Dead Man's Waterhole

*



Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou'art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy'or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Death, be not proud (Holy Sonnet 10)
John Donne



Clouds of days, crowds jostling for attention, a sympathetic ear, the comfortable cluck of children and purpose, of warm homes and cosy demeanors. We were ever so proud. We found, in incandescent pools, a perfect logic, a story that held together perfectly. The Dead Man's Waterhole was one of those. We were functioning out of the sad glaze of chaos. Even when he was good he was bad. They told us there were other assignments; and he was ignored. He clung to the schedule, but nothing was working. Addiction sweat, clothes flapping against clammy skin. Inconsistency. A charade.

Every away assignment turned into hell as he went into instant withdrawals. He was walking stone dead on a barren land, the gibber desert beneath his feet. He gazed out the window of planes, already fearful of the coming sweats, the world turning into glue, the lies perpetrated by dishonest claims. At least the rural stories had a ring of truth to them; the dignity of labour, uncomplicated lives conducted with integrity and grace. The city had betrayed him; and now his family. Social justice be dammed; passive welfare was eating into the under class, destroying all those worthy traits, frugality, humility, hard work.

I have been deeply humbled, the politicians say, when they mean nothing of the kind. But every now and then, in the jumble of it all, lies the perfect story, decent people, astonishing landscape. We were in the middle of the Pilliga, accompanied by the bloke from National Parks and a large, pleasant farm woman from the Gunnedah Tourist Information Centre. They had decided that inviting journalists from the big city was the only way to get good stories on their local area; promote their tourist industry while the farms died. They took elaborate planning, but the results were uncertain. You could end up with him, his head in a thousand places.

Shadows haunt us, everywhere. A Million Wild Acres, the classic book about the Pilliga, always lay on our shelves. But we never read it. The cars bounced across the dirt roads. Our demands were different. We wanted to see the flush of wild flowers after the previous years burning, when giant fires filled our television screens. Bless me, bless me, he thought, as the sweat began trickling in the forest heat. The orange and yellow of the egg and bacon plants; splashes of white, red, everything.

We arrived at the centre, where the old woman had lived all her life, at the heart of the old timber camp. The vast pine forest stopped; and there were open glades between the dark trees; sunlight splashing on the ground. Wild horses, brumbies, grazed at the edge of the clearing. Old roses climbed over cottages abandoned decades ago. Once there had been a hundred people here, working the mill. There had been a school, even a little shop. And here in this isolated spot in the middle of the scrub, happiness and hard work and stories around the fire at night; the hard workers who went to town once a month and came back drunk.

The families making do as best they could. And in the middle of this scene, the old mill no longer working, the rusting equipment lying in a field, the old school yard empty. In the wind, that wind that always swept through the Pilliga, picking up voices on its way, the wind which came from the vast interior, and spread here, raising dust and memories. Everything was magical, in this abandoned place. The family invited us in, this family which provided the perfect story, and he was here as a nobel laureaute, the person who could tell the story, the poet who could describe the old roses climbing over the abandoned workers' shacks, the brumbies picking through the dappled light at the edge of the clearing.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theage.com.au/world/bali-bombers-executed-20081109-5ko7.html

The three Bali bombers on death row have been executed by firing squad.

Imam Samudra and brothers Amrozi and Mukhlas were shot to death by separate firing squads at 12.15am Indonesian time, an Indonesian government spokesman has confirmed.

The executions come six years after the Kuta nightclub explosions that killed 202 people, including 88 Australians.

Family members of the bombers were informed of the execution by Ali Fauzi, the brother of Mukhlas and Amrozi.

Ali Fauzi headed to the prison island of Nusakambangan by boat about 5.30am Sydney time to oversee the religious rights on the bodies.

He sent a text message to relatives in Arabic saying "they are with the Almighty''.

In a statement on behalf of the family of Mukhlas and Amrozi, elder brother Chozin said: "We hope the spirit of my brothers Amrozi and Ali Ghufron (Mukhlas) will be takn by green birds to paradise."

The bullets will be removed from the bodies and autopsies performed before the bodies are cleaned and wrapped in traditional Muslim cloth in preparartion for burial.

The men's bodies are expected to be flown by helicopter today from the prison island to their home towns.

Amrozi and Mukhlas are from the small village Tenggulun in East Java. Imam Samudra comes from Serang in West Java.

The bombers' funerals are expected to be held within hours of their bodies arriving home.

The presence of police has been stepped up across Indonesia amid threats of attacks in Bali and in Jakarta shopping malls. Most terrorism analysts believe it's unlikely there will be a major attack but agree there is a risk of mob violence and clashes involving hardline supporters of the trio.

The executions follow years of legal challenges to the death sentences, which were handed down in 2003.

http://www.theage.com.au/national/can-rudd-keep-the-country-on-track-20081108-5klb.html

After a year as prime minister, Rudd's approval rating is high, but he now faces his biggest test in the global financial crisis.

THE fervour with which Americans voted for a change of national leadership last week was played out — albeit in more subdued fashion — in Australia a year ago when Kevin Rudd was elected prime minister after almost 12 years of conservative government.

Like US president-elect Barack Obama, Rudd's rise to the top was rapid and he was championed as the great hope of a nation ready for change. He represented a generational shift, and presented a jaded electorate with a bold vision for the nation, a determination to act on climate change, and the promise of healing a shameful history of black injustice and maltreatment.

One year on, "Sorry" has been said, the Kyoto Protocol has been signed and there has been a big talkfest at Parliament House. Rudd has also travelled overseas frequently — some would say excessively — to pursue his international aspirations for Australia.

Despite occasional setbacks, Kevin Michael Rudd is clearly relishing his job. He is riding high in the polls, with a 71% approval rating, according to the latest Age/Nielsen poll. And his government has several major projects in train, including a sweeping review of the tax and welfare systems, the introduction of an emissions trading scheme to reduce greenhouse gases, and a major infrastructure spending program.

But while the polls remain favourable, there are lingering criticisms that Rudd is a prime minister obsessed with announcing reviews and inquiries, unable or unwilling to act decisively.

Often robotic in his delivery, critics accuse Rudd of being consumed by the 24-hour news cycle, unable to express his emotions or communicate effectively with the public.

He is now facing the biggest challenge of his leadership as the global economic crisis continues to bear down on Australia, threatening to drag the nation into recession



http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/2679/218/

Truly inconvenient truths about climate change being ignored

Written by Michael Duffy, Sydney Morning Herald

Last month I witnessed something shocking. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was giving a talk at the University of NSW. The talk was accompanied by a slide presentation, and the most important graph showed average global temperatures. For the past decade it represented temperatures climbing sharply.

As this was shown on the screen, Pachauri told his large audience: "We're at a stage where warming is taking place at a much faster rate [than before]".

Now, this is completely wrong. For most of the past seven years, those temperatures have actually been on a plateau. For the past year, there's been a sharp cooling. These are facts, not opinion: the major sources of these figures, such as the Hadley Centre in Britain, agree on what has happened, and you can check for yourself by going to their websites. Sure, interpretations of the significance of this halt in global warming vary greatly, but the facts are clear.

So it's disturbing that Rajendra Pachauri's presentation was so erroneous, and would have misled everyone in the audience unaware of the real situation. This was particularly so because he was giving the talk on the occasion of receiving an honorary science degree from the university.

Later that night, on ABC TV's Lateline program, Pachauri claimed that those who disagree with his own views on global warming are "flat-earthers" who deny "the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence". But what evidence could be more important than the temperature record, which Pachauri himself had fudged only a few hours earlier?

In his talk, Pachauri said the number of global warming sceptics is shrinking, a curious claim he was unable to substantiate when questioned about it on Lateline. Still, there's no doubt a majority of climate scientists agree with the view of the IPCC.

Today I want to look at why this might be so: after all, such a state of affairs presents a challenge to sceptics such as me. If we're right, then an awful lot of scientists are wrong. How could this be?

This question was addressed in September in a paper by Professor Richard Lindzen, of the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen, probably the most qualified prominent global-warming sceptic, suggested that a number of changes in the way science is conducted have contributed to the rise of climate alarmism among American scientists.

Central to this is the importance of government funding to science. Much of that funding since World War II has occurred because scientists build up public fears (examples include fear of the USSR's superiority in weapons or space travel, of health problems, of environmental degradation) and offer themselves as the solution to those fears. The administrators who work with the scientists join in with enthusiasm: much of their own funding is attached to the scientific grants. Lindzen says this state of affairs favours science involving fear, and also science that involves expensive activities such as computer modelling. He notes we have seen "the de-emphasis of theory because of its difficulty and small scale, the encouragement of simulation instead (with its call for large capital investment in computation), and the encouragement of large programs unconstrained by specific goals.

"In brief, we have the new paradigm where simulation and [computer] programs have replaced theory and observation, where government largely determines the nature of scientific activity, and where the primary role of professional societies is the lobbying of the government for special advantage."

Lindzen believes another problem with climate science is that in America and Europe it is heavily colonised by environmental activists.

Here are just two examples that indicate the scale of the problem: the spokesman for the American Meteorological Society is a former staffer for Al Gore, and realclimate.org, probably the world's most authoritative alarmist web site, was started by a public relations firm serving environmental causes.