The Dappled Heart

*



"I have always had a 'yucky' feeling in me like that I'm dirty. I have issues because of the sexual assaults and that I'd done these things and kept them in as a dirty little secret for so long, but also because of my later destructive behaviour - a drug habit and trying to hide it. All my friends and family knew but I would deny it and make excuses for the red eyes or nodding off for example.

"It never clicked until just recently I realised that I've lost all my friends. They all thought I was a hopeless junkie and they didn't want to know me any more. I don't blame them as I did betray their trust and lie to them. Although I understand this, it still really hurts. To my face they looked like friends but really they had given up on me. I used to call people and wonder why they never called me back.

"Now since the verdict I look in the mirror and think wow - I have colour now and don't have scabs on my skin. I'm always hungry and eat all the time. I sometimes feel high on life yet scared. It's a very surreal feeling having spent so many years alive but not really living."

Victim impact statement, Milton Orkopoulis case.



Often fragile, pasts often mined, he was the full on freaks ville in a different time, blasted forward, stranded. He had never been so isolated. The parties were over. In their strange beauty, in the weird jagged movements that turned everything into a lie, in a time of crisis and crescendo when all was lost, all was lost, that's when he found his muse and snuggled closer to his dappled heart, the mottled flesh a telling sign of all that had gone on beneath. These were cruel moments, cruel days, when he turned to mining the ancient past for inspiration in the present.

Oh cloying joy, church bells ringing out, those times when he had been promised so much, had tried so hard, and all as ruined by bitchiness when you didn't agree whole heartedly it all the voices of the mass. The pack mentality is alive and well. First the search for victims, appropriate victims. The indigenous, the homeless, women. Then come the programs, multi-billion dollar programs the rest of us functioning adults have to work to pay for. Every Thursday, pay day for the dole, they used to march outside here with their beer cartons on their shoulders, carrying all the alcohol the working men and women of the country had paid for.

And in return all they got called was "white c...s. And begged for money. Got any spare change, brother. No. I'm gunna thump ya ya white c... It was a grand day and a grand moment when we could overcome the past. While Australia is slipping further and further back into old style communism, a new presidential candidate in the face of Obama has enlivened America. Here the grey days have simply got deeper. Rudd is working out worse than anyone could have imagined, the wheels falling off. The trouble of course is the hapless opposition; and the legacy of Howard. All the mistakes.

Howard betrayed the conservatives as much as he betrayed the Australian people. Voters thought he stood for lower immigration. Instead he increased the rates. Voters thought he stood for small government, and the bureaucracy increased massively. People thought he stood for lower taxes, and he introduced the GST, ripping billions upon billions more off the already groaning populace; and with no results. No one is better off. It disappeared immediately into increased public service salaries, and these bloated and incompetent bureaucracies ballooned. Fathers were stupid enough to believe that he stood for a reformed family court and a fairer child support agency, and he did nothing of the kind. And worst of all: he took the nation into an unjust and immoral war in Iraq.

So when the conservatives stand up now and bleat about the struggles to make ends meet, no one believes them. This is the mob that introduced Work Choices, throwing people on to the open market and threatening them in their kitchens. People were hurt in the lounge rooms and suburbs where they lived, and no one will ever be able to trust them again. So we are stuck with staggeringly incompetent left wing governments from coast to coast, and things will only get worse. The acerbic, unpleasant fool they call the NSW Treasurer, Michael Costa, has just announced the state budget, cheerfully declaring that they are going to plunge billions of dollars into debt to fix the state's infrastucture, transport and health problems.

They won't do anything of the kind, they never do. The only reason they are there is because the other side are so abjectly hopeless, and people were naive enough, or is it stupid enough, to fall for their social justice rhetoric, watching as they feather their own pockets. The maladministration of this country is now almost complete. Although I suspect just when you thought it couldn't get any worse; it will. There are so many dark angels circling this dark continent; and the hapless germs that cling to the surface, their fat, bloated, fundamentally corrupt and complacent faces turned to each other.

He couldn't believe all that happened to this once wonderful place. Sad to see and nothing to be done. If we valued the labour of working men and women, we would be proud and strong. We're nothing of the kind. These weak, obsequious little men stalking the corridors, bringing nothing but pestilence and evil and compromise, the stale smells of their stale flesh filling the office air. The fluorescent lights reveal too much. They are, uniformly, utterly unattractive. They look like the Middle European mafia. They act like Middle European mafia. And we pay and we pay and we pay, for them, for our compromises, for their wastrel ways, their astonishing self confidence, their complete and total lack of conscience. This is the future for our children, God save us.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/world/05react.html?em&ex=1212724800&en=b9dba68019fd4af9&ei=5087%0A

LONDON — Across the globe, pundits and politicians of all stripes competed for hyperbole on Wednesday to applaud Senator Barack Obama’s claim of victory in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, almost as if he had already been elected to the White House.

His triumph in the primaries, many said, signaled the defeat of racism, and if Senator Obama became president, his election would presage a departure from what outsiders have broadly depicted as the go-it-alone belligerence of the Bush era.

That anticipatory exuberance cut across party lines. Just in France, Ségolène Royal, President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Socialist rival in last year’s French presidential election, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Obama “embodies the America of today and tomorrow.”

Equally enthusiastically, Patrick Devedjian, the head of President Sarkozy’s center-right political party, called Mr. Obama’s candidacy ‘’a very beautiful image of America, the image of a candidate who transcends race and got to where he is because of merit alone.” And Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, declared: “His candidacy carries an enormous hope for his country and for peace in the world.”

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23812354-5007132,00.html

CONFUSION surrounding Kevin Rudd's food poisoning scare became unpalatable last night as the Prime Minister expanded the menu of possible culprits to "a savoury something".

After initially blaming a "dodgy dagwood dog" for a health scare that sparked party rumours he had suffered a minor heart attack, Mr Rudd wasn't so sure after being told ANZ Stadium doesn't feed corporate patrons battered sausages.

To assist his faltering memory, The Daily Telegraph last night obtained a copy of the "premium cocktail menu" to which Mr Rudd's party were treated as they watched the May 3 fixture between the Broncos and West Tigers.

The offending item could have been any one of 12 snacks.

But witnesses among the 60 guests who shared corporate suite 3074 with Mr Rudd were prepared to rule a number of them out.

They were confident the traditional spaghetti and meatballs, rosemary frittata, petit prawn roll, pork puff, chicken samosa and breaded scallop are not to blame for a post-match aftermath Mr Rudd labelled "graphic".

When pressed yesterday, Mr Rudd nominated a "party pie" - putting the heat squarely on the beef and burgundy pie with tomato sauce which was among the 12 snacks served to the 60 guests in corporate suite 3074.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/standen-case-may-complicate-other-prosecutions/2008/06/04/1212258910251.html

WHEN the Australian Federal Police offered voluntary redundancies in an effort to thin its senior ranks in the mid-1990s, Mark Standen put up his hand, to the surprise of those who had marvelled at his remarkable career trajectory.

But many of his law enforcement colleagues, even some at his future employer, the NSW Crime Commission, knew he spent a bit of the six-figure payout on finishing his backyard pool and the rest paying off huge gambling debts. The fact that Standen's gambling was an open secret more than 10 years ago raised questions yesterday about how the commission failed to tackle a problem that could open a senior investigator to corruption or compromise.

The Premier, Morris Iemma, faced calls to set up an inquiry with the powers of a royal commission into the NSW Crime Commission after the senior investigator's arrest for allegedly planning to import ingredients to make the drug ice.