Worshipping At The Knees Of Corrupt Saints

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Time drops in decay
Like a candle burnt out.
And the mountains and woods
Have their day, have their day;
But, kindly old rout
Of the fire-born moods,
You pass not away.

Paddy Flynn is dead;....He was a great teller of tales, and unlike our common romancers, knew how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, faeryland and earth, to people his stories. He did not live in a shrunken world, but knew of no less ample circumstance than did Homer himself. Perhaps the Gaelic people shall by his like bring back again the ancient simplicity and amplitude of imagination.....Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.

W.B. Yeats

Fear and ignorance, Hume concludes, are the true source of superstition. They lead a “blind and terrified” public to embrace “any practice, however absurd or frivolous, which either folly or knavery recommends.”

The knaves today, of course, are the would-be high priests of the global warming orthodoxy, with former Vice President Al Gore as their Supreme Pontiff. As Hume points out, “the stronger mixture there is of superstition,” with its ambience of ignorance and fear, “ the higher is the authority of the priesthood.” Like the Church in the Dark Ages or the Spanish Inquisition during the Reformation, they denounce all doubters such as Doctor Evans or Britain’s Lord Monckton as dangerous heretics, “outliers” in Gore’s phrase: or as willing tools of the evil enemy of a healthy planet, Big Oil.

This is not the first time, of course, that superstition has paraded itself as science, or created a priesthood masquerading as the exponents of reason. At the beginning of the last century we had the fascination with eugenics, when the Al Gores of the age like E.A. Ross and Ernst Haeckel warned that modern industrial society was headed for “race suicide.”

The list of otherwise sensible people who endorsed this hokum, from Winston Churchill to Oliver Wendell Holmes, is embarrassing to read today. Then as now, money was poured into foundations, institutes, and university chairs for the study of eugenics and “Racial Hygiene.” Then as now, it was claimed that there was a scientific consensus that modern man was degenerating himself into extinction. Doubters like German anthropologist Rudolf Virchow, were dismissed as reactionaries or even as tools of the principal contaminators of racial purity, the Jews.

And then as now, proponents of eugenics turned to the all-powerful state to avert catastrophe. A credulous and submissive public allowed politicians to pass laws permitting forced sterilization of the “feeble-minded,” racial screening for immigration quotas, minimum wage laws (which Sidney and Beatrice Webb saw as a way to force the mentally unfit out of the labor market), and other legislation which, in retrospect, set the stage for the humanitarian catastrophe to come. In fact, when the Nazis took power in 1933, they found that the Weimar Republic had passed all the euthanasia legislation they needed to eliminate Germany’s “useless mouths.” The next target on their racial hygiene list would be the Jews.

Real science rests on a solid bedrock of skepticism, a skepticism not only about certain religious or cultural assumptions, for example about race, but also about itself. It constantly reexamines what it regards as evidence, and the connections it draws between cause and effect. It never rushes to judgment, as race science did in Germany in the 1930’s, and as the high priests of climate change are doing today.

Politicians everywhere should be forced to take an oath similar to the Hippocratic oath taken by doctors: “Above all else, do no harm.” The debate in Australia on this issue is rapidly building to a climax. Before they make decisions that could trim Australia’s GDP by several percentage points a year and impose heavy penalties on Australians’ life style, Labour and Liberal alike need to reexamine the superstition of global warming. Otherwise, the only thing it will melt away is everyone’s civil liberty.

Arthur Herman



He folded his money back into his wallet and put it back into his coat pocket. He laughed. The young man had just loudly declared to the bar: "I'm so horny I'd f... a monkey." Somehow the statement had turned off his potential client, who no doubt thought he had a bit of class. They all did. He sat in the corner and drank and drank. At first brandy and lemonade was the most sophisticated drink he could think of. Then, after returning from a month on the Greek island of Ios, he drank triple shots of Ouzo and for some reason thought it was fun. He sought oblivion, and found it.

His play The Oblivion Seekers was a multi-layered science fiction epic which was never performed and which the judges at the playwright forum had hated. Everyting was coming to a close. The slime that coated the bar wall filtered into his dreams, into his writing, into his soul. Tendrils of an evil, alien lichen hung down from the ceiling. The stained and slimy walls reeked of some sort of dysfunctional evil, the bi-product of the corruption seeking from the pores of the drinkers. It was a cruel and negligent evil, made up of the gloating stares of ancient queens, of old hands on young flesh, of stale sheets and stale flesh, and most of all, of lost hope.

For anyone who entered here had travelled far. They had already left the normal world, bourgeois society, decent suburban lives, straight up and down working class blokes. That's not what they were. Their own self loathing decorated everything they did. It was the era of the grand queen, before clones and masculinity, t-shirts and muscles and moustaches, came into fashion. This was a time when anyone who declared themselves gay, or undecided, had already shrieked in the face of normal convention, had defied all community standards, had entered into bestiality, abnormality, eternal corruption, eternal damnation.

They flapped their wrists and they died inside. And he drank and he drank, sitting in the corner and watching the passing parade, the little rag tag group of rent boys of whom he was one, Juliana the bar manager and bar mistress, who's tolerance was the only reason they, all of them under age, were allowed into this citadel of all that was different, virtually the only gay bar in town. The Rex Hotel is no longer there. In its place are modern apartments and offices; and next to it The Alemain fountain, and the park which has now been paved and renovated, planted with palms, no longer the site of daily criminal intent, of lurking and mischief.

Other young man spoke in their later years of how much they had suffered in that bar, how truly evil it was, how much they were used, how badly they were abused, how selling their young bodies had destroyed their souls. They spoke of the years it had taken them to recover, of the depths they had sunk to, of the drunkenness that had been their only salvation, the only salve to place on their open wounds. But for him, it was none of that. He sat there speeding on the cheap high grade speed available from the chemist just down the road, he ground his teeth and he drank his beers, one after another after another, and laughed as they queued to buy him even more.

It was his philosophy, if you can drink me under the table and are prepared to pay for it, you can have me. As long as the money's right. The drinks were just the prelude, foreplay. You had to buy an awful lot to get him speed. The pharmaceutical grade amphetamines counteracted the alcohol, and he drank and he drank and he watched the bar slowly make sense, the lowering walls, the cackled laughter, the diseased tendrils that spread everywhere towards him, which turned, as the night turned into blackout and he sank under the weight of the oblivion he so desperately sought, then the tendrils turned into human hands searching desperately to touch him, pleading for his attention, longing for his love. He worshipped then at the knees of corrupt saints, and knew darkness in a way no 16-year-old should ever know.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24297636-5005961,00.html

FEDERAL Labor MP Belinda Neal is fighting off new new allegations that she behaved in a "menacing" manner towards Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson.

The latest claims saw Prime Minister Kevin Rudd reiterate his warning that her political future will depend on how she behaves from now on.

Ms Neal was accused of acting aggressively towards Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson on two separate occasions over the past week.

She had also demanded an apology from Dr Nelson for calling her an "ugly bully" at the height of the Iguanagate affair.

Staff at the NSW Central Coast Iguanas Waterfront restaurant and bar claimed Ms Neal had been abusive and threatening towards them during a night out in June. Police this week announced that no charges would be laid against her or her husband, suspended NSW Education Minister John Della Bosca.

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iGBxuNfEHZewzQtCLBxpVYRdx8YA

KABUL (AFP) — A top judge in Afghanistan's counternarcotics court, working to bring to justice key players in the world's biggest opium-producing country, was gunned down in Kabul Thursday, his office said.

Gunmen shot dead Alim Hanif, chief judge of the Central Narcotics Tribunal appeals court, soon after he left home to go to work, the Counter Narcotics-Criminal Justice Task Force (CJTF) said.

"Judge Alim Hanif was shot on his way to work and later died of his injuries in hospital," it said in a statement.

Hanif, aged between 50 and 60, was described as having a distinguished legal career and being widely respected for his honesty in a notoriously corrupt sector.

"He was motivated by bringing influential drug traffickers to court and seeing them punished for their crimes," CJTF prosecution director Ramatullah Nazri said in the statement.

Afghanistan produces more than 90 percent of the world's opium, most of which is turned into heroin inside the country and is said to in part finance an extremist Taliban insurgency.

Top government officials and former warlords are said to be involved in the multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry, although most kingpins have escaped justice.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/05/us/politics/05repubs.html?hp

ST. PAUL — Senator John McCain will explain “where, how and why” he wants to lead America when he accepts his party’s presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention Thursday night, addressing delegates and the nation from a reconfigured stage the night after his vice presidential choice shook the hall with a fiery debut.

In laying out the themes of the speech, Mark Salter, the senator’s biographer and speechwriter, said that tonight’s address to conclude the convention – as well as the speeches leading up to it – will focus on Mr. McCain’s life as well as his record of challenging the Washington establishment on matters such as campaign finance and federal spending.

“He will call on the entire political culture of Washington to start putting their country first instead of their own self interest,” Mr. Salter said.

Even as the convention neared a finale that will lead into what is increasingly looking like a combative fall campaign, attention remained fixed on the Wednesday night speech by Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska — a national, prime-time debut that followed several days of swirling questions about her family, her background and her qualifications for higher office.

The morning after her speech, Democrats aggressively challenge her remarks, saying she misrepresented her own record, distorted the record of the Democratic candidate, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, and emphasized derisive attacks over explaining the goals of the Republican ticket.



By the Darling River, western NSW, Australia.