Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.
I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.
One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.
Morning Song
by Sylvia Plath
One Christmas too early, one street too late, he never knew, as it approached the festive season, exactly what to do. They had been the only kids on their street who didn't celebrate Christmas. It was the undertow of depression that was killing him. The mistakes. The desire to start again. He remembered, he would always remember, that last Christmas before his mother converted to a fundamentalist Christian sect, a group which regarded Christmas as a pagan ritual to be avoided. Their house, the literature thrust in front of him, was full of talk of the Roman Sun God and times of the year, a harvest of plenty, pagan, primitive beats. Far off the Beatles were screaming.
Their mother decided to make up for all the Christmases that weren't to come. All that standing in the playground while the rest of the kids did scripture class. The playground that stretched forever, past the gates, down past the swings and the giant gum trees, over the secret catacombs where naked men hid in the misty steam and water dripped from ancient rocks, the catacombs only he could see. There were presents galore, that final Christmas. Their father was away, thankfully, and there must have been twenty little parcels between him and his brother. There was never much money, and the presents weren't all exactly grand, little cheap toys wrapped in colourful paper, but their excitement was boundless.
They were down the dead end in the screeching heat, showing off their new scooters. They were racing down the steep unfinished driveway that had seen so many grazed shins. They were happy, briefly, away from their parents. Just as he would be happy in the future when he got away from the ceaseless, shameless pounding of propaganda from the government, even just for a brief respite. Turn off everything, television, radio, don't read newspapers. Find a space where the truth lies. Find peace. And back then, in the cicada filled heat, lay moments of running through the cheap heat, moments when he wasn't being beaten, moments when the mystery of the neighbours filled his soul and they collected tadpoles in the puddles along the side of Wallamutta Road.
All that they said, all that they had been, was caught up in the rising air. The next year there were no presents at all. Christmas was the work of the devil, their mother explained, although they were unconvinced. And thus it was all those years later, bruises up and down his arms, he wandered the streets of Sydney's inner-city suburb of Paddington and peered in at houses where people were clearly celebrating, laughed, almost, at the excited children on their new bikes, in the days when children could still ride the streets of Paddington without fear of being molested.
He looked into those houses and it only reinforced the desert of his own life, no family, no children, no Christmas parties, just days that rolled over each other and made him feel even lonelier still, while everyone around celebrated Yule tide. The mistletoe went up in their local pub. The bright red berries were meant to add good cheer. He approached it all without knowledge. Images of Sun Gods and pagan festivals still plagued him. How could all these Christians get everything so wrong? How could the left promote so much ridiculous propaganda, such ridiculous views of the world, and get away with it?
All in sixties derived beliefs in the humanity of man, the decency of the working class, the power of the proletariat, the importance of being open-minded and tolerant, of embracing our inner-hippy, all of it faded into a gut feeling of dread as he paced the Paddington streets. There are rumours. There are decaying moments. But here, as he walked past the homes of normal people, watched the fathers with their children monitoring the first bike ride, giving gentle advice, their loving wife, the loving mother, inside their smart, expensive homes, he could only wonder why he had been abandoned by God; after all he had sought so hard. But he had been abandoned; as he made his way back to his share house; as he tried to muster a mask for the occasion. Merry Christmas, he said, as he walked past another happy looking parent. Merry Christmas came the response; crossing the divide from a different world.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/stand-up-to-climate-change-deniers/1348852.aspx
Climate Change Minister Penny Wong has hit out at federal Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull for failing to stand up to the "climate change deniers" within his party.
Comprehensive economic modelling released by Treasury yesterday painted a rosy picture of how emissions trading will affect the economy and Australians, forecasting that the average household bill will rise by just $7 a week.
The modelling predicted the scheme would barely impact on economic growth and incomes, both of which would continue to grow.
But the opposition has described it as badly flawed because it ignores the global financial meltdown.
Senator Wong told reporters in Sydney today the calls for delay on emissions trading from the opposition were "the next chapter from the climate change deniers who don't want us to take action on climate change".
"These are the same people who prevented Australia from ratifying the Kyoto protocol, these are the same people who preferred not to act on the long-term challenge of climate change," she said.
"They are now asking for further delay because they are simply climate change deniers."
Senator Wong accused Mr Turnbull, who supported the ratification of Kyoto, of being rolled by sceptics within his party.
"This is now down to Malcolm Turnbull ... but he appears unable to stand up to the climate change deniers within his party," she said.
"Malcolm Turnbull knows, just as the government knows, that delay simply increases the costs."
Senator Wong also tried to silence critics who claim the scheme will hurt households and industries already battered by the financial crisis.
"The Rudd government absolutely understands the scale of the financial crisis," she said.
"That's why we took decisive and early action to secure an economic strategy to ensure that the Australian economy was in the best place to withstand the financial crisis.
"But what we do know is that climate change is a long-term challenge and deferring acting is simply going to increase the costs."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/10/31/2406259.htm?section=australia
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says the threat of climate change remains as significant as it was before the global financial crisis.
Yesterday the Government released Treasury modelling showing that an emissions trading scheme would have an impact on economic growth of around 0.1 per cent, as well as possibly increasing household energy costs by around $7 per week.
The Opposition has criticised the modelling as flawed because it does not take into account the impact of the recent economic turmoil.
But speaking at a Business Council of Australia dinner in Sydney last night, Mr Rudd said the Government's response to climate change would take into account the needs of both businesses and households.
"Only that kind of response will provide a firm foundation for investment and job creation in the future," he said.
"The challenge of climate change is no less real today than it was before the financial crisis. Addressing climate change is part of laying the foundations for long term economic growth."
http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/2740/218/
Nigel Lawson, chancellor of the Exchequer under Margaret Thatcher, and author of three books--including his essential account of the Thatcher years, The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical--had trouble finding a publisher for his most recent book, An Appeal to Reason, which casts a skeptical eye on global warming.
As he notes in the foreword, one rejection letter suggested that "it would be very difficult to find a wide market" for a book that "flies so much in the face of the prevailing orthodoxy." So while Lawson acknowledges that his contribution to the discussion won't "shake the faith" of global warming's true believers, he's written what is a very informative book for those not yet convinced that Armageddon is our future, absent massive worldwide government action.
Lawson acknowledges up front that while he is not a scientist, neither "are the vast majority of those who pronounce on the matter" of global warming "with far greater certainty." And throughout, he deliberately uses the term "global warming" rather than the "attractively alliterative weasel words, 'climate change,'" and he does so "because the climate changes all the time."
In discussing global warming, Lawson happily takes the road less traveled in making the basic point about the science of global warming being "far from settled," not to mention that scientific truth "is not established by counting heads," as so many advocates of all manner of popular causes would likely prefer. So while Lawson doesn't hide from the fact that the 20th century ended slightly warmer than it began, he reminds readers that there has been no further evidence of global warming since the turn of the century.
Furthermore, news accounts would have us believe that calculating temperature is a foolproof process. But in reality, these calculations include data taken from the former Soviet Union, along with records from less-developed parts of the world. When Lawson checked U.S. temperature records, records thought to be most reliable, he found that only three of the last 12 years are among the warmest on record; 1934 being the warmest year of all. And though the level of carbon dioxide did increase 30% during the 20th century amid a slight warming trend, it's also boomed this century amid a slight cooling.
When we consider the slight warming that materialized during the 20th century, Lawson notes that it's not certain that the majority of it has to do with human activity. In truth, clouds/water vapor are the biggest contributors to the much vaunted "greenhouse effect," but the science of clouds is "one of the least understood aspects of climate science." Importantly, the earth's climate has always been subject to variations unrelated to human industrial activity, the "medieval warm period" of 1,000 years ago having occurred well before industrialization.
Regarding actions we might take, Lawson reminds readers that we need to avoid the kind of panic that could lead to disastrous policies. Indeed, he makes plain that there "is something inherently absurd about the conceit that we can have any useful idea of what the world will look like in a hundred years time," not to mention the other projected calamities expected to occur over 1,000 years from now. If this is doubted, ask yourself how many times weather forecasts meant to predict the next day have proven to be massively incorrect.
Fading murals on walls around Redfern, Sydney, Australia.
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