Aub had the all-seeing eyes of a prowling tiger as he scoped out the troublesome individuals from within the surging tide of miscreants on the downtown side of this most famous Australian beach.
Board over there without a current registration sticker.
Kid over there smoking.
Babe over there wearing coloured underwear.
Bloke over there drinking beer.
Blokes out there boardriding through the flags.
Blokes in the corner lighting fires, melting wax.
Lee Gordon’s ‘Les Girls’ troupe drinking wine and squealing.
Bea Miles swimming outside the flags with the all her clothes on.
Kid behind Aub, little bloke, a smart arse little bloke with a very big bloody mouth, giving The Boss aggravation enough to belt him if only no one was looking.
Head. Smart arsed little bloke
Head. Smart arsed little bloke
Bloke over there changing his sluggos under a towel.
Dero over there, raving and pissed and reeling from group to group, metho drinker, mad f......
Kids crawling through the blackwater drain, wogs swimming in the storm-water pond with all their clothes on, dogs fighting, people in rips waving; drowning.
Bloke over there perving.
So much to do, so little time.
http://kurungabaa.net/2009/11/22/aub-laidlaw-a-bondi-story-2/
Disconnected from everything, he tried to settle himself down. He tried to be a different person. He was disconsolate and yet triumphant, frightened and yet excited. Everything had dissolved away but the Christmas season was sliding into history. He listeened to their arrogance and their talk; he listened to colourful raves and others; he envied so many. They were going about their ordinary lives. They were protecting their children. He could feel it all around him, and missed having young children himself. The city was dying all around him, and yet here in the court circle they were worried about petty things, the loss of friendship, struggle in love, work. He didn't know what to make of any of it.
He had reached a point he had never wanted to reach; sans job, sans children, sans structure. He wanted to be free; and he could feel all the disassociated thoughts twirling down some infinite tunnel; cross over, cross out. He could see the trails of what had been reaching out, like some glimpse from Pandora, or from Avatar, now, apparently, the greatest rating film in history. Whole conversations were about nothing else. A film like an i-phone, an "iconic" leap, a giant step forward. They linger in the garages opposite, half naked from the beach. He had driven from Tambar to Bondi Beach in the heart of the night, and it was all over. He didn't know if he had made some terrible mistake. He didn't want to be free. They were everywhere and nowhere; the builder clutched at common sense.
He was willing to be free; willing to make the effort and be gone. He wanted to stand up and shout: it's over. He wanted to say: you are my friend for life; thank you so much for the comfort. And instead there was fleeting grace and brief encounters; and he heard about fabulous, comfortable, wealthy lives and he heard them say: no, no. You can't do this. And so it was that everything came to an end. He didn't want to leave the comfort of familiar surrounds. He didn't want to escape into a darker place. He didn't want to be free. He had been so bound up in his structured life; showing up for work, meeting deadlines, being who and what he was, instantly accessible, a subject of fascination, a role which spliced through the culture and opened up everything to debate.
Once again Bondi beach is wintery; muggy but barely warm. The baking heat which is the normal Sydney summer had, apart from a few days last week, hardly even been present. Never seen a summer like it, he said to the person next to him, and a young man called Dan agreed. How frightened he was of everything that had been. How sad it was to see so much ruined; so much in debate, riddled with controversy. He wanted to be at peace; unfrightened. I've never seen a summer like it; and even that idle comment went flyuing through the depths and his stomach twirled. He listened to the stories of the humble and could never reach out. He watched other people with their structured, fascinating, comfortable, wealthy lives: he watched and waited and could never be free.
Or confident. Or happy. Don't mention global warming, came the comment, because they knew he was a sceptic and was fascinated bhy the propaganda, suspicious of the science. So much had been so wrong. So much had turned out simply not to be true; or the things that were to provide his destiny, his courage, his infinite haste; oh they could mumble, they could be free. But he wasn't. He clung to the past and felt sorry for someone who no longer existed; if they had ever existed at all. He went around key places in Sydney in a way he did every few years; as if these were the touching points, the elements that were integral to his fate. He stood outside Withering Heights, as it was called in his day in the early 70s when he had lived there intermittently with a wild group of pill-crazed queens.
Joe would go out for the paper and return days later, full of stories of wild love. We took it with a grain of salt, but also with envy. These heightened experiences were meant to be our true selves, our sole destiny; because these were the experiences that set us apart, made us different from the mainstream. And that, most purposefully, was their principal aim, to be different. He was clear. He was shadowed. He wanted to be free. And still his stomach sank and sank, and the whisps of smoke wound up from the steep gully; and he could hear their muttering and he could hear them say: yes, yes. I will be yours. Our lives will be spectacular. We will never be ordinary. Ours will be the greatest, warmest, most colourful destinies; not just different but imbued with greatness. It was so naive, so distorted; and yet these fragments from so long ago were as real as anything he had ever experienced; and their fates had been nothing like they had imagined it would be, up there in that high apartment, looking out over the giant fig tree beside the old concrete of Withering Heights.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://paulmacrae.com/links/
Responses to “Climategate”–the leaked e-mails from Britain’s University of East Anglia and its Climatic Research Unit — remind me of the line “Are your feet wet? Can you see the pyramids? That’s because you’re in denial.”
Climate catastrophists like Al Gore and the UN’s Rajendra Pachauri are downplaying Climategate: it’s only a few intemperate scientists; there’s no real evidence of wrongdoing; now let’s persecute the whistleblower. In Calgary, the latest fellow trying to use the Monty Python “nothing to see here, move along” routine is Prof. David Mayne Reid, who penned a column last week denying the importance of Climategate.
Unfortunately for Reid, old saws won’t work in the Internet age: Climategate has blazed across the Internet, blogosphere, and social networking sites. Even environmentalist and writer George Monbiot has recognized that the public’s perception of climate science will be damaged extensively, calling for one of the Climategate ringleaders to resign.
What’s catastrophic about Climategate is that it reveals a science as broken as Michael Mann’s hockey stick, which despite Reid’s protestations, has been shown to be a misleading chart that erases a 400-year stretch of warm temperatures (called the Medieval Warm Period), and a more recent little ice-age that ended in the mid-1800s. No amount of hand-waving will restore the credibility of climate science while holding onto rubbish like that.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/exclusive-lead-author-admits-deleting-inconvenient-opinions-from-ipcc-report.html
The latest installment of Jesse Ventura’s highly successful Conspiracy Theory show exposed millions of viewers on national TV last night to the climate change fraud, blowing a giant hole in the global warming scam by exposing how its adherents comprise wealthy industrialists making billions in profits by fearmongering about the environment.
Ventura and his team attempted to track down the key architects of the scheme, a search which led them to Beijing China and the heavily guarded residence of global warming pioneer and billionaire Maurice Strong.
The show lifts the lid on how the very same alarmists pushing the threat of climate change are profiting in the billions from carbon trading systems in which they have a huge personal stake.
The most damning part of the program is when Ben Santer, a climate researcher and lead IPCC author of Chapter 8 of the 1995 IPCC Working Group I Report, admits that he deleted sections of the IPCC chapter which stated that humans were not responsible for climate change.
Accusing Santer of altering opinions in the IPCC report that disagreed with the man-made thesis behind climate change, Lord Monckton told the program, “In comes Santer and re-writes it for them, after the scientists have sent in their finalized draft, and that finalized draft said at five different places, there is no discernable human effect on global temperature – I’ve seen a copy of this – Santer went through, crossed out all of those and substituted a new conclusion, and this has been the official conclusion ever since.”
“Lord Monckton points to deletions from the chapter, and there were deletions from the chapter, to be consistent with the other chapters we dropped the summary at the end,” Santer admits to the program.
Commenting on The Alex Jones Show today, Lord Monckton said that this was the first time Santer had publicly admitted to deleting the information.
Santer was intimately involved in the Climategate email scandal, communicating with other IPCC-affiliated scientists who conspired to “hide the decline” in global warming.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/global_warming_and_the_settled.html
If you've misspent your youth conducting experiments, taking graduate courses in physics and chemistry, and learning about thermodynamics, molecular spectroscopy, fluid mechanics, modeling data and publishing scientific papers, then the current debate over anthropogenic global warming can make you hurl.
While I won't fault journalists and politicians for their stupendous ignorance when discussing most scientific subjects, I will condemn their utter lack of coherence concerning basic scientific definitions, processes, and principles.
Specifically, the chattering classes have no appreciation of the following truisms: settled science comes only in the form of physical laws, while the causes behind specific phenomena are sometimes never definitively settled. And the more complex the system being observed, the longer it takes to reach a consensus about the causal mechanisms.
Even Al Gore can probably remember being introduced to Newton's 2nd Law of Motion in high school: F=ma. This is usually our first introduction to settled science. That's why it's called a law of physics. It didn't matter that Einstein generalized its form in the theory of relativity or that in the 1920's it had it be replaced with new mechanics valid at the atomic scale. At velocities small compared to the speed of light and for macroscopic objects, F=ma is settled science.
Despite Al Gore's foolish protestations, there is no law of global warming. To the extent that global warming exists at all, it's a complicated phenomenon with multiple inputs (human and natural), and its causes are speculated upon but hardly known. Global warming is unsettled science, and honest investigators use settled laws of physics along with models to try to unravel its origins and implications.
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