Alcoholics Of A Different Era

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It is a winter's tale
That the snow blind twilight ferries over the lakes
And floating fields from the farm in the cup of the vales,
Gliding windless through the hand folded flakes,
The pale breath of cattle at the stealthy sail,

And the stars falling cold,
And the smell of hay in the snow, and the far owl
Warning among the folds, and the frozen hold
Flocked with the sheep white smoke of the farm house cowl
In the river wended vales where the tale was told.

Once when the world turned old
On a star of faith pure as the drifting bread,
As the food and flames of the snow, a man unrolled
The scrolls of fire that burned in his heart and head,
Torn and alone in a farm house in a fold

Of fields. And burning then
In his firelit island ringed by the winged snow
And the dung hills white as wool and the hen
Roosts sleeping chill till the flame of the cock crow
Coombs through the mantled yards and the morning men

Stumble out with their spades,
The cattle stirring, the mousing cat steppin shy,
The puffed birds hopping and hunting, the milkmaids
Gentle in their clogs over the fallen sky,
And all the woken farm at its white trades,

He knelt, he wept, he prayed.

Dylan Thomas A Winter's Tale.





There's no reason for the crime, no reason to be startled. He learnt never to believe a word anybody says. The mounting cynicism ripped away at my soul, turned him into another creature. Prone to melancholy on a good day, it was the core of unreason that he felt was taking over. Never believe a word the Opposition says, an editor instructed him sternly as he was sent off to do another job on God knows what. At the time the Opposition was Labor, and he was shocked that he was being told to ignore these people he regarded, so naively, as the champions of freedom and social justice.

It's not just the world that has changed, it's the party as well. But back then, after the first spate of stories on the homeless, he still believed. He wanted to make the world a better place. The homeless stories, which had been so influential in getting me employed at the Sydney Morning Herald, then regularly ranked as one of the top 20 best newspapers in the world, weren't the beginning and the end, they were just another story. Did those photographs of the homeless, their belongings scattered on the medium strip outside a grim block of apartments, really change anything?

Certainly not for them, although at the time, unused to the passing affect of sob stories, he thought he was doing them a great favour, going out of his way to tell their story, bringing all these injustices to light. The photographs, which he had taken myself, were also published and he was so immensely proud. He was living with Cara at the time, in that funny little cottage in Quirk Street, Rozelle, which she had bought with her family money for about $80,000. It seemed like an astonishing amount of money back then in the 1989s. She sold it recently for more than a million.

Whatever you do, spend your expenses, the old codgers warned him, their single, primary golden rule of journalism: don't give a cent of it back, not one. All things to all men, in those days when alcohol ruled, when they all got pissed at lunch time and stayed pissed for the rest of the day. When Tom Glascott, the environment writer, would spend his days at the Australian hotel on Broadway. Earnest young environmentalists would come into the office and he would have to send them over the road to the pub, where Tom would be sitting holding court, smoking Benson and Hedges cigarettes and drinking whisky, regaling the world with wonderfully entertaining tales.

To him, who had been out in the cold for so long, it seemed astonishingly wonderful to be mixing with these people, legends of print, legends in their own lunchtime. While these days they ride a bike to work and drink astonishing amounts of mineral water, back then it was all about being astonishing clever over a jolly bottle of red. Robert Haupt was one of the leaders of the pack, a greatly talented writer. Knew everybody. Tragically pompous. Very clever. Dropped dead in Moscow after polishing off a bottle of vodka or two, shortly before his book was published. Then there was Geoffrey Smart, who was also greatly admired both for his pomposity and his writing abilities.

Even to be on the outskirts of these people, to begin the merry dance of alcoholism, seemed like an enormous privilege, a great adventure. There was Tracy Aubin, their state political writer for a while, who was wonderfully loud and opinionated and drank hard with the boys. She died, in chaos, with alcohol seen as a major player. During a period of renovation the Australian hotel named their beer garden the Glascott Gardens; and they all thought that was fine.

he saw him after he retired, when we were staking out St Vincents hospital with would-be labour leader Mark Latham inside. He was hobbling on a stick, helped by his wife, but beaming nonetheless, glad to see someone from the old days, even if it was me. He didn't drink or smoke any more, his heart had got to him, and we wondered why the channels were so close, why time swept away these bubbles of social import, the little circles of outrage. Why time had displaced the days when the news cars were tied up for hours circling inner-city blocks, waiting for the editors to finish their lunch.

They would come back drunk, and stumble through afternoon conference reeking of alcohol, and nobody thought anything of it. That was the era. That was the profession. And he took to it like a duck to water; soon enough unable to write without a drink under his belt. Greasing the verbal facility, he thought of it as. At four pm every afternoon, when it was time to file, he ducked across the road for a a couple of double bourbon and coke; throwing them down the hatch and returning to his desk barely ten minutes later. Anyone watching might have assumed he had just gone to the toilet.

The bourbon stung through him and the words flowed. And they thought there would be no consequence, the good days would never end. They thought drinking was as natural as breathing. These days almost no one even bothers with a glass of wine at lunch, and the legendary drinkers are all gone. Those with the alcoholic gene cut a swathe through the firmament and are gone, sacked, in disgrace. And all was lost, their lives spiralling downhill into housing commission flats and failure, their talents burnt out in the smell of whisky, the cutting sting of the alcohol which had given them so much, provided them with so much entre to so many circles, had given them so many stories. It was, indeed, a different era.





THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2496902/Lord-Nelson-and-Captain-Cooks-shiplogs-question-climate-change-theories.html

Scientists have uncovered a treasure trove of meteorological information contained in the detailed logs kept by those on board the vessels that established Britain's great seafaring traditition including those on Nelsons' Victory and Cook's Endeavour.

Every Royal Naval ship kept a detailed record of climate including air pressure, wind strength, air and sea temperature and major meteorological disturbances.

A group of academics and Met Office scientists has unearthed the records dating from the 1600s and examined more than 6,000 logs, which have provided one of the world's best sources for long-term weather data.

Their studies have raised questions about modern climate change theories. A paper by Dennis Wheeler, a geographer based at Sunderland University, recounts an increasing number of summer storms over Britain in the late 17th century.

Many scientists believe that storms are caused by global warming, but these were came during the so-called Little Ice Age that affected Europe from about 1600 to 1850.

The records also suggest that Europe saw a spell of rapid warming, similar to that experienced today, during the 1730s that must have been caused naturally.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24122117-7583,00.html

IT has been a tough year for the high priests of global warming in the US. First, NASA had to correct its earlier claim that the hottest year on record in the contiguous US had been 1998, which seemed to prove that global warming was on the march. It was actually 1934. Then it turned out the world's oceans have been growing steadily cooler, not hotter, since 2003. Meanwhile, the winter of 2007 was the coldest in the US in decades, after Al Gore warned us that we were about to see the end of winter as we know it.

In a May issue of Nature, evidence about falling global temperatures forced German climatologists to conclude that the transformation of our planet into a permanent sauna is taking a decade-long hiatus, at least. Then this month came former greenhouse gas alarmist David Evans's article in The Australian, stating that since 1999 evidence has been accumulating that man-made carbon emissions can't be the cause of global warming. By now that evidence, Evans said, has become pretty conclusive.

Yet believers in man-made global warming demand more and more money to combat climate change and still more drastic changes in our economic output and lifestyle.

The reason is that precisely that they are believers, not scientists. No amount of empirical evidence will overturn what has become not a scientific theory but a form of religion.


http://www.smh.com.au/news/paul-sheehan/and-the-challenge-of-migration/2008/08/03/1217701846375.html?page=2


Paul Sheehan

Did you know the Rudd Government is implementing the biggest immigration program since the end of World War II, and the biggest intake, in absolute numbers of permanent immigrants and temporary workers, in Australia's history?

Did you know the migration program for 2008-09 has set a target of 190,300 places, a robust 20 per cent increase over the financial year just ended?

On budget night, May 13, amid the avalanche of material released by the Government, the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Senator Chris Evans, issued a press release stating, among other things: "The use of 457 visas to employ temporary skilled migrant workers has grown rapidly in recent years. A total of 39,500 subclass 457 visas was granted in 2003-04 compared with an expected 100,000 places in each of 2007-08 and 2008-09." That is a 150 per cent increase in four years.

Did you know the number of overseas students coming to Australia is also at a record high, with 228,592 student visas granted in 2006-07, a 20 per cent increase over the previous year?

Under the Rudd Government, Australia's net immigration intake is now larger than Britain's, even though it has almost three times the population of Australia. To put all this in perspective, the immigration program in the Rudd Government's first year is 150 per cent bigger than it was in the Howard government's first year. The immigration intake is running almost 60 per cent higher than it was three years ago...

Rudd did not have the decency to mention immigration once in his 4300-word campaign launch. It is the most glaring inconsistency of his Government...

The hysterics in the refugee and mandatory detention debates have always thrown around words like "shame" and "gulags" and engaged in moral relativism, comparing Howard to Saddam Hussein, while refusing to recognise that there are real consequences of failures of immigration policy. Thousands of Australian have paid a heavy price for the failed refugee-vetting processes in the 1970s and 1980s, when many people who should never have been allowed into the country were approved. We are still paying the price.

Labor learned the hard way that to compromise border security is to invite political disaster. This is why the Rudd Government is still talking tough on border security, and has a major immigration policy but dare not speak its name.

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http://www.newmatilda.com/polliegraph/?p=398

SMH Online removes hysterical parasites

By Bob Dumpling

In today’s SMH, Paul Sheehan has unloaded a standard diatribe on Labor’s ’supposed’ overhaul of it’s immigration policy.

Sheehan contends that the Australian electorate dearly holds the touching virtue that: we still decide who comes to this country and how. For this reason, the refugee intake is not increasing. Then Sheehan injects his personal view:

“The hysterics in the refugee and mandatory detention debates have always thrown around words like “shame” and “gulags” and engaged in moral relativism, comparing Howard to Saddam Hussein, while refusing to recognise that there are real consequences of failures of immigration policy. Thousands of Australian have paid a heavy price for the failed refugee-vetting processes in the 1970s and 1980s, when thousands of parasites who should never have been allowed into the country were approved. We are still paying the price.”

Someone at SMH must have found that second last sentence a bit strongly worded. You’ll be pleased to know that as of 9am this morning, it has been redacted: thousands of parasites are now known as ‘many people’. Stay classy SMH!