Low Status Males

*



http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-8181329/One-day-in-the-life.html

The pub catered to the standard contingent, the front bar with its handful of old timers and long-haul drinkers, yellow-cab couriers and short-tempered security men (for fifty bucks you could hire a standover man), and a clutch of blue collar workers - while the back bar, which gave access to a bare room set aside for pool tables, attracted the local grunge element, a few Sydney University students, welfare recipients, minor public servants from government departments (looking for an identity) and generally, the requisite agitating core of speed freaks, loners, downright shifty dudes and blow-ins. A Rabelaisian democracy, the usual suspects and standard cliques. To me the establishment always generated an edgy 'vibe' and that probably had as much to do with my paranoia as anything else. I actually felt like a foreigner smuggled into the camp.

If you got landed with a nickname, this pretty much represented a measure of provisional acceptance. Somehow, 'the poet' didn't quite cut it with that crowd for long. If this cognomen suggested exclusivity, I couldn't have agreed more. It didn't have quite the same ring to it as 'Two-Bob Pete' or 'Have-A-Chat ...' As a regular socializing venue, this was a clumsy miscalculation on my part. It proved entirely the wrong choice in anonymity. Nevertheless, there was no shortage of drinking partners, and you could always find a bar-stool to sit at, conversation and banter in varying degrees of intensity. Expectation lay no more than an easy walk and public bar away.

The Marlborough Hotel on the corner of King Street and Missenden Road (taking care to avoid the seriously busy Oxford Tavern with wall-to-wall 'ferals and goths') offered a greater crush and diversity. Newtown, gateway to the west, from the mid '80s was undergoing a sociological shift. Various musicians, artists and poets had taken up residence (John Forbes in Lennox Street, Martin Harrison in Denison Street, myself in Chelmsford Street - practically living on the same block, though interceptions, as if by sleight-of-hand, were rare) because of the cheap rental accommodation and accessibility to the CBD. By now the gay contingent had invaded the real estate market, and inexpensive Thai restaurants had started to open up one after the other (with adventurous names like Thai Tanic) along the King Street shopping strip.

At one stage I counted at least fifteen Thai restaurants within a two hundred yard stretch. Newtown had always accommodated Greek, Lebanese and Turkish communities, along with the Yugoslavs and their tucked-away gambling rooms. Earlier still in the '60s, the neighbourhood became home to a considerable Samoan population; a shifting demographic underscored by the founding Anglo-Celtic working class culture who originally established and defined the inner west. Around Enmore you might yet discover a narrow doorway and worn wooden stairs leading up to an unadorned though comfortable room full of serious gamblers. As long as you kept your mouth shut, you could stay and enjoy the spicy, pitch-black coffee. A number of the ethnic restaurants in Enmore road offered Turkish belly-dancing. Greek and Albanian women sang in spiralling Moorish or Arabian accents and circulated amongst the diners collecting tips after their performances.

This then was largely the purlieu I circulated in during those days. Newtown became an island unto itself. Yet I can't recall precisely when I first met Vicki, it might been at a poetry reading sponsored by the Goethe Institute in Woollahra, and organized through the Austrian poet/playwright, Rudi Krausmann, or an introduction made at the Rose & Crown Hotel in Paddington, a local frequented by the poet, Bob Adamson. Both he and Rudi lived in the district up until the close of the decade. They were long-time associates in varying degrees of friendship with Vicki Viidikas, going right back to the early days of the Wild & Woolley Press, a small independent, relatively successful publisher of poetry. But this was long before I arrived on the scene. I landed in Sydney in 1986 (on the eve of a recession) though I had previously visited for a couple of weeks back in late December of 1978, on my way through to the Mediterranean and the island of Crete.




There was safety in crowds. These days you could hear Arabic spoken in the street. Many of the taxi drivers were Muslim. The city had been transformed absolutely. Was it for the better? Colossal deconstruction. A Prime Minister who never shut up. A media blitz, as the powers that be grandly gave away our money to segments of the community, ripping tens of thousands off us in taxes only to give it to people who never work a day in their life. There is little sympathy and a great deal of anger. One of the problems with giving away money is that everybody who doesn't get it resents those who do.

Thousands, millions, billions, the money flows. Rudd, they say, has now grasped his uber narrative and is busy busy saving the nation. Stories don't count. Nothing matters. Clear and calm, underneath these days was flight and fear. Deeply disturbed, he looked up. There had been so much chaos. He was frightened of what he could do. He was frightened of the next oncoming binge. He didn't know why these thoughts kept coming back. He didn't understand where the malaise had started. Was it thinking evil, doing evil? Was it a lack of strength and courage? He didn't know, and sadly, deeply, didn't care.

Fateful moments? Oh yes. What was that brick doing there? Why were they collected there in the greasy corner in the garage, next to the lift? Why had so many things gone wrong; why had been propelled through so much anger? So cruel. So indifferent. So many things. His fingers splayed and the ideas rolled. Didn't they know, didn't they understand who he was? He was drunk, toweringly drunk, and his thoughts loomed out in darkness. He picked up the brick. He threw it through the owner's car window, their neat, smart, dark expensive car. He saw another brick. He picked it up. He threw it through the manager's car window, her neat, smart, dark, expensive car.

And he barely stopped to look at the chaos he had created as he exited the building, cutting a sharp left, disappearing off the radar into the channels of the city as quickly as possible. Up high he could see the lights in the magazines office, hear the music coming from on high. Why hadn't be been born normal? He could hear the music, and he would never be part of it, a normal person dancing at a party. That would show them, the broken glass, the bricks, the damage. And he scuttled through the streets till he had all but disappeared. The alcohol had been running out anyway, there hadn't been any point in staying. The bastards. The bastards.

And he woke the next day with yet another hallucinatory hangover. And a dim memory of what he had done. And the police knocking on the door. He fobbed them off, he said it wasn't him, it was someone else, he lied in a particularly squirrelly, dishonest way. He wasn't going to take responsibility for these actions. He didn't even want to be himself. He didn't know himself. He didn't really remember what had happened. Oh yes he did. But for several days he dodged the cops. Being out, lost in bars, lost in curious dark places. Just lost altogether on the river of alcohol that had become his life; those joyous cries, hooray for everybody.

He raised a glass and drank and drank, drowning shame. Why did he do that? Why had he been so stupid? Why had he drank so much - so much! The alcohol burdened his soul. He didn't know where to turn. He was being hunted. They came back and he was out. Again. And again. But finally he was there, he had to face it, he had to surrender. They came to the door and he gave in. Yes it was he. Yes he did it. No he didn't know why. They owed him money. He was angry. Francis, the mentor who looked after him, was shocked, but immediately rose to help. How much was bail? He couldn't be left out there under the glowering walls of Long Bay Jail; with all those criminals, all those dangerous men. Not his pretty boy, not his unrequited love, not this troubled talent with a future in store. Not now, not here, as they were forcibly changed into green uniforms.




THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/2498/218/

Scientists Challenge UK Govt Climate Committee to 'Drop flawed science and the Climate Change millstone - Save the economy'. CO2 is the Gas Of Life ('GOL'), it is not a problem

The recommendation that the UK cut its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80 per cent* is "total madness based on false science" said Piers Corbyn of WeatherAction long range forecasters.

"There is no evidence that Carbon dioxide has ever controlled, is controlling or will ever control world temperatures or climate and I challenge the promoters of this nonsense to produce evidence to justify their policies - or drop them, just as 13 world scientists** have similarly challenged the UN.

"Climate Change policy is a millstone around the UK and world economies. The beneficiaries are oil companies who ram up prices with abandon (taking advantage of limits placed on expansion of coal), bio-fuel producers who are increasing food prices and starvation, and the booming industry of climate change parasites such as carbon traders and nuclear power-mongers.

"Taxpayers and the developing world are the losers. There is a world recession now upon us which is being made deeper by Climate Change policies and the perpetrators must be called to account. Banks and industry are going bust yet the green fundamentalists want to impose more of this madness on the world. They actually want to increase their burden on the UK economy and deepen the world recession**.

"Genuine green policies to defend bio-diversity and reduce waste should be supported but the deceitful manipulation of the goodwill of many people in order to promote policies of mass taxation, expensive and dangerous energy like nuclear power and cuts in world living standards must be stopped. The UK and the world now need cheap energy solutions like coal to diesel technology which can be made smoke free. The danger for honest green campaigners - unless they break from the stranglehold of the Climate Change lobby - is that when the Global Warming swindle is exposed their spirited defence of nature will be forgotten too.

"CO2 is no problem - it is the Gas of Life (GOL). The problem is Climate Change Policy - not Climate Change which is beyond man's control. Global warming is over. World temperatures have fallen from their peak ten years ago while GOL (CO2) has been rising rapidly. The world was much warmer than now in the Bronze age 4,000 years ago and there was much less GOL (CO2) then. The bounteousness of world vegetation goes up with GOL. We need more GOL not less!

"13 world scientists wrote** to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in July asking for evidence to justify UN Climate Change policy and calling for the UN's climate committee (IPCC) to be made accountable. Tim Yeo MP** (chair of the Parliament Environment Audit Committee) was also written to in July. Neither have acknowledged or replied. The reason is they have nothing to say. I urge members of the public to send the scientists' letter to the UN** to their MP and ask their MPs to make the UN and Tim Yeo+ 'Put Up or Shut Up'. Gordon Brown** was also written to and his office promised to reply".


http://www.lowefo.com/pdf/Letter_UN_Sec_Gen_Ban_Ki-moon.pdf

\TO: UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, inquiries@un.org 14th of July, 2008
Copied to the G8 leaders
Dear Secretary General Ban Ki-moon,
The UN Climate Change Panel must be called to account and cease its deceptive practices
- Policies based on false science must be ended
We, an independent group of experts in various aspects of science and the environment, ask you to
redress the lack of scientific integrity of the UN’s Climate Change Panel (IPCC) and to stop making
reactionary and futile ‘Climate Change’ recommendations that hold back the developing world.
As you read this, policies that you endorse are already causing misery and starvation for the world's poor.
On the 14th of April this year some of us wrote to the Chair of the IPCC, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, copied
below and available on the UN CAPSA site (ref E), asking him to present clear and graphic evidence of
the theory that carbon dioxide (CO2) drives global temperature. We pointed out that no such evidence
exists and offered charts and references that refute the man-made global warming theory.
Dr. Pachauri has failed to respond. Perhaps he lacks the knowledge to defend his position. Nevertheless,
the IPCC's 51 ‘drafting and draft-contributing authors’ of the Summary for Policymakers (ref A) - not
thousands as claimed - includes scientists who are surely obliged to provide such evidence if any exists.
For your illumination we refer you to:
(i) The chart in our letter of 14 April (page 3) which shows, using official data, that for the last
decade World Temperatures have been falling whilst CO2 keeps rising, and
(ii) A geological (Greenland ice core) chart of polar climate covering the last 10,000 years (Ref
B) which shows that while CO2 levels have been rising, temperatures have been falling
since the Bronze Age around 4,000 years ago (see page 2).
The assertion that the recent rapid rise of CO2 is unique and dangerous is both deceptive and irrelevant
because CO2 does not drive the world's climate. Claims that such rapid rises have not happened before
are not supported by ice-core or other geological records (ref C).
Either the IPCC is simply failing to notice these gross discrepancies or it is consciously evading or
covering-up observations that challenge its theories.
Given the facts (i) above, from observations over the last decade alone, there can be no justification for
trying to restrict CO2 levels and retard third-world development while temperatures are in fact falling
(also see Note D). Considering data over the last 4,000 years (ii), in its Summary for Policymakers and
in its Full Report, the IPCC depicts CO2 rising but fails to depict a corresponding fall in temperature.
From its obstinate resistance to answer inquiries — an insult to the public, let alone to other scientists —
one can only conclude that the IPCC is engaged in a self-serving distortion of data acquired at public
expense.
Whatever might have seemed the case ten years ago, now, with better data and understanding, there is
clearly no evidence for the CO2-based theory of global warming. Indeed, there is only evidence against
it. Therefore, as a matter of utmost importance we urge you to:
1. Call the IPCC to account - Hold an Inquiry into its operations. Insist that it adhere to the
same ‘prove and predict’ norms as other sciences. Further, noting its impotence in the face of
contradictory evidence, lead the UN into abandoning the CO2-based theory of global warming
and nullifying its former recommendations.
2. Immediately announce your opposition to biofuels – whose large-scale production entails the
displacement of food crops, thus raising the price of food and bringing starvation to the poor.
Please do not hesitate to ask us for further information or assistance and we will provide it directly or
through other independent, qualified colleagues.
Yours sincerely,
Piers Corbyn Astrophysicist & forecaster, WeatherAction, UK piers@weatheraction.com
Vincent Gray IPCC Expert Reviewer, Climate Consultant, NZ vinmary.gray@paradise.net.nz
Richard Courtney IPCC Exp. Rev., Energy & Envir. Consultant, UK RichardSCourtney@aol.com
Hans Labohm IPCC Expert Reviewer, Economist & Author, Holland H.Labohm@freeler.nl
Will Alexander Prof. Em. Dept. Civil & Biosystems, South Africa alexwjr@iafrica.com
Don Parkes Prof. Human Ecology (Ret.) Australia & Japan dnp@networksmm.com.au
Joseph D’Aleo Certified Consultant Meteorologist, Fellow AMS, USA jdaleo@icecap.us
Svend Hendriksen Nobel Peace Prize 1988 (shared), Greenland hendriksen@greennet.gl
Alan Siddons Climate Researcher, USA alan618034@earthlink.net
Bob Ashworth Chem. Eng. (Energy & Environment), USA bobashworth@earthlink.net
Norm Kalmanovitch Geophysicist, Canada, kalhnd@shaw.ca
Hans Schreuder Analytical Chemist (Ret.), UK hans@tech-know.eu

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/an_open_letter_from_the_viscou_1.html

Open letter from The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley to Senator John McCain about Climate Science and Policy.

Dear Senator McCain, Sir,

YOU CHOSE a visit to a wind-farm in early summer 2008 to devote an entire campaign speech to the reassertion of your belief in the apocalyptic vision of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change - a lurid and fanciful account of imagined future events that was always baseless, was briefly exciting among the less thoughtful species of news commentators and politicians, but is now scientifically discredited.

With every respect, there is no rational basis for your declared intention that your great nation should inflict upon her own working people and upon the starving masses of the Third World the extravagantly-pointless, climatically-irrelevant, strategically-fatal economic wounds that the arrogant advocates of atmospheric alarmism admit they aim to achieve.

Britain and the United States, like England and Scotland on the first page of Macaulay's The Viscount Monckton of Brenchlysplendid History of England, are bound to one another by "indissoluble bonds of interest and affection". Here in this little archipelago from which your Pilgrim Fathers sailed, we have a love-love relationship with what Walt Whitman called your "athletic democracy". You came to our aid - to the aid of the world - when Britain had stood alone against the mad menace of Hitler. Your fearless forces and ours fight shoulder to shoulder today on freedom's far frontiers. The shortest but most heartfelt of our daily prayers has just three words: "God bless America!" For these reasons - of emotion as much as of economics, of affection as much as of interest - it matters to us that the United States should thrive and prosper. We cannot endure to see her fail, not only because if she fails the world fails, but also because, as the philosopher George Santayana once said of the British Empire and might well now have said of our sole superpower, "the world never had sweeter masters." If the United States, by the ignorance and carelessness of her classe politique, mesmerized by the climate bugaboo, casts away the vigorous and yet benign economic hegemony that she has exercised almost since the Founding Fathers first breathed life into her enduring Constitution, it will not be a gentle, tolerant, all-embracing, radically-democratic nation that takes up the leadership of the world.

It will be a radically-tyrannical dictatorship - perhaps the brutal gerontocracy of Communist China, or the ruthless plutocracy of supposedly ex-Communist Russia, or the crude, mediaeval theocracy of rampant Islam, or even the contemptible, fumbling, sclerotic, atheistic-humanist bureaucracy of the emerging European oligarchy that has stealthily stolen away the once-paradigmatic democracy of our Mother of Parliaments from elected hands here to unelected hands elsewhere. For government of the people, by the people and for the people is still a rarity today, and it may yet perish from the earth if America, its exemplar, destroys herself in the specious name of "Saving The Planet".


Science and the climate: the facts


The facts about "rising temperatures"

You have said: "We have many advantages in the fight against global warming, but time is not one of them. Instead of idly debating the precise extent of global warming, or the precise timeline of global warming, we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures ... Today I'd like to focus on just one [challenge], and among environmental dangers it is surely the most serious of all. Whether we call it ‘climate change' or ‘global warming', in the end we're all left with the same set of facts. The facts of global warming demand our urgent attention, especially in Washington. Good stewardship, prudence, and simple commonsense demand that we act to meet the challenge, and act quickly. ... Across the world average temperatures ... seem to reach new records every few years."

Here, Sir, are the facts about "rising temperatures". The facts which I shall give you in this letter are taken not from my own imagination, nor from the obscurantist reports of the UN's climate panel, nor from any lobby group, but from the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

Very nearly all of the citations that support the crucial facts which your advisers seem not to have put before you, and which I shall set forth in this letter, are from peer-reviewed papers. Some, however, such as the documents of the UN's climate panel, the IPCC, are not peer-reviewed in the accepted sense of the term. Peer-reviewed papers will be indicated by citations with the date in parentheses, thus: Boffin et al. (2008). Papers that are not peer-reviewed will be indicated by square brackets, thus: IPCC [2007].

I begin with a geological and historical perspective on global mean surface temperature that your advisors seem to have withheld from you. For most of the past 600 million years, the mode of temperature - the temperature that most often prevailed globally - is thought to have been 12.5 °F higher than today's temperature: for today's temperature, in the perspective of the long recent history of our planet, is unusually low.

During each of the last four interglacial periods over the past half-million years, temperature was 5 to 8 °F warmer than the present (Petit et al., 1999).

For 2000 years in the Bronze Age, during the Holocene Climate Optimum (which is called an "Optimum" because warmer is better than cooler), temperature was up to 5 °F warmer than the present. Thanks to the warmer weather, on many continents simultaneously, the world's first great civilizations emerged.

It was also warmer during the 600 years of the Graeco-Roman warm period, when the twin civilizations that were the foundation of our own flourished in the Mediterranean. And it was warmer during the half millennium of the Mediaeval Climate Optimum, when the Renaissance reawakened humanity after the Dark Ages, and the great cathedrals and churches of Europe were built.

In 2001 the UN's climate panel made a maladroit and disfiguring attempt [IPCC, 2001] to heighten the baseless alarm that underlies all of its reports by denying that the Middle Ages were warmer than the present. However, three eminent statisticians working at the instigation of your own House of Representatives produced the definitive report [Wegman et al., 2005], confirming the peer-reviewed research of McIntyre & McKitrick (2003, 2005) establishing that the UN's graph had been doctored so as falsely to deny the reality of the mediaeval warm period, to whose existence hundreds of peer-reviewed papers from all parts of the globe attest.

At both Poles, it was warmer only half a century ago than it is today. For temperatures in the Arctic, see Soon et al. (2004). For the Antarctic, see Doran et al. (2002).

During the Maunder Minimum, a period of more than half a century ending in 1700 when there were no sunspots on the surface of our Sun, a Little Ice Age occurred all over the world (Hathaway, 2004). In 1700 there began a recovery in solar activity that has continued ever since, culminating in the 70-year Solar Grand Maximum that seems recently to have ended. During the Grand Maximum, the Sun was more active, and for longer, than during almost any previous similar period in the past 11,400 years (Solanki et al., 2005; and see Usoskin et al., 2003; and Hathaway, 2004). A symposium of the International Astronomical Union [2004] concluded that it is the Sun that was chiefly responsible for the warming of the late 20th century.

From 1700-1998, temperature rose at a near-uniform rate of about 1 °F per century [Akasofu, 2008]. In 1998, "global warming" stopped, and it has not resumed since: indeed, in the past seven years, temperature has been falling at a rate equivalent to as much as 0.7 °F per decade [Hadley Center for Forecasting, 2008; US National Climatic Data Center, 2008]. Very few news media have given any prominence to this long and pronounced downturn in the temperature trend.



Liam holding a chook at Tambar Springs, NSW, Australia.