Total Bastards

*



New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know the neighbourhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well. Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within. The world was outside of him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him to dwell on any one thing for very long. Motion was of the essence, the act of putting one foot in front of the other and allowing himself to follow the drift of his own body. By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built for himself, and he realised that he had no intention of ever leaving it again.

Paul Auster, City of Glass.



He met Hillary absolutely by chance in the city. He hadn't laid eyes on her for at least ten, perhaps more, years. She was still the same person, but older, obviously, thin, a good looking woman riddled with unexplained neuroses, always tense and struggling with some internal drama. They went for coffee, in the old converted stone toilets on the side of Hyde Park, once one of the city's most famous beats, where men stood ten abreast wanking into the stainless steel urinal, all eyes and weird tension. Now the place is yet another upmarket Sy8dney cafe, where the tiniest biscuit will set you back four dollars and the owner is Italian, or faux Italian.

Her life had been a matter of letting go, she said, of almost all attention to physical or material things. There had been no children. There had been no job. There was no car, no house, no property. She worked occasionally as a gardener, but it was winter and there was little work. She lived at Mackerell Beach, an isolated cove on Pittwater. The last ferry over was at five; after which it was completely isolated. Once, only a few years ago, there had been a thriving community of 90 people there. Now she was one of the last, there were only 14 left. Most of the houses were owned now by wealthy Sydney siders. One was an architect designed masterpiece owned by a wealthy woman who owned so many houses she genuinely forgot she owned it. When she remembered, she sent her secretary to investigate. She had only been there in person twice, that chrome and black masterpiece. Hillary did her gardening.

She was going to Cockatoo Island to look at the Bienalle art installations, and to wander around the island, which was a fascinating slice of Sydney history by any measure. He hadn't been there since the 1980s, when as a young and comparatively inexperienced reporter he had been sent to cover the auction of all the old equipment from the ship building yards. The sale had been a crying tragedy from the very beginning, the rape and pillage of what could have been an astonishing working museum. The island was covered with red gums when Europeans arrived in the harbour in 1788. In the 1830s it had been used as a prison for allegedly recalcitrant prisoners. Holes were dug in the ground and the prisoners were thrown in and left to rot. Their food was thrown in through a hole at the top. It was just another example of the unspeakable cruelty of the English.

The island became the major ship building yard from the mid 1800s; and the last ship was built there in the early 1980s. There was more than a a century of working class life immaculately preserved there; the girly calendars from the 1940s still hanging on the walls, hundreds of lathes and giant machines whose function he couldn't quite determine. But it was a gold mine of industrial heritage. And the bastards in government, a Labor government if he remembered rightly, couldn't have cared less. All these massive old working sheds were stripped and much of the material sold off as scrap metal.

They caught the ferry out there; in one of those random days in Sydney where you can end up on one of the most beautiful harbours in the world more or less by accident, and he relayed this story of the pillage of this astonishing place; a place where thousands of men had laboured for more than a century building the nation's ships. Labour princeling Kim Beazely was Defence Minister at the time, and much of the equipment was being transferred over to Western Australia, to the shipping yards there. It was appalling greed; smashing this heritage for a few bob, for scrap metal.
It was then I realised that Labour has no respect whatsoever for its working class constituency, and no respect for the industrial heritage in which the men which made the party worked.

This trend in Labour has only worsened, with their takeover in the 1970s by numerous interest groups, urban greens, feminists, proponents of multiculturalism. They sold their soul and betrayed their origins long ago; and the ransacking of Cockatoo Island was a classic example. I told this story on the phone; of going back to the office to write the story, in the days before mobile phones, of trying frantically to find some urban architect or urban historian who would condemn what was happening. Such types were rare those days, wankers who couldn't be bothered answering their phones, or government employees too gutless to stand up. I couldn't find anyone to utter a single word of protest; and so I wrote the story and lamented in protest.

Nor were their voices raised in the coming days, and this tragedy of rape and pillage passed into the annals of Sydney history almost without notice. And now they're holding art exhibitions out their in those wonderfully atmospheric, utterly stripped old buildings. Putridly bad astonishingly boring video installations which somehow pass as art; celebrating more often than not the working class cultures of other countries, Spanish, Italian, American. The Chomsky abstract was nothing but a poor quality black and white video the great man himself going on about the evils of giant energy companies, as if we had never heard it before. Another exhibition celebrated the old posters of the Black Panthers. Yet another showed footage of an Italian workers uprising.

Here in the wreckage of our own working class culture. Here in the place where the bastards had stripped everything from this wonderful place. Here, now, a massively government funded art show of talentless and feeble exhibitions celebrating international working class culture in the raped and pillaged remnants of our own. It was an irony lost on almost everybody. It's nesting season for sea gullls, which normally breed on rocky islands off the coast, but hundreds of them have made the island their rookery, sitting on their dark green speckled eggs, occasionally protecting a little furry grey bundle. Everywhere you went the gulls squawked aggressively if you came too near. They put on a far more interesting exhibition than the art itself.



THE BIGGER STORY:

Skeptical quotes from Novelist Michael Crichton:

"I would like to suggest a few symbolic actions that right—might really mean something. One of them, which is very simple, 99% of the American population doesn’t care, is ban private jets. Nobody needs to fly in them, ban them now. And, and in addition, [APPLAUSE] "Let’s have the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council), the Sierra Club and Greenpeace make it a rule that all of their members, cannot fly on private jets. They must get their houses off the [electrical] grid. They must live in the way that they’re telling everyone else to live. And if they won’t do that, why should we? And why should we take them seriously? [APPLAUSE]"

"I suddenly think about my friends, you know, getting on their private jets. And I think, well, you know, maybe they have the right idea. Maybe all that we have to do is mouth a few platitudes, show a good, expression of concern on our faces, buy a Prius, drive it around for a while and give it to the maid, attend a few fundraisers and you’re done. Because, actually, all anybody really wants to do is talk about it."

"I mean, haven’t we actually raised temperatures so much that we, as stewards of the planet, have to act? These are the questions that friends of mine ask as they are getting on board their private jets to fly to their second and third homes. [LAUGHTER]"

"Everyday 30,000 people on this planet die of the diseases of poverty. There are, a third of the planet doesn’t have electricity. We have a billion people with no clean water. We have half a billion people going to bed hungry every night. Do we care about this? It seems that we don’t. It seems that we would rather look a hundred years into the future than pay attention to what’s going on now. I think that's unacceptable. I think that’s really a disgrace."

Skeptical quotes of University of London’s emeritus professor of biogeography Philip Stott:

"What we see in this is an enormous danger for politicians in terms of their hypocrisy. I’m not going to say anything about Al Gore and his house. [LAUGHTER] But it is a very serious point."

"In the early 20th century, 95% of scientists believe in eugenics. [LAUGHTER] Science does not progress by consensus, it progresses by falsification and by what we call paradigm shifts."

"The first Earth Day in America claimed the following, that because of global cooling, the population of America would have collapsed to 22 million by the year 2000. And of the average calorie intake of the average American would be wait for this, 2,400 calories, would good it were. [LAUGHTER] It’s nonsense and very dangerous. And what we have fundamentally forgotten is simple primary school science. Climate always changes."

"Angela Merkel the German chancellor, my own good prime minister (Tony Blair) for whom I voted -- let me emphasize, arguing in public two weeks ago as to who in Annie get the gun style could produce the best temperature. ‘I could do two degrees C said Angela.’ ‘No, I could only do three said Tony.’ [LAUGHTER] Stand back a minute, those are politicians, telling you that they can control climate to a degree Celsius.”

“And can I remind everybody that IPCC that we keep talking about, very honestly admits that we know very little about 80% of the factors behind climate change. Well let’s use an engineer; I don’t think I’d want to cross Brooklyn Bridge if it were built by an engineer who only understood 80% of the forces on that bridge. [LAUGHTER]”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/us/politics/26YORK.html

Clinton Tells Her Supporters to Back Obama

DENVER – In a ballroom overflowing with many of her most diehard supporters, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday implored New York Democrats to work as hard to elect Senator Barack Obama as they worked for her.
Skip to next paragraph 2008 Democratic Convention
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Mrs. Clinton, while acknowledging that true party unity may take time, repeatedly told them it would be disastrous for the country to endure four more years of a Republican in the White House. Despite news reports of lingering tensions between her campaign and Mr. Obama’s, Mrs. Clinton sought to dispel those notions in her remarks.

“We were not all on the same side as Democrats, but we are now,” the senator said. Mrs. Clinton also took issue with a just-released ad from the John McCain campaign that questioned why Mr. Obama did not select her as his running mate, and used footage of her criticizing the Illinois senator during the primary campaign.

“Let me state what I think about their tactics and these ads,” she said a bit mischievously. “I’m Hillary Rodham Clinton and I do not approve of that message.”

The crowd rose to its feet and started shouting, “Hillary! Hillary!”

The event was emotional at times, and members of the audience interrupted her frequently with hearty applause and numerous standing ovations. People pressed a rope line to greet and hug her, some with tears in their eyes.

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_10296609?source=most_emailed

BEIJING - By the third day of the Olympics, I had grasped the picture here. Loud and clear. With a cup of rice on the side.

I was at a restaurant around the corner from our hotel. I'd been there a few days earlier. Same waitress. She spoke English and exuded fun. But this time, before I could order, she had a special menu item she wanted to discuss.

"Eight gold," she said, holding up her fingers to show me the number. "China. Eight gold."

This would be a continuing theme.

As we learned during the opening ceremony two weeks ago, the Chinese invented gunpowder and paper.

As we learned before Sunday night's closing ceremony, the Chinese also invented the constantly updated Olympic scoreboard.

In 28 years of covering the Olympics, I had never seen anything like it. People always keep track of who's winning, of course. That's kind of the point. But the medal count is not supposed to be an official part of the Games. Usually, you see it only in newspapers and during the TV coverage.

Not here. The medal scoreboards were everywhere. On giant screens in the public squares. On small screens in the subway. At the immense Oriental Plaza shopping mall downtown there was a printed medal update posted daily at every escalator. Not to mention on the fingers of my waitress.

China was at the top, naturally. Thanks to a huge government push and huge government funding, the country made a huge improvement over its performance four years ago


Countryside near Gunnedah, NSW.

How Amazing Is That

*



Daddy

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

Sylvia Plath



What was that, where we reached into the dereliction inside out own souls? Their unwashed bodies stank. Their eyes, in various states of glaze, told not just of the previous nights misadventures, but of lifetimes beyond the law. They snarled and spat, spewing out right wing tirades. The country was being taken over by the Vietnamese. And the snarling tides. First the Greeks. Then the Italians. Then the Lebanese. There had always been the Chinese. They spat and fumed, in their ragged clothes, many of them toothless or near toothless, none of them had held down a job in years, if ever.

He watched the bundles of street addicts with a certain sad, romantic irony, as if they held the key to a greater truth. They were a sub-species, shorter, less morally developed. They grew up in violent homes with addict parents, and none had known a normal, stable, suburban life. These people had once seemed so interesting, there people in the city cracks, thieves, junkies, hopelessly dysfunctional. Scraps of conversation, primarily whinging, filtered through. Was this the end of the dream? Was this where they all ended up?

The great romance he had attached to his own dysfunctional friends all those years ago bore no resemblance to this sub-class. They were a great creative gaggle of wonderful people, the frozen, crazy nights, the bodies sleeping in the lounge room as he tip toed over them to bed. It had all seemed so wonderfully spirited, so daring, so in the face of the straight world. And the smells came out at just the wrong moment. And all was embarrassment. And the frozen rooftops at dawn, the cats perched watching or crawling home from an orgy, human and animal, the crystalline frangepeni flowers in the Paddington dawn, all was so cruel, so forgetful, neglectful of their own care, that he embraced it all with love and lust. This was his destiny.

And they had all died. He was left behind for one simple reason, to tell the story of folly and despair, of wasted lives and false hopes. To puncture the current waves, the shibboleths, the hysteria, to bring common sense and decency to a frantic, frenetic, world gone mad. You're crazy, man, he laughed, in the sudden gust of wind and rain and leaves, the full moon lurching. And I love you too. And they locked lips in an eternity of an embrace. And knew they were the only two. Pioneers on the planet surface. The first to go here, the first to feel this. The crystal grass crunched excitedly under their feet.

I've never known anyone as thirsty as you, he said, as they stopped at a water fountain and he drank deeply. It seemed like a metaphor for the whole of his life, and they laughed and were in love, ever so briefly in the frantic currents. Oh come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant. He could feel his own skeleton x-rayed inside him. He could hear the first twitch of the birds in the bushes, preceding dawn. The first prickle of light, the echo of the echo of something massive that had happened long before, lit up the night sky.

And he began to run, feeling the bushes whack across his skin and the whole of Centennial Park picked out in delicious moonlight. He could see every detail of every flower, every tree. The statues loomed like alien monuments, built by a different race. And the public toilets. They brought you down. They had been the scene of murders and gay sex for generations, men lurking in the bushes while children played nearby. It was quiet at this hour, and he was relieved. He didn't need any witnesses to the majesty of the moment. Love me for ever, Ian said, and he kissed him back. I can't do that, he said. I'm sorry. My path is a different path. But tonight is tonight, enjoy it for what it is. Look at that sky, how amazing is that, he said, pointing at the first streaks of sunrise as the chorus of birds grew suddenly louder.



http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24036736-7583,00.html

The world has spent $50 billion on global warming since 1990, and we have not found any actual evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming. Evidence consists of observations made by someone at some time that supports the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. Computer models and theoretical calculations are not evidence, they are just theory.

What is going to happen over the next decade as global temperatures continue not to rise? The Labor Government is about to deliberately wreck the economy in order to reduce carbon emissions. If the reasons later turn out to be bogus, the electorate is not going to re-elect a Labor government for a long time. When it comes to light that the carbon scare was known to be bogus in 2008, the ALP is going to be regarded as criminally negligent or ideologically stupid for not having seen through it. And if the Liberals support the general thrust of their actions, they will be seen likewise.

The onus should be on those who want to change things to provide evidence for why the changes are necessary. The Australian public is eventually going to have to be told the evidence anyway, so it might as well be told before wrecking the economy.

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/national/national/general/pollution-price-will-kill-jobs-warning/1251100.aspx

BIG business has warned of job losses, shrinking profits and the closure of some operations unless significant changes are made to the Federal Government's proposed emissions trading scheme.

In its submission to the Government's green paper, the Business Council of Australia said it supported the scheme but that greater compensation was needed to prevent some companies from relocating overseas.

"If global greenhouse gas emissions are to be reduced over the long term the world will need examples of how this can be done effectively but also with minimal economic disruption," the council's president, Greig Gailey, said.

Modelling commissioned by the council looked at the effect of the emissions trading scheme on 14 companies in areas such as minerals processing, manufacturing, oil refining, coalmining and sugar milling. It found three of the 14 business would shut, a further four would have to restructure their operations and the remaining seven would need to cut costs. In all cases profits before tax would fall by 22 per cent.

To stop this happening the council wants greater compensation from the Government and a low cap on the amount of greenhouse pollution companies can emit. It also wants the start of the scheme delayed until the rest of the world agrees to participate and a set price for the permits the Government will create to allow companies to release carbon emissions.

But the more compensation the Government hands out to business the less money it will have to help households adjust to the price rises for things such as energy that will result from the scheme.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24234257-7583,00.html

A PHENOMENON of the increasingly tense debate on the Rudd Government's carbon policies is the unwillingness of the protagonists to quantify the risk for Australian workers.

The headline-grabbing Business Council statement on companies endangered by the proposed approach does not do so. Nor have its previous statements on the issue.

Rudd Government ministers, not surprisingly, do not do so, although their frequent assurances that the policies will be economically responsible are a dog-whistle attempt to signal to workers (voters) that their interests are in mind.

No trade union statement, even those expressing concern, does so.

Not even leading federal Opposition spokesmen, Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull and Greg Hunt, attempt to quantify how many jobs might be in the firing line.

The environmental activists, who have been quick to rail against the BCA and other critics of carbon charges, naturally never mention this point, although they will try to claim job opportunities for their radical programs.

The Greens are in the van of trying to paint over the economic threats by claiming that lost jobs in energy-intensive industry will be replaced in "clean" businesses. They bolster this by pointing to the high voter concern about global warming and support for programs that will deliver abatement.

However, recent polling by Essential Media Communications showing that 72 per cent of the people it interviewed supported the introduction of emissions trading also showed that half of those polled admit they do not know what it is.

It would seem a fair guess that these voters also don't know that Australian energy-intensive firms in the firing line of high carbon charges directly employ more than 165,000 people in the food and beverage industry, 64,000 in textiles, clothing and footwear, more than 162,000 in pulp and paper making and printing, 35,000 in non-metallic minerals production, more than 2000 in liquefied natural gas processing, about 100,000 in the petroleum, plastics and chemicals industries, more than 141,000 in metals production, 195,000 in manufacturing of equipment and machinery and about 60,000 in other factories.
This adds up to 924,000 workers and is a Howard government calculation used and accepted earlier this decade in talks on greenhouse gas abatement with both business and environmental non-government organisations.

It is now several years out of date. The energy-intensive manufacturing sector claims that the total number today is actually about 1.1 million.

These are people directly employed by trade-exposed, energy-intensive companies. Many more are the beneficiaries of jobs that flow from the output of these TEEI companies.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24234263-5016634,00.html

DESIGNING an emissions trading scheme in Australia was supposed to have been made easier by the pioneering work done in the European Union. After all, they've been developing their scheme since 2000 and trading for nearly four years, albeit with varied success.

But there's a big catch. The EU hasn't worked out how to treat its emissions-intensive trade-exposed (EITE) industries and find an equitable system for auctioning permits. Under pressure from business concerned about the erosion of their international competitiveness, the EU avoided any tough decisions on permits, simply allocating them to major emitters or applying grandfather clauses since the first trial period began in 2005.

Environmentalists derided the approach and the over-generous allocations that followed, but the underlying structural problem is genuine. The accumulation of greenhouse emissions is a global problem, but any domestic emissions trading scheme will make firms inside its borders less internationally competitive, and will just relocate many trade-exposed emissions from regulated to unregulated economies.

Business activity and commensurate government revenue will diminish, unless these transfers can be accurately identified and compensated, or until a comprehensive global deal can be negotiated.

The problem will depend on the competitiveness of international markets and the sensitivity of each good or service to changes in the cost of energy.

The European Commission hopes to find a workable solution by 2010 to what Ross Garnaut described as a truly dreadful problem, leaning towards the gradual phase-in of permits from 2012 to 2020.

The 2007 federal election campaign was fertile ground for ambitious promises on climate change policy. The Rudd Government promised to start trading by 2010 and finish designing its scheme by the end of this year.

This ambitious time frame has catapulted Australia to the role of global policy pioneer in a number of key aspects of scheme design. It's a courageous move politically, given that Australia is arguably the most trade-exposed, energy-intensive economy in the OECD.




Men At Work. From a Painting in the Gunnedah Art Gallery, NSW.

The Last Living Link

*



Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?

What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder

Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands

I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih shantih shantih

The Wasteland TS Elliot.



He met Simon at a meeting in Waterloo; and he looked at him and immediately thought of people long ago, of a nest of people who had seemed like they were the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, the fulcrum of Sydney life, the most talented, most gifted, most adventurous people, souls who would make a difference not just to their generation but generations to come. They all lived together in the ground floor apartment of one of those grand old terraces fronting Moore Park Road, which was when Simon got to know them; Ian Farr, John Bygate, Russell Keithal, Lyn Hapgood; and other various hangers on. That was in the early eighties, when the decline had already set in.

He had already known all these people since the hey days of the 1970s; when Ian made it into the list of Australia's most promising composers, when John was great mates with perhaps Australia's then most famous composer Richard Meale and was well known in the city's cultural circles, when Russell was a famous up and coming, and very handsome young actor, and when Lyn was famous for being Lyn. Australia up until the 1970s had been largely a suburban place, and these filaments of genuine inner-city life were wonderfully exciting. It was in the late 1960s, hanging out with Harry Godolphin in the ramshackle houses that overlooked Woolloomoolloo, the floors cheap cane matting and the walls entrenched with the smell of bongs, that John Bygate first came up.

Harry wanted them to meet, he spoke of this wonderfully enigmatic, charismatic man whose good looks could stop traffic. It was a special day, the day they travelled up from Woolloomoolloo to Paddington and he was introduced, and instantly entranced. Bygate lived up to his advance mail, and was everything he had always wanted to be: handsome, apparently wealthy, gifted, an enormous record collection, all the latest books on his shelves, and, of course, fabulously out of it. They were the days when LSD was just hitting Sydney, as it had hit the rest of the western world, and everything was layered with an astonishing, glistening light. He made it his mission to get to know Bygate in his own right.

For a long time Bygate's house in Elizabeth Street Paddington, provided by a sugar daddy whose identity we were never allowed to know, became the centre of everything, the most exclusive, most wonderful place to be in the whole of Sydney. His handsome face. His wonderful clothes. His perfect taste. The turmoil of the times. Sylvia Platitude he scrawled on the wall during one acid ridden escapade, in reference to Sylvia Plath, the poet of the moment. Lyn lived there for a while, pushing her pram with little Brad in it, while she was escaping from "the chicken farmer", Geoffrey, a perfectly decent bloke who wanted to live the quiet life on a farm outside town. The last thing Lyn wanted was quiet. And she met up with Russell; and she didn't have to worry any more that life might be too quiet.

Just as John's house had been the centre of everything in the early 70s, so his own house in Paddington, donated freely by his friend Jenny, had been the centre of everything in the late 70s. By the time Simon came along in the early 80s, things had begun to fall apart for most of the crowd. Russell had fallen off the stage at the Opera House stoned on mandrax, wrecking a major performance, and didn't work again in the mainstream for years afterwards. Ian was doing live performances for theatre groups, but hadn't become the major Australian composer we had all expected. John was no longer the best paid rent boy in Sydney, but just another addict alcoholic on the slippery slope to nowhere.

The ever present flagons of white got cheaper. He was forced to abandon that beautiful house in Elizabeth Street, when the sugar daddy jacked up and he became the boyfriend of Garry, a hopeless junky of the very first order. And Lyn, well Lyn was along for the ride, but the circumstances weren't so fabulous any more. The crowded apartment in Moore Park Road, where they all congregated in the 1980s, was a significant step down. Simon, always humble, with no more ambition than to be a house painter, fell in with all these people, when the decay had already firmly set in. No doubt they sneered at him for his lack of artistic talent; his lack of an ideal that the world needed to change.

And then, of course, the deaths began to happen. Lyn died first, of an overdose. She was pregnant with her second child when it happened. The story went, her and Russell were living in the burbs somewhere way out, away from the chaos, getting their lives together, that one. Excited about the prospect of another child they decided to have just one more; before cleaning up their act, going on the straight and narrow for the sake of their coming child. And that was that. There couldn't have been a sadder funeral. Russell was heartbroken for years to come. Then John died, of a brain haemorrhage, after drinking and drugging himself into a strange, alcohol ridden existence in Adelaide, where it was still possible to live reasonably well on the dole and not have to work. Harry, who had introduced me to all these people, died of lung cancer. And Ian died only a few years ago, of stomach cancer.

None of them changed the world in the way we thought they would.

We went for coffee after the meeting and immediately began talking of all these wonderfully talented, enigmatic, intelligent, eccentric people we had known. They seemed like the centre of everything, the heart of Sydney, he said.

Why us, why did we survive? Simon asked.

He shook his head. I don't know, he said. Maybe we were more humble. We didn't think we were going to change the world. We didn't think we were the most gifted people on the planet. Maybe we had enough humility to sober up, I don't know, they really were a very clever bunch, they had everything. But we're the ones sitting here, having coffee. They're all dead, all except Russell.

Later, he gave him a lift to Elizabeth Street.

The last living link, Simon said as he got out of the car.
The last living link, he repeated back.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/Andrew Bolt – Saturday, August 23, 08 (12:03 am)

I doubt any shire in Australia has tried as hard as Mornington Peninsula’s to terrify ratepayers about global warming. The shire has even sent all residents a booklet, Climate change: What we are doing about it (no link), that warns that many of them could die from global warming over the next few decades:

Average annual temperature will rise by up to 3.5 degrees by 2070, placing greater stress on elderly residents and those living in older homes with inadequate insulation… The increased incidence of exteme heat days and heat waves, in conjuction with a growing and ageing population in the peninsula, has the potential to contribute to significant mortality in future decades...Potential imparts: Ability to affect entire population, especially elderly and infants; 27,000 elderly, 8000 infants and young people; Increased mortality and morbidity in vulnerable groups.

You don’t often come across scaremongering so brazen - or so wildly and irresponsibily exaggerated. Let me try to reassure the poor residents. Let’s note, for a start, that that global temperatures haven’t actually risen over the past decade. Let’s note also that by 2070, we’ll be so much richer that we can afford at the very minimum air-conditioners for everyone to save them from this allegedly apocalyptic heat.

But there is one more thing to consider.

I had to go to hospital on Thursday and found the waiting time for treatment had blown out to hours. Reason? Winters, not summers, and cold, rather than heat, is what makes us sickest and most fills our hospitals. And we should fear global cooling far more than global warming:

Some data? We are more likely to die in winter of temperature-related diseases:

Bi, P., Parton, K.A., Wang, J. and Donald, K. 2008. Temperature and direct effects on population health in Brisbane, 1986-1995. Journal of Environmental Health ...

Bi et al. report that “death rates were around 50-80 per 100,000 in June, July, and August [winter], while they were around 30-50 per 100,000 in the rest of the year, including the summer,” ... (T)he researchers further note that “it is understandable that more deaths would occur in winters in cold or temperate regions, but even in a subtropical region, as indicated in this study, a decrease in temperatures (in winters) may increase human mortality.”

We are more likely to die of heart failure in cold weather :

THE winter months bring more than colds and flu, according to research showing people are more likely to suffer heart failure in the chilly season. A team of researchers examined the seasonal differences in hospital admissions and deaths in 2961 patients with chronic heart failure in South Australia over the past decade, and found a striking trend.... ”(D)eaths in those diagnosed with heart failure were higher in winter and lowest in summer.”

A recent New Zealand study confirms it’s chilly days, not warm ones, that are deadliest to the old and very young:

From 1980–2000 around 1600 excess winter deaths occurred each year with winter mortality rates 18% higher than expected from non-winter rates. Patterns of EWM by age group showed the young and the elderly to be particularly vulnerable.

So global warming could actually cause fewer deaths from temperature-related illness:

In a review article published in the Southern Medical Journal, Keatinge and Donaldson (2004) of Queen Mary’s School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of London begin the main body of their text with a clear declaration of the relative dangers of heat and cold when it comes to human mortality: “cold-related deaths are far more numerous than heat-related deaths in the United States, Europe, and almost all countries outside the tropics, and almost all of them are due to common illnesses that are increased by cold."…

So what are the implications of global warming for human mortality? Keatinge and Donaldson state that “since heat-related deaths are generally much fewer than cold-related deaths” - and, we note, are comprised primarily of deaths that typically would have occurred a few weeks later even in the absence of excess heat - “the overall effect of global warming on health can be expected to be a beneficial one.” As an example, and even including the early heat-harvesting of naturally-expected deaths, they report that “the rise in temperature of 3.6°F expected over the next 50 years would increase heat-related deaths in Britain by about 2,000 but reduce cold-related deaths by about 20,000.”

And residents around Melbourne and such coastal areas actually have little to fear, according to a huge study Climate and mortality in Australia: retrospective study, 1979–1990, and predicted impacts in five major cities in 2030, that even had the alarmist CSIRO involved:

We conclude that the 5 largest Australian cities exhibit climate-attributable mortality in both summer and winter. Given the scenarios of regional warming during the next 3 decades, the expected changes in mortality due to direct climatic effects in these major coastal Australian cities are minor.

Bottom line: more Mornington Peninsula residents are likely to die of fright from their shire’s propaganda than are likely to die from global warming. Shame on the shire.

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=5AC1C0D6-802A-23AD-4A8C-EE5A888DFE7E

Just days before former Vice President Al Gore’s scheduled visit to testify about global warming before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works, a high profile climate debate between prominent scientists Wednesday evening ended with global warming skeptics being voted the clear winner by a tough New York City before an audience of hundreds of people.

Before the start of the nearly two hour debate the audience polled 57.3% to 29.9% in favor of believing that Global Warming was a “crisis”, but following the debate the numbers completely flipped to 46.2% to 42.2% in favor of the skeptical point of view. The audience also found humor at the expense of former Vice President Gore’s reportedly excessive home energy use.

After the stunning victory, one of the scientists on the side promoting the belief in a climate "crisis" appeared to concede defeat by noting his debate team was ‘pretty dull" and at "a sharp disadvantage" against the skeptics. ScientificAmerican.com’s blog agreed, saying the believers in a man-made climate catastrophe “seemed underarmed for the debate and, not surprising, it swung against them."

The New York City audience laughed as Gore became the butt of humor during the debate.

"What we see in this is an enormous danger for politicians in terms of their hypocrisy. I’m not going to say anything about Al Gore and his house. But it is a very serious point," quipped University of London emeritus professor Philip Stott to laughter from the audience.

The audience also applauded a call by novelist Michael Crichton to stop the hypocrisy of environmentalists and Hollywood liberals by enacting a ban on private jet travel.

"Let’s have the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council), the Sierra Club and Greenpeace make it a rule that all of their members, cannot fly on private jets. They must get their houses off the [power] grid. They must live in the way that they’re telling everyone else to live. And if they won’t do that, why should we? And why should we take them seriously?" Crichton said to applause audience. (For more debate quotes see bottom of article)

The debate was sponsored by the Oxford-style debating group Intelligence Squared and featured such prominent man-made global warming skeptics as MIT scientist Richard Lindzen, the University of London emeritus professor of biogeography Philip Stott and Physician turned Novelist/filmmaker Michael Crichton on one side.

The scientists arguing for a climate ‘crisis’ were NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt, meteorologist Richard C.J. Somerville of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Brenda Ekwurzel of the Union of Concerned Scientists. The event, which was moderated by New York Public Radio’s Brian Lehrer, debated the proposition: "Global warming is not a crisis.”

Skeptics Dramatically Convinced Audience

The skeptics achieved the vote victory despite facing an audience that had voted 57% in favor of the belief that mankind has created a climate "crisis" moments before the debate began.

But by the end of the debate, the audience dramatically reversed themselves and became convinced by the arguments presented by the skeptical scientists. At the conclusion, the audience voted for the views of the skeptics by a margin of 46.2% to 42.2%. Skeptical audience members grew from a pre-debate low of 29.9% to a post debate high of 46.2% -- a jump of nearly 17 percentage points. [Link to official audience voting results]



http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/monckton_warns_wong_youre_steering_labor_to_doom/
Andrew Bolt
Friday, August 01, 2008 at 09:16am


Christopher Monckton warns Climate Change Minister Penny Wong that the Rudd Government’s mad plans to cut “carbon pollution” is a disaster built on a fallacy:

If you introduce an emissions-trading scheme, when it transpires that the scheme and its associated economic damage had never been necessary - and it will, and sooner than you think - you and your party will be flung from office, perhaps forever.

This is Labor’s New Age Khemlani moment, in fact. The full email from Lord Monckton to Wong:

Dear Senator Wong,

Greetings from Scotland! One of your constituents, Mr. John Cribbes, has asked me to drop you a short email about emissions trading and “global warming”.

I have recently conducted some detailed research into the mathematics behind the conclusions of the UN climate panel on the single question that matters in the climate debate - by how much will the world warm in response to adding CO2 to the atmosphere?

My research, published in Physics and Society, a technical newsletter of the American Physical Society this month, demonstratres that the IPCC’s values for the three key parameters whose product is climate sensitivity are based on only four papers - not the 2,500 that are often mentioned.

Those four papers are unrepresentative of the literature, in which a low and harmless climate sensitivity is now the consensus. Therefore I should recommend extreme caution before any emissions-trading scheme is put in place. Such schemes will damage Australia’s competitiveness, perhaps fatally; they are prone to corruption in that they incentivize over-claiming by both parties to each trade and by the regulator; they are addressing a non-problem; and, even if the problem were real (as a few largely-politicized scientists persist in maintaining), adaptation as and if necessary would be orders of magnitude cheaper than emissions trading or any other attempt at mitigating the quantities of carbon dioxide that we are (harmlessly) adding to the atmosphere.

Therefore I strongly urge you to reconsider your support for this or any emissions-trading scheme. I have read the Australian Government’s paper on the proposed scheme, and the science in it is, alas, largely nonsense.

Politically, of course, the fatal damage that emissions trading will do to the Australian economy will greatly favour the enemies of the free West, which is why I, as an ally, have locus standi to approach you.

Climatically, your emissions-trading scheme will not make any significant difference. There are many other environmental problems that are real: I recommend that the Australian Government should tackle those.

As for the climate, it is a non-problem, and the correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing. Similar warnings are being sent to other legislators worldwide by those of us - now probably in the majority among the scientific community, not that one should do science by head-count - who have studied climate sensitivity and have found the UN’s analysis lamentably wanting.

The UN’s predictions are already being falsified by events: global temperatures have been falling for seven years, and not one of the climate models relied upon so heavily and so unwisely by the IPCC predicted that turn of events. If you introduce an emissions-trading scheme, when it transpires that the scheme and its associated economic damage had never been necessary - and it will, and sooner than you think - you and your party will be flung from office, perhaps forever. It is, therefore, in the long-term vested interest of your party to think again.

Chris Monckton


Outside Gunnedah, NSW, Australia.

Caution To The Wind

*



http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=616122

60 Minutes presents a live interview with mathematician and scientist, Dr David Evans. David is here to talk to us tonight about global warming.

Interviewer: Dr Evans, thank you for joining us tonight.

Dr David Evans: Thanks for listening to me, the sceptical case has been ignored by the press till now and I think you'll find it very strong. People are finally coming to terms with it now.

BruceV asks:

David, we are about to have a terrible new tax imposed on us, surely if this government is interested in the truth they will listen to you? Thank you for speaking out and for having the courage to speak the truth.

Dr David Evans: Thank you, the reason I spoke out now is because it seemed the situation got beyond stupid and our decision makers need to be reminded than the science has changed since the last 10 years. Unfortunately, the public are also unaware of the science in the last few years and I think if they were aware there would be a public outcry that these taxes do not go ahead.

finallysomesense asks: Is the IPCC still a relevant body, or have the political considerations become such that the science is lost in the fallout for these 'scientists'?

Dr David Evans: The IPCC is a UN bureaucracy. Less than half of the 2500 involved are scientists, most are bureaucrats. The IPCC is reluctant to consider causes of global warming other than human ones. The fact that temperatures haven't risen since 2001 means that their politics are becoming untenable.

Hochie asks: Dr Evans, do you know of any alternative theory for the changing global average temperatures over the past millennium, or over past ages? E.g. I heard something about solar output fluctuating over time and I wondered if there is any data on that.

Dr David Evans: The sun affects the earth's temperature in two ways. Firstly, there can be changes in solar eradiation, meaning the amount of heat pumped out by the sun. People have observed slight variation over the decades. Secondly and probably more significantly, the sun effects cloud formation on earth through solar magnetic effects. High energy cosmic rays strike the earth and help create clouds. And those clouds had a cooling effect on the earth. But the sun's magnetic shields us from some of those high energy cosmic rays. So when the sun is active, the earth gets less high energy cosmic rays so there are fewer clouds and it gets warmer. The sun has been pretty active in the last few decades. This theory still hasn't been proven and is just at the stage of correlations. There are probably half a dozen likely influences on the global temperature and at this stage I don't know of any good evidence to know, which are the important ones except to say that because the signature is missing, we can pretty much rule out carbon emissions.

listener asks: Here is a question that concerns me in relation to the doom and gloom prediction. Given there is evidence that our earth has gone through this cycle over trillions of years, is it possible the observation is just that, observation, and there are no solutions?

Dr David Evans: Yes, it's quite possible that we humans have no effect on temperature. And all we're seeing is natural variation. Bear in mind that it was warmer in the medieval times 800 years ago and it was a couple of degrees cooler in the 17 hundreds when they had a mini ice age. Humanity generally flourish when it is hotter, so personally I regard a little bit of heating as a good thing.

mainst asks: David....... Thank you for speaking out. The voices of reason have been swamped by Hansen, Gore & the IPCC et al recently. What are your thoughts on the current solar minimum & have you heard of any research being done on intergravitational waves and their potential effects on the forces that drive the core of our planet?

Dr David Evans: No I haven't heard anything about intergravitational waves, thank you for your kind comments. It's encouraging to see that journalists are finally paying attention to this fine issue.

true asks: I to have been wondering the truths or smoke and mirrors that governments often use to create taxes, but being a layperson and taught that our planet has had ice ages and warmed up many times what makes so different this time?

Dr David Evans: We don't know that it is any different this time. The alarmist want us to believe that our emission of CO are warming the planet and while that seems a reasonable proposition two decades ago, the evidence has changed in the last decade to indicate that is certainly not the case. We don't know what caused the recent global warming, but chances are the causes are natural...

Dr David Evans: CO2 is good for plants. We humans have been digging CO2 out from under the desert in Saudi Arabia and efficiently distributing it across the planet. Plants need carbon to grow, in fact they need it more than water. Satellite data shows that over the last 2 decades the amount of plant biomass on the planet has increased by 6 percent. So increasing the CO2 levels is helping feed the planet. Not only is CO2 not pollution, but it is beneficial to all plants and most animals on the planet.

Dr David Evans: We don't know what causes global warming, except that we now are pretty sure that carbon emissions do not cause it. Therefore taking measures to decrease our carbon emissions won't have any significant effect.

pete asks: Dr Evans, our Prime Minister, who states that he, is no scientist, stated in the report that humans were to blame for increases in global temperature, which is wrong; as if we follow his point of view; we are only adding to a natural cycle, therefore we are not solely to blame (way to go Kevin). Do you get disheartened with peoples natural tendencies to follow what is being stated in popular press? Rather than looking at data which shows that the Earth’s temperature has differentiated over its’ biographic life, at periods being above modern temperatures.

Dr David Evans: Many of the crucial issues in global warming are pretty simple. Well within the grasp of any educated citizen such as the Prime Minister. You only need a high school education to be able to read a temperature graph, and to see that the temperatures have been flat since 2001. You only have to be vaguely aware of the debate to notice that the alarmist are offering no actually evidence, only results from computer models. These are things that any political or journalist should feel confident in doing. I urge our Prime Minister to spend a little more time investigating the issue himself instead of just relying on the advice of people's whose jobs depend on the belief that carbon emission cause global warming.

Dr David Evans: Yes, it's important to get our response right. If the alarmist are correct, then we should cut down our carbon emissions of the planet with overheat. If the alarmist are wrong, it's important not to cut back our carbon emissions or we'll create wide spread poverty unnecessary. There is no real substitute, except the get the real science right.

Dr David Evans: Thanks for your attention, this issue will get sorted out because it’s an issue of science. No amount of human arguing and can affect the actual effects of global warming and it will be another 2-3 decades of research before we will probably have a definitive answer as to what causes global warming. Stay Tuned ... Dr Evan's website: www.sciencespeak.com

Interviewer: This concludes our chat with Dr David Evans, Sunday August 17, 2008.



This city is going backwards, bled dry by government parasites, over-regulated, over-spun, a sad shadow of what it could have been. He had a bad tooth ache in the middle of the night and went searching for an all night chemist. There aren't any, in a city heading on to five million people. It was bucketing down rain, almost cyclonic, as we all shiver through one of the coldest winters for years. Yesterday the temperatures in Sydney went from 10 overnight to 14 during the day, which is almost unheard of here, the coldest winter day for 12 years. So much for global warming. We are being inundated with millions of dollars worth of advertising designed to scare the bejesus out of us on global warming, and it's absolutely freezing. All our electricity bills will be up this winter.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has made an absolute fool of himself on Sixty Minutes; which has finally woken up to the fact that many many scientists don't buy global warming alarmism and that in fact many people think it's a crock. The Labor government has been criminally irresponsible in spreading absolute garbage on the subject, claiming there will be a drop in agricultural production when at the very worst there might be a slowing in growth, but even that's unlikely. They've whipped up fear in the community, and the more they do it the stupider they look.

Now Rudd couldn't even get the name of the IPCC right, calling it International not Intergovernmental, nor could he get right the number of scientists it supposedly has supporting its views, saying there were 4,000 when there are only 2500, and even that figure is hotly disputed as nothing but a scam. Last night, waking up in pain and knowing the Cepecal had run out, I drove through the belting rain in the freezing cold to what used to be a 24 hour chemist in Rozelle, about 20 minutes away. It was nothing but a boarded shop front. He tried the cops, he tried everything, trying to find where one was.

Eventually he parked in the back alleys around Taylor Square, not too worried about parking cops in the drenching rain at 2am, but none of the chemists around there were open either. Two slim young men kissed outside a club. The Bodyline sauna lowered dark in a back lane. It was a long time since he had been brave enough to venture there. How many people caught how many diseases in that place? Despite the weather, crowds spilled out of the clubs, drunken young things, packs of boys from the western suburbs, young queens grinding their teeth wide eyed and fabulous. They spilled out of the Stonewall Bar on to the street, the videos flashing inside.

He might as well have been a different species for all the connection he felt to these places, these descendents of their pioneering efforts. Capriccios in the 70s was the first of the gay bars on Oxford Street; and now at 2am the streets were crowded and queues outside most of the clubs. But there was nothing else. Certainly not a chemist. He asked the man in the paper shop; there aren't any, he said decisively, authoritatively, of an age and sensibility where he was most probably right.

So he thought he'd try Kings Cross, that place where he had sacrificed his youth and which was still the city's only real red light district. Maybe the Piccolo Bar would be open and he could sip hot milk amongst the aging trannies, the old stars of Les Girls who have lived out there days in the apartment buildings surrounding the once infamous club, their aging, their health and their sexuality the subject of raucous 3am humour. But the Piccolo wasn't open, the old chap who ran it and had known him since he was a drunken teenager who used to stumble in their for black coffee and icecream to sober himself up had either closed and gone home early, or was sick.

The rain kept thumping down. An infinitely desolate ice addict stood on the corner, waiting for something to come his way. A girl emerged from a hotel, promptly dumping the John she was with and running through the crowds, no doubt desperate to score while she could, cashed up, catching the dealer before he went home. "I'm too young for you," a handsome enough chap told one of the old workers. She snorted derisively. They were never too young for what she had to offer. He bought a drink in a store to swallow the nurofen he had bought; and an intense conversation broke out between two young men as to where or which bar they should go to keep on partying, their eyes wide and their cheeks twitching from amphetamine. You said you wanted to throw caution to the wind, his companion said. And the conversation continued until he brushed past them, hearing those final words: "Well it's your place then." Your place, where we'll stay up all night smoking ice and satiate ourselves in each other's bodies; your place, where I can lick you all over and you'll never feel the same again. The wind rattled, dumping another gust of rain on to the people queuing outside the clubs. Your place.... He pulled out his car keys and went home alone.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.openforum.com.au/content/global-warming-science-moves

On global warming, public policy is where the science was in 1998. Due to new evidence, science has since moved off in a different direction.

The UN science body on this matter, the IPCC, is a political body composed mainly of bureaucrats. So far it has resisted acknowledging the new evidence. But as Lord Keynes famously asked, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

Four things have changed since 1998.

First, the new ice cores shows that in the six global warmings over the past half a million years, temperature rises and falls occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rises and falls in atmospheric carbon. The carbon rises could not have either started or ended the temperature rises. So there must be natural influences on global temperatures that are more powerful than atmospheric carbon levels.

This 800 year lag became known and past dispute by 2003, which is significant. The old ice core data, collected from 1985 to 1998, was low resolution: the data points were more than a thousand years apart. It showed carbon and temperature moving in lockstep, and it was the only supporting evidence we ever had for the notion that carbon caused temperature. It seemed too good to be true-it appeared we could control the temperature of the plant just by adjusting the levels of a minor gas!

Watch Al Gore's movie carefully. The old ice core data is the only evidence he presents for believing that carbon emissions cause global warming. But by 2003 we had found the 800 year lag, so then we knew that temperature caused carbon, not the other way around as previously assumed. Al Gore's movie was made in 2005 so it was misleading of him not to mention the new ice core data. Would anyone have believed his pitch if he had mentioned that the alleged cause (rising and falling carbon levels) happened 800 years after the effect (rising and falling temperatures)?

Secondly, with the reversal of the ice core evidence, there is now no evidence that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None.

Evidence is a set of observations by people of events. The scientific method demands evidence-theory, politics, and vested interests are all trumped by evidence. The scientific method evolved as our best method for obtaining reliable information, precisely because it was immune from forces such as power and superstition.

It is important to realize what is not evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming. There is ample evidence that global warming has occurred, but it says nothing about the causes of that warming. Serious theoretical calculations for the amount of warming by 2100 range from an inconsequential 0.24°C to a catastrophic 6.2°C, but theory (including computer models) is not evidence. Comparison of model outputs to observed results is not evidence, because it cannot prove that the model is always right, only that it was right in that instance. Existing computer models treat clouds simplistically and unrealistically, and omit the effects of cosmic rays on clouds, so we cannot begin to be confident that they might approximate reality.

Western governments have spent $50b on global warming since 1990, yet have found no evidence. We are constantly bombarded with evidence that the world has warmed. Don't you think we would have heard all about any evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming, if there was any?

Thirdly, the warming trend that started in 1975 ended in 2001. The global temperature has been flat since 2001, and has dipped sharply in the last few months. The warmest recent year was 1998. This is a very different picture from that presented by the IPCC in 2001, of overpowering warming due to carbon emissions for the foreseeable future. Obviously there is some other influence on global temperatures at work, more powerful than our carbon emissions. The IPCC are silent on what those causes might be (hint: probably something to do with clouds).

So why do some people say temperatures are still rising, apart form being out of date? Satellite data is the only temperature data we can trust, but it only goes back to 1979. The satellites go around 24/7, measuring the temperature across broad swathes of the world, everywhere except the poles. Three of the four world temperature records use satellite data partly or exclusively, and they all say that the world stopped warming in 2001 and that temperatures have recently dipped.

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/rudd_feels_the_heat_on_60_minutes/

A turning point in the debate: 60 Minutes is suddenly not so sure man is heating the world to hell, after all. And it won’t have been reassured by Kevin Rudd’s shaky grasp of the evidence in spruiking his carbon tax:

PM KEVIN RUDD: But economic cost (sic) of not acting is massive, it’s through the roof. Think about food production, the Murray, think about the impact on tourism in QLD, no more Barrier Reef, Kakadu, no more Kakadu. Think about the impact on jobs, it’s huge.

Actually, even if Rudd really thinks warming will wipe out the Barrier Reef and Kakadu (neither of which show any sign of going anywhere), he is deceiving viewers by suggesting his carbon tax would make the slightest difference to the climate. Indeed, the only impact will be on jobs - as in costing them, and not, as he claims, saving them.

TARA BROWN: How certain are you that mankind is the cause behind global warming?

PM KEVIN RUDD: Well, I just look at what the scientists say. There’s a group of scientists called the International Panel on Climate Change - 4000 of them.

No, it’s actually called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And no, there are not 4000 IPCC scientists. Try 2500, instead. Rudd is lucky that this exaggeration wasn’t picked up by Brown. What’s more, a number of those 2500 don’t stand by the IPCC conclusion on man’s effect on the climate. Many others were not even consulted over the report’s bottom-line finding.

PM KEVIN RUDD: ... And what they (IPCC scientists) say to us is it’s happening and it’s caused by human activity.....

But back to Rudd, who can’t have counted on being corrected mid-scare by Brown:

PM KEVIN RUDD: Here’s a measurement which people should just sit back and pay a bit of attention to - the 12 hottest years in human history have occurred in the last 13 years. That’s a fact.

TARA BROWN: It’s not my position to correct you Prime Minister but Ive been told that in fact during the middle ages the global temperatures were two to three degrees warmer than now. Certainly we’ve had the hottest 12 years in recent history but the planet’s been a lot hotter.

PM KEVIN RUDD: Well, I stand by what the International Panel of Climate Change Scientists have had to say. There will always be argy-bargy about elements of the detail.

Where the world has been hotter in human history is now just “elements of the detail” to Rudd?

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24203848-2702,00.html

The Australian
19 August 2008

Tougher dole rules for over-55s
By Patricia Karvelas, Political correspondent

The unemployed aged over 55 will be treated the same as young people on the dole and be forced to look for full-time work in order to receive their benefits under reforms being considered by the Rudd Government.

The changes, outlined in a confidential draft report commissioned by the Government, would apply much harsher rules to older jobseekers who are able to meet their dole obligations by doing part-time work or volunteering for 30 hours a fortnight.

"Generally, age-based participation requirements should no longer apply. Mature-age jobseekers should have standard job-search requirements as long as they are receiving an activity-test payment," the report says.

But the review of the welfare-to-work system introduced by the Howard government calls for a significant softening in the rules applied to single mothers.

The report, prepared by the Participation Taskforce, says single parents should be allowed more time to study and be given a break from looking for work at Christmas-New Year to be with their children, and recommends relaxing the number of times they must report to Centrelink.

Some exceptions are allowed for those aged 55 and over with no recent work experience, who may be allowed to meet their activity test through voluntary work or other approved activities, at the discretion of their employment services provider.

Under the Howard government welfare-to-work reforms, single parents are forced off the pension and on to the dole to look for work when their youngest child turns eight. They are required to accept any job offered, but the report of the taskforce - chaired by Australian Social Inclusion Board chair Patricia Faulkner - believes that this should be changed so parents can get into better jobs.



This is the Metro Theatre in Kings Cross. This place had a profound impact on me when someone - Harry Godolphin, long dead - picked me up from a youth service in the late 1960s and took me to see Hair, providing me with a sliver of acid which had quite an impact on my naive 16-year-old self. Hair, too, was the counter-cultural anthem of the era, and provided some of the musical backdrop to our increasingly crazy lives.

Over Before You Know It

*



There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around
That the colt from old Regret had got away,
And had joined the wild bush horses -- he was worth a thousand pound,
So all the cracks had gathered to the fray.
All the tried and noted riders from the stations near and far
Had mustered at the homestead overnight,
For the bushmen love hard riding where the wild bush horses are,
And the stock-horse snuffs the battle with delight.

There was Harrison, who made his pile when Pardon won the cup,
The old man with his hair as white as snow;
But few could ride beside him when his blood was fairly up --
He would go wherever horse and man could go.
And Clancy of the Overflow came down to lend a hand,
No better horseman ever held the reins;
For never horse could throw him while the saddle-girths would stand,
He learnt to ride while droving on the plains.

And one was there, a stripling on a small and weedy beast,
He was something like a racehorse undersized,
With a touch of Timor pony -- three parts thoroughbred at least --
And such as are by mountain horsemen prized.
He was hard and tough and wiry -- just the sort that won't say die --
There was courage in his quick impatient tread;
And he bore the badge of gameness in his bright and fiery eye,
And the proud and lofty carriage of his head.

But still so slight and weedy, one would doubt his power to stay,
And the old man said, "That horse will never do
For a long and tiring gallop -- lad, you'd better stop away,
Those hills are far too rough for such as you."
So he waited sad and wistful -- only Clancy stood his friend --
"I think we ought to let him come," he said;
"I warrant he'll be with us when he's wanted at the end,
For both his horse and he are mountain bred."

"He hails from Snowy River, up by Kosciusko's side,
Where the hills are twice as steep and twice as rough,
Where a horse's hoofs strike firelight from the flint stones every stride,
The man that holds his own is good enough.
And the Snowy River riders on the mountains make their home,
Where the river runs those giant hills between;
I have seen full many horsemen since I first commenced to roam,
But nowhere yet such horsemen have I seen."

So he went -- they found the horses by the big mimosa clump --
They raced away towards the mountain's brow,
And the old man gave his orders, "Boys, go at them from the jump,
No use to try for fancy riding now.
And, Clancy, you must wheel them, try and wheel them to the right.
Ride boldly, lad, and never fear the spills,
For never yet was rider that could keep the mob in sight,
If once they gain the shelter of those hills."

Banjo Patterson. The Man From Snowy River. Late 1880s.



Cruelty, that's all it was, the constant pain that distorted his vision. The sick black spots of pain circling in the atmosphere, the nausea, the flashes of light, the closed rooms, the vomiting. Why him? Why was he picked out for rare forms of migraine that went on for months? Lopsided, pain down one side, he squinted in the sensitive light, he asked for help and received none, he endured and remained sick, he fought for air and had to hide from the too bright lights. Migraines had followed him all the days of his life. The only solution was escape. Aspirin did nothing.

I've burnt out all my receptors, he said, when offered paracetamol at work. His head growing fuzzy. The constant pain prematurely aging him. In sickness and in health. But there was no one to listen. Oh please be careful, he thought, as he watched his children embark off into the big world. Sammy is off to visit a friend in Newcastle. He's 17 now, he's capable of looking after himself, but we are shattered as they escape the fold, unfurl their wings. Will you be alright? Will God protect you?

He was constantly amazed how happy and well adjusted his kids were, considering all that had happened. But despite it all, the separation, the nightmares, the clairvoyant savages that waited just out of reach, beyond the village circle, they had grown and prospered. Soon, no doubt, to be grown and flown. Perhaps he had made the typical mistake of separated parents, of being friends with his children, even of relying on them for friendship and company. But they had been a cozy little band, us and them, them against the world, dinner in the evening, clinging together against the madness which was lapping against their door.

They jockeyed for attention, dad, dad, look at this, you wouldn't believe that, come and look at this video, see my assignment, you wouldn't believe what happened at school today. It all passed so quickly, that terrible cliché that turned out to be so true. Enjoy them while you can, they grow up very quickly. He watched other parents now, the children on their hips, the travelling caravans, the scenes in cafes, crying. He missed all that, when there wasn't any doubt about your function in life, wehn they needed you so totally, pulling at his trouser legs, constantly demanding.

These parts of life were over before anything could be heard, before the origins could be discussed. He straightened his back with sadness, and knew there had to be new resolve, new paths. Grown and flown, was the phrase, as he looked with astonishment at the gallumphing giants of teenagers that used to be his sweetest, most adorable, adoring children. They had been as cute as a button, the pair of them, little blonde bombs about as good looking as children can be made. "He's so beautiful," the teacher said of Sammy in Primary School. "He's so beautiful some days I just find myself staring at him."

If it had been a male teacher you would have started in disapproval. But he knew exactly what she meant. Those big grey green eyes, that blonde hair, that chubby handsome face, he really had been a gorgeous child. Perhaps it was all just nature's way of ensuring that you protected them, but these times, all those photographs of him with the pair of them, clinging to their dad, it was all gone. He had always wanted children, but had been 39 when the first one came along. Now it's almost over, grown and flown, and he struggled to think of life without them. Would he come to visit them in their new lives, their careers, their marriages? Would they visit him, wherever he was, in the deep scrub, roaming the world? There weren't any answers, but it's true what they say: life is short. It's over before you know it.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/whale-watch/humans-could-be-to-blame-for-stranded-calf/2008/08/21/1219262390467.html

A female humpback whale abandoning her three-week-old calf? Not likely.

Experts say a baby whale alone in Sydney's Pittwater was probably separated from its mother by force.

And humans could even be to blame.

The baby humpback, believed to be about two or three weeks old, was first spotted on Sunday, nuzzling up to a yacht in an apparent search for its mother.

Authorities have suggested that the calf, nicknamed Colin, may have a biological problem, which led its mother to abandon it.

Experts have disagreed, saying a humpback female is very unlikely to abandon her calf, and would nurture it if it was sick.

Wally Franklin, Hervey Bay-based marine biologist with research group the Oceania Project, says ships in the waters off Sydney could be to blame, because they can break up sonic communication lines between whales.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gDNLWfQWKrQc48pITBUg9KT_6oVwD92MQK0G0

POTI, Georgia (AP) — Russian forces dug trenches and built fortifications in key areas of Georgia Thursday, but also rolled columns of tanks north toward home, picking and choosing how their nation would comply with the terms of a peace accord.

A top Russian general said it could be more than 10 days before the bulk of the troops return to Russia.

Although Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has promised that his forces would pull back as far as separatist Ossetia and a surrounding zone by Friday, Russian troops appeared to be in no hurry — even settling down in strategic spots. This raised concerns about whether Moscow was aiming for a lengthy occupation of its smaller, pro-Western neighbor.

An EU-sponsored cease-fire requires both Russian and Georgian forces to move back to positions held before fighting broke out Aug. 7 in Georgia's separatist republic of South Ossetia, which has close ties to Russia. The Russians are allowed to remain in zones around Georgia's borders with South Ossetia and another separatist region, Abkhazia.

The war in Georgia, a small country straining to escape Moscow's influence, has sent tensions between Moscow and the West to the highest levels since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.

NATO, Russia's Cold War foe, said it had received a note from Moscow announcing that Russia is halting military cooperation with the trans-Atlantic alliance.

On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her Polish counterpart signed a deal to build an American missile defense base in Poland after a top Russian general warned last week that Poland was risking an attack, possibly a nuclear one, by developing the base.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24220103-5000117,00.html

Steve Lewis

August 22, 2008 12:00am

AUSTRALIA is being short-changed by gutless political leaders who place rank populism ahead of constructive debate on sensible reform.

Kevin Rudd and Brendan Nelson are guilty of playing the politics of fear, the Prime Minister with his nonsensical "just say no" stance on nuclear power.

Labor is kidding if it believes nuclear has no place in a future energy framework.

Debate has been reignited after the Coalition's trade spokesman, Ian Macfarlane, earlier this week outlined a compelling case for nuclear energy.

He said our best hope of making a serious dent in greenhouse emissions is embracing nuclear as a clean source of base load energy, as the US and European powers have.

What a shame that some of Rudd's Cabinet colleagues, sensible folk like Resources Minister Martin Ferguson, don't have the ticker to endorse a rational (public) debate on nuclear power.

Many in the resources sector believe the promise of "clean coal" is about as likely as Brendan Nelson leading the Liberal Party to the next election.