A Dust Storm on Bondi Beach

*



As an athletic endeavor, the act of surfing and the mechanical considerations of performance follow the traditional masculine associations. Power, strength and speed within the context of human exertion . The stuff of sports. As an aesthetic endeavor, the nuances of movement, positioning, and line more often drift toward the feminine sensibility. The stuff of dance. It is at the nexus of the two where greatness often lies. It is also where the confusion starts. The naked male aggression of brute physicality can create moments sublime. Gary Elkerton ripping things apart at the seams for example. A subtler, perhaps feminine, understanding in critical moments with no need for such muscle, can create the equally sublime. Rell Sunn’s luxurious lines for example. And what would be without Tom Curren’s mysterious blending of the two (for example)? The question cycles and recycles in the wider cultural movement, a way of life, where the bounds are blurred incurably.

It is always a question of context, motivation and purpose. In another world, it was not until Baryshnikov (and before, Nijinsky & Nureyev) did the male ballet dancer enter the wider cultural imagination as intrinsically masculine and anything other than power props for the female line. Here we see a case of the flip side of the coin. Even still, the Balanchine estimation of the balletic line is far more heralded in the ballerina than the danseur noble, perhaps a prime suspect in the cultural decline of an estimation of an art.

http://kurungabaa.net/2010/01/07/blurred-lines/#comment-3337



The green toxins which had lapped against the black walls were gone now; impossible to sustain in the face of such extravagant, such oft repeated beauty. They came from everywhere. The bursts of Italian. The machine gun of an excited Spanish woman. This year the bikinis are more micro than ever before; and he would stop, startled, at the sheer physicality of it all, these astonishing specimens. He passed Marsha's house almost everyday and the clouds of a drunken history broke away; and they were called for and cared for in a sea of regret. Because it could have all been so fine, that splendid piece of real estate. If she hadn't been so mad; and let's face it, so old. He was going to raise the mast after downing a bottle of red he had been fantasising about all day; and one way and another it never happened.

He always pulled short. He could not commit. So he walked past the empty house, she must be away, and people still laughed about the mad woman who had come to the party and told everyone they were lower than concrete, lower than the limestone beneath the concrete. Bands of beautiful things basked on the balconies; try that, they posed, they perved, they laughed, they gossiped; and they most certainly drank. Another round of zambuccas, he heard the young man ask the waiter at Tat's on the corner; the view of Australia's most famous beach all behind them. That blazing heat; these blazing days, the bodies dotted on the vivid sand like brush marks on a Fred Williams painting, daubs against a background, every unidentifiable colour in God's world. He could feel the need for change; for whole parts of the past to give away.

And so it went, oh so very far, from the sacrifices on the Mayan pyramids to Led Zeppelin and Mick Jagger on You Tube, from looking down at the world from 30,000 feet, thinking, never in history, never amongst all my ancestors, has this been possible, to fly so high, so see so much. And yet what had seemed so massively exultant, such a pinnacle of human achievement, was only a step towards a more glittering future, when computers encircled the globe and everything, everything, was ready for download or receipt. He could hardly breathe with excitement. There was so much to absorb. He wanted to be taken away. He wanted to see the world change. He wanted to walk along narrow alpine paths and be a million miles from anywhere. He wanted the water to lap in front of his hut, young love a lifetime ago.

He wanted to live it all backwards; to absorb once again everything that had been significant. Some of the best times of his life had been travelling; and for the past 15 years he had been transfixed here, by work, by children. After those first years travelling with them, when he used up his lieu time carting them arond the world on his back, it had been Sydney in one inner suburban setting after another. The dog shit simmering on the pavement. The ravaged air. The closed shops where the government had hoovered every last available dollar off the community and destroyed all enterprise; making it a wasteland for the old inhabitants as new new ethnic communities took over one site after another. It bred colour but remarkably little conflict, as layer after layer of immigrants swept through the city and beyond.

He found the oldest known corners of paradise, in the rich agricultural areas to the north. And at the same time, each week, or most weeks, he would walk briefly past the cul de sac off Elizabeth Street in Paddington, and looked at the house where John Bygate had lived; the one who to him had been the centre and the beginning of everything, the glamorous success story he adored, the trendy house paid for by the sugar daddy, the records lining the wall, hundreds of them, classical, modern, Stravinsky and Janis Joplin; Sylvia Plath books open and read. Daddy, Daddy. He travelled with Harry Godolphin from Kings Cross to the holy citadel, that house where everything he wanted to be lived and breathed, that house whose inner-circle he so desperately wanted to be a part of.

That fabulous person became a derelict. That handsome, handsome man vibrating on the stairs as the acid hallucinations shot through him died of a brain hemorrhage in some dreary Adelaide suburb, unemployed, unemployable, still drinking his flagons of white wine and downing his pills, his beloved pills, and laughing in that knowing snickering way as if he was the only one who got the joke, talking of the psychiatrist who had been such help to him. He arrived, years later; and was so popular, the success story from the city. Their roles had been entirely reversed. Once he had been so in awe; now the subject of his awe was pathetically grateful to see him, and looked, though he did his best to maintain his looks, as if the alcohol was taking its toll. You're happy to be lost in the spaces between your thoughts, his friend said. I'm not, I have to think one after the other. They both laughed. Asia my boy, he said. That's the place for blokes like us. At least there they believe in happy endings.



THE BIGGER STORY:

Looting has turned violent in Haiti's shattered capital Port-au-Prince, with a mob of about 1,000 people fighting for goods in a central street, according to a journalist.

The United Nations says the earthquake, which officials say has killed at least 50,000 people and left 1.5 million homeless, is the worst is it has ever confronted.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has now arrived in the country, which was again rocked by a strong 4.5-magnitude aftershock overnight.

Photographer Carlos Barria says men with stones, knives and hammers are now battling to grab T-shirts, bags, toys and any other items they can find in destroyed houses and shops.

Police present earlier were nowhere to be seen.

"It's anarchy there now, total chaos. The police have gone away," Mr Barria said.

"They are fighting, hitting each other, throwing stones at each other."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/01/17/2794066.htm?section=justin

TONY Abbott's pledge to take full control of the Murray-Darling Basin if elected has been met with widespread disapproval across the irrigation industry, with the Opposition Leader accused of a "simplistic" approach to the management of Australia's largest river system.

On Thursday, Mr Abbott said if he led the Coalition to victory at this year's federal election, and the states resisted the idea of a full federal takeover of the Murray-Darling, he would hold a referendum on the issue.

But his proposal attracted criticism yesterday from industry bodies, including the National Farmers Federation, the National Irrigation Council, the Australian Conservation Foundation and the NSW Irrigation Council.

"It's just ridiculous," said Arlene Buchan, rivers spokeswoman for the Australian Conservation Foundation.

"We welcome the fact that he recognises the importance of fixing the problems facing the Murray-Darling, but the idea of a referendum -- and the timing of this proposal -- is extraordinary.

"This is not the time to be throwing a bomb. After so many years, we are finally at a stage where some real progress is being made in regards to the basin. Mr Abbott seems to forget that the current agreement had its origins under the Howard government and, after much negotiations, also has the support of the states."

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/abbott-mauled-for-talk-of-murray-darling-takeover/story-e6frg6nf-1225820177750

BEIJING — At the elite Tsinghua University here, some students were joking Friday that they had better download all the Internet information they wanted now in case Google left the country.

But to many of the young, well-educated Chinese who are Google’s loyal users here, the company’s threat to leave is in fact no laughing matter. Interviews in Beijing’s downtown and university district indicated that many viewed the possible loss of Google’s maps, translation service, sketching software, access to scholarly papers and search function with real distress.

“How am I going to live without Google?” asked Wang Yuanyuan, a 29-year-old businessman, as he left a convenience store in Beijing’s business district.

China’s Communist rulers have long tried to balance their desire for a thriving Internet and the economic growth it promotes with their demands for political control. The alarm over Google among Beijing’s younger, better educated and more Internet savvy citizens — China’s future elite — shows how wobbly that balancing act can be.

By publicly challenging China’s censorship, Google has stirred up the debate over the government’s claim that constraints on free speech are crucial to political stability and the prosperity that has accompanied it. Even if it is unlikely to pose any immediate threat to the Communist Party, Google’s move has clearly discomfited the government, Chinese analysts say.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/world/asia/17china.html


Bondi Beach In A Dust Storm.

A Cruel and Indifferent Fate

*



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.

If Only We Could

*



The book 'Alcoholics Anonymous' says on page 45 :

"Our human resources, as marshaled by the will, were not sufficient; they failed utterly. Lack of Power that was our dilemma. We had to find a power by which we could live, and it had to be a Power greater than ourselves. Obviously. But where and how were we to find this Power? Well, that's exactly what this book is about. Its main object is to enable you to find a Power greater than yourself which will solve your problem." AA 'Big Book'

However I have come across many people who have reacted strongly against the idea of handing over to a 'power greater than self' as a way of change. It seemed to them that this was a negative approach.

But they did not understand what is involved psychologically: 'self', which we all experience as 'I' or 'me', is in a person, and has no actual power in the world. But because we all experience 'I' or 'me' as real, we think it is 'I' or 'me' that has the power, or should have the power. But 'I' as internal has no power; if you look at it from the objective point of view, it's clear that it is the person that has power, not the person's self. The person's self has enormous influence and importance in the person, but none in the world.

The practice of handing over to a 'power greater than self' recognises that power is not in the person's self. Where the true 'power' of a person, any person, comes from, is a matter of personal, spiritual belief, but will only be found by experiencing the way you are differently, not by thinking about it.

Recognition of 'power greater than self' provides a person with a way of bypassing and letting go of troublesome self, and to change in all sorts of ways that were not possible while he or she was still trapped in experiencing self as the reality.

As we shall see later, self (I or me), is a type of psychological image in a person. Image is automatically not reality, even though it is centrally important in people. Naturally, people who do not understand this think that what is required when someone is functioning irrationally in some way, is more self confidence and more power to the rational self, However, this does not produce the change needed in deep-seated disorders. For deeper disorders, we could say: ' De-power the self and empower the person'.

When this realisation comes to people, it often does so at a level deeper than words or thought. Bill Wilson mentions several times that his realisations came to him without thinking. People have described it as a lifting of a burden, a new freedom, a falling away of the old;

To bring this about there needs be losing of a mistaken faith in the self, of self-confidence, and replaced with confidence in being a person.

http://www.jimmaclaine.com/lgs7.html



It wasn't cruel, it wasn't tormented. It was simply a way of being. He had heard it all, so many times. He had watched the best and the worst. He had seen these self serving rent seekers populating the rooms and the streets, the very fabric of things, their self indulgent ways and astonishing arrogance turning everything to gold. Or mud. He couldn't be warmed, or warned. He didn't believe a word they said, not anymore. I wouldn't piss on half of them if they were on fire, Peter had said, and the bracing shock of this healthy contempt for the masses struck home. He had always had a naive, romanticised faith in the proletariat, that people were essentially good, well meaning; that it was simply a quirk of fate that he wasn't being loved back to life, supported at every moment. He had seen too much crap now.

He had come to view people like dogs. If you were vulnerable they attacked. The secret to survival was never to be vulnerable. They were arguing over the smallest of things. They were shadows lurking on the edge; disembodied voices. He had no faith; not in them, not in the heart of things. There was no way out of things; except surviving through the slow days. He longed for company and became alone. He followed the shadows through the looming dark, as if the love of his life was just around the corner. It was a shock to find so much of it over. He tried to start again but there was no way back. He just wanted to grow younger by the day; and that was not possible.

Everything was disembodied; romantic attachments; meanings, cruel flicks of fate. If only the psychological dependencies could be solved. If only there was a way out of the tangled woods; the repeating thoughts, the encroaching vagueness. The straightforward fear. If there was a way out he did not know it. These were the spaces in between. Each day he walked from one end of the beach to the other, and then up on to the point overlooking the bay. It was a spectacular view. It's like a different city, he thought again, and it was true. Here the rich frolicked amongst the tourists on the long strip of sand. Their children splashed in the beckoning surf. Apart from splashing his bare feet in the shallows, there was no way he was going to immerse himself in that cold terror called the sea, no matter how hot the weather, how many others flocked into paradise.

He couldn't have been more gifted; only to see it all wash away. Brief loves, flashing intimacies, those ghosts twirling through the rooms at World's End, so real he could reach out and touch past lives, his earthly lover on the bed, watching his every move, raptured and enraptured as the withdrawals from sleeping pills brought on a succession of vivid hallucinations. They had been so close. He remembered thinking, so ludicrously, if only I was older, uglier, could be loved for myself and not my looks. Time cures everything; including a surplus of good looks. He had passed back through London years later; and had rung his old lover, now the resident drunk in a pub in Essex; and made all the arrangements, much to the other's excitement, to travel out there. To be reunited in their clumsy, fumbling love. But it was not to be.

As so often; he made the arrangements and then never arrived. And was plagued with guilt at his own indifference, his amorality; his drunken abandonment of all that was near and dear. He could be carried past the roaring crowd; lolling on the carry couch made of reeds; appreciating only dimly the hands reaching out towards him, the eager faces, the adoring looks. How was it possible to imagine being one of them, a commoner, when he was so adored; when destiny had so clearly chosen him for this higher fate. He didn't know and he didn't care. The torturers in the palace barely even marred his consciousness, although he knew there were terrible things that went on there. They were the concerns of his father; and the political caste. He was above and beyond everything; chasing pleasure as a noble goal; ready to fly, to laugh, to be entirely exultant.

These past lives barely reflected into the present, so disengaged had he become from the lineage of the flesh. There was evil. There were the masses. But he had become disembodied from mere earthly concerns. He studied and googled the death of self; as if it was just another academic subject to fill the passing hours; watched the young Eastern suburbs moms pushing their fashionable prams as they walked in their flowing, fashionable clothes, ever so casually expensive; emerging from their multi-million dollar homes to walk along the beaches and linger in the cafes. He wasn't going to be sacred, or resolved. He wasn't going to deny he was disturbed by all the errant nonsense swirling in his disordered brain; the reasons why it was so easy, or so impossible to escape. The project was to build a new person: the project was to die with dignity. Instead it left abandoned landscapes; so beautiful in their half-formed vistas; the swirling, poisonous colours beneath their feet and the flimsy, but nonetheless magnificent structures, swaying in the strange air.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/01/10/2788925.htm?section=justin

The funeral service will be held later today for Indian graduate Nitin Garg, who was stabbed to death in Melbourne last weekend.

Accountancy graduate Nitin Garg was killed while walking to his part-time job at a fast-food restaurant last Saturday night.

Mr Garg's body will be cremated near his family's home in the northern state of Punjab.

Hundreds of mourners are expected to gather at the ceremony to honour the 21-year-old, who was fatally stabbed in the Melbourne suburb of Footscray.

Mr Garg's relatives say they want his death to put an end to assaults on Indians in Victoria.

But the latest alleged attack on another Indian in Australia, 29-year-old Jaspreet Singh, has caused widespread anger in India.

Jaspreet Singh, 29, was attacked in Essendon in Melbourne's north-west shortly before 2.00am (AEDT) yesterday.

He had just come home from a dinner party with his wife and went to park his car when four men poured fluid over him and set him alight.

He is in a stable condition in the Alfred Hospital with burns to 20 per cent of his body.

The incident is headline news in India.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/horror-indian-summer-20100108-lyw0.html

Syed, 24, came to Australia a year ago and has paid about $12,000 for a commercial cooking course. He recently decided he will return to India when his course is completed. ''Sometimes I ask myself why I paid these fees. Did I pay these fees just to be attacked? In my country I can go anywhere, even three in the morning. But here I'm [afraid] to walk around [at] 11pm. I just want to finish my studies and go home. There's no point staying.''

In the 12 months to June 2007, 1082 attacks on Indians in Victoria were reported to police - an assault rate of 1700 in every 100,000. Victorian Indians are 2½ times more likely than non-Indians to be beaten up or knifed. Why? Furious disagreement prevails. The most contentious theory, the one that has caused such damage to Australian-Indian relations, is that Indian students are targeted by Romper Stomper-style teenage thugs, skinheads looking to reassert control over suburbs newly populated by Sikhs and Hindus; an atavistic and violent response by racists sick of Indians working in every cab, service station and every pub they frequent.

Another theory is that Indian students are ''soft targets''. They are ''walking ATMs'' carrying mobile phones, iPods and jewellery as they travel on public transport between university and late-night work shifts.

Alternatively, it's argued the Indian Government and Indian media are whipping up a storm because they were miffed and insulted that Australia refused to sell uranium to India. The snubbed Indian Government consequently chose not to hose down the Indian media frenzy over Melbourne bashings.

Whatever the causes, being Indian in Melbourne in 2010 is not the most comfortable of situations.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Indian-set-on-fire-in-Oz-again-cops-say-no-race-angle/articleshow/5429296.cms

As reports of another Indian being attacked in Melbourne — this time set on fire while parking his car — ruled the airwaves on Saturday, the government appealed for “restraint” in reporting the event, fearing it would damage bilateral relations with Australia.

Jaspreet Singh, living in Essendon, Melbourne, on a spouse visa where his wife is a student, was allegedly doused in flammable liquid and set on fire after 2am by some unidentified assailants. He is currently recovering in a local hospital with 15% burns. The initial police report said there was no evidence that the alleged attack was racially motivated.

The incident, coming a week after the fatal stabbing of Indian student Nitin Garg, has put a definite strain on bilateral ties, just at a time when India and Australia are building a deeper partnership, including Australia trying to get India into the APEC grouping.

In a statement, the foreign office spokesperson said, “The Indian high commissioner in Canberra and consul-general in Melbourne are following up this matter vigorously with the Australian authorities.”

But MEA also added a cautionary note to the coverage of the incidents in the Indian media. “The media is advised to exercise utmost restraint in reporting on these sensitive issues, as it could aggravate the situation and could have a bearing on our bilateral relations with Australia.”

Unconfirmed reports say Singh hails from Yamunanagar in Haryana and was working in Australia as a driver. Other reports said he had gone there for a vocational course and stayed on, while a third account said he was living with his wife Paramjeet and a young child on a spouse visa.

Neighbours interviewed said they heard the sounds of a car explosion but did not see anyone running away from it. ‘The Age’ newspaper in Australia reported that the case appeared more “complicated” than it originally seemed and the arson squad had been called in. Police accounts say there are certain “strange” bits to the story, which made a racially motivated account appear difficult to believe.

Disorder

*



How they lied on their return about the depths of the slimed tunnels they slid into, all festooned with rags and alive with voracious rats, littered and crushed underfoot with the small grey bones of children who had never drawn breath. The poisoned floodwater alcoves along the way alchemised by their long dead lodgers into a peaceful retreat from the city that both defied and drowned them.

Years would pass before this stagnant pool of road waste and overflowing sewerage systems was diverted into the system that fed the Trevally breeding off the north Bondi outlet.

The particular stink pipe that serviced that disgraceful outlet still stands on the Royal Bondi Golf Course today, and just beneath its reinforced bricks a weary track leads down to the infested water and ammoniac air of the old fishing platforms.

The Murk.

Twenty men of all languages would gather down there on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and in the midst of the piss-stinking mist that shrouded them they would cast their long lines into the strangely grey whitewater that bounded in and out off the cliff base down in that cold and shadowed gully, and a base kind of seawater broke against the cliffs there, one that had hidden beneath its surface so much discarded and fouled toilet paper that we all used razors to cut it away from our withdrawn lines.

One mile away to the south Bondi would greet the dawn like an overworked whore on a Sunday morning with dozens of French Letters littering her high water mark.

A litter of love, sluiced down the innumerable waste pipes from the Cross to Dover Heights and all laid out like greasy nipple headed balloons on the sand.

http://kurungabaa.net/2009/10/06/bondi-another-history/



He had already departed the earth, and ever since shuffling off the mortal coil had finally been able to relax. Departing his physical form was an extreme, non-sensical way to achieve inner-peace; but that was it. A grey ghost on the outer outer out-skirts of the group; a shadow flickering far off on the edge. It was only painful if there was something that could be hurt. Armour, hiding behind all those screens, ultimately hadn't worked; leading only to an atrophied creature who couldn't possibly survive in the harsh light of day, the vivid air, the cold splash of waster. And so it was that a former self, an elaborate construct buttressed by experienced and marinated in drugs and alcohol, had blossomed, survived and died, all in a matter of what seemed like minutes.

And so what was left was an old man shuffling along the beach. His grey hair made him invisible to the frolicking young things playing, posing and perving on the beach. There was a wide assortment of languages, as there was a wide assortment of good looks; the handsome Latins, the delicate Germanic blonds with their micro micro bikinis and curves to set any man alight; the fluid Italians, the dark French, the handsome Asian criminals and Lebanese gangsters and tubby little Indian families; all of them crushed together on the expansive bit of sand; the vivid water, the vivid sky. He wasn't himself anymore; and so none of it mattered. He could finally relax. The torture was over.

The boys played at boxing each other in the cul de sac outside. His desire for oblivion came mounting in waves; and each day that he didn't fulfil his destiny, to die as a street alcoholic, was another day when another person had the opportunity to take over. When another day, crisp and clear and clean, could be born all anew, without the angst, the anger, the suffering, the liquid depression and profound despair. A pimply boy crumpled in the back of the tiny plane, mortally embarrassed, the anger of his father filling the cockpit. All below, the world passing beneath them; others went about their enviable lives and he could only look on in envy; in hope that one day their lives would be his, that there was a way out, that we were blessed.

Those were the days when the beat of the Rolling Stones was derided as the devil's music, when bikinis, far less micro than they were today, signalled the end time. It was this fear, that all was about to end, that had permeated every waking moment and populated his dreams. Now his aging mother was falling out of bed, leaping from cliffs in her dreams as she struggled to escape the dying throws. There was always evil afoot. There was always disaster about to overtake. This had transmogrified into the very fabric of things; so that objects were malignant and the very air wicked in its intent. He could have been saved; if only he had accepted a belief in God. Instead that terrible beating, when he had dared to say that he didn't believe in God and had been thoroughly thrashed as a result, backfired.

Now he believed in nothing. All the talk of the Higher Power, these ridiculous constructs people surrendered to and then communed with, these powerful, but entirely artificially invoked spiritual experiences, looked nothing more than absurd. He adopted his old defence, silence. He maintained a charming grace, cross legged, smiling, dazzling in his conversational breadth, but he didn't believe a word. There was so much bullshit. They didn't practice what they preached. They were as narcissistic, as self-centred, as greedy and unforgiving, as much a member of the pack mentality as anyone else. He had decided to leave the city, but ironically had found himself living in one of its nicest pockets, just as he was about to flee.

People drove around in cars worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, status symbols, or symbols of achievement, and he knew no one, no one. Further south, on the beaches of Shellharbour, total strangers nodded and smiled their good mornings. Here, they didn't even notice him. Because there was nothing worthwhile, nothing to be free of. The destiny, the path, the narrative thread, the story that was the person, all of it had disappeared. He couldn't write anymore, he couldn't sing anymore. He had become frozen and it made no difference. He went to the meetings and spoke to no one, never shared. He looked out the window at the vivid sky. He saw the skinny blonds littering the beach. And he cried out: make a difference, please make a difference. Please be there. Please be part of the village. And no one looked, no one noticed. Even the deranged, those living in their alcoves in the far corners of the cliffs, had been displaced; and not even their strange sympathies were there to give him strength, identity, purpose.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/01/08/2788571.htm

The leader of the Sea Shepherd says he still has not been contacted by Australian or New Zealand officials, despite one protester almost being killed in a clash with whalers on Wednesday.

This morning Sea Shepherd's futuristic anti-whaling ship the Ady Gil sank as it was being towed.

Two days ago it was substantially damaged in a collision with Japanese whaling ship the Shonan Maru 2.

A spokesman for the New Zealand foreign minister, Murray McCully, says the protesters should have called his government themselves if they were in need of help.

Both the New Zealand and Australian governments have used the media to ask the protesters to show restraint, but Sea Shepherd captain Paul Watson says that is just not possible.

"We're not going to restrain ourselves from protecting these whales and we're not going to restrain ourselves from upholding international conservation law," he said.

"The Government has shown so much restraint over the years they have done absolutely nothing."

Sea Shepherd says it will continue to chase Japanese harpoon ships in the Southern Ocean.

http://www.yumasun.com/opinion/global-55341-warming-research.html

When I attended Southern Utah University, I started with the supposition that man's activities were causing the average temperatures of the globe to increase. I decided to research this in my science classes and the more I researched the claims and research by pro-global warming scientists, the more I became convinced that man's activities have nothing to do with climate change.

Now with the exposure of e-mails of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, I have been proven right.

Many of these e-mails show what I suspected years ago. I became convinced that people were falsifying data, or selecting data that supports the hypothesis (an unproven idea) of global warming, and ignoring data that does not support their position.

What makes this worse is that for at least 10 years, and perhaps as much as 48 years, the average global temperatures have decreased and the Climate Research Unit has been trying to dismiss this.

Their models (math equations) have said that by now the earth should be so hot that places like Yuma should be unlivable due to extreme heat. Florida would be under water due to ice caps melting. A mathematician in Canada has been asking to see the data and the equations these scientists use, but they refuse to release them. Ask yourself, "What are they trying to hide?"

One of the e-mails from the Climate Research Unit talks about the problem of the warming period of the Middle Ages. One of the statements by the Global Warming "experts" is that the earth is warmer now than it ever has been, particularly in man's history. The Middle Ages warm period lasted for several centuries about 1,000 years ago. The earth was a lot warmer then than it is now.

http://www.businessandmedia.org/articles/2010/20100107133452.aspx

Even popular liberals can come under fire from the media if they offer heretical views on global warming, which many in the media promote with near-religious fervor.

Rolling Stone magazine went after 17 global warming dissenters on Jan. 6, hyperbolically labeling them “The Climate Killers.” Topping the list was Berkshire Hathaway CEO, Obama supporter and media darling Warren Buffett.

The magazine criticized Buffett for “doing far more than bad-mouthing climate legislation – he’s literally banking on its failure” by adding 1.28 million shares of ExxonMobil to his books and acquiring a railroad that hauls coal.

Rolling Stone editor Eric Bates also told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that Buffett “trashed climate change legislation calling it a huge tax saying it will cost jobs.”

That’s not even news, CBSNews.com reported in September that the Obama administration said cap and trade “would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year.” But Obama didn’t make the list of "Killers."

The Heritage Foundation estimated that capping carbon would act as an energy tax of nearly $2,000 on every American household. Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute has said “it would destroy tens of millions of good-paying jobs.”

Also on the Rolling Stone list were a number of predictable targets for left-wing vitriol, from News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch and ExxonMobil’s Rex Tillerson to Sen. James Inhofe and retired physicist Fred Singer. Each person on the list was given a nasty moniker like “the Fake Protestor” or “The Know Nothing.”

http://ricksweblog.ebidz.biz/archives/299

Don’t kill us, enslave us or torture us. Don’t steal from us or unfairly tax us. Don’t tell us which god we must pray to or how we must speak or think. Don’t make us wards of the Nanny State. Let us be free to live our lives as we wish as long as we don’t hurt anyone.

“As for ‘global climate change,’ we don’t understand what all the fuss and fear is about. The climate is always changing. It’s perfectly natural. It’s not a crisis for my species or for humans. We’ve already survived two ice ages 100,000 years long and we’ll survive the next one, which, by the way, has already started.”

“Distinguished Senators, do my species a favor. Do not place us on your Endangered Species list — or any other list. If as lawmakers you feel you must do something positive to help us, follow Thomas Jefferson’s advice and concentrate on protecting our natural rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And then leave us alone.”

When Grandpa finished no one said a word. The room was completely still.

“Clap clap clap, clap, clap.”

It was Senator Specter. He liked Grandpa’s speech so much he was giving it a standing ovation. So were Senator Inhofe and Senator Franken, who were both weeping but for different reasons. So were 11 other senators on the committee and all the people in the room ­ everyone, except Senator Boxer.

As a dozen reporters stampeded over to interview Grandpa, Senator Boxer was already on her cell phone.

“Al,” she whimpered, “You thought ClimateGate was bad. I’ve got even worse news.”

The Dismissal

*



Every religious phenomenon has its history and its derivation from natural antecedents. What is nowadays called the higher criticism of the Bible is only a study of the Bible from this existential point of view, neglected too much by the earlier church. Under just what biographic conditions did the sacred writers bring forth their various contributions to the holy volume? And what had they exactly in their several individual minds, when they delivered their utterances? These are manifestly questions of historical fact, and one does not see how the answer to them can decide offhand the still further question: of what use should such a volume, with its manner of coming into existence so defined, be to us as a guide to life and a revelation? To answer this other question we must have already in our mind some sort of a general theory as to what the peculiarities in a thing should be which give it value for purposes of revelation; and this theory itself would be what I just called a spiritual judgment. Combining it with our existential judgment, we might indeed deduce another spiritual judgment as to the Bible's worth. Thus if our theory of revelation-value were to affirm that any book, to possess it, must have been composed automatically or not by the free caprice of the writer, or that it must exhibit no scientific and historic errors and express no local or personal passions, the Bible would probably fare ill at our hands. But if, on the other hand, our theory should allow that a book may well be a revelation in spite of errors and passions and deliberate human composition, if only it be a true record of the inner experiences of great-souled persons wrestling with the crises of their fate, then the verdict would be much more favorable. You see that the existential facts by themselves are insufficient for determining the value; and the best adepts of the higher criticism accordingly never confound the existential with the spiritual problem.
William James, Varieties of Religious Experience.



The landscape was entirely artificial; half-opened cells as far as the eye could see. The floor, stretching to infinity, was reminiscent in appearance to a vast stadium littered with opened, opaque egg cartons made of plastic, with mysterious swirls of a disturbing, poisoning pink moving in the layers beneath. There wasn't anything there. These were the empty days. If it was all about the recreation of self, he had entirely failed. And so had become, in this journey into the inner, just another wasted soul. Derelict, as the saying goes, inside his own soul. And so it was that observer status was born anew, because there was no other role, no other function, no other person to be. Not with his limited gifts.

The Education Department should hire you, the boy said to his mother on Christmas Day, and parade you around in schools, saying: this is what will happen to you if you keep taking drugs. She laughed, that brazen, maniacal cackle that they all had, as they all became the same person, in between the sweeps of tears and the rising hysteria. She scratched at the sores on her legs, which were festering and poisonous. I'm on two different types of antibiotics and my blood has gone septic, she said, and if ever an outer appearance had mirrored an inner, this was it. But he had been blind to it all, blind for years, hadn't seen what was staring him in the face, hadn't even pretended there was a solution. He fell off the wagon into comforting despair because he missed the company and adventure, their little clique getting drunker and drunker, laughing and laughing.

But in the cold light of the hungover dawns there was nothing to laugh about. Their lives had become pathetic. Gersch's house was falling apart, and he was clearly in a great deal of pain, yet at the same time he was a wonderfully intelligent and talented man. The best time of his life had been selling hash to backpackers in a London guesthouse, when everything was on tap, girls, kudos, easy distractions. It had all seemed so much fun. And Bridgette too, who he did not speak to, or but rarely, was there with her schooner of beer and her neuroses and the world flying high, hoping for the knight in shining armour, making a fool of herself in front of the randy, drunken men who after a few would screw anything and not care.

Because you could always wake up in the morning and get on your way, extricate yourself from her clinging arms and seek salvatioin in the routines of the day. It was all too cruel. He was happy to be seen somewhere else. And yet time and again he went to that beer garden at the Glengowrie, out of sight of the street and away from anyone he knew in those different, straighter world, and joined the party that was always going on there. The Czech girls were back, showing the Aussie girls what partying was all about. The leader of the pack, her name anglicised as Jane, showed no adherence whatsoever to any normal morality, and was still young enough and good looking enough to get away with it. There were always more handsome strangers; and even more handsome local boys, fit, tight muscles, earnest faces, a ready smile. Happy to sweep a girl off her feet.

It was a long time since he had swept anyone off their feet. He had become a criminal lurking only briefly in the twilight of the real. They could tell he wasn't all there; that his head was somewhere else. I was effed and now I'm fabulous and I owe it all to you guys queue applause, the routine went, and he pleaded with fate to let him just be an ordinary person; not to be overwhelmed with anxiety or distress. Not to be in a mental state where the only solution was oblivion. Writing himself off had become not only a passtime but a destiny, filling every crack in the day, every waking moment. A persistent fly made his life hell; as he sat on the balcony with his laptop, everyting was going, everything was gone, it was time to surrender to a higher fate. If only, if only.

If only these aberrant desires were not so real. If only cognitive behavioiural therapy really worked; and he could alter his thinking, his feeling and behaviour; become normal, that great ambition of the permanently damaged. Instead that tiny creature that was the real person kept skuttling across artificial landscapes, dodging the poisonous pink fumes emerging from the chaotic floor, and would rise up and unite. Margaret, skinny Irish Margaret who had worked hard all her life and once drunk would tell the same stories over and over, almost word for word the same. He sat and had virtually the same conversation with her as he had had before, listening to her litany of pain and injustice and tough upbringing, only to burst into tears. Was it simply self-pity; that the whole world was so infinitely sad. He lived in a world of therapeutic jargon, yet not one person said a genuine hello. It was too much to expect; they were only human after all. And his sense of difference and of isolation solidified; just like that. There was no turning back. He was born to die a street alcoholic; and that was that.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.businessinsider.com/monckton-lies-about-calling-climate-activists-hitler-youth-2009-12

Christopher Monckton told the AP in an interview Monday that he did not call a group of young climate activists in Copenhagen "Hitler Youth," but that it was a trio of Germans and "a Dane" who did.

Unfortunately for the Viscount, video of the incident has been all over the web since last week.

Huffington Post: After lying to Associated Press about his Hitler youth comments, Monckton then proceeded to compare the climate activists to Adolf Hitler's fascist army, saying the activists were attempting to stifle free speech, using tactics "last seen here when the Nazis occupied Denmark.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/climate-change-rebel-bites-back/story-e6frezz0-1225816361017

HIS Excellency Mr Kevin Rudd,

Your speech has prompted several leading Australian citizens to invite me to explain myself in a series of lectures in Australia later this month.

I am writing to offer personal briefings on why "global warming" is a non-problem to you and other party leaders during my visit.

You say I am one of "those who argue that any multilateral action is by definition evil". On the contrary: my first question is whether any action at all is required, to which the objective economic and scientific answer is - no.

Even if multilateral action were required, which it is not, national governments in the West are by tradition democratically elected. The climate ought not to be used as a shoddy pretext for international bureaucratic-centralist dictatorship.

You say I am one of "those who argue that climate change does not represent a global market failure".

Yet it is only recently that opinion sufficient to constitute a market signal became apparent in the documents of the IPCC, which is, however, a political rather than a scientific entity. There has scarcely been time for a "market failure".

Besides, corporations are falling over themselves to cash in on the giant financial fraud against the little guy that carbon taxation and trading have already become in the goody-two-shoes EU and will become in Australia if you get your way.

http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/12/11/taking-tea-with-professor-plimer-and-lord-monckton-at-the-other-copenhagen/

The walls of the tiny room where the 50-odd sceptics gather are almost invisible behind the mass of rococo artworks: squint and you could be in the Louvre. “We are certainly small in quantity, but what we lack in numbers we make up for in quality,” boasts Christopher Monckton, chairman of the event and former adviser to Margaret Thatcher.

Buoyed by the recent release of the stolen Climate-gate emails, the sceptics are in fine spirits — one of the gatherings says their struggle is the 21st century equivalent of Galileo’s attempts to disprove the Catholic Church’s claim that the Earth was the centre of the universe.

Australian Ian Plimer, geologist and author of Heaven and Earth, is one of the stars and despite initial doubts — “What is Crikey doing at an event like this?” — agrees to answer some questions on COP15 and the Senate’s rejection of the Rudd government’s ETS:

Attending the Copenhagen Climate Change Challenge is to enter a parallel universe, a 100% irony-neutral zone.

The East Anglia professors — “Let’s sue for fraud!” — are pilloried for manipulating evidence to prove their hypothesis. But no one bats an eyelid when UK lawyer and businessman Stewart Wheeler says: “Maybe what I am about to say is not completely accurate but it’ll make the point I hope.”

At the conclusion of Wheeler’s talk, chairman Christopher Monckton lauds him for speaking up for the “common man on the bus”. Then he remarks, no pun intended: “I know where your castle is.” Turns out Wheeler is a multimillionaire who had enough spare change lying around in 2001 to donate £5 million towards the Conservative Party election campaign.

The speakers pat themselves on their backs for their “evidence-based” and “apolitical” presentations. Yet politics, of a distinctly right-of-centre variety, dominates the conference. Several of the participants boast of their membership of the anti-European Union UK Independence Party.

Professor Plimer says that not only do Al Gore and algae sound alike: “They are both scum.”

The suggestion that mankind should be demonising water rather than co2, given that 300 Americans drown in their bathtubs each year, is greeted by the reply: “I’m sure the 300 are all Democrats.”

Concrete

*



A storm raged above the city, making of the sky a darkly boiling mass. Fissures of lightning split the gloom with an eye-blinding brightness, as though they were the concentrated blues of the everyday sky fighting to prise the blackness of the clouds apart and shine upon the ground again, however briefly. The westerly waters of Crater Lake leapt against the city's ancient harbour walls and surged amongst the deserted outer docks. It made even the ships within the sheltered inner quays roll and shift uneasily, their hulls compressing the cane fenders to make them creak and crack in protest, while their tall masts swung across the black sky like a forest of disputing metronomes.

Iain M Banks. Inversions.



They slogged it out, our politicians, while from his balcony he watched a woman walk past with a ferret on a lease. They were locked here for the summer. Every day seemed a million years long. From his alcove in the north Bondi cliffs he watched as the dolphins leapt clear of the water. All was not lost; because he was here, bewildered, unexplained, watching the lovers on the rocks while out to sea the dolphins leapt and leapt, creating cries of astonishment from those on the shore observant enough to see. Some were blind to everything but the luxury of the heat. Or the cosiness of nearby cafes. For Lease, shouted the sign outside one of the upmarket townhouses overlooking Australia's most famous beach. Hordes of back packers moved to and fro.

It had been wetter than normal, cold over summer when normally the beach baked in the Great Australian heat and tourists glared pick with the unaccustomed shock of the sun. It sounds terrible, but I've never loked at him that wahy, the loud grating voice said behind him. Eighty percent of blokes... He looked to see who was talking; and saw a chunky blond, far from annerexic, overtaking him, not drawing breath despite his proximithy to what should have been a private conversation. If there had been any decency in the world. A Wicked van is turning in the cul de sac outisde his apartment; and they, too, with their brightly coloured exhortations: "Don't Drink and Drive, Smoke Pot and Fly" says one, with marijuana leaves painted all over it. Almost everyone laughs as they walk past.

There was a whole pod, or more accurately a series of pods, moving up the coast. Sometimes more than half a dozen of them would be in the air at any one time. They were all heading in the same direction, north, and as they leapt through the waves seemed to know precisely where they were going; some watery highway. I can tell you're not drinking, you've got hyour stride back, a neighbour had told him. And the festive season kept cheering and cheering, the bouncing waves, the tumult and the shouting, the drifting luminescent smoke from the fireworks, the Rabelassian scenes of excess spilling out from every luxury apartment in town; another mercedes convertible turning in the cul de sac; another spritely, high maintenance blond taking up more space than she deserved.

There was so much sickness all around him; evil contempt; deranged soldiers; gleaming, bulging eyes; and yet all that was in some suffering, subterranean world which bore no relationship whatsoever to this court circle of indulgence, the glittering wealth of the inner ring, the frothy lives and fruitless disputes. Oh how they talked, those excited girls, as they walked up and down the beach; past the fat businessmen having their once a year splash in the sea with their overweight children; the handsome Italians, the chattering Spaniards. Sometimes he walked past a pure stream of French. American tourists stretched themselves on the rocks, flaunting their hard handosme bodies in front of fauning girlfriends; emoting, moving. He watched everyuthing from his aerie; and could never enter.

A man with his shirt off smokes a cigarette on his balconhy opposite. The park is quiet; the neighbourhood kids off somewhere, causing trouble somewhere else. There wasn't any of the dark despair that had illuminated every wating moment in the inner west; here the saddest thing in sight was a lone gum tree spiking towards the sky, a remnant of a former green valley. The suburbs oldest houses were little more than a hundred metres away; and everything spoke of other lives, of paths which should have been taken, common sense decisions which would have made old age so much more comfortable. Everything had blossomed and everything had died. Trust no one3 remained the simplest motto. Surrender yourself to this simple program, the didacts said, and all he could think was, they're mad, they're mad.

Finally the last of the dolphin pods passed in front of him and the sea resumed its steel grey monotony, the currents visible from this great height, his jealousy of the common man paramount. It is the illusion or the ambition of every alcoholic to be able to drink normally, he heard someone say. Each foot in front of the other meant a failed life; a time that had passed. He couldn't wait to get away, to begin again. To reconstruct a different person. To no longer be derelict inside his own soul. The final splash of the dolphins and the great bay once again settled into its eternal piece, the murmur of holidayu makers, the bustling of the clubs, the memories of recent celebrations fading as the suburb returned to work. Everyone else had a life. He had observer status. It was time to move on. He could hardly control his desire to leave paradise; much less enjoy the moment.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/waylon-lewis/john-mackey-whole-foods-c_b_409842.html

But I'm finally losing it, and he's finally losing me.

The below excerpt is from a riveting just-released profile in The New Yorker. It represents Mackey's latest foot-in-mouth jaunt through self-delighted devil's-advocate frankness:


...One of the books on the list was "Heaven and Earth: Global Warming--the Missing Science," a skeptical take on climate change. Mackey told me that he agrees with the book's assertion that, as he put it, "no scientific consensus exists" regarding the causes of climate change; he added, with a candor you could call bold or reckless, that it would be a pity to allow "hysteria about global warming" to cause us "to raise taxes and increase regulation, and in turn lower our standard of living and lead to an increase in poverty." One would imagine that, on this score, many of his customers, to say nothing of most climate scientists, might disagree. He also said, "Historically, prosperity tends to correlate to warmer temperatures."

I don't want to be lost, Mr. Mackey. I love that a libertarian entrepreneur with guts to speak his mind, a la Apple's Jobs, is in charge of one of the greatest green success stories since...well, ever.

Still, as Al Gore said a year or so ago, the time for argument is past. There's a clear consensus among scientists--90% agree that Climate Change is significantly caused by human activities. 94% agree that it's a real and present danger, not a far-off hypothetical fear for science fiction writers to have fun with.

If Climate Change were an "Evil" empire or terrorist group--and let's not kid ourselves, it represents the possibility of a far more pervasive, lasting threat than either to all of us, and our precious economies around the earth--we'd gird ourselves for war. We wouldn't tolerate cynics. Support the troops!, we'd cry. It's time for that same sense of pulling-together, of focus.

It's time to go to War against Climate Change.

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/secondhandsmoke/2010/01/03/global-warming-hysteria-britain-facing-coldest-winter-in-100-years/

This can’t be right. As much of the USA chatters in the deep freeze–N. Carolina facing a once in a generation cold snap–weather folk in the UK warn it is facing one of the coldest winter in 100 years. From the story:

Britain is bracing itself for one of the coldest winters for a century with temperatures hitting minus 16 degrees Celsius, forecasters have warned. They predicted no let up in the freezing snap until at least mid-January, with snow, ice and severe frosts dominating. And the likelihood is that the second half of the month will be even colder…

Weather patterns were more like those in the late 1970s, experts said, while Met Office figures released on Monday are expected to show that the country is experiencing the coldest winter for up to 25 years.

Oh dear. That’s almost as far back as back when “the scientists” were predicting a new ice age. But at least the polar bears will be happy.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/6795858.html

Now that Copenhagen is past history, what is the next step in the man-made global warming controversy? Without question, there should be an immediate and thorough investigation of the scientific debauchery revealed by “Climategate.”

If you have not heard, hackers penetrated the computers of the Climate Research Unit, or CRU, of the United Kingdom's University of East Anglia, exposing thousands of e-mails and other documents. CRU is one of the top climate research centers in the world. Many of the exchanges were between top mainstream climate scientists in Britain and the U.S. who are closely associated with the authoritative (albeit controversial) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Among the more troubling revelations were data adjustments enhancing the perception that man is causing global warming through the release of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other atmospheric greenhouse gases.

Particularly disturbing was the way the core IPCC scientists (the believers) marginalized the skeptics of the theory that man-made global warming is large and potentially catastrophic. The e-mails document that the attack on the skeptics was twofold. First, the believers gained control of the main climate-profession journals. This allowed them to block publication of papers written by the skeptics and prohibit unfriendly peer review of their own papers. Second, the skeptics were demonized through false labeling and false accusations.

Climate alarmists would like you to believe the science has been settled and all respectable atmospheric scientists support their position. The believers also would like you to believe the skeptics are involved only because of the support of Big Oil and that they are few in number with minimal qualifications.

But who are the skeptics? A few examples reveal that they are numerous and well-qualified. Several years ago two scientists at the University of Oregon became so concerned about the overemphasis on man-made global warming that they put a statement on their Web site and asked for people's endorsement; 32,000 have signed the petition, including more than 9,000 Ph.Ds. More than 700 scientists have endorsed a 231-page Senate minority report that questions man-made global warming. The Heartland Institute has recently sponsored three international meetings for skeptics. More than 800 scientists heard 80 presentations in March. They endorsed an 881-page document, created by 40 authors with outstanding academic credentials, that challenges the most recent publication by the IPCC. The IPCC panel's report strongly concludes that man is causing global warming through the release of carbon dioxide.

Crawling Days

*




Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.
John Keats.

http://www.enotes.com/bright-star

In the summer of 1819 Keats and his friend James Rice left for an extended stay on the Isle of Wight off the southern coast of England. Keats had spent time alone on the Isle in the spring of 1817, reading Shakespeare and receiving the inspiration that led to the long poem "Endymion" as well as some of his most famous insights about the nature of art. He hoped the 1819 journey would prove equally invigorating, but he was distracted by his troubled love for Fanny Brawne. Keats had met her in December, 1818, but he was having trouble fully committing to their relationship. He wrote several letters to Fanny during his stay on the Isle, and one in particular seems to give insight into "Bright Star! Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art." In the letter, he writes, "I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute." Keats's biographer Aileen Ward writes that while composing the letter, Keats witnessed the planet Venus rising outside his window. At that moment, Ward says, "doubt and distraction left him; it was only beauty, Fanny's and the star's, that mattered."

Jane Campion's film Bright Star has just been released in Australia.



A tiny figure skated out from beneath the crashing waves. They had been cruel days, but only for the fading, battered selves. It's that time of year, with the build up to the Australian Open. Jelena Dockic is playing in the Brisbane International. The nation holds its breath; after being trashed by Pakistan in the cricket. Now her serve has been broken. And all our hopes for the underdog are broken; and heroes die as they should have been born. There are backpackers everywhere. The ridiculous cost of everything; the nightmare imposed from above. It was so cruel; that's all he could say. It was all so devestating. He didn't know who he was anymore. If they were heartbroken; there was no showing it. The young, the restless, the beautiful, they were everywhere.

Everywhere but where he was, everywhere but in his soul. We're in the final furlong; Michael kept saying. Maybe it was true. The long climb led nowhere. Circling whirls of confusion; darkness and collapse. Everything had been so black; inky in its astonishing darkness. He wasn't going to be compromised. There had to be a way to rebuild the old self. There had to be a way to start again. But everyone was trapped in these fragile frames. There wasn't going to be an easy way out. He couldn't see his way clear. There was disappointment; everywhere. But he wanted to tell simple stories; paint pictures with words. He wanted to be born again. The viciousness and contempt which had been dished out; he could knife those who had betrayed him; the young guns who had been out to overthrow him; the fragile determination which had been so easily overturned.

It was a wonderful party; wasn't it; Polly slurred. He looked out at the puffs of smoke drifting across the city; the red glow from the fading fireworks as 2010 began; not just a new year but a new decade. They were in the court circle; the Rabelaisian scenes as partygoers filled the apartments with their spectacular views of Sydney. Weirdo's outside, the kids said, despite his repeated lectures on showing some respect towards their mother. I know she's a difficult person, he said. But it doesn't matter. But it did matter, of course. They were angry at the chaos, the madness that had been imposed upon them. He might be lost, but there were others even more lost. He might feel as if he was surrounded by people decades younger and thousands of times happier; but there were others who had never come back.

There was a curious mix at the final party of the year. We were all compromised. 2009; everyone sighed. Terrible year; it was generally agreed. He became even more silent, crossing his legs in a sign of sophistication; but wordless. Silence had been his only defence; always. As he was beaten he retreated behind every vale he could possible pull. As a young teenager he had walked along the beach, waiting to die after swallowing a couple of packets of aspirin, and when he didn't die, suffering instead a sore stomach for years afterwards, he trundled home, only to beaten again, looking up in agony through a veil of tears thinking; one day I'll write about this, one day I'll be somebody; one day I won't be hurt, I won't be punished for being myself; no one will beat me. It was only ever partially true.

In the final decades he had become a Calamity Jane; attracting disaster and zero sympathy. Nothing but an odd ball. Some people attract disaster. He attracted catastrophe. I've never known anyone so unhappy for so long; the photographer said, and he shrugged it off as he shrugged off everything. Nothing made any sense. If there had been any purpose, any mission, it was impossible to determine exactly what it was. He painted himself as the observer; here to watch, record, document, here to paint the pain and smile at the wicked courtesies of those around him. Flashing bodies. Astonishing good looks. They were everywhere. And there was no continuous narrative structure. Nothing could be recorded. He would not be rewarded for such savage discontent, such savage thought disorder. If only their narrative had survived.

They might be in the final furlong but none of the disparate elements had been sewn together. Surrender to the program; they said; and he couldn't think of a bigger load of garbage or a greater array of idiots to which to surrender. It was clear insanity. Trust no one. Betray yourself. Come hither, up from the depths. It was time to leave the city he had lived in all his life. It was time to end one story and begin another. Friends dismissed, shadows chased. We were so cruel, fitful, easily punished, easily quashed. All that wealth; he could hear the laughter from the neighbouring towers. The Bridge, the Opera House, the glistening harbour. The fireworks blossomed in balls of colour across the city. Cheers drifted up from the apartments below. The surrounding partygoers cheered; he was alone; always alone; and smiled when a drunk gay man groped him as his boyfriend watched.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,,26548375-2682,00.html

AN HISTORIC monoplane - a relic of Sir Douglas Mawson's 1911-14 expedition - has been found in Antarctica thanks to freakish luck after a three-year search.

An Australian heritage carpenter stumbled on the remains of the craft - the first Vickers aircraft ever made - on New Year's Day at Cape Denison.

The cast iron framework of the plane was revealed by an unusually low tide and reduced ice cover.

``It's a remarkable find in remarkable circumstances,'' chairman of the Mawson's Huts Foundation David Jensen said.

``We began the search three summers ago and thought we might have a reasonable chance of finding it with all the equipment provided to us by sponsors.''

Nearly a century after it was abandoned by Mawson, the old Vickers was spotted sitting among rocks in a few centimetres of water during one of the lowest tides recorded at Commonwealth Bay.

``They would not have been found had the tide not been so low and the ice cover at Cape Denison at its lowest for several years - it was a fluke find,'' Mr Jensen said in a statement.

``The Vickers was an historic aircraft and part of Mawson's remarkable story of Antarctic exploration.''

The aircraft, built just eight years after the Wright brothers' first flight and the first produced by the Vickers factory in Britain, was also the first to be taken to a polar region.

http://www.theage.com.au/sport/cricket/pakistan-attack-crushes-australia-20100103-lmzj.html

Ricky Ponting’s decision to bat first on a rain-affected SCG pitch backfired badly as Australia was bowled out for 127 on the first day of the rain-affected second Test against Pakistan at the SCG.

Mitchell Johnson top-scored with 38 and was one of just four Australians to reach double figures.

Sami removed Phillip Hughes and Ponting for ducks in successive deliveries in the day’s fourth over. Hughes was caught at second slip, playing a typically full-blooded drive.

For the second successive Test against Pakistan, Ponting fell caught on the leg-side boundary, flicking a ball off his hip as the crowd watched in horror.

The shot raised doubts over whether Ponting has recovered from the elbow injury which he carried into last week’s first Test against Pakistan in Melbourne.

Sami narrowly missed having Shane Watson lbw next ball to claim a hat-trick.

A nervous Hughes, recalled for his sixth Test for the injured Simon Katich (elbow), gave a simple chance to gully from his first ball but Umar Akmal dropped it cold off Sami’s bowling in the second over.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/03/kurt-westergaard-cartoon-muhammad-denmark

Danish police admitted yesterday that a Somalian caught breaking into the home of a cartoonist whose work sparked riots across the Muslim world five years ago was a would-be assassin with links to al-Qaida.

The 28-year-old had an axe and a knife when he was shot and wounded by police late on Friday night after cartoonist Kurt Westergaard heard windows being broken and pressed a panic alarm at his house in Aarhus.

News of the attack on Westergaard, 74, who was with his five-year-old granddaughter at the time, shocked many in Denmark who had believed the country's brush with Islamist extremism was consigned to the past.

Westergaard told his employer, the Jyllands-Posten daily, that he had locked himself and the child in the bathroom as the assailant shouted "revenge" and "blood" and tried to smash his way into the house. "My grandchild did fine," he told the newspaper. "It was scary. It was close. Really close. But we did it."

Westergaard has lived amid tight security with a special "safe room" inside his house ever since his caricature of the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban was first published by Jyllands-Posten in 2005. Islamic law prohibits any depiction of the prophet for fear it would lead to idolatry. The cartoon, one of 12, outraged many Muslims, who make up around 3% of Denmark's 5.5 million population.

It provoked a vigorous debate about free speech then, when other newspapers reprinted the caricatures in 2006 as an act of solidarity with the heavily criticised Jyllands-Posten, it triggered violence in a number of countries.

Three Danish embassies were attacked and at least 50 people died in rioting in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Several young Muslims have since been convicted in Denmark of planning bomb attacks, partly in protest at the cartoons. In 2008, Osama bin Laden said that Europe would be punished for the cartoons.