Threats To Sanity

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Over the last few months I can’t help thinking that all this climate change stuff reaks of fear campaign. Every event now seems to be related to climate change, a storm in the pacific, Victorian bush fires, drought in Australia, snow in summer all seems to point to impending apocalypse - or so we are reminded. Then there are the random stories about nothing…except some guy is worried about climate change -I remember one report informed us that “climate change would cost the world an equivelent to two world wars and one depression…


Fear plays a key role in the reproduction of capitalist social relations: fear of terrorism justifies surveillance and control; fear caused by socio-economic ‘insecurity’ (or even ‘precarity’ if you want) helps to enforce conformity in so many ways; fear of being seen to be immoral can be used to reproduce a privatised individual ethics, which holds the atomised responsible for systemic problems and demands conformity with whatever is currently being imposed as pseudo-solutions (eg. the successful state-backed campaign to have opposition to water wastage become a moral imperative, integrated into the image of the good citizen in which we are invited to see ourselves, such that the person who waters their garden at the wrong time is now condemned as an irresponsible wrecker). Most greenies I know, even the ‘radical’ ones, have no critique of the last, only of its limits.

Control through fear has been the way of the world for a very long time. Fear of climate, fear of invaders, fear of death, fear of hell, fear of each other.
What no one sees is the part of the truth. People tend to side entirely on one side or the other. While the rest wonder what all the noise is about. Climate change is real, but not to the extent that Al Gore dreams of. The main point of climate is that is a cyclic changing of the earth. In events from as short as 100 years to millions if not billions of years. Or did science forget to mention the Jurasic Age or the Ice Age during the Al Gore movie. Science shows that these major climatic changes have already transpired about 6 times. As we just recently left an Ice Age it is obviously going to get warmer.

http://barkingcoins.wordpress.com/2007/01/15/climate-change-as-social-control-through-fear/



In a corner, in a dark little corner where the apocalypse lay, where black holes sucked life and vision, laughter and hope, where cringing disregard for all that was positive in life swirled dark, where charisma vanished and few ever returned, this was what he saw. This was what he confronted. These fields of disturbance were hard to define, or sometimes even to find, but that did not make their power any less. He was crumbling. He had been stretched to the limits. There could be no more words, no more flickering of the fingers, his pain wracked body was refusing to function.

It couldn't be true what they said, that it would all end soon. Surely he had been destined to live forever. Surely he hadn't travelled so far just to be deposited on the beach, defenseless. How had this happened, the bobbing froth? How could it call him and yet not admit defeat? Why were these voices saying, leave the planet, it's not for you? Indeed it was a very different time. He was an emissary from the past. He was duty bound to report back, except there was no way back. The little coterie of friends he had so identified with had disintegrated. Jan had died. Tim had gone mad. Bruce had overdosed. Keith had gone mad, and lived out his days in a housing commission unit, collecting sickness benefits, taking pills, his insane cackle no longer effective.

Oh how he missed them, these people, these scenes, that had hardly even been. Perhaps it was the drugs that had made these scenes so chaotic, ensured they were of so little lasting influence. Lou Reed sang, heroin, it's my life and it's my wife, and we sat in circles, you're so vicious, hit me with a flower, and the songs that were our soundtrack repeated over and over again, you're so vicious. It was the days of mandrax, when the mandie stagger was regarded as the height of sophistication, and everyone was off their tree.

It had begun with John Bygate, in that bar surrounding the coloured glass roof, the pot plants and the sky lights, Bygate vibrating from the acid, his astonishingly handsome face the centre of everything. Harry Godolphin didn't make it this far. He was still down at the back of the Cross, sucking on bongs and listening to folk records, while here we were, in upmarket, inner-city Paddington, the centre of everything. The full international junky, Bygate said, when he knocked on his door after another sojourn overseas. How good it felt to be accepted by these truly fashionable people, the heart of everything, exactly what he wanted to be, fabulously handsome, fabulously out of it.

It was so long ago now, so many generations had passed since they were there, swilling Southern Comforts and being central to the world. Even last night there was a different crew, swilling their Vodka Red Bulls and waiting for their ecstasy to peak, as they eyed each other with naked lust and were surely, surely, on The River of Babylon. The music had changed. The faces had changed. The clothes had changed. And yet he remembered still what it was like to have been there, clearly important, clearly enviable, clearly breaking all boundaries in forging new lifestyles. And he thought, naively, that everything he wrote would be so vitally important, would record in fascinating detail the triumphs and intricacies of this newest generation.

But that was the baby boomers, and nobody cared now who took what or who screwed who. Or what fascinating sexual prohibition they overcame. They were growing old, and all anybody knew was that they were the ones born before computers, the ones who wore terrible clothes and listened to terrible music and had no taste at all, the ones who had become parents and liked to talk about green issues and left wing politics as if it really meant something. He was disoriented. Weren't they going to change everything? Wasn't the world going to revolve around them, as they pushed all the boundaries and championed gay rights, ranted on about the environment and the legalisation of pot? They weren't just going to disappear as a public embarrassment, flimsy, disoriented, ineffective; their musty breaths and greying hair going with them. Hey old timer, you want something? the drug dealer on the corner asked, as the little knot of scammers parted to let him through. That's where it had got to.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/tv--radio/jones-confronts-cancer-i-wont-be-away-for-long/2008/07/03/1214950907478.html

It has indeed been an annus horribilis for the broadcaster Alan Jones.

His many fans were worried last March after a virus put him in bed for 11 days, a malady possibly exacerbated by a concurrent court order to pay $360,000 defamation damages to the president of the Australian Olympic Committee, John Coates.

But worse lay ahead: the talk-back ace lost his voice, tore ligaments in his foot, and for the first time in decades had a tooth out. He remained Sydney's No. 1 broadcaster, but suffered an ignominious withering of his audience in four Nielsen Media surveys that saw 2GB's breakfast listenership shrink from 19.1 per cent in February to 13.8 per cent last month.

Then, yesterday, Jones called a press conference to announce that, like many men of his age (he's supposedly around 65), he had prostate cancer.

He will temporarily quit 2GB to undergo surgery at St Vincent's Hospital on July 18.

"I won't be away for all that long but it will be weeks, it won't be months," he said. "You lie around and you wither."

Jones pointed out that millions of people were worse off than himself but the main thing was to remain positive.

"As I said to someone the other day, we don't do dying around here, we just try and make the most of living," he said.

But it felt like a tectonic shift was taking place in Sydney radio: the press conference was crowded with reporters, television cameras and hopeful heirs such as Ray Hadley and Philip Clark.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23965355-7583,00.html

TODAY the real debate for the Rudd Government on climate change and an emissions trading scheme begins. At the National Press Club in Canberra, Ross Garnaut will release the report he was commissioned to produce on options for carbon trading.

We already know Garnaut's economic assessment will include options that are comprehensive and drastic, as well as dire warnings of cataclysmic climate events if nothing is done.

The Garnaut report will set benchmarks and scenarios in the public mind and define the debate on emissions trading and which industries should be excluded from a cap and trade system of carbon credits.

For the Government, which doesn't release its early response until later this month, the policy and political challenge will be to set its own parameters and avoid being driven by policy extremes on the one hand and populist pressures on the other.

The public is sick of hearing from both ends of the argument. People don't want ideology; that's why they were convinced not to vote for John Howard. Neither do they want simplistic, short-term solutions, and that's why they have turned off initial enthusiasm for petrol excise cuts. They want leadership, from anyone, on anything. Of course, the biggest challenge is to get the economics right. Apart from the inevitable price rises as energy costs increase, a misstep on an emissions trading scheme could have unintended consequences that damage industry and cost workers their jobs.

http://www.theage.com.au/national/downer-farewells-politics-20080703-31a5.html

FORMER foreign minister Alexander Downer considered leaving politics before the November 24 election and may have quit even if the Howard government had been returned.

Denying his departure from Canberra on July 14 was triggered by the Liberal Party loss, Mr Downer said his wife, Nicky, had been urging him to leave for some time.

"During the course of the last term there were points where I thought I would quite like to leave politics," Mr Downer said. "But we had an election coming up and I thought it was important as one of the most senior members of the government to continue there."

Mr Downer rejected a suggestion he should apologise for forcing a federal byelection seven months after standing as the Liberal candidate in the seat of Mayo, saying his departure would be understood by voters.

"My (foreign affairs) predecessor Gareth Evans left mid-term from his seat in Victoria, it quite often happens," Mr Downer said at a media conference in the Adelaide Hills seat he won nine times and represented for almost 24 years.

Mr Downer, 56, will take on a still unconfirmed job as part-time United Nations envoy to troubled Cyprus and a visiting professorship in history at Adelaide University.

He will also become part of a new business alliance with a former political foe, Nick Bolkus, in the consultancy firm Bespoke Approach. It has been set up by public relations consultant Ian Smith, who is married to former Democrats senator Natasha Stott Despoja.