That Overlit World

*



For, dear me, why abandon a belief
Merely because it ceases to be true.
Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt
It will turn true again, for so it goes.
Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favour.
As I sit here, and oftentimes, I wish
I could be monarch of a desert land
I could devote and dedicate forever
To the truths we keep coming back and back to.
So desert it would have to be, so walled
By mountain ranges half in summer snow,
No one would covet it or think it worth
The pains of conquering to force change on.
Scattered oases where men dwelt, but mostly
Sand dunes held loosely in tamarisk
Blown over and over themselves in idleness.
Sand grains should sugar in the natal dew
The babe born to the desert, the sand storm
Retard mid-waste my cowering caravans--
"There are bees in this wall." He struck the clapboards,
Fierce heads looked out; small bodies pivoted.
We rose to go. Sunset blazed on the windows.

Robert Frost The Black Cottage



There was a set of parallel streets which ran down from the main boulevard. He was constantly being hampered in his delay, time out of joint. The warehouse was huge. He was compelled, determined to survive. The typewriter pounded through the night. Records collected in piles around his desk. Late at night, wired at 3am, he could hear every last splash of rain as it hit the iron roof. Why would there be anything in here? Just an endless sequence of stories. And sometimes he would duck out and chat to his prostitute friend in Riley Street, who was always up to no good. Just about every one in the neighbourhood seemed to be up to no good.

The story of the car was a classic of the genre, if he said so himself. By day the abandoned car was home for a homeless man. By night it played host to a pimp who needed a shelter close to the action and a base for his drug dealing. The girls were always excellent customers; cashed up and crazy. In the course of its various roles the car was pushed around the block from one spot to another. Residents, outraged at the increasingly derelict and unsightly car dumped in front of their gentrifying terraces would also push it from one spot to another. Over weeks, the car get going around and around the one block. Complaints to the council went unheeded.

As luck would have it after he had convinced the paper there could be a story in it, as they climbed out of the taxi, the homeless man was busily pushing the car to a quieter spot on the street. Just like that we had the best shot. And he looked up from the floor and thought, will this never end, the seep of hangover through his every cell. One alcoholic to another. The man was large and wore several layers of coats, all filthy. He had wild scraggly hair and clearly hadn't washed any time recently. You know why you write about those derelicts so well? Malcolm asked, and then answered his own question. Because you're halfway there yourself.

The tale of the pimp, the prostitute, the derelict, the outraged residents and the migrating car got a good run and caused much hilarity around the city and on the airwaves. They were stories off the city streets; and the paper lapped them up. At night he got pissed. Very pissed. Very often. The streets continued to radiate personalities, he was fascinated by the tableaus. In the morning, all was not lost. Calcification had not set in. He was not premised on somebody else's existence. The days of love were not over. It was an easy thing, there was always someone. Look up, look out, go home with whoever.

And rain splattered on the roof and obsessional conduct collapsed them together. There was always intrigue. Nick had set up a bed in a mezzanine kind of arrangement in one corner of that massive warehouse. It took up an entire block, massive old brick building. It's not there any more. It was bulldozed and in its place are upmarket apartments. He was shattered they weren't coming. He was dedicated to change. The world was going to be a better place once he left it, kinder, more compassionate. They talked long into the night. They were always wired. Everyone was wired. They lived in a hyper-real world. He was never going to be satisfied. The fingers flew and the pages mounted; and the terrors simply got worse. There weren't any shadows in that over lit world.




THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/10/23/1224351449199.html

A MAN described as an ASIO agent stood by as a naked US marine wearing a condom threatened Mamdouh Habib with rape, the former Guantanamo Bay inmate alleges.

In a book to be published next week, Mr Habib says he saw the words "Allah Akbar"' [God is great] written on the condom to compound his humiliation.

The claims are detailed in My Story, excerpts of which will appear in Good Weekend tomorrow.

The book includes Mr Habib's first explanation of why he was in Afghanistan before the September 11 attacks.

Australian intelligence agencies have long accused Mr Habib of training with al-Qaeda during that period but Mr Habib says he fled to Afghanistan some weeks before the attacks after Pakistani police had abducted him and shot one of his companions while they were on a business trip.

Mr Habib recounts in excruciating detail the torture he says he was subjected to by Pakistani and Egyptian security agencies after his arrest in early October 2001, and describes the grim reality of life in Guantanamo Bay, where he was subsequently imprisoned.

The book rejects the repeated assurances the Howard government gave that Mr Habib was well treated during his years in the US prison.

In the book Mr Habib alleges:

■ That he and fellow Australian David Hicks stayed at the same Islamic guesthouse in Kabul in the days before the September 11 attacks. Mr Habib says he saw Mr Hicks in the company of the Melbourne man Jack Thomas (later known as Jihad Jack), and Richard Reid (the Briton who became known as the "shoe bomber" after he tried to blow up an aircraft with explosives hidden in his shoe).

■ While in Kandahar before September 11, Mr Habib says he met Matthew Stewart, a former Australian soldier who complained about the "rape and murder" committed by Australian peacekeepers in East Timor.

■ When Mr Habib and Mr Hicks met in Guantanamo Bay, Mr Hicks apologised for telling people that Mr Habib was a CIA plant (a claim Mr Habib says resulted in inmates spitting and urinating on him).

Mr Habib told the Herald yesterday that when Mr Hicks was in Guantanamo Bay, he had been shown a videotape of Mr Habib being tortured in Egypt in an attempt by interrogators to force Mr Hicks to confess. He said he was disappointed that Mr Hicks had not spoken out about Guantanamo.

Mr Hicks has maintained his silence since his release from the Cuban-based prison last year, and his lawyer, David McLeod, said yesterday Mr Hicks would be making no comment on the claims.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/0,28124,24549087-643,00.html

Kevin Rudd buys time with new plan on bank guarantees

INVESTORS in cash management trusts remained in limbo last night after the Rudd Government's bid to end confusion over its banking guarantees failed to provide a plan to stop non-bank financial institutions haemorrhaging funds.

Wayne Swan waited until after markets had closed yesterday to reveal that, from November 28, banks would have to pay the Government a fee of between 0.7 and 1.5 per cent for the privilege of a government guarantee for their wholesale funding. Buying the guarantee will be optional for big deposits, while deposits of under $1 million will receive a government guarantee for free.

Despite the clarification of the Government's position, more cash management trusts and mortgage funds are expected to close their books for withdrawals next week as investors seek the safety of term deposits in the major banks.

Markets remain extremely volatile, with the S&P/ASX200 falling a further 3.1 per cent yesterday to 3869 points. It has dropped by 10.9 per cent since a brief moment of optimism on Tuesday. European markets recorded heavy falls in early trading last night, with Germany down 10 per cent and London off more than 7 per cent.

The Australian dollar sank to a five-year low, losing 4.2 per cent to end domestic trading at US63.91c, down from US66.71c yesterday. It was the dollar's lowest close since September 3, 2003.

Crisis talks will be held next week, with Mr Swan appointing Treasury secretary Ken Henry and Australian Securities and Investments Commission chairman Tony D'Aloisio to consult with the non-bank financial sector to identify what the Government could do to help financial institutions that are not covered by the guarantee.


http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/2571/218/

Climate Alarmism's Flimsy Foundation
Written by Paul Chesser, American Spectator

on Oct 24, 2008

earth-temperature.jpg

Forget pretty much any news reporting you see that attributes disastrous phenomena to global warming, because it's all designed to create a fog surrounding the core issue: is climate change human-caused or not?

A most recent example is from Monday's Washington Post, in which alarmist reporter Kari Lydersen (who has a long record of such journalism, in addition to work she does for leftist publications such as In These Times and the Progressive, on topics including "environmental racism") told about how waterborne diseases are expected to multiply due to future climate devastation:

Now, scientists say, it is a near-certainty that global warming will drive significant increases in waterborne diseases around the world.

Rainfalls will be heavier, triggering sewage overflows, contaminating drinking water and endangering beachgoers. Higher lake and ocean temperatures will cause bacteria, parasites and algal blooms to flourish. Warmer weather and heavier rains also will mean more mosquitoes, which can carry the West Nile virus, malaria and dengue fever. Fresh produce and shellfish are more likely to become contaminated.

The inevitable devastating consequences, as in so many environmentalist reporter articles, dominate the opening paragraphs of Lydersen's piece. She follows by asserting that a trend of heavier rainfalls "will accelerate," citing the 2007 report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I asked Lydersen where in the IPCC report it states with certainty that heavier rainfalls would rapidly increase, and she promised to get back to me on that -- "That was paraphrasing, not a direct quote from the report," she told me in an email. I'm sure.

Regardless, this kind of distractive reporting buttresses the lucrative industry that is global warming alarmism. "It's going to cause sea levels to rise!" cry the coastal scientists and fisheries experts. "It will massively displace wildlife!" scream the biological scientists. "It will prolong droughts and intensify rainfalls," warn the geologists and agricultural scientists. Their wailing fills up their applications for billions of dollars in grants from governments and sympathetic nonprofit foundations.

But these outcries miss the point, because they do not address the core issue of whether the temperature uptick (of one degree Celsius) over the last century is attributable chiefly to man's influence and thus mitigable, or to natural fluctuations and that nothing can be done about it. In other words, the vast majority of research (80 percent? 90 percent? more?) tied to climate change has nothing to do with its cause.

Therefore we have a whole derivative economic sector constructed on the foundation of a single premise: that increasing greenhouse gas emissions are having a greater impact on global climate than are other phenomena such as solar activity, cloud cover, ocean temperatures, El Niño/La Niña, etc. If that single thesis is deemed false, then all these offshoot opportunities for researchers, government, universities, nonprofits, rent seekers, and media goes into a deep chill. Goodbye grants. Adios agency positions. Ciao, charitable contributions. So long, subsidies. And where hast thou gone, writing awards?

Just think -- if it's shown beyond the mainstream media's reach that carbon dioxide and its gaseous sisters (methane and a few others) do not jack up the atmospheric temps, we would no longer have to live under the environoia of this collaborative claptrap.

So obviously it's in each of the alarmists' interests to dismiss their dissenters and undermine any evidence that global warming is not a threat to the planet or to mankind. Jim Martin, executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, has said, "You could have a convention of all the scientists who dispute climate change in a relatively small phone booth." There was the classic Newsweek smear job by Sharon Begley last August which labeled some differing-but-credible climate scientists as a fossil fuel industry-funded "denial machine." Meanwhile the green-journalism Society of Environmental Journalists marginalizes the opposers as "skeptics and contrarians." Discourteous folks call 'em "flat-earthers."

But the difficulty of the alarmists' protectionist task only grows. There has been no significant warming since 1995, and none at all since 1997. The numbers of detracting scientists were already sizable and are only continuing to grow (PDF). The oceans are cooling, Antarctic ice grows, current temperature measuring data are biased in favor of heat, and legitimate explanations for Arctic ice loss (by the way, not an unprecedented phenomenon) other than increased greenhouse gases are published.

When you think about it, the global warming industry is not dissimilar to the current mortgage-instigated mess the country now faces. We have a planetary heat crisis and an insufficient home ownership crisis. Government demands intervention to remedy both mistaken theories. Media joins in celebrating and promoting the new agenda. A bubbling system of artificial wealth is created. But because both foundations are shaky, they cannot hold up the continued weight placed upon them.

One has finally collapsed. When will the other?

You're A Bit Past It, Love...

*



In the Drink
He would have gone to Hell ageine, and earnest sute did make:
But Charon would not suffer him to passe the Stygian lake.
—Ovid, Metamorphoses (tr. Arthur Golding)

Never mind phantom forms, the Keaton-crash
that dumped us in that sea-fed swamp,
the Dutch kill, Latin nihil, thing without
opposite—attend instead the transcendent,

the flying, for god's sake, what we saw
the moment before we thwocked overboard:
a heron stutter-flapped and lifted off,
clumsy as a wind-mauled tarp at first,

but couth beyond sublime once clear
of cattail punks and saltgrass tips,
the overturned rowboat's rusted hull.
Or the cormorant that plunked and dipped,

rose flipping fish from beak to tongue
and down its neck, water beading on its head.
But the crown that really pleased the crowd
my maiden voyage was iridescent green,

brilliantined, a merganser's spiky coxcomb.
He swam right by, chasing red herrings
and cackling so happily I had to pull
a feather from his cap. And so I surfaced

solo. I tell myself, I only launch the bark,
I never book the seats. I didn't stop
to spin the prop or wipe the rail, just tipped
the motor up and paddle-poled, bottom-

stirred. Rousted horseshoe crabs, sleeping
ducks, cranky grebes, slapped along
the little waves, the seeping tide, lonelier, sure,
indignant, too—what better lover

has plucked and boasted, over what better lyre?
An open boat: it's company, not coin, I want.
I'll tune the wake to silence, court grace, make change—
still trading on the laughs I've jerry-rigged.

John Hennessy

Poetry
October 2008



Shadowed, warned, in giant rooms and muffled sounds. He looked up from the floor. He could see giant feet moving all around him. He could smell stale beer and cigarettes, and see the slops along the tray at the bottom of the bar. He could hear voices coming from far away. He was troubled, dependent, crashing. This wasn't the first time. They were crying out; and he couldn't hear them. Lyn was pushing the pram, little Blaize all tucked up inside. This was the psychic centre of the known universe, this little web of streets, these people he knew. He was surprised to be accepted by them. They were everything he wanted to be.

Fabulous, funny, money no object. He was curled up inside dying and here they were partying like there was no tomorrow; drinks raised. Bottles of champagne littered the floor. All he could smell was alcohol. Someone was trying to shake him awake. Is he alright, alright, he heard a voice ask, alright? Nothing was right, he thought, as his consciousness dissolved. A trite thought. He had sought oblivion, and now found it. Nothing would ever change. Nothing would ever be the same again. Nothing was in his heart. He recognised the voice of the bitch. What's this? The smallest joint in the world, rolled just for you.

They stamped over him like cattle, someone kept shaking him. Where had it begun? What had happened? Was it the pills, what pills? He couldn't remember. Was it the gin and tonics? Hadn't there been gin at some time in the afternoon; as the light poured in the window of an inner-city apartment. He ahd written so beautifully about the mad, and now they were dying, he was dying. What, what? But even now he couldn't rise to the surface. Perhaps it was the double bourbons that did it, the triple ouzos, the loss of life. The rooster crowed in the dawn. He would never remember.

The bitch was going to die with a pillow over his face, deliberately smothered by his lover to escape the final agonising throws of AIDS. What turmoil it had been. How fabulous they had felt. There in the know, their secret enclave, the club that could only belong to them. Outside, strangers went about their lives as if nothing was happening. They kept shaking him, wake up, wake up, but he didn't want to wake up anymore, hadn't wanted to wake up for a very long time. He had made a mess of absolutely everything. Why surface, why let them ridicule him yet again?

It had been easy when he was young. All he had to do was walk down the street and eyes would turn. They followed him hungrily. He took it as his due. It's for some to have and for some to want, an old queen said, and he smiled benevolently, giving away hope because it was cheap. You want to live forever? I don't think so. And here he was an old man; almost 30; and nobody was chasing him any more. From the hunted to the hunter. Not even he could stop time. The shaking grew more persistent. Is he dead? someone asked. It was just like the day he drowned in the pool, he didn't care whether he came back or not. It was all a joke.

Big feet, smelly feet. The poorly cleaned carpet. The slops, perhaps he could drink the slops. Someone had grabbed him and lifted him to his feet. He tried to stand, and instead found himself draped across a stranger. What? Who? I love you, he mumbled, slumping again. They dragged him outside into the street. He could see the bitch and his little coterie laughing. They would. He came back into himself. Sorry, he slurred, sorry. It's alright mate, just sit here, the bouncer said, dumping him in an alcove along the side of the building.

Are you alright? the beefcake asked, looking him directly in the eye.
Alright? he repeated back. No, I'm not alright. I don't know what's wrong. I'm sorry. It's nothing to do with you.
Just sober up, mate, the man said, and left him there.
Shortly afterwards the bitch swished by, heading to the alley at the rear of the building for a smoke. You better not, he said dismissively, when he rallied, trying to join him. You're a bit past it, love.

The coterie laughed. The traffic continued its sad swish past the bar, oblivious to the little scene in the street. He heard the phrase repeated as the group turned the corner of the building, their derisive laughter. You're a bit past it, love... You're a bit past it...



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/clock-ticking-for-mccain-obama-warns/1342254.aspx

Front-running Democrat Barack Obama has warned his White House rival John McCain he is ''running out of time'' after rejecting new Republican gibes about his own candidacy as a risk to national security.
Senator Obama, flanked by top veteran military officials in Virginia, mocked Senator McCain as ''out of touch and running out of time''.

But just 13 days before the presidential election, the Republican candidate cautioned the senator from Illinois not to take victory for granted despite his mammoth financial edge and solid lead in a slew of opinion polls.

Senator McCain also returned to his attack after recent comments by Democratic vice-presidential pick Joe Biden that, just like former president John F.Kennedy, Senator Obama would be ''tested'' by an international crisis within six months of taking office.

The Republican, a military veteran, noted that he had some ''personal experience'' with crises, citing his role in the 1962 US-Soviet showdown over Cuban missiles known as the Cuban missile crisis when he was a fighter pilot assigned to Cuban targets.

He told an enthusiastic rally at a high school football field in Green, Ohio, ''I know how close we came to a nuclear war and I will not be a president who needs to be tested. I have been tested.''

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/10/23/1224351397415.html

A Sydney telco employee has learned the hard way the perils of sharing too much information on Facebook after he was caught by his boss faking a sickie after a big night out.

In an email exchange doing the rounds of office blocks, Kyle Doyle was asked by his employer, AAPT, to provide a medical certificate verifying a day of sick leave in August.

Doyle, a call centre worker, protested, saying his contract stipulated he did not require a medical certificate for taking only one day off.

His boss replied that this was usually the case but in this instance the company had determined that the leave was not due to medical reasons.

"My leave was due to medical reasons, so you cannot deny leave based on a line manager's discretion, with no proof, please process leave as requested," Doyle responded.

The manager then sent Doyle a screen grab of Doyle's Facebook profile, highlighting a status update written on the leave day in question.

"Kyle Doyle is not going to work, f--- it i'm still trashed. SICKIE WOO!," it read.

Sprung and with no room left to move, Doyle replied to the boss: "HAHAHA LMAO [laughing my ass off] epic fail. No worries man."

Doyle did not respond to a request for comment sent over Facebook but a friend of his confirmed the incident was not a hoax.

The employer would not comment.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-10/24/content_10241863.htm

WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 (Xinhua) -- Republican presidential candidate John McCain lost his lead in rural American voters as more of them favored his Democratic rival, Barack Obama, in handling the country's economic crisis, said a poll released on Thursday.

According to the survey conducted by the Center for Rural Strategies, Obama slightly led McCain by 46 percent to 45 percent among the 841 likely rural voters in 13 battleground states including New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

About 49 percent of rural voters favored Obama on key issue of the economy, while 40 percent supported McCain in this regard.

The result was in strong contrast with a poll released a month ago, showing McCain led by 51 percent to 41 percent among rural voters.

"That is really bad news for John McCain," said Seth McKee, a political scientist at the University of South Florida, to the National Public Radio on the survey. "If the rural vote is essentially split in these swing states, then John McCain's certain to lose."

The Whisper Spread

*



People feel the democratic compact between voters and government has been shattered. They are fleeced by record levels of taxation, only to see billions poured down various sinks.

Politicians are interfering more and more in their lives, telling them not just how to behave but how to think, rewarding the irresponsible and punishing the dutiful — while failing to deliver the absolute essentials of providing security against crime and conserving the nation’s identity....

The decay of religion...has given rise to moral relativism, which regards all beliefs and principles as being of equal value and truth as a relative concept. This has given rise to multiculturalism, which masquerades as the promotion of equal rights but is actually a disguised form of cultural and national self-loathing.

This in turn lies behind the idea that nations are illegitimate or passé, and that the world’s problems can all be solved by everyone on the planet coming together to harness the power of reason to arrive at a solution. But, in robbing people of their national identity and capacity to believe in anything except the fiction that reason trumps all, this is an essentially irrational negation of self-interest.

No less irrational is the overreach of science which, as London writes, has been hijacked by secular fundamentalists who want to supplant religion by asserting that only in science can truths be found.

Such ’scientism’ — as this overreach is termed — goes beyond the ability of science to explain the nature of the world around us and claims to tell us how life began. Yet the assumption that science provides a complete theory of knowledge is itself fundamentally unscientific.

Science generates more questions than it can answer. The more science unravels the mysteries of the world for us, the more mysterious it becomes. And, as the many scientists who are also religious believers demonstrate, there is no inherent conflict between religion and science.

The dogma that science provides the answer to every question and so supplants religion has led to a junking of the moral codes deriving from Judaism and Christianity that underpin western society.

This loss of cultural nerve has created an unwitting collusion between secular zealots and the Islamists who have declared war upon western civilisation, and who believe — correctly — that a secular west will be unable to resist them.

Science, rationality and the pursuit of truth are intimately related to the religious traditions of the west. If those traditions are not defended from within against the threat from without, this will be how the west was lost.

Melanie Phillips.



Most people age badly. Alcoholics and addicts age particularly badly. The Block has aged badly. It has been particularly quiet in recent days. Few drug dealers harass passers by. The hard drinking street alcoholics who use the area as their lounge room are drinking somewhere else. For days now, there have been no drunken arguments at 3am, torrents of foul abuse carried on the night air. In the mornings, people aren't wandering around in an ice fuelled daze, gathering their thoughts for the first score of the day, looking at the people who are going to work as if they were from another species, aliens from another planet. Instead this shattered home of aboriginal activism in Australia has been quiet, subdued. Change is clearly afoot.

Kids aren't playing in front of the giant aboriginal flag painted on the side of the wall. The needle bus, when it comes, appears to have few customers. The shadows, the shallows of self interest, appear every where. The head honchos of the Aboriginal Housing Company always flash around in the latest Commodore. The rest of us, the workers, can barely afford to pay the bills. Crime and government largess are clearly afoot, hand in hand. Coddled, contrived, connived, protected by the left, these aberrations continue as never before. Police cars cruise through the area every half hour. The beggars have been moved on.

Anyone raising doubts about any of this is branded a racist. What's it matter anyway, it's someone else's money? Hundreds of brand new houses were built down there in the 1970s, and it was going to be the grant centre of aboriginal pride in Australia. The left gifted this prime land to them. There's little subsequent governments have been able to do; as the place deteriorated into the city's major heroin market. People came from everywhere to score, the jostling, excited, expectant hordes. Nothing like that moment before the score. Footage and stills still exist of those trampling crowds.

The dealer the dealer, he's coming, he's coming. The whisper spread. Corrosion came from within. The authorities stepped in. Love was lost, he could smell the crude cattle crushing, the excitement, the determination to get their hands on the best gear around. Even now when the back lane is empty, the scene of nothing but the occasional murder and happenstance deal, as they gather around and mix up and stumble back out into the open space of the Block. Now it's all gone quiet. They've been moved on.

Behind are the derelict houses, row after row, street after street, shuttered, vandalised, boarded up, nothing but a slum. All those houses, built with such public fanfare, have been trashed. While all the white c...s, as the Block's denizens often call their white neighbours, have looked after their houses, renovated them; and they now often sell for $600,000 or more, here there is nothing but desolation, the lowest common denominator, trash and ruin. A brand new $4 million community centre lies barely used, no normal people are willing to risk being robbed to get to it.

On the other side of the station a brand new theatre lies unused. A shop selling emu oil, all set up with government funds to encourage aboriginal enterprise, has never opened its doors. Once the money ran out that was it. No purpose. No courage. No decency. No integrity. Just the decay and chaos of collapse, tax payer funded collapse. Millions of tax payer dollars get drunk every year. Pension day, and carton after carton makes its way down the Block. Our thanks? Getting called: "You white c...ts." The left is pulling their old tricks, hiding what is really going on.

An unadvertised public meeting attracted two people; because no one heard about it. But they can still claim they held a public meeting, and public apathy was so bad that no one showed up. Shock and despair ripple through the surrounding streets. They'll just wreck it all all over again, why wouldn't they, they don't care, they didn't have to work for it, they say. A 60 bed hostel? It will just be another slum. There's a story that Gough Whitlam, the Prime Minister responsible for the creation of the Block, was warned that it would ghettoise and rather than being a source of black pride would become a stigma for them all. The advice was ignored. Just as now, Labor pours scorn on everyone who dares to disagree with them; while spouting on about diversity and multiplicity and the pleasure of the play; the meshing of ideas. They are as bigoted and narrow minded as those they fight against.



THE BIGGER STORY:

Police car damaged and youth arrested - Taree

2008-10-22 06:17:54 Police Media

Police have charged a teenager with multiple offences after the car he
was driving allegedly crashed into a fully marked police car on the mid
north coast overnight.

Shortly after 1.30am today police were advised that a red Holden
Commodore sedan had been stolen from Taree.

Officers patrolling in the Purfleet area sighted a similar vehicle and
continued patrolling along Breakneck Road.

As the police vehicle travelled west, the stolen vehicle which was
travelling east crossed to the wrong side of the road and allegedly
accelerated at the police car.

The driver of the police car attempted to avoid the Holden but the two
vehicles collided.

The teenage driver of the Holden attempted to flee but was arrested by
police after a short struggle.

The 17-year-old local youth was conveyed to Taree police station where
he was charged with steal motor vehicle, drive manner dangerous, mid
range PCA, unlicensed, intimidation, resist arrest and use weapon to
avoid arrest.

He has been bail refused to appear at the Taree Children's Court later
today.

The police officers, a man and woman, suffered only minor injuries as a
result of the collision however both cars were extensively damaged and
required towing from the scene.

ABC INSIDERS:

BARRIE CASSIDY: Okay, why is it to important that the Government releases the economic advice that underpinned the announcement of its package this week?

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well Barrie, because I believe in accountability and I believe in Parliament.
We have a Prime Minister who has made some enormously important statements about the economy - this $10.4-billion fiscal stimulus; these unlimited guarantees for bank deposits; guaranteeing banks whole sale term funding. These are very big measures.

John Howard, were he Prime Minister today, would have given a ministerial statement in the Parliament and the Opposition leader would have then had the opportunity to respond.

Kevin Rudd has treated Parliament with contempt. He is running the same sort of media spin approach to politics that the State Labor Governments have done and which has been so decisively rejected here in New South Wales. No debate - he refused to have a motion on the issue so that we could have a debate; no ministerial statement. It’s one television performance after another and a speech at the press club.

He won’t answer. You ran some of my questions earlier. Every question we have asked this week has been a reasonable one seeking economic and financial information. The responses have been a torrent of abuse. So throughout this week the Opposition has been asking questions about the economy. The Government has just been hurling abuse at the Opposition.

BARRIE CASSIDY: So what are you suggesting there, that they’re not putting out this information because they don’t have it? Because it’s all based on guess work? Or are they hiding something?

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, look they clearly do not believe that growth next year will be two per cent, which is what Kevin Rudd said was their most recent estimates. If they thought economic growth was going to be, GDP was going to grow next year at two per cent, I think we all know they wouldn’t be putting $10.4-billion into the pockets of Australians, into this fiscal stimulus package, almost all of which of course will be given, handed out just before Christmas. So clearly they’ve got a lower number in mind but they refuse to say what it is. So they’re not being transparent.

The second thing Barrie is that they are not prepared to discuss the consequences of their actions. I mean, let me give you an example. As you recall, a week or so ago we called, the Opposition called for the guarantee on bank deposits, this is deposits with banks, be increased to not less than $100,000. And our reason for that was firstly to give depositors greater confidence in these difficult times but also to ensure that we didn’t see all of the deposits in Australian institutions moving into the big four, and there has been that move as you’ve seen the huge increase in deposits at CBA.

Now the Government then went out and said we will now have a deposit guarantee which is unlimited. So it doesn’t matter whether the deposit is $100,000 or $100-million. Now the consequence of that has been that the short term money market has been severely curtailed. The commercial paper market has been curtailed because an obligation, commercial paper if you like, issued by Telstra or BHP now has a lower credit rating than a deposit with the smallest credit union in Australia.

Now, that is a consequence of what the Government has done and this is one of the reasons why we wanted to sit down and talk to them about this in a bipartisan way, because when you intervene in free markets, when governments intervene in free markets, they need to make no more intervention than is absolutely necessary because you can have unintended consequences which are adverse.

Now this is an issue, really, that they should be, they should have done this beforehand. They should now be talking to the Reserve Bank, getting the Reserve Bank’s advice about the deposit guarantee, debating it in Parliament and then no doubt we can reach agreement.

You know we are really reaching out to the Government to help Barrie, but whenever we do that we are just treated with contempt and scorn.

BARRIE CASSIDY: Well you seemed fairly frustrated during the week when they rejected your suggestion of a bipartisan motion in the Parliament.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well I don’t know if it was a matter of, it was more disappointment than frustration. I mean it has had its lighter moments in that.

If you have a sort of black gallows sense of humour you may recall on Thursday, Julie Bishop the shadow treasurer asked Wayne Swan whether the Government guarantee on whole sale funding, the fee charged for that, would be higher for a BBB rated bank than for a AA rated bank. Now as Wayne was getting up to speak, Lindsay Tanner who is far more capable than Wayne Swan I think as we all know, said “Just say yes, Wayne”.

But Wayne obviously didn’t hear it or wasn’t prepared to be prompted and waffled and went on, you know said nothing basically, but leaving one with the conclusion that he doesn’t understand that if the guarantee fee is not higher for less credit worthy banks than it is for the most credit worthy banks, you will never get the less credit worthy banks off that guarantee.

Now so there’s the Treasurer of Australia, doesn’t understand the implications of what he’s doing. And it underlines Barrie why the whole sale term funding guarantee for banks which could put the Commonwealth Government and us as taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars must be the subject of legislation.

The government is trying to work out a way of putting this through without it even being debated in Parliament. So what price accountability? What price looking after the taxpayers’ interests? What price democracy if you’ve got a Prime Minister who treats Parliament with such contempt?



Dead rat in the back streets of Surry Hills, Sydney, NSW, Australia.

Vulture Queens

*



Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it's queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there's some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
by Robert Frost



Oh tell the truth, that there were voices in ancient rooms, that the chequered floor spread out into infinity, that he was bleeding on to the tiles after the beating, that his hatred and contempt for his persecutors would never die. The room had no walls that he could see, no ceiling in visual range. He simply sensed, or assumed, that some where this world came to an end. Oh cold glasses, arrogant darkness, frail figures screaming. The belting never stopped, and these psychotic attacks on his young, thin frame would haunt him for more than half a century. No wonder he couldn't deal with it then.

He was left alone to cry, to nurse his bruises; supposedly to contemplate redemption, doing as he was told, not being him. Brutal facts spill down the generations. Stand up to your children man. Different eras - and yet, the same vast, empty rooms echoed inside his skull. The same muffled shadows, the indistinct hazing, the echoes that came from walls far out of sight. He was cringing and convinced, as the blows rained down. He was shadowed and curled, like an aardvark curling up inside its armour. He started reading the encyclopaedia from A to Z. He knew the aardvark entry very well.

And he curled up inside and never came out, not really. Everything since had been a pretense. Masks of courage, masks of dismay. He was only pretending to be a human being. An atrophied creature, curled up and distorted due to long absence from the atmosphere, was closer to his true self. This creature that had disconnected long ago. As he went about his job of reporting the news. Spitting out stories he no longer cared a dime about. Encouraging others. Passing into the dream time.

They were such great enclaves, groups of adventurers. The rain pours down in another dismal day. So much for global warming. It's cold and no one is happy. Obama wakes up to orange juice in crystal glass. Everything is confirmed. We can work with this guy. The world is shifting on its axis. A black man for President of the United States. Well, half black half white. Shadows fall. Preachers predict the end time. The stock market collapse proves them alright, as they thunder from their pulpits.

And he was left abandoned in that same giant room. He shouted and the sound disappeared into soft padding. He was startled and exercised; but spirit voices were coming, from the past or the future he could not tell. He went to the same bar he had been going to for years, the one that only made sense when you were paralytic drunk. He was glad to be out of jail, although the feel of the handsome robber against him kept recurring. His eyes circled the room, identifying the vulture queens perched on their stools, waiting, watching, longing, boasting about their conquests, flapping wrists.

They all thought they were so fabulous, these social warriors. In reality they were grimy little perverts you wouldn't f... on a good day. The slimy coating on their skin. The smell of stale sheets. Rotting teeth. Battered good looks. I met a handsome robber, he told a complete stranger, and laughed at the irony. They would have all loved to have had that beautiful stranger; the one he met once and remembered forever. Did he remember him? Did nostalgia ever change anything? Was he still in there, after all these years. Genet, towards the end of his life, stayed in hotels in southern France.

Here, in far off Australia, on the bottom of the world, nothing was real. Authenticity was long gone. He pondered the toss, and ordered a double bourbon and coke, a black drink for a black day, the drink that would help him forget. IF only he could relive that moment, forever, the distant grasp of perfect desire, the masculine laugh of perfect understanding.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/10/22/2397619.htm?section=business

Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan says the Government's decision to guarantee all deposits at Australian banks has been a factor in interest rate cuts.

The four big banks have all lowered their mortgage rates over the past week outside of an official rate cut by the Reserve Bank.

On Tuesday, Westpac and St George joined earlier cuts from the likes of ANZ, National Australia Bank and the Commonwealth Bank by reducing interest rates by 0.2 of a percentage point.

Mr Swan told ABC 1's 7.30 Report the decision to guarantee all bank deposits on October 12, combined with coordinated international action, has put more confidence in the system.

"That's a good thing and I think also you can see some of that effect here because our decision on the deposit guarantee is certainly a factor in the interest rate cuts that you are seeing announced here," he said.

"But having said all of that ... it looks a little brighter than it did a couple of weeks ago but there's still a rocky road ahead."

Unlimited bank deposits

Mr Swan also said he will soon be able to announce changes to the unlimited guarantee on bank deposits.

The guarantee has prompted fears vast sums of money invested in funds and institutions that are not backed by the Government will be shifted to institutions that are.

The Opposition yesterday predicted the Government would follow the Coalition's initial advice and put a cap on the guarantee.

But Mr Swan says the Government is looking at a different model.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24531383-5013871,00.html

KEVIN Rudd was unequivocal when he told parliament last week that a blanket guarantee on bank deposits had been recommended by the Reserve Bank and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority.

It was just 24 hours after the Government announced the deposit and wholesale funding guarantee for Australian banks and the Prime Minister was answering a question from Opposition Treasury spokeswoman Julie Bishop. There was no mention of levying an insurance premium on depositors, only on the guarantee for banks' overseas borrowings.

"Can I say this to the Opposition at this point, when there has been much talk about bipartisanship: this measure has been recommended to the Government by the Australian regulators - the Reserve Bank, the prudential regulation authority and the Treasurer," Mr Rudd told parliament on October 13.

On announcing the guarantee, Mr Rudd said he had "taken this decision, based on advice from our regulators, to guarantee all deposits for the three-year period ahead".

But now he faces new questions over how frank he was over what the regulators said to the Government behind closed doors.

The Australian reported yesterday that RBA governor Glenn Stevens had urged the Government to place a cap on the deposit scheme, telling Treasury secretary Ken Henry last Friday the lower the better. Mr Stevens said yesterday he supported the broad thrust of the measures, but noted that the "design features of these various guarantees will be important".

Wayne Swan conceded he was considering "necessary refinements" to the previously unlimited, free, deposit guarantee.

The Treasurer confirmed an insurance fee for large depositors with more than $1 million was under consideration.

But he was emphatic that the RBA had not proposed a cap in earlier discussions. Adding to the confusion, however, is that Mr Swan was in New York during the key talks in Canberra that fleshedout the bank guarantee.

Mr Rudd has used the regulators as something of a human shield during the bank deposit debate, hounding the Opposition for offering bipartisan support but raising questions about the detail of the guarantee plan.

"The Government have been acting in close and absolute concert with the advice provided by our financial regulators," Mr Rudd said on September 22.

http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/2553/236/

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means . That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That's where you are right now.

It's not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.

You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.

Binging In A Parallel Universe

*



"By the last year of the Bush presidency, growing numbers of former administration insiders had abandoned the government with the conviction that in waging the war against terrorism, America had lost its way. Many had fought valiantly to right what they saw as a dangerously wrong turn. With Bush, Cheney and Addington still firmly in power, it was hard to declare their efforts a success. Still, with change in the air, there was a sense that history might be on their side." She mentions by name Jack Goldsmith, Matthew Waxman, Alberto Mora and Phillip Zelikow. Zelikow had warned that the Bush Administration's descent into torture would be seen in the same light as Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. He put it this way, "Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools."
Jane Mayer The Dark Side

...


Deception, incompetence and social indifference have led the Bush administration to breach ethical and legal boundaries in its anti-terrorism interrogation policy, New Yorker writer Jane Mayer said in a discussion of her new book, “The Dark Side,” on Wednesday afternoon.

“They redefined torture so that they were not torturing unless they caused organ failure or death,” Mayer said. She explained that by employing attorneys to find loopholes in the law, the White House was able to employ techniques such as waterboarding, which involves inducing the sensation of drowning.

Likewise, the CIA has erected black-site prisons around the world to escape the jurisdiction of American courts and the restrictions of American law, Mayer said, noting that such prisons are suspected to exist in countries such as Poland, Romania, Uzbekistan, Egypt and Afghanistan.

The current administration has also reinterpreted the definition of extraordinary rendition, Mayer added.

“The extraordinary rendition program was Deception, incompetence and social indifference have led the Bush administration to breach ethical and legal boundaries in its anti-terrorism interrogation policy, New Yorker writer Jane Mayer said in a discussion of her new book, “The Dark Side,” on Wednesday afternoon.

“They redefined torture so that they were not torturing unless they caused organ failure or death,” Mayer said. She explained that by employing attorneys to find loopholes in the law, the White House was able to employ techniques such as waterboarding, which involves inducing the sensation of drowning.

Likewise, the CIA has erected black-site prisons around the world to escape the jurisdiction of American courts and the restrictions of American law, Mayer said, noting that such prisons are suspected to exist in countries such as Poland, Romania, Uzbekistan, Egypt and Afghanistan.

The current administration has also reinterpreted the definition of extraordinary rendition, Mayer added.

“The extraordinary rendition program was supposed to allow us to pick up terror suspects around the world and return them to face justice in their home countries,” Mayer said, explaining that instead, the program has been used to send arrested suspects to other countries to subject them to torture.

Incompetence, Mayer said, was also a factor in the decision to subject suspects to harsh treatment. There is evidence that torture is ineffective, she said, adding that she faults the administration for ignoring this evidence.

“[Torture] is something that amateurs turn to,” Mayer said, citing the case of al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah. Mayer criticized Bush’s claim that the results obtained by using waterboarding were in fact relevant intelligence.

Mayer also stressed the long-term consequences of harsh interrogation, noting that treating prisoners unethically only allows them to be seen as victims and is counterproductive as a result.

“Anything that would win [Abu Zubaydah] sympathy in the world with the new generation of Muslims is a tremendous political problem,” Mayer explained.

The role of the next president, Mayer noted, will be difficult, given the Bush administration’s legacy and the legal impact of changing its policies.

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2008/09/25/21471/




Binging in a Parallel Universe. That's how he felt. As if far off, in a different place, but nevertheless the same place, in a sidestep world hidden, enveloped inside this one, he was drinking like he had never drunk before, drunk in every cell of his body, steeped in alcohol, away on those massive binging spirals he used to go on, lasting days, weeks, months. They were driven by profound injustices. By a sense of betrayal, unfairness. Bill Leak, the well known cartoonist, is in hospital after having undergone brain surgery. He fell off a balcony. While feeding parrots. At the ad man John Singleton's, place. It was very Bill.

I was sober for seven years once, John, he told me. They were the worst seven years of my life. That was in the seeking, the desire for comfort. He wanted to be wounded, an animal by the side of the road. He wanted to be driven over, ignored, a piece of bleeding carcass. Gone were the days of gin and tonics, the elegant drinking. Now it was all about road kill. It was all about making the biggest mess of himself possible. Zoned in, zoned out, there was nothing left of his stomach, he was repeatedly terrified. Oh please, please, he said, tears flowing down his face in the middle of the night. He had no idea who he was talking to.

The worst seven years of my life. Going against nature. There was no hope. You will never succeed. All the negative head talk the psychiatrists talked about, profoundly dysfunctional, you will never stop, never triumph, haunted him through to the early hours. He drank and he drank until he felt the click, that moment when he felt at one with the universe, at one with the bar, the music, the people; and he knew that he would never remember anything beyond this point. Those were the days, my friend, we thought they would never end. He met old friends he hadn't seen in years, old friends who had gone off to London to succeed.

They couldn't believe he was still sitting on the same bar stools, in the same bars, talking about the same crap, gossiping about the same people. They couldn't believe his life had remained so static, while theirs had soared. Blair looked at him with something between pity and contempt. He probably barely had the money for a drink. And the old queens weren't queuing up any more to buy. He had become one himself. He was in the process of dissolving into the floor, into the surrounds. Everything about him spoke failure. He couldn't believe all that hope and promise had come to so little. All those stories had accounted for nought.

These bars truly were the heart of darkness. You know what this is? the bitch asked, rubbing his thumb and finger together. The biggest joint in the world, rolled just for you. He died under a pillow, suffocated by his lovers, his friends. They took these terrible ways out. They sat on the stools and they drank and drank. These people who had washed up here, the courage of difference, perverts. In their own, enclosed universe, they were just a group of people the city had washed up into the same place. Every time he thought, an ocean of distress opened up beneath him. The cell walls closed in.

He met the handsomest bank robber, who was out in the remand section because he was being driven to and from court for yet further proceedings. I can tell by the way you're sitting, he said, and made a grab for him. He didn't resist. For an A-grade criminal he was gentle, rather fun. He told him stories about what went on in the main jail, how everyone had their boy. How you had to find a protector or end up being raped. How he wouldn't survive for five seconds, not in there amongst the real men. And he listened and they talked and after the sex they just kept on talking, men trapped in cages, a world they didn't own. Back on the street, on the black tide of the asphalt, he drank to the handsome robber, to Jean Genet and Our Lady Of The Flowers, to a short life and a merciful death, to love exchanged in brief moments. He would never see him again. It was a laugh he had at the authority's expense, that memory, that man laid out on the narrow bed, that urgent desire.




THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,24526497-952,00.html

PRESSURE is mounting on the Government to slash the immigration intake next year as the global meltdown is tipped to push up unemployment.
Opposition immigration spokeswoman Sharman Stone yesterday urged the Federal Government to ditch past practice and consider cutting new arrivals before the financial year's end.

"It is important they remain flexible because the most important thing to do is look after Australia's own unemployed," she told The Courier-Mail.

This year Australia was due to accept a record 190,000 immigrants for the 12 months to the end of June.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has promised the Government will re-examine the migrant intake in the May Budget, but the Opposition is now pushing for earlier action.

"This Government needs to be watching very carefully the way the economy probably seems to be unravelling in the new year with higher unemployment occurring," Ms Stone said.

Her call came as Australia's biggest home lender, the Commonwealth Bank, became the third big bank to cut its home loan rates. The Commonwealth will shave 0.21 per cent off its standard variable rate for home loans, cutting it to 8.32 per cent.

The move will lower repayments on a standard $300,000 loan by about $42 a month.

Westpac is the only one of the four big banks to refuse to cut its home loan rates after cuts by its competitors.

Meanwhile, Mr Rudd has announced he will host a small business summit in Brisbane this Friday to discuss the impact of the global economic crisis.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-09-23/columns/when-is-obama-going-to-start-talking-about-bush-s-dark-side/

On C-Span, Dana Priest—the first reporter to break the story of CIA torture as an American Policy in "the war on terror" (Washington Post, December 26, 2002)—recently interviewed Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side (Doubleday). If there is an American Nuremberg trial of "the high crimes and misdemeanors" committed during the Bush-Cheney rule, Mayer's book and testimony will be a vital part of the evidence.

During the interview, Mayer strengthened my resolve to keep refusing to vote for Chuck Schumer as my senator. The discussion was about what it will take to sufficiently arouse the American people—and thereby Congress—to hold the Bush chain of command criminally accountable for its serial violations of American laws and international treaties. Jane Mayer said she had asked Schumer—"with a safe seat in a liberal district in New York state"—about the possibility of bringing Bush et. al to justice. This was Senator Schumer's answer: "People don't care about that" (emphasis added).

And Schumer, an ardent seeker of television cameras, didn't himself care enough to arouse his constituents or the nation about Bush's war on the Constitution. Instead, the powerful New York senator was the key force in enabling Bush to appoint Michael Mukasey as his current Attorney General, our chief law-enforcement officer. This former New York federal judge—who continues to avoid calling CIA waterboarding a criminal act—is a major component of the Bush regime's campaign to lock into legal precedent a far-ranging expansion of presidential powers before another administration comes in.

For one example, Mukasey is moving to further loosen FBI surveillance guidelines that will bring us back to J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Operation). The FBI, with no evidence of wrongdoing, will then be free to put "suspicious" persons and organizations into government databases. (There has been no objection from McCain or Obama).


http://www.dailyitem.com/0100_news/local_story_268233049.html

It's not as though we hadn't been adequately warned. Some of the greatest minds in the judicial and political history of the U.S. warned of the lasting harm that could be done to a democracy if it abandoned its ideals of justice and the rule of law during times of fear and panic. Accordingly, Jane Mayer begins most of the chapters of her excellent but horrifying book with short quotations from those who had the foresight to warn us away from choosing the dark side in dark times:

"America should go �not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. "¦ She might become the dictatress of the world: She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit'" (John Quincy Adams.)

"The United States must not adopt the tactics of the enemy. Means are as important as ends" (The 1976 Church Committee Report.)

"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding" (Justice Louis Brandeis.)

Jane Mayer refers to herself as a writer of narrative non-fiction, and, indeed, she brilliantly displays her narrative talent in the way she begins her book with a meticulous recreation of the panic that held the most powerful people in this country in its grip just after 9/11. Key decisions about how to deal with continuing terrorist threats, how to strengthen national security, how to apply the rule of law to these matters, and whether (or how) to expand the powers of the Presidency -- decisions that continue to affect us to this day -- were reached in a condition of chaos and panic. Nevertheless, Mayer demonstrates, key figures in the White House -- Vice President Dick Cheney and his adviser David Addington -- seized on this opportunity to act on their long-held agenda "to enhance presidential powers to a degree never known in U.S. history and obliterate constitutional protections that define the very essence of the American experiment."

The terrible consequences of those acts, just as Adams, Church and Brandeis warned, will further darken the reputation of the most despised and denigrated presidency in American history. The title of Mayer's book ("The Dark Side") is actually a Faustian quotation from Cheney. On the Sunday after 9/11 during a "Meet the Press" interview, he described how the administration planned to respond to the continuing terrorist threat: "We'll have to work sort of the dark side, if you will." He went on to say, "We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies -- if we are going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in. And, uh, so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal basically, to achieve our objectives."


Parramatta River, Sydney, NSW, Australia.

Low Status Males

*



http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-8181329/One-day-in-the-life.html

The pub catered to the standard contingent, the front bar with its handful of old timers and long-haul drinkers, yellow-cab couriers and short-tempered security men (for fifty bucks you could hire a standover man), and a clutch of blue collar workers - while the back bar, which gave access to a bare room set aside for pool tables, attracted the local grunge element, a few Sydney University students, welfare recipients, minor public servants from government departments (looking for an identity) and generally, the requisite agitating core of speed freaks, loners, downright shifty dudes and blow-ins. A Rabelaisian democracy, the usual suspects and standard cliques. To me the establishment always generated an edgy 'vibe' and that probably had as much to do with my paranoia as anything else. I actually felt like a foreigner smuggled into the camp.

If you got landed with a nickname, this pretty much represented a measure of provisional acceptance. Somehow, 'the poet' didn't quite cut it with that crowd for long. If this cognomen suggested exclusivity, I couldn't have agreed more. It didn't have quite the same ring to it as 'Two-Bob Pete' or 'Have-A-Chat ...' As a regular socializing venue, this was a clumsy miscalculation on my part. It proved entirely the wrong choice in anonymity. Nevertheless, there was no shortage of drinking partners, and you could always find a bar-stool to sit at, conversation and banter in varying degrees of intensity. Expectation lay no more than an easy walk and public bar away.

The Marlborough Hotel on the corner of King Street and Missenden Road (taking care to avoid the seriously busy Oxford Tavern with wall-to-wall 'ferals and goths') offered a greater crush and diversity. Newtown, gateway to the west, from the mid '80s was undergoing a sociological shift. Various musicians, artists and poets had taken up residence (John Forbes in Lennox Street, Martin Harrison in Denison Street, myself in Chelmsford Street - practically living on the same block, though interceptions, as if by sleight-of-hand, were rare) because of the cheap rental accommodation and accessibility to the CBD. By now the gay contingent had invaded the real estate market, and inexpensive Thai restaurants had started to open up one after the other (with adventurous names like Thai Tanic) along the King Street shopping strip.

At one stage I counted at least fifteen Thai restaurants within a two hundred yard stretch. Newtown had always accommodated Greek, Lebanese and Turkish communities, along with the Yugoslavs and their tucked-away gambling rooms. Earlier still in the '60s, the neighbourhood became home to a considerable Samoan population; a shifting demographic underscored by the founding Anglo-Celtic working class culture who originally established and defined the inner west. Around Enmore you might yet discover a narrow doorway and worn wooden stairs leading up to an unadorned though comfortable room full of serious gamblers. As long as you kept your mouth shut, you could stay and enjoy the spicy, pitch-black coffee. A number of the ethnic restaurants in Enmore road offered Turkish belly-dancing. Greek and Albanian women sang in spiralling Moorish or Arabian accents and circulated amongst the diners collecting tips after their performances.

This then was largely the purlieu I circulated in during those days. Newtown became an island unto itself. Yet I can't recall precisely when I first met Vicki, it might been at a poetry reading sponsored by the Goethe Institute in Woollahra, and organized through the Austrian poet/playwright, Rudi Krausmann, or an introduction made at the Rose & Crown Hotel in Paddington, a local frequented by the poet, Bob Adamson. Both he and Rudi lived in the district up until the close of the decade. They were long-time associates in varying degrees of friendship with Vicki Viidikas, going right back to the early days of the Wild & Woolley Press, a small independent, relatively successful publisher of poetry. But this was long before I arrived on the scene. I landed in Sydney in 1986 (on the eve of a recession) though I had previously visited for a couple of weeks back in late December of 1978, on my way through to the Mediterranean and the island of Crete.




There was safety in crowds. These days you could hear Arabic spoken in the street. Many of the taxi drivers were Muslim. The city had been transformed absolutely. Was it for the better? Colossal deconstruction. A Prime Minister who never shut up. A media blitz, as the powers that be grandly gave away our money to segments of the community, ripping tens of thousands off us in taxes only to give it to people who never work a day in their life. There is little sympathy and a great deal of anger. One of the problems with giving away money is that everybody who doesn't get it resents those who do.

Thousands, millions, billions, the money flows. Rudd, they say, has now grasped his uber narrative and is busy busy saving the nation. Stories don't count. Nothing matters. Clear and calm, underneath these days was flight and fear. Deeply disturbed, he looked up. There had been so much chaos. He was frightened of what he could do. He was frightened of the next oncoming binge. He didn't know why these thoughts kept coming back. He didn't understand where the malaise had started. Was it thinking evil, doing evil? Was it a lack of strength and courage? He didn't know, and sadly, deeply, didn't care.

Fateful moments? Oh yes. What was that brick doing there? Why were they collected there in the greasy corner in the garage, next to the lift? Why had so many things gone wrong; why had been propelled through so much anger? So cruel. So indifferent. So many things. His fingers splayed and the ideas rolled. Didn't they know, didn't they understand who he was? He was drunk, toweringly drunk, and his thoughts loomed out in darkness. He picked up the brick. He threw it through the owner's car window, their neat, smart, dark expensive car. He saw another brick. He picked it up. He threw it through the manager's car window, her neat, smart, dark, expensive car.

And he barely stopped to look at the chaos he had created as he exited the building, cutting a sharp left, disappearing off the radar into the channels of the city as quickly as possible. Up high he could see the lights in the magazines office, hear the music coming from on high. Why hadn't be been born normal? He could hear the music, and he would never be part of it, a normal person dancing at a party. That would show them, the broken glass, the bricks, the damage. And he scuttled through the streets till he had all but disappeared. The alcohol had been running out anyway, there hadn't been any point in staying. The bastards. The bastards.

And he woke the next day with yet another hallucinatory hangover. And a dim memory of what he had done. And the police knocking on the door. He fobbed them off, he said it wasn't him, it was someone else, he lied in a particularly squirrelly, dishonest way. He wasn't going to take responsibility for these actions. He didn't even want to be himself. He didn't know himself. He didn't really remember what had happened. Oh yes he did. But for several days he dodged the cops. Being out, lost in bars, lost in curious dark places. Just lost altogether on the river of alcohol that had become his life; those joyous cries, hooray for everybody.

He raised a glass and drank and drank, drowning shame. Why did he do that? Why had he been so stupid? Why had he drank so much - so much! The alcohol burdened his soul. He didn't know where to turn. He was being hunted. They came back and he was out. Again. And again. But finally he was there, he had to face it, he had to surrender. They came to the door and he gave in. Yes it was he. Yes he did it. No he didn't know why. They owed him money. He was angry. Francis, the mentor who looked after him, was shocked, but immediately rose to help. How much was bail? He couldn't be left out there under the glowering walls of Long Bay Jail; with all those criminals, all those dangerous men. Not his pretty boy, not his unrequited love, not this troubled talent with a future in store. Not now, not here, as they were forcibly changed into green uniforms.




THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/2498/218/

Scientists Challenge UK Govt Climate Committee to 'Drop flawed science and the Climate Change millstone - Save the economy'. CO2 is the Gas Of Life ('GOL'), it is not a problem

The recommendation that the UK cut its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80 per cent* is "total madness based on false science" said Piers Corbyn of WeatherAction long range forecasters.

"There is no evidence that Carbon dioxide has ever controlled, is controlling or will ever control world temperatures or climate and I challenge the promoters of this nonsense to produce evidence to justify their policies - or drop them, just as 13 world scientists** have similarly challenged the UN.

"Climate Change policy is a millstone around the UK and world economies. The beneficiaries are oil companies who ram up prices with abandon (taking advantage of limits placed on expansion of coal), bio-fuel producers who are increasing food prices and starvation, and the booming industry of climate change parasites such as carbon traders and nuclear power-mongers.

"Taxpayers and the developing world are the losers. There is a world recession now upon us which is being made deeper by Climate Change policies and the perpetrators must be called to account. Banks and industry are going bust yet the green fundamentalists want to impose more of this madness on the world. They actually want to increase their burden on the UK economy and deepen the world recession**.

"Genuine green policies to defend bio-diversity and reduce waste should be supported but the deceitful manipulation of the goodwill of many people in order to promote policies of mass taxation, expensive and dangerous energy like nuclear power and cuts in world living standards must be stopped. The UK and the world now need cheap energy solutions like coal to diesel technology which can be made smoke free. The danger for honest green campaigners - unless they break from the stranglehold of the Climate Change lobby - is that when the Global Warming swindle is exposed their spirited defence of nature will be forgotten too.

"CO2 is no problem - it is the Gas of Life (GOL). The problem is Climate Change Policy - not Climate Change which is beyond man's control. Global warming is over. World temperatures have fallen from their peak ten years ago while GOL (CO2) has been rising rapidly. The world was much warmer than now in the Bronze age 4,000 years ago and there was much less GOL (CO2) then. The bounteousness of world vegetation goes up with GOL. We need more GOL not less!

"13 world scientists wrote** to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in July asking for evidence to justify UN Climate Change policy and calling for the UN's climate committee (IPCC) to be made accountable. Tim Yeo MP** (chair of the Parliament Environment Audit Committee) was also written to in July. Neither have acknowledged or replied. The reason is they have nothing to say. I urge members of the public to send the scientists' letter to the UN** to their MP and ask their MPs to make the UN and Tim Yeo+ 'Put Up or Shut Up'. Gordon Brown** was also written to and his office promised to reply".


http://www.lowefo.com/pdf/Letter_UN_Sec_Gen_Ban_Ki-moon.pdf

\TO: UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, inquiries@un.org 14th of July, 2008
Copied to the G8 leaders
Dear Secretary General Ban Ki-moon,
The UN Climate Change Panel must be called to account and cease its deceptive practices
- Policies based on false science must be ended
We, an independent group of experts in various aspects of science and the environment, ask you to
redress the lack of scientific integrity of the UN’s Climate Change Panel (IPCC) and to stop making
reactionary and futile ‘Climate Change’ recommendations that hold back the developing world.
As you read this, policies that you endorse are already causing misery and starvation for the world's poor.
On the 14th of April this year some of us wrote to the Chair of the IPCC, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, copied
below and available on the UN CAPSA site (ref E), asking him to present clear and graphic evidence of
the theory that carbon dioxide (CO2) drives global temperature. We pointed out that no such evidence
exists and offered charts and references that refute the man-made global warming theory.
Dr. Pachauri has failed to respond. Perhaps he lacks the knowledge to defend his position. Nevertheless,
the IPCC's 51 ‘drafting and draft-contributing authors’ of the Summary for Policymakers (ref A) - not
thousands as claimed - includes scientists who are surely obliged to provide such evidence if any exists.
For your illumination we refer you to:
(i) The chart in our letter of 14 April (page 3) which shows, using official data, that for the last
decade World Temperatures have been falling whilst CO2 keeps rising, and
(ii) A geological (Greenland ice core) chart of polar climate covering the last 10,000 years (Ref
B) which shows that while CO2 levels have been rising, temperatures have been falling
since the Bronze Age around 4,000 years ago (see page 2).
The assertion that the recent rapid rise of CO2 is unique and dangerous is both deceptive and irrelevant
because CO2 does not drive the world's climate. Claims that such rapid rises have not happened before
are not supported by ice-core or other geological records (ref C).
Either the IPCC is simply failing to notice these gross discrepancies or it is consciously evading or
covering-up observations that challenge its theories.
Given the facts (i) above, from observations over the last decade alone, there can be no justification for
trying to restrict CO2 levels and retard third-world development while temperatures are in fact falling
(also see Note D). Considering data over the last 4,000 years (ii), in its Summary for Policymakers and
in its Full Report, the IPCC depicts CO2 rising but fails to depict a corresponding fall in temperature.
From its obstinate resistance to answer inquiries — an insult to the public, let alone to other scientists —
one can only conclude that the IPCC is engaged in a self-serving distortion of data acquired at public
expense.
Whatever might have seemed the case ten years ago, now, with better data and understanding, there is
clearly no evidence for the CO2-based theory of global warming. Indeed, there is only evidence against
it. Therefore, as a matter of utmost importance we urge you to:
1. Call the IPCC to account - Hold an Inquiry into its operations. Insist that it adhere to the
same ‘prove and predict’ norms as other sciences. Further, noting its impotence in the face of
contradictory evidence, lead the UN into abandoning the CO2-based theory of global warming
and nullifying its former recommendations.
2. Immediately announce your opposition to biofuels – whose large-scale production entails the
displacement of food crops, thus raising the price of food and bringing starvation to the poor.
Please do not hesitate to ask us for further information or assistance and we will provide it directly or
through other independent, qualified colleagues.
Yours sincerely,
Piers Corbyn Astrophysicist & forecaster, WeatherAction, UK piers@weatheraction.com
Vincent Gray IPCC Expert Reviewer, Climate Consultant, NZ vinmary.gray@paradise.net.nz
Richard Courtney IPCC Exp. Rev., Energy & Envir. Consultant, UK RichardSCourtney@aol.com
Hans Labohm IPCC Expert Reviewer, Economist & Author, Holland H.Labohm@freeler.nl
Will Alexander Prof. Em. Dept. Civil & Biosystems, South Africa alexwjr@iafrica.com
Don Parkes Prof. Human Ecology (Ret.) Australia & Japan dnp@networksmm.com.au
Joseph D’Aleo Certified Consultant Meteorologist, Fellow AMS, USA jdaleo@icecap.us
Svend Hendriksen Nobel Peace Prize 1988 (shared), Greenland hendriksen@greennet.gl
Alan Siddons Climate Researcher, USA alan618034@earthlink.net
Bob Ashworth Chem. Eng. (Energy & Environment), USA bobashworth@earthlink.net
Norm Kalmanovitch Geophysicist, Canada, kalhnd@shaw.ca
Hans Schreuder Analytical Chemist (Ret.), UK hans@tech-know.eu

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/an_open_letter_from_the_viscou_1.html

Open letter from The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley to Senator John McCain about Climate Science and Policy.

Dear Senator McCain, Sir,

YOU CHOSE a visit to a wind-farm in early summer 2008 to devote an entire campaign speech to the reassertion of your belief in the apocalyptic vision of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change - a lurid and fanciful account of imagined future events that was always baseless, was briefly exciting among the less thoughtful species of news commentators and politicians, but is now scientifically discredited.

With every respect, there is no rational basis for your declared intention that your great nation should inflict upon her own working people and upon the starving masses of the Third World the extravagantly-pointless, climatically-irrelevant, strategically-fatal economic wounds that the arrogant advocates of atmospheric alarmism admit they aim to achieve.

Britain and the United States, like England and Scotland on the first page of Macaulay's The Viscount Monckton of Brenchlysplendid History of England, are bound to one another by "indissoluble bonds of interest and affection". Here in this little archipelago from which your Pilgrim Fathers sailed, we have a love-love relationship with what Walt Whitman called your "athletic democracy". You came to our aid - to the aid of the world - when Britain had stood alone against the mad menace of Hitler. Your fearless forces and ours fight shoulder to shoulder today on freedom's far frontiers. The shortest but most heartfelt of our daily prayers has just three words: "God bless America!" For these reasons - of emotion as much as of economics, of affection as much as of interest - it matters to us that the United States should thrive and prosper. We cannot endure to see her fail, not only because if she fails the world fails, but also because, as the philosopher George Santayana once said of the British Empire and might well now have said of our sole superpower, "the world never had sweeter masters." If the United States, by the ignorance and carelessness of her classe politique, mesmerized by the climate bugaboo, casts away the vigorous and yet benign economic hegemony that she has exercised almost since the Founding Fathers first breathed life into her enduring Constitution, it will not be a gentle, tolerant, all-embracing, radically-democratic nation that takes up the leadership of the world.

It will be a radically-tyrannical dictatorship - perhaps the brutal gerontocracy of Communist China, or the ruthless plutocracy of supposedly ex-Communist Russia, or the crude, mediaeval theocracy of rampant Islam, or even the contemptible, fumbling, sclerotic, atheistic-humanist bureaucracy of the emerging European oligarchy that has stealthily stolen away the once-paradigmatic democracy of our Mother of Parliaments from elected hands here to unelected hands elsewhere. For government of the people, by the people and for the people is still a rarity today, and it may yet perish from the earth if America, its exemplar, destroys herself in the specious name of "Saving The Planet".


Science and the climate: the facts


The facts about "rising temperatures"

You have said: "We have many advantages in the fight against global warming, but time is not one of them. Instead of idly debating the precise extent of global warming, or the precise timeline of global warming, we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures ... Today I'd like to focus on just one [challenge], and among environmental dangers it is surely the most serious of all. Whether we call it ‘climate change' or ‘global warming', in the end we're all left with the same set of facts. The facts of global warming demand our urgent attention, especially in Washington. Good stewardship, prudence, and simple commonsense demand that we act to meet the challenge, and act quickly. ... Across the world average temperatures ... seem to reach new records every few years."

Here, Sir, are the facts about "rising temperatures". The facts which I shall give you in this letter are taken not from my own imagination, nor from the obscurantist reports of the UN's climate panel, nor from any lobby group, but from the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

Very nearly all of the citations that support the crucial facts which your advisers seem not to have put before you, and which I shall set forth in this letter, are from peer-reviewed papers. Some, however, such as the documents of the UN's climate panel, the IPCC, are not peer-reviewed in the accepted sense of the term. Peer-reviewed papers will be indicated by citations with the date in parentheses, thus: Boffin et al. (2008). Papers that are not peer-reviewed will be indicated by square brackets, thus: IPCC [2007].

I begin with a geological and historical perspective on global mean surface temperature that your advisors seem to have withheld from you. For most of the past 600 million years, the mode of temperature - the temperature that most often prevailed globally - is thought to have been 12.5 °F higher than today's temperature: for today's temperature, in the perspective of the long recent history of our planet, is unusually low.

During each of the last four interglacial periods over the past half-million years, temperature was 5 to 8 °F warmer than the present (Petit et al., 1999).

For 2000 years in the Bronze Age, during the Holocene Climate Optimum (which is called an "Optimum" because warmer is better than cooler), temperature was up to 5 °F warmer than the present. Thanks to the warmer weather, on many continents simultaneously, the world's first great civilizations emerged.

It was also warmer during the 600 years of the Graeco-Roman warm period, when the twin civilizations that were the foundation of our own flourished in the Mediterranean. And it was warmer during the half millennium of the Mediaeval Climate Optimum, when the Renaissance reawakened humanity after the Dark Ages, and the great cathedrals and churches of Europe were built.

In 2001 the UN's climate panel made a maladroit and disfiguring attempt [IPCC, 2001] to heighten the baseless alarm that underlies all of its reports by denying that the Middle Ages were warmer than the present. However, three eminent statisticians working at the instigation of your own House of Representatives produced the definitive report [Wegman et al., 2005], confirming the peer-reviewed research of McIntyre & McKitrick (2003, 2005) establishing that the UN's graph had been doctored so as falsely to deny the reality of the mediaeval warm period, to whose existence hundreds of peer-reviewed papers from all parts of the globe attest.

At both Poles, it was warmer only half a century ago than it is today. For temperatures in the Arctic, see Soon et al. (2004). For the Antarctic, see Doran et al. (2002).

During the Maunder Minimum, a period of more than half a century ending in 1700 when there were no sunspots on the surface of our Sun, a Little Ice Age occurred all over the world (Hathaway, 2004). In 1700 there began a recovery in solar activity that has continued ever since, culminating in the 70-year Solar Grand Maximum that seems recently to have ended. During the Grand Maximum, the Sun was more active, and for longer, than during almost any previous similar period in the past 11,400 years (Solanki et al., 2005; and see Usoskin et al., 2003; and Hathaway, 2004). A symposium of the International Astronomical Union [2004] concluded that it is the Sun that was chiefly responsible for the warming of the late 20th century.

From 1700-1998, temperature rose at a near-uniform rate of about 1 °F per century [Akasofu, 2008]. In 1998, "global warming" stopped, and it has not resumed since: indeed, in the past seven years, temperature has been falling at a rate equivalent to as much as 0.7 °F per decade [Hadley Center for Forecasting, 2008; US National Climatic Data Center, 2008]. Very few news media have given any prominence to this long and pronounced downturn in the temperature trend.



Liam holding a chook at Tambar Springs, NSW, Australia.