Post The Apocalypse

*

They had long wanted to talk about the chaos that had enveloped their lives in a sixty day period; the time between visa runs. And so they did. With the boy's new girlfriend, a result of a strange series of coincidences which he himself had accidentally initiated, while he was bound by a time frame of pretending to be home all night to his current boyfriend. They both had new partners, in other words, and life had moved on dramatically. Sometimes sophisticated in their calls, sometimes barren in their hopes, theirs was a new found glory. Tum pid=plahd went the line, I make a mistake. I don't love her 100 per cent, the boy admitted. Sometimes only 60 or 70 per cent, sometimes 80. Well we all make compromises, he said in a too wordy English, which meant much of what he said was not understood. If you gave 100 per cent you would be giving your life away, surrendering to another. Something like that. Choirboys in quicksand, went the song, In the land of hungry ghosts. Choirboys, choirboys, choirboys in quicksand. Kah kah kah went the girls outside the bars, their calls meant to entice but to a foreigner were as much like crow calls as calls to the divine. Massage boys didn't do much but smile if you went slow, or beckoned. He'd got used to the fact now that foreigners were often regarded with repulsion. They were large, smelly, stupid and drunk and undeservingly had far too much money.

Cute little muscly teenagers dressed in black hung around the back sois. Young boy, dirty boy, went the touts. Young girl, dirty girl, you like young? they pestered. Sometimes he knew he had landed in a very different place. An imperial drone. At other times he was shocked by the malevolence of the fabric of things. I can't sleep with them for more than a few days, they make me sick, I get an allergy, like to a cat. No allergy to the money, however, he noted, as the demented vicious sick little queen filled his boy's head with advice on how to get gold out of a foreigner and how to make sure you didn't walk away with nothing. These things were breaks in time. The ritualised, stylised sex shows, demonstrating how little they liked change, or perhaps even genuine eroticism, for the West seemed to demand some sort of affection lust or love between the combating combining partners to make it all work, whatever it was, the shows and the hard-ons and the music and the movements, even the bashful smile as one of them ejaculated in front of the crowd, were all things you didn't see in Sydney but you certainly saw in Bangkok. Rhythmic, powerful, hypnotic, at the end of the show more than a 100 boys in tight white underpants took to the stage, parading their wares around the perimeter. Number 50 is very handsome, he commented, and noted later that the boy had gone to a customer in the first cull, while others, perhaps more personable, were there to the bitter end.

You baby, you don't understand Thailand, his friend had snapped some months back when he had suggested the tired looking sex worker was complaining she had a baby at home. Let's just send her home, he had said. You baby, mai kow chaie mon Thai, some men will pay more for breast milk, she's just trying to fool you. Don't believe half of what you see or half of what you hear. It was around then that his brain clicked around in the barrel, and he realised how thoroughly alien and quixotic was this place; how treacherous and shifting the sands, how little honesty had to do with anything. They could hardly let themselves go, let themselves be free. They couldn't even see the dancing minstrels. Tired days when the daylight made no sense at all. When he caught cabs into the infinitely complex city on strange assignations only he would undertake. When there was always somebody asking for money. This morning it was the boy from Cambodia. You want me to come visit you there, he asked. It would be very awkward right now, he replied. Besides, there was always somewhere else to go. Home town boy. Country boy. Sophisticated parlance. Yet another club, where they had been before. I hear the Funky Monkey is very entertaining, he said, just for something useless to say. The music pounded out without the usual Thai melodies, and being a Monday night only a scattering of Thais danced between the whisky laden tables. They didn't stay long. They remembered everything, every nuance. The bottle of Black Label the boy had consumed almost entirely on his own. I'm happy you're happy, the man at the next table had declared. But things were never as they seemed. That he had discovered. There was always an angle. There was always a desire for money. Status. Ambition. Confidence. A niche in a poverty stricken world. So he didn't tell them what they wanted to hear. Instead, he smiled an exhausted smile out of his washing machine head and declared: Let's go off to our respective partners, our respective lives. Lets act like civilised men. An hour later he noticed the missed call.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/greens-make-first-move-with-same-sex-marriage-legislation-in-senate/comments-fn59niix-1225931687793

THE Greens have wasted no time flexing their new parliamentary muscles, with senator Sarah Hanson-Young set to introduce same-sex marriage legislation into the upper house later today.

The move comes as the House of Representatives prepares to debate and adopt new standing orders that will establish a new committee to scrutinise legislation before it enters the house and rule on whether it is controversial.

The new bills committee is part of the suite of parliamentary reforms that all sides of politics agreed to earlier this month - at least initially.

But Senator Hanson-Young will not wait to have the same-sex legislation introduced into the house, saying she was fulfilling an election promise by introducing the same-sex marriage bill.

The next step, she said, was to push the major parties to allow a conscience vote on the matter.

Julia Gillard rejected the idea of legalising same-sex marriage earlier today, a move the Greens senator said the Prime Minister would have to explain to her party and the community.

“The ALP is not united on this and neither are the Liberal Party. The Tasmanian Labor Party in their policy platform has that they support marriage between same-sex couples,” she said.

“Julia Gillard will have to be clear about how she explains that to the community, they didn't accept her answers to this question during the campaign. Stonewalling isn't going to be accepted by anyone, not the community or within the ALP.”

Earlier today Ms Gillard confirmed she would not allow a conscience vote on same-sex marriage.

“The Labor Party has a clear position on the Marriage Act, that is a party position, so you should expect to see the Labor party voting as a political party, in unison, if that proposition comes to the parliament,” she told ABC radio.

“I'm saying the word `if' deliberately. Of course, there are members making suggestions about what private members' propositions they are interested in thinking about pursuing.

“The parliament will then collect those up in a proper process, bills will need to be drafted and then obviously choices and selections will need to be made about what goes forward.

“There is only so much parliamentary time. We've got to deal with government business as well as private members' business so there will be some clear selections about which bills get parliamentary time.”

But Senator Hanson-Young said the “new paradigm” meant a less-strict adherence to party lines was needed.

And she called on people to lobby their individual MPs in the coming months to demand a conscience vote.

The Greens will look to have the bill passed through the Senate and then moved to the lower house.

The Greens have also promised to introduce a private member's bill on euthanasia and the Prime Minister has promised a free vote on that legislation.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gKQgVdBxfhWneF-UNXpCJfoEDcPgD9IH8C500?docId=D9IH8C500

LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan — Gen. David Petraeus trudges across a gravel helicopter landing area with his aides, looking purposeful but a bit grim, as he reaches a village outpost in the violent Afghan province of Helmand. He's here to chart progress, or lack thereof, in a war that's running at the pace of a horse cart, in a world that runs at the speed of a text message.
The only time the 57-year-old commander's smile reaches his eyes are a couple of brief moments when he stops and chats with troops. He poses for snapshots that memorialize his first months in command here, fighting a long war that he knows the American public, not to mention the White House, wants done yesterday.
Petraeus does not snap when a reporter asks him a question he has answered 50 times before, and will at least another 50 this year: Do you see progress?
When he replies, the pressure weighing on him shows in his voice — quieter than when he was in charge at U.S. Central Command in Florida, or earlier in Baghdad and Mosul — and it shows as well in the slightly hunched set of his shoulders, leaning on one arm of the chair.
There is none of the showmanship described in magazine profiles that sketched a megawatt four-star commander who outmaneuvers his adversaries with political and media savvy.
Instead, there is a solemn professor, patiently getting through the next order of business in a day scheduled down to the minute. To answer that "progress" question, he asks his aide for a stack of charts, leafs through to the chosen page, and then walks the reporter through his vision of the war, like a tough calculus problem he keeps having to explain over and over.
Yes, there is some progress, but only some, Petraeus says. No, he will not be drawn out on whether it's a trend. Yes, things are going according to plan. But no, he won't give the plan a timeline, because yes, he knows NATO has overpromised before.
His favorite expression is "only now do we have all the right inputs in place," as in only now do the United States and NATO have all the tools, from manpower to surveillance platforms to all the logistics and air support needed to fight the military side of a counterinsurgency conflict. That encompasses "stressing" the enemy through capturing and killing, and moving Army units into contested Afghan neighborhoods, to win them back from the Taliban.
He's got a chart showing those "inputs," too, including one called "People," which lists Gen. Stanley McChrystal — the man dismissed from the post Petraeus now occupies, after quotes embarrassing to the White House appeared in a Rolling Stone article. If you ask an aide why the chart hasn't been updated to say "General Petraeus," instead of "General McChrystal," the aide says: "McChrystal's name is there because the boss wants it there." McChrystal put everything into place, he explains.
True to that, Petraeus brings up McChrystal's name in nearly every conversation, mentioning how everything that's happening now was jointly planned by him and McChrystal last fall.
Petraeus says the burden of convincing the American public that this war is winnable is not his job — he advises the White House on how to prosecute the war, nothing more.
Yet when pressed about the dour headlines of diving public opinion polls back home, he turns to his computer and digs out the latest statistics on violence in Iraq — only six incidents thus far that day, compared to roughly "220 a day back in 2007," which is proof, he says, that his counterinsurgency strategy worked once and will again. You get the sense the tired general keeps an eye on that rearview mirror as a touchstone, to remind himself as much as the journalist sitting before him that no one believed he would turn around that war, either.
And he is keenly aware that few are convinced he can turn this one.
The NATO commanders he is to visit that day do report incremental progress, mapped out in spreading blotches of color overlaid on village maps, showing where once no-go zones have been turned into safe areas. In the U.S. Army counterinsurgency manual Petraeus helped author, these blotches of territory where troops establish security are called "inkspots." The plan, a standard counterinsurgency tactic for nearly 100 years, is that the inkspots grow to meet each other.
The commanders Petraeus visits explain the slow pace is because Afghans will work with NATO troops only if they see "Hesco" barriers go up. Those are the steel cages wrapped in a tough canvas burlap that troops station around their more permanent bases, filled with rocks and earth to stop car bombs and the like.
In the one area on the map the general visited Thursday — in and near the town of Lashkar Gah — these "Hesco inkspots" had indeed grown over the past year. The barriers are a symbol, Petraeus later explains, that the NATO troops and the security they provide are there to stay, presumably to be replaced later by Afghans.
Opponents of Petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy have raised doubts about whether Afghan troops will be ready to take the lead from NATO by 2014 — Afghan President Hamid Karzai's stated deadline.
And NATO officers, like Petraeus' predecessor McChrystal, have openly admitted that the local government-in-a-box that was supposed to backfill NATO efforts is not yet providing adequate services. U.S. and Afghan officials privately complain that Afghan officials extorting bribes from the people they were hired to serve also remains commonplace.
Questioned about some of those obstacles, Petraeus said it was too soon to guess how much progress would be made on security, or governance, over the next year.

From: www.squidoo.com
From the movie Reign of Fire.