Days Volume Two

* It is beyond imagining in responsible circles that we might have | some culpability for mass slaughter and destruction, or owe some debt to the millions of maimed and orphaned, or to the peasants who still die from exploding ordnance left from the U.S. assault, while the Pentagon, when asked whether there is any way to remove the hundreds of thousands of anti-personnel bomblets that kill children today in such areas as the Plain of Jars in Laos, comments helpfully that "people should not live in those areas. They know the problem." The primary targets of the manufacture of consent are those who regard themselves as "the more thoughtful members of the community," the "intellectuals," the "opinion leaders." An official of the Truman administration remarked that "It doesn't make too much difference to the general public what the details of a program are. What counts is how the plan is viewed by the leaders of the community"; he ...

* "What can be said to characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, or unreality. This is the sense of unreality, that can strike out of a perfectly clear sky. Good health and strong nerves can make it unlikely; but that may be only because the man in good health is thinking about other things and doesn't look in the direction where the uncertainty lies. And once a man has seen it, the world can never afterwards be quite the same straightforward place. Barbusse has shown us that the Outsider is a mean who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality. "He sees too deep and too much", and what he sees is essentially chaos. For the bourgeois, the world is fundamentally an orderly place, with a disturbing element of the irrational, the terrifying, which his preoccupation with the present usually permits him to ignore. For the Outsider, the world is not rational, not orderly. When he asserts his se...

* The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. George Bernard Shaw 'Oh Jesus,' Sollis said, and I guess she'd seen what I'd just seen; that the flasks contained human organs, floating in a green chemical solution, wired up with fine nutrient lines and electrical cables. I was no anatomist, but I still recognised hearts, lungs, kidneys, snakelike coils of intestine. And there were things anyone would have recognised: things like eyeballs, dozens of them, growing in a single vat, swaying on the long stalks of optic nerves like some weird species of all-seeing anemone; things like hands, or entire limbs, or genitals, or the skin and muscle masks of eyeless faces..." Alastair Reynolds. The Nightingale. As if we couldn't see properly; as if the frustration was everything and nothing we stood for, nothing we understood as being important, mattered anymore. In his soul he knew. The routine, he was sure now, was exactly th...

* "Aereial walkways had been strung from one side of the street to the other, with stairs and ladders snaking their way through the dark fissures between the buildings. Now and then a wheeler sped through the water, sending a filthy brown wave in its wake. Very rarely, a sleek, claw-like volantor slid overhead. But volantors were off-world tech and not many people on Sky's Edge could afford that kind of thing any more. It didn't look right to me, but all the evidence said that this had to be the place." Alastair Reynolds, Nightingale. If the cast was wrong, if planets sheared apart, if dull drives in nonthreatening country were not enough, as if these things had an answer. He was crystallised into fear. Surely no one could survive being re-written so many times. He didn't know who to ask for advice. In reality there was no one. The planets were fearsome in their size, and the collisions, the groaning yaws as things fell apart, all of it left him startled as a rabb...

* Mural, Redfern, Sydney. "Back in my room I couldn't sleep. The feel of Crace's fingers on my neck and on my legs, working their way up my thighs, continued to burn into me. The fear of what he might do next unsettled me and a thousand elaborate, equally disturbing, scenarios ran through my mind. I realised I couldn't continue as I was..." Andrew Wilson, The Lying Tongue. Mural, Redfern, Sydney. The tendrils of absence, he could almost have described it, the connections winking out one by one, the visual and physical vibrancy that had shimmered through him at every turn, which had transformed the most routine of landscapes into profoundly inspiring scenes, all of this was a wreckage. He didn't know why the muffled disconnect had caught up with him so quickly. He felt like he was being unplugged, and not just one wire at a time, whole scale circuits were being deliberately removed. He didn't know how to take the circumstance that had now become his own. He...

* Murals, Redfern. "Before confronting him, I wanted to try and lull him into a sense of security and so I did everything according to his instructions, careful not to upset or antagonise him in any way. I ignored his occasional bursts of rudeness, his impolite dismissal of questions and enquiries, and endured his pathetic attempts to flirt with me. When he 'accidentally' brushed against me as he tried to squeeze by me in a corner of the kitchen, I closed my eyes and imagined that I was somewhere else... I would catch him looking in my direction, a dream-like expression on his face, living out some fragment of memory from the past." Andrew Wilson, The Lying Tongue. These were uncertain times, and he couldn't get the image out of his mind as made the 20 minute drive home; travelling at exactly the right speed to hit every green light. But the things he really wanted to know, they weren't there anymore. We were profoundly grateful, and absolutely remiss. He saw ...

* Mural, Redfern, Sydney. "Out of a distant past came a fragment of poetry I hadn't known I remembered and I hung on to it and recited it in my head, over and over. 'Build me a willow cabin at thy gate, and call upon my soul within the house..' I tried to concentrate on the syllables. 'Let the babbling gossips of the air cry out.' Inky fingers and the sun shining in thick, dissolving shafts through the windows. Surely they must come now. Surely. I walked back and forth, back and forth. The cold burned in my eyes, the horizon wavered and warped in the winter light. The sun was dipping towards the sea on its shallow arc. The waters rose and swelled as I watched, beads of spray riffling across the grey surface." Nicci French, Losing You. It wasn't at all possible, these cruel things that kept coming at him freak fold, shrieking like sirens, odd images of comfort not holding for a second. You can be one of us, you are one of us, just accept that things are...

* We are at war with an enemy who has vowed to cut the heads off our children, who mounts cowardly attacks against the defenseless, who has infiltrated our culture -- and yet some of the presidential candidates refuse to call that enemy by name!Our enemy is busy training children as young as 7 to handle automatic weapons while in this nation we suspend from school 7-year-olds who so much as draw a picture of a gun. This enemy lacks the courage to put uniformed soldiers on the field of battle but chooses instead to use civilians to blow up other civilians. Furthermore, our national media, led by the Associated Press, call these people "insurgents" or "militants" instead of labeling them the ist cowards that they are. We are at war with an ideology, not a country. This ideology personifies evil, and yet we have national "leaders" who tell us that we must be inclusive in our institutions and avoid offending our enemies at all cost. The threat we face is...

* The journey starts when the bureau phone rings and it’s one of our stringers in Baghdad telling us that a car bomb has exploded or an official has been assassinated. I worry more when I hear about explosions because they cause more casualties and most of them are innocent civilians or security forces who are trying to earn a living or do their jobs. I can’t understand who is fighting whom; all that I know is that it is the people who pay the price all the time. Tracking the traces of death in every spot of Baghdad has become a hobby, as if I were a detective. It awakens my curiosity, but never puts an end to my questions every time I attend one of these scenes — who are the criminals and what are their real intentions? It shakes my faith and I wonder what we have done in our lives to deserve all these attacks. Mudhafer al-Husaini is an Iraqi employee of The New York Times. The call was so splintered, so far off, so utterly melancholy in its resonance, that for once he was caught stil...

* Storm clouds pre-Katrina, anonymous photographer. The speculative, Ponzi mania spread especially to Anglo-Saxon countries and to other developed countries in lesser degree. Australia took to "free" markets, "free" trade, free-floating currencies, deregulation, privatization, globalization, derivatives, hedge funds, private equity, wildcat mortgages and leverage-without-limit as a duck to water... Consumerism raged. Industry was gutted. Debts ballooned. The value of the currency fell at home and abroad. Despite low-cost imports, inflation flourished. In 2008, the Australian dollar can perhaps buy as much in real terms as five or 10 cents did in 1969... Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told us late in March that Australia's economic prospects remain "sound, strong and good". The Reserve Bank of Australia shares that view. Eerily, they echo US President Herbert Hoover in 1929 immediately before the stock market crash of that year. The Black Death of financial ...