What Was Unforgiveable

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Sculpting the South Pillar

Eta Carinae, one of the most massive and unstable stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, has a profound effect on its environment.

Found in the South Pillar region of the Carina Nebula, these fantastic pillars of glowing dust and gas embedded with newborn stars were sculpted by the intense wind and radiation from Eta Carinae and other massive stars.

Glowing brightly in planet Earth's southern sky, the expansive Eta Carinae Nebula is a mere 10,000 light-years distant. Still, this remarkable cosmic vista is largely obscured by nebular dust and only revealed here in penetrating infrared light by the Spitzer Space Telescope. Eta Carinae itself is off the top left of this false-color image, with the bright-tipped dust pillars pointing suggestively toward the massive star's position.

Image Credit: NASA, SSC, JPL, Caltech, Nathan Smith (Univ. of Colorado), et al.


Bias is an inevitable consequence of the belief we must have to be successful in
whatever we do. Where there is a wide diversity of beliefs and the freedom and
resources to pursue them, bias is less of a problem. In most scientific controversies the
timescales and risks are such that we can let the passage of time settle them. In some,
like medicine and climate change, we cannot. In medicine, despite centuries of study,
there are few things absolutely safe or efficacious but we assume that most medical
professionals would not propose medicines or procedures that they knew were poor in
either respect. However, we have learnt through experience that it is unwise to allow
pharmaceutical manufacturers, or others with a conflict of interest, to be the judges of
these qualities. Carefully controlled studies are mandated specifically to avoid bias in
the judgements as to which medicines and procedures are appropriate. High standards
of record keeping and disclosure are enforced. It is inconceivable today that the
developer of any medicine or procedure would be allowed to conceal test data or take
a leading role in a review process that approved it. In comparison, climate research is
in its infancy and almost entirely unregulated.
Many, particularly the conscientious young, have been persuaded that
anthropogenic global warming is a very serious problem for mankind and one which
governments can and should do something about. Sir David King, the UK’s chief
scientist said it was a more serious problem than terrorism1. So strong is the beliefamong some that they are prepared to resort to civil disobedience, shut down power
stations and disrupt major airports. It is by all measures as important a field of research
as medicine, and ought to operate to standards at least as high, but it does not. On the
contrary, it is steeped in bias, concealment and spin. The Stern Review2 said “The
causal link between greenhouse gases concentrations and global temperatures is well
established, founded on principles established by scientists in the nineteenth century.”
This is both disingenuous and plainly wrong. Until the 1950’s climate research was
largely a branch of Meteorology, and what limited data were collected were largely to
assist in weather forecasting. Similarly, the computer modelling that now dominates
the climate debate evolved from the development of weather models. The dispute that
has emerged is not over the basic science of the nineteenth century, or that a causal
link exists between greenhouse gases and global warming, but concerns our ability to
detect the contribution that a minor human increase in particular greenhouse gases
makes to current climate change, and the possibility and economics of attempting to
reduce it. Strong and well-founded scientific disagreement remains between those who
say the limited observations since the beginning of the industrial era indicate a
sensitivity of the Earth, to a doubling of carbon dioxide, of around 1°C or less, to
which we can and should adapt, and those who say, based solely upon theory
developed in numerical models, that the sensitivity is several times larger and that we
must drastically reduce emissions.
This paper focuses on one strand of the dispute, the so-called “hockey stick” study,
which suggested that little change occurred in global temperatures over the
millennium that preceded the industrial era. Until recently, the “hockey stick” was
strongly promoted as proof of human interference in the climate. The “hockey stick”
story demonstrates that, contrary to what may be said elsewhere in this journal, much
of the climate science in which we are invited to place trust is biased, sloppy and
protected from exposure by concealment of the underlying data and methodology, and
by a well organised “spin” process....

BIAS AND CONCEALMENT IN THE IPCC PROCESS:
David Holland.




The violence against him continued to escalate throughout his 15th year; right up until his 16th birthday, when he was legally free and could walk off down the road, albeit in a gale of tears, to begin a new life. But there was only one moment, it must have lasted almost a month, perhaps even a little more, he stayed home or his father was away, when the beatings ceased. But for most of that terrible year the pattern was the same. He came home from school on a Friday, changed out of his school uniform, and headed down the road to the bus, where he would sit cold frozen and watch the suburbs slide by, frozen in fear, expedition, sadness.

Or often enough, there would be a car waiting for him, just out of sight of his parent's house. The men who picked him up had preyed on unhappy boys for thousands of years, but he wasn't to know that. He was flattered by the attention. And diverted. Anything to escape the appalling battery that he was enduring at home; accompanied by an appalling silence, a silence thick with his father's anger and his mother's crying. All the men wanted to do was give him a blow job, it wasn't exactly demanding sex. And in return, he got lifts into town, money, alcohol, attention. He was, briefly, infamous, the available boy.

And each Monday morning he would return at about two, three, even four am. No matter how late he returned, his glowering father would be waiting in the kitchen for him, the belt laid out in a geometrically precise fashion along the table. Did the men who dropped him off know how bad those beatings were. Was there anything that could be done to stop them. The beatings escalated in intensity throughout that year, until they became psychotic, vicious, brutal and unforgivable attacks, when he was left cowering and sobbing in the corner with welts all over him, on his back, on his arms, on his legs, everywhere, as the belt went whack whack whack whack whack and he shivered and cried and his father hit and hit and hit.

The monster. The vicious brutality of it all was completely out of proportion to the crime, whatever that was, being different probably, and the worst day, the very worst day, when both his father and his mother, thinking she was doing her good Christian duty, joined in, both snaking the belts out towards him as he dodged around the house until they cornered him and hit and hit and hit. And he never forgave them. The level of brutality was so extreme that once he walked down that road, he never looked back. Apart from a few odd things, it was more than 30 years, more like 40, before he spoke to his father again. And no one ever beat him again.

Lingering, even to a man in his 50s, was the memory of that belt laid out so neatly on the patterned 1960s kitchen table. The way he felt as he got out of whichever car it was, there in that remote winding road surrounded by those demonic trees, and looked down at the house to the light on in the kitchen and the shape of his father through the window. The way he would say goodbye to whatever adoring queen had driven him home, the way he would brace himself for the beating you could never brace yourself for, and his feeling of absolute terror as he opened the door. The way they would look at each other. And the way the attack would begin. Again. And how the extreme brutality of it escalated, to the point where he could barely walk to school in the morning. And how he became the silent, abused child, plotting his escape. And the way he never, ever forgave the bastard for what he did. It was unforgivable.




THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24248135-5013871,00.html

THE political day together for Brendan Nelson and Peter Costello began yesterday as they strolled across Parliament House to see their new Liberal colleagues being sworn in.

After the Coalition partyroom meeting finished, the Opposition Leader and the man who could be Opposition leader casually wandered together to the Senate chamber.

As they sat in the visitors' gallery on the floor of the Senate they exchanged jokes, comments, wry smiles, funny faces and moments of meditation as the focus in the Senate switched from the ceremony to the two who control the fate of the Liberal leadership.

As Dr Nelson is being dismissed as a lame duck because of poor polling, Mr Costello is not only the bulwark supporting him but could also be the instrument of his downfall.

Liberal MPs are urging the former treasurer to change his mind about retiring and expect Dr Nelson to step down if he does, so there was a sense of the old Abbott and Costello comic line of "Who's on first?" as they joked between themselves.

Later, in the first question time in the House of Representatives for the spring session, the synergy between the two continued in every sense.

News.com.au

IT was intended to boost the birth rate, but a legal loophole means the $5000 baby bonus can be claimed for late-term abortions.

The loophole arises because abortions after 20 weeks' gestation are recorded by doctors as stillbirths.

Parents of stillborn babies receive the maternity benefit on compassionate grounds.

The Federal Parliamentary Library, which examined the issue for Liberal senator Cory Bernardi, confirmed the anomaly.

Senator Bernardi said: "This is not a debate about abortion. This is about the baby bonus being misused and misapplied to women who do have terminations.

"Clearly that is not the intention, it's not in keeping with the support of mainstream Australians for the baby bonus."

National Association of Specialist Obstetricians and Gynaecologists chairman Andrew Pesce said there was no legal difference between stillbirths and abortions after 20 weeks.

Dr Pesce said most late-term abortions were prompted by fetal abnormalities.

When it came to women who had a late-term abortion, he said: "I think it is a very humane gesture from society to say, 'You are going through enough already, we're not going to withhold the bonus'."

A spokeswoman for Families Minister Jenny Macklin maintained the baby bonus was not available for aborted pregnancies.

"If there is any evidence of this occurring we will follow it up immediately," she said.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/relationships/the-big-dry-its-not-raining-men/2008/08/25/1219516418963.html

An exodus of single women from rural areas has led to a shortage of eligible bachelors in Australia's main cities, a new study has found.

Demographer Bernard Salt published an analysis of data from the 2006 census in a new book Man Drought yesterday, showing that a shortage of 30-something women in Australia during the 1970s has been reversed.

The news is not all bad for single women. They outnumber men every year of their lives until the age of 34, in a shift that Salt describes as "the tipping point".

In 1976, there were 54,000 fewer men than women aged in their 30s but by 2006 men in the age group outnumbered women by 9000.

Salt said a tendency of older men to "raid the stocks" of eligible young women, who tend to marry earlier, accounted for the shift, as well as higher rates of men emigrating and a more even mix of men and women entering the country than before.

But the most important shift in the past three decades has been the widespread movement of women away from rural areas into major cities, which Salt said has accounted for a "gender imbalance".

While 40-something single women outnumber their male counterparts in Sydney, they are outnumbered by seven-to-one in Wakool in southern NSW, six-to-one in Durras and Stanwell Tops and two-to one in Murrurundi.


Countryside near Tambar Springs, central NSW, Australia.