Hiding In Plain Sight

*



The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm. He came along the street of Green Town, Illinois, in the late cloudy October day, sneaking glances over his shoulder. Somewhere not so far back, vast lightnings stomped the earth. Somewhere, a storm like a great beast with terrible teeth could not be denied.

So the salesman jangled and clanged his huge leather kit in which oversized puzzles of ironmongery lay unseen but which his tongue conjured from door to door until he came at last to a lawn which was cut all wrong.

No, not the grass. The salesman lifted his gaze. But two boys, far up the gentle slope, lying on the grass. Of a like size and general shape, the boys sat carving twig whistles, talking of olden or future times, content with having left their fingerprints on every movable object in Green Town during summer past and their footprints on every open path between here and the lake and there and the river since school began.

"Howdy, boys!" called the man all dressed in stormcolored clothes. "Folks home?"

The boys shook their heads.

"Got any money, yourselves?"

The boys shook their heads.

"Well --" The salesman walked about three feet, stopped and hunched his shoulders. Suddenly he seemed aware of house windows or the cold sky staring at his neck. He turned slowly, sniffing the air. Wind rattled the empty trees. Sunlight, breaking through a small rift in the clouds, minted a last few oak leaves all gold. But the sun vanished, the coins were spent, the air blew gray; the salesman shook himself from the spell.

The salesman edged slowly up the lawn.

"Boy," he said. "What's your name?"

And the first boy, with hair as blond-white as milk thistle, shut up one eye, tilted his head, and looked at the salesman with a single eye as open, bright and clear as a drop of summer rain.

"Will," he said. "William Halloway."

'Me storm gentleman turned. "And you?"

The second boy did not move, but lay stomach down on the autumn grass, debating as if he might make up a name. His hair was wild, thick, and the glossy color of waxed chestnuts. His eyes, fixed to some distant point within himself, were mint rock-crystal green. At last he put a blade of dry grass in his casual mouth.

"Jim Nightshade," he said.

The storm salesman nodded as if he had known it all along.

"Nightshade. That's quite a name."

"And only fitting," said Will Halloway. I was born one minute before midnight, October thirtieth. Jim was born one minute after midnight, which makes it October thirty-first."

"Halloween," said Jim.

By their voices, the boys had told the tale all their lives, proud of their mothers, living house next to house, running for the hospital together, bringing sons into the world seconds apart; one light, one dark . There was a history of mu mutual celebration behind them. Each year Will lit the candles on a single cake at one minute to midnight. Jim, at one minute after, with the last day of the month begun, blew them out.

So much Will said, excitedly. So much Jim agreed to, silently. So much the salesman, running before the storm, but poised here uncertainly, heard looking from face to face.

"Halloway. Nightshade. No money, you say?"

Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury



Once they came out of the woodwork, once he knocked on the door which opened on to clouds, the vast sky, and he took a single step out on to the precipice, to find no floor beneath him. We were shadowed by the astonishing popularity of the Prime Minister. Kevin Rudd now has a 74% approval rating, almost equal to Bob Hawke's peak of 75%, an Australian record. So much did we bequeath. So much did we shelter. The passions of the time are so different to the passions that ruled us. Now everyone wants to find their own village, their own group of friends, to protect themselves against the storm of anonymity and the final glaze of horror that was ours. He wasn't certain. He didn't even know why he had been placed here. He was going out in a big way, God bless you all.

This thought disorder, so different to the past, was much more frothy, cheerful, self-deprecating. It was never his intention to be born again. He had clung as long as possible to the beliefs of the past. But the external had become the internal, the marginal the mainstream, the boundary riders the core of government policy. Getting up and going to work was for fools, when the government kept dishing out vast amounts of largesse to the welfare class. It made no sense. It disappeared in a flash, in cheap Chinese goods and wrapping paper on the floor of housing commission units. It disappeared into dealers pockets and bottle shops, into pubs and debts, and created no jobs. But what would he know. He didn't look good in a suit. He wasn't part of the ruling class.

These abject attitudes, these inconsiderate bastards who kept pecking at him, pecking at him, as if there was anything to be gained from persecuting the already disadvantaged. Screw loose, they said. Not the brightest brick in the wall. And the spirit of the suburbs; it was close. It was warm. He was certain to be made clear and whole. He was certain to find a purpose, in the beauty of the mundane. That's what he thought. He would make poetry out of the plain, the ordinary, the humble days, the unambitious loves. He remembered vividly how terribly disappointed he was when he discovered Ray Bradbury voted conservative, as if it was entirely astonishing that someone with such an imagination could be right wing. How as that possible? Surely it invalidated everything he had written.

But that, of course, was before he lived through some of the terrible excesses of the left, before he had become a victim of its pack mentality, before a crusty old right winger had taken residence in his brain, right next to the drunken old queen and the left wing young idealist, sandwiched between entirely conflicting personality types. Tell me what must be done. Warn me of further cuts. Celebrate what had already been achieved. Select out the marked man. Prepare to die. Dress elegantly and hide in plain sight. He knew he would need a week to recover. All the random incidents that had been his journalistic life came flooding back. He couldn't have been more saddened by what was happening. Nothing was fair. Nothing made sense. Brutopia had come to the here and now.

We were tiny little vessels in the matrix of democracy; and not very effective ones. He could remember everything that had happened, the plane that had crashed in Botany Bay, the chaos at the scene. That was early on in his reporting career, and that meant nothing. He was worried. He hadn't acquired the superficial gloss and the easy command. In truth, he didn't have a clue what he was doing. It was one of his first big stories and he was well at sea. None of this had happened before, not for him. He remembered with some astonishment the sight of D.D. McNicoll. It was the first time he had eyed a McNicoll since he used to have to take the wire stories by hand into David McNicoll's office, D.D.'s father. They were both big walrus style men, almost identical in physical appearance, albeit it of different ages.

They plane perched up out of the water about 30 metres from the shore. Miraculously, if he remembered rightly, there had been no casualties. But the laden plane, bound for Norfolk Island, had flown its last. The opposition, in the form of D.D., had it all over us because they had been on board the plane. The pictures inside the plane, taken by Chris Pavlich, showed in perfect, graphic detail the chaos on board the plane seconds before it crashed. There was no way we could beat that. He was astonished at everything that had happened. He wanted to be wasted and completely on the board. He wanted to hide and he wanted to trumpet news of all this astonishing beauty from the highest vantage point. He wanted to time travel and live every moment to the full. And so it was that he picked up the paper, followed the story with some grim satisfaction, they hadn't made complete fools of themselves, and never knew that in the quiet alleys and behind whispering hands he owuld meet these people again, his life would be swallowed by daily dramas, he would dismiss the curiosity and even admiration of ordinary people, and he would join the slip stream, destined for disaster.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7974867.stm

US President Barack Obama has set off from Washington DC for Europe on his first major foreign trip since taking office in January.

Mr Obama's first stop is London where he is due to attend the G20 summit.

He will also join leaders at a Nato summit on the French-German border and visit the Czech Republic and Turkey.

Mr Obama's mission during his tour will be to restore the US's place at the head of the diplomatic table, says BBC North America editor Justin Webb.

He will do so by asserting that the US has changed - that America is willing to listen and engage, but he will also insist that America still has the capacity to pull the world in the right direction, our correspondent says.

A White House spokesman stressed the president would "listen in London as well as lead".

'Everyday values'

The host of the G20 meeting, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, is keen for world leaders to reach agreement on a new set of rules for regulating global finance as well as measures to boost economic demand and support poorer countries.

According to UK officials, Mr Brown spoke to the president on the phone during his flight to "identify outstanding remaining issues" ahead of the gathering of world leaders.

The call was an "opportunity for both of them to take stock of where we were," a No 10 spokesman said.

Speaking earlier at a gathering of religious leaders at St Paul's Cathedral, Mr Brown called for the "values that we celebrate in everyday life" to be brought to the financial markets.

"I believe that unsupervised globalisation of our financial markets did not only cross national boundaries, it crossed moral boundaries too," Mr Brown said.


OBAMA'S EUROPEAN TRIP
Tuesday: Arrives in London
Wednesday: Mr and Mrs Obama breakfast with the Browns at 10 Downing Street; Mr Obama holds talks with Gordon Brown; meets Russian and Chinese presidents, David Cameron, and the Queen
Thursday: G20 summit; Mr Obama will also meet the Indian PM, the South Korean president and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia during the day
Friday: Departs for Strasbourg; meets French president; holds town-hall meeting; visits German Chancellor in Baden-Baden, returns to Strasbourg
Saturday: Attends Nato summit in Strasbourg; departs for Prague
Sunday: Attends EU-US summit, departs for Ankara
Monday: Departs Ankara for US

But with two days to go before the London summit, further splits are emerging on how to tackle the economic crisis.



Andrew Bolt

April 01, 2009 12:00am

IF China were no threat, our Defence Minister might not have been so secretive about the Chinese gifts he'd pocketed.

Nor would our Prime Minister be just as secretive about his own ties to this Communist autocracy.

In fact, it's precisely because China's rising influence here is a security threat that Joel Fitzgibbon should now resign and Kevin Rudd should stop hiding.

When dealing with such a regime, our politicians must come clean.

Yet Rudd is still playing absurd games, secretly meeting China's top security and propaganda chiefs in private, but asking the BBC this week not to film him sitting next to the Chinese ambassador in public.

Fitzgibbon's secrecy is the more culpable, of course, even if Rudd's may have the more serious consequences.

While in Opposition, Fitzgibbon was groomed by Helen Liu, a Chinese-born businesswoman with strong ties to China's military and foreign affairs establishment.

She gave him a $20,000 campaign donation, a suit (later returned), other unspecified gifts and two business-class trips to China when he was an Opposition frontbencher.

It's those two trips that Fitzgibbon failed to declare on the register of members' interests, as obliged by Parliament, and it's those trips that the now Defence Minister failed to own up to when confronted by a reporter last week, after his links to Liu hit the news.

Reporter: Have any of your trips to Beijing been paid by Ms Liu? Or any of her companies?

Fitzgibbon: I've said on a number of occasions I've had a close, personal relationship for the Lius and the family for 16 years now. And over that period of time there has been an exchange of a number of small gifts, for example on birthdays etc. No one has ever raised concern . . .

Reporter: Can you give an example of those gifts?

Fitzgibbon: No, very small gifts.

But luxury travel and five-star accommodation are not "very small gifts", and Fitzgibbon may have worked out reporters were asking questions to which they already knew the answers.

And so he quickly announced he'd made a "mistake". Or as Acting Prime Minister Julia Gillard put it so generously: "I think it's just an innocent lapse which occurred."

Actually, it was two lapses - first, the failure to disclose to Parliament, and then the failure to disclose, perhaps out of sheer funk, when asked a direct question by a journalist.

(I was the journalist who asked the first question.)

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/03/lobbyists-thriv.html

Obama in Europe -- could she upstage her husband? »
Lobbyists thriving in Obama's Washington

Barack Obama said during the campaign that he wanted to change the culture in Washington, to close the revolving door on lobbyists seeking to influence his administration.

No doubt the president means to make good on his promises.

But ironically, in the months since Obama was sworn in as president, the number of lobbyists in Washington has grown. The reason: complex bills like the president's $787-billion stimulus package are like lobbyist catnip to Washington's K Street corridor of influence peddlers.

And with so much money on the line, the Washington Post found that more than 2,000 cities, companies and associations outside Washington have hired, you guessed it, lobbyists.

"We decided we needed eyes and ears in Washington," said Ed Tinker, city manager of Glenpool, Okla. So the town of 10,000 hired Capitol Hill Consulting Group, which employs former Rep. Rep. Bill Brewster (D-Okla.), for $10,000 a month to help it win grants for education and infrastructure improvements. "There are dollars up there that could come to our community that we weren't aware of," Tinker told the Post. "It's worked out real fine for us. Having that guy on the ground in Washington is going to keep us in the loop."

So the economy may be in the tank, Wall Street may be weeping dollars every day, but jobs are opening for lobbyists. And chief beneficiaries seem to be Democratic firms, like former Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart's Glover Park Group, which posted a 27% increase in business last year. One big client: PhRMA, the pharmaceutical lobby, which expects a huge effort this year on the president's health care reform proposals. "We're busy as bees out here," said PhRMA CEO Billy Tauzin. "Making honey."

Democratic causes are also becoming a new growth industry in Washington. According to the Houston Chronicle, climate-change lobbying is enjoying a renaissance. With likelihood of a Democratic victory last fall, roughly 2,340 lobbyists dealing with climate issues -- from doubters to boosters -- were hired in 2008, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of Senate lobbying disclosure forms.

As a result, said the Texas newspaper, climate lobbyists now outnumber members of Congress by more than 4 to 1.

-- Johanna Neuman

Hiding In Plain Sight

*



Sometimes the experience of writing my memoirs is like the experience of life--euphoric; sometimes it is homely and domestic; sometimes there is the sense of the ceaseless surge of the sea, of a fierceness of energy; sometimes I feel as if I am in possession of the heart's foul rag and bone shop, as the elder Yeats poignantly described his inner life. Sometimes I feel as if I am obsessively preoccupied with refining perceptions, with analysing. Sometimes I feel my agenda is in some basic ways one that is similar to Yeats who once said the only two things that should concern a serious writer is: death and sex. Well, like so many things, there is some truth here.

I feel no need to continue the external journey, occupied as it was with living in some two dozen towns over the last forty years, but I do not want my life to end. This tinkering in the world of thanatos, of the death wish, does occur for short periods late at night, a residue of this bi-polar disorder. But life's journey does not show any signs of ending in this my 63rd year, so continue it I will, as we all must to the end of our days. As Emily Dickinson puts it:

The Brain--is wider than the Sky--
For--put them side by side--
The one the other will contain
With ease--and You--beside--

The Brain is deeper than the sea--
For--hold them--Blue to Blue--
the one the other will absorb--
As Sponges--Buckets--do--

The Brain is just the weight of God--
For--Heft them--Pound for Pound--
And they will differ--if they do--
As Syllable from Sound--

Many autobiographers and analysts of autobiography examine their lives and the field of autobiography in the context of postmodern theory. Postmodernism is a movement, a theory, an approach, to life which encapsulates the arts, the sciences, society and culture, indeed every aspect of day to day life, but outside the context of a meta narrative. I find this theory useful because it exists as a polarity, one of the ubiquitous, multitudinous, polarities that define who we are and what we do. Postmodernism suggests, sees the world, the external world as one of ceaseless flux, of fleeting, fragmentary and contradictory moments that become incorporated into our inner life. The modern hero is the ordinary person and the world is filled with abstract terms. This postmodern society could indeed be called 'the abstract society.' It is a society filled with a commercial, private, pleasure-oriented, superficial, fun-loving individual. This type of society and this type of individual began to appear, or at least the beginnings of post-modernism, can be traced back to the 1950s.

The post-modern in autobiography tends to doubt everything about both self and society. After examining more than fifty biographies of Marilyn Monroe the postmodernist is left with plausibilities and inscrutibilities but not unreserved truth. This school of thought sees, deals with, multiplicity....
Ron Price, Tasmania
http://www.gradesaver.com/poems-of-wb-yeats-the-rose/forum/318/



IN all the secret pathways, in all the shadows that had snapped at his feet, things were rarely orthodox. The deranged dog continues to bark next door, it's entire life lived out on a concrete space, lonely as. It's incessant barking is part of the neighbourhood and part of our life. It never goes out. It just barks and barks and barks. It's called Lucky. The irony is lost on no one. The Lebanese don't coddle their dogs like westerners. Last night's blackouts gave every one the frisson of more chaotic times ahead. He was deeply moved; deeply shattered. He wanted to flee but there was nowhere safe. The old imagery, caught on open ground, was already fading. He was fleeing from one derelict structure to the next, but somehow he never made it from one building to the next.

He was still on open ground, and in order to protect himself had to invent some new way to become invisible; to hide in plain sight, to create a multi-tiered task force which would deflect all attention from the real person. There was no way out this time. She thought he was ruined, but in fact everything was loose, everything was in a different place, there was no salvation. They had grown up on a diet of television. All the old values, the narratives, the story telling, the communication between people, all of it had been washed away in a matter of 50 years. The place was now bereft of any genuine sentiment, for fantasy and fact had become entirely confused, the welcome sign was no longer out. No one dropped by any more. They were no longer young.

He had thought of so many wonderful things to say. Every little interesting thing he thought: I must tell her that. But she was paid to listen. That fact, too, as he looked out the window at the university students on the way to their day, added to the semblance of horror that was taking over the place. All was not lost; you could survive the most brutal of things. But so much of their image, both their self-image and the way others looked at them, was bound up with their jobs. There was general fascination with the goings on, what happened, behind the concrete walls of the Propaganda Unit. How did they decide these narratives? How did they pick the winners and the losers? How was everything so quietly assumed, when no purpose had been stated, when no God was allowed.

Those lonely winding streets of his childhood at least had an end; they led down to the bus stop and out to the wider world. The too bright colours, the intense greens of the trees and the vicious blue of the bay, was all part of it. He buried himself inside Swallows and Amazons; a place with friendly, normal families, people who loved each other, parents who acted like mums and dads should. All these things were plastered with a patina of regret. Some things would never be the same. Sometimes he could make a story out of the tiniest of threads; at others no amount of self-imposed grandiosity could create a single sentence. Go forth. He had been forth. All he found was the bars; and oh how much he had loved them.

Every figure, every laugh, every tableau in the sodden atmosphere gripped him as if this was the universal moment all men aspired to, that moment when God prickled in the fabric of things and a story of such profundity was there to tell, if only he could muster the words. If only he could be worthy enough to be granted narrator status. If not, there was nothing much to say. Another life gurgled on the stream; another life in the midst of millions, hundreds of millions, billions. He reached out and patted him, although he would much rather have kissed him, twisted and bewildered, with inappropriate passions. They curled in brief moments which existed only in brain flashes. And the whole world broke down. And he could have adored another totally.

He could make a fool of himself as he had done so often; declaring his inappropriate love. He reached out to kiss her. He ran his hands across her smooth belly. He wanted to deny everything, the past which excluded him from being a genuine man; the entities that had crowded in when his guard was down. He could see them thrashing on the ground, or trying to hide: the drunken queen, the marshmallow left young writer, so earnest, so committed, the grouchy old right winger who had seen the worst mankind had to offer and had therefore lurched into conservatism; harking back to a simpler time. He could make a fool of himself; or he could hide in plain sight. Finally, as he waved his hands in the plastic air, that is what he chose to do, building a perspex structure which distorted all light, which had so many cut and angled surfaces it was impossible to see what, if anything, was inside.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,25267857-5001021,00.html

SYDNEY'S anti-terrorism defences were exposed last night after the city's emergency warning system failed to activate during yesterday's mass blackout.

Police made the embarrassing admission that the emergency warning system operated on electricity - and had no battery back-up - making it useless in the event of a power failure.

It was also revealed it took more than 40 minutes to issue an SMS alert to 2400 city office wardens, by which time they, along with thousands of office workers had already evacuated.

Officials defended the actions by insisting the warning system was "not to be used in any other situation than for a terrorist attack".

Were you caught in the chaos? Do you have photos of the results of Sydney's blackout? Send them to photo@dailytelegraph.com.au

Gallery: Sydney shuts down
The system was originally installed during APEC in 2007 and was designed to prepare Sydney for a possible terrorist attack.

Senior police, who have regularly said they would publicly test the warning system once a month, moved quickly last night to distance the force from the system.

"The RTA owns it. They own it and maintain it. Police simply use it," a police spokesman said last night.

But even if the system had been working, Deputy Commissioner Dave Owens had deemed it unnecessary to use during the blackout, the spokesman said.

"The system's status was not a consideration in (Deputy Commissioner Owens') decision, so it's not an issue as to whether or not it would've worked," he said.

Police sent out an emergency SMS message at 5.20pm but the RTA had also alerted radio stations of the blackout by 5.15pm, 35 minutes after it occurred.

City office workers spilled from darkened buildings on to the streets, with most unaware of what had happened.

"It wasn't clear as to the extent of the outage at first," a spokesman for Premier Nathan Rees said of the delay.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25267130-5013871,00.html

THE wealthy Chinese businesswoman who befriended Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon and showered him with gifts is a leading member of an organisation with strong ties to the Chinese military.

Helen Liu, who was born in the northeastern Chinese province of Shandong and is now an Australian citizen, is a member of the editorial committee of Shandong Ming Jia.

The organisation, which translates as Shandong Celebrities Family, promotes the work of leading people from Shandong.

It has extensive membership within the China's military, the Peoples Liberation Army, especially its logistics division.

Ms Liu has attracted enormous attention after allegations reported last week that Mr Fitzgibbon had been the subject of a covert spy operation by officials from his own defence department because of his relationship with her.
According to the claims, departmental officials regarded Ms Liu as a possible security risk.

Ms Liu, who has had many property development interests in China and Australia, is among members of the Shandong Celebrities Family network whose activities are regularly covered by its own colour magazine.

Of the past 10 cover photos, three have featured senior army officers - two men and one woman. Calligraphy, which is a strong feature of the organisation's website, was written by a former commissar of the PLA's logistics division.

Shandong is famous as a source of senior soldiers in China.

Ms Liu has also become a prominent representative for the People's Republic in the vast overseas Chinese world - a role that gives her high status back in China.

Mr Fitzgibbon, who describes Ms Liu as a personal friend, met her during a trip to China with his father, former Labor MP Eric Fitzgibbon, in the early 1990s.

Over the years, Mr Fitzgibbon has introduced Ms Liu to Labor MPs at dinners. She paid for two trips Mr Fitzgibbon made to China in 2002 and 2005, which he failed to declare on his parliamentary statement of pecuniary interests until last week.

http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/3642/218/

The War on CO2 Isn’t About Science
Written by Bob Ellis, Dakota Voice
Monday, 30 March 2009

Alan Caruba’s latest column provides some simple bullet-point truths about the religion of global warming which demonstrate that adherents to this religion are believing in something as silly as ancient astrology:

Here are a few things you need to keep in mind about carbon dioxide:

– CO2 is not a “pollutant.” It is a trace gas necessary for all life of Earth because it is essential to the growth of all vegetation.

– Without CO2 all vegetation—grasses, forests, jungles, crops such as wheat, corn and rice—dies. Then herbivores die. Then you die.

– The CO2 produced by human industry or activity is a miniscule fraction of a percentage of greenhouse gases. It constitutes a mere 0.038% of the atmosphere.

– The oceans emit 96.5% of all greenhouse gases, holding and releasing CO2 as it has down through the millennia of Earth’s existence.

– In past millennia, CO2 levels were often much higher than the present.

– CO2 levels rise hundreds of years after temperature rise on planet Earth.

– The Sun is the primary source of warmth on Earth. Rising CO2 is an effect of global warming, not a cause.

– Both global warming and cooling are natural phenomenon over which humans have no control.

– The Earth is not currently warming. It has been cooling for a decade and likely to continue for at least another twenty years or longer. If a new Ice Age is triggered, it will last at least 10,000 years.

– Polar ice is now at record levels and still growing.

Obviously this reality doesn’t match up with the flames of hysteria being fanned by Al Gore and the UN. The science is simply not on their side.

So why this massive campaign of unscientific lies? Well, it’s not hard to figure out, when you understand the great motivation of power-hungry big-government socialists.

And Caruba spells it out:

The EPA proposal is not about science. It is about power and it is about money. As the Wall Street Journal noted, “The administration has proposed a cap-and-trade system that could raise $646 billion by 2019 through government auctions of emission allowances.”

Folks, don’t fall for more socialist lies aimed to remove more of the money you earned from your pocket to make even bigger government which aims to rob you of more of your God-given liberties.

More and more Americans are waking up to the fact that the fantasy of anthropogenic global warming is a load of hot air.

Isn’t it time you took a look at how thin the “facts” are behind Al Gore’s religion, and join the rest of us in rejecting this anti-American nonsense? It’s time we relegated this crazy notion of man-made climate disaster to the place it truly belongs: a Saturday-afternoon C-grade Sci Fi Channel movie–something you might watch if you were snowed in and stuck in the house, but wouldn’t bother with if you had anything better to do.

Have You Heard The One?

*



Through sheer willpower, he managed to get through two weeks without contacting her, the business card burning a hole in his wallet the entire time. But then Pastor Dennis gave a sermon on the subject of "Temptation" that made him rethink his strategy.

"You know what temptation is?" he asked. "It's a fungus. It hides in the dark corners of the soul, those damp cracks and moist crevices we'd prefer not to think about. Well, I'll tell you what, people. You can't ignore temptation. Nuh-uh. That's how it thrives. You pretend it's not there, and pretty soon this tiny speck of mold turns into a giant poison mushroom with deep, twisted roots. Then see how easy it is to get rid of it! No, the thing to do with temptation is face it head-on at high noon! Right away! The second you realise it's there! Expose it to the fresh air and sunlight of Jesus Christ! Because you know what, friends? That slimy fungus can't stand the light of day! It just shrivels up and dies! Amen!"

After the sermon...

The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perrotta.



Well he walked into the hell hole and the gargoyles laughed. Tell a joke, the entourage demanded, sitting on their high stools, downing their poisonous drinks. He was shattered, inside and out, by recent events. He grinned. He knew he looked good, new shirt, new sunglasses, new life wrapped around the old. He couldn't remember many jokes, never could. They were telling the dwarf nun joke. The seven dwarfs are at the Vatican. Elaborately, they ask the pope if there are any dwarf nuns in the Vatican. No says the pope. Any in Europe? No says the pope. Any in the world? No says the pope. Dopey f'd a penguin, Dopey f'd a penguin, they all chant. There were gales of intoxicated laughter. These moments were rare in this sour town.

They sought shelter from the storm, giant rain goblets sizzling through the pollution. The people are so easily manipulated, a giant voice intoned. What are you going to do about it? There was nothing that could be done about it. US dollar, the television commentator burbles. Their lives had been split into fragments. Justin and Christian are two prawns living happily on the bottom of the ocean, he began. Justin is bored and prays to the Great Cod, oh Great Cod I want to be a shark, and whoosh the Great Cod appears out of the murky gloom and grants him his wish. But Justin soon gets bored with being a shark because all his friends are frightened of him and he prays to the Great Cod, I want to be a prawn again. Whoosh the Great Cod appears out of the gloom, grants him his wish.

Justin is happy to be a prawn again, and happy to be amongst his friends. But he particularly wants to see Christian. Where is my friend? he asks. His best friend turned into a shark and he is hiding in his house. So Justin seeks out his friend's house and knocks on the door. It's me, Justin, I'm back, come out. No no, says Christian, you're a shark, you'll eat me. No no, I'm a prawn again Christian, comes the response. And the laughter. And the old jokes recycled. The jogger in Centennial Park tricked in to hugging a tree to hear it sing. Snap locked to the tree. Raped by the enticer. A policeman comes along. He tells him the whole story of how he came to be padlocked to a tree in the centre of the park with his pants around his ankles. Please help me, he cries. I guess it's not your lucky day, the copper says, reaching for his zipper.

They were rude, they were crude, they made darkness in the walk, they assembled for another go. He mourned the passing of old crowds. Just when you thought it was safe; the old bastards triumph again. She was shuddering in retrospect. We'll be right, the payouts are handsome. I can't believe I lasted as long as I did, she said, chortling, the old Stalinist on the floor, aching in disbelief. We were deeply shattered. We had defied all sense of time. The arrogant new generation of the left, even more arrogant and convinced of their own ways than their forebears, imposed new taxes and decried the evils of the capitalist system, riding high in their long black limousines on the money generated by the very system they berated. All they could think of was more taxes, more control, more regulations, more feminist infiltration from the whacky left.

He shuddered and new it would all end in disaster. He knew the society was cannibalising itself. He knew that they had been forsaken, that the politicians did not represent him any more. He knew the country was going to the dogs, and rapidly. He knew this curdled city was sour to the core, that friendships were rare and fleeting, that trust was for the naive. They manipulated the media as they manipulated everything else. They were so smug in their convictions, bleating on about the dispossessed, "among the country's most vulnerable". Weak people, ideologically driven people, needed a cache of the vulnerable to justify their own policies, to make them feel better men, to help them preen like little bantam roosters.

But there were plenty of bastards who needed no such justification. JA stalked the corridors like some creature from a Mervyn Peake novel, rubbing his hands together in his peculiar gesture. He could never get them clean. He, too, had preened around the office like a powerful man, radiating fear and ill will, clouding the avenues with bile. They had stalked and stalked, hiding in their offices, their days numbered. He had known all along it could never last. Oh stay, won't you stay, just a little bit longer. Jackson Browne. Just a little bit longer. Nostalgia draped his every move; they talked to each other as if there was peace to come, as if the dark forces were not going to smash their secure, tight little abode. He wanted to die. He wanted to pass away. And then he wanted to live forever, throwing his personality through the ether into a different form.

I can't believe we're all going to die, his daughter said, how long will you last she asked. He snorted derisively, as if it was a question not worth answering. And already they were drifting away, everything that had been his life. Drifting into darkness, drifting into another chaotic life, a broader universe, broken and shattered on the ocean floor. Have you heard the one about....?....



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-world/rudd-wraps-us-tour-with-finance-talks-20090328-9ejk.html

Rudd wraps US tour with finance talks
Kate Hannon
March 28, 2009

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, a critic of neo-liberals and free marketers responsible for the global financial crisis, entered their lair on the final day of his five-day visit to the US.

Mr Rudd had a working lunch with the board of the New York Stock Exchange on Friday and a dozen chief executives of listed companies where he told them of the robustness of the Australian economy and of the need for next week's G20 summit to rein in the kind of activity which allowed banks to grow fat on toxic assets.

By contrast, while her husband was downtown hobnobbing with captains of industry, Therese Rein visited a school for disadvantaged children uptown in Harlem.

Ms Rein has taken a personal interest in a project, the Harlem Children's Zone, which seeks to keep children from troubled or impoverished backgrounds in school and spent several hours there on Friday afternoon talking to students and teachers.

Mr Rudd later told reporters that next Wednesday's G20 summit in London was an important chance for the leaders of the world's largest economies to report on their respective economic stimulus measures and to discuss how to deal with the toxic bank assets constricting the flow of credit.

They would also discuss a restructure of the financial regulatory system and reform of the International Monetary Fund.

"These will be difficult challenges in the week ahead, agreement has not yet been reached across all governments, officials are still working hard and there's still a lot of work to be done between now and next Wednesday in London," Mr Rudd told reporters.

"The economic stakes of the global economy are high and because of that the economic stakes for the Australian economy and jobs in Australia are also high."

Introducing Mr Rudd before his news conference, NY Stock Exchange chief executive Duncan Niederauer said both he and Mr Rudd had "lousy timing" as they both began their respective jobs on December 3, 2007.


http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25261697-29277,00.html

SYDNEY'S bikie war has intensified after a man believed to be a member of an outlaw motorcycle gang was gunned down in Sydney's southwest.

Police say a 32-year-old man was sprayed with gunfire at about 11.30pm (AEDT) on Sunday at a unit block in Punchbowl Road, Lakemba.

It appears the victim pulled up at the unit block in a car and was shot several times when he got out of the vehicle.

Another man was seen running from the unit block onto Punchbowl Road.

He's described as being around 173cm tall, of muscular build, with long dark collar length hair and wearing a dark long sleeved jacket and dark jeans.

The victim was rushed by ambulance to St George Hospital where he underwent surgery for his wounds.

Police say he remains in a serious but stable condition.

A crime scene was established and investigators began to search the area for clues with the assistance of Polair, the dog squad and general duties officers.

Police are appealing for the driver of a white motor vehicle, who encountered the man who fled the scene, to come forward.
Related Coverage

The driver had to sound his horn while avoiding the man running across Punchbowl Road shortly after the gunshots were heard.

The victim is believed to be a member of an outlaw bikie gang.

http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/3628/218/

One man's meat may be another man's poison, but the Environmental Protection Agency has taken the idea to an absurdity. EPA has just sent a proposal to the White House that would classify carbon dioxide as a health hazard.

But if there wasn't carbon dioxide around, there would be no plants. And, for that matter, neither would there be any people or pets if we weren't allowed to exhale. The claimed "health hazard" from carbon dioxide is, of course, global warming, yet the data we have seen, such as Stanford economist Thomas Gale Moore's work, show that warmer temperatures and higher incomes are associated with healthier, longer-living people. In case environmentalists haven't noticed, bio-diversity is also much greater when temperatures are higher.

Over history, human civilizations have expanded during warmer periods but declined when it got cold. For a history lesson, we recommend University of California Professor Brian Fagan's excellent book, "The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History."

Obviously, higher temperatures support more plant life, and that in turn supplies the food for more animals. If you want more plants, animals, and healthier people, more carbon dioxide and higher temperatures are beneficial and certainly not "hazardous to health."

All sorts of bizarre regulations already are devoted to "protecting" us from warmer temperatures - regulations that do endanger health and safety. Take mile per gallon regulation rules for cars. These rules directly endanger health and life because smaller cars are simply inherently less able to protect their passengers. Then there are mandates for compact fluorescent light bulbs that contain mercury. The EPA itself has extremely detailed and scary instructions about requiring people to leave the area once a bulb is broken. You can't vacuum the spot, and if the spill occurs on a carpet the EPA claims that you should cut out that portion of the carpet and dispose of it properly.

There is little rational discussion on global warming these days. Consider the following questions. A "no" to any of them should logically imply that we should not restrict carbon dioxide.

(1) Are global temperatures rising? They were clearly rising from the late 1970s to 1998, but temperatures just as clearly have not gone up in the last 11 years. Indeed, the more recent numbers show evidence of cooling.

(2) Is mankind responsible for a significant and noticeable portion of an increase in temperatures? Mankind is responsible for just a few percent of greenhouse gases, and changes in greenhouse gases are responsible for just a tiny fraction of changes in global temperatures. The big factor is variations in the sun's energy output. Last December, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works released a list of 400 prominent scientists who questioned the general notion of significant manmade global warming.

(3) Are increased temperatures "bad"? That answer is hardly obvious. Higher temperatures could increase ocean levels by between 7 inches and 2 feet over the next 100 years. On the other hand, massive areas from Canada to Europe to Russia would be much more habitable than now. We have already noted the other benefits to life.

(4) Finally, let's assume that the answer to all three previous questions is "yes." Does that mean we need more regulations and taxes? No, that is still not clear.

If we believe that man-made global warming is "bad," we still don't want to eliminate all carbon emissions. Having no cars, no air conditioning, or no electricity would presumably be much worse than anything people claim results from global warming. We would want to balance the benefits with any costs of additional carbon dioxide emissions.

Redfern Station, Sydney, Australia.

In A Soulless Town

*



Beautiful waste, stupid feeling
Why do you feel it? When will it stop?
Beautiful waste, wonderful feeling
Ready to die now, ready to drop

River of waste, mountain of feeling
Bigger than love, bigger than us
Beautiful waste, terrible fever of love
Stupid feeling making fools out of us
Fools out of us

Beautiful waste, stupid feeling
Try and ignore it, tell it to stop
River of sadness, one moment of glory
Don't it hurt and sting when your love runs out
Over and out

Beautiful waste, stupid feeling
Why do you feel it? When will it stop?
River of sadness, one moment of glory
Don't it hurt and sting when your love runs out
Over and out

Feeling of love, feeling of love
Over and out

The Triffids



The bells ring out across the suburb, as they do every Sunday morning. There's acres of despair to be overcome, as the sun catches the roof tops and the last of the all night revellers makes their way into sleepy corners, derelict houses, auntie's place. At dawn they were still arguing, although he could never determine about what. Listening carefully, he could only make a few words out of the stream of abuse, slut being the most oft-repeated one. The city had become crueller, colder, more sour. It had always been a heartless place full of jostling elites. Now it was even more so, a corrupt diamond of sliding ice sheets, a place to scale, simply not home. Or homey. He was forced to live here, as were so many others. There was no work elsewhere. But the shadows were marching fast towards him, he was glad he had planned an escape route.

It took him right back, back to a time when all his hopes and dreams had collapsed in a self-induced pile. When he parked his car beside the spitting grey sea and stared out in bleak awe, overcome, frightened, confused as to how to continue the masquerade. It was an empty vessel. He wasn't sure of how to move forward. All the normal defences, all the broken brazen drunken days gone, everything, the brief liaisons, the friendships, had all collapsed in an instant. The powerful did not care. They did not suffer from empathy, or sympathy. They ordered their minions to do things they could never do themselves, spewing forth ideas in a mistake for cleverness.

And now the worst had happened. He was staring down the barrel of unemployment. The children were still young, entirely reliant on him. His carefree days were over, with the kids in tow. There were ways to survive, but he was unsure what. These were classified sins. The sea had never seemed lonelier that day. His own bad ways never sadder. The chill that had gone through his life never messier. Conviction let loose. All that talent wasted. Death an ever constant friend. While all those friends he had partied with, that gang he had amplified into the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, went scuttling into hiding, collapsed or died.

In the back of his brain was thunderous applause, as if a secret audience had been watching his every move. He was classified a secret. But every secret has an outer coasting, a mask, and it was for these clever constructions he expected to world to grin. For the under-sea fronds to join hands in applause. For the world to dance in a new, bright way, reflecting his new spiritual ascendancy, his discovery of the truth, of a newer, brighter path. He always thought he would make it. He always thought his old age would be an eccentric, wealthy time. That all those years of travelling around the globe, of endless curious situations that could only have happened to him, that they all led somewhere, pointed to something, had a genuine purpose behind them.

That was not what he was finding. Once the children came everything else stopped. His tragic destiny was hardly tragic with two young blonde creatures who adopted him totally rushed to greet him as he opened the door. Or would look up with excitement when he pulled the car up out front. I can't believe you and mum were heroin addicts, the teenager said to her aging parents. It was a long time ago, the father sniffed, diverting the topic as rapidly as he could. Those shameful times, so tawdry from the outside, were never meant to be echoed in the future. All his friends dead. He hadn't thought of consequence. He didn't want it to end. He had hoped to be a different person, but never made the leap. And caught in the gaps he floundered, and instinctively chose to hide.

And so in those heightened moments when everything collapsed, when every artifice was stripped bare, he prayed for relief from pain. And none came. He tried to be a different person and it didn't happen. He sought to isolate himself from old connections, and could barely break the bonds. There was always someone else in the street. There was always a huddle of never-do-wells lurking on the corner. All he had to do was shuffle up and ask. Relief was always a $100 and a phone call away. It had taken so long to move on from those secret moments, those abject moments when he had been truly himself. All was not well. He could feel it in the chilling air. He could see it in the graffiti plastered fronts of the empty shops. In the For Sale signs. The empty restaurants. The crowded streets. He dropped his daughter up the road from her friend's house, as instructed, so they would not see their povo car and their lack of status. Poor, pooor, the voices jeered, here in a land of stratified edges, power sheets, blunt edges and crystal aspirations, in a heartless, dead, soulless town where only the bastards triumphed.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25251937-5013945,00.html

Premier Nathan Rees revs up his engine
Imre Salusinszky | March 28, 2009

SENIOR Labor figures have been shaking their heads this week over Nathan Rees's response to last Sunday's fatal brawl between rival bikie gangs at Sydney airport.

The day after the killing of Anthony Zervas, Rees was asked if the murder indicated there were problems with security at the airport.

"No is the short answer," was his reply.

While it would surely be irresponsible of Rees to declare Sydney airport a happy hunting ground for al-Qa'ida, to deny a reality that was staring everyone in the face was almost as unwise.

But the political failing was that it took Rees another four days before he did what Bob Carr and Morris Iemma surely would have done earlier: get all over the bikie wars so that he was seen as the last barrier between the homes of honest burghers and marauding gangs of amphetamine-fuelled, sex-crazed Comancheros and Bandidos.

Surely Rees, a literary man, has read Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels, a primer on the exploitation of the bikie threat for political gain?

By yesterday, a front-page story in Sydney's The Daily Telegraph signalled Rees was getting the hang of it: "The elusive leader of the Notorious outlaw gang has been charged with possession of anxiety pills as Premier Nathan Rees vows to do 'whatever it takes' to smash the bikies."

While Rees's inexperience still shows, generally he has performed better since Carr's former chief of staff, Graeme Wedderburn, was called in to perform the same role in the Premier's office.

The influence of Wedderburn was apparent in parliament this week, when Labor gave us a foretaste of the strategies it will use in the two years leading up to the 2011 state election.

During every question time this week, the Government turned the spotlight back on Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell and his team, accusing them of being a gutless, hopeless, policy-free zone. This kind of negative campaigning, with plenty of muscling up to accompany it, is what NSW Labor does best and what allowed it to scrape across the line in the 2007 election.

During that campaign, Labor targeted former Coalition leader Peter Debnam, portraying him as a hothead and an out-of-touch silvertail. Its television advertisements, based directly on the federal Liberal campaign against Mark Latham three years earlier, branded Debnam a failure at everything he had tried.

It wasn't exactly edifying or Obama-like, but it worked.
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25258454-5007146,00.html

Truth behind Labor's Chinese whispering

By Piers Ackerman
The Sunday Telegraph
March 29, 2009 12:01am

THERE are some 1338 million people in China, give or take a million or so. Businesswoman Helen Liu is but one of them.
Yet she is literally in the picture with a series of Chinese and Australian political leaders and there is little doubt that she is a person of considerable influence and knows a lot of secrets.

The millionairess, whose picture has been taken with the most senior members of the Chinese Government, is also one of the largest individual contributors to the Australian Labor Party's coffers and her ties with the ALP go back decades.

One might think that the influential businesswoman, pictured with Gough Whitlam toasting former Chinese premier Li Peng in one front-page photo on Friday, and with the then Chinese foreign minister Tang Jiaxuan, in another, was an unforgettable character whose gifts would be similarly memorable. Apparently not.

In Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon's world, business-class tickets to exotic destinations are easily overlooked, even when they entail a two-day trip to China which coincides with the wife's birthday. Yet he could not recall Madame Liu stumping up for two business-class trips to China, in 2002 and 2005, when asked last week.

Madame Liu would not make such a stupid mistake. She may even know the Defence Minister's inner-leg measurement, having sent him a suit - which he returned a week later, apparently unworn.

The question of why Fitzgibbon returned the suit but could not recall visiting Beijing and Shanghai remains, however, and as he is now Defence Minister, it is legitimate to ask him to produce details of his itinerary.

Who did Madame Liu require him to meet, what was his role, or does he want Australians to believe that his business trip was in fact a sightseeing sortie, with a tour of the Forbidden City, and a photo-op on the Great Wall?

The ALP's China Syndrome has not re-emerged merely because of Fitzgibbon's Folly. There is also the question of the visit of Li Changchun, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau, and one of the five most senior officials in the Chinese Communist Party, to talk in secret with Prime Minister Kevin (Lu Kewen) Rudd in Canberra last Saturday.

http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/3621/218/

Keep Your Lights On Tonight
Written by Alan Caruba, Warning Signs
Friday, 27 March 2009

Does it sometimes seem like everything you read, see or do has the word “Green” attached to it?

We have a Green President and a Green Congress. More and more products and services tout themselves as Green. We are paying more and more with greenbacks—dollars—that are in danger of losing what value they once had.

Green was not always the great, amorphous dream of achieving oneness with Mother Earth. People still talk about being “Green with envy” or “Turning Green” just before a projectile vomit attack.

We have reached this nauseating time in our society as the result of a vast environmental movement, truly worldwide, that are masters of propaganda and possessed of the millions necessary to brainwash a lot of people into accepting an endless assault on all the advancements in science, engineering, and technology we accept as part of our everyday lives.

So, naturally, the World Wildlife Fund has come up with “Earth Hour”, an event in which at 8:30PM, Saturday night, in everyone’s respective time zone, people will be asked to turn off their lights and, presumably, the use of all electricity to increase awareness of “energy conservation.”

Two questions: What does this have to do with wildlife? And why should anyone bother?

What need is there to “conserve energy?” One either uses it or does not. You can’t “conserve” it. You can use more or less of it, but you cannot save it up for later. Electricity is always “now.”

Is the Earth running out of coal? Hardly, the Chinese can’t build coal-fired plants fast enough to generate the electricity to grow their economy. In India, they’re launched on a huge program to build nuclear plants for the same reason. A nation without adequate electricity is strictly Third World.

Nor is the Earth running out of oil? The rumor is that there’s vast amounts in the Arctic and both the U.S. and Russia are making nasty noises at one another to ensure that neither one or the other gains control of it. Brazil just struck oil way offshore of its beautiful beaches and you don’t hear them complaining about it.

The U.S., of course, has vast untapped reserves of oil offshore and an estimated 3 to 4.3 BILLION barrels of it in the Bakken Formation under North Dakota and Montana. There’s oil under Utah as well. We’re not running out of oil in the United States. We just can’t drill for it thanks to Congress and the White House.

We can’t build coal-fired plants either because the Greens keep telling us that coal is “dirty.” The electricity it provides—just over half of all that’s used nationwide—isn’t dirty. Soon, though, they’re won’t be enough of it because our Green President thinks that solar and wind can provide it. It can’t and it won’t. Ever.

There’s just one way to “conserve” energy. Don’t use it. Don’t turn on the light. Don’t turn on the computer. Don’t turn on the television. Unplug your refrigerator, your heating and cooling system. Don’t wash and dry your clothes in a machine. Don’t use it.

Otherwise, the next moron that talks about conserving energy should be stuffed in a barrel and allowed to float over the Niagara Falls which, during Earth Hour, will not be lighted.

We will all be treated to the idiotic sight of a darkened Empire State Building and other similar structures around the world such as the Eiffel Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge, Las Vegas strip, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the London Eye Ferris wheel, and the Pyramids of Egypt.

No Way Back

*




The thing that baffled him was why a good Christian girl like Carrie would even want to get tangled up with a guy like him. Couldn't she see he was damaged goods - a divorced father, a recovering addict, a musician who could have qualified for his own episode of Behind the Music, if only anyone had ever heard of him?

The flip side of his inability to see what was in it for Carrie was an all-too-clear awareness of what wasn't in it for him. Because the sad fact was that, even now, after he'd accepted Jesus into his heart, turned his back on drugs and alcohol, and committed himself to walk in the light of the Lord, he still couldn't manage to get himself all that excited about good Christian girls. Certain kinds of toothpaste, it turned out, were harder to get back into the tube than others.

The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perrotta.




The self satisfaction of the smug rulers of the land, their absolute divorce from the ways of ordinary men, the brutality that he had seen in his own field, all of these things were not his own. He had been divorced from himself for too many years. The old friends he had cared so passionately about were long gone. Sometimes there was a brutal march. Sometimes he felt sympathy even for people who had never been kind to him. But the brutal truth in this sour city was that bastards thrived, simple answers were for fools, and his own opportunities were wasted in naive faith. There wasn't any reason to push forward. Careers went nowhere.

All of this, and Chris swept his hand in a gesture which embraced the whole of journalism, all of this is is so recent, it means nothing. For most of man's history they have been preoccupied with survival, with living from day to day. He began to expound an argument he had heard on the ABC the day before, a fawning interview with a global warming hysteric from the New York Times. All of these modern day gurus of the simple life were utterly smug in their own certainties, spewing forth their garbage while preening like bantam roosters. He was shocked by the inanity of it all. And now he was shocked by the brutality of the times.

He had seen it all before; in a different place, in a different time, with a different caste of characters. People he thought would be safe were disappearing. Stalinist style purges spread fear through the depleted ranks. Cogs in the wheel fell off. Fear ate at his stomach; at every one's heart. He was sad, distressed, moved. Part of the audience was peeling away. People who had been his mentors were disappearing. The city became uglier, more brutal, his financial circumstances even more difficult. We were shadowed by the ghosts of the past. The smugness of the successful ones took him right back to a different era. There wasn't much he could say that would really make a difference.

The old brewery that stood opposite, the old Australia Hotel, the entire dam block was now a gigantic hole opposite UTS. The landscape of his days in jail, the years he spent trapped at the Sydney Morning Herald, had been radically obliterated. Shadows were everywhere, fleeting, invisible. In fact the streets were oblivious to the changes. The soul of the city had shifted, was no more. His own despair, his own struggles, were minute in contrast to the unfeeling landscape, the shifting scenes, the heartless crowds. It was impossible to make an imprint on any one's life. He was shocked, sullen, trying to gather respect, a fan base, knowledge, friends. Always he thought of Plato's, or was it Socrates's, edict that men were villagers, they were not designed to live in large places.

Woe to those who build house upon house, the bible intoned. Every apartment block was an affront to the scriptures. But it seemed so true in this heartless place. Patterns of friendships formed only briefly, often around work. They would all head off to the pub on Fridays, and he, who often used to have a start on all of them, having downed several bourbon and cokes in the process of writing the story, would join them in the celebrations and the gossip; masquerading, as always, as a normal person. The alcohol helped maintain the pretence. No one noticed, or accepted that journalists were meant to be eccentric. The cruelty of the game, he couldn't believe what was happening.

Sooner or later it would happen to him, the execution. Vicious rumours circled like mad dervishes. John Alexander, who had inflicted so much pain on so many others, had done so much damage to Australian journalism, was featured in all the papers; this time for an out sized termination payment of $15 million from some company he had been at only briefly. The devil of the piece, these cruel whippet like pieces of shit, mobile garbage, vicious little men determined to push their imprint on to other people's lives, their chests puffed out. Alpha males. They had to destroy someone else in order to grant themselves power. Look at these reporters, JA had declared from behind the news desk one day, having emerged briefly from his office. They all look like pineapples. And that one's stoned, he said, pointing directly at him. No I'm not, he protested. Bullshit, Alexander spat, and stalked back into his office.

It was true, the Fairfax roof was a place they could occasionally retreat to for an indiscreet puff. It was the era. They thought they had the right to be as smashed as they wanted to be. The old timers drank themselves to oblivion on a daily basis. The younger ones mixed and matched. And the traffic sang down Broadway; and he thought of all these things, staring at the old Brewery site, now a vast empty hole. Even the hotels, which had been so much a part of the life of the district, were gone. He shuddered. He looked at the aboriginal sculptures in the UTS window. He remembered everything that had happened, and new now it meant nothing. The soldiers were gone, the sailors were gone, the journalists who had made their own little nests in the surrounding pubs, they, too, were all gone. And in these times, when day after enfolding day exploded into the future, when thought was proscribed, money meant everything and fake philosophies presided, there was simply no way back to a more decent time.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/03/25/2526381.htm?section=australia

A man is in a critical condition after being shot in Sydney's north-west tonight in a possible bikie-related attack.

The man was shot in the chest and hip at Beaumont Hills at around 9:20pm (local time) and has been taken to Westmead hospital where he will have surgery later tonight.

"Ambulance officers transported a 39-year-old man to hospital with two gunshot wounds," a New South Wales Ambulance spokesman said.

Officers say those responsible fled the scene in a car.

Police say they are examining the possibility that the attack is linked to the recent gang violence, but preliminary inquiries suggest that it is not related to outlaw motorcycle groups.

No one else was injured in the shooting and a crime scene was established by police.

Police are appealing for witnesses but no description of suspects or vehicles has been released.

Earlier today, the President of the Comancheros group called for calm, saying he was aware of public concern about a bikie war.

He has banned his members from wearing gang colours or riding their bikes.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25243347-26397,00.html

KEVIN Rudd and Barack Obama are in furious agreement on the latest solution to the global economic crisis.

In a warm and relaxed meeting in the Oval Office yesterday, the Prime Minister endorsed the US President's $US1 trillion bank rescue package, the core of which is to call upon Wall Street fund managers - the very people blamed for creating the mess in the first place - to help claw the world out of crisis.

In fact, the President said the pair had "a great meeting of minds" on the financial crisis.

The prime ministerial seal of endorsement of the plan to ask for the market to be part of the solution was at odds, as Malcolm Turnbull noted yesterday, with Mr Rudd's searing critique of the free market in his recent essay in The Monthly.

As economists debated the merits of the latest bailout plan, doubts also emerged in Britain about the effectiveness of further stimulus packages.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's effort to win Group of 20 support for more ambitious budget support has been undermined by Bank of England governor Mervyn King warning that Mr Brown's own Government cannot afford to take his advice.

Addressing a parliamentary committee, Mr King said that "the fiscal position in the UK is not one where we could say, 'Well, why don't we just engage in another significant round of fiscal expansion?"'

No such doubts were evident in the first official meeting between Mr Rudd and Mr Obama.

Mr Obama said he and Mr Rudd agreed on the US approach to removing so-called toxic assets from the balance sheets of major banks in a bid to loosen frozen credit.

They also agreed on the need for regulatory reform, economic stimulus and protecting emerging nations from the effects of the recession.

"In the run-up to the G20, I feel there's a great meeting of the minds between Prime Minister Rudd and myself in terms of how we should approach it," the President said. But after the 70-minute meeting, the Prime Minister's staff denied his support for the Obama bank rescue package was inconsistent with his recent attacks on Wall Street funds managers and "neo-liberalism".

The new plan is to establish funds that would provide government loans to private investors wanting to buy out bad bank debts at a ratio of six to one. But it has sharply divided economists.

The Opposition Leader said there was a contrast between Mr Rudd's support for Mr Obama's plan and his attacks on free markets.

"Kevin Rudd's enthusiastic endorsement of President Obama's enlisting Wall Street investors to acquire and restructure distressed bank assets is impossible to reconcile with his denunciation of the private sector in his essay in The Monthly," Mr Turnbull said.
Mr Rudd's spokesman said last night: "The basis of The Monthly article was that we need to take steps to protect the market from its own excesses.

"It clearly follows that the market would be part of the response (to the recession)."

A History of Dishonesty

*




Well I find it repulsive
What you're doing to yourself
You're treating your body
Like it was someone else
Like it was someone else

You're starring in a movie
And the cameras start to roll
The lights reveal the burnt and gaping
Caverns and the holes

I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish
I could be like you
Could be like you

You're lying in my parlour
Like a ship that's been wrecked
The strangers shuffle in the room
To pay their last respects
To pay their last respects

I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish
I could be like you
Could be like you

It's a matter of opinion
It's a question of degree
If I had been nicer
Would you still be here with me?
Would you still be here with me?

I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish
I could be with you
Could be with you

The Triffids, Bad Timing.




They are so smug, the middle class left, pontificating on about the evils of carbon dioxide and capitalism on the ABC, shadowed by darker forces of which they were completely oblivious. There has been a great deal of injustice in your life, the psychiatrist said, and the latest, the gifting of money to everybody else but him, made worse by relatives giving his junky ex $10,000 to pay her bills and briefly restore order to her chaotic lifestyle, made him even more furious. He couldn't stop smoking. He could find hell in his own quarter, he could match his discontent with the broader universe, light bulb moments, he wasn't really a crippled dwarf in a desperate landscape, was all the more peculiar because there was nothing ostensibly wrong. At least on the surface.

On the surface he was another reporter in the pack, sitting at the media table at the side of the court, watching the endless succession of addicts and alcoholics in trouble with the law, waiting for the particular gangster that was of interest to the media on that day. The magistrate, a puffy short little man with greying hair, had been merciless all morning. Six months, twelve months, bail refused. He showed absolutely no mercy, no understanding, no sympathy for the hopes of rehabilitation. On parole, picked up for stealing, that was it. Gone for all money, six months, twelve months, two years, more. She has been attending AA meetings in prison and I would suggest to your honour that the pre-sentencing report shows that their are signs of hope, the legal aid lawyer said. She has two children she wants to be able to look after. She has family on the outside.

Your Honour will accept that most of the crimes for which my client has been caught are minor affairs, mostly shop lifting, mostly under $100, do doubt related to her drug use. The magistrate looked down without sympathy. I would suggest the sentencing report shows no signs of hope at all, he said, it shows a long history of dishonesty and bad behaviour. Six months, 12 months, two years or more. While there was no gavel, he could hear it in his head, the stamping of the documents. Bail refused. Not to be released. The magistrate gave the aboriginal woman, aged 23, six months. There was no argument. There was no barrister eloquently arguing her case, as happened for the rich. Even the legal aid lawyers barely seemed to be trying, in this sausage factory of justice, or injustice as the case may be.

Another man, 56, although he looked older, appeared via video link, dressed in his prison greens, hair white, face seedy and old. He ... You had barely been out of jail for more than three days when you committed another offence, the magistrate said, disgust, perhaps despair, filling his voice. You have broken parole. My client is from Western Australia and would like to return there, the legal aid lawyer argued. He has family and property there. I'm sure the authorities here would be glad to get rid of him, the magistrate noted. Once again the legal aid lawyer argued, the crimes are minor, they are drug related, my client has made attempts at rehabilitation. A history of dishonesty, the magistrate intoned yet again. Two and a half years, he said said, stamping away at various documents. My client has asked, the legal aid lawyer faltered on, yet another earnest young woman who had no doubt entered the law for social justice reasons, if the sentence is over two years could he be entered into the PET program for drug rehabilitation.

The magistrate looked annoyed. He looked at the grey headed man on the video link, clearly a scumbag. He agreed in a short burst of ill humour that clearly indicated he had nothing but contempt for the client and held zero hope for his rehabilitation. He had seen too many of them, too often, the alcoholics and the addicts who cluttered his court, one after the other after the other. They all had their excuses. It was the drugs that made me do it. As if that argument was going to persuade him of anything, using one illegal behaviour to justify another. He could see in a flash the old junky, the clearly depressed man up on the screen, holding court in the prison's AA and NA meetings. He would become a reformed character, briefly, again, and he would build his little coterie of followers in jail just as he had done on the outside.

And then he saw the next one, brought up from the cells beneath Central Local. He was a strapping, rather handsome, fit, Germanic looking man. Charges of affray. Long history of violence the magistrate muttered, long history of dishonesty. The legal aid lawyer did her best, the brawl was out of character, he admits he was drunk at the time, he doesn't actually remember the incident, he thinks he was defending the honour of a friend. Once again, he was 23. The arguments were brief. Nine months he said. The young man looked in disbelief, as if he couldn't believe he had gone to the pub one minute and ended up in jail the next. There was virtually no family for any of them, as they were sent away with the shabbiest of representation and the briefest of judgements. The boy reminded him of a friend in London, Kristoff, a big German boy who had also liked his drugs, a talented painter, an intense genius escaping from the conformity of Germany.

You can see the trouble ahead, the reporter sitting next to him whispered. This is just one stone in a very troubled path. He looked again, surprised by the analysis. And nodded. Yes, you can. This is just one bad day in a future of bad days. They looked again at the young man in the dock. You could see he wanted to say something, to shout at the injustice. Instead Corrective Services, sensing they had trouble on their hands, ushered him quickly downstairs. Already the magistrate was mumbling over his next case. "A history of dishonesty," he was saying. "A long history..." Already the modern Kristoff had disappeared from view; and he wondered if his old friend had met a similar fate, there on the other side of the world.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/03/25/2525281.htm?section=world

US President Barack Obama says he and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had a meeting of minds this morning on the question of the global response to the economic crisis.

Mr Rudd and Mr Obama held their first face-to-face meeting, spending a little over an hour in discussions at the White House.

President Obama says he greatly admires the Rudd Government's vision on the domestic and international stage and the two agree on the importance of a coordinated response to the global financial crisis to be agreed at next week's G20 summit.

They also discussed the war in Afghanistan and the current US review of its operations.

President Obama spoke strongly about the need to stay fighting, saying the threat from Al Qaeda has not gone away and it is important to stay on the offensive.

He says he expects troops to be there for some time, but did not say whether he has requested an increase in the Australian contribution.
http://townhall.com/columnists/PhyllisSchlafly/2009/03/24/global_warming_is_running_out_of_hot_air?page=2

Global Warming Is Running Out of Hot Air
Written by Phyllis Schlafly, TownHall
Tuesday, 24 March 2009

The coldest winter in a decade in many places, with snow in unlikely cities such as New Orleans, has deflated some of the hot air in global warming. And a heavy snowfall that paralyzed Washington, D.C., upstaged a mass demonstration scheduled to promote global warming.

Nevertheless, according to Al Gore and the mainstream media, "the debate is over" proving that global warming exists, that humans are causing it and that "science is settled."

But 680 of the world's leading scientists, economists and policy analysts, who met March 8-10 in New York City for the second Heartland International Conference, beg to differ. The title of the conference expressed their doubts: "Global Warming: Was It Ever Really a Crisis?"

These authorities assert that scientists worldwide do not agree that global warming is human induced (in scientific lingo, anthropogenic). They do not even agree that the Earth is still warming.

Many scientists and other observers have come to realize that global warming is no longer a question of science but is all about politics and money. Their slogan, cap-and-trade, was best explained by House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, as "a carbon tax that will increase taxes on all Americans who drive a car, who have a job, who turn on a light switch."

President Obama is being pressured by James McCarthy, head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to rush his carbon tax through Congress before the American people discover the lie in Obama's promise that "95 percent of working families" will not see their taxes rise by "a single dime." In fact, his own budget shows that taxes will rise for 100 percent of Americans for the sake of global warming.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change plans to use a treaty to reduce America's use of energy and therefore our standard of living, while forcing us to subsidize energy production in other countries and close our eyes to the omission of China and India from any obligation.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25239267-29277,00.html

THE man killed at Sydney Airport in Sunday's violent bikie gang brawl was wanted over the stabbing of an off-duty police officer, police said.

Anthony Zervas, 29, the brother of a senior Hells Angel member was bludgeoned to death during the brawl allegedly involving members of the Hells Angels and the Comancheros.

Police revealed today that Mr Zervas was being sought for questioning over the stabbing of an off-duty police officer at Brighton-Le-Sands on Friday.

The officer had approached two men, one of whom was allegedly Mr Zervas, who had been trying to enter the front door of an apartment block on The Grande Parade.

"An argument ensued and one of the males produced a knife, stabbing the officer twice in his left arm," police said.

"The officer managed to shut the glass door before the male with the knife kicked the door, causing the glass to smash."

The two men fled, while the officer sought medical attention and was taken to St George Hospital for treatment.