That Overlit World

*



For, dear me, why abandon a belief
Merely because it ceases to be true.
Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt
It will turn true again, for so it goes.
Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favour.
As I sit here, and oftentimes, I wish
I could be monarch of a desert land
I could devote and dedicate forever
To the truths we keep coming back and back to.
So desert it would have to be, so walled
By mountain ranges half in summer snow,
No one would covet it or think it worth
The pains of conquering to force change on.
Scattered oases where men dwelt, but mostly
Sand dunes held loosely in tamarisk
Blown over and over themselves in idleness.
Sand grains should sugar in the natal dew
The babe born to the desert, the sand storm
Retard mid-waste my cowering caravans--
"There are bees in this wall." He struck the clapboards,
Fierce heads looked out; small bodies pivoted.
We rose to go. Sunset blazed on the windows.

Robert Frost The Black Cottage



There was a set of parallel streets which ran down from the main boulevard. He was constantly being hampered in his delay, time out of joint. The warehouse was huge. He was compelled, determined to survive. The typewriter pounded through the night. Records collected in piles around his desk. Late at night, wired at 3am, he could hear every last splash of rain as it hit the iron roof. Why would there be anything in here? Just an endless sequence of stories. And sometimes he would duck out and chat to his prostitute friend in Riley Street, who was always up to no good. Just about every one in the neighbourhood seemed to be up to no good.

The story of the car was a classic of the genre, if he said so himself. By day the abandoned car was home for a homeless man. By night it played host to a pimp who needed a shelter close to the action and a base for his drug dealing. The girls were always excellent customers; cashed up and crazy. In the course of its various roles the car was pushed around the block from one spot to another. Residents, outraged at the increasingly derelict and unsightly car dumped in front of their gentrifying terraces would also push it from one spot to another. Over weeks, the car get going around and around the one block. Complaints to the council went unheeded.

As luck would have it after he had convinced the paper there could be a story in it, as they climbed out of the taxi, the homeless man was busily pushing the car to a quieter spot on the street. Just like that we had the best shot. And he looked up from the floor and thought, will this never end, the seep of hangover through his every cell. One alcoholic to another. The man was large and wore several layers of coats, all filthy. He had wild scraggly hair and clearly hadn't washed any time recently. You know why you write about those derelicts so well? Malcolm asked, and then answered his own question. Because you're halfway there yourself.

The tale of the pimp, the prostitute, the derelict, the outraged residents and the migrating car got a good run and caused much hilarity around the city and on the airwaves. They were stories off the city streets; and the paper lapped them up. At night he got pissed. Very pissed. Very often. The streets continued to radiate personalities, he was fascinated by the tableaus. In the morning, all was not lost. Calcification had not set in. He was not premised on somebody else's existence. The days of love were not over. It was an easy thing, there was always someone. Look up, look out, go home with whoever.

And rain splattered on the roof and obsessional conduct collapsed them together. There was always intrigue. Nick had set up a bed in a mezzanine kind of arrangement in one corner of that massive warehouse. It took up an entire block, massive old brick building. It's not there any more. It was bulldozed and in its place are upmarket apartments. He was shattered they weren't coming. He was dedicated to change. The world was going to be a better place once he left it, kinder, more compassionate. They talked long into the night. They were always wired. Everyone was wired. They lived in a hyper-real world. He was never going to be satisfied. The fingers flew and the pages mounted; and the terrors simply got worse. There weren't any shadows in that over lit world.




THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/10/23/1224351449199.html

A MAN described as an ASIO agent stood by as a naked US marine wearing a condom threatened Mamdouh Habib with rape, the former Guantanamo Bay inmate alleges.

In a book to be published next week, Mr Habib says he saw the words "Allah Akbar"' [God is great] written on the condom to compound his humiliation.

The claims are detailed in My Story, excerpts of which will appear in Good Weekend tomorrow.

The book includes Mr Habib's first explanation of why he was in Afghanistan before the September 11 attacks.

Australian intelligence agencies have long accused Mr Habib of training with al-Qaeda during that period but Mr Habib says he fled to Afghanistan some weeks before the attacks after Pakistani police had abducted him and shot one of his companions while they were on a business trip.

Mr Habib recounts in excruciating detail the torture he says he was subjected to by Pakistani and Egyptian security agencies after his arrest in early October 2001, and describes the grim reality of life in Guantanamo Bay, where he was subsequently imprisoned.

The book rejects the repeated assurances the Howard government gave that Mr Habib was well treated during his years in the US prison.

In the book Mr Habib alleges:

■ That he and fellow Australian David Hicks stayed at the same Islamic guesthouse in Kabul in the days before the September 11 attacks. Mr Habib says he saw Mr Hicks in the company of the Melbourne man Jack Thomas (later known as Jihad Jack), and Richard Reid (the Briton who became known as the "shoe bomber" after he tried to blow up an aircraft with explosives hidden in his shoe).

■ While in Kandahar before September 11, Mr Habib says he met Matthew Stewart, a former Australian soldier who complained about the "rape and murder" committed by Australian peacekeepers in East Timor.

■ When Mr Habib and Mr Hicks met in Guantanamo Bay, Mr Hicks apologised for telling people that Mr Habib was a CIA plant (a claim Mr Habib says resulted in inmates spitting and urinating on him).

Mr Habib told the Herald yesterday that when Mr Hicks was in Guantanamo Bay, he had been shown a videotape of Mr Habib being tortured in Egypt in an attempt by interrogators to force Mr Hicks to confess. He said he was disappointed that Mr Hicks had not spoken out about Guantanamo.

Mr Hicks has maintained his silence since his release from the Cuban-based prison last year, and his lawyer, David McLeod, said yesterday Mr Hicks would be making no comment on the claims.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/0,28124,24549087-643,00.html

Kevin Rudd buys time with new plan on bank guarantees

INVESTORS in cash management trusts remained in limbo last night after the Rudd Government's bid to end confusion over its banking guarantees failed to provide a plan to stop non-bank financial institutions haemorrhaging funds.

Wayne Swan waited until after markets had closed yesterday to reveal that, from November 28, banks would have to pay the Government a fee of between 0.7 and 1.5 per cent for the privilege of a government guarantee for their wholesale funding. Buying the guarantee will be optional for big deposits, while deposits of under $1 million will receive a government guarantee for free.

Despite the clarification of the Government's position, more cash management trusts and mortgage funds are expected to close their books for withdrawals next week as investors seek the safety of term deposits in the major banks.

Markets remain extremely volatile, with the S&P/ASX200 falling a further 3.1 per cent yesterday to 3869 points. It has dropped by 10.9 per cent since a brief moment of optimism on Tuesday. European markets recorded heavy falls in early trading last night, with Germany down 10 per cent and London off more than 7 per cent.

The Australian dollar sank to a five-year low, losing 4.2 per cent to end domestic trading at US63.91c, down from US66.71c yesterday. It was the dollar's lowest close since September 3, 2003.

Crisis talks will be held next week, with Mr Swan appointing Treasury secretary Ken Henry and Australian Securities and Investments Commission chairman Tony D'Aloisio to consult with the non-bank financial sector to identify what the Government could do to help financial institutions that are not covered by the guarantee.


http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/2571/218/

Climate Alarmism's Flimsy Foundation
Written by Paul Chesser, American Spectator

on Oct 24, 2008

earth-temperature.jpg

Forget pretty much any news reporting you see that attributes disastrous phenomena to global warming, because it's all designed to create a fog surrounding the core issue: is climate change human-caused or not?

A most recent example is from Monday's Washington Post, in which alarmist reporter Kari Lydersen (who has a long record of such journalism, in addition to work she does for leftist publications such as In These Times and the Progressive, on topics including "environmental racism") told about how waterborne diseases are expected to multiply due to future climate devastation:

Now, scientists say, it is a near-certainty that global warming will drive significant increases in waterborne diseases around the world.

Rainfalls will be heavier, triggering sewage overflows, contaminating drinking water and endangering beachgoers. Higher lake and ocean temperatures will cause bacteria, parasites and algal blooms to flourish. Warmer weather and heavier rains also will mean more mosquitoes, which can carry the West Nile virus, malaria and dengue fever. Fresh produce and shellfish are more likely to become contaminated.

The inevitable devastating consequences, as in so many environmentalist reporter articles, dominate the opening paragraphs of Lydersen's piece. She follows by asserting that a trend of heavier rainfalls "will accelerate," citing the 2007 report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I asked Lydersen where in the IPCC report it states with certainty that heavier rainfalls would rapidly increase, and she promised to get back to me on that -- "That was paraphrasing, not a direct quote from the report," she told me in an email. I'm sure.

Regardless, this kind of distractive reporting buttresses the lucrative industry that is global warming alarmism. "It's going to cause sea levels to rise!" cry the coastal scientists and fisheries experts. "It will massively displace wildlife!" scream the biological scientists. "It will prolong droughts and intensify rainfalls," warn the geologists and agricultural scientists. Their wailing fills up their applications for billions of dollars in grants from governments and sympathetic nonprofit foundations.

But these outcries miss the point, because they do not address the core issue of whether the temperature uptick (of one degree Celsius) over the last century is attributable chiefly to man's influence and thus mitigable, or to natural fluctuations and that nothing can be done about it. In other words, the vast majority of research (80 percent? 90 percent? more?) tied to climate change has nothing to do with its cause.

Therefore we have a whole derivative economic sector constructed on the foundation of a single premise: that increasing greenhouse gas emissions are having a greater impact on global climate than are other phenomena such as solar activity, cloud cover, ocean temperatures, El Niño/La Niña, etc. If that single thesis is deemed false, then all these offshoot opportunities for researchers, government, universities, nonprofits, rent seekers, and media goes into a deep chill. Goodbye grants. Adios agency positions. Ciao, charitable contributions. So long, subsidies. And where hast thou gone, writing awards?

Just think -- if it's shown beyond the mainstream media's reach that carbon dioxide and its gaseous sisters (methane and a few others) do not jack up the atmospheric temps, we would no longer have to live under the environoia of this collaborative claptrap.

So obviously it's in each of the alarmists' interests to dismiss their dissenters and undermine any evidence that global warming is not a threat to the planet or to mankind. Jim Martin, executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, has said, "You could have a convention of all the scientists who dispute climate change in a relatively small phone booth." There was the classic Newsweek smear job by Sharon Begley last August which labeled some differing-but-credible climate scientists as a fossil fuel industry-funded "denial machine." Meanwhile the green-journalism Society of Environmental Journalists marginalizes the opposers as "skeptics and contrarians." Discourteous folks call 'em "flat-earthers."

But the difficulty of the alarmists' protectionist task only grows. There has been no significant warming since 1995, and none at all since 1997. The numbers of detracting scientists were already sizable and are only continuing to grow (PDF). The oceans are cooling, Antarctic ice grows, current temperature measuring data are biased in favor of heat, and legitimate explanations for Arctic ice loss (by the way, not an unprecedented phenomenon) other than increased greenhouse gases are published.

When you think about it, the global warming industry is not dissimilar to the current mortgage-instigated mess the country now faces. We have a planetary heat crisis and an insufficient home ownership crisis. Government demands intervention to remedy both mistaken theories. Media joins in celebrating and promoting the new agenda. A bubbling system of artificial wealth is created. But because both foundations are shaky, they cannot hold up the continued weight placed upon them.

One has finally collapsed. When will the other?