Shane

This is my friend Shane, a bombastic and difficult person, but interesting. He's here outside the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, RPA, where I had driven him. He hasn't been well lately and has been bouncing in and out of hospital a lot lately; and I sometimes kept hauled in to pick him up and take him in when things go haywire late at night. I first got to know him on the phone, he rang up the news desk one night; it was those times when winter really did seem like winter, gusty dark winds around corners, dank spots, chaos, and it was the night I had got the judgement from the Family Court which progressively reeduced my time with the children over the next two years. Luckily this never came about; but at the time, after I thought I was doing the right thing and instead came up against a wall of the most dishonest and corrupt arseholes I had ever met in my life. I was upset, teary, and didn't know what to do.

Shane at the time had a little child protection lobby group called Care For Us, and he was ringing up to pester us about some story or other. Nobody ever pays much attention to the public, they're mostly lunatics or would have know idea what a story was. These days, the days of talkback, they all think they're on radio. They ring you up and give you their opinion on this that or the other that has been published in the paper, and nothing will stop them. There's no point interrupting them. But as soon as they've said their bit and you've thanked them for their input their off, happy as Larry. Any suggestion that they might follow some traditional route, such as writing a letter to the editor, falls on death ears.

Anyway, Shane rang up this night and I told him the whole story, and one way or another we've known each other ever since. The fascinating thing about Care For Us was the body of documentation he had accumulated on a string of outrageous child cases; where the appalling conducts of the psychs and the closed, circuitous nature of the system, were clearly evidenced. I met a Lebanese couple. Could I help. I was a big pooh bah journalist. No, I couldn't help. They were the big messy family that lived down at the end of the street. A neighbour had made some stupid complaint. The department stepped in. The mother, a Lebanese villager, made the mistake of telling the psych, oh my God what shonks some of these people are, anyway; she made the mistake of telling this psych, in response to a question of what she did during the day, that she sometimes talked to the mouse in the house. That was enough. They lost all four children, including a new born, and she was put on medication which made her vague and sweaty. And they couldn't understand why they had lost their children. And they pleaded with me to help. That was just one of the cases.

The story goes that one of the kids got run over and badly hurt in his foster home by a case worker. That was the last I heard.

NEWS:

www.spacedaily.com

A Matter of Fact

by Staff Writers
Boston MA (SPX) Aug 22, 2006
As a rule, scientists seek certainty. So it's rather unusual that for more than 70 years, many astronomers have wagered the universe is primarily made of dark matter -- a mysterious and unproven substance.
It's a bet that finally paid off, because a team of scientists working with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has found direct evidence that dark matter is as real as the rings around Saturn.
The discovery cements dark matter's status as the biggest building block in the universe, while also putting to rest the nagging worries of many astronomers that they gambled wrong....
It ends:
Hidden Influence
The scientists had already calculated the masses of the galaxies using other measuring methods. Yet the results from gravitational lensing showed the galaxies are bending much more light toward themselves than they should be able to. The astronomers knew something was amiss. An unseen force, substance or object had escaped the clouds along with the galaxies and was helping to bend more light.
For the first time in history, astronomers caught dark matter at work.
"These results prove that dark matter exists," declared Clowe.
So there it is, bright as starlight: Dark matter matters, as a matter of fact.