In A Soulless Town

*

Beautiful waste, stupid feeling
Why do you feel it? When will it stop?
Beautiful waste, wonderful feeling
Ready to die now, ready to drop

River of waste, mountain of feeling
Bigger than love, bigger than us
Beautiful waste, terrible fever of love
Stupid feeling making fools out of us
Fools out of us

Beautiful waste, stupid feeling
Try and ignore it, tell it to stop
River of sadness, one moment of glory
Don't it hurt and sting when your love runs out
Over and out

Beautiful waste, stupid feeling
Why do you feel it? When will it stop?
River of sadness, one moment of glory
Don't it hurt and sting when your love runs out
Over and out

Feeling of love, feeling of love
Over and out

The Triffids

The bells ring out across the suburb, as they do every Sunday morning. There's acres of despair to be overcome, as the sun catches the roof tops and the last of the all night revellers makes their way into sleepy corners, derelict houses, auntie's place. At dawn they were still arguing, although he could never determine about what. Listening carefully, he could only make a few words out of the stream of abuse, slut being the most oft-repeated one. The city had become crueller, colder, more sour. It had always been a heartless place full of jostling elites. Now it was even more so, a corrupt diamond of sliding ice sheets, a place to scale, simply not home. Or homey. He was forced to live here, as were so many others. There was no work elsewhere. But the shadows were marching fast towards him, he was glad he had planned an escape route.

It took him right back, back to a time when all his hopes and dreams had collapsed in a self-induced pile. When he parked his car beside the spitting grey sea and stared out in bleak awe, overcome, frightened, confused as to how to continue the masquerade. It was an empty vessel. He wasn't sure of how to move forward. All the normal defences, all the broken brazen drunken days gone, everything, the brief liaisons, the friendships, had all collapsed in an instant. The powerful did not care. They did not suffer from empathy, or sympathy. They ordered their minions to do things they could never do themselves, spewing forth ideas in a mistake for cleverness.

And now the worst had happened. He was staring down the barrel of unemployment. The children were still young, entirely reliant on him. His carefree days were over, with the kids in tow. There were ways to survive, but he was unsure what. These were classified sins. The sea had never seemed lonelier that day. His own bad ways never sadder. The chill that had gone through his life never messier. Conviction let loose. All that talent wasted. Death an ever constant friend. While all those friends he had partied with, that gang he had amplified into the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, went scuttling into hiding, collapsed or died.

In the back of his brain was thunderous applause, as if a secret audience had been watching his every move. He was classified a secret. But every secret has an outer coasting, a mask, and it was for these clever constructions he expected to world to grin. For the under-sea fronds to join hands in applause. For the world to dance in a new, bright way, reflecting his new spiritual ascendancy, his discovery of the truth, of a newer, brighter path. He always thought he would make it. He always thought his old age would be an eccentric, wealthy time. That all those years of travelling around the globe, of endless curious situations that could only have happened to him, that they all led somewhere, pointed to something, had a genuine purpose behind them.

That was not what he was finding. Once the children came everything else stopped. His tragic destiny was hardly tragic with two young blonde creatures who adopted him totally rushed to greet him as he opened the door. Or would look up with excitement when he pulled the car up out front. I can't believe you and mum were heroin addicts, the teenager said to her aging parents. It was a long time ago, the father sniffed, diverting the topic as rapidly as he could. Those shameful times, so tawdry from the outside, were never meant to be echoed in the future. All his friends dead. He hadn't thought of consequence. He didn't want it to end. He had hoped to be a different person, but never made the leap. And caught in the gaps he floundered, and instinctively chose to hide.

And so in those heightened moments when everything collapsed, when every artifice was stripped bare, he prayed for relief from pain. And none came. He tried to be a different person and it didn't happen. He sought to isolate himself from old connections, and could barely break the bonds. There was always someone else in the street. There was always a huddle of never-do-wells lurking on the corner. All he had to do was shuffle up and ask. Relief was always a $100 and a phone call away. It had taken so long to move on from those secret moments, those abject moments when he had been truly himself. All was not well. He could feel it in the chilling air. He could see it in the graffiti plastered fronts of the empty shops. In the For Sale signs. The empty restaurants. The crowded streets. He dropped his daughter up the road from her friend's house, as instructed, so they would not see their povo car and their lack of status. Poor, pooor, the voices jeered, here in a land of stratified edges, power sheets, blunt edges and crystal aspirations, in a heartless, dead, soulless town where only the bastards triumphed.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25251937-5013945,00.html

Premier Nathan Rees revs up his engine
Imre Salusinszky | March 28, 2009

SENIOR Labor figures have been shaking their heads this week over Nathan Rees's response to last Sunday's fatal brawl between rival bikie gangs at Sydney airport.

The day after the killing of Anthony Zervas, Rees was asked if the murder indicated there were problems with security at the airport.

"No is the short answer," was his reply.

While it would surely be irresponsible of Rees to declare Sydney airport a happy hunting ground for al-Qa'ida, to deny a reality that was staring everyone in the face was almost as unwise.

But the political failing was that it took Rees another four days before he did what Bob Carr and Morris Iemma surely would have done earlier: get all over the bikie wars so that he was seen as the last barrier between the homes of honest burghers and marauding gangs of amphetamine-fuelled, sex-crazed Comancheros and Bandidos.

Surely Rees, a literary man, has read Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels, a primer on the exploitation of the bikie threat for political gain?

By yesterday, a front-page story in Sydney's The Daily Telegraph signalled Rees was getting the hang of it: "The elusive leader of the Notorious outlaw gang has been charged with possession of anxiety pills as Premier Nathan Rees vows to do 'whatever it takes' to smash the bikies."

While Rees's inexperience still shows, generally he has performed better since Carr's former chief of staff, Graeme Wedderburn, was called in to perform the same role in the Premier's office.

The influence of Wedderburn was apparent in parliament this week, when Labor gave us a foretaste of the strategies it will use in the two years leading up to the 2011 state election.

During every question time this week, the Government turned the spotlight back on Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell and his team, accusing them of being a gutless, hopeless, policy-free zone. This kind of negative campaigning, with plenty of muscling up to accompany it, is what NSW Labor does best and what allowed it to scrape across the line in the 2007 election.

During that campaign, Labor targeted former Coalition leader Peter Debnam, portraying him as a hothead and an out-of-touch silvertail. Its television advertisements, based directly on the federal Liberal campaign against Mark Latham three years earlier, branded Debnam a failure at everything he had tried.

It wasn't exactly edifying or Obama-like, but it worked.
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25258454-5007146,00.html

Truth behind Labor's Chinese whispering

By Piers Ackerman
The Sunday Telegraph
March 29, 2009 12:01am

THERE are some 1338 million people in China, give or take a million or so. Businesswoman Helen Liu is but one of them.
Yet she is literally in the picture with a series of Chinese and Australian political leaders and there is little doubt that she is a person of considerable influence and knows a lot of secrets.

The millionairess, whose picture has been taken with the most senior members of the Chinese Government, is also one of the largest individual contributors to the Australian Labor Party's coffers and her ties with the ALP go back decades.

One might think that the influential businesswoman, pictured with Gough Whitlam toasting former Chinese premier Li Peng in one front-page photo on Friday, and with the then Chinese foreign minister Tang Jiaxuan, in another, was an unforgettable character whose gifts would be similarly memorable. Apparently not.

In Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon's world, business-class tickets to exotic destinations are easily overlooked, even when they entail a two-day trip to China which coincides with the wife's birthday. Yet he could not recall Madame Liu stumping up for two business-class trips to China, in 2002 and 2005, when asked last week.

Madame Liu would not make such a stupid mistake. She may even know the Defence Minister's inner-leg measurement, having sent him a suit - which he returned a week later, apparently unworn.

The question of why Fitzgibbon returned the suit but could not recall visiting Beijing and Shanghai remains, however, and as he is now Defence Minister, it is legitimate to ask him to produce details of his itinerary.

Who did Madame Liu require him to meet, what was his role, or does he want Australians to believe that his business trip was in fact a sightseeing sortie, with a tour of the Forbidden City, and a photo-op on the Great Wall?

The ALP's China Syndrome has not re-emerged merely because of Fitzgibbon's Folly. There is also the question of the visit of Li Changchun, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau, and one of the five most senior officials in the Chinese Communist Party, to talk in secret with Prime Minister Kevin (Lu Kewen) Rudd in Canberra last Saturday.

http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/3621/218/

Keep Your Lights On Tonight
Written by Alan Caruba, Warning Signs
Friday, 27 March 2009

Does it sometimes seem like everything you read, see or do has the word “Green” attached to it?

We have a Green President and a Green Congress. More and more products and services tout themselves as Green. We are paying more and more with greenbacks—dollars—that are in danger of losing what value they once had.

Green was not always the great, amorphous dream of achieving oneness with Mother Earth. People still talk about being “Green with envy” or “Turning Green” just before a projectile vomit attack.

We have reached this nauseating time in our society as the result of a vast environmental movement, truly worldwide, that are masters of propaganda and possessed of the millions necessary to brainwash a lot of people into accepting an endless assault on all the advancements in science, engineering, and technology we accept as part of our everyday lives.

So, naturally, the World Wildlife Fund has come up with “Earth Hour”, an event in which at 8:30PM, Saturday night, in everyone’s respective time zone, people will be asked to turn off their lights and, presumably, the use of all electricity to increase awareness of “energy conservation.”

Two questions: What does this have to do with wildlife? And why should anyone bother?

What need is there to “conserve energy?” One either uses it or does not. You can’t “conserve” it. You can use more or less of it, but you cannot save it up for later. Electricity is always “now.”

Is the Earth running out of coal? Hardly, the Chinese can’t build coal-fired plants fast enough to generate the electricity to grow their economy. In India, they’re launched on a huge program to build nuclear plants for the same reason. A nation without adequate electricity is strictly Third World.

Nor is the Earth running out of oil? The rumor is that there’s vast amounts in the Arctic and both the U.S. and Russia are making nasty noises at one another to ensure that neither one or the other gains control of it. Brazil just struck oil way offshore of its beautiful beaches and you don’t hear them complaining about it.

The U.S., of course, has vast untapped reserves of oil offshore and an estimated 3 to 4.3 BILLION barrels of it in the Bakken Formation under North Dakota and Montana. There’s oil under Utah as well. We’re not running out of oil in the United States. We just can’t drill for it thanks to Congress and the White House.

We can’t build coal-fired plants either because the Greens keep telling us that coal is “dirty.” The electricity it provides—just over half of all that’s used nationwide—isn’t dirty. Soon, though, they’re won’t be enough of it because our Green President thinks that solar and wind can provide it. It can’t and it won’t. Ever.

There’s just one way to “conserve” energy. Don’t use it. Don’t turn on the light. Don’t turn on the computer. Don’t turn on the television. Unplug your refrigerator, your heating and cooling system. Don’t wash and dry your clothes in a machine. Don’t use it.

Otherwise, the next moron that talks about conserving energy should be stuffed in a barrel and allowed to float over the Niagara Falls which, during Earth Hour, will not be lighted.

We will all be treated to the idiotic sight of a darkened Empire State Building and other similar structures around the world such as the Eiffel Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge, Las Vegas strip, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the London Eye Ferris wheel, and the Pyramids of Egypt.