Once Caught There Was No Escape

*



And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion, Dylan Thomas.


Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear.

Alan Corenk




The book is both a memoir and a meditation on the changing nature of journalism. He has been working as a general news reporter on the country's two leading broadsheet newspapers, for almost a quarter of a century, since the mid 1980s to the present. During that time journalism and the newspapers themselves have changed dramatically. Once reporters had to hunt for a working phone booth before filing their copy, sometimes in the pouring rain with wind whipping through the booth. Now the only problem is whether the signal drops out on your mobile phone.

He was in his 30s when he joined the staff of The Sydney Morning Herald. He had already been working as a freelance journalist for many years, writing for publications including The Bulletin and The Financial Review and had lived and often colourful and bohemian life. In the first, faltering years, it seemed that every magazine he wrote for collapsed and died the minute they published him; and he appeared in the last editions of such august publications as Ash and The Metallic Tadpole.

He has been involved either directly as a reporter or on the outskirts of many of the country's major events over those years; in more recent times with the boy in the suitcase story of Dean Shillingsworth, the two year old who's body was found stuffed into a suitcase floating on a western Sydney pond. And the Macquarie Fields riots. Those riots, triggered by the deaths of two housing estate boys during a police car chase, exemplified problems afflicting Australia's welfare dependent under-class.

They were crying, they were caught beside the road, they were in darkness and in hell and there was no way out, no way the could resume a normal life. Once in mourning, once in night, we were entirely fragmented. The typewriter hummed and he was caught in many broken passages, but once caught there was no escape. It was there, in London, working as a cleaner for a mad queen with a silver wig and an Airdale sitting in the front seat of his red BMW that he finally made the decision that he would live or die by the typewriter, come what may.

Brian Flowers, if that was his real name, was picked up by immigration and deported back to Australia, straight to Pentridge Jail, where he was serving time for a complex financial scam - for complex read, something he did not understand. There were other ways out. But at his age, doing bum jobs simply lacked dignity. Picking up glasses in The Bell hotel at Kings Cross in London for a pound an hour while interviewing famous authors as a sideline. Running through buildings holding a spray in either hand, drenching the place with a fresh smell that almost made him gag, but at least made the residents think the cleaner had been there.

While he had made small dribs of money out of freelancing, doing these sorts of bum jobs at 30 entirely lacked the dignity and sense of adventure they had held when he was younger. His life was slipping away. The books, wild, meandering, senseless things, remained unpublished. There was only one path left, to do what came relatively easily and what he was interested in, writing and journalism, the twin forks, fantasy and truth, or a meditation on the truth. In retrospect, he often thought it had been good for him to be forced to write about the real world, rather than retreat into obscure fantasy, drinking and smoking too much as he destroyed himself in order to produce ever greater, more convincing images.

Thus it was that he began to write for magazines. At first it was music magazines, poor payers always desperate for copy, that he wrote for. It was the era of XTC and The Pretenders, and he ate them up in a world consumed. There was always more to do. The record albums mounted up. He hired a space in the middle of a giant inner-city warehouse, and pounded away through the long nights, the building creaking around him. Money was always short. He always felt as if he was surrounded by darkness, a hostile world. He hated having to sell himself, but soon worked out an old idea with editors; always offer them three different ideas; it's easy to say no to one idea, but three forces them to pick. And once they've picked it's their project.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://business.smh.com.au/business/time-to-aim-high-on-climate-change-20080909-4cyj.html

Time to aim high on climate change

Ross Gittins

The latest report on climate change by the economics professor Ross Garnaut is the most disheartening government report I've read. It tells us how hugely destructive climate change is likely to be, but doubts that the world's governments will be able to agree on effective action to halt it. Now you know why economics is called the dismal science.

Garnaut quotes an authoritative American study of the consequences if nothing is done to fight climate change and average temperatures rise by 5 or 6 degrees by the end of this century.

Such a change would be "catastrophic", posing "almost inconceivable challenges as human society struggled to adapt". "The collapse and chaos associated with extreme climate change futures would destabilise virtually every aspect of modern life," the study concluded.

Among the destruction would be the extinction of more than half the world's species. The Great Barrier Reef and other coral formations would almost certainly be killed and much Australian farmland rendered useless.

Worse, the Greenland ice sheet and parts of Antarctica would be highly likely to melt, greatly raising the sea level and inundating coastal areas in Australia and many other countries. These changes would be irreversible.

Garnaut says that to reduce these risks to acceptable levels, we need agreement and action by all the major countries to stabilise the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million - although 400 would be better.

(Note that we've already reached 455 parts per million, so we'd go well above the 450 target before eventually getting back down to it.)

But Garnaut doubts that any comprehensive agreement will be forthcoming from the post-Kyoto negotiations at Copenhagen in December next year or in negotiations soon after.

Summoning all the optimism at a dismal scientist's disposal, however, he says "there is a chance, just a chance, that humanity will act in time and in ways that reduce the risks of climate change to acceptable levels".


http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24321608-5000117,00.html

Relax, truth has surfaced

KEVIN Rudd's global warming guru has finally - and reluctantly - exposed the con. Ignore everything the Government has told you.

The truth, conceded Professor Ross Garnaut last week, is that it really is cheaper for Australians to do nothing about global warming.

And, no, it's not immoral to figure there's no point spending big money to "stop" this warming when it won't make a blind bit of difference.

No wonder the Rudd Government refuses to comment on Garnaut's latest report, released on Friday. Much of the argument for its grand plan to make us slash emissions from 2010 has just been destroyed.

I guess it's just hoping no journalists, most of whom are warming believers, will care to notice what Garnaut has just admitted through gritted teeth. As far as I can tell, only the Daily Telegraph's Piers Akerman has drawn the unmistakable conclusions.

Let's assume just for now that man's carbon dioxide emissions really are heating the world. Let's also assume that heating would be bad, and wouldn't actually help crops grow. Let's also ignore that the world has in fact cooled since 2002.

Even given all that, it's bizarre to think Australia should lead the world in slashing emissions, losing billions of dollars and thousands of jobs.

What difference to the world could Australia make, when we pump out less than 1.5 per cent of all man's greenhouse gases? Why make such sacrifices when giants such as China and India are stamping on the growth pedal, getting gassier by the week, and have vowed not to stop until they're rich? It's brainless, of course.

And to that argument, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has had one glib response: panic now or pay later.

Or as he put it on June 23, and again on June 26: "The economic cost

of inaction on climate change is

far greater than the economic cost

of action."

One government minister, from Treasurer Wayne Swan to Environment Minister Peter Garrett, after another repeated the mantra -- that we must pay now or pay more later.

Here, for instance, is Climate Change Minister Penny Wong on June 24: "The economic costs of inaction are far greater than the costs of responsible action now."

But is all this actually true?

As Akerman has pointed out, Garnaut in his draft report in July calculated the cost if we did nothing about "climate change" and just adapted to whatever turned up.

The cost by 2020, he estimated then, would be a cut of 0.7 per cent in the GDP we'd normally expect.

Now compare that claimed cost with what we'd pay if we actually tried to stop global warming.

In his report last week, Garnaut says if we cut our emissions by 25 per cent by 2020, and the rest of the world somehow agreed to do likewise, our GDP would fall 1.6 per cent.

If we cut emissions by 10 per cent, we'd lose 1.1 per cent.

And if we simply adopted the weakest version of the Government's planned emissions trading scheme, even without actually cutting gases, we'd still lose 0.9 per cent.

That is: doing nothing about global warming turns out to be cheaper than "doing something" every single time.

So Rudd is exactly wrong: the economic costs of action are far greater than the economic costs of inaction.

That's according to Garnaut's own reports, which, incidentally, point out that whatever happens, we're still likely to be seven times richer in 2100 than we are today. That's assuming that any reliance can be placed on his models, which haven't been checked by anyone outside the loop.

Now before you dismiss Garnaut as just another evil sceptic, consider this. He's actually the deepest believer in the theory that man is heating the world to hell. In fact, he even asked the City of Yarra Council for permission to build a steel roof on his home on the grounds that global warming would cause "severe and more frequent hailstorms".

And, like so many devout believers

in global warming, Garnaut skips

over inconvenient truths -- such as

the fact that even the alarmist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's four assessment reports admit that "decreases in hail frequency are simulated for Melbourne".

So Garnaut is a believer and confirmed catastrophist, but even he is now wondering how sane it is to slash our emissions when we're so irrelevant on our own.

He now recommends that the Rudd Government promise only to cut our emissions by 10 per cent by 2020, a target that has horrified the green movement and warming scientists. Greens leader Bob Brown in particular is apoplectic, saying cuts of at least 40 per cent are needed to save us from Armageddon.

Labor itself was thought to be toying with promising cuts of 20 per cent.

But now Garnaut says just 10 per cent is the most we can realistically hope to cut without sending jobs overseas for no real gain to the climate.

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,24304472-5001030,00.html

By Piers Akerman

September 07, 2008 12:00am

NO SINGLE issue better illustrates the Rudd Government's gross incompetence than its blindly ideological approach to the question of climate change.

Fortunately, and perhaps accidentally, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's own hand-picked climate change guru, Professor Ross Garnaut, has now driven a truck through its principal argument.

In the 10 months since Rudd, Treasurer Wayne Swan, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong and Environment Minister Peter Garrett have held office, the Government has constantly decried and denigrated as ``irresponsible climate-change deniers'' all who question their views .

The snide use of the word "denier'' to link sceptics with those who deny the actuality of the Holocaust is so obvious it hardly deserves mention.

But its repeated usage is indicative of the gutter nature of the massive propaganda campaign waged by Rudd and his colleagues as they attempt to capitalise on their symbolic signing of the politically correct Kyoto Protocol.

Fixated with the flawed reports prepared by the totally partisan Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and falsely claiming there is a "consensus'' among climate scientists that human activity is responsible for global warming, Rudd has pushed a warped agenda based on extraordinarily dubious modelling.

And such an agenda can, in all reality, have no effect on the planet, let alone the behaviour of other nations.

For the whole of their period in office, federal Labor's mantra has been simple: the cost of doing nothing about climate change will be greater than the cost of doing something.

Now, however, former foreign affairs mentor Professor Garnaut has revealed that mantra is false.

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/

What fear campaign? What emotional blackmail? What wild exaggerations?

From the Victorian Education Department’s Classroom Energy Monitor Checklist:

Turn off the following:

Lights
Computers
Heaters
Fans
Air Conditioners
Printers

What happens if you don’t do it?

The Mountain Pygmy Possum is so cute! It’s also not happy! Heating up the earth with greenhouse gases will melt all the snow where it likes to live.

Hmm. Either these preachers are stretching the truth or a lot of scared energy monitors are turning off a lot of lights, because in the real world…
r> The state has had its coldest winter in 10 years and snow is expected to continue to fall in alpine areas this week as spring begins. Snow was falling on Mt Buller yesterday afternoon and was expected to continue in the evening.... The snow season has been extended to October 5 on the mountain.

One day a lot of former students will match what they were taught with what they can actually see, and then their lesson will at last be complete.

(Thanks to reader Stephen. No link to class monitor guide.)

UPDATE

Al Gore warned of catastrophic sea level rises in the near future of 6 metres. ABC science guru Robyn Williams predicted even worse - apocalyptic rises of as much as 100 metres by 2100.

Jennifer Marohasy brings reassurance to those stupid enough to believe either:

A study of sea level rise from ice melt in Greenland and western Antarctica has just been published in Science and concludes that a rise of 0.8 metres is possible by 2100, but even 2 metres ”physically untenable”.

Research scientists W.T. Pfeffer, J.T. Harper and S.O’Neel calculated how much ice and water would need to be lost from Greenland and Antarctica for a two metre rise, then how fast contributing glaciers would need to move in order to dump that much ice, and concluded that a two meter rise in sea level by 2100 would require significantly faster ice velocities than had ever been reported before.

To reach even 0.8 metre rise would, the study says, require “accelerated conditions”.
>
(Thanks to reader Neville.)



A mural on the side of some innere-city terraces, Glebe, Sydney, Australia.