Bully beef!

Obama and his sock puppet Kerry are holding Israel ransom to Palestinian aggression because of their flawed worldviews. They believe in the one-world theory that international law trumps national interests.

If only the bullies would listen everything would be copasetic!

Unfortunately the bullies in this case are not who ObaKer believe them to be. America itself is bullying little Israel with punitive sanctions if they (Israel) do not bend over for the lesser bully; Palestine.

Israel is the only truly democratic state within the middle East and has surrendered far too much to appease the bullies, beside which if the American quislings are wrong,  then the OOOPS factor is potentially rather more devastating for Israel then America.

In fact one gets the impression that the 'elites' in America would be quite glad to see the end of Israel. Of course that is never going to happen as human history has a habit of repeating itself, and the history of Israel is that it always survives whereas its oppressors do not. What will happen is the Israel is going to see the end of America, that is unless America repents.

This is how Melanie Phillips views the current debacle:

More important, there is also deep shock within Israel at what it sees as bullying by the U.S. When President Obama met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this month, he issued a veiled threat that if Israel did not accept the Kerry framework, the U.S. would no longer defend Israel against its enemies at the U.N. and elsewhere. This followed Mr. Kerry's remark last year that if Israel stymied the peace process, it might soon be facing an international delegitimization campaign "on steroids."

  In Israel, there is bewilderment that it alone is being held responsible for the absence of peace. After all, while Mr. Netanyahu has accepted the prospect of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, Mr. Abbas has said repeatedly that the Palestinians will never accept that Israel is a Jewish state.

 He also continues to insist on the right of every Palestinian "refugee" to immigrate not just to Palestine but also to Israel, which would destroy it as the Jewish national home.

  In addition, despite President Obama's statement this week that Mr. Abbas has "consistently renounced violence," the Palestinian Authority continues to incite hatred against Israel through its educational materials and regime-controlled media, and permits and glorifies acts of terrorism by the al Aqsa brigades and others.

 Yet the U.S. and U.K. hold only Israel's feet to the fire. Why? An important part of the answer lies in the inherent nature of the "peace process" itself.

  This rests on two premises. The first is the Western fallacy that everyone in the world is governed by reason and material self-interest, whereas in fact some have non-negotiable agendas. The second is the current liberal belief that trans-national instruments such as international law can transcend the grievances of nation states.

  War thus becomes a primitive throwback. It must be replaced by conflict resolution, negotiation and the "peace process."

  This then becomes a deeply problematic end in itself. Based on an amoral equivalence in such negotiations between aggressor and victim, the peace process has to be kept going at all costs if war is to be avoided.

  That means ignoring the fact that the aggressor in the dispute may still be violent or threatening. For if that is acknowledged, the "peace process" becomes something unconscionable: an enforced surrender to violence.

 If the victims protest at this free pass to murderous aggression and refuse to submit, it is they who get the blame for derailing the peace process. That process is therefore innately inimical to justice, and biased in favor of the aggressor in a conflict.

Historically and in 'real life' if the bully is a 50 pound weakling and the bullied is a Clint Eastwood with a magnum 44, the Clint character can easily and effectively negotiate a compromise, in fact the aggressor even comes off looking quite courageous, thus ensuring that everyone wins.

For many years America has been the Clint Eastwood sheriff of the global village.  Unfortunately these days with Obama at the helm of Americas armoury they currently appear more like Woody Allen with a catapult in his back pocket trying to convince the Russian bear that eating him would not taste very nice therefore please leave him alone. WE all know what a hungry bear would do.

  

Another March in March

Hear the march of the green stormtroopers

Andrew Bolt –, Wednesday, March, 19, 2014, (12:34pm)

Global warming - propaganda:  Professor Don Aitkin, former vice chancellor of the University of Canberra:

So the orthodox [warmists] go on waiting impatiently for the warming to return, and becoming even louder and more aggressive in their contempt for those of us who ask for good argument and good data and point out what seem to be problems in the orthodoxy… So to the first of [two recent] articles, which is by Rod Lamberts, Deputy Director of the ANU’s National Centre for Public Awareness of Science. What do you think of this?

 The fact is that the time for fact-based arguments is over. We all know what the overwhelmingly vast majority of climate science is telling us. I’m not going to regurgitate the details here, in part because the facts are available everywhere, but more importantly, because this tactic is a core reason why climate messages often don’t resonate or penetrate. If, like me, you’re convinced that human activity is having a hugely damaging effect on the global climate, then your only responsible option is to prioritise action.

I don’t think that what he proposes is at all a ‘responsible option’. The most responsible surely would be to look hard at what you think are the facts. Like Bernie Fraser, however, of whom he speaks well in this essay, Mr Lamberts knows what ‘the vast majority of climate science’ is telling him, though he won’t tell his readers.. We don’t need any more facts, he says, we need action. Nor is it clear what sort of action he has in mind, other than noisy behaviour.  But then we get this: What we need now is to become comfortable with the idea that the ends will justify the means.
That really worries me, and it should worry anyone. That is not how democracies should behave, and indeed it is what people object to about people who think they know The Truth: they are always telling the rest of us what to do. Mr Lamberts says that deniers should just be disregarded.  Ignore them, step around them, or walk over them. I object to this sort of talk, especially from an academic at the ANU, from which I have my PhD. It is stormtrooper stuff, and has no place either in universities or in a website funded by universities.
The second essay is by Lawrence Torcello, an American academic who teaches philosophy in the USA. It ... is certainly another good illustration of the aggressive style which you can find from the ‘believers’. Here is a sample:

We have good reason to consider the funding of climate denial to be criminally and morally negligent. The charge of criminal and moral negligence ought to extend to all activities of the climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus… What are we to make of those behind the well documented corporate funding of global warming denial? Those who purposefully strive to make sure “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information” is given to the public? I believe we understand them correctly when we know them to be not only corrupt and deceitful, but criminally negligent in their willful disregard for human life. It is time for modern societies to interpret and update their legal systems accordingly.

Nowhere in this is any attempt to define anything; apparently it’s not needed by philosophers like Mr Torcello, though I would have thought ‘climate denial’ at least needs some kind of explanation if funding it is to be regarded as criminal behaviour. As I’ve said a few times, I am simply unaware of any funding that flows to me or to the others with whom I discuss AGW…
No matter. Any innocent reading this will come away with the view that ‘climate deniers’, whoever they are, should be jailed. It’s different stormtrooper talk, and just as objectionable.

Hell is getting hotter, must be AGW!

It appears that there are signs of sanity appearing on the horizon, at least in regards to the climate change nonsense.  http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/tony-thomas/2014/03/finally-real-climate-science/

However I do not think that we should get our hopes up that the Nietzscheian or the eco-religious amongst us will take any notice of facts or reason. they will continue along their chosen paths until hell freezes over or they land up there...whichever comes first.
  

I know my rights!

Joseph Conrad's description of a man many of us may have had the misfortune to meet, serve with, work with or perhaps in a moment of deep and serious self-evaluation, mirrored in some unenviable way:

This clean white forecastle was his refuge; the place where he could be lazy; where he could wallow, and lie and eat—and curse the food he ate; where he could display his talents for shirking work, for cheating, for cadging; where he could find surely some one to wheedle and some one to bully—and where he would be paid for doing all this. They all knew him. Is there a spot on earth where such a man is unknown, an ominous survival testifying to the eternal fitness of lies and impudence? . . . He was the man that cannot steer, that cannot splice, that dodges the work on dark nights; that, aloft, holds on frantically with both arms and legs, and swears at the wind, the sleet, the darkness; the man who curses the sea while others work. The man who is the last out and the first in when all hands are called. The man who can’t do most things and won’t do the rest. The pet of philanthropists and self-seeking landlubbers. The sympathetic and deserving creature that knows all about his rights, but knows nothing of courage, of endurance, and of the unexpressed faith, of the unspoken loyalty that knits together a ship’s company. The independent offspring of the ignoble freedom of the slums full of disdain and hate for the austere servitude of the sea.

Amen

this comment by Miranda Devine speaks the truth about conservation. The truth is that nature unsupervised turns to weeds, disintegration and ultimately destroys all and sundry. This, as Christians are aware, has to do with the Genesis curse.
Leave your garden to return to nature and see what happens...'nature' will be strangled by weeds, and as any game park ranger will testify, cultivation is the key to conservation.

The night after Ludlum gave his nasty little speech, Abbott delivered his own speech around the corner, in the Great Hall of Parliament House, at the annual dinner of the Australian Forest Products Association. It was an ode to the timber industry that could only be interpreted as a giant finger to the green movement.

“I salute you as people who love the natural world, as people who love what Mother Nature gives us and who want to husband it for the long-term best interests of humanity.”

He called foresters the “ultimate conservationists”. Which of course they are. They were taking care of trees long before middle-class professional Greens showed up to destroy their livelihood.

A well-kept forest is a joy for flora, fauna and human economic interests. Forest locked away as national parks, on the other hand, we have seen become incinerated moonscapes. After deadly runaway bushfires, the silence of the koalas is deafening and nothing will grow for years.

The scorched earth of a burned out national park can be seen as a metaphor for what the green movement has done to Australia. From Tasmania’s rotten supplicant economy to the corporate victims of the carbon tax, from bulging immigration detention centres to vast green bureaucracies sucking the taxpayer dry for zero environmental gain.

Abbott’s words fell on the room of foresters like a chorus of angels signifying the dawning of the light.

“Man and the environment are meant for each other. The last thing we should want — if we want to genuinely improve our environment … is to ban men and women from enjoying it, is to ban men and women from making the most of it …

Hallelujah.

Surrender

One of the more disturbing comments I have read recently:

"Political correctness might have become so insidious that it is now a thought-crime to support the repeal of laws that stifle free speech lest we be tarred with the words of others. Far from emulating Voltaire’s famous line on free speech, the political class surrenders."

Hosing down the neurons

From the horses mouth, so to speak:

But don’t take my word for it. Lesbian Tammy Bruce, former president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women, put it this way: “During my activism in the feminist and gay communities, the conditioning was nonstop. The effort, using the mass media primarily, was and is to brainwash the public into believing that certain sexual practices are merely ‘alternative lifestyles’… I was told that my describing S&M as a sickness put gay people at risk. Why? Because if any ‘alternative’ sexual practice was condemned, there would be the slippery slope, and no gays would be safe from those maniacal Christian fundamentalists. By default, it was argued, we had a responsibility to embrace and support anyone who challenged the sexual and social status quo.”

Bummer ahead

The following article illustrates how artists in Australia today (that is those who 'play the game' so as to receive 'official' acceptance and the filthy lucre that flows from said acceptance), are no longer independent in the true sense of the word. Such sheep are happy to accede to the demands of their left-wing patrons irrespective of what  they might feel personally about any issue, and they will do it in ignorance of the logical consequences because who in the world would think it is the artists duty to think logically?

Puhlease my brother...we are artistes!

In the past when the funding dried up they ran bleating to the government and begged for more moolah and when the lefties were in power they got it.

I suspect that it will not turn out so comfortably this time.

Watch this space for the bleating, hand-wringing and emotional diatribes.

Australian artists demonstrate the collective instinct that distinguishes the mediocre, the intolerance of difference that distinguishes the totalitarian and the contempt for consequences (as in the death of 1100 boat people thanks to policies they never protested) that distinguishes the adolescent. In other words, the Left has won:

The Biennale of Sydney has announced it will sever ties with its founding partner Transfield, caving into pressure from artists angered by the company’s links to Australia’s offshore detention centres.
The board of the Biennale of Sydney also announced on Friday that Luca Belgiorno-Nettis had resigned as chairman, less than two weeks before the event is scheduled to begin. Mr Belgiorno-Nettis’s resignation after 14 years and the severing of ties with Transfield represents a huge win for artists and refugee advocates and an embarrassing backdown for the Biennale board, which claimed the Biennale could not exist without Transfield and pledged its loyalty to the Belgiorno-Nettis family two weeks ago.

Forked tongues

The BBC (Beeb) knocks Orwellian 'doublespeak' out of the ballpark when it comes to their 'correspondents' (commissars?) habit of manipulating the facts, take this comment for example:

And Daniel Hannan on unflattering facts:  

One of my constituents once complained to the Beeb about a report on the repression of Mexico’s indigenous peoples, in which the government was labelled right-wing. The governing party, he pointed out, was a member of the Socialist International and, again, the give-away was in its name: Institutional Revolutionary Party. The BBC’s response was priceless. Yes, it accepted that the party was socialist, “but what our correspondent was trying to get across was that it is authoritarian.”

Great Scott

One of France's most famous contemporary philosophers interviewed by Der Spiegel speaks on the failures of multi-cultural immigration in France.
Like France, Australia's loopy left-wing sentimentalists have condemned us in the past to such a fate, the evidence of which is in the news on an almost daily basis, and the continued flood of such unsuitable 'citizen' candidates has only been circumvented by the boldness (in the face of socialistic savagery) and fortitude of immigration minister Scott Morrison.
An excerpt: (red highlights mine for emphasis)

Finkielkraut: Immigration used to go hand-in-hand with integration into French culture. That was the rule of the game. Many of the new arrivals no longer want to play by that rule. If the immigrants are in the majority in their neighborhoods, how can we integrate them? There used to be mixed marriages, which is crucial to miscegenation. But their numbers are declining. Many Muslims in Europe are re-Islamizing themselves. A woman who wears the veil effectively announces that a relationship with a non-Muslim is out of the question for her.

SPIEGEL: Aren't many immigrants excluded from mainstream society primarily for economic reasons?

Finkielkraut: The left wanted to resolve the problem of immigration as a social issue, and proclaimed that the riots in the suburbs were a kind of class struggle. We were told that these youths were protesting against unemployment, inequality and the impossibility of social advancement. In reality we saw an eruption of hostility toward French society. Social inequality does not explain the anti-Semitism, nor the misogyny in the suburbs, nor the insult "filthy French." The left does not want to accept that there is a clash of civilizations.
 

The full interview: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-french-philosopher-finkielkraut-on-muslims-and-integration-a-937404.html