Duped Into Believing

*



"Care to elaborate?"
"Only to say that everything you cherish, everything you work for, everything you hold precious will have its end. You are very proud of this intricate little community of yours, with its ten thousands habitats, its ticking clockwork mechanisms of absolute democracy. And perhaps in your own small way you are entitled to some of that pride. But it won't last for ever. One day, Prefect, there will be no Glitter Band...

"For now she hides, flitting furtively from shadow to shadow, surviving by her wits. She lives in your world, but her influence over it is limited. I believe she means to change that. She means to become more powerful. She will rip control of human affairs from your fumbling hands... You must be ready for her when she shows herself. She will move quickly, and you will not have much time to react."

Alastair Reynolds, The Prefect.

But do you know my problem?

It’s not just that I hate mobs, knowing there’s no wisdom in them.

It’s not even that I’m stubborn by nature, and like the answer Albert Einstein gave to One Hundred Authors Against Einstein—that all it took to defeat his Theory of Relativity was not 100 scientists but just one fact.

My real problem is simply that in my 48 years I’ve lived through so many pack-panic attacks over nothing that I won’t fall so easily for the next.

Your parents or grandparents may know what I mean. Go ask if they remember all those plagues we were told would surely smite us if we didn’t sign some cheque, praise some god, or vote for some politician.

Ask if they remember scares like the nuclear winter, DDT, mega-famines, global cooling, acid rain, Repetitive Strain Injury, bird flu, the millennium bug, SARS, toxic PVC, poisonous breast implants, the end of oil, death by fluoride, the Chernobyl doom, the BSE beef that would eat your brains, and other oldies and mouldies.

It’s amazing we’re still alive after all that, let alone richer and healthier.

Andrew Bolt.



It's as if they were all there, the friends that he had acquired, the young, earnest journalists he had admired. It was an African state at war, Nubia, which he had never previously heard of. He had engineered yet more time off from his job in Australia, although his predilection for the rest of the world, for a life beyond the narrow confines in which he had spent so long, was raising eyebrows back in the office. There was always some one, everyone had a boss, and he too was controlled by the vicious sagas that made up modern life, the cruel contempt that was displayed as they all searched for the top, climbing over each other to get that great, well paying job.

The trouble was, the plundered weren't being paid enough to make it worth their while. They looked around at their lives, paying ridiculous mortgages and peddling furiously to stand still, and they realised there was no longer any point. They fled in their thousands from the chaos that Sydney had become, leaving broken dreams, even broken families, behind. They packed whatever possessions they had and drove into a new life, usually northwards, into the warmth, the beaches, to enact their own sea change in a coastal village somewhere, the crash of the surf replacing the drone of the traffic, living on benefits like everybody else. What was the point of doing otherwise?

The trouble for the Australian punter was that they were betrayed by the left as much as the right. They were curious and slow, and put up with a great deal before they finally revolted. They were stripped by mortgage brokers and financial advisers, by petrol companies and grocery cartels. They were stripped by public servants who were paid several times what they were to do nothing but stalk corridors with their clip boards, filling their days with endless useless meetings, achieving nothing. It amazed him, always, how tolerant they were of corruption, how indifferent they were to the outcomes of their policies, as long as the victims were unfashionable ones.

And so it was that he found himself in a ragged African state, away from everything. He was at the capital's bus station, watching the media, many of them westerners, gathering in a familiar routine. He had seen it for years, the gathering of the pack prior to any major announcement or event, or after some disaster, large or small. The camera crews set up their tripods, the reporters swapped notes. There had been a coup and everyone was on edge. The shrill ringing of the rickshaws filled the air. Hawkers shouted out, extolling their wares. Indifferent, but nonetheless dangerous soldiers stood in the corners, hoisting their guns, scratching their crotches, watching the westerness with a curious, semi-hostile air.

Who's coming, he asked one of the TV crew. Maybe he could do some work while he was on holidays; that would be typical of him. The opposition leader, a cameraman replied, he's expected to be shot, probably right here in front of all of us. They don't give a rats. And Dan Box is coming too, on the same train. From The Guardian. He had got to know Dan during his stint in Australia, when he had stayed for several years and endeared himself to everybody for his straight up and down honesty, his thorough and complete decency. He had always joked with him, you'll be a professor of journalism at Cambridge one day, I'll come and visit you, when I'm an old man. You're already an old man, he would spark back, and they would laugh for no reason.

All around him the darkness and the wealth, the chaos of that vast continent, the seething cities, the stunning landscapes, the gorgeous mountains. The people filled every last pixel of his eye frame, and he admired the gleam of their dark skin, the bright white of their teeth flashing in dark faces, the ebony glow of the torrent, the wonderful clashes of colour from their bright bright clothes. He had never belong anywhere, except perhaps in remote mountain villages where he could never return, and he was sure of the danger in a new acceptance.

He thought he saw John O'Neil standing by a pole, surveying the scene, the chaos, the dust, the noise. In reality O'Neil had been a reporter on the Sydney Morning Herald in the 1980s, and had gone on to take a string of high profile public service jobs, the last being as head of Tourism NSW. Tourism went backwards after the Olympics, as a government which couldn't find it's way out of a paper bag failed to exploit the world wide interest that had flowed from the "best games ever". O'Neil took the fall for government incompetence, but had already made his fortune from Sydney real estate, and didn't need the job. As he drew closer he realised it was someone else, probably from one of the British networks. He went to speak to him, and then a shout went through the crowd. The train was coming.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://news.theage.com.au/national/iemma-wont-pressure-della-bosca-to-talk-20080630-2z7w.html

NSW Premier Morris Iemma says he will not pressure Labor MP John Della Bosca to speak to police about his role in the Iguanas nightclub fiasco, because to do so would interfere in the investigation.

News Ltd said Mr Della Bosca and his federal Labor MP wife Belinda Neal were expected to be interviewed by detectives on Monday, more than three weeks after the Gosford nightclub incident.

All the other major players have given their version of events to police, who are investigating the altercation between the couple and nightclub staff, and the conflicting statutory declarations produced in its wake.

Staff members involved in the incident at Iguanas incident on June 6 have reportedly already been interviewed by police.

But with the main players in the drama yet to be interviewed, Mr Iemma was asked why he had not pushed Mr Della Bosca to speak to police earlier.

"I have no evidence that he is not (co-operating)," Mr Iemma said.

"The police will determine the course of the investigation and the people that they wish to interview and the manner that that will take."

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23945975-5005961,00.html

NIGHTCLUB staff involved in an argument with a Labor power couple should be commended for their courage in giving their side of the story, Federal Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson says.

Staff from the Iguanas nightclub, on the NSW Central Coast, will tell their side of the story on the Channel Nine's A Current Affair tonight. Nine has refused to say if the nightclub's staff had been paid for the interviews.

NSW MP John Della Bosca was stood down as Education Minister after he and wife, federal Labor MP Belinda Neal, were involved in an altercation with Iguanas' staff on June 6.

Neither MP has given evidence to the police, but their public comments that they did nothing wrong conflict with statutory declarations by nightclub staff and with statements by a former staffer of Belinda Neal, who was present during the incident.

Ms Neal has been accused of threatening the staff and threatening to have the "f***ing licence" of the club.

Dr Nelson commended the staff today for going public with their version of what happened.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23942337-30538,00.html

TODAY is the unofficial start of the Government's July festival of climate-change policy. Professor Ross Garnaut opens the show today when he delivers the long-awaited draft report of his climate-change review to be issued publicly at the Canberra Press Club on Friday.

A day earlier, economist and Reserve Bank board member Warwick McKibbin will issue a paper questioning the effectiveness of the Kyoto model of national timetables and targets. McKibbin's model for a hybrid tax and trading scheme was dispatched in a speech given by Garnaut earlier this month, so the timing is curious.

Next week, climate change heads the agenda of the group of eight major economies (G8) meeting in Japan although oil prices may have something to say about that. And then we're back to Canberra for the release of the Government's climate-change green paper, over which Cabinet has been burning the midnight oil in the past few weeks.

The Government promised plenty of action on climate change at last year's election and basked in the warm glow of an electorate duped into believing it was just another moral eco-challenge, like stopping the Franklin Dam or commercial whaling.

It's got a lot colder since then.

Done With All Things

*



I am done with all things, I give it unto you.'
So he flung the bread and the strips of
bacon among the beggars, and they fought
with many cries until the last scrap was
eaten. But meanwhile the friars nailed the
glee man to his cross, and set it upright in
the hole, and shovel led the earth in at the
foot, and trampled it level and hard. So
then they went away, but the beggars stared
on, sitting round the cross. But when the
sun was sinking, they also got up to go, for
the air was getting chilly. And as soon as
they had gone a little way, the wolves, who
had been showing themselves on the edge
of a neighbouring coppice, came nearer,
and the birds wheeled closer and closer.

'Stay, outcasts, yet a little while,' the cruc-
ified one called in a weak voice to the beg-
gars, 'and keep the beasts and the birds
from me.' But the beggars were angry
because he had called them outcasts, so
they threw stones and mud at him, and
went their way. Then the wolves gathered
at the foot of the cross, and the birds flew
lower and lower. And presently the birds
lighted all at once upon his head and arms
and shoulders, and began to peck at him,
and the wolves began to eat his feet. 'Out-
casts,' he moaned, 'have you also turned
against the outcast?'
WB Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
WB Yeats

Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a little.
From Yeats last poem.



Oh how did it get to this, where the only rational response was retreat into fantasy, where cruel bureaucrats and unfeeling politicians created havoc, and no one cared, no one spoke out, no one belled the cat? It had become an impossible place to reside. We were caught in unfeeling arms, dreams peopled by drooling savants, savage days, cold light, cruel nights. We could only praise the memory of another era, look back on a time when men spoke out for men, when the simpering betrayals were not absolute. Creeping, crawling, they plundered in their careless way, they savagely imposed their beliefs and sneered whole heartedly at those who dared to disagree.

All was lost, lost, when a savage day sloped towards Bethlehem, when cries of discontent were not ignored, when people genuinely did care for the working class. Now it had all become idealised, and most of them wouldn't have known what a day's work consisted of. He was saddened by the discontent permeating every wall and flower. Twenty three hundred people a week cross the border fleeing into Queensland, Richard said last night. When I made the decision to go I thought I was the only one, but every one's going.

Sydney has become impossible, he replied. The traffic, the chaos, the parking, the stress, the corruption. Corruption is everywhere, Trevor said, laughing at the memory of white shoe gangs, the Gold Coast spivs. Every one's leaving, I chimed in. It's not just that the government is so hopeless and horrible. It's the living things. The rents, the mortgages. The struggle just to survive. No one can make ends meet any more. It's just become impossible. People are sitting in these endless traffic queues to get to work, jammed for hours, paying massive fees on the toll ways, nothing adds up, they just can't survive.

We all agreed, there in the winter night in the heart of Redfern, here where the scummy asphalt lined roads intersect with the mysterious cross hatched networks of terrace lined streets, here where every thing comes to us and the heartless city encircles us. Could we be free, could we make our own darkness last? he asked. And of everything he had conceived, it was now escape that made the most sense. Every letter is bad news, a bill, harassment. Nothing comforts us. Nothing says I'm sorry, I've made your life hell.

They're talking now about the failure of the Rudd government: the test of a good government is whether or not it's made the lives of ordinary people better. And on that he has completely failed. More disasters are to come, as the left feeds on its own successes. They talked of transparency and accountability, of open government, but it was all nothing but words. They are as secretive and as unaccountable as any government we have ever seen. They are cruel and indifferent to the consequences of their own theory; and us mere plebs just get in the way of their grand ideas, their emoting over the country's "most vulnerable".

Facts haven't met theory for a long time, there isn't a plague of domestic violence like they tell us there is, there isn't an obesity crisis, the planet is not warming, women don't get paid less for doing the same jobs, but all of these lies are peddled at us every day; and no one cares. The obscene difficulty of living in this city has made much and many of our lives impossible, and cruel heart, cruel indifference, nobody cares. Richard's leaving to start a new life. His "babe" and their five kids have already gone, are already settling into the Sunshine Coast. It was his last night and we could feel the prickly gloss of the divine, poking into our consciousness. The walls glistened and the sky echoed.

And we said our quiet farewells. I don't ever want to come back to Sydney, he declared. I don't ever want to see it again. We're left here, slowly dying, and the darkness of the city has enveloped our souls. Think of the power behind you, not the power in front, he said. And all crawled into blackness of the night, all crawled away from the cruel tentacles of the state, all was savaged in darkness and in glory, and all was cruel and vacant. This was the city the socialists had created; they had no soul, only the sleazy convictions of their own pack mentality. There was no safe space, not here. And all was lost, in darkness and in chaos.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gxvUh_AgnZN7SZ1U7PplUvo_HVHA

HARARE (AFP) — Robert Mugabe awaited Saturday confirmation of victory in Zimbabwe's one-man election and prepared for a rapid inauguration as US President George W. Bush ordered new sanctions against the Harare regime.

Although officials had still to declare results from the 210 constituencies, counting had been completed and the tallies were being collated.

"After the closing of polling stations yesterday (Friday), presiding officers started counting. That process has been completed," Utloile Silaigwana, a spokesman for the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, told reporters.

Mugabe is certain of a landslide victory after opposition leader and first round winner Morgan Tsvangirai boycotted Friday's run-off poll.

While Zimbabwe had to wait five weeks for the results in the first round on March 29, government sources said 84-year-old Mugabe was expected to be inaugurated on Sunday before flying off to an African Union summit in Egypt.

"The inauguration is tomorrow at 10 am (0800 GMT)," said one source close to Mugabe.

A visitor to State House, his official residence, said tents were being set up for the ceremony which will mark the start of his sixth term.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/28/us/politics/28unity.html?ei=5087&em=&en=300f861c599783f1&ex=1214798400&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1214686013-PJ7UrHdMKbsS7sAiMaby3w

UNITY, N.H. — Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton set off on their maiden political voyage on Friday, trading their rivalry from the presidential primary battle for a newfound display of harmony intended to set a fresh tone for any Democrats still harboring bitterness from their grueling duel.

It was a day of choreographed unity — their destination was a rally here in this small western New Hampshire town — with the two senators appearing together before the cameras for the first time. Three weeks after suspending her campaign, Mrs. Clinton renewed her endorsement and pledged to do all she could to help Democrats win the White House in the fall.

“Unity is not only a beautiful place, it’s a wonderful feeling, isn’t it?” Mrs. Clinton said. “I know what we start here in this field of unity will end on the steps of the Capitol when Barack Obama takes the oath of office.”

Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton strode onto an outdoor stage here, arm-in-arm, waving to a friendly crowd. Their messages complemented one another, as did his blue tie and her blue pantsuit.

“For sixteen months, Senator Clinton and I have shared the stage as rivals,” Mr. Obama said. “But today, I couldn’t be happier and more honored that we’re sharing it as allies in the effort to bring this country a new and better day.”

http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/story/0,26278,23937923-5013560,00.html

THE Bahamas has been declared a no-fly zone over Greg Norman's $2million wedding today as part of a security crackdown to protect the VIP guest list.

Norman has virtually taken over the small Commonwealth country for his lavish nuptials with tennis great Chris Evert, renting an entire island and enlisting the Bahamas police force to ensure intruders and the press stayed away.

With guests including former US presidents George Bush Sr and Bill Clinton, authorities on Friday granted a request to ban aircraft from flying over Paradise Island where the wedding was to take place.

Clinton is a long-time friend of Norman and Bush is a friend of Evert, having regularly played in her annual charity tennis tournament in Florida.

Secret service teams assembled on the island and on Friday the resort's private beach was swarming with uniformed police and security officers.

Lost Glory Moral Decay

*




http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aginatur/hotair.htm

n fact, there is every doubt whether any global warming at all is occurring at the moment, let alone human-caused warming.

For leading politicians to be asserting to the contrary indicates something is very wrong with their chain of scientific advice, for they are clearly being deceived. That this should be the case is an international political scandal of high order which, in turn, raises the question of where their advice is coming from.

In Australia, the advice trail leads from government agencies such as the CSIRO and the Australian Greenhouse Office through to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations.

As leading economist David Henderson has pointed out, it is extremely dangerous for an unelected and unaccountable body like the IPCC to have a monopoly on climate policy advice to governments. And even more so because, at heart, the IPCC is a political and not a scientific agency.

Australia does not ask the World Bank to set its annual budget and neither should it allow the notoriously alarmist IPCC to set its climate policy.

It is past time for those who have deceived governments and misled the public regarding dangerous human-caused global warming to be called to account. Aided by hysterical posturing by green NGOs, their actions have led to the cornering of government on the issue and the likely implementation of futile emission policies that will impose direct extra costs on every household and enterprise in Australia to no identifiable benefit.

Not only do humans not dominate Earth's current temperature trend but the likelihood is that further large sums of public money are shortly going to be committed to, theoretically, combat warming when cooling is the more likely short-term climatic eventuality.

In one of the more expensive ironies of history, the expenditure of more than $US50 billion ($60 billion) on research into global warming since 1990 has failed to demonstrate any human-caused climate trend, let alone a dangerous one.

Yet that expenditure will pale into insignificance compared with the squandering of money that is going to accompany the introduction of a carbon trading or taxation system.

The costs of thus expiating comfortable middle class angst are, of course, going to be imposed preferentially upon the poor and underprivileged.

http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aginatur/sealevel.htm

We have Venice. Venice is well known, because that area is tectonically, because of the delta, slowly subsiding. The rate has been constant over time. A rising sea level would immediately accelerate the flooding. And it would be so simple to record it. And if you look at that 300-year record: In the 20th Century it was going up and down, around the subsidence rate. In 1970, you should have an acceleration, but instead, the rise almost finished. So it was the opposite.

If you go around the globe, you find no rise anywhere. But they need the rise, because if there is no rise, there is no death threat. They say there is nothing good to come from a sea-level rise, only problems, coastal problems. If you have a temperature rise, if it's a problem in one area, it's beneficial in another area. But sea level is the real "bad guy," and therefore they have talked very much about it. But the real thing is, that it doesn't exist in observational data, only in computer modelling....

I'll tell you another thing: When I came to the Maldives, to our enormous surprise, one morning we were on an island, and I said, "This is something strange, the storm level has gone down; it has not gone up, it has gone down." And then I started to check the level all around, and I asked the others in the group, "Do you see anything here on the beach?" And after a while they found it too. And as we had investigated, and we were sure, I said we cannot leave the Maldives and go home and say the sea level is not rising, it's not respectful to the people. I have to say it to Maldive television.

So we made a very nice program for Maldive television, but it was forbidden by the government (!) because they thought that they would lose money. They accuse the West for putting out carbon dioxide, and therefore we have to pay for our damage and the flooding. So they wanted the flooding scenario to go on.

http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aginatur/swindle.htm

No one can show that a warmer climate would produce negative impacts overall. The much–feared rise in sea levels does not seem to depend on short–term temperature changes, as the rate of sea–level increases has been steady since the last ice age, 10,000 years ago. In fact, many economists argue that the opposite is more likely—that warming produces a net benefit, that it increases incomes and standards of living. Why do we assume that the present climate is the optimum? Surely, the chance of this must be vanishingly small, and the economic history of past climate warmings bear this out.

But the main message of The Great Global Warming Swindle is much broader. Why should we devote our scarce resources to what is essentially a non–problem, and ignore the real problems the world faces: hunger, disease, denial of human rights—not to mention the threats of terrorism and nuclear wars? And are we really prepared to deal with natural disasters; pandemics that can wipe out most of the human race, or even the impact of an asteroid, such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs? Yet politicians and the elites throughout much of the world prefer to squander our limited resources to fashionable issues, rather than concentrate on real problems. Just consider the scary predictions emanating from supposedly responsible world figures: the chief scientist of Great Britain tells us that unless we insulate our houses and use more efficient light bulbs, the Antarctic will be the only habitable continent by 2100, with a few surviving breeding couples propagating the human race. Seriously!

I imagine that in the not–too–distant future all the hype will have died down, particularly if the climate should decide to cool—as it did during much of the past century; we should take note here that it has not warmed since 1998. Future generations will look back on the current madness and wonder what it was all about. They will have movies like An Inconvenient Truth and documentaries like The Great Global Warming Swindle to remind them.



What was once so far away, caught in tunnels and back lots, in a future that was never expected to arrive, is now upon us; and an immoral and self serving government wraps us all in paperwork. The great moral challenge of the age, global warming, is looking more and more like spin every day. The great moral challenge of the age is more likely to be how to get rid of an immoral and incompetent government and a vastly preened over-watered bureaucracy. They grow like weeds, but serve even less purpose. They feed off the masses, and give nothing back. They grow in the back lots, and no one asks why.

It's Jess's last day at the cafe A Little On The Side, just down the road from here, and she's heading off to Ios, the Greek Island, for three months. I've been there, I said, in 1975, and look at me, surprised. There was only one nightclub on the island, and it was closed while I was there. Now there are dozens. I was arrested for having peace signs on my shoes, it was the 70s, and they look even more startled. They think we were never young. They think the world is there; and yes it is; we've been pushed aside.

I click the coffee on my card and leave, the cold winter sun lighting up the inner-city terraces. There is nothing that can be gained, nothing condoned, as bad news mirrors everywhere and we wait, wait, for changes to come, for hope to water our ancient souls, for an irrigation scheme to change our crumbling psyches. Oh why, oh why, he asks, and there is no answer for the profoundly disappointed. The world didn't work out in our favour, as we had assumed it would, and we, in the centre of things, the only generation to have grasped the modern world, to have embraced and changed everything, grow old and bitter, destroyed by the institutions we helped create.

All the men who were such great supporters of feminism have had their homes and children ripped off them by the Family Courts they helped build - the corrupt bureaucracies they supported; the very ones they remained silent on, or ridiculed the critics of the day as right wing and backward. Now the manufactured crises compound upon us, and the politicians lie and lie and lie. They use false data and don't even blanch. They think we're fools and smugly climb into their limousines, speeding on their high moral ground, their high moral highways.

How farcical it all is. The young swallow everything, believe everything. My dad thinks global warming is a myth, my dear daughter said in class, and was howled down for even daring to suggest such a thing. Global warming sceptic is used as an epithet in parliament, as if to be a sceptic was in itself a bad thing. Serves them right, for the hysteria they promoted is now coming back to bite them. The emissions trading scheme the Rudd government has committed itself to will be a rolled gold disaster of the very first order, an insane bureaucracy bleeding business and destroying initiative.

It will be classic Labor, left wing lunatic ideologically driven Labor, the one we thought had died in the 70s and is now everywhere for all to see. It's hard to believe, the nonsense they promote. They claimed in government the other day that agriculture would contract by 20%, ignoring the industry figures who have pointed out that it will do nothing of the kind. Increasing carbon in the atmosphere increases plant production, not decreases it. Even if it's true the planet is warming, for which now there exists no evidence whatsoever, surely that's a good thing if you live in Siberia, or Tasmania for that matter.

But reality has nothing to do with the manufactured crises and the eternal hysteria now promoted by governments everywhere, and most particularly by our government here in Australia. They just can't help themselves. Domestic violence, that untouchable subject, is a classic example. They spend hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars on it, and funnily enough, the claimed problem just gets worth, justifying the spending of yet more hundreds of millions of dollars. This week the lunar left down in Victoria included financial abuse in the definition of domestic violence, so if you don't buy that couch when she asks you can be charged. This in the 21st century, when surely every one's perfectly capable of going out and getting a job for themselves. How much more insane will this country get? Much, I fear.

If social policy was a person, this week it would have been locked up. While they were busy including financial abuse in the ever expanding definition of DV, the government was using money owed by dead dads, thousands of dead dads, dating back to 1988, to justify their claim that one billion was owed by recalcitrant parents. If that is not morally bereft, nothing is.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/petrol-price-to-be-protected/2008/06/27/1214472770817.html

MOTORISTS will be spared an increase in the price of fuel under the emissions trading scheme being thrashed out by the Federal Government.

As a special climate change subcommittee of cabinet met again yesterday, followed by a full cabinet meeting, senior Government sources told the Herald that the starting point was that there be no net increase in the price of petrol.

"We are not going to do people over," one senior minister said.

The commitment came as the president of OPEC, Chakib Khelil, warned oil prices could jump by more than 20 per cent by September. The resulting shockwave pushed the price of crude over $US140 a barrel for the first time.

The chief economist at AMP Capital, Shane Oliver, predicted that oil at $US170 a barrel would mean unleaded petrol rising to between $1.95 and $2 a litre.

The Government's price commitment indicates that should fuel be included in the emissions scheme, petrol excise would be cut to offset the increase caused by the imposition of a carbon tax.

http://business.smh.com.au/expect-a-soft-landing-on-emissions-trading-20080627-2y3o.html

The T-word - transition - is much in vogue as business lobbies watch the growing shenanigans in Canberra over the looming introduction of an emissions trading scheme

If the Government is hesitant about flattening the economy with a sudden, sharp scheme in 2010 - as all the pointers, much less Coalition politicking on higher petrol prices, suggest - then the issue becomes the size and shape of the transition.

Climate change adviser Ross Garnaut's report next week is expected to recommend a broad cap-and-trade scheme embracing all sectors of the economy, including transport. Separately, a green paper from the Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, will set the stage for final decisions on a trading scheme later in the year.

Betting is that the transition path, when it is thrashed out, will be relatively easy, with insiders expecting it will be aimed more at sending a signal about intentions than imposing tough emissions controls.

If the Government's penchant for spin is any guide, a carefully crafted package can be expected, giving all the appearance of doing something while treading water until the global picture comes into sharper focus with the next Kyoto agreement after 2012.

Promising an emissions trading scheme by 2010 may sound fine in Opposition, but delivering it in Government - with a federal and four state elections due that year - is another thing altogether. It would take a very courageous Labor politician to walk into a round of elections promising significantly higher petrol and electricity
charges.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601081&sid=aXktBX9CocTs&refer=australia

N.Z. Industry Says Emissions Trading Too Costly, Seeks Debate

By Gavin Evans

June 27 (Bloomberg) -- New Zealand industry has asked the government to re-open submissions on the nation's emissions trading laws, saying they are too costly and uncertain even after more than 1,000 amendments were made to the proposed rules.

Parliament is in the final stages of considering laws that will control emissions at four-times the per-unit cost of the European system, industry groups said in a letter to parliament. The process is being rushed ahead of elections this year and too many rules are being left to officials to formulate, they said.

New Zealand's plan to apply pollution caps to all industry by 2013 is the broadest of any emission trading program to date. BlueScope Steel Ltd. wants an exemption, saying its plant will be uncompetitive. Cement-maker Holcim Ltd. is ``perplexed'' that policy makers are trying to encourage investment in cleaner, more efficient plants while imposing a cap on emissions as severe as 90 percent of levels three years ago.

``We do want to see emissions trading,'' Holcim New Zealand Ltd. Energy and Climate Change Manager Michael Rynne said in a telephone interview from Christchurch. ``You just want to be careful to get it right because the implications are big.''

BlueScope and Holcim are among 15 companies that account for about 80 percent of the nation's emissions. Others include Fonterra Cooperative Group, the world's biggest dairy exporter, Rio Tinto Alcan Inc.'s Tiwai Point aluminum smelter and Fletcher Building Ltd.

Under the proposal before parliament, they will be liable for the equivalent of 10 percent of their 2005 emissions starting from 2010. That cap will tighten from 2018 with emitters meeting the full cost of their pollution by 2030.

Simmering Uncertainty Simmering Discontent

*



Have I not shown you glimpses of the world to come, if we do not act now?

She had, too, and he knew that everything boiled down to a choice between two contending futures. One was a Glitter Band under the kindly rule of a benevolent tyrant, where the lives of the hundred million citizens continued essentially as they did now, albeit with some minor restrictions on civil liberty. The other was a Glitter Band in ruins, its population decimated, its fallen glories stalked by ghosts, revenants and monsters, some of which had once been people.

'I have the weevil data,' he said, when the silence had become unendurable.

Alastair Reyonds.






Simmering uncertainty, simmering discontent, he heard it everywhere, the harsh plays of light, the appalling, apparently racist rants. These are the great working class, the working families our Prime Minister loved so much. He heard them everywhere, talking about the Asians that were taking over, "breeding like monkeys", the Muslims that are just so different. "Wait 40 years and they'll regret what they've done," a gap toothed man said. "Where I get on the train there's not a single Aussie," says another. "Not a single Aussie." "They're all on our welfare," another says.

Threatened, strangers in their own country, there's a reason why the Prime Minister's announcement that he would be massively increasing immigration rates has gone down like a lead balloon amongst his traditional supporters. The Labor Party has always manipulated the ethnic vote, one of the reasons they championed multi-culturalism. Anything to undermine what was already here. Anything to undermine the old power structures. The left wing lunatics are now totally in power, and their simpering deconstructionism and bleating for the most vulnerable entirely dominates our public life.

He couldn't bear it, the anguish of it all, the thirsting, thrusting new races, the ridiculous government carry on, the betrayal of the old, the championing of the new. Old suburbs are now no-go zones for whities, and the city locks down in fear. He was a champion of causes, a fighter of injustice, and the sick rhetoric that dominated everything, sick, dishonest and hypocritical, made him choke. Bile had taken over laughter, and the ancient systems were gone. Always an emigrant nation, built on immigrants and the hard work of the anonymous, the simpering platitudes of the left stuck in his craw.

How could it have got this way? How could we have been so thoroughly betrayed? he thought. And the answer was obvious. Useful fools. Useful fools from the Prime Minister on down. He listened to the racist rants of the unwashed, rants that would make even the most thinly educated blanch. There's monkeys everywhere, they said, there's illegals everywhere, they live in these little mud huts in the back of houses, they build slums, they take our dole. The anger was growing and no one in authority, no one at all, would dare acknowledge it.

The freeways were packed with disillusioned workers trying to get to unsatisfying jobs. Fighting with their bosses. Fighting with their wives, or husbands, or lovers. Nothing was more unfashionable now than old fashioned marriage; except amongst the young Christians, who could see all too well the mistakes their ancestors had made. The papers have been full of stories of traffic jams kilometres long, of the blithering, total, complete, appalling incompetence of the Iemma Labor government, of the shine coming off our new Prime Minister, of the ceaseless left wing rhetoric which has crucified old relationships and stuck the government everywhere in our lives.

Lawyers everywhere in our lives. No one says NO, stop, this is all wrong, it's all the wrong way. Those who have been dispossessed sit on park benches and gristle, blaming the "Asians", blaming the "muslims", blaming the things they don't understand, targeting groups who simply took up an offer to live here. Their calls to prayer. Their expansive mosques. Their tinkling monks. All of it's a different country, a different place; all of it was engineered by people no longer accountable, people who have gone to their graves proud of what they have done, eroded the traditional working class, eroded the traditional prejudices, created a brave new world. A brave new world they never had to live in, protected as they were by wealth. And now a brave new world they will never see, protected by their own deaths.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/children-living-among-faeces-and-rubbish-court-told/2008/06/26/1214472673480.html

THE cousin of a Canberra woman charged with neglecting four of her children told police the mother was a disgraceful parent and unfit to have custody of the children, a court has been told.

A bail hearing in the ACT Magistrates Court was told the Ainslie house where the woman lived with her children was filthy.

When the police went to the house on Sunday night they found the four children - aged five, seven, 10 and 13 - huddled in the lounge room alone watching television - Constable Jarryd Dunbar told the court.

There was animal faeces in the bathroom, three of the five bedrooms were inaccessible because of clothing and rubbish piled up behind the doors and there was out-of-date food in the kitchen.

There was also what appeared to be a pot roast in the oven, but Constable Dunbar said it was hard to determine exactly what it was because of the "extent of mould and decay".

The court was told the woman's male cousin, who is now looking after the four children, believed she was "unfit to have custody". But he said she was a good mother "when herself".

The 35-year-old was arrested on Wednesday after a complaint was made against her for allegedly breaching a protection order. A statement of facts tendered to the court said she had repeatedly threatened to kill a woman who lived nearby and cared for her two older children.

This week she allegedly drove past the woman's house and made a motion of slitting her throat. She allegedly said: "You dirty f---ing slut. I'm going to slit your throat if it's the last thing I do.


http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/06/27/2287312.htm?section=business

The Federal Opposition has signalled cautious support for including petrol in a carbon trading scheme, as long as it does not drive up fuel prices.

Federal Parliament is now in recess for two months after a week dominated by debate on climate change.

Liberal MP Greg Hunt says his party's position is clear.

"We should have no new net taxes on petrol," he said.

He says it is possible to include petrol in a carbon trading scheme without a price hike.

But it is debate on climate change that will intensify over the winter break, with a key report to be handed to the Government next week.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/06/26/1214073422618.html

The 3 mobile network is banking on people power to help it convince Apple to allow it to carry the new 3G iPhone in Australia.

A new website, three.com.au/iphone, will go live tomorrow and 3 is encouraging customers to register their interest "for the powers that be at Apple to see".

Launching on July 11, the second version of the iPhone will be available from both Optus and Vodafone.

But because the handsets will come locked to specific carriers, those on the 3 or Telstra networks will be unable to use it without a third-party hack, which may not eventuate at all.

Noel Hamill, director of sales at 3, said since Apple announced the impending local launch of the iPhone 3 had been inundated with queries from customers wishing to buy the device from 3.

"We've engaged Apple to get the 3G iPhone but at this stage we haven't been able to range it, so I don't know if we're going to be able to range it," he said.

Apple's decision to exclude 3 from its local carrier partners is curious given it has partnered with 3's parent, Hutchison, to launch the device in Hong Kong and Macau.

Local pricing details for the 3G iPhone have yet to be released, but in the US the base model with 8GB of memory will sell for $US199 ($210), while the 16GB model will retail for $US299.

I Wonder When

*



I wonder when people last got widely and publicly ridiculed for not believing in God: probably not for several hundred years.

Nowadays, you'd get a slightly odd look for doing the opposite and expressly stating your faith. But, if you really want to know what it's like to be a 16th-century heretic, try saying you're a bit sceptical about man-made global warming.

Temperatures do seem to have gone up a little, even though environmentalists acknowledge that we might be in for a cool spell now. And we've certainly had our fair share of tsunamis, hurricanes and typhoons recently. Still, no one has convincingly proved that all this is definitely man's fault. Try saying that in polite circles and it's like saying you're partial to roasted babies.

I understand people disagreeing with global warming sceptics, but not the jeering, ridiculing way they do it. I'm not sure I'm right; they're convinced I'm wrong. They're convinced, too, that they have the moral high ground, that all sceptics are sworn enemies of nature, flowers and puppy dogs.

Environmentalism is the new secular faith - school prayer for liberals, as an American philosopher put it. The faith is a strict one. You're not allowed to join if you think that it's sensible to keep an eye on the environment but don't think that man is to blame for changes in world temperature.

You must believe in the full package. If you do, you are blessed, free from sin and allowed the pious smugness you find in the worst sort of religious believers. It's not enough to believe in these things yourself; you must condemn others for not sharing your belief.
Blog.


It's as if hundreds of thousands of people, some of them prominent scientists, are made of glass and cannot be detected by an ABC-trained eye. Nor can even the noisiest of them be heard by an ABC ear - or the ear of almost anyone in the media.

Take Dennis Jensen, for instance. This federal Liberal MP, who has a PhD in physics, gave a speech in Parliament outlining the latest scientific evidence that the world stopped warming a decade ago.

He had charts from the four international bodies that measure world temperature, including Britain's Hadley Centre, showing that since 1998 world temperatures have stayed flat, contradicting all official predictions. And he warned: "This data shows that the temperature has flatlined over the last 10 years.

"Observation does not fit theory and yet the theory is deemed correct."

You'd think evidence that the world may no longer be heating - indeed, say some sun-studying scientists, may even start cooling - might be of interest to reporters, given our governments are spending billions to pretend to stop a warming that may not be happening, and may not be our fault. Or even bad.

Yet not a single newspaper or television report mentioned Jensen's speech. He was so invisible that there's no pink dot for him on the Chaser map.

In the two days since Jensen spoke, the evidence he's right has firmed.

Now the University of Alabama in Huntsville, one of those four temperature monitors, has found that the temperature of the lower troposphere has cooled more in the past 16 months than it warmed in the previous 100 years.

A blip, maybe, but unexpected.

And, with satellites and weather balloons not detecting any warming of the troposphere in tropical regions, again contradicting the predictions of every global warming model, it's no wonder 31,000 scientists, including Australia's Prof Bob Carter, last month signed a petition declaring there was still no proof humans were warming the world to hell.
Andrew Bolt.



In a gathering circumference, in growing despair at the blithering dishonest ideologically driven propaganda eminating from the Gucci communists who rule us, the gathering despair and dislocation at the gap between the way lives are lived and the plethora of words spewing from their mouths. There was such a plethora of concerns, domestic violence, obesity, child welfare, global warming, that the counter concerns, competency in government, abuse of statistics, the damage of fear driven and inaccurate campaigns, were entirely drowned out. Anyone who disagreed was pilloried. How did we get here?

How did we get to a place, a space, where honesty was only a distant and obscure cousin. Where people didn't care about the truth, as long as they were in the pack. Where government ministers knowingly used worst-case scenarios to justify their ever tightening control on the populace. Where the idiots reigned. Where the distant wind in the gums, the puff of pink clouds, the ancient connection to the land that all of us glimpsed at one time or another, was wiped out in a peurile parade of hysteria and nonsense.

That's what was happening; as they, the rulers, sat in their luxury cars, the engines idling uselessly for hours. How much they must envy China, where dissent just simply wasn't tolerated and the press was not free. Here the press is controlled by fashion, there it is controlled by the gun. How they must wish no one could pursue them or hunt them down. How they must wish the honeymoon had never ended. The fools we call politicians are making hay while the sun shines; all on their massive salaries and air conditioned lives, the shockingly huge expense accounts.

And no one asks us: what do you think? Because they all know better. After they hunt down the separated dads who allegedly owe money, hunt them down and shoot them in a corner, drive them into crummy little caravans in the back of remote caravan lots, the only places they can afford. The government doesn't care. The bureaucrats don't care. As they turn hundreds of thousands of people's lives into mud.

They're talking now, their latest insanity, of an emissions trading scheme. It's a confident prediction: it will be a fiasco of the absolute first order. Another Labor bureaucracy, another mess. Another set of left-wing lunatics driving the agenda. Another place where theory and fact don't meet, and they don't care. How quickly the shine has come off, after all the evil manipulation and utter professionalism that they showed to get there. Labor ran a brilliant campaign, and their predecessor, the every where John Howard, frenetic, frantic, pathetic, desperately buying our cheap votes, was finally, emphatically, shunted off into history.

The current lot look worse by the day. Yesterday they were abusing figures in parliament to justify their global warming hysteria. Tomorrow it will be something else. The day after that... the day after that there will be another campaign, another launch, another speech, another piece of putrid propaganda to a gullible public. Why does no one bell the cat? Why did none of his colleagues tell Howard he was destroying the image of conservatives, that it will now take years before they are ever trusted again. Why did no one say Work Choices was a disgrace; you can't implement major changes to people's lives without evening mentioning it at the last election.

And why, oh why, does no one stand up? Why, oh why, do people swallow the propaganda and not even question it, not even care? If only this was our darkness, this was our future, a place where the truth was told, a place where people questioned the received wisdom, queried the government, didn't sit po faced watching Dumb and Dumber, had a sparkle in their eye as they examined the status quo, breaking forward into a new life.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=34&objectid=10518393

The world's millionaires club is getting bigger - and its members decidedly richer.

The number of people around the globe with at least US$1 million ($1.3 million) in assets grew 6 per cent last year to 10.1 million, says the 12th annual World Wealth Report released yesterday by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini Group, a consulting firm.

An additional 600,000 people became millionaires or richer even as problems tied to the United States credit crisis spread in the second half of the year.

The combined wealth of the millionaires' club meanwhile grew 9.4 per cent to US$40.7 trillion. Their average wealth, which didn't include primary homes, surpassed US$4 million for the first time.

The super rich - those with at least US$30 million - grew 8.8 per cent in population while their accumulated wealth grew 14.5 per cent. This rarefied group controls about a third of the US$40.7 trillion.

For such an elite club, 10.1 million may seem like a lot of members. But the figure represents just 0.15 per cent of the world's population of 6.7 billion.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/news/ball-in-qantas-court-says-union/2008/06/24/1214073216287.html

Qantas engineers are considering further industrial action after rolling stoppages across Australia's eastern seaboard caused the cancellation of 18 flights today.

The Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers' Association said the ball was now in Qantas' court, and it could end the dispute when it wanted to.

The association's federal president, Paul Cousins, told reporters today he hoped the stalemate over the pay dispute would not go on much longer.

"Our objective is still to keep pressure on Qantas in this current offer situation," he said.

"The last thing Qantas engineers want to do is inconvenience the travelling public, but it is unacceptable for a company that is making record profits to expect these hard-working, highly-skilled engineers to take a real pay cut.

"Despite several weeks of high-level negotiations, Qantas management is still not prepared to offer its engineers a pay rise that meets the cost of living at this point in time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/world/africa/26zimbabwe.html?em&ex=1214539200&en=3bc1a09cd7245467&ei=5087%0A

Queen Elizabeth II has stripped Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s strongman president for nearly 30 years, of his honorary knighthood as a “mark of revulsion” at the human rights abuses and “abject disregard” for democracy over which he has presided, the British Foreign Office announced Wednesday.

The rebuke showed the extent of international frustration over Mr. Mugabe’s insistence to go ahead with a presidential runoff on Friday, even though his sole opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, pulled out of race on Sunday because of the persistent violence and intimidation against him, his party and their supporters.

Mr. Mugabe’s government has had a long history of human rights abuses, but he was granted an honorary knighthood during an official visit to England in 1994 when, the foreign office contends, “the conditions in Zimbabwe were very different.”

But with the widespread attacks against the opposition, the foreign office said the honor could no longer be justified. Stripping a dignitary of an honorary knighthood is exceedingly rare. A foreign office spokesman could think of only one other time it had been done — in 1989 to the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu.

Brutus's: Do Good Be Good

*



THERE is grey in your hair.
Young men no longer suddenly catch their breath
When you are passing;
But maybe some old gaffer mutters a blessing
Because it was your prayer
Recovered him upon the bed of death.
For your sole sake - that all heart's ache have known,
And given to others all heart's ache,
From meagre girlhood's putting on
Burdensome beauty - for your sole sake
Heaven has put away the stroke of her doom,
So great her portion in that peace you make
By merely walking in a room.
Your beauty can but leave among us
Vague memories, nothing but memories.
A young man when the old men are done talking
Will say to an old man, "Tell me of that lady
The poet stubborn with his passion sang us
When age might well have chilled his blood.'
Vague memories, nothing but memories,
But in the grave all, all, shall be renewed.
The certainty that I shall see that lady
Leaning or standing or walking
In the first loveliness of womanhood,
And with the fervour of my youthful eyes,
Has set me muttering like a fool.
You are more beautiful than any one,
And yet your body had a flaw:
Your small hands were not beautiful,
And I am afraid that you will run
And paddle to the wrist
In that mysterious, always brimming lake
Where those What have obeyed the holy law
paddle and are perfect. Leave unchanged
The hands that I have kissed,
For old sake's sake.
The last stroke of midnight dies.
All day in the one chair
From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have
ranged
In rambling talk with an image of air:
Vague memories, nothing but memories.
WB Yeats, Broken Dreams.



If in memory, if in ancient times, we could crawl back to the past and live there, decided, tranquil, at peace with a past agony. The man who ran Brutus's was shot through the heart by a rent boy almost four decades ago now. Ruschutter's Bay Park was always a place of mystery and furtive assignations, the yachts of the wealthy bobbing in the too-blue bay, the tawdry trees spreading their leaves. Still around te corner is the yacht club, where the wealthy come and go.

But on the other side, sweeping up the hill, is the nest of streets leading up to Kings Cross, to the old cafes and fading draw queens, to the dusky clubs full of memories, to the knots of the dammed doing drug deals in their corners. And it was from here that we all swept down, in our fabulous youth, and gathered each night at Brutus's, the city then so small that all the different, all the sexual adventurers, could gather in one place and eye each other, and know that we were at home.

In the late 1960s in Sydney you just had to go to Brutus's if you wanted to understand the underbelly of the city; and that of course was exactly what he wanted to know. The door clanged as you entered, a bell deliberately announcing your arrival, and all heads would turn surreptitiously, checking out the new arrival. It was so dark it was almost impossible to see, and the lighting picked out everyone in a strange glow. Being young, he was particularly fond of a shirt which glowed only at Brutus's, but otherwise wasn't much. But he always knew when he got there he would be queen of the ball, so to speak, all eyes on his beauty, the centre of attention.

And the centre of great adventure. Brutus was a funny, grumpy, middle aged gay guy who ran his late night cafe as his own personal fiefdom, controlling everything. There was no alcohol, and in those far-off, naive days, the worst anyone could think of to do was to smoke a bit of hash before going and sitting in the glowing dark. Some of the handsomest men in the city gathered there late, always late. Brutus's didn't open till midnight, and never really started hopping till two or three in the morning. Sometimes there was almost no one there, sometimes it was packed.

It was all part of a grand adventure that can no longer be understood. Everything happens now, and no one looks twice. The trannies stumble down Oxford Street "eccied" off their heads, their eyes like saucers and their love freely available, their perfumed body odours available for rent. Nobody gives a damn. But back then all was secretive, all was illegal, gay men met under the cloak of darkness and secretive, fabulously famous clubs, the Purple Onion, Costello's, Capriccios, Oddys, they all formed part of a tight circle of must see's in a hidden network all the more fabulous for its underground nature.

News that Brutus had been shot spread rapidly, shocking everybody. For years afterwards, the cafe remained boarded up, the discrete sign for those in the know peeling slowly with the years. At first details were sketchy. But then it even made the papers. Shot straight through the heart at a hundred metres, the kid must have been an amazing shot, everyone said. Shot straight through the the heart when love went wrong, when he chased young men he should have left alone. There wasn't much sympathy, strangely enough. It was just another scandal of the day. Old Brutus had been such a prima donna, such a difficult prick to us all, that while we all loved to go his dark strange cafe and see who else was there, we didn't necessarily like him.

Straight through the heart at a hundred metres, that was all anyone could talk about. What an amazing shot that kid was. He knew him vaguely, one of the handsomest of the troubled young men. He was off to juvenile prison, and we never heard the results of the court case. We had all moved on. But for years it wasn't possible to drive down past that sign and think: I remember that cafe, the owner was killed by a rent boy, a friend of mine. No one quite knew why, exactly what it was that went on between them. And even now it's impossible, when driving past that park, with its dappled shadows and wretched trees, its clapped out toilet block and scraggly air, the city all around turbo charging into a new millennium, and think: what an amazing shot that kid was. An amazing shot. Straight through the heart.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7471924.stm

Former US President Bill Clinton has announced for the first time his support of fellow Democrat Barack Obama's bid for the White House.

Mr Clinton's wife Hillary was Mr Obama's biggest rival for the party nomination, and he was often critical of Mr Obama on the campaign trail.

Mr Clinton's spokesman said he was committed to working for an Obama win.

Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton are to hold a joint rally on Friday, but Mr Clinton will be in Europe and will not attend.

"President Clinton is obviously committed to doing whatever he can and is asked to do to ensure Senator Obama is the next president of the United States," said spokesman Matt McKenna.


http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23918059-5000117,00.html

HOW much do we need to change? Judge from this: that parents in this country now let their children starve to death.

Last November for instance, a seven-year-old girl was found dead from hunger in bed.

Two weeks ago in Brisbane, twin babies just 18 months old were found dead of starvation in their cot.

And yesterday in Adelaide, 14 malnourished children from two families were taken to hospital.

It's not for lack of money that such children starve.

In fact, they are, if anything, children of a welfare generation gone rancid, and what's desperately lacking is not cash but responsibility.

Take that seven-year-old girl .

She was the daughter of a tattooed disability pensioner who'd already had one daughter taken off him, reportedly for malnutrition, and now blamed the Department of Community Services for not checking more closely as he starved his second.

"DoCS is disgusting," he raged. "They should be shut down."

Or take the dead twins.

Their father said it wasn't his fault he hadn't noticed they were dying, since he'd broken up with his wife.

Yet he still lived in the family home and walked past his babies' bedroom each night on his way to his own.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23919264-662,00.html

MOTORISTS have had their strongest hint yet to prepare for higher petrol prices under the Rudd Government's plan to fight climate change.
As petrol prices nudged $1.70 yesterday, Transport Minister Anthony Albanese said the Government's emissions trading scheme (ETS) had to include major carbon polluters.

"The transport sector, which contributes about 14 per cent of total greenhouse emissions, must be a part of any climate change strategy," Mr Albanese said.

"For the ETS to be effective, we know it needs to have as broad a coverage as possible."

Under a $50-a-tonne "carbon price", petrol prices would rise by about 17c a litre.

Opposition Treasury spokesman Malcolm Turnbull has dropped his earlier support for the inclusion of transport fuels in the scheme.

"That was the Howard government's policy," the former environment minister told Sky News.

He said that nobody expected petrol prices to rise as high as they had and motorists had already had to curb their fuel use.

Pursued, Hunted Down

*



He was in Kashmir, he knew, lying in the meadows near running water among violets and trefoil, the Himalayas beyond, which made it all the more remarkable he should suddenly be setting out with Hugh and Yvonne to climb Popocatepetl. Already they had drawn ahead. "Can you pick bougainvillea?" he heard Hugh say, and "Be careful," Yvonne replied, "it's got spikes on it and you have to look at everything to be sure there're no spiders,". "We shoota de espiders in Mexico," another voice muttered.
Malcolm Lowry.



Life had become impossible. They made it so. An army of communist style bureaucrats had turned the people's lives to mud. Towers loomed over the rain swept streets, but what made it more disgusting was the people who peered down from those towers, their beady, self=righteous eyes justifying everything that had gone before. It was chaos, it was a depth of despair these self-righteous bastards would never know. Nothing was more dangerous than a bureaucracy on a motherhood mission or a noble cause. And contemporary Australia was riddled with them.

The new government is working out worse than anyone could possibly have imagined. They are little better than communists, and Kevin Rudd's close association with China raises eyebrows everywhere. We were principled, old fashioned, believed in things that had been washed away long ago. There couldn't be any greater level of suffering. The causes, they loved their causes. Global warming, obesity, domestic violence, drugs, industrial relations, child support, social welfare, you name it, they're trying to make our lives better, and instead turning it all to mud.

He couldn't have been more bewildered, as he stared up at the skyscrapers which surrounded the park. Years ago he had worked nearby, in the city's major newspaper offices. He had even been considered talented, though no one who saw him now would have believed it. Your aching heart. My aching heart. The flicker of the computer screens. Before the sting got him; and the voices became overwhelming, and everything turned and churned and his life became a bitter joke. He couldn't reach back to fix a point, the smell of his dank clothes distracting him. He couldn't find where he had hidden the bottle, if indeed he hadn't drunk it already, and the voices were more tortured and persistent than ever before.

He watched them pouring out of the train station each morning on their way to work, wave after wave of them, pack animals. Even at their young age there was a resigned look on their faces, as if they had become automatums already. Sometimes he would shout at them, trying to break through. Couldn't we be weary? Couldn't you acknowledge my vast humanity? Couldn't they see the person behind this jerking frame?

I was once like you, he shouted. Then: bastards! The guards from the station were heading towards him, their ironed grey uniforms picking them apart, frightening him. Why couldn't they just leave him alone? What did it matter to them where he slept? The most recent crackdown, although he didn't understand that was what it was, was making his life harder. The little alcoves where he had slept were all being hosed away, his bedding tossed into the garbage tips, his possessions scattered. He could never, would never, understand their casual cruelty.

He watched another denizen of the park, Ben he had an idea his name was, sitting squat legged, his back against the rear wall of the park, the city trains thundering behind him. Ben was rocking back and forth, talking animatedly, clearly off his medication. Then he noticed the line of piss running out from him, his sopping clothes. And then he looked down at himself and saw the same thing: he had pissed himself without even noticing. He, too, was rocking and muttering as the guards approached, looking for all the world like modern day Gestapo. There can be no justification for this brutal treatment he shouted. I was somebody once. Or that's what he meant to say, all was confused.

Leave us alone you bastards, leave us alone, he shouted, waving a walking stick he had found at them. He could see one of them on a phone. Dialling the Fuehrer he thought; as he rushed at him waving the stick. The men backed off, like nuisance birds, and he could hear sirens in the distance. You have no idea, he shouted, no idea, and could feel the damp of his clothes clinging to him, the smell of stale urine. I was once somebody, I was once somebody, you bastards, he shouted again; and the tears flowed down his face for no apparent reason. Terminal stages of alcoholism, he heard someone say, and turned around startled, but there was no one there. The sky scrapers stared down unblinking, and he began to run, or shuffle, as fast as he could. Away, away, turning only once to wave his stick and shout again: you bastards.



THE BIGGER STORY:



http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/strike-forces-qantas-to-cancel-14-flights/2008/06/23/1214073151596.html

QANTAS struggled to cope with a national engineers' strike yesterday, with disruptions to its flight schedule worse than predicted.

The airline told customers six flights would be cancelled but its flight data showed 14 flights were hit by late afternoon.

Its pledge that no customer would wait more than an hour for a flight was also broken, with long delays to four domestic flights; nine international flights from Sydney were also delayed by more than an hour.

"The vast majority of domestic flights left [after a delay of] less than half an hour," a company spokeswoman said.

One businessman, who asked not to be named, was told QF25 from Melbourne to New Zealand had been cancelled less than two hours before departure.

"I was literally going out the door when I got a call from Webjet, who I booked the flight through, and then 20 minutes later Qantas called. I asked was [the cancellation] due to the industrial action and they said yes."

The strike went ahead in four cities - Sydney, Perth, Melbourne and Brisbane - after wage negotiations between Qantas and the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association failed on Thursday.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7469102.stm

Africa's newspapers are discussing what could be in store for Zimbabwe following opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai's decision to pull out of the presidential run-off election.

One South African daily says the world now has to make it clear to Zimbabwe's President Mugabe that it will not accept him declaring himself a winner in the run-off. Another says it is now time for "radical diplomacy" to find a solution, with Britain as the principle negotiator.

Zimbabwe's own papers remain silent on the political implications of Mr Tsvangirai's announcement, with the government-owned daily focusing on his alleged criminal activity.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23913016-2,00.html

A PERTH man who was offered $2.2m when he put is life up for sale on eBay has had his multi-million dollar dreams crushed after bids were cancelled.

Ian Usher, a 44-year-old divorcee living in the Perth southern suburb of Wellard, is selling everything, including his home, car, jet ski, hobbies - even friendships and his job - in the online auction after his 8-year marriage fell apart.

Late yesterday the total amount offered for his "ALife4Sale'' eBay item plummeted from $2.2 million to just $155,100 after dis-genuine bids were removed from the online auction site.

The bids were removed after retractions were entered by users who said they entered the wrong amount or by others who were deemed not genuines bids by eBay.

Mr Usher, who is originally from Yorkshire in England, launched the auction on Sunday June 22 with a starting bid of $1.

Within hours he said was popping champagne corks as bids climbed toward six figures.

Early yesterday his "ALife4Sale'' eBay account had 114 bids and the highest bidder (Bidder 41) was offering a staggering $2.2 million for a package valued between $450,000 and $500,000.

But by 6pm (WST) his eBay dreams were shattered with the total bids now a far reach from his hopeful $500,000.

He Was A Legend

*



I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
Umberto Eco

Paddy Flynn is dead;....He was a great teller of tales, and unlike our common romancers, knew how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, faeryland and earth, to people his stories. He did not live in a shrunken world, but knew of no less ample circumstance than did Homer himself. Perhaps the Gaelic people shall by his like bring back again the ancient simplicity and amplitude of imagination.....Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.
A Teller of Tales

HAD I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
W.B. Yeats




He was a legend, supported on all sides, surrounded by acolytes. His chest had puffed out with the continuous applause. The waiters hovered expectantly, showing all due deference. Important people sat at the surrounding tables, while he sat, appropriately, next to the President, George Bush. It was a small, "intimate" dinner, his reward for being dutiful, above all for going along with the Iraq War, but his duties, his faithfulness, had been many in number. He had paid a price back home, amongst the unwashed and the ignorant who were against the War, amongst those who did not know, could never know, the complexities of leadership.

His heart was about to burst with pride. A life of service had come to this, the ultimate accolades. Someone was standing up, making a toast. He beamed, and dared to take a sip himself. He had come a long way for a little man. If only his mother had been alive to see him now, sitting at the same table as the President of the United States of America. Back home the War had not been popular. They had called him a right wing war monger. What little they knew, a leader had to make difficult decisions; and it had fallen to him, history had imposed on him, those decisions.

It was an excellent wine, as one might expect, and he took an extra long sip. If not now, when. He would be expected to make a speech. He could see the attendants in their black and whites. The Americans really knew how to do things, you had to give them that, here at the centre of things. How far he had travelled, from an ordinary, comfortable suburb in Sydney to here at the White House, in the heart of things. The people who had put him here, and who had turned on him so viciously, emphatically, at the last election, could never understand what a real leader had to understand.

The twin towers, those planes, the smoke burning, the astonishing collapse of the World Tower, the constantly repeated scenes of people running from the scene, the more than 3,000 people who had died on that fateful day, all that had changed every thing, and George had his support no matter what. They said he was the worst president in American history, and the polls were not being kind to his buddy either, but what would the peasants, the toiling masses, ever really know. A leader had to lead. An elegant band tinkled in the corner, all for them, all for him, and he took another sip, a long deep sip.

There had been the funeral recently of one of the soldiers, a funeral he couldn't shake from his conscience. A young, fit, handsome, utterly decent young man with an adoring young wife and adoring young children. And he had died a dismal death in the harsh landscape of Afghanistan. Because he had sent him there. Because the nation, history, had sent him there. But really, ultimately, he had sent him there. Things were said at the funeral, the pointlessness of war, the pointlessness of this young man's death, the overwhelming, utterly overwhelming grief of his relatives, and he had got back in his government car and been whisked away, only too glad to get away.

Because after all, he thought, as he took yet another sip of the excellent Semillon which seemed to fit so well with the excellent scotch he had had earlier, they couldn't understand the difficulties of leadership, not those boiling, inconsiderate, ungrateful masses out there. How did George cope, he wondered admirably. More than 4,000 US soldiers had died in the sands of Iraq and he didn't seem to be bothered by it. He stood tall and took the flack and told everyone they had died for a worthwhile cause. He ignored the polls and looked to history for approval.

An attentive waiter topped up his glass, surprised perhaps by how much the Australian prime minister was drinking. But it wasn't his job to be surprised, or to even notice. The things he had noticed. His brother had died in the war last month, and here were the men who sent him there, the chiefs of staff and department heads, all the so-called leaders of men. The little man from Australia took yet another sip; and the room began to swirl around his bellicose thoughts. What did he say to the families? Your son died in vain. Of course not. These doubts were not the doubts of a leader, cringing into the leather upholstery of the limousines, the thrump thrump thrump of the helicopter as he was whisked from one important event to another.

A tear almost welled in his eye, and he didn't know why. This was his thank you dinner, thank you for being such a good friend of America, thank you for supporting the War, thank you for never doubting me, thank you for a life time of conservatism. His bank account bulged, he would never have to worry about money again, but he couldn't shake the haunting. George was standing up now, talking loudly, making jokes about his great friend from down under. He wasn't taking in a word he said, but knew it must have been a joke as the sycophants all around, in their smart suits and their wealthy complexions, clapped and laughed and clapped some more.

He took another long deep sip of the wine, long enough to know that he had drunk too much, and all he could think of was the pictures of that young man, the tears of his widow as she demanded of him that die: why did you send him, why did you send him, tell me he didn't die in vain. And angrily, inappropriately, defying all protocol, breaching every custom and rule of polite behaviour, she had called him a murderer, before she had been led away, back to the coffin of the man she had loved so much, her children tugging at her dress, their faces full of tears. The applause crescendoed around him. It was clear from the faces, the applause, the timing, he was expected to rise and speak. He stood up, stumbled slightly, tried to gain his balance. The room swirled around him, the dazzling chandeliers, the magnificent paintings, the expectant faces, the waiters, this peak of power and luxury. And then he feinted.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/06/22/1214073053656.html

THE besieged federal Labor MP Belinda Neal could face a charge of conspiring to pervert the course of justice over her former employee's claim that the MP made her staff complete untrue statutory declarations about the Iguanas nightclub affair.

Police sources confirmed they would consider charging Ms Neal while the Prime Minister will come under pressure to expel Ms Neal from the Labor Party tonight, when her former staffer, Melissa Batten, tells Channel Nine's A Current Affair that she no longer stands by her statutory declaration about the Iguanas nightclub fracas. She wrote the statement in Ms Neal's presence.

The Herald understands she claims Ms Neal, a solicitor, instructed staff on what to put in and what to leave out of their statutory declarations about the night of June 6, when Iguanas staff alleged the MP and her husband, the NSW Education Minister, John Della Bosca, threatened and abused them.

A police source said Mrs Batten had made very similar allegations during a five-hour police interview. When asked if her allegations could result in Ms Neal facing charges of perverting the course of justice, the source said: "[Investigators] would have to be thinking along those lines."

Conspiring to pervert the course of justice carries a maximum sentence of 14 years' jail. Another option, legal experts said, would be to charge Ms Neal with being an accessory to the creation of a false statutory declaration.


http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5g3yHTaTou7p447cGBJNP-xQyKGfw

WASHINGTON (AFP) — US Senator Hillary Clinton will return to congressional politics this week before staging her first joint appearances with White House contender Barack Obama, a spokesman said Sunday.

Clinton's Senate spokesman Philippe Reines said the New York senator would be in the chamber on Tuesday and Wednesday for the first time since losing to Obama in the Democratic presidential nominating race nearly three weeks ago.

In her first public speech since conceding, Clinton told a high-school graduating class in New York on Sunday that meeting thousands of people across the nation during her primary campaign had been an "extraordinary experience."

"No one four years ago could have predicted that an African-American and a woman would have been competing for the presidency of the United States in 2008," she said in a clip aired by NY1 television.

Clinton urged the graduating class, which included a longtime volunteer to her campaign, to use their "God-given talents and abilities" not only for themselves "but for all of us to make this world a better place."

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23905741-5013404,00.html

FORMER foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer has admitted that he told lawyers for Schapelle Corby - who is on suicide watch in a Bali hospital - to consider that her brother may have been involved in the foiled drug-smuggling attempt.

Mr Downer made the admission after Corby's dumped Australian lawyer, Robin Tampoe, told a documentary he had confected her initial defence that Australian baggage-handlers had planted 4.2kg of marijuana in her bodyboard bag.

Corby, arrested at Denpasar airport in October 2004, was jailed for 20 years after a Bali court dismissed Mr Tampoe's arguments that the drugs had been planted in the bag before she left Australia.

Mr Downer yesterday said Mr Tampoe's admission - in a two-part Nine Network documentary that began last night - would not go down well with Indonesian authorities.

"To say that they have been pushing a line in the court which they now admit is not true is a very damaging thing to do," he said.