How Amazing Is That

*



Daddy

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

Sylvia Plath



What was that, where we reached into the dereliction inside out own souls? Their unwashed bodies stank. Their eyes, in various states of glaze, told not just of the previous nights misadventures, but of lifetimes beyond the law. They snarled and spat, spewing out right wing tirades. The country was being taken over by the Vietnamese. And the snarling tides. First the Greeks. Then the Italians. Then the Lebanese. There had always been the Chinese. They spat and fumed, in their ragged clothes, many of them toothless or near toothless, none of them had held down a job in years, if ever.

He watched the bundles of street addicts with a certain sad, romantic irony, as if they held the key to a greater truth. They were a sub-species, shorter, less morally developed. They grew up in violent homes with addict parents, and none had known a normal, stable, suburban life. These people had once seemed so interesting, there people in the city cracks, thieves, junkies, hopelessly dysfunctional. Scraps of conversation, primarily whinging, filtered through. Was this the end of the dream? Was this where they all ended up?

The great romance he had attached to his own dysfunctional friends all those years ago bore no resemblance to this sub-class. They were a great creative gaggle of wonderful people, the frozen, crazy nights, the bodies sleeping in the lounge room as he tip toed over them to bed. It had all seemed so wonderfully spirited, so daring, so in the face of the straight world. And the smells came out at just the wrong moment. And all was embarrassment. And the frozen rooftops at dawn, the cats perched watching or crawling home from an orgy, human and animal, the crystalline frangepeni flowers in the Paddington dawn, all was so cruel, so forgetful, neglectful of their own care, that he embraced it all with love and lust. This was his destiny.

And they had all died. He was left behind for one simple reason, to tell the story of folly and despair, of wasted lives and false hopes. To puncture the current waves, the shibboleths, the hysteria, to bring common sense and decency to a frantic, frenetic, world gone mad. You're crazy, man, he laughed, in the sudden gust of wind and rain and leaves, the full moon lurching. And I love you too. And they locked lips in an eternity of an embrace. And knew they were the only two. Pioneers on the planet surface. The first to go here, the first to feel this. The crystal grass crunched excitedly under their feet.

I've never known anyone as thirsty as you, he said, as they stopped at a water fountain and he drank deeply. It seemed like a metaphor for the whole of his life, and they laughed and were in love, ever so briefly in the frantic currents. Oh come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant. He could feel his own skeleton x-rayed inside him. He could hear the first twitch of the birds in the bushes, preceding dawn. The first prickle of light, the echo of the echo of something massive that had happened long before, lit up the night sky.

And he began to run, feeling the bushes whack across his skin and the whole of Centennial Park picked out in delicious moonlight. He could see every detail of every flower, every tree. The statues loomed like alien monuments, built by a different race. And the public toilets. They brought you down. They had been the scene of murders and gay sex for generations, men lurking in the bushes while children played nearby. It was quiet at this hour, and he was relieved. He didn't need any witnesses to the majesty of the moment. Love me for ever, Ian said, and he kissed him back. I can't do that, he said. I'm sorry. My path is a different path. But tonight is tonight, enjoy it for what it is. Look at that sky, how amazing is that, he said, pointing at the first streaks of sunrise as the chorus of birds grew suddenly louder.



http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24036736-7583,00.html

The world has spent $50 billion on global warming since 1990, and we have not found any actual evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming. Evidence consists of observations made by someone at some time that supports the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. Computer models and theoretical calculations are not evidence, they are just theory.

What is going to happen over the next decade as global temperatures continue not to rise? The Labor Government is about to deliberately wreck the economy in order to reduce carbon emissions. If the reasons later turn out to be bogus, the electorate is not going to re-elect a Labor government for a long time. When it comes to light that the carbon scare was known to be bogus in 2008, the ALP is going to be regarded as criminally negligent or ideologically stupid for not having seen through it. And if the Liberals support the general thrust of their actions, they will be seen likewise.

The onus should be on those who want to change things to provide evidence for why the changes are necessary. The Australian public is eventually going to have to be told the evidence anyway, so it might as well be told before wrecking the economy.

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/national/national/general/pollution-price-will-kill-jobs-warning/1251100.aspx

BIG business has warned of job losses, shrinking profits and the closure of some operations unless significant changes are made to the Federal Government's proposed emissions trading scheme.

In its submission to the Government's green paper, the Business Council of Australia said it supported the scheme but that greater compensation was needed to prevent some companies from relocating overseas.

"If global greenhouse gas emissions are to be reduced over the long term the world will need examples of how this can be done effectively but also with minimal economic disruption," the council's president, Greig Gailey, said.

Modelling commissioned by the council looked at the effect of the emissions trading scheme on 14 companies in areas such as minerals processing, manufacturing, oil refining, coalmining and sugar milling. It found three of the 14 business would shut, a further four would have to restructure their operations and the remaining seven would need to cut costs. In all cases profits before tax would fall by 22 per cent.

To stop this happening the council wants greater compensation from the Government and a low cap on the amount of greenhouse pollution companies can emit. It also wants the start of the scheme delayed until the rest of the world agrees to participate and a set price for the permits the Government will create to allow companies to release carbon emissions.

But the more compensation the Government hands out to business the less money it will have to help households adjust to the price rises for things such as energy that will result from the scheme.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24234257-7583,00.html

A PHENOMENON of the increasingly tense debate on the Rudd Government's carbon policies is the unwillingness of the protagonists to quantify the risk for Australian workers.

The headline-grabbing Business Council statement on companies endangered by the proposed approach does not do so. Nor have its previous statements on the issue.

Rudd Government ministers, not surprisingly, do not do so, although their frequent assurances that the policies will be economically responsible are a dog-whistle attempt to signal to workers (voters) that their interests are in mind.

No trade union statement, even those expressing concern, does so.

Not even leading federal Opposition spokesmen, Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull and Greg Hunt, attempt to quantify how many jobs might be in the firing line.

The environmental activists, who have been quick to rail against the BCA and other critics of carbon charges, naturally never mention this point, although they will try to claim job opportunities for their radical programs.

The Greens are in the van of trying to paint over the economic threats by claiming that lost jobs in energy-intensive industry will be replaced in "clean" businesses. They bolster this by pointing to the high voter concern about global warming and support for programs that will deliver abatement.

However, recent polling by Essential Media Communications showing that 72 per cent of the people it interviewed supported the introduction of emissions trading also showed that half of those polled admit they do not know what it is.

It would seem a fair guess that these voters also don't know that Australian energy-intensive firms in the firing line of high carbon charges directly employ more than 165,000 people in the food and beverage industry, 64,000 in textiles, clothing and footwear, more than 162,000 in pulp and paper making and printing, 35,000 in non-metallic minerals production, more than 2000 in liquefied natural gas processing, about 100,000 in the petroleum, plastics and chemicals industries, more than 141,000 in metals production, 195,000 in manufacturing of equipment and machinery and about 60,000 in other factories.
This adds up to 924,000 workers and is a Howard government calculation used and accepted earlier this decade in talks on greenhouse gas abatement with both business and environmental non-government organisations.

It is now several years out of date. The energy-intensive manufacturing sector claims that the total number today is actually about 1.1 million.

These are people directly employed by trade-exposed, energy-intensive companies. Many more are the beneficiaries of jobs that flow from the output of these TEEI companies.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24234263-5016634,00.html

DESIGNING an emissions trading scheme in Australia was supposed to have been made easier by the pioneering work done in the European Union. After all, they've been developing their scheme since 2000 and trading for nearly four years, albeit with varied success.

But there's a big catch. The EU hasn't worked out how to treat its emissions-intensive trade-exposed (EITE) industries and find an equitable system for auctioning permits. Under pressure from business concerned about the erosion of their international competitiveness, the EU avoided any tough decisions on permits, simply allocating them to major emitters or applying grandfather clauses since the first trial period began in 2005.

Environmentalists derided the approach and the over-generous allocations that followed, but the underlying structural problem is genuine. The accumulation of greenhouse emissions is a global problem, but any domestic emissions trading scheme will make firms inside its borders less internationally competitive, and will just relocate many trade-exposed emissions from regulated to unregulated economies.

Business activity and commensurate government revenue will diminish, unless these transfers can be accurately identified and compensated, or until a comprehensive global deal can be negotiated.

The problem will depend on the competitiveness of international markets and the sensitivity of each good or service to changes in the cost of energy.

The European Commission hopes to find a workable solution by 2010 to what Ross Garnaut described as a truly dreadful problem, leaning towards the gradual phase-in of permits from 2012 to 2020.

The 2007 federal election campaign was fertile ground for ambitious promises on climate change policy. The Rudd Government promised to start trading by 2010 and finish designing its scheme by the end of this year.

This ambitious time frame has catapulted Australia to the role of global policy pioneer in a number of key aspects of scheme design. It's a courageous move politically, given that Australia is arguably the most trade-exposed, energy-intensive economy in the OECD.




Men At Work. From a Painting in the Gunnedah Art Gallery, NSW.