March of the Polar Bears
By George F. Will
Thursday, May 22, 2008
A preventive war worked out so well in Iraq that Washington last week launched another. The new preventive war -- the government responding forcefully against a postulated future threat -- has been declared on behalf of polar bears, the first species whose supposed jeopardy has been ascribed to global warming.
The Interior Department, bound by the Endangered Species Act, has declared polar bears a "threatened" species because they might be endangered "in the foreseeable future," meaning 45 years. (Note: 45 years ago, the now-long-forgotten global cooling menace of 35 years ago was not yet foreseen.) The bears will be threatened if the current episode of warming, if there really is one, is, unlike all the previous episodes, irreversible, and if it intensifies, and if it continues to melt sea ice vital to the bears, and if the bears, unlike in many previous warming episodes, cannot adapt.
Because of restrictions on hunting, polar bears might be more numerous today than ever and might be twice as numerous as they were three decades ago -- when the media were fanning frenzy about global cooling. (Science magazine, March 1975, reported "the approach of a full-blown 10,000-year ice age.") As Nigel Lawson, a former British cabinet member, writes in his new book, "An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming":
"Over the past two-and-a-half-million years, a period during which the planet's climate fluctuated substantially, remarkably few of the earth's millions of plant and animal species became extinct. This applies not least, incidentally, to polar bears, which have been around for millennia, during which there is ample evidence that polar temperatures have varied considerably."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/21/AR2008052102428.html
It was so true, the malignant chaos that had enveloped these neighbourhoods was preparatory. There was worse to come. They were innocent in their own disease; and cornered, shockingly cornered, in their own lives. We can hear the drunken shouts all night, every night. There's always an argument. They're always screaming at each other. Sometimes I strain to hear the words, to understand what the drunken brawls are all about; but mostly all you can hear are slurred, drunken, indecipherable shouts. It's the same across a lot of aboriginal Australia, often hidden, unnoticed, ignored in the leafy suburbs. Our new socialist government has found themselves a worthy groups of victims, and are pouring yet more billions of dollars down the sink hole of black white relations.
Almost the entirety of Australia's indigenous nation are on welfare payments; supplemented by hundreds of millions, yeah billions of dollars of extra programs. There isn't any way to sort any of this. Well meaning commentators, promptly dismissed as right wing, talk about the damage of passive welfare; of entire lives spent on the public tit. They blame the aboriginal men; but there isn't a single solitary program for the men; it's all for the women and children. These utterly destroyed traditional societies have descended into chaos; aided and abetted by the left; aided and abetted by hundreds of well meaning whites, out there sacrificing their energies, sometimes their entire lives, to the cause of lifting up aboriginal people.
We see the worst of it here. The other morning I warm up the car and pull out into the traffic, on the way to work. There's a police car in front of me; and a police car behind. Even for this area it was an unusual level of police activity. I pass the front of the Block, about a hundred metres from where I live, and the entire front is blocked by a wall of police. As I pull up at the lights I notice the police car next to me is full of aboriginal people, mostly kids. Then I notice the same is true of the car behind me. They don't look like they're under arrest. Later it emerges they were witnesses to the murder of a 23-year-old bloke, and they're being taken up the stations to give statements.
You wouldn't know where your f'n kids are, you dumb f'n c..., they shout in the back lane. Least I know where my f'n kids are. They're up in f'n Lismore. We hear it all the time. We see it all the time. Recently, about six months ago, there was a particularly bad rape down in the derelict houses. About a dozen men were involved. The details of the victim were confused: a white woman stupid enough to walk through their late at night; some hopeless drunk woman trying to score. It was just another stain on a sea of stains, blood on the ground, little knots of people gathering, dealing, arguing.
I walk past the strange half-cast aboriginal woman with the dyed blonde hair, a junky in full flight; I see her almost every day, sometimes mad, sometimes talking animatedly to a John, and I can hear her promising that the gear is good and there's no way on God's earth she swears she would ever rip him off; not her. She's not a dog. And yesterday she was begging outside the train station. University is in full swing and thousands of naive, often well off students pour out of the station every day. They're soft targets. I walk back and the police are at her; you've been asking for money, they say. Aaaah bullshit, she says, exasperated. But it's a common sight, the white police hassling the local aboriginals.
And what do you do? Nothing that happens around here would be allowed anywhere else. The dealing builds up, the knots of boys at the top, ready to sell anything you want. Then there's another big arrest involving hundreds of police, and for a few days everything goes quiet. Something like $36 million dollars gets poured down into the Block every year in welfare programs; and there's almost no evidence of where it goes. They built a multi-million dollar state of the art community centre down there, and almost no one in the area is either brave enough to go there, or wants to go down there because you have to walk through groups of threatening boys selling drugs. So, funnily enough, the $4.5 million community the Council launched so proudly remains almost empty.
There's a very old saying: the worse thing you can give an alcoholic or addict is tea and sympathy. Does that apply here, where the culture of street alcoholics dominates the streets? Do you lock them up, demand they get a job, sober up? Do you treat every one the same. Or allow the rest of the population to work their butts off so one section of the community can live almost entirely on welfare and crime. Is that the way to go? Make any move and you are condemned as a racist. This government, shamefully, has reintroduced the permit system in remote communities, which is an appalling piece of apartheid which separates these communities from the rest of the country, conveniently out of sight, all supposedly for their own benefit.
These things are destined to failure; and in a short historical frame represents the complete failure of collectivism. We don't work together. We get called white c's. We remember what happened, remember the way things were, and shake our heads. All is lost. The male of the species is extinct; and now that feminism has derided and scorned masculinity and male traits for decades, articles in the papers lament the loss of the traditional Aussie male. It's pathetic, truly pathetic, the contradictions. Had he swung to the right? They asked me in the car, what's your politics?
I was marshmallow left, just a dippy guy who liked to write, he said. And then a decade ago I hit the Family Court, an entirely Stalinist style institution where truth is irrelevant, housing some of the most dishonest people I had ever met in my life. Who couldn't have cared less, as I fought and cried and tried desperately to protect the children I had brought up, for the kids themselves, shonky lawyers running round spouting rubbish about the "best interests of the child"; children they had never met. It was the brutality, farcical processes and rampant corruption that astonished me the most; and obsessed me enough to dare to speak out. The computer's running much faster than normal, dad, my son said yesterday afternoon after school. It's usually a sign the police are monitoring it, I said.
It's a democracy, he said, that's not very fair. It's the way it is, I said. Speak up and forever pay the price. This is the country I once loved so much; which I thought was the heart and soul of the world, was an exciting, even thrilling place to be, the heart of progressive attitudes, modernity, liberalism. A good place to be; amongst good, well intentioned people. A place that was genuinely progressive in its attitudes, which promoted a new way of being, which was all we had ever fought for. We threw our faith into the government, we believed they could work for our good, that they were there for us. But now it's become all too clear; they're not there for us; these institutions do more harm than good; the millions, nay billions they rip off the populace are used against them; and we have now what we have: a parasitic bureaucracy, a despised and cynical political elite; a dysfunctional judiciary; and a people who no longer believe a word that's said to them. Good work guys and gals, good work.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/redfern-murder-teenager-charged/2008/05/23/1211183085197.html
Police have charged a teenager with the stabbing murder of a 23-year-old man at The Block in Redfern yesterday.
The teenager handed himself in to Parramatta Police Station today and was taken into custody, charged and refused bail, police said.
The 23-year-old man, from the North Coast of NSW, was visiting a house in Vine Street shortly after midnight when a fight erupted.
"It is alleged a number of people became involved in a physical altercation outside the premises, before one man was stabbed," police said.
The dead man suffered a single stab wound to his upper chest. He was rushed to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital where he was pronounced dead.
The 18-year-old man, from Redfern, is scheduled to appear at Parramatta Bail Court tomorrow.
http://news.theage.com.au/national/man-stabbed-to-death-in-sydneys-redfern-20080522-2h1z.html
A man was fatally stabbed in a dispute after a drinking party with friends in the Sydney suburb of Redfern overnight, police say.
The 23-year-old man suffered a single stab wound in his upper chest about midnight on Wednesday on Vine Street, in an area known as The Block.
Ambulance officers tried to resuscitate him after he was found lying in the road, but he was pronounced dead on arrival at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.
The man, from the NSW north coast, had been staying with friends in the area.
Detective Inspector Brad Monk said the man had been drinking with friends prior to his murder.
"Earlier in the evening this person had been drinking alcohol in company with a friend and they partied on at another location down here in The Block," Det Insp Monk told reporters at the scene.
"As a result, a number of males engaged in an altercation, and subsequently one male was stabbed in the chest area.
"We are still working the relationships out (between the men), but I believe a number of people involved in the incident are familiar with each other."
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/why-you-got-stuck-operation-avert/2008/05/13/1210444375757.html
Police today revealed why thousands were stuck for more than four hours in a Sydney traffic jam yesterday while a shot was fired during a chase.
It was all part of Operation Avert, a major three-day police action that led to 460 arrests, including more than 200 for outstanding warrants and 55 for breach of bail. Some 640 charges were laid.
A police officer fired at a stolen four-wheel-drive because its occupants drove towards a fellow policeman, police said today.
The shot was fired at the beginning of the pursuit through Redfern and down Parramatta Road yesterday, which involved up to 30 police cars, several undercover vehicles and a police helicopter.
Police said they spotted the allegedly stolen vehicle in the Redfern area during Operation Avert, a state-wide crackdown on outstanding offenders.
A check showed it had been linked to several unsolved armed robberies.
Police followed it and stopped it in Cleveland Street, Redfern. An officer approached and tried to speak to the driver. But the driver motored towards him, so another officer, fearing for his colleague's safety, fired a shot.
The pursuit ended in Strathfield, where it hit a stationary car. Three men tried to run. Two were arrested nearby, and the third was arrested during a raid on a unit block by heavily armed officers several hours later.
These pictures were taken on Wallamutta Rd., Newport, Sydney, near the house where I grew up.
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