I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
I want to get far away from the busyness of the cemeteries.
I want to sleep the sleep of that child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.
I don't want them to tell me again how the corpse keeps all its blood,
how the decaying mouth goes on begging for water.
I'd rather not hear about the torture sessions the grass arranges for
nor about how the moon does all its work before dawn
with its snakelike nose.
I want to sleep for half a second,
a second, a minute, a century,
but I want everyone to know that I am still alive,
that I have a golden manger inside my lips,
that I am the little friend of the west wind,
that I am the elephantine shadow of my own tears.
When it's dawn just throw some sort of cloth over me
because I know dawn will toss fistfuls of ants at me,
and pour a little hard water over my shoes
so that the scorpion claws of the dawn will slip off.
Because I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
and learn a mournful song that will clean all earth away from me,
because I want to live with that shadowy child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.
Garcia Lorca, Gacela Of The Dark Death.
Delicate flowers, heat beneath the bushes, ancient queens flocking across Centennial Park, striped umbrellas held up against the rain, all things, all major and minor contributions to the flow of humanity, all sweeping desires, all longing for the end to come, it swirled inside a gut wrenching heart, it finished for good. He flapped his wrists. He was ashamed. He knew desire and he knew the infinity of longing. He made sharp noises and he meowed in despair. Famous people had died here. Sally Anne Huckstepp was drowned in a pond. We thought these things were part of our own story, their tragic destinies and short lives, all folded into one.
Daylight saving has dislocated the nation. It's dark when it should be light and light when it should be dark. I love it, people said, but for him the shift in hours just added to the disorientation. There was never enough time. Reality crinched back into tiny focus. Smart recovery. I don't think so. There was always a point when the longing should have ceased. Those early years, asleep over the teleprinters, the news of the world hammering out beneath him while he slept on the midnight to dawn shift, it was all part of his embrace of the universe, his desire to know everything, to understand everything. To embrace the great philosophers and the great novelists. To make the world his own.
Come hither, make your way to the front gate. Be a normal human being. Celebrate the weekend. Be happy. Break open bottles of champagne. Serve up the picnic lunch. At the same time, on the edge of the oval in the centre of the city's largest park, he couldn't help but watch the furtive comings and goings from the public toilets. The trees were charged with tension. The green on green of the landscape held a sickening despair, a futile gasp, a magic realm. A group of footballers jogged past. The palm trees arked in perfect succession down the drive. The ducks broke the surface of the water, while the water hens picked their way through the reeds.
Was it here, in this pond, that they found Sally's body? Here, or here? He spread the chicken and mayonnaise out on the picnic cloth, and between them they guessed which pond it had been, the hopeless junky, the police pariah, the charmer and the desperate, speaking out after her boyfriend, Warren LeFranchi, had been shot. Will we ever really know what happened? Who killed who? Was it the police themselves who left her body in the pond, who decided she had caused enough trouble for one life?
There were rumours and rumours as to who had caused the trouble, who she had gone to meet that fateful night. He opened up the chutney and spread the rolls. Another man entered the public toilet on the opposite side of the oval, and took some time to emerge. Pigeons gathered at the sight of the bread. They dragged her body from the pond the next morning, and news of who it was spread across the city almost instantly. Her damaged good looks, her fervent threats to spill the beans, to expose corruption, were captured on film and screened into the nation's lounge rooms.
Fame, it was thought, would stop them from killing her, after the things she had said to the news reporters, her smeared good looks poignant, the distress over the death of her boyfriend in a shoot out with notorious policeman Roger Rogerson, seen as the epitome of the force from a different era. These images were everywhere. And we thought even then, almost as she said the very words, how is she going to get away with this? She must be marked. They must want to get rid of her now.
She seemed to us then, the scarred, the marked generation, that she stood for something more noble, that the delinquent adventures of our generation were worth preserving, that she was one of us. That her death, her brutal extinguishment by the authorities, was something worthy of fighting about, writing about, that just because she chased the dragon and called the police corrupt was no reason to kill her. But her death washed away in the historic annals of the city, and in the end it was just a blip in a city full of strangers, in a place without a soul, a park with no history, a death with no purpose. She disappeared quicker and younger than the rest of us, but in the end we would all be washed away, here in the cathedral air of the southern continent, here in this vast strange place.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE49A36O20081013
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Governments around the world bet hundreds of billions of dollars to rescue failing banks on Monday, sending world stocks soaring and giving Wall Street its biggest one-day gain ever.
The U.S. government is set to buy $250 billion in equity stakes in banks, a source briefed on the situation said, after Britain, Germany, France and other European countries pledged more than 1 trillion euros ($1.36 trillion) for bank guarantees and equity stakes.
U.S. regulators would announce details of the U.S. plan at 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday, the Treasury Department said.
The Dow Jones industrial average and the S&P 500 index raced to an 11 percent gain, their biggest ever, after recording their worst week in history last week amid panic over collapsing banks and fears that major economies were headed toward recession.
Stocks worldwide added more than $1.7 trillion in value on Monday, based on a record 9.3 percent gain in the MSCI world equity index.
"Sometime last week it seemed like we faced Armageddon, so to have a coordinated plan on stabilizing banks is huge progress," said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Harris Private Bank in Chicago.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson met with top Wall Street bankers on Monday, agreeing to spend $250 billion on equity stakes and a three-year guarantee of bank-to-bank lending, the source said.
This was an about-face from a previous U.S. focus on buying bad debt from banks, after world finance ministers coalesced around a British proposal at weekend meetings in Washington.
http://www.bdafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10641&Itemid=5812
October 15, 2008: A tumultuous global financial system is leaving Kenya with less of the much needed hard currencies adding the pain of a weak shilling to an economy under pressure from runaway inflation.
The shilling yesterday touched a new low of Sh75.86 against the US dollar and dealers said they had seen no indication the decline would stop soon.
The currency has since the beginning of the year lost 14 per cent of its value against the greenback leading to a windfall for earners of dollar-denominated salaries but adding a huge burden to an import dependent economy.
But even as millions of Kenyans feel the pinch of a weaker shilling in their pockets, opinion is divided as to what is driving the deceleration.
Though the Central Bank has largely maintained that the currency swings are a result of speculative activity by a few key players in the market in search of a harvest, the ground is rapidly tilting in favour of those who see it as a product of changing fundamentals.
As the global financial meltdown deepened in Europe and America, dollar inflows from key sources such as remittances from Kenyans in the diaspora have been thinning.
This means that a dollar scarcity is slowly creeping into the domestic economy, piling pressure on the shilling.
http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/2485/218/
PS: I do not agree that any of Mr. Gore’s ideology has changed. He is espousing the same pseudo-scientific environmental nonsense that he has been for many years now. The difference in the ideas in the two presentations lies in their intended purpose. An Inconvenient Truth was intended to frighten the American people into pushing Congress to pass the carbon tax legislation, solely for the purpose of putting huge amounts of power and profit into the hands of a select few. That profit will cost an unthinking public dearly. The Assault on Reason, in part a vengeful and spiteful attack on President Bush for winning their electoral contest, actually has a far cruder (believe it or not) basis. It is another attempt to scare the American public into pushing Congress into another type of legislation, this one to more specifically benefit Mr. Gore. The book urges Americans, for the benefit of our democratic process, to insist Congress pass laws allowing broad band users of the Internet, those who resell parts of that bandwidth to others for a profit, to be allowed use of the Internet for the same fees charged to individual home users. While most would agree that those who use more of anything should pay in accordance with the portion they use, this book lets us know this legislation to prevent such proportional payment is necessary to insure continued freedom and democracy in America. It has nothing to do with Mr. Gore’s recently acquired half ownership in a broadband user attempting to compete with “youtube.” Just as carbon legislation requiring American industry to subsidize projects by “sustainable” companies has nothing to do with Mr. Gore’s half ownership of an investment company buying up ownership of many of the sustainable companies our companies will be forced to pay tribute to. The amazing thing is Mr. Gore counting on America being so stupid as to not notice the difference in the two sets of ideas. As to which has the most ability to influence America, the carbon legislation will as absolutely destroy our economy as it did that of Czechoslovakia. The assault on reason was just a foolish exercise lacking greatly in the sophistication of the first ruse. The difference between the two suggests strongly of other minds behind the environmental coup in progress.
SGW: Mr. Gore had a mentor of sorts in his early days as an advocate for change to fight global warming. Who was he and how did his relationship with Al Gore change over time?
PS: I do not know if Professor Roger Revelle, one of Mr. Gore’s instructors in college, claimed our environmental savior as his protégé, but Mr. Gore certainly claimed Mr. Revelle as his mentor in his 1992 book, Earth in the Balance. We are told Mr. Revelle drew a correlation between the processes of civilization and changes in the composition of the atmosphere, and what would happen if we did not change, and everything was clear. Mr. Revelle did not, in fact, make this projection into the future. In a 1984 interview with Omni magazine, asked specifically if CO2 increases were responsible for worsening weather, Dr. Revelle indicated an increase would be more likely to temper weather extremes. In a 1991 article for Cosmos, he warned against the economic harm and potential human suffering possible from acting precipitously to curtail emissions when decades of research were still required to understand the real effect of such gasses. He advocated that we looked before we leaped. His rebuttal of Mr. Gore’s misrepresentation of his work, claiming the proof was not yet definitive enough to cry “wolf,” changed the nature of the relationship between them. Three months after that article in Cosmos, Mr. Revelle passed away. The differences between what he believed, and what Mr. Gore claims he believed, became national news in the 1992 presidential election. Mr. Gore’s response was to claim his “mentor” had become senile before his death. He also claimed the co-author of the article had lied about Dr. Revelle’s involvement. After a defamation suit, an apology was made in 1994. There is no way to know now what Mr. Revelle would think of his protégés current drastic proclamations. We do know he had no time for them while alive.
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