The Coming Apocalypse

*

There's a thin line of light
On the outskirts of love
Lights on the bend
Disappearing from view
There's a hard black road
Through the outskirts of love
It carries me back
And it scares me too
Bad news always reminds me of you

Well I recognise these parts
This once was my home
Where I played as a child
Where I first met you
Just to look at it now dear
Sends a chill to my bones
Oh I wish I knew then what I know now to be true
Bad news always reminds me of you

Bad news always reminds me of you
Bad news always reminds me of you

I heard one or two facts
That may once have been true
I heard colourful stories
Pertaining to you
And the corners of your postcard
Show telltale smudges of red
You said you were still in love
That wasn't what the postmark said

With the sky made of rock
My back to the rain
And the lights on the bend
Disappearing from view
I am winding the clock back
And starting again
The outskirts of love fading from view
Bad news always reminds me of you

Well the last time that I saw the lights
Was the last time that I saw you
It had to be me or it had to be you
Bad news always reminds me of you.

Bad News Always Reminds Me Of You
The Triffids.

These were the end times, the times of loss and finality, the time they had all been waiting for all their lives, the end of days. This was the belief, so deeply ingrained. No good could come of it. No shelter from the storm, no cosy alcove, no fire at the hearth. They were all under 16, the children gathering at the corner, waiting for the Hillsong bus to come and collect them, to ferry them back to Glebe, to make sure they had a bed for the night. Having a good ding dong argument. The only word he could hear being shouted was "slut". Those girls are always fighting, Craig said. He knew of whom he spoke. They were always selling dope to any passer by who hesitated even for a moment. Twenty dollar bags of smoking dope, the community norm.

The fight was so lively that people were stopping to watch. The gang split in two, groups of children on either side of the road. Some of them were so young, he thought, they shouldn't be out on the streets at this hour of night. Vulnerable, although the cocky little bastards thought they were the kings of the street.
A puffy faced, crumpled, extremely drunk man stumbled past them. They'll be thick as thieves and hugging each other any moment, the two sisters, he said. Craig agreed with him, adding a dash of camaraderie into the night. We're all blokes. We're all in this together. The sun has already set. How do you get so drunk? he thought, that's drunk; as Craig and the man exchanged pleasantries over the fighting girls.

The man continued to sway and stumble down the street. Do you know who that was? Craig asked. He shook his head, nup. He was a boxer down at the Mundine gym, famous, won an Australian title, everything. He couldn't stay off the sauce. His eyes followed the man as he disappeared into the gloom. Half the country feels flash with handouts. The other half feels resentful. If you take money off one person and give it to another, you create resentment. And that is exactly what the government is doing, creating resentment on a massive scale; my bet, the so-called stimulus package, handing out billions of dollars to the great unwashed, no strings attached, spend it hope you like. Everyone got something but him. He got nothing. He watched in disgust.

The man stumbled down the Redfern street as they watched, their conversation droned on, built on resentments and crazed luck, solid block, sad case, nightmare scenario, children hanging off us like parasites, deeply deserved, like elongated avocados clinging to a tree. Everyone took us for everything they could get. And now the government was stealing our taxes and giving it to every undeserving bludger in the country. Welfare dependency got worse. The economy wobbled. They kept voting left in giant packs. Anna Bligh romped it home in Queensland. The conservatives were vanquished. No one was going to vote Liberal, conservative, not after Howard, not after Work Choices. They grizzled as they talked, their low tones mumbling into the city scape, the scenes they always watched, a clear catastrophe on the way.

The man stumbled and they both continued to watch. Do you remember his name? he asked Craig, who shook his head, trying to think. No. There seemed to be even more children gathering on the corner, waiting for the bus to take them home. There's a curfew in Glebe, Craig said, they all come here because they'll get picked up in their home suburb. And Hillsong ferries them around. Hoping to convert them. Doing good deeds. Were the first socialists Christians? They were always emoting for the poor, the underclass. He himself had hoped to dedicate his life to improving the lot of the common man; the ordinary, unfamous, average Joe. And for his grief he got disillusioned, as he saw the unwashed grow ever greater in number, while he watched the impacts of passive welfare, handing money out for nothing.

It will all be seen as a big mistake, he said. Blowing the surplus and plunging into deficit. Wounding the heart of the nation with bureaucratic excess, with grand, pointless gestures. You can't just do nothing, the Prime Minister said, and made himself even more popular, money pouring into their pockets. They all think he's doing alright out there, in the great unwashed. What he saw as frenetic they saw as busy. What he saw as pompous they saw as important. What he saw as slimy they saw as personable. And rhetoric from Turnbull; Wayne Swan is to finance what Kevin Rudd is to public speaking, a disgrace to both professions, was entirely lost on an audience that mistook boring for erudite, who were easily impressed and easily manipulated, as media management was taken to new heights.

They watched as the old boxer stumbled closer to the pub. They watched as the untended, unsupervised children, finished their dealing for the day and waited for a bus to take them back home. They watched; and they waited for the end time. They both knew it was coming. It was only a matter of timing. Would it happen in their lifetime, or could they live out their own days in relative peace and order. Are we heading for a Depression? he asked. And Craig shook his head, more in bewilderment than affirmation, acknowledging the complexity of the scene before them, of the global financial crisis, of arrogant, out of touch politicians smug on their own fat wages, flickering uncertainty, deep loss, profound dislocation, all were heading our way.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/national/bikie-killed-in-sydney-airport-brawl-20090323-95xc.html

A HELLS Angels bikie was killed in a huge brawl at Sydney Airport with rival club the Comanchero, in a brazen attack witnessed by dozens of travellers yesterday afternoon.

The 29-year-old was knocked to the ground during the brawl - involving at least 10 men - and bashed repeatedly in the head with a metal bollard.

The attack took place in terminal three, one of the most secure and monitored public spaces in Australia.

A shocked Premier, Nathan Rees, immediately announced he would meet the Police Commissioner, Andrew Scipione, this morning to discuss tough new anti-bikie legislation.

"I was sickened by this brazen attack. Violence of this nature particularly in front of families and children is nothing short of disgusting," Mr Rees said.

The attack came hours after the Sydney-based Bandidos had been involved in a series of drive-by shootings at six homes in Auburn, though that is believed to be linked to a feud with another club, Notorious.

The Hells Angel was travelling with other interstate bikies who had flown from Adelaide via Melbourne to reinforce the Bandidos' Blacktown chapter in its war with Notorious, underworld sources said.

"Even if there was airport security there was no way they could have intervened. They came across the turnstiles like a tangled mob," a witness, who did not want to be named, said.

"[There was] a man on the ground and a man smashing his head with this silver bollard - there was nothing [security and police] could have done."

Initial police reports suggested the dead man may also have been stabbed.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/03/23/2523039.htm

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd leaves Australia today for a two week world tour which will focus on the deteriorating global economy.

Mr Rudd flies out today for Washington where he will hold his first face-to-face meeting with US President Barack Obama.

The global economic downturn will be at the top of the agenda.

Mr Rudd says the recession will get worse before it gets better and he believes economies like Australia's depend on significant changes being made to the world's big banks, including those in the US.

Among the key issues for Mr Rudd is tackling toxic assets on bank balance sheets to get credit flows moving and reform of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Mr Rudd wants the IMF to be better resourced so it has more flexibility to deal with emerging crises in the developing world.

"We don't want a second wave sub-prime crisis ... [which] could occur if you've got a huge implosion in the economy say in central and Eastern Europe or elsewhere in the developing world, which then washes back into the world's major banks again," he said.

But he has promised Australia's national interest will always come first when dealing with Washington and insists he will disagree with the US, if it is in Australia's interest.

Former prime minister John Howard was often criticised for being too close to former US president George W Bush and following him into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr Rudd wants a positive practical relationship with the new US President.

"The key thing ... is to work with America on the big problems which confront us all," he told the Nine Network.

"That doesn't say we're going to agree on everything, as I've said before. I mean our job is to look at everything in terms of Australia's national interest.

"But I think I'm going to have a good relationship with President Obama and I'll be working practically in that direction."

The crumbling case for global warming -- Signs of the Times News: "http://www.sott.net/articles/show/179428-The-crumbling-case-for-global-warming"

One young radical turned up at the Heartland Institute's climate change skeptics' conference in New York this week to declare that he had never witnessed so much hypocrisy. How, he asked the panelists of a session on European policy, could they sleep at night? Clearly puzzled, one of the panelists asked him with which parts of their presentations he disagreed. "Oh," he said "I didn't come here to listen to the presentations."

The conference - titled "Global Warming: Was it ever really a crisis?" - attracted close to 700 participants. Most of those I met displayed almost joy at being among people who dared to stand up to the mindless climate "consensus" and the refusal to debate, or even look at, the facts, as typified by that righteous young radical.

President Obama is considering a cap-and-trade system with which Canada would be forced to co-ordinate its own policies. The conference made clear how damaging and pointless such a policy would be.

Vaclav Klaus, the professorial president of both the Czech Republic and the European Union, pointed out at the conference's first session on Sunday evening that the global political establishment was still in the grip of thinking reminiscent of the Communism under which he once lived. He noted that few if any politicians seemed even aware of, or interested in, either the shortcomings of officially cooked climate science, or the potential disasters of climate policy.

Professor Richard Lindzen, one of the world's leading climatologists, also stressed that climate alarmism was a political and not a scientific matter. Particular worrying, he said, was that various scientific bodies had been seized by alarmists, who now issued statements without polling the members. This played into the appeal to authority rather than science. He called climate modelling "unintelligent design" and global warming a "postmodern coup d'état." He stressed that "Nature hasn't followed the models" used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. There has been no global warming for 10 or 15 years. Countering all the blather about Exxon's (former) support for Heartland that appeared in coverage of the conference by climate-change cheerleaders at The New York Times and The Guardian, he noted that skeptics in fact had minimal resources to rectify the incipient policy horrors.

Asked why the skeptics had so much trouble in presenting a unified front, Professor Lindzen stressed that there was no "skeptical solidarity." But Joseph Bast, head of the Heartland Institute, pointed out that such diversity was a sign of free inquiry, as opposed to bogus claims that the science was "settled."

The sessions indicated the huge potential costs of the Obama administration's commitment to cap and trade, regulation and the promotion of renewables, effectively rationing energy as a way of grabbing revenue. Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who takes pride in having been dubbed a "climate criminal" by Greenpeace, noted that the political struggle had to keep the message simple. Voters should ask politicians one simple question: "Why do you want to raise my energy prices?" Since the one issue on which there truly is consensus is that Kyoto would have had little or no impact on global temperatures, it is a question for governments around the world, not least that of the government of Ontario, which has just introduced its draconian Green Energy Act.

Indur Goklany, an expert on globalization and a contributor to the IPCC, noted, using the UN's own figures, that global warming was by no means the threat conventionally portrayed. Indeed, the UN even acknowledged its benefits, although to establish that fact you had to read the documents "like a lawyer."

The session interrupted by the callow youth outlined the disaster of the EU's emissions trading system, and of its climate change policies in general. The good news, as Benny Peiser of John Moores University in Liverpool, and editor of the influential CCNet science network, suggested, was that the green movement was collapsing in Europe and becoming increasingly unpopular, as its enormous costs and minimal results were becoming apparent. The attempt to "rebrand" Europe as the "Environmental Union" had fallen apart and was now causing increasing discord both between and within countries.

Sam Meoy the photographer and scenes from Sydney Park, Sydney, Australia.