Monday 29 February 2016

FOUR LEGS GOOD, THREE LEGS BETTER

As always Roger Scruton is a voice of reason amongst a babble of chaotic clammerances:
"We should reject the view that high culture, as the possession of an elite, is of no use to those who don’t possess it. This is as false as the view that science or higher mathematics are useless to those who don’t understand them. Scientific knowledge exists because a few talented people are prepared to devote their energy to pursuing it. That is what a university is for: and since you cannot pass on difficult knowledge without discriminating between the students who can absorb it and those who cannot, discrimination is a social good. The same is true of high culture. Those able to acquire it will be a minority and the process of cultural transmission will be critically impeded if that teacher must teach Mozart and Lady Gaga side by side to satisfy some egalitarian agenda."
He also articulates the sometimes agonising path that those who agree with such a worldview must walk, seemingly against great odds:
"It is hard to persuade someone who has grown up without culture that culture is a thing of value, and argument with egalitarians is pointless, since it presupposes that good reasons are superior to bad, and that is an elitist opinion. All we can do is to go on making a space for culture in a world of noise and inviting students to enter. Often it might seem as though the task is hopeless. But I am convinced that it is not hopeless and that the rewards, both for the teacher and the student, outweigh the costs.

Saturday 27 February 2016

HIDDEN BY THE HIJAB

The heretofore generally articulate and undoubtedly brave young Pakistani girl Malala is said to have ‘dissed’ Trump with the most ‘elegant’ of putdowns:
“Malala Yousafzai offered up a reality check for Donald Trump and any other politician attacking the entire Muslim faith.  "The more you speak about Islam and against all Muslims, the more terrorists we create," she said in an interview with Channel 4 in the United Kingdom.
I am not at all convinced about the ‘elegance’ of what appears to me to be a stock standard defence of any/all criticisms of the Islamic faith. If such a simplistic causality between ridicule and violence actually existed, then the left-wing Media's relentless assault on Christianity should have created millions of terrorists all around the world.

I think it has more to do with the fact the Islam was founded by a warlord and continues to be a political dominance programme wrapped in religious garb.

Thus Malala’s simplistic ‘reasoning’ should be exposed for what it is, rather than excessively feted just because it fits the paradigm the mass media wish to project.

Friday 26 February 2016

- HISTORY = CONSEQUENCES

How far has America and the West in general fallen from this ideal?
"Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence heralded a new kind of government, in which men would live under laws that they themselves had made. But he believed, along with his fellow Founders, that educated citizens would be the key to such a government—not intellectuals, professors, or geniuses like Milton but merely people who understood the difference between liberty and tyranny, who knew from the Bible or history books or family traditions or their own experience of the countries from which they’d escaped that tyranny has been the deplorably ordinary condition of mankind. Jefferson and George Washington strongly supported public schooling, which the 1650 Connecticut legal code required, and all the Founders envisioned citizens who read newspapers, freely discussed public men and public measures, made up their own minds, and voted accordingly. With their clear-eyed skepticism about human nature, knowing that passions and interests motivate men more often than reason does, the Founders had no fantasies about a nation of toga-wearing Athenian philosophers, but they did envision a republic of practical-minded people pursuing their own happiness and self-improvement (Dante’s pursuit of excellence), while jealously guarding their right to govern and think for themselves." [Myron Magnet]

Thursday 25 February 2016

IGNORANCE IS A MISTAKE

Do you believe that Obama would be embarrassed about his inaccurate prediction re:the price of gas?
We can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices,” President Obama told an audience four years ago today at the University of Miami. Like this year, it was an election year and Obama was running for re-election. Later in his speech, he added: “anybody who tells you that we can drill our way out of this problem doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or just isn’t telling you the truth.” He scoffed at the Republicans for believing that drilling would result in $2 gasoline — remember this was when prices at the pump, in many places, spiked to more than $4 a gallon: “You can bet that since it is an election year, they’re already dusting off their three-point plans for $2 gas. I’ll save you the suspense: Step one is drill, step two is drill, step three is drill.”
Well, Mr. President, you owe America, and the Republicans, an apology. Your snarky comments were wrong. The Republican’s supposed three-point plan, which you mocked, was correct.
I don’t expect our presidents to be energy experts, but they should be advised by the brightest minds in the business. Obviously, Obama surrounds himself with ideologues.
Today, on the four-year anniversary of another of Obama’s inaccurate predictions, we have drilled our way to $2 gas — despite the fact that he has supported the anti-fossil-fuel movement’s efforts to impede and block oil production.
No way!

Just as our Australian nostradamus's are dumb to their errors (and numerous there are) and blithely move on to more and greater predictions, just so Obama and his cronies. Obama didn't try to hide his intentions of changing American society, he was quite candid about it, so failing to stop the production of shale oil gas will not stop him from continuing to try and sabotage as much of America as he can on his way out. Remember this is the president who wrote about his hatred towards America in his own words:
I bought and read Audacity of Hope. It was difficult to read considering his attitude toward us and everything American. Let me add a phrase he use to describe his attitude toward whites. He harbors a "COIL OF RAGE".
Many of our Australian ideologies are also committed to bringing down our way of life, a life they view as 'Imperialistic, wasteful (unsustainable), selfish, racist, etc....whilst there is a modicum of truth in such assessments it is as a result of human nature rather than the culture, if anything; having the freedoms hard won by Western nations gives rise to increasingly anti-social behaviours.

Many of our elite Social Justice Warriors (actual warriors they are generally not!) are little more than what Lenin termed 'useful idiots', in that they fail to extrapolate past their current intellectual orgasms and project the consequences of their ideologies into the future. Part of the problem is that too many from the past two generations have not been well versed in history, so they have no capacity to learn from the past, in fact they abhor anything and everything from the past as they have been taught to do.

Truman (Harry) said it best: "It is ignorance that causes most mistakes.” 

TO BE OR NOT TO BE IS NOT THE QUESTION...TO APPEAR TO BE IS!

"It might be argued that Pell is somewhat unfortunate in finding himself in the role of poster boy for the Catholic Church's institutional response to child sexual abuse. Perhaps he's copping more than his fair personal share of rhetorical abuse. A major reason for this is that, in all his public responses to this crisis, he has never demonstrated anything even approaching empathy or remorse."
This passage appears to be very similar in tone to the opprobation heaped onto the head of the Queen when she 'appeared' less than disturbed by the death of Diana in 1997.
"The Queen was criticised for two things. One was taking the boys [Princes William and Harry] to church [on the day the Princess died]. But they wanted to go to church. If you are a Christian and your mother has been killed, it is a comfort going to church.
"The other thing was that people expected the Queen to abandon her two grandsons – whose mother had just been killed – and go to London to mourn with people who had never even met the Princess. "If you stand back and think about it, it is an extraordinarily selfish attitude. Queen Elizabeth was hugely upset by the criticism of her daughter because she has always admired her so much. It was such a cruel criticism and it was unfair."
The truth is that our Western culture now believes that it is more important to appear to be virtuous rather than feeling the need to actually be virtuous.

It is emotionalism that wins the day and any perceived lack thereof is hunted down and destroyed in the name of tolerance and fairness. Some have termed it the Oprahfication of culture; obviously because of the extreme public emotionalism of the Oprah show, others, longer ago called it the Vannatization of culture after the game show hostess Vanna White whose sole claim to fame was the result of a fake, vacuous display of false emotions.

Either way our culture has lost authenticity. We are more concerned with the outward expressions of piety rather than deeply held ones. As a society who has accelerated from what was once a drift into what has now become a stampede away from the Judeo-Christian foundation of our culture, we are all in danger of becoming like the Pharisees depicted in the Gospel of Matthew chapter 23 vs 27/28:
27 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.

28 In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.

GUILTY IS AS GUILTY DOES

As always David Thompson dishes the goods on the wailing class:
I’ve heard it called “Luxurious Concerns.” That is, your concerns mark your social status. If your concerns are about keeping your job, paying your rent, or whether your kids’ school is any damn good, you’re worried about Big Things, and therefore you are marked as a Struggling Person. Only those who have really made it -- who are at the top of the economic and social order -- have the luxury of worrying about the Small Things. And if you worry about the Very Small Things, or indeed the Microscopic Things, then, well and truly, you have arrived… If you can’t afford a Luxury Car, or a Luxury Apartment, you can at least adorn yourself with Luxury Worries. It’s very cheap. Easy, too… Our modern class of intellectually-insecure social climbers are posing as connoisseurs of offensiveness. 
The attempt to cultivate pretentious guilt and pretentious indignation, and to balance grief and umbrage on a very tiny thing, the tinier the better, is of course a Guardian staple. It gives the left’s national organ its distinctive tone - that tinny, unconvincing high-pitched whine. Affecting woe, especially improbable woe, is how many leftwing columnists signal their position in their own moral hierarchy, relative to you, the heathen rabble.  It’s important to understand these are not just lapses in logic or random fits of insincerity; these outpourings are displays – of class and moral elevation. Which is why they persist, despite getting knottier and ever more absurd. Crudely summarised, it goes something like this: “I am better than you because I pretend to feel worse.” 
And this is why, for instance, a tearful Theo Hobson tells us, “There is no excuse for failing to feel liberal guilt about race and class.” Because until “this problematic world” has been purged of all vice and inequity, however unrelated to your own behaviour, a heavy, heavy heart must be worn on the sleeve. How else will people know how superior you are?
According to Mr Hobson, if you aren’t ostentatiously fretting about the eating of meat and “affluent lifestyles endangering the planet,” and if you aren’t “anxious about your status as a comfy bourgeoisie” and ashamed of earning more than some other random person, then there must be something wrong with you. And so you should feel guilty for not feeling guilty about things you shouldn’t feel guilty about. It’s the Guardian way.
 

Tuesday 23 February 2016

SHAME ON SHAME

More evidence of the bias that has taken hold of the chattering classes and which is destroying the country:
THE ABC’s news division needs a brutal overhaul, now it has been caught red-handed broadcasting the monstrous lie that a five-year-old boy was “raped” on Nauru, in an Australian offshore immigration facility.
For an entire week, night and day, on its most prestigious programs, on TV, on radio, online, this falsehood was repeated as if it were fact, apart from the odd “alleged” thrown in, without the most rudimentary fact-checking having been done.
They wanted so much for the story to be true that they didn’t even apply the most basic bullshit detector.
It’s hard to think of more shoddy, irresponsible, or cynical journalism.
The story was never credible, which is why no one got worked up about it.
It was “advocacy disguised as journalism”, as Department of Immigration and Border Protection secretary Michael Pezzullo put it.
There was “no evidence, whatsoever, anywhere” that a five-year-old had been raped on Nauru”, he told a Senate hearing, in a cold fury, on Monday.
“It’s getting to a point where there is advocacy parading as journalism that is actually deleterious to a sensible discussion about these matters.
“We’ve gone beyond journalism when you’ve got certain segments of the media undertaking essentially pamphleteering of almost a political nature and then in that context the facts just get bent.
“The allegation that my department is somehow complicit in a ­regime where children are raped and they are returned to a brutal ­regime of detention, I reject that utterly.”
That is what the ABC’s foul untruth meant, that we all were complicit in a child’s rape, the Prime Minister, the Immigration Minister, the department, the slandered Nauruans, the complacent Australian public, everyone except the moral narcissists of the ABC and the refugee lobby.
It was designed to whip up public opposition to our border protection policies, cruelly raise false hopes among asylum seekers, and try to force the Turnbull government to weaken, just as Kevin Rudd did so disastrously.

IGNORANCE IS GLOSS

English as it is spoke and teached by our intellectual elite:
"The Guardian‘s Vanessa Badham actually presents classes on writing opinion pieces, including advice on “how to structure your content for effective and clear commentary”.
Lesson one – don’t begin your very serious column about sex education with an unintentionally hilarious ambiguity:  'Our friend Danielle narrated the experience of losing her virginity to us all on the bus.'

TWIST AND TURN

Note the twist in this leftist journalists words that transforms it from mere reporting into propaganda:
"The researchers] found that political affiliation was a much larger determinant of a person’s willingness to accept humanity’s role in climate change than other social fault lines. Conservative voters were more likely to be sceptical, while progressive voters typically believed the science."
This manipulative assault occurs day in and day out and is a significant contributor to the undermining of our culture by the chattering classes.

Saturday 20 February 2016

A (truly) CAUTIONARY TALE

...Speaking of safe spaces, my old magazine Maclean's publishes an obituary that reads like a latterday Hillaire Belloc. Alas, every word is true:
Dean even wore safety goggles when playing with Nerf guns. "They might be foam, but they could still take your eyes out," says Kelly. "That's called instilling safety."
Dean never grew out of his cautious ways. After moving to live with Kelly and his stepfamily in Hinton, Alta., at age 12, he preached to his friends about safety while driving four-wheelers and dirt bikes. "He always made me wear a helmet," says one of his best friends, Brian Scotland. "I hate helmets. Somehow I listened to Dean." Dean was equally prudent at home. He never turned on the lawnmower without boots and eye protection, and "there's safety stickers all around our house," says his stepbrother, Brendan Bieker...
On work sites, Dean never removed his hard hat or safety harness, not even at lunch...
When their son, Kingston, was born in September 2014, Dean became known as the world's safest dad. He insisted on buying a $300 car seat, with help from his grandmother, Donna Smith. "He had to get the top safety brand," says Donna. Worried that Kingston might knock his head on a sharp corner, Dean moved all four coffee tables out of the living room.
Dean was installing a safety handrail for mill employees to cross a tower without needing to wear a harness. "It was literally to make it 100 per cent safe for them," says Kelly. According to Kelly, Dean's safety lanyard got caught in the coupling of a motor and sucked him into the machinery. Alberta Occupational Health and Safety is investigating the death. Dean was 23.

Wednesday 17 February 2016

MINE, MINE, MINE, MINE!

Josh Gelernter follows the twisted logic of “cultural appropriation”: 
History’s first recorded sandwich was invented by the Jewish sage Hillel, who proposed celebrating Passover by eating the commemorative sacrifice of lamb sandwiched between two soft pieces of matzoh — which reminded Jews of the exodus — along with bitter herbs, to remind them of slavery. Jews [should therefore] demand that non-Jews renounce sandwiches… Of course, it was a Christian — Newton — who discovered Newtonian physics, and a Jew — Einstein — who discovered relativistic physics. Jews and Christians invented the majority of modern medicine and the majority of advanced mathematics. The automobile was invented by the Jew Siegfried Marcus, and the airplane by the Christian Wright brothers, who were the sons of an Evangelical bishop. Christians and Jews [should therefore] demand that young leftists renounce science, medicine and transportation.


Tuesday 16 February 2016

LET THE SUN SHINE INTO THE CORNERS...

I don't think that the latest development in climate change by legitimate scientists will make the slightest bit of headway against the AGW fanatics. Not because the Solar theory is wrong, in fact because it is pure science I believe it to be absolutely right, but because AGW ceased to be about science a very long time ago.

It is actually about power, a manipulative grab for power and for the redistribution of wealth...sound familiar. Indeed, those who have lived beneath the mantle of communism are amongst the most vociferous voices raised against the AGW scam because they recognise the signs.
First, they constructed the best possible temperature record from 1880 to 2014. Remarkably, no one had ever done this before. This required using only surface temperature data from stations not affected by a changing environment.
They show their temperature record is compatible with temperature trends derived from sea surface temperatures, glacier length records, and tree-ring widths.
Their corrected “composite” temperature record shows warming from the 1880’s to 1940’s, and from the 1980’s to 2000’s, with a cooling period from the 1950’s to 1970’s. The record shows the current warm period is similar to the previous warm period from the 1880’s to 1940’s.
They show climate models do not reproduce the correct temperature record when back tested. This means, of course, climate models are of no value in making climate predictions. The reason is obvious. Climate models do not properly simulate the physical effects of carbon dioxide, water vapor, clouds, aerosols, and solar irradiance.
Read the precis of the paper @  http://edberry.com/blog/ed-berry/new-study-sun-not-co2-causes-climate-change/   The full paper is way to complicated for non scientific dufuses like myself, but many questions are answered in the comment section.

Monday 15 February 2016

USEFUL INFO

In the 1960s, radical philosopher Herbert Marcuse popularized the "repressive tolerance" theory of modern progressives. "Liberating tolerance would mean intolerance against movements from the right and toleration of movements from the left," Marcuse pontificated. "Certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed."

Friday 12 February 2016

HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS

Some (slightly) out-of-date stats proclaim a problem in education in the UK. I seriously doubt that the situation has improved, nor that the situation in Australia is indeed much better.
Hence the explosion in homeschooling.
An official report in 1999 claimed one in five adults could not find the entry for “plumbers” in a telephone directory and that innumeracy was even more widespread. A 1998 Gallup Poll indicated only 56 per cent of the adult population could identify the Queen as the British head of state.[2] A Basic Skills Agency report calculated 24 per cent of the population was functionally illiterate and innumerate. Showing how seriously the government took this, the Minister for Schools, Jim Knight, responsible for class-room standards, published a short letter on his website in 2009, claiming “there is [sic] also a lot of positive things going on in our schools”, which contained several basic spelling and grammatical errors, including “archealogical”, “acheiving” and “maintainence”.
I was at a homeschooling 'collective excursion' yesterday and learned that homeschoolers in South Australia make up the biggest 'school group' in the state. And that reflects only the ones who have registered...many do not. A few of the non-registered parents/caregivers are loons, others just old-fashioned rebels, but most homeschooling parents are dedicated to good education and spare no effort in obtaining both the materials and the opportunities to provide the very best for their children. When one reflects on the above statistics, it becomes difficult to argue for the alternative.

Fortunately there remains a significant cohort of dedicated, moral teachers who treat teaching as a calling rather than a mere job, and if your family has no options but schooling, send them to schools where these teachers are the norm. They exist, you just have to do your homework and pay the price.

CRY WOLF

How easy it is for wily operators to fleece the bleeding heart liberals:
Crikey‘s Josh Taylor weeps about self-slicing illegals:  102 incidents of self-harm on Nauru in 2015. 40 on Manus.
But that was before a travel incentive was removed:

The number of asylum-seekers on Nauru harming themselves plummeted to zero three months after Immigration Minister Peter Dutton stopped family members from being allowed to travel to Australia to accompany a sick or injured person …
Late last year, Mr Dutton instructed the Immigration Department to bring only the person needing medical treatment to Australia, not the whole family, unless there were “extenuating circumstances”.

It was just that easy.

Thursday 4 February 2016

BRAVE NEW UTOPIA

In today's world the more you toady to the elitist ideologists the more fame and fortune you garner. Witness our new 'Australian of the year' whose actual record should have relegated him to janitorial status.
"Morrison presided over one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in this country’s military history, in his over-the-top ­response to the Jedi Council scandal. His impassioned 2013 speech excoriating sexist soldiers made him a hero to the feminist establishment.

But the price was that he ruthlessly sacrificed eight officers on the altar of feminism.

And no one was more hard done by than the most senior of the group, Ken, because he hadn’t even opened the offending emails which were the cause of his downfall."
In our Brave New 'Utopia' you can be excoriated just for receiving a 'sexist' email even if you don't read it. Witness just one of those affected by Morrisons' lack of courage in standing up to the Feminazi's:
“I was the most senior officer he accused ... He embarrassed (me) on national TV. I, like many others, didn’t read the emails or deleted them because I didn’t have time to read stuff from a civilian.
“Morrison tried hard to pin the Jedi Council on me but when he couldn’t, he sacked me from Command because ‘I failed to remain aware of issues that ­affect me, my unit and Army’.
“Removing me from command is a death sentence for your career and particularly me because everyone thought I was part of Jedi Council. I was just dead man walking … The ­betrayal has broken me.”
His life was ruined and yet he had no idea what the “Jedi Council” was, had met Fredrickson twice 12 years earlier, and had never read his obscene emails. Not one.
He was too busy as a commanding officer in Townsville, getting hundreds of emails a day to read any email that wasn’t ­directly addressed to him.
“I did not read the emails from Fredrickson. When Morrison finally agreed that I was not part of the Jedi Council he sacked me from Command (anyway). So as far as Morrison’s justice goes I was going to be sacked whether I was guilty or not. The whole thing felt like the Salem witch trials.”
Ken has since been medically discharged from the Army after 24 years of dedicated service. He’d served in East Timor and Afghanistan, He’d studied at Kings College London. He has three masters degrees. He planned to be a general. Now he is unemployed and has spent six months of the last two years in psychiatric wards.
And of course his wife, his “soulmate”, and his two young children suffer as well.
“You can ruin your own reputation and you have to live with that but when your reputation is ruined by someone else that is when it eats at you.”
Feeling safer in the new Australia?

GODLESS RELIGION

This has to make you think twice, surely! Everyone has a 'religion', even those who claim there is no God.
A Catholic priest would earn in a year what Morrison earns in just two or three speeches of his own brand of moralising:
Former army chief David Mor­­rison is charging up to $15,000 for speaking engagements as Australian of the Year, up to three times more than his predecessor Rosie Batty asked for each appearance.
In an insight into the growth of the industry that has built up around advocacy of equality and diversity, Mr Morrison stands to earn as much as $780,000 while he is Australian of the Year if he gives one speech a week.
How about equality of salary? A few bracing lectures from Morrison on that would be interesting.
On the same theme, a Human Rights Commissioner gets ten times the salary of a Catholic priest, and usually gets treated by the media like a minor oracle and not a leper.
New Age moralists don’t come cheap. It’s a business now. But I rather suspect we’d hear more to our advantage from the priest.

Tuesday 2 February 2016

AUSSIE RUI(NATION)

Often it is the comments on the various blogs I read that hit the home-run. There are, particularly on conservative blogs, always the foul mouthed/brained Trolls (whose nom de plumes usually rather amusingly describe their predilections) who are often of insignificant intellect and a waste of space, but their are also the rather erudite and sometimes prescient commentators whose contribution bears repeating, as in the following remarks by 'R Blake' about our new 'Australian of the year' (as I now retire to wash my mouth out with soap):
David Morrison is a just another self-serving public servant, riding the wave of the new immoral paradigm. He has found himself a lucrative “social issues” gig and he’ll work it for everything it’s got, just like the others. These talkative media advocates tend to fit a certain personality type - i.e. fragile egos craving attention, emotional, committed, but with relatively low intelligence.
David Morrison, Elizabeth Broderick, Gillian Triggs, Rosie Batty - none of these could be remotely described as intellectual heavyweights. They are stock-standard, ideologically based misinformation disseminators, who crave appreciation and attention, especially media attention.
Bleating about social issues, regardless of the accuracy of their statements (because accuracy does not matter in the digital era), provides them with both financial and emotional sustenance. At the end of the day, this is what they seek.