrolled to produce evidence that fits a pre-conceived outcome? Is the fact that a carbon tax fueled by fear of climate change that will go directly to assorted U.N. agencies itself a commentary on the U.N.'s role on hyping man-made global warming?

In addition, Greenpeace are recruiting "global warming field organizer's" whose job it is to lobby members of Congress to push the agenda for man-made global warming. So if you thought your donation was going to help save whales or protect the rainforest you're sorely mistaken - it's partly funding a PR assault that will eventually orbit right back to you in the form of a draconian carbon emissions tax that will do nothing to prevent global warming but will fill the pockets of global government and the U.N.

Not all scientists were prepared to sacrifice their impartiality to be in on the scam. Dr. Chris Landsea resigned from the IPCC in his own words because, “I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound.”

Landsea is one of many climate experts, meteorologists, geologists and others who have braved the scorn of the flat-earthers to point out that man-made advocates have utilized myopic and blinkered scientific trickery to make their case.

The Floating World

*



My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,
a captive as Racine, the man of craft,
drawn through his maze of iron composition
by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.
When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body
caught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines,
the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . .
I have sat and listened to too many
words of the collaborating muse,
and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,
not avoiding injury to others,
not avoiding injury to myself--
to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction,
an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting

my eyes have seen what my hand did.

Dolphin
Robert Lowell



Caught in the shadows, in the tiny spaces, there on the streets of past lives, there before the Christmas that never came. It was a terrible time of year. Everyone had gone away on holidays. Everyone that is who had any money to escape the city. Everyone who hadn't pissed everything up against a wall, who weren't walking around the streets with a head full of sad and disconnected thoughts, travelling far, a journey without end, a journey that led him precisely nowhere, back to this same street, these same houses, his abusive, sneering flat mate who spent all of his nights trolling the gay bars of Oxford Street and all of his days boasting about his conquests.

That was it. He would never be able to foresee the future. He didn't know that the gutter awaited. That if he didn't stop drinking and carrying on he would die in Belmore Park, shouting at skyscrapers, a broken man, alcoholic. None of this he understood. He still thought it was all a great adventure, a nice bloke having a rough trot. Between jobs. Between lovers. Between careers and motivation. Certainly between happiness. Nice day if you like that sort of thing was as cheerful as he got. He didn't understand why everyone else wasn't caught up in this brutal, grinding, universal angst. He didn't understand why they smiled happily at each other, embracing in the street.

And he would never understand where it all went wrong. He knew some of the biggest crims in the city. He was their court jester, their poet, recording their secret lives, their furtive dartings, the undertow of threat. He was not in danger, he knew that. His personal camouflage consisted of a shambling, shambolic self. No one could pick the intelligence behind that eccentric form. He shambled through their lives and made himself good company; in receipt of the best drugs in town.

Years later, gainfully employed on the city's leading newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald, he returned to that same street, Paddington Street, Paddington, to the same set of houses. Then it was a crazy story about a cat that wouldn't die. The woman who owned the house had died and in her will had insisted that the house not be sold for the life of her beloved cat; and that the boarder could continue to live rent free in return for feeding and caring for her beloved animal. This arrangement lasted about as long as it took for the greedy relatives to think of a way around it.

They trapped the cat and sent it to an animal refuge. As part of the story we had to photograph the dam cat in the animal refuge, surrounded by other old cats living out their lives on the bequests of their owners. And he paced up and down the same street where he had been so unhappy, unformed, suffering at the derision of yet another bitch. The giant terraces underneath looming elm trees looked much the same from the outside, despite the frenzy of renovating that had transformed their interiors.

He was in shadow, strung together by glue. Only he knew the story of the cat on which an entire inheritance had hung; the devious machinations of the greedy relatives to get rid of the spoilt, spitting black and white ball of fluff. Only he knew how desolate he had felt that Christmas, way back then, way back when, how the streets merged into a universal grey; how the cat had got on the front page and his fame, or notoriety, had spiralled briefly higher. None of these things mattered any more. The bitch had long ago disappeared from Sydney, to die with a lover in an AIDS plagued affair, to live out his final days in sick misery, clinging to the good times to the very end.

Each time he drove through Paddington he avoided Paddington Street. The trees were larger still, shrouding it in shadow, the houses even more renovated and considerably more expensive than before. And his memory of the bitch and the cat their last reflections in the floating world. He chose not to bring them back to life, not if it could be avoided.




THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hHdia2TAGvPkZ6UaX2qzFYqYehBgD94HJ4AO0

Obama promises leadership on climate change

By LIZ SIDOTI – 22 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Calling climate change an urgent challenge, President-elect Barack Obama promised Tuesday that Washington would take a leading role in combating it in the United States and throughout the world. "My presidency will mark a new chapter in America's leadership on climate change," Obama said in a video message to governors and others attending a Los Angeles summit on the issue.

In the roughly four-minute message, Obama reiterated his support for a cap-and-trade system approach to cutting green house gases. He would establish annual targets to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them another 80 percent by 2050. Obama also promoted anew his proposal to invest $15 billion each year to support private sector efforts toward clean energy.

President Bush has been criticized for failing to do enough to combat climate change and Obama has promised quick action to address the issue. He may have to start tackling the issue through administrative actions, given that leaders in the Democratic-controlled Congress have indicated that they aren't likely to act until 2010 on a bill to limit the heat-trapping gases blamed for global warming.

At a news conference Tuesday, a coalition called the U.S. Climate Action Partnership — made up of 32 leading corporations, including electric utilities and oil companies, and environmental groups — urged Obama to press Congress to approve legislation next year for a mandatory cap-and-trade system to limit the release of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and other greenhouse gases. Opponents of such action argue controls on carbon dioxide emissions will increase energy costs.

Under a cap-and-trade program, the government would establish a ceiling on the amount of carbon dioxide that can be released into the air from burning fossil fuels. A utility or industrial plant would have to purchase emission allowances for every ton of pollution released. Anyone who exceeds the cap must either make pollution reductions or buy additional allowances, while those who cut emissions below the cap would be able to sell allowances. Initially the cap would be relatively high and then be lowered gradually to achieve the targeted pollution reductions.

http://www.spacedaily.com/2006/081119171128.moufx8ea.html

Climate change is fading as a priority in the Pacific Rim as the gloomy state of the global economy takes precedence, a survey of opinion leaders showed Wednesday.

The Pacific Economic Cooperation Council, a non-governmental group, released an annual survey of leaders in government, business and media ahead of a summit in Peru of 21 Asia-Pacific leaders.

Twenty-four percent of some 400 opinion leaders surveyed said the top priority for Asia-Pacific leaders should be addressing the US-bred financial crisis, far outweighing other issues.

Last year, the top priority was reviving stalled global trade negotiations, at 12 percent, but climate change came close at eight percent. Global warming did not even figure among the top priorities this year.

"We've been swamped by bad economic news and you don't have to look at our survey results alone to see that the interest and focus on climate change has dissipated somewhat," said Yuen Pau Woo, co-author of the report.

"You see the same shift in focus in the public away from climate change questions to questions of economic survival and growth," said Woo, president of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.

The survey was released a day after US president-elect Barack Obama pledged to engage the world on climate change, which UN scientists warn threatens extinction for many species by the end of the century.

George W. Bush, the outgoing president, was the industrialized world's main holdout from the Kyoto Protocol, arguing that mandatory cuts in carbon emissions blamed for global warming were too costly for the US economy.

The survey also found that 78 percent of opinion leaders predicted the United States would suffer much weaker growth in the coming year and that a US recession was the main risk for the region.

http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/2756/218/

Freeman Dyson Debunks Dire Forecasts on Global Warming and Other Tenets
Written by Ellen Gilbert, Town Topics
Wednesday, 19 November 2008

Freeman Dyson gets around. Last Wednesday, for example, the 85-year-old “retired” physicist regaled a lunchtime audience at the Nassau Club with his “heretical” ideas about global warming. Just a few hours later he could be found once again sharing his thoughts on global warming, as well as on intelligent design, nuclear warfare, extraterrestrial life, and HAR-1 (a DNA component that distinguishes human beings from other animals) with a standing-room-only crowd at Labyrinth Books.

Mr. Dyson’s credentials are venerable: the British-born scholar received a BA from the University of Cambridge in 1945, and was, from 1953 until his retirement in 1994, a physics professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. The absence of a PhD in his resume has been more than compensated for by the 21 honorary degrees he has received over the years.

He seems happiest, however, when he is working at being the rebel, and indeed, one of his books, a compilation of essays published earlier in The New York Review of Books, is called The Scientist as Rebel. Wearing an effusively-colored tie that set off his gray suit, Mr. Dyson began his talk at the Nassau Club by encouraging the audience to interrupt him as he spoke, since, he declared, “it’s much more fun to have an argument than do a monologue.”

In the absence of audience interruptions, Mr. Dyson had an argument anyway with the scores of people (like Al Gore) who weren’t present to defend their belief in the dire consequences of global warming. (“There’s no accounting for human folly,” Mr. Dyson said when asked about Mr. Gore’s Nobel Prize.) Saying that on a recent trip he and his wife found Greenlanders to be delighted with their warmer climate and increased tourism, Mr. Dyson suggested that representing “local warming by a global average is misleading.” In his comments at both the Nassau Club and Labyrinth, he decried the use of computer modeling to make “tremendously dogmatic” predictions about worldwide trends, without acknowledging the “messy, muddy real world” and the non-climatic effects of increased carbon dioxide. “There is no substitute for widely-conducted field operations over a long time,” he told the Nassau Club audience, citing the “enormous gaps in knowledge and sparseness of observation” that characterize the work of global warming experts.

Mr. Dyson’s fearless commentary continued later at Labyrinth, where, standing for over an hour and without a microphone, he delighted a full house by declaring the existence of 10,000 string theorists to be “sociologically dangerous” (“one thousand would be enough”), and balked at an audience member’s query about what he would do with a $700 billion grant. “When science gets rich it becomes political,” he observed. As an example of the most expensive efforts not necessarily being the most worthwhile, he pointed to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, the subject of much recent attention, noting that it was designed to identify only certain particles, losing much potentially interesting information in the process. “The important things are the ones you don’t expect,” he noted.




Sorghum crops near Gunnedah, NSW, Australia.