'Apocaholics anonymous'

If you are genuinely worried about the apocalyptic ravings of the eco-idiots then Isuggest you read this blog in its entirety: http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/apocalypse-not.aspx
It not only shows you how widespread the warnings are, but also how little changes.
Interestingly there are never any apologies for false warnings.
We should treat them in the same manner that false prophets were treated in the Old Testament. Amazingly I think that pretty much every apocalyptic warning would disappear.

One sided

THIS IS WHAT THE LEFT-WING CALL DEMOCRACY:



The Drum presents the kind of poll demanded by its core ABC audience.

Art as prophecy

This short excerpt from a poem by Steve Turner written some years ago has an uncannily prophetic edge to it when you think of recent newspaper headlines.

"If chance be the father of all flesh, disaster is his rainbow in the sky.

And when you hear “state of emergency, sniper kills ten”, “troops on rampage”, “youths are looting”, “bomb blasts school”, it is but the sound of man worshipping his maker."

Ship of Idiots more like!

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot...LOL. However this seems to be the Modus Operandi for the current ship of fools we euphemistically call the Labour 'Government'.

Labor tactics from only a couple of months ago:

A document calls on staffers to find details on their opponents’ “younger days”, articles in student newspapers, and any fundraising, companies or legal cases that they’d been involved in. The Prime Minister says it’s reasonable to scrutinise Opposition frontbenchers.

As the PM puts it, such scrutiny informs the public debate. (Via CL)

UPDATE:

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says Labor MPs – not coalition members – are behind the resurgence of claims against the prime minister dating back to her time as an industrial lawyer.

Well, they’re the experts

Terminal prophecy.

Wouldn't it be interesting if we applied old Testament standards to the new age 'prophets'.

One very good disincentive to going around making up wild and fanciful predictions can be found in the ancient book of Deuteronomy. At the end of the 18th chapter we find a pretty good deterrent to panic mongering and telling porkies about the future: the false prophet is to be put to death.

That is one good way to keep all the gloom and doom predictions at bay, and to restrain those who would presume to know exactly what the future holds. Such a punishment is of course no longer with us, so while ancient Israel was spared much of this foolishness, we today are not, unfortunately.

And some of the most bizarre, whacky and just plain wrong predictions, forecasts and prophecies have come from the new green religion. Radical environmentalism has been around for some time now, and they have never lacked for doomsday scenarios which could be dished up at will.

There is always some new ecological crisis just around the corner, and if we don’t act immediately – if not yesterday – then we shall all be doomed. Even before the last prediction was proven to be just so much baloney, several more mega-prophecies of global destruction are offered.(Muehlenberg 19.8.12)

Liberation in chains.

Theodore Dalrymple as usual nails it...ahem!

Thanks to the sexual revolution, current confusions are manifold. In a society that forms sexual liaisons with scarcely a thought, a passing suggestive remark can result in a lawsuit; the use of explicit sexual language is de rigueur in literary circles, but medical journals fear to print the word "prostitute" and use the delicate euphemism "sex worker" instead; commentators use the word "transgressive," especially in connection with sex, as a term of automatic approbation when describing works of art, while such sex offenders as reach prison have to be protected from the murderous assaults of their fellow prisoners; anxiety about the sexual abuse of children subsists with an utter indifference to the age of consent; compulsory sex education and free contraception have proved not incompatible with the termination of a third of all pregnancies in Britain and with unprecedented numbers of teenage pregnancies; the effective elimination of the legal distinction between marriage and cohabitation is contemporary with the demand that homosexual couples be permitted to marry and enjoy the traditional legal rights of marriage; and while it has become ever more difficult for married but childless parents to adopt, homosexual couples now have the right to do so. The right of lesbians to artificially aided conception by the sperm of homosexual men has likewise been conceded on the principle of non-discrimination, and 60-year-old women naturally enough claim the same rights to in vitro fertilization. Sexual liberty has led to an increase, not to a diminution, in violence between the sexes, both by men and by women: for people rarely grant the object of their affection the freedom that they claim and practice for themselves, with a consequent rise in mistrust and jealousy—one of the great, age-old provokers of violence, as Othello attests. Our era admires sexual athleticism but condemns predatory conduct. Boundaries between the sexes have melted away, as men become women by surgical means, and women men, while demands for tolerance and understanding grow ever more shrill and imperious. The only permissible judgment in polite society is that no judgment is permissible.

Quality communication

Can one do anything but marvel at the (seemingly) effortless erudition of some members of the human community:

Our world is a palimpsest, and over the book of nature, written in the language of cause and effect, there is another and incommensurable text, written in the language of freedom. We cannot rewrite the book of nature so that it accords with our hopes and ideals, for these have no place in that book. But we can rewrite the book of freedom, and that is where the contests lie. (Scruton Feb 2012)

The Hater tribe

The lunatic lefties no longer consider people who disagree with them to be wrong, no they consider them heretics or 'phobics' of some sort, e.g. homophobic and Islamaphobic:

Hate crimes are of course the invention of the secular left, especially the homosexual activists. In their books, anyone who disagrees with their agenda is guilty of hate, and that should be punished by law. It is simply a means by which the coercive utopians seek to stifle all dissent and silence all critics.

But let’s suppose for the moment that such a beast in fact exists. If anything, if there are hate crimes, they seem to be coming from the militants. I have documented how the leftist activists engage in hateful activities on a regular basis. (Muehlenberg 17.8.12)
http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2007/05/03/fake-hate-crimes/

The hidden truth about our current society and the way that society in the not-to-distant future is developing is captured rather well in this article by Bill Meuhlenberg:
http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2012/08/16/hate-crimes-and-lefty-double-standards/

The Media does have lot to answer for but not in the way that the watermelons of the left would have us believe.

Playdoh truth

What the Post-Modern deconstructionists have done well is to devalue truth based on facts by calling into question the idea of truth altogether. This approach means that facts themselves are open to manipulation and are frequently distorted to 'prove' sometimes the very opposite of what they are actually indicating. Truth now belongs to the tribe...falsehood lies in the realm of all of those who oppose the tribe.

The defenders of Assange are tribalists - the collective. Assange must be excused because he is one of them. And the facts must be displaced by the myths of the tribe. The women accusing Assange count for nothing. They are outside the tribe, and threaten it. (Bolt 17.8.12)

A clarion call

When you consider the attack on marriage by the gay lobby, reflect on this rather profound statement by Princeton University professor Robbie George:

The two greatest institutions ever devised for lifting people out of poverty and enabling them to live in dignity are the market economy and the institution of marriage. These institutions will, in the end, stand or fall together. Contemporary statist ideologues have contempt for both of these institutions, and they fully understand the connection between them. We who believe in the market and in the family should see the connection no less clearly.

The whole article is worth a read.
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/mirandadevine/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/preserving_the_family/

Culture wars!

Roger Scruton makes some extremely valuable points in this article:
http://spectator.org/people/roger-scruton/all.xml

This is a small extract from the article:

SO WHAT SHOULD CONSERVATIVES BE DOING? This is the last of my regular articles for The American Spectator, so let me conclude a happy period of my life with a few observations for future use. Our work, it seems to me, consists in what Plato called anamnesis -- the defeat of forgetting. We cannot ask young people to live as we lived or to value what we valued. But we can encourage them to see the point of how we lived, and to recognize that freedom without responsibility is, in the end, an empty asset. We can tell them stories of the old virtues, and enlarge their sympathies toward a world in which suffering and sacrifice were not the purely negative things that they are represented to be by the consumer culture but an immovable part of any lasting happiness. Our task, in other words, is now less political than cultural -- an education of the sympathies, which requires from us virtues (such as imagination, creativity, and a respect for high culture) that have a diminishing place in the world of politics.

Of course, we should do our best to control the growth of the state and to make it more difficult to depend upon its constant expansion. We should seek, through whatever avenues remain, to rebuild our education system with knowledge rather than “self-esteem” as its product. There are a hundred small-scale ways in which we can help the next generation not to fall completely into the trap that is being prepared for it. But there is no way, I fear, to destroy that trap entirely. For it is built from human ingenuity and baited with our own desires.

The great unmasking

A must read article for sceptics of all ages and creeds but in particular those ageing white conservative males like myself.
It unmasks the pretensions of the elite who would occupy and rule through fear and gives the lie to the crazy ongoing catastrophic theories that pretend to give pretext to a constant state of 'emergency'.
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2012/08/the-climate-of-opinion

Group think

This is a situation/problem that applies to many groups of 'experts', I have no doubt...not least those who consider themselves the experts in climate change.

I also was fairly careful not to go out on a limb, which basically meant following the herd of other economists. None of those economists, I am satisfied, knew more than I did, so it is a mystery how particular consensuses emerged. I suppose it was through some collective process of osmosis. (Peter Smith-Quadrant)

AGW squib

The big guns of the Global warming tribe are in fact small peashooters.

You’d expect a professor to have done the basic research.
Naomi Oreskes is famous (of sorts) for the book: Merchants of Doubt — it seeds doubts about skeptics by saying that skeptic’s “seed doubts” about climate change.
The skeptics seed doubts by questioning the evidence and pointing to contrary results (isn’t this known as “discussion”?). Orsekes seeds doubts by digging through biographies, analyzing indirect payments of minor amounts, hunting through unrelated topics and tenuous associations from 20 year old contracts.
The hypocrisy of saying that skeptics attack the messenger is lost on Orsekes who specializes in … attacking the messengers.
Oreskes’ work is based on a logical fallacy, inept research, and incompetent reasoning.
What is remarkable is that so many “intellectuals” or journalists can’t or won’t see through her thin rhetoric.

1. Oreskes can name virtually no significant funding for skeptics. Skeptics are almost all unpaid volunteers, working out of professional and patriotic duty, appalled by the illogical, anti-science sentiments of people like Oreskes.
2. The enormous “vested interests” are well over a thousand to one in favor of alarmism as measured by funding, yet Oreskes has not even considered them. The largest proactive skeptical organization (Heartland) has a budget that is one hundredth of Greenpeace and WWF’s combined. Funding for alarmist research since 1990 is at least $79 billion, and probably a lot higher. Funding for skeptical research is so small, no one can add it up. The oil giants like Shell and BP mostly support alarmism and carbon markets. The global carbon market was worth $176 bn in 2011, about the same as the global wheat trade, and the renewables investments added up to $243 bn in 2010. These are very large amounts of vested interest. Since Oreskes is blind to the real money in the debate we can only assume she is an activist rather than a historian.
3. She resorts to twenty year old documents about tobacco funding to smear by association because she has so little real evidence of actual funding or misbehavior of skeptics. As it happens, Fred Singer was never directly paid by a tobacco company, has never doubted that smoking causes cancer, but corrected a scientific error in a paper on passive smoking. He deserves thanks. Oreskes owes him an apology.
4. Skeptics far outrank believers in both numbers and in scientific kudos. They have won real Nobel Prizes in physics, the climate scientists Orsekes quotes have won “Peace Prizes”. Skeptics can name 31,500 scientists including 9,000 PhD’s and hundreds of professors. The IPCC can name 62 people who reviewed the critical chapter nine of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, some of them reviewing their own work. Alarmists don’t try to counter the Petition Project with a petition of their own because, even with all their supporters on the scientific gravy train, they don’t stand a chance of coming up with a number large enough to prop up their claims that 97% of scientists agree.
5. Oreskes claims “deniers” attack the messenger, which on it’s face is true, except that she is the one who denies the evidence and attacks the messenger. She is the Queen of Smear and The Merchant of Doubt herself. Virtually no one has done more to smear opponents in this debate than she has. She refers to them continuously as “Deniers” — though she cannot name any evidence they deny, she has dug mindlessly into the paltry funding, biographies, or association and connections with topics that are totally unrelated to our atmosphere. Skeptics keep asking for evidence. It’s been 30 months since I asked, and no one can provide THAT mystery paper that supports the catastrophic claims.
6. Oreskes keeps stating that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and increases the temperature of the planet, but almost all the leading skeptics agree with it. Why does she keep stating it, as if it is a point of contention? She wants the audience to believe that this is what the debate is about, while the skeptics agree that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that causes warming — but dispute the feedbacks asserted by models (which account for two thirds of the forecast increase in temperatures), but which is completely absent in the observations. Is Oreskes ignorant and incompetent in assessing the real scientific debate or is she deliberately deceiving her audience? Only she knows.

When she says those in denial reject “the scientific evidence”, she mistakenly believes that “evidence” about climate change is an internet poll of government funded researchers. It’s an anti-science position akin to witchcraft. Tens of thousands of real scientists, including men who walked on the moon, and Nobel Prize winners of physics, know that evidence for climate change comes from thermometers, ice cores, satellites and fossils. Real scientists can quote 1,100 peer reviewed papers that support their skepticism. Naomi Oreskes can quote no real evidence that supports her catastrophic pet hypothesis. Instead she thinks computer simulations produce “observations” and scientist’s opinions are worth measuring and quoting.

theres more....

Revolution 101

Post Modern political power strategy explained clearly:

The first thing to understand is the dirty little secret of the Victim Value Index. .. Actual suffering doesn’t matter. Neither does historical justice. Both of those are easy to make up, and in a dogma-ridden environment no one will look past the politically correct line anyway.

The Victim Value Index is calculated based on one overriding factor: Disruptiveness…

To be a progressive is to be committed to perpetual reform in the name of perpetual grievance for perpetual power. Grievance ... justifies their right to agitate and undermine, to seize power by any means necessary and to implement their programs legally or extra-legally.

Reformers need their bleeding sores, their cries of outrage and their muck to rake. Those who give them that often go to the head of the line acting as their secular clergy, blessing their rule… But that’s just part of it.

Progressivism is a revolution in slow motion, and revolutions need revolutionaries. Disruption is more than just grievance, it’s violence. Those who are willing to ruthlessly attack the status quo clearing the ground for revolution are the ones who go to the head of the line and the dais of honor on top. A little murder and mayhem, and progressives will trot out “moderate” versions of the murderers and mayhemists, usually linked to them, and offer to represent them and tamp down the violence in exchange for meeting their demands…

September 11 and its aftermath is why Muslims have gone to the top of the Victim Value Index… Muslims used to be shelved in the back with Asians, Indians and Jews. The War on Terror dramatically upgraded their status. The other groups are stuck there because they are relatively successful and aren’t rioting or blowing things up.

Latinos are still somewhere in the middle. Native Americans are in the back along with most unclassified minorities. Homosexuals are somewhere near the front, but behind African-Americans. Their status tends to drift wildly depending on current events, but they cannot overtake African-Americans or fall behind Latinos… Women are, and have always been, in the back.

The practical value of the Victim Value Index is that it mediates internal conflicts. For example, a bias attack by a member of a high-value group on a member of a low-value group is much less likely to be treated as a hate crime. However, an ordinary attack by a member of a low-value group on a member of a high-value group is more likely to be treated as a bias attack even when it isn’t.

Rotary valve revolution...the neverending story...how depressing.

Collective dismay

Perhaps a slightly jaundiced comment but with a whiff of truth I would think. What does it convey about Juliar Gillard however if it be true?

The overwhelming majority of Olympic sports have no spectator following of any substance and in the case of those which do (such as tennis, basketball and football) the event is peripheral and a nuisance to the normal calendar. Olympians are no longer the outsiders who make it in their own way - as Harold Abrahams was or Don Thompson who won a walking medal in 1960 training on his own, using his own methods. Nor are they genuinely commercial stars like Lewis Hamilton or Didier Drogba. They are Soviet-style, state-subsidised creatures, competing for the benefit of their political masters: "Team GB" with the PM as skipper.

So what is in it for politicians and for the state? The Third Reich, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China are only the most notable examples of states which have abandoned an initial hostility to the Olympic movement in favour of trying to succeed within it. If David Cameron is looking for a feelgood factor from the 2012 games, which he surely is, he treads in the footsteps of Nazis and Communists.

Certainly it leaves room to contemplate.

 

So what is in it for politicians and for the state? The Third Reich, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China are only the most notable examples of states which have abandoned an initial hostility to the Olympic movement in favour of trying to succeed within it. If David Cameron is looking for a feelgood factor from the 2012 games, which he surely is, he treads in the footsteps of Nazis and Communists.

There is a kind of mirrored perception factor which can be generated either by winning a lot of medals or by holding a successful games because these things generate a national perception that one is admired elsewhere. They let you strut on the global village green. And this effect comes pretty cheap.

The USSR chose the Olympics rather than the development of a world-beating F1 car or football team because it offered soft targets: not very many western women felt a mission to emulate the likes of Tamara Press, the great Soviet shot putter. In the past I calculated that a sports programme could deliver medals at around £100,000 each - currently two days pay for Wayne Rooney. Subsidising sport in the Soviet style has allowed China to rise to the top of the medals table without much in the way of sporting culture, tradition or infrastructure. And it has allowed the UK to go from one gold medal (+ 14 others) at Atlanta in 1996 to 19 gold (+ 28 others) at Beijing in 2008. And that was during a period in which participation in sport has declined steadily.

But even if one is happy with the idea of creating athletes for the purposes of state propaganda, there are plenty of other reasons why a sportsman - or any citizen - should be sceptical about the Olympic movement. It has been, historically, extremely corrupt in the classic manner of international organisations. (It is a SINGO - a Sporting International Non-Governmental Organisation, a sub category of INGO. Actually, I think I invented the acronym SINGO, but I may be wrong and anyone else is welcome to it.)

There has been corruption in the allocation of games, in the covering up of breaches of rules (including doping) and in the judging of events. The latter includes marking cartels to rival those of the Eurovision Song Contest. I won't dwell on the idea that £12 billion spent on hosting the games is a ridiculous way of spending money, much of it taken from sources that would have gone to grass roots sport and from places that needed money a lot more than London did.

Perhaps like most things in our modern lost world, the perception outweighs the reality.

 All of these criticisms of the games seem to me, at least, rational and informed, but rationality and information have little to do with reality. What is real is what the American sports sociologist Rick Gruneau calls "fairy dust", which turns dross into glamour. The overwhelming majority of people would not normally cross the road to watch gymnastics, weight-lifting or synchronised swimming if they were free - and even track and field athletics is essentially a small and declining sport, but give them the Olympic magic and there is a scramble for tickets, a longing for the chance to say "I was there".

Hopscotch?

Wow...well said:

Today’s digital market seeks to satisfy the appetites of intellectually curious people with very short attention spans. The result is a deluge of books, blogs, online lectures and web apps that offer to unpack the world for us by playing multidisciplinary leapfrog.

Green nightmare

What say you now Bobby?
A letter from an aboriginal elder:

Dear Dr Bob Brown,
I am writing to you because I have heard that you are coming to the Kimberley on a mission to our country and our culture from gas developments at James Price Point…
Our people have had to make a choice about allowing development on our lands. It hasn’t been easy, but we have made a decision - a majority decision -to face up to our own challenges, and to build a better future for our children, our people, our culture, and our country.
Dr Brown, it is hard for us to understand why you think it is necessary for you to speak on our behalf, about our country, our culture, and our futures.
The only thing We need saving from, is people who disrespect our decisions and want to see our people locked up in a wilderness and treated as museum pieces…
There are people, like you Dr Brown, who disagree with our vision for our future. And that’s a good thing in our democratic society. But please, don’t use us to push your view. We can speak for ourselves…
I am an old woman now and I have witnessed and lived the despair and hopelessness of many Kimberley Aboriginal people. Dr Brown, do you know what it is like to be taken away from your family, to not have money to buy food, to live in a house that is dilapidated and beyond repair? To see your children grow up in despair, die before they are 50, or even worse, take their own lives before they get to their 20s?
My people have lived this life, and we don’t Want it anymore…
But what saddens my people most is your complete disregard for Aboriginal people. I know you care about the whales and the dinosaur footprints, but what about people?…
Yours faithfully
Rita Augustine
On behalf of the Environmental and Cultural Heritage Team and Jabirrlabirr Traditional Owners

Bravo

Tony Abbott defending free speech...worth a read:
http://www.tonyabbott.com.au/LatestNews/Speeches/tabid/88/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/8833/Address-to-the-Institute-of-Public-Affairs-Sydney.aspx

Dumb and Dumber

The grand educational experiment in Britain has finally been exposed as a real-life equivalent of Orwellian 'Animal Farm' ideologies. Unfortunately the Australian educational paradigm follows close behind...I have experienced it first hand as both a teacher and a parent:

...with child-centred educational theories, which in the interests of eradicating both ‘illegitimate’ adult authority over children and equally‘illegitimate’ differences in achievement, simply undid the very concept of education altogether.

The result was countless numbers of children abandoned to ignorance and under-achievement, with middle-class ones such as William Miller bullied at their comprehensives — and with those at the very bottom of the social heap, who depended most of all upon school, left locked into disadvantage.

This was because the aim of this experiment had nothing to do with education and instead everything to do with social engineering — to create a society without privilege. But this aim was always unattainable.

The result was that education was now geared to the lowest common denominator, producing a catastrophic decline in standards from top to bottom of the system.

The damage done by this experiment has been incalculable. The further irony is that it actually increased the numbers going to independent schools.

To avoid the poor standards of education and discipline at so many comprehensives, more and more desperate parents proceeded to impoverish themselves to educate their children privately — just to give them the kind of education they once would have received at the grammar schools.

The result of Utopian dreamers whose desire to rule simply overwhelms any cry for freedom, and all of it done in the name of the common good.
Save us all from those who believe they know best.

Approaching Pinnacles

Arkaroola in the Northern Flinders ranges of South Australia is a magical place. My latest offering in watercolour, a 49X29 cm study which I believe will translate beautifully into oil on canvas:

LOL

Talk about an erudite put-down:' Masterly chefs prepare a delicacy by stuffing a boned duck into a boned turkey. It is known as a turducken. In politics, a swan which is really more goose and turkey is called a Wayne.' (Piers Ackerman)

Yes but!

What a marvellous article. It articulates very eloquently the unintended consequences of non-reflective ideologies:  http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/mirandadevine/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/great_green_lies_never_die_they_merely_get_recycled/

PoMo 'truth'

See how a 'leading academic' uses shamelessly manipulated statistics in attempting to 'prove' his argument.

But then look at the methology of this survey Manne cites:

The number stems from a 2009 online survey of 10,257 earth scientists, conducted by two researchers at the University of Illinois. The survey results must have deeply disappointed the researchers - in the end, they chose to highlight the views of a subgroup of just 77 scientists, 75 of whom thought humans contributed to climate change. The ratio 75/77 produces the 97% figure that pundits now tout.
The two researchers started by altogether excluding from their survey the thousands of scientists most likely to think that the Sun, or planetary movements, might have something to do with climate on Earth - out were the solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists and astronomers. That left the 10,257 scientists in disciplines like geology, oceanography, paleontology, and geochemistry that were somehow deemed more worthy of being included in the consensus. The two researchers also decided that scientific accomplishment should not be a factor in who could answer - those surveyed were determined by their place of employment (an academic or a governmental institution). Neither was academic qualification a factor - about 1,000 of those surveyed did not have a PhD, some didn’t even have a master’s diploma.The real result is based on the views of just 75 of 10,257 scientists. Manne thinks this is decisive. This says everything.

The cheating, lying and extreme manipulation behind those who would maintain the Global warming scare campaign should be enough to call everything they say into disrepute. But there is quite simply, too much money and power at stake for those at the top of the mountain to back down now.
But us ordinary folk should be very careful to think long and hard on what we believe.

Make a stand

The following excerpt contains very sobering words and ones that reflect strongly on what must happen in Australia in the not too distant future.

In the words of scholar Robert Kraynak, democracy—for all of its strengths—also “has within it the potential for its own kind of ‘social tyranny.’” The reason is simple. Democracy advances “the forces of mass culture which lower the tone of society . . . by lowering the aims of life from classical beauty, heroic virtues and otherworldly transcendence to the pursuits of work, material consumption and entertainment.” This inevitably tends to “[reduce] human life to a one-dimensional materialism and [an] animal existence that undermines human dignity and eventually leads to the ‘abolition of man.’”⁴

To put it another way: The right to pursue happiness does not include a right to excuse or ignore evil in ourselves or anyone else. When we divorce our politics from a grounding in virtue and truth, we transform our country from a living moral organism into a kind of golem of legal machinery without a soul.

This is why working for good laws is so important. This is why getting involved politically is so urgent. This is why every one of our votes matters. We need to elect the best public leaders, who then create the best policies and appoint the best judges. This has a huge impact on the kind of nation we become. Democracies depend for their survival on people of conviction fighting for what they believe in the public square—legally and peacefully, but zealously and without apologies. That includes you and me.

Thank goodness for those in the political arena who do stand up for good morals and who as a result bear the 'slings and arrows' of vituperation and slander.
We need to rally and support them, pray for them, help in any way we can to create a world for our children that will not end up with them becoming entertainment for bloodthirsty mobs like our brethren were two millenia ago. We must FIGHT!

Critics often accuse faithful Christians of pursuing a “culture war” on issues such as abortion, sexuality, marriage and the family, and religious liberty. And in a sense, they’re right. We are fighting for what we believe. But of course, so are advocates on the other side of all these issues—and neither they nor we should feel uneasy about it. Democracy thrives on the struggle of competing ideas. We steal from ourselves and from everyone else if we try to avoid that struggle. In fact, two of the worst qualities in any human being are cowardice and acedia—and by acedia I mean the kind of moral sloth that masquerades as “tolerance” and leaves a human soul so empty of courage and character that even the devil Screwtape would spit it out.⁵

In real life, democracy is built on two practical pillars: cooperation and conflict. It requires both. Cooperation, because people have a natural hunger for solidarity that makes all community possible. And conflict, because people have competing visions of what is right and true. The more deeply they hold their convictions, the more naturally people seek to have those convictions shape society

Humpty Dumpty

Brothers and sisters do not think for a moment that this fight is about 'romantic equality', it is a war pure and simple, and if we choose the fence - we will lose.

“As legal scholar Robert Vischer has observed, ‘The tension between religious liberty and gay rights is a thorny problem that will continue to crop up in our policy debates for the foreseeable future. Dismissing religious liberty concerns as the progeny of a “separate but equal” mindset does not bode well for the future course of those debates.’

“But there is, in my opinion, no chance—no chance—of persuading champions of sexual liberation (and it should be clear by now that this is the cause they serve), that they should respect, or permit the law to respect, the conscience rights of those with whom they disagree. Look at it from their point of view: Why should we permit ‘full equality’ to be trumped by bigotry? Why should we respect religions and religious institutions that are ‘incubators of homophobia’? Bigotry, religiously based or not, must be smashed and eradicated. The law should certainly not give it recognition or lend it any standing or dignity.

read the full article in:  http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/07/5884

Clever comment

An amusing comment from one of the blogs I subscribe to...it is so clever and perspicacious I had to reprint it in its entirety.
..................................................................................................................................................................
In an attempt to discover the reasoning of the Labor Government, a scientist, who in demonstrating a high level of common sense and obviously coming from outer metropolitan Australia, stumbled across a new element.

The new element is Laborium Governmentium (Gv). It is one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons and 198 assistant deputy neutron, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lefton-like particles called peons.

Since Laborium Governmentium has no electrons or protons, it is inert. However, it can be detected because it impedes every reaction with which it come into contract. A tiny amount of Laborium Governmentium can cause a reaction normally taking less than a second to take from four days to four years to complete

In an attempt to discover the reasoning of the Labor Government, a scientist, who in demonstrating a high level of common sense and obviously coming from outer metropolitan Australia, stumbled across a new element.

The new element is Laborium Governmentium (Gv). It is one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons and 198 assistant deputy neutron, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lefton-like particles called peons.

Since Laborium Governmentium has no electrons or protons, it is inert. However, it can be detected because it impedes every reaction with which it come into contract. A tiny amount of Laborium Governmentium can cause a reaction normally taking less than a second to take from four days to four years to complete

Laborium Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2 to 6 years. It does not decay but instead undergoes a reorganisation in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.

In fact, Laborium Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganisation will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.

The characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Laborium Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as a critical morass.

When catalysed with money, Laborium Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy as Laborium Governmentium since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons. All the money is consumed in the exchange, and no other by products are produced

Lift your eyes

I have reproduced an article worth reading. It concerns the politically correct 'cultural cringe' that some fanatical ideologues would have us translate into ruinous, self flagellating policies more akin to the misanthropic deep green philosophies of those who view the human inhabitants of this planet as a virus. Well I say 'let them eat grass'!

The Article:
Australia competes in a cruel world
 The Olympic Games; that fascinating time where our national self-image lives vicariously through the ultra-trained, superhuman endeavours of our athletes. Seconds of a televised race is all that it takes to transform us from mere mortals to espousing a collegiate affinity to a group who manifest in a pool of our own superhuman alter ego. Listening to James Magnussen or Emily Seebohm in their after race interviews, you see the pressure they feel to fulfill our goal is immense. We want to bask in their golden image, not the silver or bronze one.
 
 Like it or not, the Olympics is read as a global gauging station and at this stage our position has slipped. China's growth and advancement in their global status is now reflected in their sporting results, and it appears to be completely legitimate as opposed to the question marks of the past. Sporting prowess lives off the back of two essential attributes; talent and the excess economic resources to source and train talent to an internationally competitive level.
 
 Another issue that is pertinent about fair competition in a forum such as the Olympics, is that the results are an unambiguous representation of the reality of how the athletes rate. It is not clouded by rhetoric. You win because you are the best and any assertion otherwise is refuted by the replay. The world is super competitive and the difference between fame and anonymity is seconds or parts thereof. Wonderful bon mot and weeping excuses really do not matter in the end. Glory ultimately resides with the victor and the rest can please themselves.
 
 Economics however talks of fairness but generally favours the judicious cheat. The stakes are far too high to play by the rules so the world lives in a twilight zone of varying degrees of tolerance for a range of variant degrees of cheating.
 
 Other countries, virtually all, have quite prescriptive forms of protection of the national interest from foreign investment, in such seminal areas as agricultural land. However, we alone screech our righteous sermon that the national interest is a parochial anachronism to a congregation of one, ourselves. The same sermon is read with expectant intrigue by many other nations who would not in a blind fit make the same laws for themselves but are quite happy to take advantage of ours.
 
 We are scared to mention the word state-owned enterprise for fear that it will offend the State that owns the enterprise. Apparently we will fortuitously develop the clinical steel to deal with future disputes with that State. We can’t mention their name now but the Australian Taxation Office will have no problems hauling them into court later if required.
 
 There are no genuine free trade deals, there are bilateral and preferential trade deals euphemistically termed Free Trade Agreements. After our free trade deal with the US, is there really free trade between us? The US is about to pass a $1 trillion dollar farm support bill and that sounds awfully like subsidising farm production to me.
 
 So when global economics lines up on the blocks in its Speedos for the economic 4 x 100, and gets drug tested, then I will concede we have a fair race. When a country is starting in an outboard tinny, others are wearing flippers and we are stating that guilt will make them swim like us, then I have serious concern as to whether we are merely fooling ourselves.
 
 We should not be timid about stating the bleeding obvious about what we desire for Australians. We should not sanitise our own desires with some form of self-enforced, domestic political correctness. The Nationals have this peculiar notion that Australian farms should, as much as possible, be owned by Australians. Now let’s be honest, isn’t that the desire of every country? Why do I get a distinct sense of a reception of chardonnay embarrassment when I mention this about Australian farms, but that parochialism dissipates to a bipartisan position of no to the foreign purchase of residential homes?
 
 Australia has this peculiar habit of participating in a form of economic self- flagellation, as seen in no better form than our sole crusade with the carbon tax. It is always perplexing as to exactly who gives a toss about our desire to persecute ourselves or what global eco-moral attribute we think we have bequeathed from our loss