Through The Curtain

*




The turn of the second millennium has brought about, in the Western world at least, an outpouring of concern about cosmic matters. A major portion of this concern has taken a delusional, even hysterical turn, specifically in imagining an end-of-the-world scenario. "The end of the world is near," predicts Karl de Nostredame, supposedly the "last living descendent" of Nostradamus; "White House knows doomsday date!" he claims (Wolfe 1999).

The study of collective delusions most commonly falls within the domain of sociologists working in the sub-field of collective behavior, and psychologists specializing in social psychology. Collective delusions are typified as the spontaneous, rapid spread of false or exaggerated beliefs within a population at large, temporarily affecting a particular region, culture, or country. Mass hysteria is most commonly studied by psychiatrists and physicians. Episodes typically affect small, tightly knit groups in enclosed settings such as schools, factories, convents and orphanages (Calmeil 1845; Hirsch 1883; Sirois 1974).

Mass hysteria is characterized by the rapid spread of conversion disorder, a condition involving the appearance of bodily complaints for which there is no organic basis. In such episodes, psychological distress is converted or channeled into physical symptoms. There are two common types: anxiety hysteria and motor hysteria. The former is of shorter duration, usually lasting a day, and is triggered by the sudden perception of a threatening agent, most commonly a strange odor. Symptoms typically include headache, dizziness, nausea, breathlessness, and general weakness. Motor hysteria is prevalent in intolerable social situations such as strict school and religious settings where discipline is excessive. Symptoms include trance-like states, melodramatic acts of rebellion known as histrionics, and what physicians term "psychomotor agitation" (whereby pent-up anxiety built up over a long period results in disruptions to the nerves or neurons that send messages to the muscles, triggering temporary bouts of twitching, spasms, and shaking). Motor hysteria appears gradually over time and usually takes weeks or months to subside (Wessely 1987; Bartholomew and Sirois 1996). The term mass hysteria is often used inappropriately to describe collective delusions, as the overwhelming majority of participants are not exhibiting hysteria, except in extremely rare cases. In short, all mass hysterias are collective delusions as they involve false or exaggerated beliefs, but only rarely do collective delusions involve mass hysteria as to do so, they must report illness symptoms.
http://www.csicop.org/si/2000-05/delusions.html



In the realm of the dark, with stolen opportunities, with the spring daffodils that lined the Yorkshire lanes, with the smell of others he wanted to grasp and entangle. He grew more gangly and disassociated by the day. The Christmas blessings were not what they seemed. He had held so much back; the thumping sequence of thoughts in his head so loud he couldn't believe no one else could hear them. It was a cruelty. It was a destiny. His usefulness was over. He hung on the edge of social clusters, embarrassed to be so out on a limb, and all was lost, all was lost. They could see it in his face and steered clear.

The remnants of the computer menace still lingered in his life, the imagery, the job of writing up the history. The constant pain had twisted his soul inside out. He was sure there was some other reason, but he didn't know what. The years of isolation were beginning to show. "I'm in housing," they said, in a terrible nasal Australian accent, hoooousssing, as if it was a badge of honour, or a badge of failure, the club, a social marker. He shuddered as he listened. Eight million go to work in a country of little more than 20 million, supporting millions on the welfare rolls. Centrelink is the central agency in these millions of lives, the source of income, frustration, often despair.

Adopt a pensioner is the latest campaign, humiliating, contemptuous, demonstrating the virtual impossibility of surviving. While those on average wages can barely step outside the front door. And others triumph; they chatter in smart houses, they gaze down the foreshore cliffs, the mansions perched high above the sandstone, their fabulous lives against the vivid blue of beach and sky, and here in the curling, mundane streets of Redfern, we go about our days. The entire country is backing up with a common flaw, a working wage gets you nowhere these days. All is lost, all is lost, here in our defective souls. He couldn't hear them screaming; their voices muffled in the morning cold as they made their way into another day of toil.

It was the gloss that got to him, the arrogance and the gloss. He was disassociated, thought disordered, depressed, longing for a life free of physical and mental pain. The solution presented itself repeatedly: travel. But the finances were tight, the children still dependent on him, and his eroded spirit could barely rise any more. Dear Lord, dear Lord, he chanted, and the muffled voices puffed steam in the morning air. All was lost, all was lost, the trails of garbage along the side of the road, the crowded street stalls, the entire collapse of the country they had known. Only the elderly could remember a different world, and they made it seem so fabulous, when people drove around in their very own cars, when hundreds of thousands were not living on the streets at any one time.

They had become the Calcutta of the future; and money cut a swathe through everything. He was wrong to regret it. He thought their hearts had been warmed, he had, briefly, relied on the generosity, the warm hearts, of others. But clearly, increasingly, his own mishappen heart reflected in the world that he saw. He took in the worse elements on a daily basis. He saw the fires of the future in the oil drums on the side of the road. He saw the chaos of Eveleigh Street, the fires, the rapes, the dealing, the fights and the drunkenness, as a gateway to the future. The leftwing politicians of the time had been so certain, had brooked no alternative view, deriding those brave enough to disagree with them.

The stifling of dissent began slowly in the early part of the century, but rapidly escalated. Dissent was crushed or more often, and often more effectively, ridiculed. The myths were beyond astonishing; and public policy was run by a series of manufactured crisis, the obesity crisis, the domestic violence crisis, the aging crisis. The figures failed to support many of their public campaigns, showing that in reality most people went about their days quietly and with little violence, and were largely able to look after themselves. But this didn't stop the building of ever larger and more complex layers of bureaucracy, and saw, as more and more people became reliant on falsehoods for the livelihoods, the drowning of dissent.

A uniform silence came to dominate public life. No armed forces were necessary. They simply isolated and ridiculed those who dared to disagree. We were ruled by fads and fantasies, by left wing shibboleths that harked back to the days of Stalin and Trotsky. What was most amazing was that most people appeared to believe the pap they were fed; or at least did not speak up. The social isolation of those who did was a very effective weapon. He shuddered at the cruelty of it, but was beginning to understand. Stand up and be counted really meant stand up and be shot, live a lonely life, be ridiculed as an eccentric; or embrace the apocalyptic visions of global warming, obesity epidemics, the left wing lies that the family was the most dangerous place to be. Accept; or be isolated. You might as well be shot.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/union-ministers-warn-of-backlash/2008/05/31/1211654370878.html

FEDERAL Government ministers, staff and unions are pleading with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to slow down or risk a serious political backlash.

And the Opposition has warned Mr Rudd that his frenetic work demands and hypocritical stance on work and family balance could be politically fatal.

The Commonwealth Public Sector Union, covering more than 60,000 Federal Government employees and hundreds of political staffers, is gearing up for a showdown over conditions.

The union's national secretary Stephen Jones said he would shortly call a meeting of parliamentary staff, ahead of a meeting with the Prime Minister. After a string of complaints from distressed and exhausted staffers, Mr Jones has met with senior ministers to relay health concerns over their extreme working conditions.

A minister told The Sun-Herald the Prime Minister's cracking pace and "unfair" expectations of everyone in government, including the bureaucracy, was "the elephant in the room". Ministers were embarrassingly aware of how the Government's work practices differed from the philosophy it preached. "He [Mr Rudd] doesn't want to hear it", the minister said.

Widespread concern in the public service has also prompted a string of meetings between the union and the bureaucracy. Reflecting the growing backlash within the Government at Mr Rudd's style, Mr Jones could not rule out industrial action. "I certainly hope it doesn't get to that," he said. "I wouldn't want to speculate on that".

http://business.smh.com.au/were-all-fiscal-conservatives-now-20080530-2js0.html

Update: Australians are morphing into Kevin Rudd's fiscal conservatives - albeit mostly against our will.

The long-held passion for the plastic is waning, with repeated Reserve Bank rate rises - amplified with interest by the commercial banks - prompting more shoppers to leave the credit card unswiped.

Today's credit numbers published by the RBA showed just a 0.4% increase for April, half the pace expected by economists. It was the weakest growth in more than two years.

While the annualised rate still looks extravagant at 14.1%, the growth pace compared with a 16.5% clip at the end of last year.

The effect of interest rates on consumer outlays is even more severe on the home front.

Housing credit grew by just 0.7% in April, as the yearly rate dropped to 11.1% - the lowest rate in 16 years.

A breakdown of that number shows that owner-occupied housing rose 0.8% and investor housing up merely 0.5% or 9.5% annualised - a 17-year low.

The numbers will not bode well for those hoping for an ease to the national housing shortage.

http://www.canada.com/vancouvercourier/news/artsandentertainment/story.html?id=cb007eea-cacc-4819-ae13-1be138dc31c6
Kudos & Kvetches
Dropping out
Vancouver Courier
Published: Friday, May 02, 2008

If the doors of perception slammed shut on you recently or the snake you were riding with the ghost of a Native American chief suddenly turned back into your IKEA sofa and ottoman, it's probably because Albert Hoffman, the "father of LSD," died of a heart attack at age 102 this week.

The Swiss chemist accidentally discovered LSD in 1938 while studying medicinal plants, trying to synthesize their active components in hope of discovering a stimulant for respiratory and circulatory systems. Five years later, he spilled some synthesized LSD ("Lyergsaeure-Diathylamid" or lysergic acid diethylamide) on his hand and reported that he felt waves of happiness, hallucinations and the sensation that he could fly--something members of the K&K team feel every time we eat too many Timbits. After dropping acid for the first time, Hoffman finally understood the appeal of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, which he had previously dismissed as self-indulgent and tedious. The fact that Dark Side of the Moon wasn't recorded for another 30 years was proof of LSD's magical powers.

LSD's psychedelic properties were originally championed by psychiatrists treating patients who were in a reactionless state and in the 1960s by dirty hippies and bands such as the Beatles whose song "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" was reportedly a nod to the mind-expanding drug, although we're pretty sure the band's little known B-side "Hey Paul, Check Out That Eagle Growing Out of Ringo's Forehead" was way more influenced by LSD.

So all you acid heads and tie-dye shirt wearers, take a moment of silence, if that's possible, and pay some respect to the man responsible for the circus that paraded across your bedroom wall and the talking ashtray who kindly told you the secret of life, which you wrote down on your living room carpet with a hotdog wiener that could shoot lightening. Ride the snake.

Divided, Dysfunctional Souls

*



And unfortunately most people do not have sufficient powers of discrimination to distinguish the artificial world of the media from the real world of everyday experience. The two worlds merge in their minds, and they can't tell them apart. What people see on the television screen is not just entertainment; it is a collection of artificial experiences which merges with their collection of real experiences and gives them a new and largely artificial basis for evaluating things and making decisions.
Dr William Pierce.



All that was coordinated, all that was lost, young bones striding along valley floors, laughter, the dazzling sunlight. Oh how much hope there was. We had celebrated everything, the mornings, the evenings, the nights, we had celebrated being alive and we had celebrated being of a different time. We wanted to tear down the ramparts. Now the country is run by stale old socialists who have subsumed and inverted the messages of the past, exploited social justice dogma for their own ends, built massive and pointless bureaucracies, and poured contempt on the common man, those naive enough to have voted for them.

In a system where tweedle dum and tweedle dee are just as bad as each other, modern democracies are creaking to a close. Our juvenile dreams were exploited, but they were so far outside the square, so far away from the circles of power, that we felt we genuinely held a new card. Now the dour sour face of dressed up modern communists hoover every last cent of the populace, tell us they're acting in our own good, sneer behind our backs, their putrid breaths, their aging flesh, wrapped in penguin suits and stalking corridors, it has all come to past. The worst possible governments. The previous Prime Minister John Howard introduced the GST and reaped yet more billions of dollars off the general populace, telling us it was all for our own good and the good of the nation.

No one, no one, can tell you how we're better off after the GST. The money disappeared into the pockets, all those billions and billions and billions, disappeared into the already bloated salaries of public servants. And while they live in their comfortable suburbs, send their children to comfortable schools, drive their comfortable cars at our expense, the rest of the masses toil in ever increasing despair. Ends just don't meet. This is Australia, you can do anything you like, parrot those on $300,000 plus, six times the average wage, parroting the triumph of the individual. All you have to do is get up and give it a go. The rest sit in fume filled traffic, their hearts breaking, the bills mounting.

Housing affordability is the catch phrase, but behind it lies a starker, more brutal story. They all got on the band wagon, I'll have some of that, when they could see the value of houses doubling, tripling, quadrupling in a matter of years and those first in, those who showed no caution or more likely just happened to have the cash or the family support, dived in and prospered. They followed, at the end of the school of fish; and now they're being eaten by the back tide of rising costs and falling house prices. Repossessions filter on to the news. Everyone blames everyone else.

He who must be loved and admired at all times, our Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, has had his week from hell and finally the honeymoon, perhaps the longest in political history, is coming to an end. The public service are turning on him, and that is a dangerous game. Policy wonks, they proudly promote, but anyone can shuffle paper and sound important, introduce new programs that do absolutely nothing, circle desperately while the floor falls out of the building. How much chaos looms. While one of the most enduring images of the moment is John Howard lapping up his retirement, sitting in the West Indies with Janette ever by his side, watching the cricket.

While his own party flounders in the myriad messes that he left; while Australia's notoriously self congratulatory and administratively hopeless left is in power from coast to coast, while the genuine socially progressive conservatives that represent the middle ground of the middle class have been utterly fully and truly betrayed. They have no conscience. They care not a jot. Other people's deaths are other people's faults. We shout and the voices disappear immediately in flat, echo-less chambers, and all is lost, all is lost.

Flat tack traffic will brutalise you, the noise of car engines will populate your soul, sea weed will rise up from the ocean floor, and everything, everything, will change. Old certainties will disappear. Old hierarchies will disintegrate. All those sour faced certainties will dissolve; and a different order will rise up. Not the one the government envisaged, bleating about the marginalised and the disadvantaged, the countries most vulnerable, but a different order of ordinary people, sick of the dysfunctional and the desperate and the welfare dependent occupying the entire field of public debate. Get up, go to work and get shat upon, those days would be finally, finally over. Cracked, chortled grins. "I told you so."



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5huwECNWFJHbvOgIgWHReW7Dfq9BwD9106K2GB

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush White House is known for secrecy and strict message control, and a new book by its former press secretary details extraordinary measures it has used to manage what information gets out.

Keeping the chief spokesman — and thus the news media and the public — out of the loop at times is not unheard of, but President Bush has taken it to new lengths, Scott McClellan writes in his insider account.

Bush told McClellan's predecessor, Ari Fleischer, that he would purposely not tell him things at times. Then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice cut off Fleischer's authority to read notes on Bush's phone conversations with fellow world leaders. This attitude filtered to other top advisers, who resisted filling in the press secretary, McClellan said.

"No one charged with keeping the press and the public informed about the workings of the government should have to play such frustrating games," McClellan writes.

White House press secretary Dana Perino says it was his own fault if McClellan was an outsider. "You can be as in or out of the loop as you choose to be," she said.

Current and former White House aides, unaccustomed to someone from their famously tight circle spilling the goods, have reacted to McClellan's explosive — and immediately best-selling — book by trying to discredit their old friend. In the kind of seemingly coordinated lockstep familiar to reporters who have long covered the Bush White House, they have suggested in similar language that he is betraying his former boss for money or rewriting history to vindicate old grudges.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23784843-5000117,00.html

Laurie Oakes

May 31, 2008 12:00am

IN his early months as opposition leader, Kevin Rudd remarked that it would be fun to play with John Howard's mind for a while.

Suddenly it's as though someone is playing with Rudd's.

The Prime Minister, as everyone knows, is a control freak who likes to micro-manage everything.

But leaks take control away. Real leaks, that is.

Not the kind of deliberate daily "drops" of information Rudd's office engineered in the lead-up to the Budget. They were part of the control process.

Genuine leaks can't be planned for. They can undo the work of spin merchants and micro-managers in a flash. They create chaos and suspicion.

So the kind of leaks we have seen in the last week will be messing with Rudd's mind big time.

If this can happen twice, he will be thinking, it can happen again.

What will leak next?

Publication in The Australian of a confidential letter from Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson to colleagues, warning that Rudd's FuelWatch scheme could actually hurt the suburban battlers who swung to Labor at the last election, was bad enough.

But the document leaked to me - the co-ordinating comments from four key economic departments on the FuelWatch Cabinet submission - was devastating.


http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1810335,00.html

I paid a visit a few weeks ago to Bethel, a very small town in upstate New York where I had been once before. As soon as I got there, it started raining. I wasn't surprised. The last time I was there it also rained quite a bit. That was in August 1969, when I was one of the 400,000 or so people who converged on the place to attend something called the Woodstock festival. I had headed there that time by instinct, like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn, because I was 17 years old and anything involving guitars or hippies demanded my immediate attention. The opposition of my parents, the discouraging weather forecast and traffic so heavy it closed the New York State Thruway meant nothing compared with my need to get in on whatever this thing was going to be.

What it turned out to be, of course, was something none of us foresaw: not just a concert but a spontaneous utopian community. Now I was back, 39 years later--cue the wistful music--to visit the Museum at Bethel Woods, which is perched on the edge of the festival site and dedicated to telling the story of Woodstock and of the 1960s generally. A museum about Woodstock was probably inevitable. Those three days of peace, love and mud have become the baby boomers' version of the Trojan War, their collective foundation myth. It was only a matter of time before the whole thing was commemorated with interactive displays, a replica hippie bus and a gift shop.

The museum, which opens June 2, has been a consuming project for Alan Gerry. Long ago, he was a high school dropout who ran a business selling and repairing televisions in nearby Liberty, N.Y. But eventually he founded Cablevision, which he sold in 1996 for $2.7 billion to Time Warner. At 78, he's a venture capitalist who wears an American-flag pin on his lapel--which makes him an unlikely guy to devote himself to the legacy of a place that had a freak-out tent. But he does have a daughter who attended Woodstock (against his wishes). And another who missed out but persuaded him much later to buy the land where it all happened.

Rising Through The Corn Fields

*



Most people have a very limited range of real life experiences. Television and films and glossy magazine advertisements provide an enormous expansion of experience for the average person, by substituting artificial experiences for real experiences. On the television screen viewers experience artificial conflicts, artificial life. In advertisements they are given artificial ideals of beauty and fashion, artificial life-styles to which they can aspire. And in their newspapers and news magazines they are given a carefully filtered, a carefully slanted, view of what is happening in the world.
Dr William Pierce. America's Dissident Voices.



He had been unhappy for so long that when the opportunity came to change all that he didn't know what to do, how to recognise himself. All was changing. The profession which had once seemed so noble echoed in the corridors; flat, meaningless, the snakes in power. In the alcove opposite was the dero who's name no one had ever deciphered. One Christmas we asked him what he would like. He wanted a walkie talkie so he could talk to the ships off New Zealand, warn them of what was coming. Those days, when Fairfax was at its peak, was a different era. The Sydney Morning Herald had been a venerable, indeed revered institution. He looked out across the waves. There was only one ship on the horizon, far out.

It had been one of the proudest moments of his life, when, after his first front page story, the boss had reached across the news desk and said: congratulations, you've got the job. From all that chaos, the sadness that had coated his increasingly chaotic life, had come this wonderful achievement. It was possible. He didn't have to be beaten; they didn't have to look sorrowfully at him as some failed, drink ridden talent. Things didn't have to go wrong. He didn't have to die young. He didn't have to crawl out o the park in stench laden clothes, unwashed, the dirt of ages grimed into his skin. The sour stench. It didn't have to be that way.

All those glorious adventures; all that time when he had not known there was a different path, a different life, when each day grew more wild as he drank and he drank; sneering at anyone, the normals, who didn't drink like they did. Every moment was condensed into glory, sitting on a bar stool, smoking, in the days when you could smoke in bars, laughing, in the days when he still laughed. Another. And another. The tequila slammers. We laughed and we laughed, our teeth unbroken, our skin unlined. Indeed, despite the knock about he had given himself, he had always looked younger than he really was. Ungrown inside. All the normal forces, the aging forces, had slipped by; a ship making its way through troubled waters, intact, untouched.

He wasn't certain when the ecstasy plateaued and he began the slow decline. It had been a choatic path in itself, learning to drink normally, learning that there were ways to recover from the whack whack whack of the crystal light. That one handshake justified everything, all the battles with addiction, all the crazy adventures that had peopled his younger days. The upmarket apartments where he would spend a few days, pursued by queens. He didn't care. As long as he could drink. They'd pick me up, give me a shower, a blow job and $20 bucks and send me on my way, he'd say; and they tittered into their hands.

He was old now and nobody was paying for anything. He could barely stand to see what had happened to himself. What was once so outrageous, so much fun, such a grand adventure, had become a tired little routine. He wasn't comfortable about the way he was treated; but all up, it was better than the alternatives. He looked forward to a different life now; in the mountains or in the country, it wouldn't make a difference. He was determined everything would change. On the home track now. They could say what they liked, he would soon be free.

The ambitious little shits that had populated all those news rooms over all those years, the giant egos that bloomed as the Fairfax way, didn't matter any more. He had always thought, as he had said before, that history would rewrite the justices of the time. Instead history glossed over things that were no longer important; office politics that in retrospect were minute. If it wasn't written it wasn't written, it wasn't part of the record; and now, never would be. As time took his hand and his heart, as destiny mapped out a gentler path, he smiled, waved to the onlookers, shook the hands of his compatriots and disappeared. There was no point being angry about it all. The mountains would change all that. History, in a different, unexpected way, would change all that.



THE BIGGER STORY:

Some revealing passages from Scott McClellan's just-released book about his time in the Bush White House, "What Happened," as selected by Michael D. Shear:

On President Bush:

In the years to come, as I worked closely with President Bush, I would come to believe that sometimes he convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment. It is not unlike a witness in court who does not want to implicate himself in wrongdoing, but is also concerned about perjuring himself. So he says, "I do not recall." ... Bush, similarly, has a way of falling back on the hazy memory defense to protect himself from potential political embarrassment.

On openness:

The Bush administration lacked real accountability in large part because Bush himself did not embrace openness or government in the sunshine. His belief in secrecy and compartmentalization was activated when controversy began to stir. That secrecy ended up delaying but not preventing the consequences. Resistance to openness in times of controversy is ultimately self-defeating in the age of the internet, blogosphere, and today's heightened media scrutiny.

On the War:

In Iraq, Bush saw his opportunity to create a legacy of greatness. Intoxicated by the influence and power of America, Bush believed that a successful transformation of Iraq could be the linchpin for realizing his dream of a free Middle East. But there was a problem here, which has become obvious to me only in retrospect...Bush and his advisers knew that the American people would almost certainly not support a war launched primarily for the ambitious purpose of transforming the Middle East.

...

Rather than open this Pandora's box, the administration chose a
different path -- not employing out-and-out deception but shading the
truth; downplaying the major reason for going to war and emphasizing a
lesser motivation that could arguably be dealt with in other ways
(such as intensified diplomatic pressure); trying to make the WMD
threat and the Iraqi connection to terrorism appear just a little more
certain, a little less questionable, than they were; quietly ignoring
or disregarding some of the crucial caveats in the intelligence and
minimising evidence that pointed in the opposite direction; using
innuendo and implication to encourage Americans to believe as fact
some things that were unclear and possibly false (such as the idea
that Saddam had an active nuclear weapons program) and other things
that were overplayed or completely wrong (such as implying Saddam
might have an operational relationship with al Qaeda).

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1810019,00.html

Given the barrage of publicity and outrage that it has generated in the last day, you know what you're in for before you even crack the spine of What Happened, Scott McClellan's memoir of his nearly three years as George W. Bush's press secretary. It's not necessarily surprising that McClellan critiques his former co-workers. But the candor, anger and overall disappointment with which McClellan discusses President Bush and his policies is particularly surprising from someone previously presumed to be the most faithful of aides. On the fifth page of the preface McClellan bluntly writes, "History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided — that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder." That blunder, he continues, was one propagated by a "political propaganda machine" that misled the public on the reasons for war with Iraq.


http://www.slate.com/id/2192266/

Now he tells us. Scott McClellan's memoir offers more candor in a chapter than he let loose during his three years as the president's spokesman. Often kept in the dark by his boss and, at least in one case, deliberately sent out to mislead the public by his superiors, McClellan writes as if he went home after he left the White House in 2006 and purged. Disgorged onto the pages of What Happened, due out next week, are all of the emotions, regret, and doubt that apparently bottled up even as he eternally presented a sunny, largely unflappable demeanor while on the job selling the president's policies.

Because McClellan was such a team player, the book comes as a bit of a shock to those of us who covered the White House during his tenure. Yes, I knew he was angry at Karl Rove and Scooter Libby for using him to spread the falsehood that they had no role in the CIA leak case. That's in the book: "Top White House officials who knew the truth—including Rove, Libby, and possibly Vice President Cheney—allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie." But the denunciation expands from there, and it's that breadth I never thought that his memoir would offer. McClellan outlines the "obfuscation, dissembling, and lack of intellectual honesty that helped take our country into the war in Iraq." He suggests the president and his aides were in permanent campaign mode, putting politics above principle, and chronicles how a "state of denial" led to the mishandling of the response to Hurricane Katrina. (He also includes a critique of the press, which he says acted as "deferential, complicit enablers" of Bush administration "propaganda.")

From The Land Of Recovery

*



A LITTLE POEM:

We drank for happiness and became unhappy.
We drank for joy and became miserable.
We drank to be outgoing and became self-centered.
We drank for sociability and became argumentative.
We drank for sophistication and became crude and obnoxious.
We drank for friendship and made enemies.
We drank for sleep and awakened without rest.
We drank for strength and felt weak.
We drank for sex drive and lost our potency.
We drank for relaxation and got the shakes.
We drank for confidence and became uncertain.
We drank for courage and became afraid.
We drank for warmth and lost our cool.
We drank for coolness and lost our warmth.
We drank for freedom and became slaves.
We drank for power and became powerless.
We drank to soften sorrow and wallowed in self-pity.
We drank to stimulate thought and blacked out.
We drank medicinally and acquired health problems.
We drank because the job called for it and lost the job.
We drank to make conversation and became slurred in speech.
We drank to stimulate thought and blacked out.
We drank to feel heavenly and knew hell.
We drank to forget and were haunted.
We drank to erase problems and saw them multiply.
We drank to cope with life and invited death.
So now, we don't drink.




If it was all there could be, an ancient gripe, rustling in the bushes long ago, a mere fleck on an ancient land. He could muster strength. He could gather himself into one in order to face the whole. He could tell you everything and end up being nothing. He could forsake you and be gathered up for a higher life. He could move through splintered fissures in the sky; and awake. Oh Lord have mercy on my soul; they gasped. They didn't want to be free because freedom was terrifying; it cast you back amongst your selves and left you responsible for your own torture. These days were changing, but not fast enough.

Just as The History of the Machine Age had made him world famous; so too The History of Computer Threat received a great deal of attention. He was being interviewed even before it was finished. He hadn't expected to recount his own journey to the core; indeed he had never even expected to survive it. Wiped ten times, he had not been wiped since; and slowly found his faculties coming back. They were mundane, led by fools. The country's governance had lurched from bad to worse, from pseudo-conservative to rabid left. There are more than a 100 new committees and organisations, including the Board For Social Inclusion, which could mean anything and do anything. It is entirely communistic.

The gloss has fallen off Rudd in six months, and the long and astonishing honeymoon that he has had is coming to an end. If Howard hadn't been so bloody hopeless, splashing money everywhere and offending everybody, bleeding the ordinary worker dry and recycling billions of dollars into the pockets of those he chose, the mountainous divide, the insane levels of paper work, the bureaucrats who all thought they knew better. The country is going down the tube, most old people gristle. We betrayed those who went to war. We sold the farm. We flogged off our minerals and wasted the proceeds. We sheltered in alcoves and the tide of discontent passed by. It wasn't his world anymore.

If those lingering memories meant anything, he had to make sense of the broader framework, and that was becoming increasingly impossible. The ineptitude of the government was mind boggling. Howard was hopeless, and the present mob are starting to look even more hopeless. And there had been so much hope. After 11 years of a conservative government, and the drearily persistent personality of the leader, stale, old, smelling of dentures and age, furrowed, bushy little eyebrows migrating across old skin, a persistent little quack in his voice; and he went from rock star to skid mark in a matter of months; from able administrator to idiot of the first order almost, it seemed, overnight.

In the old days, at the height of it all, Howard was greeted like a rock star wherever he went. The Howard haters, the doctrinaire left who couldn't bear to be disagreed with and longed for power, could never believe it. But it was true, more than true. The disabled athletes came back from the disabled Olympics. No one could have cared less, certainly not the media. But to the ones who were returning, the fact that they were being met by the Prime Minister was exciting indeed. They wore the famous Australian colours, the green and gold, and he said how excited he got, every time he saw the colours.

The first one through the barriers, an intellectually disabled man, virtually jumped into his arms. Howard, almost knocked over in the rush, beamed good-naturedly. In the long wait for the athletes, for the plane had been delayed, he signed an autograph for my children, who I had taken to the airport because it was too early to take them to school. The kids took the autograph to school, where they proudly showed their teachers the autograph from the Prime Minister. But the left wing teachers hated Howard, and it is unlikely an autograph from their nemesis would have provoked much enthusiasm.

But these were the good sides of Howard. The things he did that no one saw, the mundane, almost suburban kindnesses, unassuming, almost humble. And then something happened and everything went wrong. He spouted at endless press conferences and we knew he had lost the plot; mini announcements, money splashed everywhere, the cost, the astonishing cost of everything. Good to meet you, glad to meet you, good to meet you, he kept repeating on the last campaign trail, shaking hands and shaking hands, his simpering little eyes betraying defeat. It had all gone mad, all was lost, and with him, although nothing much can be seen now through the prevailing orthodoxies of the left, with him went the hope of the conservatives; who almost to a man are annoyed at the insane things he did, the money and opportunity he squandered, the waste, the terrible waste, of an historic opportunity to actually fix the country. Now the left has formed a smothering blanket from coast to coast, a wall of incompetent governments, and it has all gone mad.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23775288-662,00.html

THE Rudd Government ignored the advice of four government departments that its much-vaunted FuelWatch scheme could leave motorists worse off.

Bureaucrats said the scheme could push up petrol prices, increase costs for small business and disadvantage independent service station operators.

The revelation came as petrol hit a new high of 164.9c in Melbourne yesterday.

And Qantas revealed soaring fuel costs have forced it to cancel some domestic flights and alter international routes.

A leaked Cabinet document revealed that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was warned by his own department that FuelWatch could lead to "a small overall price increase" in the pump price.

Three other departments -- finance, resources, and energy and industry -- also argued against the scheme.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7424302.stm

The Himalayan nation of Nepal has become the world's newest republic, ending 240 years of monarchy.

A constituent assembly meeting in the capital, Kathmandu, overwhelmingly voted to abolish royal rule.

The Maoists, who emerged as the largest party in last month's elections, were committed to ousting King Gyanendra and creating a republic.

They entered politics in 2006, after signing a peace agreement that ended a decade-long insurgency.

The approved proposal states that Nepal is "an independent, indivisible, sovereign, secular and an inclusive democratic republic nation".

Only four members of the 601-seat assembly opposed the change.

Royal privileges "will automatically come to an end", the declaration says.

It also states that the king's main palace must be vacated within a fortnight, to be transformed into a museum.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/muslims-warn-of-gift-to-extremists/2008/05/28/1211654124109.html

CAMDEN Council's decision to block an Islamic school could force Islamic education underground, where "extreme imams" could reach children without supervision or monitoring, the president of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, Ikebal Patel, has warned.

Muslim schools should be encouraged so that education could be overseen by the State Government, he said.

"Or Muslim children will be given their religious education in backyards and garages by … teachers whose credentials no one could vet," he said. "You may have some very extreme imams or religious teachers getting through to the children."

The school's developers, the Quranic Society, said it would appeal in the Land and Environment Court against Monday's decision to reject it on planning and environmental grounds.

The project's consultant, the former Sydney lord mayor Jeremy Bingham, said the rejection was tainted by politics and accused the council of pandering to ill-informed residents.

The Wider Sweep, the Broader Cast

*




In the ancient cult of the earth goddess Cybele Mater Magna, young male devotees would fall into a frenzy, grab a sword and, in a dramatic public gesture, emasculate themselves.

Some versions have the freshly made castrati run through the streets, choosing the family whose honour it will be to support them by tossing their severed gonads onto the doorstep. But what is generally agreed, from Ovid to Lucretius to Catullus to Pausanius, is that the now genderless youths, known as galli (or, in Greek, galloi) lived and dressed thereafter as women, becoming Cybele's priestesses, presiding at her worship and at ritual orgies in her honour.

This story might have nothing more than shock value, were it not for the obvious and unexplained feminisation of contemporary men. As Mal Meninga noted with disgust after a recent bloke-survey, "the nation's iconic hard Aussie blokes are a dying breed. We've become a nation of pansies...

Behaviour, too, emulates the female. Wherever you look, boofy footballer-types are accessorising with girl-stuff; proudly pushing strollers, being photographed naked with their newborns. The shopfront of Lockhart Menshed, in far west NSW, tells a poignant story. Here men can sit and talk, share problems and coffee, work the benches and lathes. But their product looks a lot like womb-envy; in a row, for sale, 20 bucks, a dozen or so neat wooden nesting boxes.

Even in overtly testosterone-based pursuits like sport and war, testosterone acts are treated like bizarre and unforeseeable accidents, rather than part of the deal. Barry Hall clocks an opponent on the field and is suspended from the Swannies. Nick d'Arcy thumps a teammate and is ejected from the Olympics, his career in tatters. Stuff that 10 or 20 years ago would have been dismissed with a boys-will-be-boys ticking-off is now punished harshly.
Elizabeth Farrelly

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/wax-or-be-damned/2008/05/23/1211183103112.html





If there was a time when things were different, when we were not ruled by layer after layer of incompetent government, when the population did not have a poor and beaten feel about it after the parasites in control had hoovered every last cent of them, then it was hard to remember. The roads were stifling in their conformity; and the points of difference, the out of control boys, the rude, sassy, in-you-face girls, they were ignored. There was nothing you could do. The elderly had long wrung their hands over the behaviour of the young; but there wasn't any doubt: the idiots had taken over the asylum.

He looked back, beyond the giant grey core which had obsessed him for so long, back, back, to spinning disco balls and spinning laughter. They were talking intensely, with strangers they might never meet again, although briefly it felt as if they would know each other forever. The pain was still constant, but had changed, and the laughter which underlay everything, glancing, cynical, smart comments and an urgent faith; it had all been washed away. He had thought the stories would bring justice, rectify past wrongs, but the past was the past and all was lost. Nothing could be further away, more pointless, than yesterday's news. Their comfort couldn't last, the cosy little family he had built.

One fractional stance away, one lost chord, one warming piece of protection, one grasp of the way things were. He was shattered by the passing of time. What he had seeked to grasp and hold kept slipping through his fingers. The noble causes which had given meaning to his life were miniscule in comparison to what had overtaken the planet. Foreign slaves were being sacrificed in an echo of the Mayan past. Layers of people provided ever more consumers. They were caught up in something far bigger than they could ever imagine. Look at the lies we are told every day. In contrast he was happy that things had come to this; he had always wanted to escape.

The cross had been our salvation, the most exciting part of town, a flash of urbanity in a land of suburbs. Wall to war, that horror had locked in. The flickering screens of the television could be seen through curtains, and a terrible cold had descended. Each house was an infinitely lonely house. The habitants might as well have been on television themselves, for all the humanity they had. He was outside, always outside, and hungry now, not having eaten for a long time. He was outside pleading and no one paid the slightest heed. He always knew there had been a different, more successful life, that once he had held down employment and been well regarded, but those days, decades ago, never even filtered through.

He had spent the day begging at the train station, dodging the police, just trying to get enough dollars together to get his sting for the day, he never understood why they made it so hard. Here he was in the cold night at Cherrybrook. The collapse had even got to hear, he could see it in the unmowed lawns and broken windows of what had once been the ultimate middle class suburb. Some of them still remained comfortable, the well cared for green of their gardens standing out from the neighbours. It would not be hard to find a place to sleep, but he was looking or a particular house, one where his mother had lived decades before. He didn't even understand why he was looking for it, why he was returning after all these years.

She was long gone and any trace of his family in this suburb had been wiped away by generation after generation, layer after layer. But the time lines interconnected; and he wanted to touch a point in the past when the world had been a very different place; when decisions made then could have changed the story now. He took a swig of the bottle of orange juice and metholated spirits he had so carefully prepared, wrapped neatly in the newspaper he had got from the shop. He hadn't watched, and he could smell his own stench rising from his clothes. He was looking for the clue of where it all went wrong, looking back to a time when he had belonged to a normal family, standing in the cold staring in.

They were never going to invite him in. If they saw him, they drew the curtains, frightened. The beggars were making it this far the city, and that in itself was frightening. The cold was preternatural, of a different dimension to the normal nights. The crevice beneath the Town Hall station that he had made his home had been blocked off by some bastard station attendant; and it was getting too dangerous to stay on the streets. Once there had been a lore, they shared their bottles on a good day and looked after each other; now all that was gone and he was as frightened of the other beggars as he had once been frightened of himself. He pulled his wretched jacket tighter around him, and shuffled further down the street, searching, searching, while the cold made him old and a tear trickled down his face, he didn't know why. There had been other paths, but he had been born defective; and here he was, the cold as bad as he had ever known, the alternatives long past being achievable.




THE BIGGER STORY:

Car enthusiasts, licensed premises and antisocial behaviour targeted
during May - Kings Cross

Police have been out in force at Kings Cross this month in a high
visibility operation targeting car enthusiasts, drug possession and
supply, licensed premises and antisocial behaviour.

The operation has seen police from Kings Cross Local Area Command joined
by the Public Order and Riot Squad, the Mounted Unit, Operation Taipan
and the Dog Unit on selected nights throughout May, including the last
two weekends and some nights during the week.

Based on intelligence, it is in response to incidents of alcohol-related
crime and drug dealing occurring in the inner-city suburb, as well as an
influx of car enthusiasts to the area in recent times, and targeted
licensed premises, public areas and roadways.

In one night alone earlier this month Operation Taipan officers stopped
145 vehicles, arresting five people, including three for drink-driving,
issuing 26 traffic infringement notices, six speeding infringements and
two defect notices.

Numerous people have also been arrested by police on the street for
offences such as drug possession, assault, resisting police and
offensive language.

Acting Kings Cross Local Area Commander, Superintendent Luke
Freudenstein, said the operation was about sending a strong message to
people coming into Kings Cross that criminal behaviour of any kind would
not be tolerated.

"We welcome people into Kings Cross who come here to have a good time,
but anyone who wants to commit crimes or partake in antisocial behaviour
will come under police notice," Supt Freudenstein said.

"It has also come to our attention that car enthusiasts who have
modified their vehicles and are creating excessive noise have been
flocking to the Kings Cross area in recent times and they are also in
our sights.

"Any drivers breaking the road rules will be detected and stopped, and
vehicles with these unlawful modifications, especially those which
emanate a lot of noise, will be targeted and reported to the Department
of Environment and Climate Control.

"Police will also work closely with that department and the Roads and
Traffic Authority, and any cars not heeding our warnings could be taken
off the road immediately."

Police attached to the high visibility operation in Kings Cross will
continue to patrol the area throughout the month of May.
Police Media.


Sydney Harbour from Lady Macquarie's Chair.

He Went Through A Period When...

*




Apocalyptic beliefs have always been part of the Christian tradition. They express the yearning for heaven on earth, when evil is destroyed and the good are saved.

In their classical religious form, such beliefs rely on signs and omens, like earthquakes and sunspots, which can be interpreted, by reference to biblical passages, as portending a great cataclysm and cleansing. Thus, apocalyptic moments are products of a sense of crisis: they can be triggered by wars and natural disasters.

Classical apocalyptic thinking is certainly alive and well, especially in America, where it feeds on Protestant fundamentalism, and is mass marketed with all the resources of modern media. Circles close to the Bush administration, it is rumoured, take current distempers like terrorism as confirmation of biblical prophecies.

In secularised, pseudo-scientific form, apocalyptic thinking has also been at the core of revolutionary politics. In his latest book, Black Mass, the philosopher John Gray discusses how political doctrines like Marxism colonised the apocalyptic vision in prophesying the destruction of capitalism as the prelude to the socialist utopia. But political messianism was an offshoot of nineteenth-century optimism. With the collapse of optimism, contemporary apocalyptic belief lays more stress on catastrophe and less on utopia.

For example, in his book Flat Earth News, the investigative journalist Nick Davies reminds us of the millennium bug panic. Newspapers everywhere carried stories predicting that computer systems would crash on January 1, 2000, causing much of the world to shut down. The subtext was familiar: those who live by technology will die by it.

Misreporting of science is now so routine that we hardly notice it. Much more serious is when science itself becomes infected by the apocalyptic spirit. Faith-based science seems a contradiction in terms, because the scientific worldview emerged as a challenge to religious superstition. But important scientific beliefs can now be said to be held religiously, rather than scientifically...

Scientists are notoriously loath to jettison conclusions reached by approved scientific methods, however faulty. But their intolerance of dissent is hugely magnified when they see themselves as captains in the salvationist army, dedicated to purging the world of evil habits.

Today it is the West that foists an apocalyptic imagination on the rest of the world. Perhaps we should be looking to China and India for answers about how to address environmental damage, instead of using climate change as a pretext to deprive them of what we already have. How do the Chinese feel about their new found materialism? Do they have an intellectual structure with which to make sense of it?

The best antidote to the doom merchants is scepticism. We must be willing to take uncertainty seriously. Climate change is a fact. But apocalyptic thinking distorts the scientific debate and makes it harder to explain the causes and consequences of this fact, which in turn makes it harder to know how to deal with it.

The danger is that we become so infected with the apocalyptic virus that we end up creating a real catastrophe – the meltdown of our economies and lifestyles – in order to avoid an imaginary one. In short, while a religious attitude of mind deserves the highest respect, we should resist the re-conquest by religion of matters that should be the concern of science.

The apocalyptic mind
Randa Takieddine


With my brother Doug, more than 50 years ago.


She sat, fat, on the side of the tennis court in Bangkok. It had been hard to file. He had intended to write the diary of a Bangkok brothel, a long history of often hair brained ideas, to interview the Prime Minister of India, to write the world. This time, in semi-retirement, he had wanted to write a moving piece about the comings and goings at the bottom end of town, outside the Russian quarter, away from the gangsters. They had danced half the night away during a weekend in Phuket, in astonishing apartments with views stretching down the coast, vast entertainment areas, an open bar on the roof, ample cocaine for the flagging energies and flagging bones. But that, the life of wealthy ex-pats at the prime of their indulgent success, was not what he wanted to record.

And so it was, in these peopled dreams, that he came to be filing once more for newspaper deadlines, and his fat sister was getting in the way. There wasn't much he could say, in these grimy streets where money cut a swathe. He was regarded as just another eccentric foreigner. He ate from the local stalls and the locals looked at him as if he was mad. His stomach soon proved them right. There wasn't any clear way into this society, and if he was reduced to a pimp or a letch, so be it. How could they be so cruel as to distance themselves, these beautiful men. Moving slowly on the stage, the numbers around their neck; the ultimate slave motif, the ultimate for sale sign.

There had been so many extremities of life, back in Sydney, he had seen, he once thought, the greatest decadence that man was capable of. Vast seething rooms of flesh. The cloaking, cloying smell of amyl nitrate. The smell of semen and unwashed flesh, the room of a thousand orgasms. He had played disc jockey one night. They had wanted something different. The Stallion. Saw dust on the floor. The bar took up an entire block in the city's imagination. It was before the licensing laws and the thought police destroyed the city's night life, when entertainment really was entertainment and the bold step into New York style sex bars was the most exciting new thing happening.

He had seen things no one person should see. The communist puritans who now ruled the city and had overseen the death of fun would have been appalled. You came, you saw, you most definitely conquered. It was so dark there was no telling who was groping you. And then in the cold light they all began dying of AIDS, and the popularity of the sex bars plummeted. The police were everywhere. The new laws made it illegal to serve someone intoxicated by alcohol, which as many a determined drinker pointed out somewhat defeated the purpose of a night out. These days bouncers in the front of empty bars turn away anyone looking a bit under the weather. And the silent brooding suburbs plot their revenge.

These sweeping moments, when all kinds of acts were perpetrated, lived on only in memory; and decreasingly few of those. The Warehouse. The Store. The Dark Knight. Searching for love in all the wrong places, that's what it came down to. Tucked in the back of the Cross in the old days was The Venus Room, owned by notorious underworld figure Abe Saffron, related to a good friend of mine. Everyone who was into going out ended up there some time. And then of course The Purple Onion, another must see. Speed was 20 cents a capsule over the counter at the chemist, if you knew the right chemist. What were they doing selling to one so young?

And all this kaleidoscope, how did it telescope through to the grey days of yore? How could things have gone so far backward, become so grim? The traffic congestion builds and builds. This is Australia, you only have to try and you can achieve anything, the successful tell each other. But the truth is very different. Every spare cent has been hoovered off the populace; the big food chains, Woolworths, Coles, have destroyed local economies. Effort is not rewarded. Beyond the luxuriant, indeed astonishing wealth lining the harbour foreshore, stretched grim miles of suburban struggle. No one could cope; in the silent despair. The gum trees offered a sense of infinity from the Australian bush in otherwise featureless suburbs.

And he longed and he longed, for a different time, for a sense of purpose, for a breakthrough into a higher consciousness. Once there were butterflies and mushrooms on his jeans. Now he donned a tie and went to work like everybody else; the terrible dilemma of the baby boomers, or the 68ers as they are now being dismissively called, those who's lives and attitudes were forged at a time when Janis Joplin was belting down Southern Comfort and belting out her songs, Oh Lord, won't you give me, a Mercedes Benz. We scribbled Sylvia Plath poems on the walls of squats, signing them off as Sylvia Platitude. And we thought every step was a step to a different world, we were the revolution, living the dream. We desiccated our souls, plastered drunk, and watched the splintering sunrises, naively believing that every new insight was a tunnel to a grander, more exultant place, to freedom and a higher plane, the destiny of the human race.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/in-search-of-a-way-to-involve-all/2008/05/23/1211183108450.html

AMID the barrage of reviews, reports, inquiries, papers and strategies — not to mention that mega-thinkathon the 2020 Summit — in Kevin Rudd's first six months as Prime Minister, another was this week added to the mix: the Social Inclusion Board.

The concept of "social inclusion" has become almost as much a mantra of the Government as "working families". And it is equally ill defined.

Since Julia Gillard took to the podium in the heat of the election last year as Labor's spokeswoman for social inclusion, the term has been inserted into copious amounts of text penned by Labor speechwriters.

Their words seem to be resonating. Despite keeping a room packed with hundreds of Australia's leading welfare people waiting for 30 minutes at the Australian Council of Social Service conference last month, Gillard, now Deputy Prime Minister, received a rock star's reception.

A more socially inclusive society. It all sounds so warm and fuzzy. But what does it actually mean? Bleeding-heart spin from the old left or a radical rethink of how we shape social and economic policy?

This week, a group of thinkers ("This isn't a bleeding hearts club," stresses Eddie McGuire, one of the included) sought to nut out precisely who are the socially excluded. The 14 members of the new Social Inclusion Board met in Broadmeadows, a suburb that quickly springs to mind when thinking about pockets of disadvantage. They came up with three priorities: jobless families — the apparent antithesis of "working families" — children at high risk of disadvantage, and "locational disadvantage" a la Broadmeadows.

http://www.geelongadvertiser.com.au/article/2008/05/27/14365_opinion.html

THE polls might have his popularity above 70 per cent, closing in on Bob Hawke's stellar performance of the early 1980s, but Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's honeymoon with the electorate seems to be cooling.

A range of issues are coming into focus which present a variety of potential problems for his government and, had it the wherewithal to stop its in-fighting, opportunities for the coalition opposition.

Not the least of these must be the impatience within the trade union movement at the Federal Government's sluggishness in winding back the previous Liberal government's industrial laws.

If there was a single factor that characterised Labor's campaign and victory at last year's election, it was workplace laws. But with local unionists marshalling for a rally later this week to complain about construction workers' rights, it seems clear workplace laws remain an issue with the party faithful.

Of course, unions scrapped with Labor during the election campaign and may simply be pushing their barrow but their workplace complaints are hardly the only problems facing Mr Rudd.

Pensioners have voiced their displeasure at the recent federal Budget's failure to tackle their needs and they've attracted considerable profile doing so. Concerns are rising within environmental groups about the Federal Government's commitment to reducing greenhouse emissions; Aboriginal groups are already calling for a new `sorry' to address ongoing intervention difficulties; the private health sector is alarmed at Medicare levy threshold changes; while rising petrol and food prices, along with interest rates, present chronic problems for the Government.
Weekend reports that futures trading in oil remains buoyant as far ahead as 2016 point to ongoing problems in that regard _ not that this should be particularly surprising _ as well as the industry and consumer costs so closely aligned to transport costs.



Newport Beach.

Signs Of Hope

*



What Friedrich Hayek called the "fatal conceit" -- the idea that government can know the future's possibilities and can and should control the future's unfolding -- is the left's agenda. The left exists to enlarge the state's supervision of life, narrowing individual choices in the name of collective goods. Hence the left's hostility to markets. And to automobiles -- people going wherever they want whenever they want.

Today's "green left" is the old "red left" revised. Marx, a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist, prophesied deepening class conflict but thought that history's violent dialectic would culminate in a revolution that would usher in material abundance and such spontaneous cooperation that the state would wither away.

The green left preaches pessimism: Ineluctable scarcities (of energy, food, animal habitat, humans' living space) will require a perpetual regime of comprehensive rationing. The green left understands that the direct route to government control of almost everything is to stigmatize, as a planetary menace, something involved in almost everything -- carbon.

Environmentalism is, as Lawson writes, an unlimited "license to intrude." "Eco-fundamentalism," which is "the quasi-religion of green alarmism," promises "global salvationism." Onward, green soldiers, into preventive war...
George F. Will
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/21/AR2008052102428.html

I’ve never put much stock in this argumentation for leading a religious life, anyway (nonpunitive theologies would seem to throw a kink in this ordering). Conservative naysayers, however, have begun demonizing the ethics of saving the planet with the same moralizing fervor that often accompanies truly religious fundamentalism. George Will furthers this new line of atttack in an odious column...
http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/environmentandenergy/archive/2008/05/24/environmental-fundamental-ism-s.aspx




Well how cruel was that, he shrugged, as they moved through distorted vision into a parallel world, where his own heart broken and diseased psychosis could rally against the tide, overcome all, step into the sunshine. A thousand fresh starts. A rallying cry. A beginning which had no end. He was determined not to make the mistakes of the past; but there was little that could change. He was shocked by what he had seen. IN the depths were different shallows, shadows of former selves and warm hearted addicts. They dribbled on us. WE had had it all confirmed. There was no way the future could be ours. We were deeply psychotic; and the plain Jane world around us could only be of great assistance.

The bars flashed; a sequence of happier days. It's not going to end today, they said. You look like you're carrying the world on your shoulders. It's the pain, he said, it's wearing me down. Into psychosis. Into old age. He wanted comfort of a different form. He was pleased to be greeted at the gate. Exercises in automatic writing produced nothing but gibberish; you couldn't have been more certain. It was the bars, he guessed, that gave him the greatest hearts; all that glory washed away. They were so infinitely proud; and they downed glass after glass. He smoked in the alley out the back; and further down the hill, the pond with the giant gold fish where he used to linger; looking up at the warm glow of electric light that came from the apartments, from people with somewhere to live.

These days had been long and hard, but in retrospect seemed like some enormous adventure. He was pleased at what had happened, the devotion, that proud glory, the creepy hands, the absolute drunkenness. Other times there would be other solutions; but here he could see the only solution was to pretend to be a normal person, to act like everyone else. They didn't have to know his head was splintering with light, the world was dancing in a zillion colours, rivers of ecstasy shivered through him and away, as if all of our destinies were wrapped into these tiny moments. Cruel? Only if you allowed them to hurt you. The timing was all wrong. He was too young to get back into the bar; to drink legally. It all depended on who was behind the bar; and whether the cops had been around.

There's been another police crackdown, this time focusing on the nightclubs around Kings Cross, the city's only real red light district. Any aberrance is pounced upon in a hideous conformity communist in its style. All done, supposedly, for our own good. We fought to be different; gladly paraded our difference, shoved everything in their face, painted the fence multi-coloured, danced till dawn. The last thing we wanted was to be like everybody else, or to act like everybody else. It wasn't right. They represented the worst our society could offer. Nobody wanted to be like them, the mainstream, with their dark suits and conservative attitudes. And now the coating of conformism has become almost total, a think layer of lacquer which made everyone the same. There was no difference. No one stood up and said they were proud not to run with the pack. Think outside the square and be squashed, it was as simple as that.



http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=64734

By Bob Unruh
© 2008 WorldNetDaily


More than 31,000 scientists across the U.S. – including more than 9,000 Ph.D.s in fields such as atmospheric science, climatology, Earth science, environment and dozens of other specialties – have signed a petition rejecting "global warming," the assumption that the human production of greenhouse gases is damaging Earth's climate.

"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate," the petition states. "Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."

The Petition Project actually was launched nearly 10 years ago, when the first few thousand signatures were assembled. Then, between 1999 and 2007, the list of signatures grew gradually without any special effort or campaign.

But now, a new effort has been conducted because of an "escalation of the claims of 'consensus,' release of the movie 'An Inconvenient Truth' by Mr. Al Gore, and related events," according to officials with the project.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0805/S00122.htm


Global warming hysteria: how the pendulum has swung

It has become commonplace knowledge, and is unchallenged, that global average temperature has not increased since 1998. This corresponds to a 9-year period during which the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, in contrast, did increase, and that by almost 5%.

The greenhouse hypothesis - which asserts that carbon dioxide increases of human origin will cause dangerous global warming - is clearly invalidated by these data.

As if that were not enough, a leading computer modelling team has recently published a paper in Nature which acknowledges what climate rationalists (the so-called “sceptics”) have always asserted. Which is that, contrary to IPCC assessments, any human influence on global temperature is so small that it cannot yet be differentiated from natural cycles of climate change. The same modellers have even predicted (after the start of the event, of course) that cooling will now occur for at least the next few years. Mortal strike two against dangerous, human-caused warming.

At this news, the rare balanced commentaries that hitherto have been but a trickle through cracks in the monolithic dam of climate alarmism have coalesced into a steady, fissured flow, and there is an imminent likelihood of total dam collapse. Interestingly, at the same time, the fierce discussion about the pros and cons of dangerous human-caused change that has formerly been conducted almost exclusively on the internet (including particularly blogs and video outlets like YouTube) is starting to spread to the more mainstream press.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/719126/brr-the-climate-cools-for-realitydeniers.thtml

I have previously written about the work of Lawrence Solomon for Canada’s National Post. He has been regularly charting in his column the ever-increasing number of climate scientists around the world who have been either crying foul about the man-made global warming scam or, having initially signed up to it, have been having second thoughts about it. This was a journey of discovery for him, to put it mildly; he had previously been inclined to believe the claims that ‘deniers’ were oil industry stooges, since he himself had worked for an anti-nuclear energy group and so was duly cynical about the way that industry’s scientists could twist the truth to suit their paymasters. But then to his astonishment he discovered that, when it came to MMGW, the scientists who were corrupt weren’t pushing the boat out for big business but for its holier-than-thou green challengers.

Now he has written a book, provocatively entitled The Deniers, in which he shows that not only is the fabled climate change ‘consensus’ itself a sham but the so-called MMGW ‘deniers’ are by far the more accomplished and distinguished scientists than those pushing the theory as a settled and incontrovertible truth. A number of them indeed, are so eminent they were used as experts by the IPCC – but then came to realise that this was an innately corrupted process and that even some of their own work was being abused and distorted in order to promulgate the false doctrine of MMGW.

Among those he cites are Dr Edward Wegman, chairman of the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics and the granddaddy of statisticians, who administered the definitive coup de grace to the ‘hockey stick curve’ research that underpinned the whole IPCC doomsday prognosis by showing that its author Dr Michael Mann (an impressive authority in his own field of paleoclimatology) had made a catastrophic statistical error (and had thus managed to ‘lose’ several hundred years of climate history including the Little Ice Age) which vitiated his entire study;


Major, Estie and Sam on Newport Beach.

Blast Through Black Cockatoo

*



When they reached the mountain's summit, even Clancy took a pull,
It well might make the boldest hold their breath,
The wild hop scrub grew thickly, and the hidden ground was full
Of wombat holes, and any slip was death.
But the man from Snowy River let the pony have his head,
And he swung his stockwhip round and gave a cheer,
And he raced him down the mountain like a torrent down its bed,
While the others stood and watched in very fear.

He sent the flint stones flying, but the pony kept his feet,
He cleared the fallen timber in his stride,
And the man from Snowy River never shifted in his seat-
It was grand to see that mountain horseman ride.
Through the stringy barks and saplings, on the rough and broken ground,
Down the hillside at a racing pace he went;
And he never drew the bridle till he landed safe and sound,
At the bottom of that terrible descent.

He was right among the horses as they climbed the further hill,
And the watchers on the mountain standing mute,
Saw him ply the stockwhip fiercely, he was right among them still,
As he raced across the clearing in pursuit.
Then they lost him for a moment, where two mountain gullies met
In the ranges, but a final glimpse reveals
On a dim and distant hillside the wild horses racing yet,
With the man from Snowy River at their heels.

Banjo Patterson, The Man From Snowy River.



If he was free, if all the journeys had been brought to nought, if the raucous squawk of the black cockatoos meant anything, here at the end of days, in the infinite brush of wings. The group of black cockatoos settled in the trees. They were up there, wild, a part of our days but clearly from an ancient time, a different Australia, somewhere impossibly old. It began because I kept asking the tourist information girl at Bathurst, or was it Orange, is there anywhere cheaper, anywhere cheaper? And eventually she came up with Wombat Hilltop Cottages, which had recently listed.

I took my mother and my kids there, in the freezing cold, and we huddled there away from the storm of everything else that was happening, the evil that had overtaken our lives in an unforgiving city. To the victor the spoils, and we had not been the victors. We had stood out on the wrong side not just of thought fashion, but didn't have the money to protect ourselves against the consequences of unfashionable views; or simply to be on the wrong side of the great gender debate which was ripping families apart as pompous judges lied and lied and lied, leaving ordinary souls destroyed as they tried to pick up the pieces.

And so it was that they came to be at Wombat Hilltop, exactly halfway between Lithgow and Mudgee, on the top of the hill. There was a fence, and a road that led away from the main road. Even here there were remnants of the evil. One of the most corrupt, most shockingly dishonest psychs in the system, this cadre of so-called "experts" willing to say anything for money, willing to distort their biases in return for millions of dollars a year, appallingly dishonest people prepared to say or write anything as long as it satisfied the feminist lawyers and their extremist anti-male agenda in Legal Aid, owned a house out here. He had never confronted this level of corruption in public life before, not on a personal level; and was shocked to the core.

Why were they so slack, why did they write such rubbish, why did they lie so easily? Five thousand a pop for an interview that only lasted minutes and a report that couldn't have taken half an hour to write, that's why. And this was gathered into the court as evidence; and usually people gave up after these dishonest "wholly suspect" reports were delivered, often, as in his case, at the last minute, anything to throw him off. There was no recourse; for the simple reason that these were the court's favourite experts, nothing a mere lay person said would have any effect. Especially not a lay person with a history.

And so he became the victim of fate, the victim of a tide of circumstance that made it almost impossible to protect his own children, the children he had brought up. The same shonky arseholes who had caused him such grief retired with honours years later; with volumes of praise from even the Attorney General himself; these shonky idiots who couldn't even get simple facts like the date right. That was the level of incompetence and blatant dishonesty that we were dealing with; and hence sought shelter at Wombat Hilltops; away from everything, the threats of the traffic, the brutal nonsense that had destroyed our lives; and most certainly our faith in the judiciary.

It was not an isolated case. Around the world millions of dads were treated with the same contempt, dare to disagree with the prevailing orthodoxy and you would pay the price. But here it struck home even further; as he obsessively read everything on the topic and prayed and prayed that this couldn't really be so; that people really weren't this dishonest. But of course they were. High in the trees, the squawking of the cockatoos took them back to a different time, pre-European, even pre-man. The cottages were set in a stark, barren little valley that time forgot; and when the black cockatoos flew over each evening, as they had no doubt done for tens of thousands of years, it was as if they had entered a primitive, primordial time.

He would wake up shouting in anger. The same voice went round and round and round i his head, obsessively. He reported the shonks as high up the food chain as he could; and got nowhere. He dobbed in the shonky psych to the Health Care Complaints Commission, and they thanked him for his contribution. The corrupt bastard just kept on going, writing rubbish, destroying lives, making millions. So many of the fathers, faced with the loss of their children, suffered post traumatic stress syndrome. They became slow, they stuttered, the same thoughts went round and round in their heads. Outraged at the injustice, disillusioned with everything they had once believed, paying taxes to pay the salaries of those who fought against them, treated them with contempt, waged war against them. All supposedly for the greater good. Or at least, for the "best interests of the child", the most dishonest, most brutally dishonest claim of all. While the black cockatoos flew overhead, squawking, their lonely, infinite cry disappearing into the ancient hills.





THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/burmamyanmar/2022402/Myanmar-cyclone-Burma-junta-tells-survivors-to-go-home.html

The Burmese government stood accused of fresh acts of callousness over Cyclone Nargis yesterday after claims that officials had ordered survivors to tear down temporary shelters built along roads through the disaster zone.

In the absence of proper help from their own government, tens of thousands of people rendered homeless by the storm have erected makeshift roadside huts along the raised concrete roads that run through the Irrawaddy delta. Their location means they are less at risk from further flooding, and puts them on hand for donations from any passing aid convoy.

Now, despite claims by the Burmese government that it is doing more to assist with relief efforts, aid workers say that police in the delta areas have been ordering destitute villagers to dismantle the shelters, apparently unhappy at the image which the sprawling roadside shanty towns presents to the outside world.

Occupants have been told to return to their homes in outlying areas, even though many are scared to do so for fear of another cyclone striking. "We are afraid of staying in our former villages – even the dogs are scared when the wind blows," one woman said.


http://business.theage.com.au/roll-up-folks-see-the-dollar-fly-20080524-2hux.html

WHEN American author Washington Irving coined the phrase "the almighty dollar" in his 1836 work The Creole Village it was a reference to his native currency. But these days, anyone quoting the saying might well be talking about the Australian dollar.

Driven up by strong commodities markets and high interest rates, the Aussie dollar is on a roll and is soon set to reach parity with its more famous namesake on the other side of the Pacific.

"I think it's a matter of 'when' rather than 'if' we reach parity with the US dollar; and it will probably be in the next few months, if not weeks," says Shane Oliver, head of the economics team at AMP.

And while most financiers say that parity is just an arbitrary figure that is essentially meaningless in itself, the results of a strong Australian currency resonate powerfully throughout the economy and touches everyone.

Depending on your view, the surging dollar is either a great chance to grab an overseas bargain or a worrying development that will rob local companies of the chance to compete effectively abroad and could endanger employment.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/arts/gallery-under-angry-siege/2008/05/24/1211183177189.html

THE owner of the Sydney art gallery at the centre of a storm over photographs of naked teenagers was holed up inside it yesterday after receiving violent threats.

Messages left on the answering machine at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in the inner-city suburb of Paddington threatened to "burn the building down".

The owner, Roslyn Oxley, remained in the gallery yesterday after police on Friday seized photographic works by world renowned artist Bill Henson.

The seized photos depicted boys and girls, some as young as 12, naked in dark, moody photographs.

The police removal of the photographs provoked a nationwide outcry over the sexualisation of children in the media and art worlds.

Yesterday Tony Oxley, the shaken husband of Roslyn, spoke outside the gallery where his wife was rehanging the remaining photographs of the exhibition - for a possible reopening as early as Tuesday - before flying to an art fair in Switzerland.

"There are some crackpots out there," Mr Oxley said. "They have left threats on the phone. We have had threats to burn the building down. It is very worrying."

He said the artist was taking the issue very hard, and he and Ms Oxley were concerned about his welfare.