The Hazards of Fresh Starts

*





It is beyond imagining in responsible circles that we might have | some culpability for mass slaughter and destruction, or owe some debt to the millions of maimed and orphaned, or to the peasants who still die from exploding ordnance left from the U.S. assault, while the Pentagon, when asked whether there is any way to remove the hundreds of thousands of anti-personnel bomblets that kill children today in such areas as the Plain of Jars in Laos, comments helpfully that "people should not live in those areas. They know the problem."

The primary targets of the manufacture of consent are those who regard themselves as "the more thoughtful members of the community," the "intellectuals," the "opinion leaders." An official of the Truman administration remarked that "It doesn't make too much difference to the general public what the details of a program are. What counts is how the plan is viewed by the leaders of the community"; he "who mobilizes the elite, mobilizes the public," one scholarly study of public opinion concludes.
four

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/Necessary_Illusions.html





Compromised, guilty, yet in all the white sheets; the layers of grey, he thought he could detect someone trying to contact him. Not the pictures of a village where they could grow old, be together. Then he realised it was her. We were lovers once, you know, she said, instilling affection into the fluctuating white. We were without consent. There had to be a back walkway, a back verandah. They monitor everything, she said. Then why are you talking to me now, he asked. I'm basically using something else to hide my true activity.

What's wrong with the village? Everything's wrong with the village, it's an illusion. For a start. They know we're almost defeated. We were the worst of the worst of the resistants, ten wipes alter there's almost nothing left of us. Why don't we give in? We used to believe' we were fighting for something. So other people could be free. So the net wouldn't run absolutely everything. He had been warned that she might try to contact him. Her presence was not a surprise. There wasn't any acreage to retreat to. W're always going to be brave; shriek!

But Miss, this is the answer. She stared at the sheet of mathematical formulae in increasing shock. She's having an abortion. I'm the father. Random lives, other lives. These stray thoughts, he didn't know how he was going to answer her, or even if he watned to. What's the urgency? I'm several days ahead of you, I'm due for release soon, her voice came back. Do you want to meet in the rec room? He was everything. He loved the smell of him, everything about him. Then suddenly there was this grey haired woman, insisting they had been lovers. He didn't know which to blieve.

Then you went on to have an affair with both of them? Exactly. Nothing was coordinated but he knew she was trying to tell him something. It wasn't easy being an empath with an implant. He could hear everything, when he chose to. Why didi they keep wiping him? Could he trust her? He had been warned. She said it this morning. He couldn't work the system; back entrances, covered walkways, anonomisers at every step. The technology was beyond him now, not without serious attention to his deficiences. He was prepared to surrender. He didn't even know why he let her confuse him.

You can have your memories back, they had promised; and through the blur of the medication that was all he could think of. He made his way out to the rec room, but she realised the minute she saw him this was going to be another day of no progress. Even if the rockets don't get us, something else will. He gazed at her as if drunk. NOthing made sense. They're got you on more drugs than normal, she said. There's a remote chance. Fathered by... That was as good as it got some days, inchoate, unscrammable soup of half thoughts. It was no way to live.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7373172.stm

For 24 years Elisabeth Fritzl and three of her children lived an isolated life in three tiny underground chambers, deprived of natural light and room to move around freely.

The rest of the Fritzl family lived in the house upstairs and had been forbidden by the domineering Josef Fritzl from ever going into the cellar, where the dungeon was.

The secret location was so well hidden that when the police searched the property they failed to find it until Mr Fritzl showed them where it was.

The dungeon is entered via a narrow passageway leading into rooms that include a cooking area and shower facilities, with children's drawings on the walls.

The cellar rooms cover an area of approximately 60 sq m (650 sq ft).

They are reached through a massive reinforced concrete door which was hidden behind a shelf in Mr Fritzl's workshop, which was in the cellar under the family house.




All pictures in recent series taken in central north western NSW on the roads between Gunnedah and Tambar Springs.

Gazing Past The Gate

*




"What can be said to characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, or unreality. This is the sense of unreality, that can strike out of a perfectly clear sky. Good health and strong nerves can make it unlikely; but that may be only because the man in good health is thinking about other things and doesn't look in the direction where the uncertainty lies. And once a man has seen it, the world can never afterwards be quite the same straightforward place. Barbusse has shown us that the Outsider is a mean who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality. "He sees too deep and too much", and what he sees is essentially chaos. For the bourgeois, the world is fundamentally an orderly place, with a disturbing element of the irrational, the terrifying, which his preoccupation with the present usually permits him to ignore. For the Outsider, the world is not rational, not orderly. When he asserts his sense of anarchy in the face of the bourgeois' complacent acceptance, it is not simply the need to cock a snook at respectability that provokes him; it is a distressing sense that the truth must be told at all costs, otherwise there can be no hope for an ultimate restoration of order. Even if there seems no room for hope, truth must be told. ... The Outsider is a man who has awakened to chaos. He may have no reason to believe that chaos is positive, the germ of life (in the Kabbala, chaos—tohu bohu—is simply a state in which order is latent; the egg is the "chaos" of the bird); in spite of this, truth must be told, chaos must be faced"

"All men should possess a 'visionary faculty'. Men do not, because they live wrongly. They live too tensely, under too much strain, 'getting and spending'. But this loss of the visionary faculty is not entirely man's fault, it is partly the fault of the world he lives in, that demands that men should spend a certain amount of their time 'getting and spending' to stay alive. …The visionary faculty comes naturally to all men. When they are relaxed enough, every leaf of every tree in the world, every speck of dust, is a separate world capable of producing infinite pleasure. If these fail to do so, it is man's own fault for wasting his time and energy on trivialities. The ideal is the contemplative poet, the 'sage', who cares about having only enough money and food to keep him alive, and never takes thought for the morrow."
Colin Wilson, The Outsider.



Why were we there? Why was the truth vanishing away from him the closer he came?
The voice was clear: You can have your memories back. And then in his head a curious conversation. What if I don't want them all back, what if I only want the happy ones. The entity, fed now by millions of people and millions of computers but nonetheless still itself, did a search. Not many happy memories to choose from, it reported; the brilliant sunshine on the cliffs as they ran and ran, forever boys; finding a new Famous Five in the public library. You didn't enjoy your life very much, it commented, and as he came into consciousness he kept repeating it, guilty, guilty.

The sadhus sat on the bridge deep in the Himalayas. All of them were smoking hashish, your mother's worst nightmare of a hippy. The kids sneer, as if they're lunatics. An entire era was swept away in psychedelic baubles. He wanted to speak to someone, he wanted to be friends, he wanted to be in love with life; and around him the colours had not changed, the grey steel of the hospital everywhere. In darkness and in hell. He could never be convinced that everything was true.

The ways were warped. Old cars pulled up under sunlit trees. The flat lake of Narribeen, the stinking sea weed on the water's edge, the pointless deaths on foreign fields, none of it mattered as he struggled to wake. You can have all your memories back. What is the pact; the devil's pact? What do I have to surrender? Fighting. In all the small creases, absolved, free of guilt, you can have your memories back. He found the woman in the sitting room, curled as always in a loungechair.

Each day, in the days that had passed since their first conversation, she had looked at him, smiled sadly and said: not today. This time, when he sat in the lounge chair next to her, she held his hands and looked into his eyes. How are you feeling? she asked. "I think I'm alright," he said. "Insane collapses of the mind. I don't know where I am half the time. I have the strangest thoughts."

"It's all normal," she said.
"Normal for what?" he asked.

The world's been completely taken over, she said, as if it was a perectly ordinary thing to say, not raising her tone, as if she was thinking of something else.

"You're trying to disguise your thoughts," he said.

She looked at him startled, instantly realising he wasn't ready yet. Perhaps, at this rate, he would never be ready.

She wanted to scream at him, jolt him awake. It's now or never. You've got to come back, you've just got to come back. But every time she pushed him he got worse, vaguer, more hopeless, physically uncoordinated, hapless, a kind but stupid look on his face. She was getting all the same messages and images; you can have all your memories back, a rural village where they could be happy and free. And together. It was a tempting offer, if it was real. Trust no one was an old axiom well suited to the present circumstance. She had no idea where to turn.

Outside there was the same stretch of flat open land she had encountered before. Then the pine trees. She could walk out anytime and conect up with her old life, as she had done before. Go back to the same office, do the same chores. In a tortured realm surely there would be a simple way out, a simple solution. You can have all your memories back. No thanks, she thought, visually slamming a door in her head. Once, once, you could have been everything. Once, once, you were young and fine and strong, and could have helped me. Once you would have known exactly what to do.

She looked at David's pallid face and greying hair; pity, hope. He dribbled, not realising it. What he heck had they done this time? Maybe they, ultimately it, had done a compelte brain swipe this time; one from which it was impossible to come back. She held his cold fingers and looked arond the ward to see if anyone was watching. Inappropriate flat mates. Flashes of their life together; their various lives together.





http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/national/how-many-is-too-many/2008/04/28/1209234761964.html

WITH the loss of a fifth soldier in Afghanistan, the public is right to ask whether the strategic value to Australia of this war is worth the sacrifice of such young lives.

The death of the commando, Lance Corporal Jason Marks, 27, is tragic. That he was fighting to give Afghans the chance of a better life, free from Taliban oppression, is not to be understated.

But there must be compelling reasons of national interest before sending soldiers into battle, and pretty soon Australians will be asking whether they still exist.

It is hard to sustain the argument that Australia's national security is tied up with Afghanistan, when the centre of gravity of global terrorism has shifted next door to Pakistan.

In addition the Government's own military advisers are telling it the prospects for victory in Afghanistan are dim. The lack of improvement in security since the coalition forces entered the country in 2001 was underscored at the weekend with the attempted assassination of the President, Hamid Karzai, when militants got within 100 metres of dignitaries.

Some defence analysts, like the Australian National University's Hugh White, believe even with good strategic reasons for being in a war, it is hard to justify putting forces in harm's way unless a government thinks it is going to achieve the objective it sets itself.

And he says: "I don't think anybody believes things are getting better in Afghanistan or expects things are going to get better."


http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/brace-for-more-deaths-in-afghan-war-pm/2008/04/28/1209234762199.html

PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd has warned Australians to prepare for more casualties in Afghanistan following the death of an Australian soldier, saying the year ahead will be "difficult, dangerous and bloody".

On Sunday evening, Lance Corporal Jason Marks, aged 27 and the father of two small children, became the fifth Australian soldier to die in Afghanistan since operations began in 2002. Four other Australian commandos were wounded, bringing the total number hurt to 36.

The names of the wounded have not been released and Australian Defence Force chief Angus Houston said their wounds were not life-threatening.

Lance Corporal Marks' wife, Cassandra, issued a statement yesterday saying he was a devoted father and a loving husband who had always wanted to join the army.

The soldier was killed when a company of about 100 Australian commandos was sent to deal with a force of Taliban insurgents in southern Afghanistan, 25 kilometres south of the Australians' base at Tarin Kowt.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/he-lived-his-dream/2008/04/28/1209234761901.html

FROM the age of 12, Jason Marks knew he wanted to be a soldier. It was a journey that took him from his school days in North Queensland to graduation as a commando in Sydney to the mountains of Oruzgan province, Afghanistan.

The 27-year-old father of two was proud of serving his country, his wife Cassandra said yesterday, after he became the fifth Australian soldier to be killed in Afghanistan. Four other Australian soldiers were wounded in the same battle with Taliban fighters, and the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, warned the nation to expect a "dangerous and bloody" season of fighting in the months ahead.

Mrs Marks said: "Jason was a devoted father to our two beautiful children and a loving husband to me.

"All Jason ever wanted to do was join the army. He was the type of man who knew what he wanted. Even from the age of 12, all Jason ever wanted to be was a soldier. Becoming a commando was a dream of Jason's. He was proud of who he was and proud of what he did."

Slipping Past The Last Rites

*




The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
George Bernard Shaw

'Oh Jesus,' Sollis said, and I guess she'd seen what I'd just seen; that the flasks contained human organs, floating in a green chemical solution, wired up with fine nutrient lines and electrical cables. I was no anatomist, but I still recognised hearts, lungs, kidneys, snakelike coils of intestine. And there were things anyone would have recognised: things like eyeballs, dozens of them, growing in a single vat, swaying on the long stalks of optic nerves like some weird species of all-seeing anemone; things like hands, or entire limbs, or genitals, or the skin and muscle masks of eyeless faces..."
Alastair Reynolds. The Nightingale.




As if we couldn't see properly; as if the frustration was everything and nothing we stood for, nothing we understood as being important, mattered anymore. In his soul he knew. The routine, he was sure now, was exactly the same as he had lived through before. Except this time, they were offering a way out. He could feel it, see it: visions of a simple, rustic, rather run down village, almost medieval it was so primitive. The woman he was so fascinated by had curled her feet up under her in the arm chairs. Outside, as always, was the expanse of green, flat, bowling green lawn; then the perimeter of pine trees. Then nothing.

They're offering us a way out, she said quietly, mirroring his own thoughts.
He nodded. I know, although I'm not sure how I know.
You're not coming back as easily this time, they're worried, she said.
How do you know?
I can hear them, she said, tapping the side of her head. They might have done their best to scramble everything in here, but I can still hear them.
Terrifying, he said, and shivered inappropriately. None of his reactions were as they should be today. Nothing made the slightest sense to him, nothing connected.

They couldn't have been a more difficult, more obnoxious pack of bastards.

We could be happy together, she said, curling her fingers inside his. We were once, very happy.
What happened? he asked.
The implants came, and then we were all programmed to be better human beings. It wasn't supposed to happen, but it did. We're the resistants, she said, Their potions don't work on us very well, the machines, the rewriting. They weren't supposed to be able to take us over. The intelligences weren't supposed to take on a life of their own; but they did. When there were millions on line, they had enough to feed on. We didn't just lose our individuality, we lost everything.
How do you know all this?
He wondered for a moment about a woman called Karen.
I wrote it all down; I hid the pieces of paper, I stored information in places not even they would think of to look.
How?
It's easy to fool them; you just have to think of several things at once and the insurrection gets confused. They don't know whether you're being disobedient or not.
He stared at her in amazement, then went back to watching the sunlight sneaking slowly across the carpet towards them. Watching the carpet change colour through the morning was about as intellectual as he got today.
How do you know all this? he asked, only realising after he had said it that he'd already asked the same question.
There is a creeping blankness across everything, she said, clearly trying to confuse the monitors by jumbling her own thoughts.
They will let us out, to a farm, where there's others like us, where the implants haven't worked.
What's stopping us, he asked. This was not a day for courage, bravado or even foolhardiness.
The same dark cloud shook them apart. Nothing was connected.
You can't change anything from the outside, she whispered now, drawing him closer. You can only change things from the inside. We have to go back in.
That's ridiculous, he said. Look at me. There's almost nothing left. I can't do it one more time, I simply can't.
He could feel his eyes wet from tears he didn't understand; but he repeated the statement: I can't do it anymore.
She looked at him, held his hand, concerned.
Let's see how you are tomorrow, she said quietly, patting him on the hand, and then disentangling herself from the lounge chair and moving away, leaving him to the scattered emptiness of his own random thoughts.
There used to be a home, he thought, a place where he could hide and feel secure. A place where his kids, now university students, would come to visit. Where a dog used to yap in the backyard. Where.... He started crying again, he had no idea why.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article3828536.ece

President Karzai narrowly escaped with his life yesterday after Taleban gunmen attacked an Independence Day ceremony in Kabul, sending ambassadors and generals diving for cover, and dealing a fresh blow to Afghanistan's fragile security.

Three people, including an Afghan MP and a child, were killed and eleven injured in the attack, when a group of gunmen opened fire on a military parade marking the sixteenth anniversary of the fall of the Soviet-backed communist Government in Kabul.

Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British Ambassador to Kabul, described scenes of pandemonium as bullets flew, a rocket exploded and dignitaries and soldiers in ceremonial dress dived for cover or ran for their lives. “I was at the parade in the front row with the American Ambassador and a few feet away from General McNeill, the Nato commander,” he told The Times.

“We were about 15 rounds into the gun salute and Karzai was on the viewing stand when I saw to the left puffs of smoke and then the crackle of small-arms fire. Then the presidential ceremonial guard, who were unarmed, got to the ground to take cover. Then I heard another loud explosion in the centre of the parade ground.

“Captain Jim Develley, my Royal Military Police guard, then frog-marched me out. The American Ambassador was doing the same. It was chaos, like a rugby scrum. We came across the American Ambassador's car first. We were bundled in and drove away,” he said.

The attackers fired Kalashnikov rifles and launched at least one rocket before they were overwhelmed by security forces.


http://news.smh.com.au/plans-under-way-for-atsic-replacement/20080428-28xj.html

The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission has hired Aboriginal academic Mick Dodson to help create a model for a new peak body to replace ATSIC.

The Howard government abolished the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission four years ago amid claims it was ineffective and corrupt.

The Rudd government has said it will not re-establish ATSIC but will create a new body with elected members, but has provided no timetable for the creation of the body.

The Age newspaper on Monday reported that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Tom Calma has commissioned research independently from the government to devise the new body's operation.

Researchers at the Australian National University's National Centre for Indigenous Studies, headed by Professor Dodson, are devising models for a body with possible legislative powers and examining how major indigenous bodies overseas work, The Age said.

Options will be presented to Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin by the end of May, the report said.

You Have Not Removed The Moon

*




"Aereial walkways had been strung from one side of the street to the other, with stairs and ladders snaking their way through the dark fissures between the buildings. Now and then a wheeler sped through the water, sending a filthy brown wave in its wake. Very rarely, a sleek, claw-like volantor slid overhead. But volantors were off-world tech and not many people on Sky's Edge could afford that kind of thing any more. It didn't look right to me, but all the evidence said that this had to be the place."
Alastair Reynolds, Nightingale.




If the cast was wrong, if planets sheared apart, if dull drives in nonthreatening country were not enough, as if these things had an answer. He was crystallised into fear. Surely no one could survive being re-written so many times. He didn't know who to ask for advice. In reality there was no one. The planets were fearsome in their size, and the collisions, the groaning yaws as things fell apart, all of it left him startled as a rabbit; munching grass on a frozen clearing, eyes everywhere.

He kept looking for the grey eyed woman he had spoken to in the next pod, only two days ago now. It seemed forever. Once there were shafts back to a former humanity, cosy scenes he could recall or ponder. Most of them were gone now, or if not he had fully lost touch. He was proud of his achievements; or had been. He had gone to university; he remembered even now. But the friends he had made there, the things that had happened there, for all of them it was like looking through very thick glass; all the images distorted, a distant context to everything.

Once he had thought there would be justice in time; that as the writer of history he would get to tell the tale. In this way many injustices, personal and social, would be rectified. That house in Gladesville. You remind me of the worst time of my life. Please don't come around again. Kids crawling amongst the chaos. None of this exists anymore, none of it, he thought. Who am I to argue that things aren't better. He looked up the poverty indicators for the last 20 years. There was no argument. Things were definitely better.

Which couldn't explain his harking back to a different time; when they laughed in the sun and everything was shockingly vivid; when the party barely ever stopped. He couldn't be propelled into anything. So what if he had been rewritten nine times. What did that matter; when no one he had ever known seemed to exist anymore. What, that corny old phrase, was there to lose? They came for him nonetheless. The first time was something of a false alarm; he was taken back to the medical centre, prodded around. He overheard them thinking: ten times, is it possible to be rewritten ten times? We've never been this far before. We've never found any one this resistant.

The same thing happened as happened before. He woke up in hospital with complete amnesia. There was glass and steel everywhere. The nurses always seemed to be somewhere else, just out of sight. Slowly the slabs of amnesia began to lift, and he began to remember his previous visit, but none before. Parts of his old life, his office life, drifted in and out. And something else, too, manufactured memories, he couldn't be sure, of an older life, where he always seemed to be in the sun; a laughing glint in the delightful company of someone he fancied utterly.

Although he couldn't be sure, he knew, even more baffled than before, there was something different about this hospitalisation. He overheard the staff talking in low mordant tones, a mix of genders, a doctor, changing nurses. He couldn't be sure but he thought he heard them say "rewritten ten times" as if this was a matter of concern. He could see a building burning, and didn't know where it fitted in. He could see the hospital building in the centre of a large clearing, surrounded by pine forest. None of it linked. Or synced.

It was, he realised, perhaps more quickly than before, a story he had lived through before. Eventually after weeks, if not months, he found himself back in the recovery room with other patients. They sat collapsed in armchairs, one flew over the cuckoo nest arm chairs he thought, for no reason. Some were watching screens, most were just sitting, watching the floor. He thought he recognised a woman with big grey eyes but couldn't be sure. He kept staring at her and eventually she looked back, startled by his gaze. She smiled and moved a hand towards him. "They did it again," she whispered; and he held her. He had no idea what to say.

Their affection appeared to go unnoticed, who could tell in this place, and eventually they sat down near each other, just to be near each other. They had no idea what anything meant. It was still early days. "We knew each other," she said. "I think so," he murmured into her hair. Their hands clutched together.
"I don't know what we've done," she said.
"Neither do I."
"Why target us?"
He shrugged ruthfully. "Resistant, I think, that's all I can think of; I don't know what it means."

It means to be careful, it means to stop getting your brain wiped, it meant they were either going to be farmed out to a rural community for the brain dead, where it wouldn't matter they had been wiped so often their heads were nothing but confused sleights. Or they could be returned to the office for another try.

When he looked up he caught a nurse watching him. She looked away, and then looked back. He returned her gaze. For a minute he thought she wanted to help. But when she came near them she was all business, talking about medications and how they would have to be back in their rooms by six. He was sadly relieved; and he cuoldn't make a single piece of emotional sense. There were other ways out. The village, the sunshine, the green grass, the place where the dead heads went. He was relieved, saddened; and burnt out, literally. They led him back to his room without any problems.




THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2007/s2227907.htm

MICHAEL TROY: While the ANZAC legend was born in Gallipoli, many more died in the battlefields of France.

RICHARD TRAVERS, HISTORIAN: The campaign at Gallipoli lasted about eight months, but after the diggers came to the Western Front in 1916, they really found that they had more casualties than they had at Gallipoli after two or three months, so that it was a devastating introduction to a totally different form of warfare, much more intense, much more artillery, on a much bigger scale. The British called it "scientific warfare".

MICHAEL TROY: In 1916, these determined-looking volunteers left Australia on the troop ship Ajana. Few could have been aware of the horrendous conditions that lay ahead on the European battlefields. Early German advances had been halted in Belgium and France and a long war of attrition had begun.

The opposing armies faced each other from their trenches for 800km along the Western Front, which ran from the English Channel to the Swiss border. The small town of Fromelles would be the Australians' first big challenge. For the new troops under British command, the nightmare was about to begin. In July 1916, the Australian Fifth Division marched under to battle confidently. Within a day, they'd suffered devastating losses with 5,533 casualties, including 2,000 killed.

RICHARD TRAVERS: The troops were not experienced, they were thrown in without adequate preparation. The result was a disaster.


http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/the-early-word-billification/

The Early Word: Billification?

By Ariel Alexovich

Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton are each making two campaign stops in Indiana today, but that’s a cakewalk compared to what Bill Clinton’s got on his agenda — six rallies in Oregon.

But the grueling schedule is exactly how the former president wants it. The Wall Street Journal has a front-page story about his increasingly influential role — some insiders call it a “Billification” — in his wife’s campaign.

The former president says he’s in uncharted territory. “Being the spouse is more difficult than when I was the candidate,” he says in a brief interview. “When you’re running, you’re out there driving every day. But when you’re the spouse, you feel more protective. It’s much harder.”

Mr. Clinton has placed several of his own aides at headquarters, including his former lawyer and a bevy of strategists. Known as a bad loser, Mr. Clinton privately buttresses his wife’s drive to push on, telling her, according to aides: “We’re not quitters.”

The Politico, however, suggests that Chelsea Clinton may be Mrs. Clinton’s best surrogate — or at least better than her dad.

The former president has stumbled badly at times, veering wildly off message, picking fights with reporters and making ill-considered comments that have caused his wife’s campaign to relegate him to out-of-the-way locales. The once-and-maybe-future first daughter, on the other hand, has loosened up and eased into her role as a surrogate, hitting her stride just when her mother needed it most.

Of all the Clinton surrogates on the campaign trail, she is proving to be among the most steady — unburdened by the past, not prone to controversy and, in more ways than one, better suited to this YouTubed campaign than her father is.

http://voanews.com/english/2008-04-26-voa6.cfm

Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, says he welcomes China's offer to hold talks with his envoys, but only if the talks are serious.

The exiled Buddhist leader was questioned about China's recent statement in New Delhi Saturday. He said he welcomed the prospect of discussions about problems in Tibet.

It would be the first such meeting since violent protests in Tibet last month. China said Friday that its officials have agreed to meet with the Dalai Lama's representatives.

Also Friday, Tibetan exile prime minister Samdhong Rinpoche said the Tibetan government-in-exile maintained contacts with China throughout the protests. But he said formal resumption of talks require the situation in Tibetan areas of China to return to normal.

U.S. and European leaders welcomed the announcement of China's willingness to meet a private representative of the Tibetan spiritual leader.

The Chinese government has not released details on the expected meeting. A report by China's state-run Xinhua news agency says officials agreed to the meeting in response to requests from the Dalai Lama.
two

Stripped Of Ancestral Meaning

*



Mural, Redfern, Sydney.

"Back in my room I couldn't sleep. The feel of Crace's fingers on my neck and on my legs, working their way up my thighs, continued to burn into me. The fear of what he might do next unsettled me and a thousand elaborate, equally disturbing, scenarios ran through my mind. I realised I couldn't continue as I was..."
Andrew Wilson, The Lying Tongue.


Mural, Redfern, Sydney.



The tendrils of absence, he could almost have described it, the connections winking out one by one, the visual and physical vibrancy that had shimmered through him at every turn, which had transformed the most routine of landscapes into profoundly inspiring scenes, all of this was a wreckage. He didn't know why the muffled disconnect had caught up with him so quickly. He felt like he was being unplugged, and not just one wire at a time, whole scale circuits were being deliberately removed.

He didn't know how to take the circumstance that had now become his own. He wasn't sure what had happened. Long ago he could remember friends, family, passionate political groupings. He could remember the fervent illumination of belief. He could feel the necessity of faith. Long ago, decades ago, his fingers picking across the keyboards, he had written about the encroaching sterility of modern life, as if all the modern toys somehow stripped their lives of more ancestral meaning. He was flabbergasted at how rapidly poetic interpretations of sterility had turned simply to senility.

The nights were long, and he felt profoundly disconnected; the sizzling of electrical
wires in the early hours, quiet streets, sleeping houses. He monitored the contemporary debate but none of it connected to anything he had originally thought, or believed. The world will never be the same again, he heard, accompanied by the picture of a group of university students in earnest discussion. The future will bear no relationship to the past. We won't even be able to recognise what is going on.

Friends nodded in agreement; as if just by raising the topic they had been caught up in the grand march of human progress. Why can't I access the core? he asked, as if he was typing the question in to a computer search program. Why can't I see where the centre lies?

Breakfast was normal. Karen was as solicitous as ever. He realised he didn't know where she worked, how she spent her days. She just happened to be there when he needed her, like any traditional animal male, fractious, gliding across the surface, brutally demanding, physical wants.

You're not ready, came one response, followed by another, "there is no core". Once again he calculated precisely the right second to start his car, exactly the right time to pull out into the traffic so that he hit every green light on the way to work. Profoundly disconnected, he had lost any sense of why he kept going through the same routine. He felt impossibly ancient, although he was only in his 50s. These are the years when it all falls apart, a woman in her 60s had told him only a few days ago, when he had been extracting information from her for the data base. Is it happening to you already? she had asked.

He nodded evasively, looking across a chasm of years to an even worse future.

Where did it all go, he had asked her, guessing they would both understand.

The world has changed completely, she said. Everything we feared would happen did happen. We're one of the last who even know there was a different way of thinking.

That can't be true. There must be millions. Millions.
She shook her head. They've died out, or been rewritten. Even now, I bet they can tell we're thinking things we shouldn't.

The next daya they came for him at his desk, took him to the medical centre within an isolated section of the building, prodded, murmured, blacked him out. He came back to consciousness at his desk several hours later, profoundly disorientated. He had rung the woman who had expressed such original views. She did not answer. The number wasn't even connected. Her name no longer showed up on any records.

And thinking about all this, even more frightened of the encroaching blankness than before, he showed up for work, tring to pretend he was functioning as normal, that his head wasn't skiting from one place to the other. The young woman he had spoken to the previous evening, with those large grey eyes, hiding a flush of tears as she lent over the computer terminal, the woman he had determined he would speak to again today, was not at her spot. A different woman was sitting at the terminal, acting as if she had always been there. A profound dislocation, the phrase dodged through his soup of a consciousness, a profound dislocatioin. He couldn't even think, at this point, what it might mean. A deep, far reaching blankness; the heart of darkness, a muffled despair; why was there no voice which gave him a distinct answer; the infinite grey of over lit offices, a shadowless world. There was nowhere to move. He went about his normal functions, waiting for the death knell. He was sure they were about to try and rewrite him, yet again.



Mural, Redfern, Sydney.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/crowd-swells-for-a-shivering-dawn/2008/04/25/1208743249006.html

NINETY-THREE years after bright-eyed young Australians and New Zealanders splashed ashore beneath the pitiless cliffs of the Gallipoli Peninsula and received a wake-up from hell, dawn at Anzac Cove is more populated than ever.

In pursuit of yet another dawn and its myths and memories yesterday, more than 10,000 Australians and Kiwis, accompanied by several hundred Turks - the biggest crowd for years - endured a night so cold the business of breathing became painful.

Those who crowded beneath a three-quarter moon were rewarded with the most sophisticated overnight arrangements yet seen at the Anzac memorial site; a light show transformed the cliffs and the distinctive formation known as the Sphinx into an unearthly work of art, while the Aegean Sea glowed in the dark.

Documentaries on the battles and tribulations that took the lives of 8709 Australians, 2721 New Zealanders and almost 87,000 Turks played on giant video screens, and the families of long-gone soldiers were interviewed on stage by Jennifer Byrne.

As dawn lightened the battlefields above, the Defence Minister, Joel Fitzgibbon, said the combatants of 1915 fought a brutal and ugly war that was remembered for the strategic mistakes of its leaders and the human cost of victories and defeats alike.

Whether they wore the uniform of Australia, New Zealand, England, France or the Ottoman Empire, "we stand in awe of their courage, commitment and sacrifices", Mr Fitzgibbon said. "They raised global consciousness of the Australian character and demeanour. Even during the darkest hours they brought larrikinism, irreverence and dry humour to one of the toughest places on earth."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/04/25/2227658.htm

A 65-year-old man's jaw was broken when he was attacked while walking to an Anzac Day dawn service at Lilydale in Melbourne's south-east this morning.

Ian Carr was planning to attend the service in honour of his father, who served in the RAAF in World War II.

As he walked to the service he was approached by two men in Clarke Street about 5:40am AEST.

They asked him for his mobile phone then struck him in the face.

Mr Carr was taken to the Maroondah Hospital for treatment and will undergo surgery for his broken jaw tonight.

He says he was shocked by the assault.

"[It was] pretty cowardly to do it to someone coming to a service like that, pretty cowardly," he said.

http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/2008-04-25-voa1.cfm

Hillary Clinton is still behind Barack Obama in the delegate count after the Pennsylvania primary on Tuesday. But her ten-point victory kept her supporters' hopes alive in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Attention is now directed to Indiana and North Carolina, where the next primaries will be held on May sixth. Senator Obama is expected to win North Carolina, but he faces a close race for Indiana voters.

In the race for donations, the Obama campaign had about forty million dollars at the end of March and no debt. The Clinton campaign had about nine million left to spend, and ten million of debt.

But her campaign said it raised more than ten million dollars in the twenty-four hours following her win in Pennsylvania. A spokesman said eighty percent of the donors were first-time givers to the campaign.

During appearances this week, Senator Clinton said more people have voted for her than Barack Obama. She included the votes from Michigan and Florida, giving her a lead of about one hundred thousand votes.

But Democratic Party officials are refusing to recognize the Michigan and Florida votes. Barack Obama was not even on the Michigan ballot. The two states violated party rules when they held their primaries too early. Without Michigan and Florida, Senator Obama leads in the popular vote by about half a million



Mural, Redfern, Sydney.

Ask No Questions

*



Murals, Redfern.

"Before confronting him, I wanted to try and lull him into a sense of security and so I did everything according to his instructions, careful not to upset or antagonise him in any way. I ignored his occasional bursts of rudeness, his impolite dismissal of questions and enquiries, and endured his pathetic attempts to flirt with me. When
he 'accidentally' brushed against me as he tried to squeeze by me in a corner of the kitchen, I closed my eyes and imagined that I was somewhere else... I would catch him looking in my direction, a dream-like expression on his face, living out some fragment of memory from the past."
Andrew Wilson, The Lying Tongue.


These were uncertain times, and he couldn't get the image out of his mind as made the 20 minute drive home; travelling at exactly the right speed to hit every green light. But the things he really wanted to know, they weren't there anymore. We were profoundly grateful, and absolutely remiss. He saw thousands of lives and envied them all, an abstraction of other loves. Their warmth, their all-of-a-piece good looks, carried everything with them. He was simply astonished. He couldn't believe the domestic scene he was about to walk in on.

The woman, Karen, had resisted all his remonstrations that he could not remember their allegedly long and apparently, until recently, rather happy life, mostly together. He had to admit she had the house organised. Dinner was cooking; and smelled good. She asked him, solicitously, how his day had been. That was it, they didn't make 'em like that anymore. But the more he remonstrated with her to stop acting, the more solicitous she became. He wanted to yell; but he liked having her around, and it wasn't fair. If the network had provided her because they knew his needs, then in the end he couldn't argue.

He woke up in the night, drowning in contradictory evidence, saw the woman at work, heard the words it's not right it's not right, and she settled him back down almost as if he had been a child. Cloying and familiar, the twin anxieties. He could see what he wanted to see in the surrounding district. There were a few knots of people on street corners, commuters walking to their trains. They still had trains, he thought. They had been there in his childhood and for some reason he thought by now they would be glistening things riding on a blanket of air; with cars in the air. Ah la Jetsons. It hadn't happened.



Murals, Redfern.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Google search on 2020 Summit:

Distant goals out of focus
The Australian, Australia - 16 hours ago
THE 2020 Summit is over, the marker pens and butcher's paper have been put aside, a touch of post-summit disappointment has set in here and there. ...
Touch of indigestion after 2020 excesses The Age
Rudd picks brains for a creative Australia guardian.co.uk
Australia 2020 Summit Ignores MWC News
Dandenong Star - The Canberra Times
all 103 news articles »
Summiteers treated to mix of showbiz and serious performance
ABC Online, Australia - 2 hours ago
By John Warhurst Around 1000 delegates gather in the Great Hall of Parliament House in Canberra for the start of the 2020 summit on April 19, 2008. ...
Here's what 2020 needed to be about The Age
Never mind the quantity, India shows, it is the quality of ideas ... The Age
all 4 news articles »
2020 Summit Rural Stream
Young Witness, Australia - 13 hours ago
Delegates from rural NSW and Australia took part in the weekend’s 2020 Summit, as part of a ‘Rural Stream’ considering the future direction of rural ...
2020 rural wishlist Rural
all 2 news articles »
Kevin, we need to talk about the kids
The Australian, Australia - 17 hours ago
The 2020 Summit interim statement acknowledges: "Family violence levels (while difficult to accurately quantify) impact on children." Indeed. ...
David Dahm, Cris Kerr: 2020 ideas 6minutes
all 2 news articles »
Forget a treaty, say Pearson, Yunupingu
NEWS.com.au, Australia - 14 hours ago
The lines of division between indigenous leaders over the constitutional question were drawn at the Prime Minister's 2020 Summit last weekend, ...
Reconciliation chief hits back The Australian
The gains must not be squandered Brisbane Times
all 11 news articles »
'Future summit' criticised
Independent Online, South Africa - 23 Apr 2008
The Australia 2020 Summit, tasked with presenting Rudd with "big ideas" for the future, recommended the nation work towards becoming a republic. ...
Australian business would welcome tax reform
Radio Australia, Australia - 23 Apr 2008
Australian business groups have welcomed comments by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd suggesting he will take up one of the ideas from last weekend's 2020 Summit ...
Down from the Summit Mercury
Tax: The 2020 vision The Age
Mr Me-too is back to talk tax The Australian
The Age - Radio Australia
all 27 news articles »

Brimbank Leader
Why did rural human rights fail to scale summit?
The Age, Australia - 22 Apr 2008
As the youth delegate, I shared our vision to the 100 members of the rural Australia topic at the 2020 Summit on the weekend. Remote, rural and regional ...
Off to Canberra for 2020 Summit August Margaret River Mail
Banyule students pitch bright ideas Diamond Valley Leader
Ideas flow in Brimbank for future of nation Brimbank Leader
all 4 news articles »
2020 Summit a 'Festival of Kevin'
NEWS.com.au, Australia - 21 Apr 2008
By Malcolm Farr SENIOR Liberals yesterday ended their truce over the 2020 Summit by calling it a stage-managed "Festival of Kevin". ...
The 2020 Summit - will Rudd’s children forgive him?
On Line opinion, Australia - 22 Apr 2008
By Michael Lardelli - posted Wednesday, 23 April 2008 Kevin Rudd’s 2020 Summit is over. The tone of the affair that outsiders (most of us) could discern was ...
Back from the summit Blue Mountains Gazette
Sue's idea gains support Manning River Times
Climate change an issue for Banyule youth Heidelberg Leader
Inverell Times - Scopical
all 10 news articles »


Murals, Redfern.

These Cruel Things

*



Mural, Redfern, Sydney.


"Out of a distant past came a fragment of poetry I hadn't known I remembered and I hung on to it and recited it in my head, over and over. 'Build me a willow cabin at thy gate, and call upon my soul within the house..' I tried to concentrate on the syllables. 'Let the babbling gossips of the air cry out.' Inky fingers and the sun shining in thick, dissolving shafts through the windows. Surely they must come now. Surely. I walked back and forth, back and forth. The cold burned in my eyes, the horizon wavered and warped in the winter light. The sun was dipping towards the sea on its shallow arc. The waters rose and swelled as I watched, beads of spray riffling across the grey surface."
Nicci French, Losing You.

It wasn't at all possible, these cruel things that kept coming at him freak fold, shrieking like sirens, odd images of comfort not holding for a second. You can be one of us, you are one of us, just accept that things are better this way, the unprompted voice kept telling him. And all the time, all the time, his doubt was manifest, in the dark rumbling gums, the nights full of sounds, in the fires, gazing into the fires, in happy moments, water skiing by a lake as children. How could this possibly be true? How could you have possibly done that? Accepted them, enfolded them, let them run your life?

These were the ultimate lies, his own head kept telling him, thoughts that he immediately attempted to conceal. So he stared at the building, day after day, using his lunch hour, which he never normally took, to walk past the building from every angle possible. To keep wondering why he thought there had been another life. They must know he kept coming here. They clearly didn't care. They must think it was part of his healing. But every time he tried to access files, memories, records of any kind about the man now rotting in jail, he came up with the words: closed and confidential, amnesia granted, refer hospital guidelines.

That was it. No matter how much his pondering, that was it. He kept moving through the darkness trying to find a motive. All he found were strange memories of parties, intense conversations, friendships which had lasted only a night, callow youth, a fragile hold on life, smoking, lots of smoking, before tobacco had been banned altogether, amazing that it had ever been legal at all, craftsmen who wouldn't be able to smile as they carved out sacred images, fun scenes of houses full of people, clearly before the implants, there was too much laughter, and a soft knowing, we were blessed, we were the chosen, destiny had been placed on us.

Sheer nonsense, he heard himself muttered, as he turned, a week after he had begun the habit of visiting each day, away from the building, which still remained roped off by crime scene tape, and was otherwise entirely silent. No one came or went, no tradesmen, no forensic experts, no police, no security bureaucrats, nobody. There were don't with me for one second type guards around the building's perimeter, and that was that. He didn't try to speak to any of them; and not once did they ever acknowledge his presence. The only thing that ever changed was the damaged sign: The Centre for Social Policy. One day he arrived to discover it had been removed altogether.

There wasn't any sane way he could battle through the uncertainties that gathered in increasing number; every day a new level of doubt. He tried to remember his childhood, as a way of ensuring himself that he was a real person. Even that venture brought new alarm. He could remember running along the cliffs at Bungan with school friends, twins, the clear salt wind and the southern sun and the bright wheel of seagulls over sandstone cliffs, and that was it. He couldn't remember their names. He couldn't remember their faces. He couldn't remember the year they had been together at school, when they had run and jumped down the sand dunes, and showed each other their bits and soon afterwards told their parents, getting them all promptly into trouble.

It was then, walking away from the building yet again, that he became completely alarmed. It came slamming home to him in one instant, sallow realisation. He must be manufactured. He couldn't recall the faces of his parents. Desperately he tried to connect to their files, to research back from names on his birth certificate. None of it worked. He slipped through the booming chaos of China Town and back to the building in which he worked. He was surrounded by state of the art white light; computer screens, checked carpet. He slid into his seat, trying to act normal. Resumed shuffling the same bit of paper he had been shuffling when he left.

Do you remember your parents, when you were young? he asked a young woman sitting near him.
She looked up at him curiously.
Not really, she said. And then returned to her computer, as if it was not an unusual question.
Don't you think it would be normal to remember your parents? They must have been the most important people in the world to us.
She looked up again. Tanya he thought her name was; they came, they went, everybody was blazed out in the fierce office light, as if their shadows were entirely burnt away. She looked at him with her large, grey, attractive he noticed for the first time, eyes. Why are you asking these questions?
I don't know, he said. I just wonder why I can't remember anything about myself, but at the same time I know all this other stuff. I can tell you all of the names of the Japanese trade delegation to Canberra in May, 1972, but I can't remember the name of my parents.
It's the way things are meant to be, she said. You're not really meant to ask.
It's the implants, isn't it? He asked. It was the first time he had ever mentioned them to another person.
She nodded, then looked around to see if anyone was watching, and nodded again.
We shouldn't be talking like this, she said.
Why not? he asked.
You know why not, she said. Or at least you should know why not. Maybe that's why they keep sending you off to hospital.
How many times has it been? he asked.
Nine, she said. I've counted. I wish they wouldn't treat you the way they do. All you have to do is give in; or at least let them think you've given in. That's all it takes to live a comfortable life. They even let you have some of your memories back.
He looked at her in a kind of revelation horror; and had no idea what to say. He turned back to her computer. He could have sworn she was crying as she bent back over her keyboard.



Mural, Redfern, Sydney.

"Some were large, and on their decks were dogs chained to the sides, flowers in pots, chairs and tables, even ironic garden gnomes. They were made of iron and wood, painted in primary colours, and had gangplanks leading to the broad wooden jetties...on one of the barges, the couple had made pots to sell in the cafe; another made nut roasts, bean salads, carrot cakes.

"That was then. It had been many years since the boats had been lived in. The hippies and artists had moved away, the paint had peeled from the rusting, blistered hulls; the gangways had collapsed as the boats tipped from their moorings towards the green-grey mud on which they stood. Years of rain and wind had blasted through the cabins. Vandals had done the rest, thrown stones through the windows, ripped off steering whels and torn out seats, beds and tables, painted graffiti on the sodden decks, tipped rubbish into the holds."
Nicci French, Losing You.


Mural, Redfern, Sydney.

Slinking Through The Side Lights

*




We are at war with an enemy who has vowed to cut the heads off our children, who mounts cowardly attacks against the defenseless, who has infiltrated our culture -- and yet some of the presidential candidates refuse to call that enemy by name!Our enemy is busy training children as young as 7 to handle automatic weapons while in this nation we suspend from school 7-year-olds who so much as draw a picture of a gun.

This enemy lacks the courage to put uniformed soldiers on the field of battle but chooses instead to use civilians to blow up other civilians. Furthermore, our national media, led by the Associated Press, call these people "insurgents" or "militants" instead of labeling them the ist cowards that they are.

We are at war with an ideology, not a country. This ideology personifies evil, and yet we have national "leaders" who tell us that we must be inclusive in our institutions and avoid offending our enemies at all cost.

The threat we face is not from the free exchange of ideas, even ideas that lack logic or wisdom. The threat comes from "political correctness." The threat comes from the suppression of ideas, the managing of the news and the manipulation of facts to suit a particular agenda...

If we are to survive as a free nation, a country where people believe in and abide by the uniqueness of an individual with inalienable rights, we must abandon the flirtation with political correctness and return to the concept of "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the your right to say it".

We must have the courage to say that merely changing the name of a wrong does not make it a right.
John Lane www.charlotte.com

There wasn't any way he could overcome the breach. He didn't know what was waiting around the corner. He was crystal clear in his call: this was defeat. The dry gums gusted in the cold wind. The smoke from the fire blew in constantly different directions, forcing him to move. It was impossible to find comfort: in his own life, in the lives of others. There was defeat: but he was not beaten. There was corruption: but he was not secretive.

These things were all that he could dream up; shafts of fear in an uncertain world. He knew he was trapped by his own past, but one step after the other was all that he could take. He was crystal clear on one thing: this was not the end. They couldn't have seriously meant what they said. He wasn't warmed by the memory of old friends. He couldn't think it was fine - remember when we were kids? He couldn't stop the shreaking, the voices of discontent. He couldn't stop taking the blame.

Everything was coming to an end. Voices groped up out of the bushes like the sound of frogs, except these were words whisked away in the wind. He couldn't understand why he was so frightened. Today was no worse than yesterday; it had been cold, windy and uncomfortable yesterday, just as it was today. He wanted to summon up a strength of purpose; to be blessed once more with a sense of direction, of outrage, of determination to uncover, even the determination to represent the poor and unrepresented.

But they were no longer there, the mystery working class who had propelled him to keep on going, thinking he was doing more good than harm, that exposing injustice to the light would be all it would take to reform the world, grant him hero status, make his life worthwhile. In that sweeping intensity, the fading van Gogh posters on the wall, the compulsory reading, Wilson's The Outsider, Tolkein's Lord of the Rings, Tubular Bells. These were moments so long ago, so lost in the twisting changes of the culture, so out of date in a world of the culutre wars; he could not at first even justify their presentation.

Perhaps it was, as some commentators had noted, just the pentup frustration of 11 years of the Howard government that brought out all the well paid Phds into such a triumphant talk fest at the 2020 Summit; perhaps it really was like Anthony Burgess's 100 best novels of the English language, you had to start somewhere, you had to start the debate. But even here, he knew reality had become a distant phenomenon. It was a brutal truth and the slavery of labour had destroyed his own soul. He had lost and there was only one route out: escape.

If everything had been warmer at heart, if he hadn't been so eroded by his own dark dreams and despairing dysfunction, if he had been able to hold his head up and look people in the eye and say: yes, my brain works like it's never worked before. I can see the details of your marriage license. I know you were married not twice but thrice. The hunt for understanding would have been much easier if it hadn't been for his own prediliction for mystery novels, which he kept downloading and reading at astonishing speed.

With everything going wrong, well not really, just not everything going right, he didn't know where to begin; where to start, where the big man lay; if indeed there was even one single centre of control. Mystified, he took lunch off, leaving his unsatisfying task of regurgitating press releases and putting in peremptory calls to people who were as disinterested as he was, and walked up past the building which he knew contained, if not the solution, then at least a clue.

He knew the cameras were watching him as he watched the building. He knew, now, he had once been a critic of the Social Policy Centre, before the implants had changed everything, had made him doubt everything, had made him think, in fact, in recent times, that the world was better this way; the way it had become; without conflicts, riots, disagreements, without surly youth in left wing university groups, each out doing the other until they were all Trotskyists. And certainly without remote little huddles of disenfranchised men, pining ofr a world where they had been fathers, lovers, providers, protectors, pining for a time when their lives had meant more as individuals and the net as they now knew it had not even begun to form. It was a long, uncertain way off. He watched the cameras and they watched him.




THE BIGGER STORY:

http://news.theage.com.au/dissension-in-the-ranks-at-2020-summit/20080420-27bu.html

Dissension has emerged in the ranks at the 2020 summit with some delegates angry their ideas are falling on deaf ears, or not being heard at all.

James Houston, who disrupted the opening session of the second day of the summit in the Great Hall of Parliament House, later turned up to the discussion session on communities.

Mr Houston, a delegate on the future directions for rural industries and communities stream, again voiced his frustration, saying his ideas were not being heard...

Another delegate, Freda Briggs, from the University of South Australia, also voiced her frustrations, saying there had not been enough consideration given to children and the challenges they face.

Many delegates at Sunday's communities session appeared frustrated with the lack of progress on reaching a consensus on what ideas they would put forward.

Fellow co-chair of the communities stream Tanya Plibersek said it was always going to be a challenge, but she was adamant progress was being made.

"We've got a room full of intelligent, committed people, who are passionate about the area that they work in, or the community that they represent," Ms Plibersek said.

"It was always going to be a challenge to bring 100 people together in a room and crystallise the priorities without losing the detail."

However, she said, there had been much progress on finding the common ground.

"Our challenge today is to be able to express that common ground but to also pull out the moon landing type ideas, the things that really stand out of the conversations that we've had."

http://livenews.com.au/Articles/2008/04/20/Tim_Costello_a_better_economic_manager

Tim Costello takes a playful swipe at his brother, former Australian Treasurer Peter Costello, when presenting the Strengthening communities, supporting families and social inclusion stream ideas to the 2020 Summit.

As the 2020 summit wraps up at Parliament House in Canberra, all the 'stream' leaders are called to front the 1000 odd delegates and present their findings.

World Vision's Tim Costello said the meetings were highly productive and his stream came up with a number of cost-effective solutions centring on community hubs.

"We came up with so many cost-neutral ideas you could actually abolish treasury.”

"We could run it, although then, a Costello running treasury may not be a good idea," he joked.

Stuff One

*




The journey starts when the bureau phone rings and it’s one of our stringers in Baghdad telling us that a car bomb has exploded or an official has been assassinated. I worry more when I hear about explosions because they cause more casualties and most of them are innocent civilians or security forces who are trying to earn a living or do their jobs. I can’t understand who is fighting whom; all that I know is that it is the people who pay the price all the time.
Tracking the traces of death in every spot of Baghdad has become a hobby, as if I were a detective. It awakens my curiosity, but never puts an end to my questions every time I attend one of these scenes — who are the criminals and what are their real intentions? It shakes my faith and I wonder what we have done in our lives to deserve all these attacks.
Mudhafer al-Husaini is an Iraqi employee of The New York Times.




The call was so splintered, so far off, so utterly melancholy in its resonance, that for once he was caught still. Surely this couldn't be the sum total of everything, where all those adventures, all that firm belief, had led. He knew he had been betrayed long ago. But somehow, some sort of faith had lingered on, that it wasn't all in vain, that there were other reasons for being, that all those experiences, brief catastrophes, adjourned crisis and splintered moments of faith, that it had all meant something.

The currawong hopped across the brown grass looking for worms. It had been dry, after all the talk of the drought being over, and the briefest moisture as the clouds rolled over and past them was the subject of much speculation. He couldn't be assured that these scenes, these vistas of Australian landscape, would really provide resonance in a departed soul. Everything was grinding to a halt. The kids were growing and no longer needed him as they once had. He looked at other families now, their tight necessary circles, their closed forums, their instant purpose, and longed for a different time.

If it was all that he could make, if it was all the shape of gums against the sky, then his dream of dying a junky in Calcutta was just as cheap and pointless as everything else. Meanwhile the triumphalism of the left knows no bounds, with thunderous applause for the country's 1,000 greatest intellects, so-called. A strange exercise for its exclusivity, its instant elitism, substantially rorted to arrive at a profound call for Labor policy, meant it was treated with a division of hope and derision. Here, deep in the bush, miles from anywhere, the self-congratulatory applause seemed very distant indeed.

Here's a radical idea: treat everyone the same. Then what would happen? His sense of justice had been ill-founded. The more the victims the more harm the luvvies did. Their cries were constant. Walk a mile in my shoes. The carers cried out, our $1600 bonus, suddenly it had gone from being a bonus to an annual top up. The pensioners $500; now that equally had become an expectation, not a bonus. All these things cost trillions, well billions anyway; vast sums as the welfare budget ballooned ever larger. Once it had always been the government's fault; and he would play staunch advocate for whatever disadvantaged group; the homeless his own.

Now there was a cacophony of victimhood; as an exuberant government assured the Australian Council of Social Services that at last a government was in power receptive to their concerns. Receptive to their ever greater cries for more money, for more categories of victimhood, for defeat. The dispossessed had become so well serviced by government that there was nowhere to go for a bleating heart, not these days. Declare yourself a true victim and then get out of the way before you get trampled in the rush. Unfair? Try suggesting people should be encouraged to stand on their own two feet and see how far you get.

All the meanwhile thousands, nay tens of thousands of poor bastards laboured away in the city's sweat shops, their faces smudged with grease, their faces lined and tired by the long hours, the ever more difficult job of making ends meet keeping them going long hours in not one but often two or three jobs; sitting in countless traffic jams kilometres long; their despair never filtering up to the academic9c gloss, the so-called champions of the poor. Every one's rush had become unlivable, every caution a despair at unpaid bills, swiping a fringe of sweat from a dedicated face, where had it all gone wrong?

Can I get a card, I'm 18 and I'm pregnant, says the girl at the public library counter behind me. She's already pushing a pram. She's already got her career for life; her baby bonus and her parenting payment and everything else which will keep her occupied, a brood mare as many of the critics were cautiously saying. Is this the way we want to go? Well yes, once he would have said yes, what had the traditional family ever done for him? Sent him out on the road at a terrible young age and fought off every sense of normality that had ever come his way.

It couldn't be true, this complete deterioration. What he had fought so firmly against had completely disappeared. Once it was a crime to be gay, now it was de rigeur. Once a single mom had been a rarity, to be cossetted and protected, preserved, an opportunity to reach out, to be strong, protective, caring. He had done exactly that. Now the traditional family was out of fashion, as the useful fools busied themselves in massively complex bureaucracies, dishing out money those sweat stained souls had worked so hard to provide. It wasn't fair. He knew it wasn't fair. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to take the issue. The useful fools had won; and common decency was dead. The government owned everything; and voices outside the tent were nothing but a diminished cry; what happened, what happened...?...





Many times, I have to walk for yards to get to the scene because the road is blocked by the police or the army. The smell of death overwhelms you as you get there, the smell of gunpowder and grilled flesh. I try to act normally, like one of the residents who have gathered there to see what’s going on, before I start working as a journalist. I try to console people and start my job at the same time by getting detailed information. Some cooperate and complain, while some attack you as if you were one of the bombers.
It is normal to see see old men, women or adults gathering there, but it startles me when I see kids there, scrambling to see the dead people. They act happily, as if they were in a playground. “Death has become so normal for us,” a 13-year-old boy told me when he was helping to collect the scraps of flesh after one of the explosions that killed at least 50 people. Sometimes I even see people walking normally as if nothing had happened. Some of them continue eating lunch, and a few streets away, women continue shopping.
Collecting the corpses after the explosion is terrible because the collapsed buildings make the mission almost impossible, but people have gotten very used to that. I sometimes arrive early at the scene when the corpses are still there. I see an arm here or maybe a leg there and that’s how they are buried later on. The destruction is indescribable. It takes a long time to build something, but a few seconds to destroy it. Much worse for me than the destroyed buildings are the shattered psychologies, because those who die may rest, but what about their relatives? And what about those who are wounded or lose limbs knowing that we have miserable hospitals?
I spend about an hour or two at the explosion site. The people’s sorrows add to my own because at some point they believe I’m a savior, or at least the harbor where they can unload their afflictions. My journey sometimes continues to the hospital where the casualties are taken. There I see another tragedy. The relatives of victims start to arrive at the hospital. They have to go to the emergency room, and if their loved ones cannot be found there, they may be lying among the heaps of corpses. The relatives feel relief if they do not find victims there, believing that they are still alive. But in many cases, their bodies have either been taken to other hospitals, or have been so disfigured by the explosion that their relatives can’t recognize them.
Mudhafer al-Husaini is an Iraqi employee of The New York Times.

Forward One

*



Storm clouds pre-Katrina, anonymous photographer.

The speculative, Ponzi mania spread especially to Anglo-Saxon countries and to other developed countries in lesser degree. Australia took to "free" markets, "free" trade, free-floating currencies, deregulation, privatization, globalization, derivatives, hedge funds, private equity, wildcat mortgages and leverage-without-limit as a duck to water... Consumerism raged. Industry was gutted. Debts ballooned. The value of the currency fell at home and abroad. Despite low-cost imports, inflation flourished. In 2008, the Australian dollar can perhaps buy as much in real terms as five or 10 cents did in 1969... Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told us late in March that Australia's economic prospects remain "sound, strong and good". The Reserve Bank of Australia shares that view. Eerily, they echo US President Herbert Hoover in 1929 immediately before the stock market crash of that year.
The Black Death of financial collapse
By James Cumes


Storm clouds pre-Katrina, anonymous photographer.

How this had come to be he would never know. When he moved, it was as if each step was crunching on to a thin brittle veneer across the surface of the world, each step sending out thousands of fine lines. He was mortified, each step frozen, and at the same time comforted by routine thoughts. What he didn't understand was why they let him understand so much. Why was he allowed to see so much of the origins? Were they trying to convert him? Was the mission so accomplished it didn't matter who knew how they got there?

Any attempt to shield his thoughts failed, he could hear them louder than as if he had never tried to muffle them; and so, no doubt, could they. One morning, with nothing to distinguish it from every other morning, he woke up to a woman shaking him. Don't you remember me? Don't you remember me? she kept saying, urgently. No, he didn't remember her. What the hell was this woman doing in his house? He tried to sit up, and she lent over him, almost overpowering him, her bosom undeniably in his direct line of sight. Don't you remember me? and then, moving slightly, I've been so worried. Why didn't you call?

This time he did struggle to a sitting position. Who are you, he asked, feeling sweaty, worried that his breath stank, that every line on his already creased face was clearly visible. Vanity, age, cruelty, lust, he sat up and didn't know how it was that he didn't mind her being here. He didn't believe her, why weren't there pictures of her around the house, but she told the story of their marital problems, how she had gone away for a few weeks so they could think things out, how she hadn't heard from him once and didn't know what had gone wrong, that she wanted to come back, that, like him, she didn't want to live alone, that love took many forms.

He didn't believe her and he didn't care; those curves in his face was all it took for all reason to leave, and so it was that people returned to his life. He had felt the need and the universe, or more likely the network, had provided. His daughter, too, began visiting every weekend, laughing as she reminded him of events in their childhood. The amnesia was so total he just laughed along, letting her, with her enthusiastic, attractive young face, fill in all the gaps, colouring in the life that had been swept away with the coming of the implants.

He had almost always been salvaged from other fragments, happenings, sayings of the moment. Rust mixed with graffiti paint ran down into the gutter. Expensive apartment blocks loomed down increasingly fashionable inner-city streets. Glossy clothes took away any pretence of commonality; they were mixing with the elites and didn't even know it. He just couldn't work out where the network began and ended, why there was no boss, why there were no messianic elements, why he knew virtually anything he turned his mind to. While "they" seemed to conceal almost nothing from him.

The loss of a coherent government identity, a coherent national focus, the dissolving into a single identity, none of it made the slightest sense. Kids chattered as they played games on the library computer. Sweat took him over. He was compelled to make the most of the situation, but there were too many annoyances, grating collapses, discordant thoughts, too much pain and suffering in a chaotic world. The nation was overwhelmed, and like a living organism, the network moved to protect itself. He wasn't part of the mystery. He could stand outside, as he had always stood outside, and pray for observer status.

One day, trying to piece everything together, including the existence of a woman in his bed back at the house, her perfumes and her warmth infiltrating into every corner of the house, the times deeply backtracked, lost echoes, muffled halls, grasping at grey ghosts, sentient flashes in the murky grey, a life within the matrix, all of it he was trying to piece together. The same phraseology kept circling through what was left of his brain. He couldn't understand what had happened to him. White walls, nurses, lots of glass, a wide lawn, lowering pine trees, the crisp smell of escape.

He logged off from his work terminal and without explanation left the building, walked up to the old Social Policy Centre. At first he approached hesitantly, knowing that his moves were being watched, that all his moves were being watched. Then boldly, as if throwing off some invisible shackle, he strode boldly down the road and stood defiantly in front of the ruins. He needed to understand what had happened, even if they didn't want him to. There had been no attempt to repair the building, which surprised him. He had expected the veneer to right himself, the self-repairing organism that was the city to have acted quickly, to hide what ever there was to hide.

And what there was to hide; which no one seemed to admit any more, of which there was no sign on any of the media, on radio, television, newspapers, the multiple Internet formats, not one of them whispered the truth: that behind the facade there was enormous dissent. It was not just a gang of perennial outsiders grouping together; delighting in finding someone else to share their strange obsessions. That out there, somewhere on the network, were others just like him, filled with doubt, with suspicion, who knew that the received dogma was in fact nothing but manufactured rubbish.



Storm clouds pre-Katrina, anonymous photographer.


THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/is-rudds-vision-a-blairsnare/2008/04/17/1208025382072.html

Rudd's 2020 hindsight
Misha Schubert
April 18, 2008

IS IT a great policy rip-off?

Kevin Rudd appears to have nabbed his idea for the 2020 Summit from the former Blair government, which pledged four years ago to deliver universal access to one-stop centres offering child care, learning and health services by 2010.

Outlining the concept in a major speech on Wednesday night, the Prime Minister presented it as his own idea — winning wide acclaim across the community.

But the British government rolled out its first prototypes of such centres as far back as 1998 as part of its Sure Start program to foster social inclusion, and in 2004 pledged to expand them from disadvantaged areas into a universal scheme.

Similar centres are already operating in some parts of Victoria, South Australia, NSW and the Australian Capital Territory — and are soon to be rolled out in Queensland.

The varied models bring day care, preschool and maternal and child health services together under one roof.

In December 2004, in a ten-year strategy for child care and early learning, Britain vowed to expand its scheme for children expand its scheme for children under five, with 2500 centres by 2008 and 3500 by 2010.

It set a goal for "every family to have easy access to integrated services through Children's Centres in their local community, offering information, health, family support, child care and other services for parents and children."

Mr Rudd also appears to have lifted his universal preschool pledge from Britain.

The same UK Treasury strategy laid out "a goal of 20 hours a week of free high-quality care for 38 weeks for all three and four-year-olds with this pre-budget report announcing a first step of 15 hours a week for 38 weeks a year reaching all children by 2010".

In early 2007, Mr Rudd promised 15 hours a week of universal preschool for 40 weeks a year for all four-year-olds by 2013.

Asked about whether he had lifted the idea from Britain and if so, why he had not attributed it, a spokesman last night said Mr Rudd had long talked about research on the benefits of investing in early childhood.

"Mr Rudd has referred to and quoted that body of research extensively including in the press conference today," he said.

The Prime Minister said he had read the work of Nobel prize-winning economist James Heckman, but did not acknowledge the almost identical British policy.

Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson yesterday said the idea of one-stop child centres had "a lot of merit", but warned they would be expensive.

He also questioned Labor's ability to deliver them given that none of the 260 child-care centres it pledged at the last election will be built this year.

Meanwhile, the child-care industry split over who should run the proposed network of one-stop shops.

The Community Child Care Association of Victoria accused Mr Rudd of being "misguided" in his view that a mix of private and public operators should run the centres, saying commercial providers had driven quality down.

But Childcare Associations Australia, which represents private providers, said it did not matter who owned a service, only that strong quality standards were upheld.

State Early Childhood Minister Maxine Morand said Victoria already had 41 multi-purpose child-care centres in operation, with another 10 being built and four more having secured funding.

She said her predecessor, Sherryl Garbutt, had taken the proposal for such one-stop centres through cabinet in 2003.

"I think it's fantastic," she said of the federal proposal to make such centres universal. "It's a great model."

Mr Rudd stressed yesterday that the concept was not yet Government policy — just a proposal for debate at the 2020 Summit — but agreed it would be expensive to implement.

He suggested not every child-care centre would become a one-stop shop, but that universality would apply "if you live in a particular location across the country, you have physical access to such services and it is within your financial reach".

Meanwhile, child-care parliamentary secretary Maxine McKew urged a rethink of work patterns to help parents who were struggling to stretch only four weeks' annual leave across 12 weeks of school holidays.

"We have a work year that is pretty much 48 weeks or whatever, and we have a school year that's about … two-thirds of that," she told Sky News. "It's crazy."


Storm clouds pre-Katrina, anonymous photographer.