The Stranger

*



I am exhausted from carrying these things.

There is The Quiet Half. We all possess a Quiet Half. Here are our sins and transgressions, our crimes and iniquities, our lapses of reason and faith and honesty, our voices and misdeeds and every time fell from grace...

The Quiet Half haunts; it follows like those proverbial shadows, and then it waits with unsurpassed patience and fortitude. What do they say? Ultimately everyone dies from wongdoings and shortness of breath.

I carry enough for one man. Truth? I carry enough for three or five or seven.

R.J. Ellory A Simple Act of Violence.



Well we were criminal in our intent, long before we knew the nature of crime. Splintered moments, blank skies, anything to take him back. Crawling back, not just through the time tunnel. Hiro from Heroes chirps brightly: I can move through time and space. He laughs in delight at his own powers. But there is no laughter here, no shadows, no mirth. He stepped out from the school playground and all was fear. The trees themselves were loathsome in their intensity. He knew his own heart would die racing, that there was no solution. We were here on the planet for short specks of time; and his ancient spirit, inherited from past lives, was determined to take him back to unresolved dilemmas from thousands of years ago, his death, his murder in the catacombs.

And so it was that as an apparently ordinary Australian school boy, dressed in shorts and socks and with fearsome middle class parents hidden behind bland walls, he would walk out of the school playground and into the park each afternoon after school. Fractured heavens. Why was he the only one who could find them, these catacombs, beginning as they did at the rock entrance beside the swings. Every night in his dreams he was walking down there, comfortable, perhaps, in familiar surrounds, damp mist, clammy rocks, naked men lurking in corners.

Maybe it was here his death occurred. Maybe this was the reason these false memories had been implanted. Surely they were false, surely it could not be occurring. But he would have sworn blind that the square stone entrance really was there beside the swings; that he and anyone else could walk down those ancient, mossy steps into this strange, subterranean world. Out here in the suburbs; near the beach, amidst the screeching cicadas of summer, the smell of gum trees, the littered ground. Out here where the waves curled in an endless, cruel succession and the surfy boys paraded with their boards and their girl friends in the mercilessly bright sun.

Only he found his way into this dank, misty world, and stood as a school boy watching the mysteries of adult males, unable or unwilling to decipher the tensions in the air, the strange looks. The approbation of the villagers outside; their knowing winks, their dirty laughter. He emerged two thousand years ago into a sunlit place, the villagers, the sunlit columns, he emerged full lit into a world of embarrassment and disgrace, coated in guilt, still sore from the ramming, their brutal love; their memories, their actions, their grunts and ugly passion, all his, the receptacle, their servant. impassionate, compassionate, the feel of their semen still on him, the royal whore.

He knew they whispered as he passed, pig ignorant villagers in dark lanes. Ugly as. He strode with elegant long legs and his head held high; he didn't mince, not exactly, he walked tall no matter what they thought. He walked tall and could hear the sniggers in his wake, could see the merry laughter of the boys playing ball games in the dust, could feel the heat of the day on his musky skin, away from the cool, muffled murmurs of the catacombs, away from the sin and disgrace and forgetful passions; away from the highlights, his most beautiful self, the peak of his physical form.

Away from it all, drained through time, telescoped he knew not how into another time and place, in the head of an Australian school boy walking home from school, heightened in his alertness, almost bouncing on his feet he was so aware of everything around him. Here in the screeching sunshine; the too bright colours; away from the coherent beauty of his old town. Here what appeared to be enormous houses, almost mansions, clung to hills amongst vivid green trees. And then the impossible happened: and he saw, once again, the entrance to the catacomb, the large stones shaping the dark hole, the stairs leading down into the nether world that had once been his entire domain. And so he took the steps and walked there, thousands of years after he had lived, here in the mind of a frightened school boy. And that boy would never forget the strangeness of the catacombs, there next to the swings, the catacombs that strangely only he could see, although he was convinced most days they were really there, waiting for him each afternoon, waiting for the stranger inside his head.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/02/22/2497865.htm

Australians will today observe a national day of mourning to honour the victims of Victoria's bushfires.

Services will be held across the country, with the largest taking place at Melbourne's Rod Laver Arena at 11am AEDT.

The Melbourne service is expected to draw up to 100,000 people, and will be broadcast live on ABC1 and ABC Online.

ABC Local Radio will also broadcast the service, with a program to start after the 10.00am (AEDT) news.

Choirs and orchestras will play, while those gathered at Rod Laver Arena will hear from political leaders, religious figures and other dignitaries.

Princess Anne will attend on behalf of the Queen.

The service will include words from bushfire survivors and will end with a speech by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

Victoria's Premier, John Brumby, says it will be a chance for everybody to grieve together.

"[It's] a magnificent opportunity for Victorians and Australians to come together ... to show our mourning, to show our grief, to show our respect," he said.
http://www.fayettedailynews.com/article.php?id_news=3062

Syndicated columnist George Will’s recent column on global warming and the so-called man-made warming phenomenon should be required reading.

Will actually takes the experts to task for continuing to shove the global warming theory in our faces, since, as he writes, evidence seems to be mounting that these experts have it all wrong.

According to the University of Illinois Artic Climate Research Center, the global sea ice levels are now equal to those of 1979. This fact contradicts the claims by those who say global warming, as evidenced by the melting polar ice cap, is happening and may be unstoppable.

Will points out that 30 years ago the fear expressed by climatologists was that the Earth was entering a sustained period of global cooling and we were headed for another Ice Age.

I have made that point on a number of occasions, citing a program hosted by Leonard Nimoy called In Search of the Coming Ice Age.
And I don’t plan on falling for the same scare tactics that those who espouse the theory of man-made global warming want us to believe. And I don t want our elected representatives to do that either.

I don’t trust our government. And I’m not alone in that.

A recent release survey found that there is a wide level of distrust and dissatisfaction of government across the board among the people of America.

That is a sad state of affairs. We elect these people to represent us on the local, state and federal level, and still we do not trust them.

Time and again we are faced with public servants who put their own interests above those of their constituents. Is it any wonder that our trust level is so low?

And so it goes with global warming. Those leaders in our state and federal governments who continue to preach that man is not only causing, but can actually do something about global warming, refuse to look at all the facts and instead choose to rely on information from skewed sources.

Will’s column points out that the United Nations World Meteorological Organization says there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade, or one-third of the space since the global cooling scare.

Try to get a global-warming fanatic to listen to that finding.

Or try to get some member of Congress who has already closed their mind to another opinion to listen.

Bet you can’t.

(Kerlin is a veteran journalist whose family roots go back for generations in the community)

http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/3333/218/

Dark Green Doomsayers Print E-mail
Written by George F. Will, Washington Post
Saturday, 14 February 2009
chu-steven.jpg

A corollary of Murphy's Law ("If something can go wrong, it will") is: "Things are worse than they can possibly be." Energy Secretary Steven Chu, an atomic physicist, seems to embrace that corollary but ignores Gregg Easterbrook's "Law of Doomsaying": Predict catastrophe no sooner than five years hence but no later than 10 years away, soon enough to terrify but distant enough that people will forget if you are wrong.

Chu recently told the Los Angeles Times that global warming might melt 90 percent of California's snowpack, which stores much of the water needed for agriculture. This, Chu said, would mean "no more agriculture in California," the nation's leading food producer. Chu added: "I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going."

No more lettuce for Los Angeles? Chu likes predictions, so here is another: Nine decades hence, our great-great-grandchildren will add the disappearance of California artichokes to the list of predicted planetary calamities that did not happen. Global cooling recently joined that lengthening list.

Speaking of experts, in 1980 Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford scientist and environmental Cassandra who predicted calamitous food shortages by 1990, accepted a bet with economist Julian Simon. When Ehrlich predicted the imminent exhaustion of many nonrenewable natural resources, Simon challenged him: Pick a "basket" of any five such commodities, and I will wager that in a decade the price of the basket will decline, indicating decreased scarcity. Ehrlich picked five metals -- chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten -- that he predicted would become more expensive. Not only did the price of the basket decline, the price of all five declined.

An expert Ehrlich consulted in picking the five was John Holdren, who today is President Obama's science adviser. Credentialed intellectuals, too -- actually, especially -- illustrate Montaigne's axiom: "Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know."

As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.

An unstated premise of eco-pessimism is that environmental conditions are, or recently were, optimal. The proclaimed faith of eco-pessimists is weirdly optimistic: These optimal conditions must and can be preserved or restored if government will make us minimize our carbon footprints and if government will "remake" the economy.

Because of today's economy, another law -- call it the Law of Clarifying Calamities -- is being (redundantly) confirmed. On graphs tracking public opinion, two lines are moving in tandem and inversely: The sharply rising line charts public concern about the economy, the plunging line follows concern about the environment. A recent Pew Research Center poll asked which of 20 issues should be the government's top priorities. Climate change ranked 20th.

Real calamities take our minds off hypothetical ones. Besides, according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade, or one-third of the span since the global cooling scare.


Put arrives for APEC meeting in Sydney 2007.