Nothing Is As It Seems
*
Sydney Harbour
The reasons this has happened go far beyond mere criticism of individuals. For these events reveal the existence of an underclass which is a world apart from the lives that most of us lead and the attitudes and social conventions that most of us take for granted.
But it is an underclass which affluent, complacent, materialistic Britain has created.
An underclass composed of whole communities where committed fathers are so rare that any child who actually has one risks being bullied. Where sex is reduced to an animal activity devoid of love or human dignity, and boys impregnate two, three, four girls with scarcely a second thought.
Where successive generations of women have never known what it is to be loved and cherished by both their parents throughout their childhood. How can such women know how to parent their own children?
These children are simply abandoned in a twilight world where the words ‘family’ or ‘relatives’ lose all meaning, as the transient men passing through their mothers’ lives leave them with an ever-lengthening trail of ‘step-fathers’ or ‘uncles’who have no biological connection with them whatsoever.
Reaping The Whirlwind, Melanie Phillips.
Voices of reason are derided here more than anywhere else, in this left wing country full of the half educated and the self serving; these ancient times clashing with a wave of technological achievement. He stood on the shore. He didn't know which way to move. All his belief systems had collapsed. The things he had dedicated his life to proved not just useless but a chimera, washed away, utterly pointless. That was where it finally ended. They had been young and full of vigour, yes that had been true, although they were long forgotten no one could take away the glory days.
But now, with his aching bones in the desolate streets, his own spirit scarred from repeated assaults and self inflicted wounds, he looked out from his rat hole in a kind of curious wonder, trying to rebuild that lost hope. He wasn't going to let them beat him. That had been the point of all the retreat. But now his body betrayed him, his aching feet and his sore back. He didn't want to forgive. He didn't want to forget. He wanted to carry his anger into a new era; to carry a noble cause, to whack the heart out of recalcitrant villagers, pillage, swords flying, light a bonfire as the horses stampeded past.
He wanted it all to mean something again; and now, instead, his life seemed like a minuscule adventure on a far off screen, dull, too many days inside, too much retreat. Those glorious bars had betrayed him. The alcohol had seeped into every bone. He dismissed this as if it was nothing, although it had consumed so many years. They reached out and inhaled and looked startled: as they stared at shamans on the bridge crossing, your mother's worst image of a hippy. The mountains climbed up around them, magnificent, drawfing them. And all these years later, on the streets of inner-city Redfern in Sydney, perched on the edge of a great land, he stared belligerently at the footpath, hoping for a kindness that never came.
His present disillusionment was so total, so overwhelming, that he wondered if there was any way back to a more invigorated state. The gnomes of the area all betrayed him. Living here just wasn't that exciting, face it. There's the drunken shouts in the early hours of the morning as the brothers and sisters fought with each other over God knows what, down on the block amongst the bottles and the derelict houses. And there were the knots of kids up to no good hanging around the station; providing a service to or ripping off the passers by. It was all predictable and untouchable, even more so since the apology.
Dawn is much later now, as autumn turns to winter. His own old soul gathered in itself for the approaching cold. He expected nothing anymore. In the ethos the excitement of a new government was rapidly being replaced by cynicism and the raucous cries of special interest groups. The left had taken over completely due to the utter idiocy of the right. And now the extreme social remodelling had reached such a stage that there was no alternative but to retreat. The voices raised in opposition, coherent, intelligent, well educated though they were, made no difference whatsoever to the status quo.
People still got screwed by the courts every day. The bureaucracy was still running rampant, having reached ridiculous proportions under the previous supposedly conservative government. But the conservatives had expanded the bureaucracy ever further; increasing the welfare budget by tens of billions at a time when unemployment was at record lows. Betraying the core beliefs of those who voted for them. Dishing out money to a bewildering number of the country's supposedly most fragile, most vulnerable people; the carers, the elderly, the disabled, the mentally unemployed. It had all reached a size of dizzying proportions.
And to fund it all, the taxes too had reached dizzying proportions. The GST, a Howard special, ripped $39 billion off the populace last year alone, sent numerous businesses broke and imposed a massive paperwork burden on everybody, creating a record of every single transaction, yet absolutely no one can name a single way in which anybody is better off for it. Except the public servants. The money had disappeared into ever higher public service salaries; and the groaning masses continued to be ground into the dirt. And our self righteously comfortable politicians created a picture of a one dimensional world where things really did work; when they clearly didn't.
He had reached these conclusions, this state of disenchantment with the polis, with the political whole, not just through the crumbling decline of his own life, through a crawling and hopeless recognition of his own failures and his own lack of achievement, but through his own bleak observations of a political culture bereft of integrity. The conservatives had failed so totally, out of power and in a shambles from coast to coast, that the only hope for the nation's transformation came from within the Labor Party, an unlikely scenario. This utter lack of belief, this sad decline of hope, this approaching of a cruel indifference like a cloak across the populace, it left him not just numb but bereft. "I wish I believed in something," he would say plaintively, as they walked away from yet another demonstration or passed some young person waving a placard. It was meant as a kind of passing joke. It was all too true.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gyOFkVCpG18KBpUFStqs-sSpLFRQD8VIKSC00
DHARMSALA, India (AP) — Nearly six decades of struggle against the might of China has taught the Tibetans one thing: Ask the world for little, expect less.
As Tibetans rose up in recent weeks against China's harsh rule over the Himalayan region and China sent forces to quell the protests, Tibet's government-in exile-sent its envoys to far-flung capitals with appeals for help.
But guided by the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, they kept their requests modest. They know few countries have little appetite to cross China, particularly at a time the world is counting on the emerging superpower to keep the global economy ticking as the United States appears headed into a recession.
"His Holiness says we have to be realistic," said Tenzin Taklha, a senior aide to the 72-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner who has come to embody the Tibetan struggle since he fled to India in 1959 in the wake of a failed uprising against China.
From the exiled Tibetan leaders, there were no calls for sanctions, like those imposed when Myanmar suppressed pro-democracy protests last year, or even a boycott of this summer's Beijing Olympics.
It's an approach that reflects the pragmatism of the Dalai Lama, who has long sought an accommodation based on his "Middle Way" dialogue with Beijing aimed at autonomy for Tibetans under Chinese rule.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/one-more-ticks-obama-as-rice-apologises/2008/03/22/1205602728909.html
DEMOCRATIC presidential hopeful Barack Obama has won a coveted endorsement from New Mexico's Governor and a US State Department apology after his passport files were improperly viewed.
Embarrassed officials say the passport files of the three remaining presidential contenders were breached and a full probe is under way.
In a growing uproar, the State Department found that the files for the Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton and the Republican Senator John McCain had been breached in a way similar to Democratic Senator Barack Obama's, which had been discovered earlier.
Officials admitted the incidents were embarrassing and said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice telephoned the candidates to apologise.
Senator Obama, the first to learn of the breaches, and Senator McCain, who was overseas, both demanded a full investigation.
"We're going to do a full investigation and that investigation is going to be led by our inspector-general here in the Department of State," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack confirmed.
The State Department said earlier that it had fired two contract employees and disciplined a third over three unauthorised accesses to Senator Obama's file in January, February and March.
Meanwhile, Governor Bill Richardson's decision to endorse Senator Obama is a blow to Senator Hillary Clinton who sought his backing, in part because the politician could garner support among Hispanics. They could be a key voting bloc in the November 4 election.
The decision by Mr Richardson, 60, to back Senator Obama was likely to be a particularly bitter pill for Senator Clinton and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, who named the New Mexico Democrat as his energy secretary and ambassador to the United Nations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/world/middleeast/23iraq.html?ref=world
BAGHDAD — Four American soldiers were killed near the capital in the past two days, the military said Saturday, and north of Baghdad an American attack helicopter killed six people who the Iraqi police said were pro-American Sunni militia fighters.
Three soldiers were killed when militants attacked their patrol with a roadside bomb northwest of the capital on Saturday, the military command in Baghdad reported. Two Iraqi civilians also died.
The fourth American soldier was killed south of the capital on Friday by indirect fire, which normally refers to mortar shells or rockets. Four other soldiers were wounded in the attack, according to a military statement, which did not provide any more details.
Violence in Iraq dropped sharply late last year, especially in Baghdad and Anbar Province, but the decline in casualties has halted. Since the beginning of the year, Sunni guerrillas and Shiite militants have been killing an average of about one American service member per day.
Civilian deaths have also begun to rise in recent weeks. But casualty tallies still remain well below those of a year ago.
Many of the security gains have been attributed to the decision by Sunnis, many of whom were guerrilla fighters, to become American-backed neighborhood militia guards, paid about $300 a month by the military. More than 90,000 militiamen, most of them Sunnis, are now on the American payroll. But it is not clear how many had previously fought American forces.
Sydney Harbour
Sydney Harbour
The reasons this has happened go far beyond mere criticism of individuals. For these events reveal the existence of an underclass which is a world apart from the lives that most of us lead and the attitudes and social conventions that most of us take for granted.
But it is an underclass which affluent, complacent, materialistic Britain has created.
An underclass composed of whole communities where committed fathers are so rare that any child who actually has one risks being bullied. Where sex is reduced to an animal activity devoid of love or human dignity, and boys impregnate two, three, four girls with scarcely a second thought.
Where successive generations of women have never known what it is to be loved and cherished by both their parents throughout their childhood. How can such women know how to parent their own children?
These children are simply abandoned in a twilight world where the words ‘family’ or ‘relatives’ lose all meaning, as the transient men passing through their mothers’ lives leave them with an ever-lengthening trail of ‘step-fathers’ or ‘uncles’who have no biological connection with them whatsoever.
Reaping The Whirlwind, Melanie Phillips.
Voices of reason are derided here more than anywhere else, in this left wing country full of the half educated and the self serving; these ancient times clashing with a wave of technological achievement. He stood on the shore. He didn't know which way to move. All his belief systems had collapsed. The things he had dedicated his life to proved not just useless but a chimera, washed away, utterly pointless. That was where it finally ended. They had been young and full of vigour, yes that had been true, although they were long forgotten no one could take away the glory days.
But now, with his aching bones in the desolate streets, his own spirit scarred from repeated assaults and self inflicted wounds, he looked out from his rat hole in a kind of curious wonder, trying to rebuild that lost hope. He wasn't going to let them beat him. That had been the point of all the retreat. But now his body betrayed him, his aching feet and his sore back. He didn't want to forgive. He didn't want to forget. He wanted to carry his anger into a new era; to carry a noble cause, to whack the heart out of recalcitrant villagers, pillage, swords flying, light a bonfire as the horses stampeded past.
He wanted it all to mean something again; and now, instead, his life seemed like a minuscule adventure on a far off screen, dull, too many days inside, too much retreat. Those glorious bars had betrayed him. The alcohol had seeped into every bone. He dismissed this as if it was nothing, although it had consumed so many years. They reached out and inhaled and looked startled: as they stared at shamans on the bridge crossing, your mother's worst image of a hippy. The mountains climbed up around them, magnificent, drawfing them. And all these years later, on the streets of inner-city Redfern in Sydney, perched on the edge of a great land, he stared belligerently at the footpath, hoping for a kindness that never came.
His present disillusionment was so total, so overwhelming, that he wondered if there was any way back to a more invigorated state. The gnomes of the area all betrayed him. Living here just wasn't that exciting, face it. There's the drunken shouts in the early hours of the morning as the brothers and sisters fought with each other over God knows what, down on the block amongst the bottles and the derelict houses. And there were the knots of kids up to no good hanging around the station; providing a service to or ripping off the passers by. It was all predictable and untouchable, even more so since the apology.
Dawn is much later now, as autumn turns to winter. His own old soul gathered in itself for the approaching cold. He expected nothing anymore. In the ethos the excitement of a new government was rapidly being replaced by cynicism and the raucous cries of special interest groups. The left had taken over completely due to the utter idiocy of the right. And now the extreme social remodelling had reached such a stage that there was no alternative but to retreat. The voices raised in opposition, coherent, intelligent, well educated though they were, made no difference whatsoever to the status quo.
People still got screwed by the courts every day. The bureaucracy was still running rampant, having reached ridiculous proportions under the previous supposedly conservative government. But the conservatives had expanded the bureaucracy ever further; increasing the welfare budget by tens of billions at a time when unemployment was at record lows. Betraying the core beliefs of those who voted for them. Dishing out money to a bewildering number of the country's supposedly most fragile, most vulnerable people; the carers, the elderly, the disabled, the mentally unemployed. It had all reached a size of dizzying proportions.
And to fund it all, the taxes too had reached dizzying proportions. The GST, a Howard special, ripped $39 billion off the populace last year alone, sent numerous businesses broke and imposed a massive paperwork burden on everybody, creating a record of every single transaction, yet absolutely no one can name a single way in which anybody is better off for it. Except the public servants. The money had disappeared into ever higher public service salaries; and the groaning masses continued to be ground into the dirt. And our self righteously comfortable politicians created a picture of a one dimensional world where things really did work; when they clearly didn't.
He had reached these conclusions, this state of disenchantment with the polis, with the political whole, not just through the crumbling decline of his own life, through a crawling and hopeless recognition of his own failures and his own lack of achievement, but through his own bleak observations of a political culture bereft of integrity. The conservatives had failed so totally, out of power and in a shambles from coast to coast, that the only hope for the nation's transformation came from within the Labor Party, an unlikely scenario. This utter lack of belief, this sad decline of hope, this approaching of a cruel indifference like a cloak across the populace, it left him not just numb but bereft. "I wish I believed in something," he would say plaintively, as they walked away from yet another demonstration or passed some young person waving a placard. It was meant as a kind of passing joke. It was all too true.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gyOFkVCpG18KBpUFStqs-sSpLFRQD8VIKSC00
DHARMSALA, India (AP) — Nearly six decades of struggle against the might of China has taught the Tibetans one thing: Ask the world for little, expect less.
As Tibetans rose up in recent weeks against China's harsh rule over the Himalayan region and China sent forces to quell the protests, Tibet's government-in exile-sent its envoys to far-flung capitals with appeals for help.
But guided by the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, they kept their requests modest. They know few countries have little appetite to cross China, particularly at a time the world is counting on the emerging superpower to keep the global economy ticking as the United States appears headed into a recession.
"His Holiness says we have to be realistic," said Tenzin Taklha, a senior aide to the 72-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner who has come to embody the Tibetan struggle since he fled to India in 1959 in the wake of a failed uprising against China.
From the exiled Tibetan leaders, there were no calls for sanctions, like those imposed when Myanmar suppressed pro-democracy protests last year, or even a boycott of this summer's Beijing Olympics.
It's an approach that reflects the pragmatism of the Dalai Lama, who has long sought an accommodation based on his "Middle Way" dialogue with Beijing aimed at autonomy for Tibetans under Chinese rule.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/one-more-ticks-obama-as-rice-apologises/2008/03/22/1205602728909.html
DEMOCRATIC presidential hopeful Barack Obama has won a coveted endorsement from New Mexico's Governor and a US State Department apology after his passport files were improperly viewed.
Embarrassed officials say the passport files of the three remaining presidential contenders were breached and a full probe is under way.
In a growing uproar, the State Department found that the files for the Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton and the Republican Senator John McCain had been breached in a way similar to Democratic Senator Barack Obama's, which had been discovered earlier.
Officials admitted the incidents were embarrassing and said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice telephoned the candidates to apologise.
Senator Obama, the first to learn of the breaches, and Senator McCain, who was overseas, both demanded a full investigation.
"We're going to do a full investigation and that investigation is going to be led by our inspector-general here in the Department of State," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack confirmed.
The State Department said earlier that it had fired two contract employees and disciplined a third over three unauthorised accesses to Senator Obama's file in January, February and March.
Meanwhile, Governor Bill Richardson's decision to endorse Senator Obama is a blow to Senator Hillary Clinton who sought his backing, in part because the politician could garner support among Hispanics. They could be a key voting bloc in the November 4 election.
The decision by Mr Richardson, 60, to back Senator Obama was likely to be a particularly bitter pill for Senator Clinton and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, who named the New Mexico Democrat as his energy secretary and ambassador to the United Nations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/world/middleeast/23iraq.html?ref=world
BAGHDAD — Four American soldiers were killed near the capital in the past two days, the military said Saturday, and north of Baghdad an American attack helicopter killed six people who the Iraqi police said were pro-American Sunni militia fighters.
Three soldiers were killed when militants attacked their patrol with a roadside bomb northwest of the capital on Saturday, the military command in Baghdad reported. Two Iraqi civilians also died.
The fourth American soldier was killed south of the capital on Friday by indirect fire, which normally refers to mortar shells or rockets. Four other soldiers were wounded in the attack, according to a military statement, which did not provide any more details.
Violence in Iraq dropped sharply late last year, especially in Baghdad and Anbar Province, but the decline in casualties has halted. Since the beginning of the year, Sunni guerrillas and Shiite militants have been killing an average of about one American service member per day.
Civilian deaths have also begun to rise in recent weeks. But casualty tallies still remain well below those of a year ago.
Many of the security gains have been attributed to the decision by Sunnis, many of whom were guerrilla fighters, to become American-backed neighborhood militia guards, paid about $300 a month by the military. More than 90,000 militiamen, most of them Sunnis, are now on the American payroll. But it is not clear how many had previously fought American forces.
Sydney Harbour
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