NB

Is Rudd Australia's 'Kerensky'?

I hope they are merely stupid!

I have been reading recently about the period of Egyptian history between 1923 and 1952 when there was a level of political freedom unseen before or since in that benighted land. 

I was drawn to this exploration by a marvellous sculpture of Mahmoud Mokhtar's entitled 'Nahdit Misr'(Egypt's Awakening). I love that style of art and was thrilled to see such an excellent example in a place most would not consider to be of great significance to the 'Deco' period.

However what I discovered in my reading was how the political situation was manipulated by cynical, seditious and anarchic factions and how effective these strategies became:

The Nasser-led regime which emerged did not take long to devastate the entire Egyptian economy, and its civil society, even more thoroughly than the great fire of early 1952 had destroyed Cairo. Egypt would never recover. The regime’s destructive power prepared the perfect wasteland conditions for the Islamist recruiting sergeants of the 1970s and beyond.

I can’t help but think of the similarities that exist in our current political situation in Australia. This Labor government appears to be hell bent on destroying the Australian economy and the social fabric on which the country built its current prosperity . The decisions that they have taken and are continuing to pursue do not make any sense unless there is a hidden agenda somewhere.

If I stand back and look at what I am saying I think ‘how did I become a conspiracy theorist’? Yet there doesn’t seem to be any logic to the decisions that this government are taking.

One does not have to be an economic genius to observe how the irrational decisions being enacted are going to destroy this economy. To what purpose? To appease some UN committee, I think not. From the evidence readily available I can only assume that there are powers who wish to create chaos and unstable political and economic conditions sufficient to enable them to step in and rule by fiat.

Mugabe when asked why he allowed the ruinous policies that led to the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy replied in words to the effect that a people who rely on the government to eat are completely within that government’s power. So it appears a strategy emerges from a government that embraces deliberately bad economic policies; that is, another route to the ‘will to power’.

Who said History repeats itself:

The regime (Egyptian) which came to power with US support would soon abolish all vestiges of civil society that were not dependent on the state. Over the next several years, it proceeded to destroy economic property rights and the rule of law. All significant private businesses, and all publishing houses and media, were seized by the state. Thousands of Egyptians were ruined overnight. Many journalists and writers were sent away to camps for years. 

Fascists in sheeps clothing

Unfortunately the exact same thing is happening in Australia. Substitute Obama for Gillard and Bush for Abbott and the situation is almost identical. Read the attached essay and weep for our country:

Socialist or Fascist?
By Thomas Sowell


It bothers me a little when conservatives call Barack Obama a "socialist." He certainly is an enemy of the free market, and wants politicians and bureaucrats to make the fundamental decisions about the economy. But that does not mean that he wants government ownership of the means of production, which has long been a standard definition of socialism.
What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector.
Politically, it is heads-I-win when things go right, and tails-you-lose when things go wrong. This is far preferable, from Obama's point of view, since it gives him a variety of scapegoats for all his failed policies, without having to use President Bush as a scapegoat all the time.
Government ownership of the means of production means that politicians also own the consequences of their policies, and have to face responsibility when those consequences are disastrous — something that Barack Obama avoids like the plague.
Thus the Obama administration can arbitrarily force insurance companies to cover the children of their customers until the children are 26 years old. Obviously, this creates favorable publicity for President Obama. But if this and other government edicts cause insurance premiums to rise, then that is something that can be blamed on the "greed" of the insurance companies.
The same principle, or lack of principle, applies to many other privately owned businesses. It is a very successful political ploy that can be adapted to all sorts of situations.

<>

One of the reasons why both pro-Obama and anti-Obama observers may be reluctant to see him as fascist is that both tend to accept the prevailing notion that fascism is on the political right, while it is obvious that Obama is on the political left.
Back in the 1920s, however, when fascism was a new political development, it was widely — and correctly — regarded as being on the political left. Jonah Goldberg's great book "Liberal Fascism" cites overwhelming evidence of the fascists' consistent pursuit of the goals of the left, and of the left's embrace of the fascists as one of their own during the 1920s.
Mussolini, the originator of fascism, was lionized by the left, both in Europe and in America, during the 1920s. Even Hitler, who adopted fascist ideas in the 1920s, was seen by some, including W.E.B. Du Bois, as a man of the left.
It was in the 1930s, when ugly internal and international actions by Hitler and Mussolini repelled the world, that the left distanced themselves from fascism and its Nazi offshoot — and verbally transferred these totalitarian dictatorships to the right, saddling their opponents with these pariahs.
What socialism, fascism and other ideologies of the left have in common is an assumption that some very wise people — like themselves — need to take decisions out of the hands of lesser people, like the rest of us, and impose those decisions by government fiat.
The left's vision is not only a vision of the world, but also a vision of themselves, as superior beings pursuing superior ends. In the United States, however, this vision conflicts with a Constitution that begins, "We the People..."
That is why the left has for more than a century been trying to get the Constitution's limitations on government loosened or evaded by judges' new interpretations, based on notions of "a living Constitution" that will take decisions out of the hands of "We the People," and transfer those decisions to our betters.
The self-flattery of the vision of the left also gives its true believers a huge ego stake in that vision, which means that mere facts are unlikely to make them reconsider, regardless of what evidence piles up against the vision of the left, and regardless of its disastrous consequences.
Only our own awareness of the huge stakes involved can save us from the rampaging presumptions of our betters, whether they are called socialists or fascists. So long as we buy their heady rhetoric, we are selling our birthright of freedom.

Cut from the same cloth?

The  reality of the enviromentalist vs 'ordinary' human existence is; that the Australian flora and fauna are in a much better shape than the average Aussie 'battler'.
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2012/06/unesco-butt-out
Hopefully the upcoming Aussie government will take a more realistic approach to reality than the current 'earthians' but given recent mutterings from the Liberal back-benches perhaps that future is no foregone conclusion.
One can but hope!

Culture wars

The foundational centre-piece of socialism's cultural war strategy:

...the fundamental attack on objective truth, moral authority and bedrock cultural values — (nor) the hijacking of language which effectively redefined the centre ground in leftist terms.

When are conservatives going to emerge with courage?...Courage to confront the ideologically driven and immeasurably stupid.

Wierdo!

Erudite word-smithery that perfectly captures the magical mystery tour that is Julian Assange:

"Irony doesn’t quite capture the mordant weirdness of Assange seeking sanctuary in a country where the suppression of information is a flagship government policy."

Climate scam

No matter how committed you may be to the crackpot theory of Anthropogenic global warming, this extract from a paper by the former chief atmospheric scientist of the CSIRO must give you pause...if not then you are motivated by ideology and not fact which makes your contribution nothing more than uninformed and possibly criminally tainted opinion.

But the real worry with climate research is that it is on the very edge of what is called postmodern science.... Postmodern science envisages a sort of political nirvana in which scientific theory and results can be consciously and legitimately manipulated to suit either the dictates of political correctness or the policies of the government of the day.

...and

Climategate scandal of 2009, wherein thousands of emails were leaked from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England, showed that certain senior members of the research community were, and presumably still are, quite capable of deliberately selecting data in order to overstate the evidence for dangerous climate change…

Climate science has transformed itself from a research backwater a few decades ago into one of the greatest public-good scientific cash cows ever devised. In Australia, for instance, there is a separate federal Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency specifically devoted to implementing (buying?) the social change required to limit global warming. The livelihood of many of the climate scientists within the CSIRO and elsewhere is now dependent on grants from that department. It is not a situation conducive to sceptical outlook and balanced advice…

No doubt these scientists genuinely believe in their own perception of the climate change story. But why do mainstream scientists go along with the inevitable overstatement associated with the activism business?

One factor is a form of loyalty to colleagues. Another, bearing in mind the singular nature of the funding source, is the need to eat.

Abandon all hope...

Quite frankly those who still support this most disastrous government of Australia and its global warming scam as well as its murderous illegal refugee policies are as culpable of manslaughter and ruinous deceit as they are.
I trust that they examine their selfish conceit under the light of compassion and intelligence.

Deceit in the air, not carbon!

A crock of horse manure by any other name remains a crock of horse manure. The Chicken Little's of the environmental universe have decided that honesty is not the best policy...well Booga Booga and we are surprised?

The term “Climate Change” is so on the nose, everyone is thinking of ways to reframe it. Activists openly admit the new terms are biodiversity, and sustainable development.

Huxley Lawler, Executive Coordinator of Environment and Climate Change of the Gold Coast City Council in Australia (an ICLEI member), told CFACT Executive Director Craig Rucker bluntly that “we don’t use the term climate change anymore. It’s sustainable development.” Rucker and CFACT staffer Abdul Kamara confirmed this in conversations with other delegates, including Paul Chambers, a Sustainability Manager for the Auckland Council in New Zealand. Chambers said it is important to use inexact environment protection terminology when dealing with conservative governments, like the one he says currently heads his nation. [CFACT]

What are they hiding?

What is worrying though is that as Christopher Monckton points out, they have, for the first time ever, locked out all the non-government delegates. So much for transparency. The pain of Copenhagen and Durban has made them both sharper and more desperate.

RIO DE JANEIRO — In a shock move, officially-accredited non-government delegates who had traveled thousands of miles to attend the UN’s Rio+20 sustainable development conference in Brazil have been refused all access to the central negotiating text.

There is no public UN documentation center at Rio, though such centers were always available at previous UN conferences.

Marc Morano, publisher of Climate Depot, has attended many UN conferences and is in Rio, said: “This censorship by the UN is without precedent. The public has had access to these documents at previous UN summits. This latest development makes a mockery of any UN claim to ‘transparency

The 'sorry' con

The book’s introduction specifically tackles Australia’s reputation for genocide. Windschuttle’s most astonishing piece of evidence—of which I was utterly unaware—is that the reason Australia’s courts have not been deluged with compensation claims is that most of these claims simply do not stand up to the laws of evidence, and that the genocide argument has been legally disproven in the High Court on several occasions. Windschuttle rightly puts Kevin Rudd’s “Sorry Speech” in this context, noting that it allowed Rudd to maximise his publicity while not binding himself to any compensation obligations, knowing full well that the High Court had already made this almost impossible.

This puts Rudd's smarmy hypocrisy in bold perspective. Unfortunately Gillard's deceits are merely the continuum of Labor's lust for power.

Tough times

When I read the following essay: http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2012/6/it-s-really-about-freedom  I was struck by the use of the phrase PNS (Post-Normal-Science). The ideology behind the phrase is one hundred percent Post-modern; that cursed grandchild of the Modern movement, child of the 60's revolution and the filthy baggage of Charon's reverse journey across the Styx.

 The political realm has been exposed to the Furies* and Hades has been unleashed on this earth. We are at war...it is a war of ideas and if we are not careful it will eventuate in a real, killing war between people. Already the polarisation of ideas has closed minds to the 'other perpsective' and that is why the 'watermelons' are committed to achieving power irrespective of how manipulative they have to be. And we only have to look at the tiny minority behind the Russian revolution but who possessed an incredible commitment to power at any cost, to realise that Australia is teetering on the brink of something very hot and smelly.

Obviously the vast majority of those sympathetic to the Green movement are not Marxist-Leninists like Rhiannon, and yet the same motivating spirit is at work: a desire for human society to be regulated, monitored and instructed by a Gnostic elite endowed with the incontestable truth. There is, as Delingpole says, “nothing cuddly, fluffy or bunny hugging about the Green religion”. The guiding principle is not quirky Lennonism but steely-eyed Leninism. To grasp this is to understand the inner-dynamics of Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature.

Environmental activists, along with their “useful idiot” allies, are at war with “free markets and free trade and personal liberty”. In this respect they are no different from their collectivist antecedents, communism and fascism alike. There can be “no middle way” in our response to their totalitarian challenge: 

Even if you think there is a middle way, the people who would wish to steal your freedoms and your democratic rights in the name of “environmentalism” have seen to it that there is not. It really is that simple: optimism or pessimism; freedom or tyranny; joy or misery. You choose.

*The Furies, who are usually characterized as three sisters (Alecto, Tisiphone and Magaera) are the children of Gaia and Uranus. They resulted from a drop of Uranus' blood falling onto the earth. They were placed in the Underworld by Virgil and it is there that they reside. However, Greek poets saw them as pursuing sinners [see anyone opposed to deep Green ideology] on Earth. The Furies are cruel.

The green zealots running this government and those who act as  their mouth-pieces do not care if you and I struggle to meet our bills, pay for food, electricity or anything else. In fact they believe we must increase the pain at least by 5 times more.

Yet this same planet-saving government, having already given us so many green disasters - the free pink batts, the solar hot water rebates, green audits, failed solar projects, limp wind farms, carbon capture - is still pushing ahead with a $10 billion green energy fund that is guaranteed to waste even more.

It’s insane that even after trawling though this latest smoking ruin, author Lenore Taylor and those she interviews don’t conclude that “stopping” global warming is not worth this pain, but that we need to spend yet more. Much, much more:

Dr Peter Cook, former head of the CO2CRC and now professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne, says progress is being made, particularly in understanding how carbon dioxide can be sequestered.

But he agrees with Wells that ‘’a $23 carbon price will not drive this investment - you need $100 a tonne or something of that sort to drive it. Other low-emissions technologies get effective support of that order.’’

And what difference will all that spending actually make to the climate? About zero. Utter madness

Ed-decline

 An interesting even necessary read:

This book is an insider's account of the current state of Australia's universities. It paints a picture of a system driven by the balance sheet, administered by a mindless and mean-spirited bureaucracy, adrift in a mire of pedagogical pap peddled by Educationalists.

It is the story of the transformation of our higher education system from one that delivered a rigorous education, producing highly competent graduates, many of whom distinguished themselves on the international stage, into two-dollar-shop degree factories. The resultant threat to the broad-scale competence of the professions is obvious.

In spite of policies for everything: Quality Assurance, Graduate Attributes, Personal Performance Plans, KPIs and myriad managerial fantasies, the fall in standards is undeniable and the extent of institutional dysfunction is staggering. Students, parents of students and graduates are scarcely equipped to critically examine the assumptions underlying these "reforms" and the ensuing impact on education. One of the aims of this book is to redress that shortfall.

Not only are university and government education bureaucrats presiding over the destruction of the intellectual fabric of the nation in an era of unprecedented global competition, they are denying a genuine higher education to those Australians with the necessary intelligence, motivation and practical skill to succeed.

Click this link to download the book as a pdf (no charge):

Australian Universities: A Portrait of Decline. (1MB)


(A paperback edition of the book is also available for purchase)

Conservatism & morality

This short paragraph from an address by Tony Abbott sums up who may be defined as a 'conservative':

As John Howard once observed, “a conservative is someone who doesn’t assume that he is morally superior to his grandfather”. A conservative instinctively appreciates everything that shaped him, doesn’t lightly change anything, and, where change really is necessary, tries to ensure that it enshrines values that have stood the test of time. Conservatives are not against change, but they instinctively prefer restoration to reform.

Bravo!

I believe that the current lack of respect for history in education is directly attributable to the desire by neo-Marxian activists to disparage the importance of the past and its ramifications in our lives today.
It is the trap that such people fall into believing that they are indeed more intelligent, more sophisticated, and more morally advanced than their grandfathers.
Neil Postman called it 'instantanaeity' meaning that what happens now is always superior to what happened in the past and is the by-product of the evolutionary perspective of continual improvement.

Personally I think the opposite is true and history appears to bear me out.

Tony Abbott's full address is available @ http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2012/6/living-large

Celebrity listings

Hehe, an amusing list of those in the 'eco-hypocrites club'...or the "do what I say not what I do" occupiers of the moral high ground:

* John “5 private jets” Travolta: we must all “do our bit for climate change”.

* Harrison “6 private planes and a helicopter” Ford: “We are at a tipping point”.

* Leonardo “Learjet Liberal” DiCaprio: “Our planet’s alarm is going off”.

* Sheryl “three tractor trailers, four buses, and six cars” Crow: “We can make it work with only one square per restroom visit”.

* Madonna “new toilet seat every day” Louise Ciccone: “If you wanna save the planet, jump up and down!”

* Prince Charles “16,400 airmile green crusade” Windsor: “Our planet has reached a point of crisis”.

* James “3 homes in Malibu” Cameron: “We’re going to have to live with less”.

* Barbra “120 bath towels per hotel visit” Streisand: “We are in a global warming emergency state”.

* Paul “Lexus by airmail” McCartney: “Less meat means less heat”.

And many more besides...think Al Gore, Tim Flannery et etc.

My mind boggles, not so much at the hypocrisy of these morons, fools like these have always existed, particularly those who achieve some level of fame in the entertainment field and then begin to believe their publicity handouts, that is that somehow success equals prescience. In reality their unconscious motivations appear to be more like survivors guilt than a true epiphany.

The major problem however, lies with the many 'ordinary' people who subsume their common sense and embrace these crackpot 'end-is-nigh' theories. The same people who would laugh at a religious nut  who makes a similar, but perhaps even more evidentially based claim.
I suppose it is the inevitable result of a civilisation that has had it too good, too easy for too long a time and whose busy worker bees are too distracted to understand that the benefits we currently enjoy did not just 'evolve' out of the mist, but that they are the result of a collective worldview and that ideas have consequences and ludicrous ideas bankrupt civilisations with chaos the resultant outcome.

Some want this of course so that they can clean up and control. For those naive dupes who have never experienced totalitarian rule...I hope and pray that I am wrong!

Deceptions

The proposition to  build a shrine to the 'Camelot years(?)' of the Whitlam government should not amaze anyone who has taken notice of the incredible narcissism exhibited by the Gillard government.
This blindness to reality appears to be a mirror image of the Obama debacle and perhaps it explains why Gillard and Obama seem to recognise 'familiar spirits' in each other.
The following excerpt is from an article by David Limbaugh:

Obama is so self-satisfied that in his mind, his legacy was largely written before he stepped into office. So fervent is his ideological belief system that even objective evidence of his dismal policy failures doesn't shake his confidence in his prescriptions. Because the facts don't square up with his pre-inauguration narrative, he simply changes the facts to make them conform, essentially saying: "The economy isn't good, but it's much better than it would have been had I not been in office. To the extent it's still bad, it's Bush's fault."

It sounds suspiciously like the Gillard/Swan hypothesis.

Scintillating

A GK Chesterton gem:

“The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that…

"The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.”

And this observation of his sounds chillingly like the Gillard governments approach to family values:

“Hitler's way of defending the independence of the family is to make every family dependent on him and his semi-Socialist State; and to preserve the authority of parents by authoritatively telling all the parents what to do… In other words, he appears to interfere with family life more even than the Bolshevists do; and to do it in the name of the sacredness of the family.”

sad little men (and women)

Just watched a rugby match entitled 'Classic Match' between England and Australia and featuring all of the rugby greats playing...Larkham, Latham, Gregan, Finegan, Roff, Waugh, Burke etc, on ABC and true to the overarching ideology of this sad organisation the English won.
Only on the ABC can a 'classic' match feature the home country losing...patriotism is so bourgeois you know!
Wouldn't it be great if this organisation would likewise be so 'even-handed' about the really important things like politics, global warming and illegal immigrants.
One can dream!