Tuesday 31 December 2013

Ship of Fools

Media cover-up: warmist scientists trapped by ice are just “tourists”

Andrew Bolt , Tuesday, December, 31, 2013, (9:12am)
Global warming - dud predictions, Global warming - propaganda

The farce: warmist scientists and reporters sail to Antarctica to find signs of the global warming they claim has changed that continent since Douglas Mawson explored it a century ago. Instead, they find sea ice when Mawson didn’t and their ship is locked in.
Be clear about the joke here. This Australasian Antarctica Expedition was meant to scare us about global warming changing Antarctica, causing melting instead of all this damn ice. As the expedition leaders said on their website:
… there is an increasing body of evidence, including by the AAE members, that have identified parts of the East Antarctic which are highly susceptible to melting and collapse from ocean warming… We are going south to ... determine the extent to which human activity and pollution has directly impacted on this remote region of Antarctica.
Now to the media cover-up.
Note the Sydney Morning Herald’s coverage this morning. It has a reporter on the third ice-breaker to go to the expedition’s help, only to be driven back by thick ice. There is no mention in her stories of global warming, the trapped mission’s quixotic quest or how stupid those warmists now look. There is no mention that sea ice around Antarctica has steadily increased over the past three decades, contrary to what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admits its climate models predicted.
Instead, the SMH republishes a tweet from the trapped expedition’s leader, Professor Chris Turney, still insisting he’s unnaturally warm despite being packed in by ice:
image
Turney is now the Black Knight of global warming:

In fact, it does indeed rain in Antarctica in summer, as the Mawson’s Huts Foundation demonstrates.
Then there’s this:
image
Jo Nova is astonished by a media cover-up that has changed what was a ship of climate scientists into a ship of mere “tourists”:
A month ago the mission of the $1.5m expedition was “to answer questions about climate change”. Now the ABC describes the Australasian expedition as “a Russian ship stuck in sea ice in Antarctica.” ...
Let there be no doubt, the mission was to document and record scientific changes in Antarctica and to broadcast that to the world. Most scientific missions don’t have a dedicated media team, but this one named a staff of five journalists. There is a journalist and a documentary maker from the Guardian as well as a senior producer from the Science Unit at the BBC world service. (See the media list.) If they’d discovered less sea ice, fewer penguins, or big cracks, we know the images would be all over the mass media and it would be evidence for “climate change”.
But with the MV Akademik Shokalskiy trapped by thick sea ice, the mission apparently is to call it a tourist boat. The BBC now tell us the mission was “to follow the route explorer Douglas Mawson travelled a century ago”. Don’t mention the climate…
The spin is that team has “met heavy ice”. Not “been trapped by unprecedentedly thick sea ice, unlike anything Mawson ever saw, and in record levels”. If they had met thin sea ice, would it have been described as a dangerously thin layer, a risk for penguins, and a stark reminder of how much the climate is changing? Would it have been an undeniable factoid?
It’s not what the ABC says, it’s what they don’t say (a.k.a. “lying by omission"). The headlines could read “Global warming scientists trapped in Antarctica by record sea ice they didn’t predict”. As if. That would be against the religion.

Instead, there are reports from the ABC like this, with no mention of climate change or what the “passengers” on the “cruise ship” were actually up to:
TONY EASTLEY: The Australian operation to rescue passengers from a Russian cruise ship stuck in thick Antarctic sea ice, is continuing this morning, but it’s slow going.
The Aurora Australis ice-breaker is the third vessel to try to help the stricken expedition ship, which has been trapped since Christmas Eve.
Authorities say the scientists and tourist on board the Russian vessel are packed and ready to go.
But deteriorating conditions mean any rescue is unlikely any time soon.
Another ABC report that fails to mention the scientists and journalists were actually trying to prove global warming was changing Antarctica:
An Australian icebreaker has abandoned its attempt to rescue a Russian-flagged ship stuck in sea ice in Antarctica due to adverse weather conditions…
The Akademik Shokalskiy had been retracing Sir Douglas Mawson’s Antarctic expedition and conducting scientific research when sea ice closed in about 1,500 nautical miles south of Hobart.
The 74 people on board, including scientists, crew members and paying passengers, have been stranded since Christmas Eve.

More from Watts Up With That.
By the way, how much is the rescue of these warmists costing - in money and emissions

Monday 30 December 2013

Game,set & match

Good on George Brandis for standing up (in such an erudite way) to the bully 'persons' of the left:
But some things never change, like the reaction of the claque of bilious pseudo-intellectuals who constitute what passes for a left-wing commentariat in this country. Mike Carlton, Catherine Deveney, Van Badham and their ilk were nothing if not boorishly predictable.
They and their followers unleashed a storm of hatred and bile against Wilson on social media, the like of which I have never seen. The irony that these people pose as the enemies of “hate speech” was lost on them, if not on others.
He also highlights the hypocrisy at the heart of left-wing fanaticism.

Friday 27 December 2013

the Nietzschian era

A profound illustration by David Thompson as to why our civilization has reached a dangerous point in history.
Poor Mr Power is getting quite a kicking in the comments, which now number over 900, thanks largely to links from non-Guardian readers. Sadly, so far as I can see, he’s not responding to his critics. Any of them. Instead, he’s taken to Twitter, where he tells us, rather triumphantly; 
"I wrote this about sexist men and BBQs and the comments went wild. 930 so far. Anyone would think I touched a nerve."
If you want to know who such people are, how they imagine the world and what they will ignore… that’s a big clue. You do have to marvel at a mind that when faced with a barrage of refutation and factual corrections can somehow construe this as validation. The fact that so many people are mocking him and pointing out his errors is, amazingly, proof that he is righteous. An achievement he then declares to the world. That’s not an everyday kind of vanity. That’s something else

Post Modernism, its obsessions and its 'luvvies' wedded to their moral high grounds steeped in relativistic values have so destroyed reason and logic that the only 'logical' step remaining is for power to replace persuasion.
Orwell and Huxley foresaw it accurately, just timed it a couple of decades short.

Thursday 26 December 2013

Monbiots moonbattery

This piece from David Thompson's blog provides a conflicted snapshot of the Utopian perspectives held by urban elites.
These are the people who hold academically fashionable, neo-Marxist views of society whilst living (usually) on the upper-register of the 'capitalistic' scale.
They are those who eulogise the 'labourer' yet whose own knowledge of labour and the production of goods is often severely limited to protesting 'slave labour products', and who worship the environment (Gaia) but live in high-rise apartments surrounded with tons of concrete (plus the occasional 'pot'-plant).
These are luvvies who are deeply embedded in the urban jungle and its surrounding culture of theatres, restaurants, politically correct opinions and groovy hangouts.
Most (according to Australian Tourism statistics) holiday overseas rather than travelling through the Australian outback and under-settled areas (no 'culture' you understand).
And almost all that I have encountered (and in the 'high' arts arena I have encountered many) view the 'underclasses' (everyone that is except the suburban mortgaged, white, middle-classes) through blinkered 'Rousseauin' beer-glasses.

'Moonbat' Monbiot is a prime example:

......the Guardian’s George Monbiot encounters the underclass and shows how his worldview is quite different from yours:
A group of us had occupied a piece of land on St George’s Hill in Surrey... Our aim had been to rekindle interest in land reform. It had been going well – we had placated the police, started to generate plenty of public interest – when two young lads with brindled Staffordshire bull terriers arrived in an old removals van. Everyone was welcome at the site and, as they were travellers, one of the groups marginalised by the concentration of control and ownership of land in Britain, we went out of our way to accommodate them. They must have thought they had died and gone to heaven.
Almost as soon as they arrived they began twocking stuff. A radio journalist left his equipment in his hire car. They smashed the side window. Someone saw them bundling the kit, wrapped in a stolen sleeping bag, into their lorry. There was a confrontation – handwringing appeals to reason on one side, pugnacious defiance on the other – which eventually led to the equipment being handed back. They wound their dogs up, making them snap and snarl at the other occupiers. At night they roamed the camp, staffies straining at the leash, cans of Special Brew in their free hands, shouting “fucking hippies, we’re going to burn you in your tents!”
We had no idea how to handle them without offending our agonised liberal consciences. They saw this and exploited it ruthlessly.
Eventually the police solved the problem for us. Most of the cars parked at a nearby attraction had had their windows smashed and radios stolen, and someone had followed their lorry back to our site. As they were led away, my anarchist beliefs battled my bourgeois instincts, and lost.
 
complete article @ :  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/26/my-inner-anarchist-lost-out-bourgeois

Sunday 22 December 2013

Persecution?

Left wing hypocrisy


Funny Darwin

I happen to be; as one of my more frustrated critics accused; 'a medieval theologist', or put another way, a believer in the absolute truth of the gospel, i.e. in no ways a Darwinist...having said that I found this article to be very funny and even if some of the incidents are too bizarre to be believed (although truth is often stranger than fiction), they are therefore imaginatively funny. I think the Zimbabwean bus driver should have won, but then having grown up in Africa I can see it happening.

The 2013 Darwin Awards Are Out! Posted on by

Yes, it’s that magical time of year again when the Darwin Awards are bestowed, honoring the least evolved among us.
Here Is The Glorious Winner:
1. When his .38 caliber revolver failed to fire at his intended victim during a hold-up in Long Beach, California would-be robber James Elliot did something that can only inspire wonder. He peered down the barrel and tried the trigger again. This time it worked.
And Now, The Honorable Mentions:
2. The chef at a hotel in Switzerland lost a finger in a meat cutting machine and after a little shopping around, submitted a claim to his insurance company. The company expecting negligence sent out one of its men to have a look for himself. He tried the machine and he also lost a finger. The chef’s claim was approved.
3. A man who shoveled snow for an hour to clear a space for his car during a blizzard in Chicago returned with his vehicle to find a woman had taken the space. Understandably, he shot her.
4. After stopping for drinks at an illegal bar, a Zimbabwean bus driver found that the 20 mental patients he was supposed to be transporting from Harare to Bulawayo had escaped. Not wanting to admit his incompetence, the driver went to a nearby bus stop and offered everyone waiting there a free ride. He then delivered the passengers to the mental hospital, telling the staff that the patients were very excitable and prone to bizarre fantasies. The deception wasn’t discovered for 3 days.
5. An American teenager was in the hospital recovering from serious head wounds received from an oncoming train. When asked how he received the injuries, the lad told police that he was simply trying to see how close he could get his head to a moving train before he was hit.
6.. A man walked into a Louisiana Circle-K, put a $20 bill on the counter, and asked for change. When the clerk opened the cash drawer, the man pulled a gun and asked for all the cash in the register, which the clerk promptly provided. The man took the cash from the clerk and fled, leaving the $20 bill on the counter. The total amount of cash he got from the drawer… $15. [If someone points a gun at you and gives you money, is a crime committed?]
7. Seems an Arkansas guy wanted some beer pretty badly. He decided that he’d just throw a cinder block through a liquor store window, grab some booze, and run. So he lifted the cinder block and heaved it over his head at the window. The cinder block bounced back and hit the would-be thief on the head, knocking him unconscious. The liquor store window was made of Plexiglas. The whole event was caught on videotape.
8. As a female shopper exited a New York convenience store, a man grabbed her purse and ran. The clerk called 911 immediately, and the woman was able to give them a detailed description of the snatcher. Within minutes, the police apprehended the snatcher. They put him in the car and drove back to the store. The thief was then taken out of the car and told to stand there for a positive ID. To which he replied, “Yes, officer, that’s her. That’s the lady I stole the purse from.”
9. The Ann Arbor News crime column reported that a man walked into a Burger King in Ypsilanti, Michigan at 5 A.M., flashed a gun, and demanded cash. The clerk turned him down because he said he couldn’t open the cash register without a food order. When the man ordered onion rings, the clerk said they weren’t available for breakfast… The frustrated gunman walked away. [*A 5-STAR STUPIDITY AWARD WINNER]
10. When a man attempted to siphon gasoline from a motor home parked on a Seattle street by sucking on a hose, he got much more than he bargained for. Police arrived at the scene to find a very sick man curled up next to a motor home near spilled sewage. A police spokesman said that the man admitted to trying to steal gasoline, but he plugged his siphon hose into the motor home’s sewage tank by mistake. The owner of the vehicle declined to press charges saying that it was the best laugh he’d ever had and the perp had been punished enough!
In the interest of bettering mankind, please share these with friends and family…. unless of course one of these individuals by chance is a distant relative or long lost friend. In that case, be glad they are distant and hope they remain lost.

Saturday 21 December 2013

Cultural genocide

A timely wake-up call from David Limbaugh to engage in the culture wars. Not as condemners but as those who realise that we are all 'incomplete', tainted, faulty, prone to weaknesses, i.e we are ALL sinners in need of forgiveness and mercy. However we also need to stand up to the forces that would silence our voices and thus condemn our fellow travellers.
As many are now belatedly realizing, the option of sitting out the culture wars is increasingly closed to us if we value our liberties, as we conservatives claim we do. Despite all of its sermonizing, the militant left will not live and let live. They demand uniformity of thought, and those who dissent from their PC standards are to be shunned and silenced.
The left is outraged that someone like Robertson would be so judgmental as to call homosexual behavior sinful. Yet they are, in effect, condemning as sinful those who express this opinion.
........................................................................

But we're approaching that time -- we already may have arrived -- when the belief in certain scriptures will be deemed intolerably sinful and the believer outcast as a hater.
Gay activists have redefined hate to mean disapproval of certain lifestyles or practices, but in reality, if there's any hatred going on, it's from the activists toward the Christians who don't agree with them.
Christians and other social conservatives must fight for their beliefs and rights in this culture and quit foolishly believing their liberties will survive if they sit passively on the sidelines.

http://townhall.com/columnists/davidlimbaugh/2013/12/20/the-lefts-militant-proactive-intolerance-n1766201/page/2

Wednesday 18 December 2013

Bear bait

This is a small excerpt from an article on national borders (i.e.national sovereignty) vs. the European Union by Theodore Dalrymple. The article concerns the fact that EU bureaucrats are currently pushing for "Euro scepticism" to be declared a psychiatric disorder. The implications are extensive and frightening particularly for those of a 'spiritual' disposition. Charles Colson warned some years ago that those who believed in a superior being might one day be labelled as having a psychiatric disorder, this push by EU authorities shows how easily such thinking could be both entertained and facilitated. This small excerpt shows how any argument against the 'collective' threatens rather than providing opportunity for discussion and when that happens the only solution is power.
Recently I attended the public defence of a PhD dissertation at Leiden University by a young Dutch legal philosopher, Thierry Baudet, published in English as The Significance of Borders: Why Representative Government and the Rule of Law Require Nation States. What was striking to me as an observer was the extreme emotional antagonism of some of the professors to the candidate argument. It was not merely that they thought him in error, or even thought him wicked: it was their entire Weltanschauung that he challenged and threatened, and upon which they had based their lives and careers. At least one was quite literally shaking as he spoke.
 
This is also an indication of how far ahead the 'intellectual elites' have managed to forge with their 'One World government plans'. That to question the idea is not merely to differ in opinion, but it is morally inferior and more than that; it is threatening to the status quo. And we all know what happens when you threaten a bureaucrat with his finger on many triggers!

Please forgive my conspiracy mindset, I usually deplore such thinking but find myself in that forbidden zone more and more these days. I suspect that when the moment does finally arrive it will come upon us like a bear trap...seemingly sudden and without warning, that is until we look back and see the signs along the back path.

I so hope that I am wrong and that all is copacetic.

Dalrymples full article is @ http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8817531/why-borders-matter/

Tuesday 17 December 2013

Eco power play

Jo Nova speaks out about selective law enforcement:

It’s one rule for you, and another for their friends. If a coal plant was wiping out thousands of birds and bats you can be sure Greenpeace would be launching a campaign. But when an industrial turbine with blade-tips travelling at 180mph does the killing, who cares?
The law for normals makes it expensive to kill birds and bats:
“Following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, BP was fined $100 million for the damage it caused to bird populations in the area, both migratory and resident. — AlaskaDispatch
“Exxon Mobil has agreed to pay $600,000 in penalties after approximately 85 migratory birds died of exposure to hydrocarbons at some of its natural gas facilities across the Midwest. — NY Times
And it was going to get expensive for windfarms:
“Nov 22 2013 Duke Energy has agreed to pay a $1 million fine for killing 14 eagles and 149 other birds at two Wyoming wind farms. – audublog
That was the first time a windfarm got pinged. And it works out to be about $6000 a bird. Could get expensive, eh?
“The Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that 440,000 birds are killed by wind turbines every year in the U.S. However, that number is said to be a low-ball estimate by independent researchers. Each year 573,000 birds and 888,000 bats are killed by wind turbines in the U.S., according a study by K. Shawn Smallwood that was published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin. — dailycaller.com
Killing 400,000 birds at $6k each would make windpower in the US about $2 billion* more expensive, and less viable, than it already is. But industrial wind turbines are special friends of big-government and they were given licenses to kill “accidentally” for up to five years. But I guess the five year licenses were expiring, so the Obama administration reassessed the rule and now says it’s OK to kill them for 30 years.
“The Interior Department on Friday unveiled a final rule extending the length of permits that allow facilities to unintentionally kill protected bald and golden eagles.The regulations are a major victory for the wind and solar industry, among others, which will now be able to obtain permits for as long as 30 years — a sixfold increase from the previous five-year limit.
I like the newspeak from the Department of Bird-Killing explaining why 30 years of carcasses is a good thing:
“This change will facilitate the responsible development of renewable energy and other projects designed to operate for decades, while continuing to protect eagles consistent with our statutory mandates,” the department said in its regulation. -- The Hill
Five years of bird deaths was not responsible, but 30 years of deaths is? Anyone would protect eagles like this, of course.
In the end it amounts to another $20$2 billion dollar subsidy for renewables (and a lot more dead birds). But it’s all for the sake of the planet.
But there is a bigger issue at stake here. When is a law not a law? When the government can issue licenses to break it. Selective enforcement anyone? Since Duke Energy may be one of the only wind operators to have to pay the bird-killing tithe, I have to ask, what did they do wrong? Perhaps they didn’t butter up the right people on the right day?
WWF would be outraged if coal fired plants got 30 year exemptions for busting bald eagles.
When is a dead bird a tragedy for an eco-green? Only when it scores a political point.
As usual, it’s not about the environment. It’s only power and politics

Monday 16 December 2013

Welcome to Dante's dream...

A witty couple of paragraphs exposing the psychic dissonance exhibited on a regular basis by our 'intellecual betters', i.e. the PoMo elite:
In the comments, svh notes that Laurie’s article, which denounces the modern campus as akin to “a military dictatorship,” omits any mention of why the police might find it necessary to be on campus, let alone use force against students. As regular readers will know, Laurie’s mental landscape is one in which she and her peers are always and forever the victims of the drama, irrespective of who did what to whom. As elevated beings, the fault is never theirs. This conceit requires certain omissions and failures of memory, in order to imagine a world where self-styled revolutionaries and would-be anarchist ninjas are subject to inexplicable and unprovoked beating. The violence, you see, just fell out of the sky for no particular reason.
In Laurie’s mind, presumably, nothing you see in this video actually happened. Nobody laid siege to someone else’s property, terrorising staff and trapping them in their offices. Nobody barricaded fire escapes and used mob force repeatedly, while denouncing any kind of physical retaliation or attempt to enforce the law. No, the thuggery and shoving, the attempts to intimidate and impose on others… that somehow didn’t happen. It was, in Laurie’s mind, “a peaceful occupation.”
Like so many of her comrades, Laurie relies on a kind of faux naiveté - according to which, laying siege to a building and trapping staff for hours while chanting “Fuck the police” is in no way provocative or an invitation for scuffles and violence. Using mob coercion against random people, and then against the police, is what pacifists do, at least in the minds of idiots and pathological liars. Idiots and liars who then affect shock and indignation when that violence escalates, inevitably, as planned, while relishing the publicity and Heroic Victim Status.
If the inversion of reality isn’t sufficiently bold, consider yesterday’s student protest against the police response to such “peaceful” occupations. One protest organiser, University of London Union president Michael Chessum, insisted, “The vast majority of the trouble that happens in protests is because of [the police] presence.” And not because of masked mobs acting out their adolescent power fantasies. ULU vice president Daniel Cooper shared his thoughts via Twitter, “Today was a huge show of our force. Who’s universities? OUR universities! Who’s streets? OUR streets!” Setting aside the primary school spelling, Mr Cooper and his fellow radicals can apparently claim ownership of whatever they please, impose on whomever they please, and exult in this use of force while denouncing “fascism.”
Meanwhile on the streets of central London, students were keen to demonstrate their moral credentials too, by breaking down other people’s gates, setting bins on fire, blocking traffic for hours and trashing police vehicles. To show the world how unnecessary police involvement is.
Thank goodness these socialist intellectuals are showing us the way.
 
In reporting, TV interviews, radio interviews and through various other information outlets I see and hear these folk making claims that stagger the imagination. Yet they truly seem to believe the rubbish and downright lies that they promote. It can only be some form of psychological schizophrenia or delusion. And these are the people who are to all intents and purposes the ones who influence the ones who keep their fingers on the triggers.

Welcome to the global loony bin.

In developing news a reader responded to the above article:
As we saw from her cheerleading for – sorry, reporting on - Occupy, in Laurie’s mental landscape she and her peers are always and forever the victims, irrespective of who did what to whom first, and then did it again harder. The fault is never theirs. This conceit necessitates certain omissions and in turn implies that the occupiers were collectively subject to some inexplicable and unprovoked beating. The violence just fell out of the sky for no particular reason. It’s colossally dishonest, indeed delusional, but it follows the general rules of such behaviour. From what I can make out, those rules are fairly simple:
1. Adopt the nearest available minor cause – say, the privatisation of some campus support services - and amplify hyperbolically, preferably invoking unprecedented hardship, class war and the end of civilisation.
2. Claim to speak and act on behalf of all members of whatever this week’s oppressed group happens to be, even (or especially) if actual support for the ostensible cause is contentious and limited. Don’t let impracticality stop you. Or logic, or maths. Remember to be grandiose and self-flattering at all times.
3. Occupy someone else’s property, obstruct and intimidate law-abiding people, cause as much disruption as possible and make absurd demands. Wear a mask and act like you’re an Anarchist Ninja (and not just an obnoxious little wanker). Remember to establish your Marxoid / ‘anarchist’ credentials with some gratuitous shoving and vandalism. Property is theft, man.
4. Continue aggravating others with noise, trespass, expense and inconvenience, escalating as necessary, until enough people are sufficiently scared or pissed off to call the police.
5. On their arrival, provoke the police by refusing to obey the law or normal standards of civility. Scream and swear at them, make threats, while congratulating yourself on just how brave you are. Barricade fire escapes and trap and frighten random people. Heighten tensions with more abusive chants, projectiles, shoving, etc. Use mob force and the threat of violence repeatedly while denouncing any kind of physical retaliation or attempt to enforce the law. With cameras everywhere, remember to be passive-aggressive too. You’re the victim here. Pretend that you’re being kicked by a police officer who isn’t actually kicking you.
6. When the police do respond physically and things get out of hand - just as you’d planned - cry “police state” and “brutality” then use it as a pretext for the next fit of delinquent psychodrama.
 
On reflection I do believe that if you want to really understand what is going on it is advisable to familiarise yourself with Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.

Ignorance as intellect

Beautifully stated, succinct and to the point:
You have to despair at the stupidity of so much media today, so often made manifest by the cynicism of the idiot who trusts nothing but the ignorance he takes for his superior intellect. Who trusts his own uniformed prejudices about the considered professional judgment of our intelligence agencies and the politicians overseeing them.

Saturday 14 December 2013

Interesting!!!!!





"Can you answer this question correctly? As between liberals and conservatives, who donates more to charity? The answer is it isn't even close. According to the book "Who Really Cares" by Arthur Brooks, conservative-headed households are more generous with their money by some 30 percent and also give far more of their time."

Celebrity downside


Wisdom from Breakpoint:

 
What Jesus said about the dangers of wealth is just as true about celebrity in our postmodern age, and for most of the same reasons: It distorts our sense of self, both in relationship to others and to God.

And that’s before we take into account the hyper-sexualized nature of most of pop culture.

So the best advice I can give Christian parents is, to paraphrase Willie Nelson, “mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be pop stars.”

Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t encourage their interest in creative endeavours such as music, theatre, and the visual arts. Quite the contrary. As Eric Metaxas and I have said many times on BreakPoint, we need more Christians in all these fields, pointing people to Truth and beauty through their work. But there’s a world of difference between being a celebrity and being an artist. The celebrity draws attention to himself, the artist to his work.

The celebrity thinks success is being famous. The artist knows success is being faithful. The celebrity chooses style over substance. The artist knows looking good is never as important as being good.

While artists can glorify God, celebrities, almost by definition, probably won’t. Because more often than not, there’s only room for one star in their firmament.

Obfuscation alert!

Ann Coulter sums up the level of argumentation in politically correct/PoMo Western culture:
Whenever liberals (in Australia Labor/Green/Leftie) are in a tight spot, they adopt the scorched-earth policy of argumentation. With no answer, they start demanding that you define words: What do you mean "liberal"? What do you mean "democracy"? What do you mean "patriotism"?
They retreat from argument, burning the English language as they go.

Myth-busters unite

Another 'cultural' myth bites the dust:
Consider one of the Goldberg family's favorite shows: Bravo's "Top Chef," in which the "cheftestants" compete in various culinary challenges for the title of -- duh -- Top Chef. Surely, a cooking show should be safe viewing for all ages. But for 10 years running, the cast has cursed nonstop. Worse, the profanity isn't really bleeped out, merely "bleeped at," in the words of the New York Times.
In 2008, head judge Tom Colicchio rightly chastised the cast and posted an apology on the show's website for all the "gutter language." Nothing's changed. Defenders of the cursing insist it reflects the reality of culinary culture. I'm sure that's true. But journalistic accuracy is a pretty hypocritical defense for a show that has chefs making haute cuisine from vending machines amid egregiously staged product placements. (Also, the cursing is utterly gratuitous. I, for one, have never concluded a delicious meal with the exclamation, "Wow, the guy who made this must be really foul-mouthed!")
And such hypocrisy gets at the core of the problem. Vulgarity has become cultural shorthand for everything from seriousness to rebelliousness to "keeping it real." But it's closer to the opposite.
Colicchio notes the chefs are always "on their best behavior" when they're around him. They never curse in front of the judges. Nor would they, one hopes, around their kids or customers. But when they're on TV -- broadcast to millions (including the judges, their customers and their kids) -- they think it's obligatory to let the expletives fly.
In other words, the standards of the common culture are lower than they are in nearly every other walk of life. Which means they're not really standards at all. If anything, the new taboo is decency.

Friday 13 December 2013

Almost there!

Thomas Sowell:
"Many people take pride in defying the conventions of society. Those conventions of society are also known as civilization. Defying them wholesale means going back to barbarism. Barbarians with electronic devices are still barbarians."

Thursday 12 December 2013

To true blue

As Ronald Reagan once said, "the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.'"

Wednesday 11 December 2013

Left-Right

FIRE’s Harvey Silverglate on policing speech and the redefinition of “liberal”:
The thing that makes me laugh the most is that I am considered a right-winger by people on the academic left. Only people on the academic left are sufficiently narrow-minded to call me a right-winger. In fact, I’m a liberal, but I’m a civil libertarian liberal, an old-fashioned liberal, who not only believes in the decent society that helps its most unfortunate members survive, but who also happens to believe in freedom. So much of the left today doesn’t believe in liberty, especially the academic left. There’s something wrong with calling the academic left liberalism – they’re not liberals at all. They’re really leftist totalitarians.
If that last line strikes you as unfair, you may want to revisit this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or… hell, just click the tag marked academia.

Monday 9 December 2013

THE BUREAUCRATIC SOFT SHOE SHUFFLE BOONDOGGLE


 Have you ever noticed what happens when you lob a stone into the centre of a mass of insects feeding on a dead carcass? There is an instant explosion of movement away from the point of impact. The vermin flee as rapidly as possible from that spot where the most immanent damage is liable to be experienced.

 And so it is with bureaucrats when there is bl...ame to be apportioned for an error, mistake or system failure. Alas, we are experiencing such a moment in regards to Bryany, another hiccup in her short but already slightly checkered history.

 It all began when she wanted to study a ‘grown-up’ subject for her SACE, that is; she chose the way of VET (vocational education training) as one of her subjects for year 12. Great, we thought, having a TAFE qualification should prove advantageous in her still to come (then) employment prospects. Little did we know the extent to which the increasingly bureaucratised (see: blame adverse) Australian education system would play its part in upping the discomfiture levels of those ‘unusual’ students and in particular the parents of such children?

 As it turned out Bryany’s powerful personality, natural charms and abilities procured for her a dream job without the need for the nod of approval from said academic overseers however, the ongoing farrago does appear to have the potential to put a spanner-in-the works regarding her longer term university plans, that is in our current understanding of how things pan out (though she has this uncanny ability to circumvent such mundane barriers).

Thus we are embroiled in the battle for culpability. This is a significant struggle I can assure you because at the very mention of the word responsibility, collars are turned up, faces averted and tremulous tones assert in true Shultzerian terms: “we know nothing!” , it’s not our fault”, we were not told” and so forth. When evidence is produced to disprove such disclaimers the lines change to: “WE cannot be blamed, it is the students fault, they knew this was an adult course and therefore we adults cannot be blamed for the student’s error”. And would you not know it but all of the relevant documents that attest to failure, apportion blame etcetera, have been ‘lost’.

 We are currently maintaining the path of proportional benevolence and giving the relevant educational authorities room to recant but soon I fear we are going to have to pass the details onto authorities with an axe to grind and see if political election sloganeering translates into actual action.

 Watch this space.

Friday 6 December 2013

Duh!

Well articulated Shaun O'Doyle:
There is also the ‘reading Genesis scientifically’ (p. 66) canard. Young-age creationists do not read Genesis as science but as history. Pattemore, like many theistic evolutionists, doesn’t seem to understand the difference. It seems that a ‘scientific’ account of history for Pattemore (and others like him) seems roughly to mean an account of what really happened in the physical world. If so, then that is how we understand Genesis 1–11, but why call that ‘scientific’? That just causes concept confusion—science is not history. Science is about repeatable present process; history is about unrepeatable past events. Science can be used in the study of history, but it cannot be the final authority on determining historicity in a universe governed by the God of Scripture since at the very least science cannot constrain how God might act. Science can’t ‘tell’ us how God acted, only people can—and only God is sure to produce a reliable account.
 
A dilemma some well intentioned but obviously non-reflective folk fall foul of. And I include even those who appear reflective; i.e. with a vast string of letters behind their names, because smart does not preclude fallibility.

Pattemore’s tone towards his opponents is also problematic: “Although the proponents [of young-age creationism] claim the authority of Scripture for these beliefs, their activity is also driven by certain fears or perceived dangers” (p. 35). He then proceeds to list more than half a dozen fears that supposedly drive the beliefs of biblical creationists. Pattemore doesn’t claim this only for biblical creationists: “Does Intelligent Design harbour undercurrents of fear too? I suspect it does” (p. 36). He then lists the supposed ‘fears’ of ID proponents. Apparently anyone who believes in some form of Special Creation is motivated by fear. Pattemore must be nigh omniscient to know just what motivates his ideological opponents! C.S. Lewis called this ‘Bulverism’13—the fallacy of pontificating on the motives one’s opponents have for their ‘obviously irrational’ belief before actually disproving their belief.

Victims of victimology

More profound insight from one of America's most perspicacious sons, Thomas Sowell:

What do low-income whites in England and ghetto blacks in the United States have in common? It cannot be simply low incomes, because children from other groups in the same low-income brackets outperform whites in England and outperform blacks in America.
What low-income whites in England and ghetto blacks in the United States have in common is a generations-long indoctrination in victimhood. The political left in both countries has, for more than half a century, maintained a steady and loud drumbeat of claims that the deck is stacked against those at the bottom.
The American left uses race and the British left uses class, but the British left has been at it longer. In both countries, immigrants who have not been in the country as long have not been so distracted by such ideology into a blind resentment and lashing out at other people.
In both countries, immigrants enter a supposedly closed society that refuses to let anyone rise -- and they nevertheless rise, while the native-born at the bottom remain at the bottom.
Those who promote an ideology of victimhood may imagine that they are helping those at the bottom, when in fact they are harming them, more so than the society that the left is denouncing.

We in America have gotten used to vast gaps between blacks and whites on test scores. But this was not always the case, in places where there was anything like comparable education.

Back in the 1940s, before the vast expansion of the welfare state and the ideology of victimhood used to justify it, there was no such gap on test scores between black schools in Harlem and white, working class schools on New York's lower east side.

You can find the data on pages 40-41 of an article of mine in the Fall 1981 issue of "Teachers College Record," a journal published by Columbia University -- that is, if you think facts matter more than rhetoric or social visions.

Thursday 5 December 2013

Imaginary enemies

A short excerpt from a brief article on the inanity of identity politics and the damage it is causing:

An identity defined in terms of victimhood needs fresh injections of oppression to sustain its existence. Those African-Americans who define “blackness” not in terms of positive values but in terms of negative values, need white racism, the real thing or the fake one, to remind them of who they are. And the same holds true for other minorities who define themselves not by their culture or values, but by their resentments…
The left’s need for victimisation means that increasing levels of tolerance actually lead to escalating confrontations with these manufacturers of intolerance. The assertion that all white people are innately racist because of their privilege is one such response to increasing tolerance. By claiming that whiteness itself is racist, the left gets back to political identity, rather than actual discrimination, as the source of conflict, and redefines even the most tolerant university multicultural spaces as racist.
The manufacturers of intolerance, whether they’re tenured academics like Ward Churchill, professional politicians like Barack Obama or angry waitresses like Dayna Morales, respond to tolerance with provocations. Their goal is to elicit evidence of intolerance to sustain their political identity. The more tolerance they encounter, the more they escalate their provocations. Their goal is not a tolerant society. It’s not a multiracial society or a post-racial society. It is a society perpetually at war over identity politics. That conflict is what gives them power.
 
 
The whole article is worth reading and to be found @
http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2013/12/because-lying-and-resenting-is-what-angels-do.html#more

Tuesday 3 December 2013

The not-so-hidden agenda behind the ABC!

When you come across an article that effectively articulates your own particular viewpoint and does it in a seemingly effortless and erudite way, then it behoves one to publish it without alteration.
This is a small excerpt:
The ruse of open-mindedness, over the past half-century, has enabled bohemia-styled socialists to capture the commanding heights of our erstwhile Judeo-Christian nation, from the education system and academia to many of our mainstream Christian denominations. The march of the left through our social institutions has been that much more effective for the marchers themselves believing they march to their own drum. They are all – cough, cough – individuals. We have to accept the probability, as astonishing as it might sound, that Mark Scott genuinely thinks the ghosts of Media Watch past and present have been without “ideological bias”. Conservatives must also face the likelihood that ABC management really believes publishing Edward Snowden’s leaked documents best serves Australia’s national interest – the national interest being best served by the humiliation of a Coalition government and undermining its “stop the boats” agenda.
...this gem is hidden within the article:  'The ABC’s undeclared mission statement is to reconfigure Australian society;(italics & bold mine) the takedown of Tony Abbott’s character, paradoxically, is nothing personal.

The complete article can be found @: http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2013/12/taxes-abc/

To be PC or not to be PC, that is.....

A very instructive excerpt, particularly for an artist:

....the late Doris Lessing on language, academia and political correctness:
A very common way of thinking in literary criticism is not seen as a consequence of communism, but it is. Every writer has the experience of being told that a novel, a story, is “about” something or other. I wrote a story, The Fifth Child, which was at once pigeonholed as being about the Palestinian problem, genetic research, feminism, anti-Semitism and so on. A journalist from France walked into my living room and before she had even sat down said, “Of course The Fifth Child is about AIDS.” An effective conversation stopper, I assure you. But what is interesting is the habit of mind that has to analyse a literary work like this. If you say, “Had I wanted to write about AIDS or the Palestinian problem I would have written a pamphlet,” you tend to get baffled stares. That a work of the imagination has to be “really” about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary.

We can only hope this is so!

Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:
Global climate alarmism has been costly to society, and it has the potential to be vastly more costly. It also has been damaging to science, as scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions…

There are past examples. In the U.S. in the early 20th century, the eugenics movement had coopted the science of human genetics and was driving a political agenda. The movement achieved the Immigration Restriction Act of 1923, as well as forced sterilization laws in several states. The movement became discredited by Nazi atrocities, but the American consequences survived well into the 1960s. In the Soviet Union, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898-1976) promoted the Lamarckian view of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. It fit with Stalin’s megalomaniacal insistence on the ability of society to remold nature….
Global warming differs from the previous two affairs. Global warming has become a religion. A surprisingly large number of people seem to have concluded that all that gives meaning to their lives is the belief that they are saving the planet by paying attention to their carbon footprint…
In contrast to Lysenkoism, Global Warming has a global constituency, and has successfully coopted almost all of institutional science. However, the cracks in the scientific claims for catastrophic warming are, I think, becoming much harder for the supporters to defend.

The warming religion will collapse from its sheer cost


Andrew Bolt , Tuesday, December, 03, 2013, (6:46am)



How many billions of dollars have been squandered on pretending to do something about the weather? On placating the great Climate God?
Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

Global climate alarmism has been costly to society, and it has the potential to be vastly more costly. It also has been damaging to science, as scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions…
There are past examples. In the U.S. in the early 20th century, the eugenics movement had coopted the science of human genetics and was driving a political agenda. The movement achieved the Immigration Restriction Act of 1923, as well as forced sterilization laws in several states. The movement became discredited by Nazi atrocities, but the American consequences survived well into the 1960s.
In the Soviet Union, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898-1976) promoted the Lamarckian view of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. It fit with Stalin’s megalomaniacal insistence on the ability of society to remold nature….
Global warming differs from the previous two affairs. Global warming has become a religion. A surprisingly large number of people seem to have concluded that all that gives meaning to their lives is the belief that they are saving the planet by paying attention to their carbon footprint…
In contrast to Lysenkoism, Global Warming has a global constituency, and has successfully coopted almost all of institutional science. However, the cracks in the scientific claims for catastrophic warming are, I think, becoming much harder for the supporters to defend.
For example:
image
In fact:

“‘Real Risk of a Maunder Minimum ‘Little Ice Age’ announced the BBC this week, in reporting startling findings by Professor Mike Lockwood of Reading University. ‘Professor Lockwood believes solar activity is now falling more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years [raising the risk of a new Little Ice Age]…, explained Paul Hudson, the BBC’s climate correspondent. If Earth is spared a new Little Ice Age, a severe cooling as ‘occurred in the early 1800s, which also had its fair share of cold winters and cold summers is, according to him, ‘more likely than not to happen.”