Red sunset, black night, bright new day!

Welcome to our new world reality; rapidly deepening its roots in Australia if we are not careful:

Silent Night

December 24, 2011 2:10 P.M.

By Mark Steyn    

On this Christmas Eve, one of the great unreported stories throughout what we used to call Christendom is the persecution of Christians around the world. In Egypt, the “Arab Spring” is going so swimmingly that Copts are already fleeing Egypt and, for those Christians that remain, Midnight Mass has to be held in the daylight for security reasons. In Iraq, midnight services have been canceled entirely for fear of bloodshed, part of the remorseless de-Christianizing that has been going on, quite shamefully, under an American imperium.

Not merely the media but Christian leaders in the west seem to be embarrassed by behavior that doesn’t conform to their dimwitted sappiness about “Facebook Revolutions”. It took a Jew to deliver this line:

When Lord Sacks, chief rabbi in England, rose in the House of Lords to speak about the persecution of Christians, he quoted Martin Luther King. “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

Do not be ignorant of the reality that our own self-loathing, lefty, 'useful idiots' are unwittingly preparing the ground for more and more sharia intimidation to gain ascendancy in this still marvellous country.
We are engaged in a never-ending battle and its current 'black knights' include those representatives of the 'religion of peace'.

Ah...hollow men indeed!

Mark Steyn notes well the root cause of much of the 'hollowness' at the centre of Western lives today:

The notion of life as a self-growth experience is more radical than it sounds. For most of human history, functioning societies have honored the long run: It's why millions of people have children, build houses, plant trees, start businesses, make wills, put up beautiful churches in ordinary villages, fight and, if necessary, die for your country. A nation, a society, a community is a compact between past, present and future, in which the citizens, in Tom Wolfe's words at the dawn of the "Me Decade," "conceive of themselves, however unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream."

Much of the developed world climbed out of the stream. You don't need to make material sacrifices: The state takes care of all that. You don't need to have children. And you certainly don't need to die for king and country. But a society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for: It's no longer a stream, but a stagnant pool.

Christmas Cheer

I hope that these comments by the well qualified Jennifer Fulwiler prove to be prescient as opposed to wishful:

I’ve thought for a long time that the pro-life position will be the default position in the future. I fully believe that 100 years from now, the vast majority of people will consider abortion morally wrong—modern technology has made it too hard to deny the dignity of human life within the womb. The only question was when the shift would finally happen, when society would finally stop clinging to the antiquated, unscientific ideas about unborn children. Survey data has been looking promising for a while, but the internet reaction to the Duggar photos seals it. There is no question that our society has far more respect for unborn human life than it used to.

Ten years ago, the average person would have felt uncomfortable admitting it if she thought abortion were wrong; in the future, I think that public opinion will have shifted to the extent that it will not be socially acceptable to be in favor of abortion. And I believe that history will point to 2011 as the year the balance of public opinion tipped, and the momentum began moving in a pro-life direction.

I believe that we have just witnessed the tide turn.

Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/pro-lifers-the-tide-just-turned/#ixzz1hPXVDgbe

THWACK!!!!!!

Stephen Kates hits the ideological nail on the head with this statement:

And when you look at every other value the left runs with, the will to interfere in our everyday lives is not merely a nuisance but is frequently a very large problem with each separate failure leading to more government involvement to repair the damage the previous sets of involvement have caused.

http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2011/12/havel-vs-kim

And Martin Durkin does the same with this:

Who poses the greater threat to freedom?   Colonel Gaddafi?  The Taliban?  Or let’s look closer to home, at a sinister group with far, far greater influence on the future of Western civilization.

The Green zealots, with their bicycles and wispy dresses and organic fruit juice, should have us quaking in our boots.  With terrifying single-mindedness, the Green movement is waging war against freedom, for more State control.   And they’ve been at it from the start. 

In his Population Bomb (written in the 60s) Paul Ehrlich says, ‘The policeman against environmental deterioration must be the powerful Department of Population and the Environment.’   Sounds scary, but when the future of the planet hangs in the balance, there’s no room for half measures.   

E. F. Schumacher, in his classic green text Small is Beautiful, advocates, in place of capitalist free markets, a ‘national plan’ imposed by ‘some central agency’.  And he reminds us, in sinister tones, ‘Planning (as I suggest the term should be used) is inseparable from power’.  National planning by a central agency would, he says, give us ‘a more democratic and dignified system of industrial administration’.    And, with topsy-turvy logic, he equates State control with freedom, ‘private ownership of the means of production is severely limited in its freedom of choice of objectives, because it is compelled to be profit-seeking, and tends to take a narrow and selfish view of things.  Public ownership gives complete freedom in the choice of objectives and can therefore be used for any purpose that may be chosen.’   How free they must all have felt in the old Soviet Union!

NB the similarities

When Vaclav Klaus speaks about the communism he lived under and its intellectual partners, it sounds like he is describing the Labor/Green/ABC alliance in Australia today:

The communist politicians needed their intellectual fellow-travelers.  They needed their “dealings in ideas”, their “shaping of public opinion”, their apology of the inhuman, irrational and inefficient regime. They needed their ability to supply them with general, abstract and utopian ideas. They especially needed their willingness to deal with the hypothetical future instead of criticising the very much less rosy reality.

...The question is what kind of ideas is favoured by the intellectuals. The question is whether the intellectuals are neutral in their choice of ideas with which they are ready to deal with. Hayek argued that they are not. They do not hold or try to spread all kinds of ideas. They have very clear and, in some respect, very understandable preferences for some of them. They prefer ideas, which give them jobs and income and which enhance their power and prestige.

They, therefore, look for ideas with specific characteristics. They look for ideas, which enhance the role of the state because the state is usually their main employer, sponsor or donator. That is not all. According to Hayek “the power of ideas grows in proportion to their generality, abstractness, and even vagueness”. Hence it is not surprising that the intellectuals are mostly interested in abstract, not directly implementable ideas. This is also the way of thinking, in which they have comparative advantage. They are not good at details. They do not have ambitions to solve a problem

...They were not “valued” (or evaluated) by the invisible hand of the market but by the very visible hand of the rulers of that society. To my great regret many intellectuals were not able (or did not want) to understand the dangerous implications of such an arrangement.

As a result of this, and, again, it was no great surprise to me, after the fall of communism, in our suddenly free society, where many (if not all) previous constraints were removed practically over night, the first frustrated and openly protesting group were the intellectuals – “journalists, teachers, publicists, radio commentators, writers of fiction, and artists” (to quote Hayek). They were protesting against the unpleasant constraints created by the market. They found out very rapidly that the free society (and free markets) may not need so much of their service as they were used to in the past. They especially understood that their valuation by the impersonal forces of supply and demand may be not only less favorable than their own self-valuation (and Robert Nozick is right when he says that “intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people”) but even less favorable than that of politicians and bureaucrats of the old regime. They became, therefore, the first visible and noisy critics of our new free society we had been dreaming of having for decades.

The compplete text of the article is @ : http://www.klaus.cz/clanky/2171 and makes for interesting reading.

Sanity prevails

David Cameron appears to be emerging from his straitjacket. Melanie Phillips reports:

For against a background in which Christian belief is constantly denigrated and ridiculed, eyebrows are raised if politicians talk about God and even the Church of England seems embarrassed to do so, Mr Cameron nevertheless defended Christianity as essential to British society.

...Mr Cameron honed in on the real cause — the replacement of Biblical codes of behaviour by moral neutrality.

He was absolutely right to say that bad choices have too often been defended as just different lifestyles, and that ‘live and let live’ has too often become ‘do what you please’. Nowhere is this more disastrously true — although he did not spell this out in his speech — than in the breakdown of the traditional family

 ...He was right to say that this mentality helped cause some of the social problems that lay at the heart of the anarchic lawlessness in this summer’s riots, and also that the absence of moral codes had allowed some bankers and politicians to behave with scant regard for the rest of society.

And he was also right — and brave — to stress that Britain remains a Christian country, and that it is vital to acknowledge that the belief in universal human dignity and equality is rooted in the Bible.

You don’t have to be a Christian to grasp that the decline of religious belief in Britain has, in turn, eroded the social glue that keeps society together. So, bravo to the Prime Minister for an unexpectedly traditional speech.

Indeed bravo to him for saying what he has, however, Christianity was never meant as a social panacea, it is the Truth; therefore let us pray that truth will prevail and then watch as the benefits flow on to society as history shows it will.
A question remains, is it too late? And by this I do not mean for those who might be redeemed by Truth, but for Western civilisation in general.
Some comments would be welcome.

Be of great courage my son!

Paul Johnson musing on the value of university:

Indeed, the study of universities and the great men and women who have attended them leads me to think that the best of these schools are characterized not so much by what they teach and how they teach it but by the extent they provide opportunities and encouragement for students to teach themselves. The best also help to instill certain intellectual virtues in young minds, including respect for the indispensable foundation of democracy, the rule of law; the need to back up opinions with clear arguments, empirical evidence and hard work; the varying importance of resolute conviction and friendly compromise, when appropriate; open-mindedness at all times; and the perpetual need for courage in the pursuit of truth.

Can't argue with that!

A Rabbit-hole government

Thomas Sowell writing on 'liberals' (in Australia we would call them greens) and their 'Alice in Wonderland' view of the world.

Strange how much like the Rudd/Gillard government it sounds:

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the world envisioned by today's liberals is that it is a world where other people just passively accept whatever "change" liberals impose. In the world of Liberal Land, you can just take for granted all the benefits of the existing society, and then simply tack on your new, wonderful ideas that will make things better.

For example, if the economy is going along well and you happen to take a notion that there ought to be more home ownership, especially among the poor and minorities, then you simply have the government decree that lenders have to lend to more low-income people and minorities who want mortgages, ending finicky mortgage standards about down payments, income and credit histories.

That sounds like a fine idea in the world of Liberal Land. Unfortunately, in the ugly world of reality, it turned out to be a financial disaster, from which the economy has still not yet recovered. Nor have the poor and minorities.

If it fails then just blame someone else, preferably 'big business' and then like the mad queen...try to cut off their heads.

Clean-up the green.

How is it possible for a modern western government to be so incompetent?
Is it the perfect example of that cliche that states how in a bureaucracy, the least capable are promoted in order to get them out of the various departments?

The Gillard government is quite happy to intervene and regulate to a ridiculous extent practices that are legal and less harmful such as smoking, drinking and gambling.

Yet when it comes to illicit drugs, they’re all softly softly, turn a blind eye and get the law out of it.

You can be as judgmental, punitive and discriminatory as you like to poor, hounded smokers huddled around office buildings, but when it comes to 14-year-old potheads, we are supposed to be open-minded...and unconcerned. [Miranda Devine]

That such rapid decline is directly proportional to the number of 'Green' thinking individuals in a government body appears to be beyond dispute.
What we need is a severe 'green-clean' of government and community bodies.

Vive le (new) revolution

The sado-masochistic and peculiar little man that was Foucault has much to answer for. He has undoubtedly been the inspiration (if I could call such thinking inspirational) behind most of today's paradoxical thinking amongst our political (ideological) overlords.
His perverted worldview is the logical outcome of an incestuous marriage between the cancerous philosophical tumour that was the French revolution and the equally grievous Neo-Marxist methodology of Gramsci; i.e.the 'long march through the institutions'.
It is about time that people of integrity, family (the old definition) minded and rational thinkers begin to storm the Bastille's of modern education, political influence and the art/media oligarchy so as to retake the ground surrendered since 1789 and to return this nation of Australia to some semblance of sanity.

A quiet revolution

This is poster from Australian offices government (idiom in sync with poster's idiotic language, perhaps a direct tanslation?):

These are not, but the similarities are striking

Welcome to the revolution...you didn't really even know was going on!

Fake Attenborough

Well said Melanie Phillips on the deceit perpetrated by the BBC.

The dismissal and even defence of the BBC’s polar deceit is an emblem of a culture that no longer understands the distinction between fact and fakery. I think that for those who have understood the significance of this deception for both the BBC and for Britain, their hearts are simply broken.

I was one of those who marvelled at the footage and was taken in by it, believing it to be in the 'wild'. I am horrified by the attempts to dismiss the negative reaction and by the complete lack of conviction by so many against trickery and deceit.
I will never look at another Attenborough program in the same way again.

RIP Christopher Hitchens

It saddens then humiliates and finally angers me when I read of the gloating and hate filled messages posted about the death of Christopher Hitchens by many so-called 'christians'. Although I think that Hitchen's perspective on Christianity was wrong I can quite understand how such man would arrive at a negative conclusion given the drivel that he has had to suffer as an honest unbeliever and particularly as a cancer sufferer.

I too was been declared 'terminally ill' by the medical profession. Given six months to live...now six years later I have no reluctance in declaring my miraculous deliverance as being from the healing hands of Jesus Christ, in fact even the unbelieving doctor acknowledged something 'peculiar' in the disappearance of a tumour he had felt with his own hands and which bore no relation to the medical procedures that they had proscribed. I was the recipient of strong prayers by many powerful spiritual figures, I was also offered numerous ridiculously superstitious mumbo jumbo 'healing' ointments, recipes, methods and advice, some from well meaning but stupid Christians. I use the word stupid lovingly because I think that these are people who have suffered throughout their Christian 'walk' from a lack of 'meaty' intellectual food and are thus syncretized with the world around them.

I judge not however, because even though I have been blessed with really great teachers preachers and mentors, Istill recognise that some of the beliefs I hold are flawed and some are perhaps quite erroneous, thus I pursue life-long enlightenment.

Life experience has taught me that many Christians are amongst the most unforgiving, malevolent, stupid, violent, uncaring, selfish and moronic people on earth, and I include in myself many of the 'qualities' as listed here. This does not exclude them from the Kingdom however...such is the mystery of salvation...I believe that it is God's will for us all to be better than we were and to work towards an improved life here on earth, more like Jesus if you will. Are we kinder, more patient, less selfish, more generous, and generally better than we were yesterday?
This is the yardstick we need measure ourselves with.

But!!!!!!!!!!!!!
For goodness sake let us not suffer the unadulterated bovine faeces that some regurgitate as 'christian doctrine' (lower case deliberate) without rebuttal. 

For example it is not OK to gloat over the suffering of another human being no matter how much he or she deserves it, scripturally I can point to numerous passages that contradict such a position. Most who adopt this condemnatory stance are probably not Christian and conceivably might even be demonic in origin or at the very least, ignorant.

I believe in Heaven and Hell and I believe that those who choose not to accept the sacrifice of Jesus on their behalf are doomed to eternity without Him which in my book constitutes Hell, aside from the 'sufferings' described in the bible. I have made so many mistakes in my life yet I truly shudder at only one, and that is when I consider how close I came to making that one without retraction, the one with eternal consequences. That knowledge...of passing through the door of immortality and finding that you have made the biggest mistake of your life and that there is no way back, no way of correcting that mistake or of ameliorating the consequences of that choice...that would be enough to send me over the edge into instant madness I am sure.

Therefore let us pray that all who cross that final frontier do so ensconced in amazing Grace and for those who don't, pray for mercy.

PS I thought that Christopher Hitchens communicated eruditely about many issues and with a refreshing honesty. In pertinent ways his life was a testament to truth and courage and he adopted stances that I believe pleased his maker far more than some of the options too many Christians and 'Christian' leaders employ.
PPS 22.12.2011
This piece on Hitchens vs Havel by Michael Cook has given me some food for thought. Perhaps Hitchens' final body of work will not stand the test of time! Perhaps it will. Nevertheless Michael makes some telling points:
read them @.....http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/just_one_hitch_with_all_those_eulogies

The selfish gene

Being a regrettably selfish person myself and aided and abetted in that pursuit by a world whose sole raison detre appears to be the nurturing of that selfishness I have to wonder where it all is going to end. The following excerpt is from a bleakly amusing story of naked Santa's in San Fransisco:

It is the world of what Kay Hymowitz calls the ‘child-man’ phenomenon.  It is an expression of men's loss of the life script that previously guided the transition to male adulthood via marriage and career.  It is the world of immature men portrayed in Seinfeld and by Will Ferrell, with its sort-of female equivalent in Sex and the City.  It is a world of autonomous adults and casual sex unencumbered by children or responsible parenthood. 

It was a celebration of a world without children, of what the recent report on The Revolution in Parenthood calls the worldwide trends in law and reproductive technologies that are leading to a redefinition of “parenthood in ways that put the interests of adults before the needs of children.

In a world where crimes against children used to be considered the very worst, we have 'deconstructed' our consciences against violence to children in general, by murdering millions upon millions of helpless babies; and we have carried out these atrocities via the most hideous of methods; literally tearing them apart.
Therefore; whatever illnesses, disaster, or misfortunes that come our way are, unfortunately, sadly deserved, and it is only by an all forgiving and beneficent Grace that any of us are still standing.

Perhaps those politicians who are so keen on saying 'sorry' to various groups of claimants for whatever imaginary or real 'victimizations' they believe they may have suffered, ought to consider; is that this is the time to really say sorry to the One they have caused serial grief too, and to whom this season used to be focused upon.

May this time be one of repentance, redemption and a return to true adult responsibility.

Scaryland!

Welcome to Alice's 'wonderland':

When the Australian Labour Party won the federal government benches in 2007, it established policies for monitoring prices (and the movement of whales and Japanese whaling ships in the southern ocean). The government did not have much success with these policies; prices rise in response to market forces regardless of who is watching. But, not learning from the futility of Fuel Watch, Grocery Watch and Whale Watch, Julia Gillard's government is now proposing a "Gender Watch". Medium and large businesses will be subject to spot checks on the numbers of women they employ with penalties for non-compliance.

....However, quotas and separate toilets are not enough for true equality. Australian activist, Katrina Fox, who in 2008 co-edited a book Trans People in Love, wrote an emotive piece for the Australian Broadcasting Commission recently entitled Marriage needs redefining. In it she clarifies how all the gender boundaries surrounding marriage must be removed. “A more inclusive option,” she begins, “is to allow individuals to get married whatever their sex or gender, including those who identify as having no sex or gender or whose sex may be indeterminate.”

"Indeterminate"? Can't everybody fit into one of the 23 genders the AHRC has listed so far? But, happily, Fox does have some boundaries. Further into the article she writes: "I'm not suggesting we go as far to sanction people marrying inanimate objects, like the German woman who married the Berlin Wall and was utterly devastated when her ‘husband’ was destroyed in 1989!

So you thought that the arguments over same-sex marriage ended with an acceptance by the wider community of gay couples getting hitched?

I think the lid to Pandora's box is about to be well and truly opened.

The Southpark Emperor

Ever wondered about KRudd's quixotic urge to a post at the UN? Here's the reason:

The Copenhagen Treaty draft establishing a world “government” with unlimited powers of taxation and intervention in the affairs of states parties to the UN Framework Convention fortunately failed. Yet at the Cancun climate conference the following year 1000 new bureaucracies were established to form the nucleus of a world government, with central control in the hands of the Convention’s secretariat and tentacles in every region and nation.

If he can't rule Australia he wants to rule the world!

The last days?

Forgive me for adopting a conspiracy theorists mindset, it is a truly remarkable turn of events..I never believed that I could think in such a way...just goes to show!
But I cannot escape the fact that what is happening in our world today smacks of a takeover of the 'free world' by sinister forces almost beyond our control.
Vaclav Klaus is on record as saying that the Global warming scare is not about actual environmentalism but rather it is all about who controls what, and I am convinced that he is on to something. Consider Christopher Moncktons report from Durban:

DURBAN, South Africa — “No high hopes for Durban.” “Binding treaty unlikely.” “No deal this year.” Thus ran the headlines. The profiteering UN bureaucrats here think otherwise. Their plans to establish a world government paid for by the West on the pretext of dealing with the non-problem of “global warming” are now well in hand. As usual, the mainstream media have simply not reported what is in the draft text which the 194 states parties to the UN framework convention on climate change are being asked to approve.

The contents of this document, turgidly drafted with all the UN’s skill at what the former head of its documentation center used to call “transparent impenetrability”, are not just off the wall – they are lunatic.

I love this bit...

Throughout pre-history, the governing class – Druids or Pharaohs or Mayans or Incas – thought they could replace their Creator and command the weather. They couldn’t. No more can we. But try telling that to the strait-jacketed ninnies of today’s governing “elite”. Speech after speech at the plenary sessions of the Durban conference has drivelled on about how We Are The People Who At This Historic Juncture Are Willing And Able To Undertake The Noble Purpose Of Saving The Planet From Thermageddon and Saving You From Yourselves [entirely at your prodigious expense, natch].

Read the main points at: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/09/durban-what-the-media-are-not-telling-you/#more-52760

Lovelock hates!

Where does such a willful blindness originate? AGW warmists continue to waste money on quixotic schemes while the real world citizens die like flies,or perhaps they are encouraged by this al la the 'human virus' meme?

“We urge citizens from across the political spectrum to take a more mature perspective, one that is based on real science, engineering and economics, not political correctness,” asserts ICSC energy issues advisor, Bryan Leyland of Auckland, New Zealand. “Whether you are socialist or capitalist, industrialist or environmentalist, no one wants to pour money down the drain. Yet, that is exactly what is happening as a result of the global warming scare. Expensive and ineffective alternative energy projects such as wind turbines and solar cells are receiving massive government support, in the belief that they will reduce GHG emissions which are wrongly blamed as a cause of dangerous global warming. Meanwhile, the conventional power sources that we rely on for our very survival, let alone the economic progress we need to create a better world, are deliberately starved of support. This is a very dangerous situation."

Ratchet goes to rat s#*t!

The way to introduce once unimagined laws is by initially promoting an extreme position on some issue so that when that position is rejected a lesser position is accepted even though it would once have never even have been considered. Hence the 'ratchet' con is introduced.

Some of the most profound coarsening of our culture has come about through a kind of ratchet effect.

First the law is liberalised. Then people get worried about the damage that’s being done as a result.

But then, rather than undoing the liberal attitudes which are causing the problem, people try to pretend this damage can be corrected by picking up the pieces once it has been done.

We have watched this ratchet effect time and again with sexual behaviour. First the taboo on sex outside marriage was broken, and sex was redefined as having scant more significance than a recreational sport.

Then concerns grew about the ballooning rate of teenage pregnancies.

But instead of guiding children away from precocious sexual activity, sex education focused on how to have sex without getting pregnant. The result: more and more children at ever younger ages are having sex.

Well, what a surprise!

Then we saw it with drug-taking. First, lax enforcement brought the law against drugs into disrepute. Then concerns grew about the increasing number of young people taking drugs.

But instead of enforcing the law, a new policy was introduced of ‘harm reduction’ which told children how to minimise the risks to their own health when taking illegal narcotics. The result: more and more  children taking drugs. Well, who’d have thought it?

If you doubt the work of a malevolent mind behind the introduction of these 'laws' then you are either naive, stupid or of the malevolent mindset yourself.

Durban Stonehenge.

One of the recent UN resolutions as per the Durban conference on global warming and critiqued by Christopher Monckton.

War and the maintenance of defence forces and equipment are to cease because they contribute to climate change. Just like that. The UN draft text asserts: "Stopping wars, defending lives and ceasing destructive activities will protect the climate system; conflict-related activities emit significant greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere." A wave of the UN's magic wand and peace will reign throughout the Earth, the sun will shine (but not too much) the rain will fall (just where and when needed), and non-gender-specific motherhood and non-commodificated apple pie will be available to all. Ouroborindra, ba-ba hee! It does not seem to have occurred to the Druids of the UN that they have near-totally failed to prevent wars on Earth – the original purpose for which it was founded. Yet now, in their gibbering, spastic arrogance, they think to command the weather. Canute, thou shouldst be living at this hour!

I was born and bred in Durban and it makes me angry when I realise that the name of that beloved place will now forever be synonymous with all things stupid, banal, ludicrous and paganistic.
I also have a greater understanding of K Rudd's striving to get into the UN club...birds of a feather!

Scientific scaremongerers

It is healthy to be skeptical about science...it is the nature of science to question, a fact which makes the scaremongering so strange. read this for a wake up call.
http://www.ipa.org.au/publications/1964/a-history-of-scientific-alarms

A worldwide phenomena?

In Dalrymple musings on the London riots this passage seems to ring rather true about our current generation in general. A philosophical position which has somewhat dire consequences for future potential outbreaks...think even of the current 'occupy' political trends and the people and ideology's behind them.

One rioter told a journalist that his compatriots were fed up with being broke all the time and that he knew people who had absolutely nothing. It is worth pondering what lies behind these words. It is obvious that the rioter considered being broke not merely unpleasant, as we all would, but unjust and anomalous, for it was these qualities that justified the rioting in his mind and led him to suggest that the riots were restitution. Leave aside the Micawberish point that one can be broke on any income whatever if one’s desires fail to align with one’s financial possibilities; it is again obvious that the rioter believed that he had a right not to be broke and that this right was being violated. When he said that he knew people with “nothing,” he did not mean that he knew homeless, starving people left on the street without clothes to wear or shoes on their feet; none of the rioters was like this, and many looked only too fit for law-abiding citizens’ comfort. Nor did he mean people without hot and cold running water, electricity, a television, a cell phone, health care, and access to schooling. People had a right to such things, and yet they could have them all and still have “nothing,” in his meaning of the word. Somehow, people had a right to something beyond this irreducible “nothing” because this “nothing” was a justification for rioting. So people have a right to more than they have a right to; in other words, they have a right to everything.

Wow, the implications are indeed scary yet scarily true given today's news.

A journalistic bard.

Whilst there are aspects of Theodore Dalrymple's worldview that I cannot agree with, his elucidation of current affairs and the terminology he employs in that regard, leaves me filled with wonderment at the richness of the English language.
I also appreciate his way of looking at current events, it betrays I think, a romantic (though life scarred) cynical, aesthetes perspective...perhaps I can even identify with certain aspects of it?
His writing embodies descriptive excellence and penetrating prescience in the deployment of sometimes pedestrian information:

Apart from the empirical unlikelihood of the Ping-Pong tables’ exerting the hoped-for prophylactic effect, the theory suggests that it is government’s duty not merely to keep the peace but to keep the population happy and amused. It is hardly surprising, then, that when people claim that service reductions provoked the riots, they are unable to see that if this were so, the problem would be not the removal of services, but dependence on them in the first place.

Right on!

Ask not for whom the (marriage?) bell tolls,...

Michael Cook provides some food for thought:

...the reason why same-sex marriage has become conceivable is that the prestige of heterosexual marriage has sunk so low that anyone can take it on. As Amanda Vanstone, a former minister in the Liberal (conservative) Howard government put it, “It is not convincing. It is a triumph of hope over reality. Marriage long ago stopped being to the exclusion of all others and for life. If we don't care about those two elements being disregarded by so many, why should we care about the ‘between a man and a woman’ part?”

In other words, the currency has become so debased that paupers can pretend they are millionaires. It’s all just make-believe.

What gays and lesbians want is marriage lite, not real marriage. This confers the right to do karaoke versions of  “Going to the Chapel of Love” in public, but little more. Divorce is an ever-present possibility, fidelity is unnecessary and children are optional. Big deal.

What compelling reason is there for the state to support such an impoverished institution? Traditional marriages nurture children, who are the future of society and deserve protection. But why should the state get in the business of supporting what is little more than friendship with benefits?

Marriage is in a terrible state in our society. More and more couples are cohabiting; nearly half of all marriages end in divorce; children are treated as optional extras; extra-marital affairs are common; pornography is a scourge.

The absurdity is that gays and lesbians don’t regard this as a disaster at all. In their eyes these are precisely the conditions which make same-sex marriage an attractive option.

And so our culture drifts a little closer to the whirlpool at the centre of the 'gurgler'.

The new reality

The Stephen Conroy debacle in Parliament illustrates how emotionalism triumphs over reason in today's politics. This is the PoMo philosophy of 'caring' writ large, where it is more important to be seen to be caring than to actually be caring.
This wearing of your heart on your sleeve gained its apotheosis during the Princess Diana's death debacle where the Queen had to show her mourning to the crowds in order to be accepted as truly mourning.
No more of that stiff upper lip nonsense in this new 'caring' age, we need to be metro-sexual, green, soft, and pliable.
Just like the  mujahidin camped outside our front gates; I don't think!

It’s the Case of Conroy’s Curious Tears - and how tragically easy it is to become an overnight hero of the Left. Stephen Conroy is the Communications Minister, disliked by Labor’s Left for being a faction boss of the Right. So it astonished many to see Conroy cry at Labor’s national conference on Sunday. Even wilder, he cried as he spoke against Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s plan to sell our uranium to India.
Gillard has reason on her side, of course. India is a democracy and an ally. Our uranium would be used only for electricity generation in a country very short of the stuff.
Anyway, we already sell uranium to China, which is not a democracy and, unlike India, has helped ugly regimes develop nuclear weapons.
Then there’s the jobs we’d create, the cash we’d earn and the friendship with India we’d repair. It’s a no brainer. So what on earth was Conroy’s argument against it all?

Stand by: He’d had an uncle who’d worked at Windscale, a nuclear reactor in Britain which in 1957 - six years before Conroy’s birth - had a fire.

Here’s how Conroy put it. His now-retired uncle was “involved in all the cover-ups” of the Windscale fire. which released Iodine-131 into the atmosphere. “My family remembers when they came and took away all the milk for months because you couldn’t drink it,” an emotional Conroy declared. His cousins and another uncle still worked in the nuclear industry and his uncle had said: “If you’ve got a choice, don’t be in it.” For this rationalisation of unreason, Conroy got a standing ovation and was dubbed a “Left wing idol”, which shows how much the Left prefers tears to thought, fantasy to fact. Scary.

First, a question. If Conroy’s family thinks the nuclear industry is so horrific, why do some of them still work in it, more than 50 years after Windscale? Why is it OK for them to earn a buck from nuclear, but not OK for Australia?

Behind the mask!

So true...LOL, Michael Durkin nails it again:

Now consider the intellectual.  He has graduated, proudly, with a degree in French literature, or a PhD in the breeding habits of butterflies.  He regards himself as socially superior to a plumber but, to his horror, when he tries to enter the labour market, he discovers there is little or no demand for experts in Baudelaire, or for lepidopterists.  Perhaps he tries to obtain a poorly paid position at a university, to continue his ‘work’.  Even if he lands such as position he struggles to maintain a middle class lifestyle on the paltry wages.   Does he retrain as a plumber (since demand for plumbers is high)?   God forbid.  The very thought! 

Ludwig von Mises says of the intellectual, ‘As a “worker by brain” he looks arrogantly down upon the manual worker whose hands are calloused and soiled.  It makes him furious to notice that so many of these manual workers get higher pay and are more respected than he himself.  What a shame he thinks, that capitalism fondles the simple drudgery of the “uneducated” and does not appraise his “intellectual” work according to its “true” value.

This mentality is what is behind the 'new class':

The intellectuals believe there is a nobility in public service which is not to be found in the vulgar market place.  Happily for them, with the expansion of the State in the 20^th Century the number of these State-funded jobs has swollen enormously.  J.K Galbraith (among others) called this burgeoning State-sponsored intelligentsia the ‘New Class’.

These are the bureaucrats, the feeders at the public trough, the parasites who hate 'capitalism' because they can't compete in the market:

The poorly paid intellectual, says Mises, ‘must swallow down his mortification and divert his wrath toward a vicarious target.  He indicts society’s economic organisation, the nefarious system of capitalism.  But for this unfair regime his abilities and talents, his zeal and his achievements would have brought him the rich reward they deserve.’    Of the intelligentsia, he says, ‘They sublimate their hatred into philosophy, the philosophy of anti-capitalism, in order to render inaudible the inner voice that tells them their failure is entirely their own fault.’   Schumpeter too describes the ‘hostility of the intellectual group – amounting to moral disapproval of the capitalist order.’ 

...these are the ones who want us to give them our taxes and they want to rule because they know best, they are the 'intellectuals', they are the ones who care!

As Vaclav Klaus so presciently says the Global warming scare is not about greening the planet its really about who wants to be in charge.

The market is based on merit.  Success is determined by how highly people value what you have to sell.  The intellectuals, whose talents are not highly valued, yearn for a society based on status.  This is why the Green intelligentsia fetishise hierarchical pre-capitalist society.  This kind of society, they assert, was more ‘natural’ and ‘ordered’ and ‘harmonious’.

Today, the bulk of intellectuals in the ‘New Class’ work directly or indirectly for the State.  They are paid out of taxes levied on the productive economy.  In other words, the plumbers (and bricklayers and lorry drivers and estate agents) are forced to pay for them.  No wonder the plumbers do not turn up at Green demonstrations to demand higher taxes and more state control. 

Woe to the reasonable!

To all those who believe that the world is a better place and that we are happily 'evolving' ever onwards and upwards; I invite them to remove their brains from their #*!es. This world is not improving! We are in the midst of a civilisational collapse and the sooner you wake up to that reality the better.
Melanie Phillips is one of the few journos who write about what is actually happening rather than what should be, or would like to be, or what could if only...the dreams of Utopianists who actually do not believe the evidence of their own eyes.
Colour them Green or perhaps more accurately, Red!

This attack followed hard on the heels of a story about a teenage burglar who, asked to write a letter of apology to his victims, wrote instead that he wasn’t bothered or sorry at all, and that the burglary was all their fault for leaving their window open.

Such incidents suggest that we are dealing with something beyond merely ruthless acquisitiveness and contempt for the law. They suggest a total absence of empathy for another person, which is the basic requirement of morality and, in turn, of a civilised society. They illustrate a brutalisation of humanity.

Evidence of this sickening tendency has been accumulating for years. While violent crime has always been with us, elements of sadism, cruelty or total indifference to anyone else’s distress are becoming frighteningly commonplace.

To some of us, it has long seemed obvious that this is intimately related to the breakdown of religious belief. It is the morality embedded in the Bible that expressly requires us to put the interests of others first.

C.S. Lewis wrote of the tendency within modern ideologues to: "geld the stallion then  bid him procreate", or words to that effect. Essentially that 'contemporary thinkers' (an oxymoron if ever) desired the very thing that they denied, i.e. evidence of a self-delusional hypocrisy, mass schizophrenia perhaps?

Paradox is the essence of being human: believing one thing should be done and doing something else, instead, or thinking in an honest way one moment and not, the next. Self-deception is an essential tool for self-advancement. It is most developed in the most intellectual.

Think of the high priests of the AGW movement and how they preach about rising oceans then buy mansions on the seashore, or Obama who gives speeches about cutting back on excessive petrol consumption then jumps into his convoy of SUV's and onto the next bully pulpit. It just doesn't make any sense unless you realise that these folk do not believe that ordinary restrictions apply to them...they are after all, the elite, the new mandarins, the rulers, the ones who deserve to be in charge, the aristocratic class, the Carers!

Klein cares. Gore cares. Hansen and Suzuki care. Or, at least, appear to do so: the perception of caring is actually more important than actual caring. The actual caring by deed can be carried out by underlings as long as the overlings have set the parameters for caring right. Which she and the others know how to do. Tough love is for harsh people; martyrdom for one’s cause is better, if unfortunate, when feelings, rather than reason, guide your life. Klein et al want to be remembered for what they stood for; little people want to be remembered for what they do, in comparison.

Prophetic insight

The sleep of reason produces monsters:

What the west refused to grasp was that there was never any chance of the Iranian regime seeing sense. That’s because what drives its dominant members at least is not conventional political impulse but an apocalyptic messianism. That means they actively seek to bring about a conflagration -- even if this consumes much of Iran -- since they believe that this apocalypse will prompt the return to earth of a religious messiah figure. They actually want to bring about the end of the world. But the west just didn’t take any of this remotely seriously.

A parallel universe

So saith Dorothy Sayers:

"...for the popular mind has grown so confused that it is no longer able to receive any statement of fact except as an expression of personal feeling."

...in 1941!

How much more confused might the popular mind be these days?

I don't think you need look far to see that the popular mind as expressed through the media, arts, culture, politicians etc, is quite beside itself.

Quite beside the seashore in fact...sorry, just a meandering illustration of how my mind, like most others, is truly beside itself, mostly with frustration at what I perceive as a dangerous ignorance regarding the things of this world.

Almost like we are blinded in fact to the obvious...now where does it say something of that nature I wonder?

Trust carefully!

For honest researchers who put their faith in Wikipedia read this: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/wild_and_wacky_wikipedia

Food for thought!

Thomas C Reeves:

As for moral principles, why not just "hook up" with anybody for as long as you feel like it and have as many babies as you want? What's wrong with that?

It is hardly news that Western culture is rapidly embracing secular materialism, a culture in which age-old truths are banished as bigotry and chaos and narcissism abound. The media and the schools are largely responsible. The message that streams into our homes from cables, satellites, antennas, and cell phones declares the joy of doing what feels good, never growing up, owning as much as possible, and declaring the past irrelevant. In schools at all levels political correctness, increasingly enforced by the federal government, preaches "inclusiveness" and "diversity." These are code words for leftist dogmas that seek to foster a society based on colour and sex, and that would banish supernaturalism, destroy the traditional family, dismiss venerable moral standards, and set up a wholly indulgent welfare state.

Given current philosophical/ideological undercurrents and actual policies, who can argue with the above statement?

Distopia.

Is it any wonder that our civilisation is in the process of imploding?

In pop culture, crude sexism, misogyny, homophobia and plain old bad manners are rife.

It is as if the political correctness constricting the surface culture has incubated fetid hatreds underneath, away from the moderating influence of civilised society.

We now have a generation of men brought up with rap music that celebrates violence to women while their own innocent maleness has been treated as a dirty little crime since boyhood.[Miranda Devine]

Are we encouraging the marriage of same sex couples because the different sexes can no longer get along?

Cheeky!

Mr Cool cops it on the cheek:

One loon to another.

Pea in a thimble trick!

The duplicity and mendacity of the current government of Australia:

In GK Chesterton's Father Brown novels the world renowned criminal Flambeau makes a name for himself by forming a successful London dairy company even though he owns no cows, no carts and no milk. Instead, he served his customers by moving the milk bottles outside people's homes to the homes of his customers.

 All very similar to Wayne Swan's crisis budget. Moving money from his year of surplus to his years of non-surplus years before and after. No cows, no milk, no focus on increased production just a bunch of very tricky, very sneaky accounting tricks. Remember their surplus does not pay off the extra $15 billion they will now borrow this year.

Perfect summation!

If this quote doesn't perfectly summarise the Gillard government, then I don't know what does:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
                                                                      H L Mencken

A dying breed.

Courtesy of Bret Stephens from the Wall Street Journal:

 How do religions die? Generally they don't, which probably explains why there's so little literature on the subject. Zoroastrianism, for instance, lost many of its sacred texts when Alexander sacked Persepolis in 330 B.C., and most Zoroastrians converted to Islam over 1,000 years ago. Yet today old Zoroaster still counts as many as 210,000 followers, including 11,000 in the U.S. Christopher Hitchens might say you can't kill what wasn't there to begin with.

Still, Zeus and Apollo are no longer with us, and neither are Odin and Thor. Among the secular gods, Marx is mostly dead and Freud is totally so. Something did away with them, and it's worth asking what. Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.

As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term "climate change" when thermometers don't oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other "deniers." And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.

This week, the conclave of global warming's cardinals are meeting in Durban, South Africa, for their 17th conference in as many years. The idea is to come up with a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire next year, and to require rich countries to pony up $100 billion a year to help poor countries cope with the alleged effects of climate change. This is said to be essential because in 2017 global warming becomes "catastrophic and irreversible," according to a recent report by the International Energy Agency.

Yet a funny thing happened on the way to the climate apocalypse. Namely, the financial apocalypse.

The U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and the EU have all but confirmed they won't be signing on to a new Kyoto. The Chinese and Indians won't make a move unless the West does. The notion that rich (or formerly rich) countries are going to ship $100 billion every year to the Micronesias of the world is risible, especially after they've spent it all on Greece.

Cap and trade is a dead letter in the U.S. Even Europe is having second thoughts about carbon-reduction targets that are decimating the continent's heavy industries and cost an estimated $67 billion a year. "Green" technologies have all proved expensive, environmentally hazardous and wildly unpopular duds.

All this has been enough to put the Durban political agenda on hold for the time being. But religions don't die, and often thrive, when put to the political sidelines. A religion, when not physically extinguished, only dies when it loses faith in itself.
That's where the Climategate emails come in. First released on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit two years ago and recently updated by a fresh batch, the "hide the decline" emails were an endless source of fun and lurid fascination for those of us who had never been convinced by the global-warming thesis in the first place.
But the real reason they mattered is that they introduced a note of caution into an enterprise whose motivating appeal resided in its increasingly frantic forecasts of catastrophe. Papers were withdrawn; source material re-examined. The Himalayan glaciers, it turned out, weren't going to melt in 30 years. Nobody can say for sure how high the seas are likely to rise—if much at all. Greenland isn't turning green. Florida isn't going anywhere.
The reply global warming alarmists have made to these dislosures is that they did nothing to change the underlying science, and only improved it in particulars. So what to make of the U.N.'s latest supposedly authoritative report on extreme weather events, which is tinged with admissions of doubt and uncertainty? Oddly, the report has left climate activists stuttering with rage at what they call its "watered down" predictions. If nothing else, they understand that any belief system, particularly ones as young as global warming, cannot easily survive more than a few ounces of self-doubt.
Meanwhile, the world marches on. On Sunday, 2,232 days will have elapsed since a category 3 hurricane made landfall in the U.S., the longest period in more than a century that the U.S. has been spared a devastating storm. Great religions are wise enough to avoid marking down the exact date when the world comes to an end. Not so for the foolish religions. Expect Mayan cosmology to take a hit to its reputation when the world doesn't end on Dec. 21, 2012. Expect likewise when global warming turns out to be neither catastrophic nor irreversible come 2017.

And there is this: Religions are sustained in the long run by the consolations of their teachings and the charisma of their leaders. With global warming, we have a religion whose leaders are prone to spasms of anger and whose followers are beginning to twitch with boredom. Perhaps that's another way religions die

Voluntary blindness

Molech's hunger rages against us all:

Given all that we know about the unborn human being, it is clear to me that force of will, rather than genuine ignorance, now seems to be the driving force behind abortion. Our society simply wants abortion to stay legal regardless of the facts. It is not that we don't know the truth; rather, that we don't want to be reminded. It's a strange madness, with teams of doctors struggling to keep premature infants alive in hospitals where just a floor away, babies are being killed and discarded.

Leviticus 20: 2>5

TThe Tyranny of Labor

Gillard should take a leaf out of TJ's book:

"To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical." -- Thomas Jefferson

Just imagine!

Welcome to a world ruled by bureaucrats, as Australia aspires to be under Bob Julia and Kev.

To the planners, freedom itself is a problem.  Just as nature abhors a vacuum, every unregulated activity taunts them.  If there is no problem to justify an extension of their activities, a problem must be found.  And if no problem can be found, then there must be the threat of a problem – they call it the precautionary principle.

Green subterfuge

If you think the green movement is for harmless, tree-hugging ex-hippies, think again. If you are not afraid to have your eyes opened to the agenda behind green ideology then consider this:

Why are the Greens so rabidly keen on more State control?  No doubt they would argue that all their green concerns lead naturally to demands for more regulations and public spending and government restrictions. 

Or is the other way round?  Is there a class of bureaucratically-minded folk who favour more State control, for whom green concerns provide what they regard as a justification?  In other words, are the Greens looking after the dolphins, or are the dolphins looking after the Greens?

There is, I believe, a solid, self-interested, class basis for environmentalism.  Green is the natural world view of what sociologists call the ‘New Class’

Greenies have become experts in verbal deconstruction; that is, they use words such as 'democratic', 'freedom', 'sustainability', 'science', 'culture' etc in ways that completely subvert the words original meaning. What this accomplishes is a 'muddying' of the communication waters.  This problem is exacerbated by a grammatically anorexic national English curriculum with the end result being an emerging voter block less able to distinguish political fact from fiction.

We are already witnessing genuinely well motivated voters choosing the Greens because of reasons completely at odds with what the Greens stand for, not because the voters are stupid, but because the Orwellian doublespeak has superseded logic.

The fact that the overwhelming percentage of national journalists and cultural 'influencers' lean rather dramatically towards the extreme left does not auger well for a balanced perspective either:

At the start of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, Stone uses a clip of President Eisenhower’s famous farewell speech, in which Eisenhower warned of the growing power of the ‘Military-Industrial complex’.  But if you look closely, you’ll see a glitch in the middle of the clip.  It is what’s called in the trade a jump-cut.  Oliver (being left wing) decided to edit President Eisenhower’s original sentence, to remove an equally dire warning about the growing influence of the ‘scientific-administrative complex’

Read this for a clearer exposition: http://www.martindurkin.com/blogs/green-superstate-what-global-warmers-really-want

Tilt!

Read this http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2011/11/left-turn and then buy the book if you have any doubts that the media in Australia is severely tilted to the left.

Rebirth of the aristocrat.

The power of words...Alan RM Jones commenting on 'European unity' (Oxymoron), i.e. making EU government bigger, stronger and even more unelected:

...what William Buckley would call, immanentizing the eschaton. That is, the attempt to create heaven on Earth – really just a utopian eurocratic centraliser’s wet dream more likely to provoke what Barroso fears: an undemocratic, dysfunctional, alienating, extremist breeding dystopia where everyone and no-one gets to have a say about everything. Think Occupy with a budget and power.

Ah! the penny drops...Kevin Rudd's words almost exactly; our own little Euro dictator in the making. 'Shrimp mussolini' se vous plait.

And so we advance a few more steps 'back to the future' by articulating the vision that gives Bob Brown and his coterie of would-be ruling 'aristocrats' onanistic spasms.

Government of clowns.

The carbon tax comedy

 continues

Rulings like the one banning companies from advertising that the new carbon tax has increased their cost  don’t serve the country. It merely advertises how scared our 'rulers' are about public perceptions and reactions. This government always puts its own interests above those of the people it is supposed to be serving...kind of like our own politburo.

Living in the Matrix

Kevin Rudd said this:

"The international challenge for social democrats is to save capitalism from itself.”

Des Moore comments:

Such naive comments reflect a thesis that capitalism and free markets are the problem and that governments are the rescuers. Putting it another way, governments are not to blame but bankers and greedy chief executives have exploited the system for their own benefit. This idea is reflected in the Occupy Wall St group of protesters that has spread to other countries. These 99 percenters want to cut the incomes of the top 1 percent. If we tried that, the 99 per centers would certainly get a small addition to their incomes first up but that would dwindle over time as the top 1 per centers would stop trying to earn above their cut off point.

What we are witnessing throughout the western democracies are 'leaders' who have, due to the benefits conferred by a successful and productive philosophy and their unthinking abuse of this worldview; grown soft in mind as well as in body. People who have lived the 'easy life' for so long that they have embraced thinking patterns at odds with their actual existence and who remain blissfully unaware of the disjunction.

People like Al Gore, who preaches (at a cost of millions to the listeners) about rising ocean waters due to global warming, then goes and buys a mansion right on the seashore. As did the overpaid/over-hyped Tim Flannery.
People like movie stars who berate ordinary people for living unsustainable lives and then hop on their private jets to holiday lavishly in the Bahamas. The list is too long to enumerate.
People like Kevin Rudd, who states that 'capitalism' is the cause of society's failures and bigger/stronger/more powerful governments are the answer. And yet as the Rudd/Gillard governments have overwhelmingly illustrated; government operated schemes fail miserably almost without exception. And as Rudd himself illustrates in his earlier career as a Queensland government lacky; he failed at everything he was tasked to do. In fact Mark Latham was quite scurrilous about Rudd's lack of ability in his (Latham's) expose on the Labor government (for what thats worth), yet Rudd still manages to be promoted to the top spot. How often have we all seen that happen in bureucratic institutions. Failure is alsmost a right of passage into promotion.

The real problem is how many others like him are running parliment?
How many others like him are in the opposition? 
How effective has Gramsci's 'long march' been?
How perspicacious were Francis Schaeffer's predictions in his "How then should we live' series? 

Global destruction

James Delingpole artfully exposes the absurdity of Naomi Klein's rhetoric in this article:
 http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100117165/only-a-totalitarian-new-world-order-can-save-us-now-says-naomi-klein/
However, the truly sad aspect of this story and others like it, is that there appears to be many disaffected people in the western democracies who actually believe that the ills of our world can be cured by a totalitarian government.

In Australia we bear daily witness to unions who scream at, rant over and abuse greedy 'capitalists' who dare to make a profit in their businesses. The same union bosses who incidentally are rather cavalier with  union funds, i.e. they spend it on necessities such as prostitutes, personal shopping trips overseas, and expensive lunches; nevertheless these same profligate union leaders hold the employers to ransom, extorting promises of 'job security', and exorbitant bonuses. How can there be job security when pressures like these are exerted on companies...maintaining jobs at all becomes a struggle in the face of more government taxation, energy taxes, mineral taxes, ever rising wages, global competitors etc.

The radicals in this country will only be satisfied when they have reduced the country to North Korean standards at which time they will turn on the capitalist bosses and blame them for having ruined the country. A win-win situation for radicals of all stripes.

What infuriates me is that there are so many fools of this stripe in Australia, so many who give active support to the oft repeated failures of Marxist/Utopian thinking. People who applaud lunatics like Naomi Klein calling for the jackboot approach. Imagine, more bureaucrats telling us what to do, how to do it and when we are allowed to do anything and then making us pay for the privilege.

Unfortunately the unexamined mind usually requires a cataclysmic event to wake it up to the real world, or as Bruce Cockburn so eloquently observed; "some only see the light through bullet holes".

Just yesterday I and my youngest son had reached Mark 13 in our daily reading and I shuddered at the dark power of this chapter. How soon are we to realising this frightening vision? And for those who laugh at such sandwich-board prophecy consider how easily you may have been convinced by Al Gores ridiculous claims of 'catastrophic global warming', or the Gaia hypothesis, or Rachel Carsons DDT scare, or the Y2 bug, or Paul Erlichs population explosion or any of the many other 'catastrophes'.

The real issue is not so much of which potential catastrophe is about to befall us, but which one do you believe?

Coming to the 'right' conclusion.

Dallas Willard in an introduction to Phillip Johnson's book Wedge of Truth has some challenging things to say about Western thinking during our current Post Modern period:

Reason is the human ability to determine what is real or not real by thinking. Just as, centuries ago, the honest thinker had to be willing to follow the inquiry even if it led to a godless universe, so today the honest thinker has to be willing to follow the inquiry even if it leads to a God-governed universe. This latter possibility today causes those who think they are in charge of what is only reasonable and right to become impatient and imperious. They cannot afford to be wrong about the godlessness of reality, for now our whole system of education is based on that assumption, just as some while ago it was based on the assumption of God.

And so, as Phillip Johnson so beautifully explains and illustrates, reason is replaced by rationalization. Rationalization is the use of reasoning to make sure that one comes out at the right place. Not long ago the dominant ideal within intellectual circles was to judge the conclusion by the method through which it was derived. If the method was good, you were required to accept the conclusion, at least provisionally. Now sadly, the method is judged by whether it brings you out at the 'right' conclusion, as determined by institutional consensus congealed around glittering personalities. If you don't come to the 'right' conclusion, your method is wrong, and you are probably a bad person. Derisive terminology will be used to describe you.

.....The character of rationalization is hidden beneath the cloak of benign authority. In our case today that authority is science. Science we told says this or that. We has better believe it. Unfortunately science say nothing. It is not the kind of thing that can say anything. Only scientists say things, and scientists can be remarkably unscientific and are often remarkably wrong - as subsequent events frequently show. In addition many who would speak for science are not scientists or have no qualifications in the area of their claims. 

This description of the 'debate' sound oddly familiar in Australia at this point in time doesn't it?

Down the gurgler!

.Read this and you will no longer think our debt is insignificant.

Column written by Barnaby in the Canberra Times last week

Forever in debt and Labor still ignoring cost cuts
The Labor party did something remarkable last week, they actually paid back some money after borrowing $11 billion over the six weeks before. Our gross debt is now at $215 billion. Unfortunately they will probably borrow more again this week.

Recent statements by Penny Wong about cost-cutting and by the Secretary of The Treasury, Dr Martin Parkinson, seem to accord with my fears of two years ago that we were taking on too much debt.

On 21 October 2009, Australia's gross debt accelerated through $100 billion. This was before my unfortunately spectacular and brief tenure as Australia's Shadow Finance Minister. I was deeply concerned about the trajectory of our debt but it was very hard to find somebody else in the government or the fourth estate that held similar concerns.‪

I remember the date well as I put out a media release at the time which concluded "There are lots of ways you can try to pay debt but closing your eyes tightly and crossing your fingers has proven lately to be completely ineffective."‪

Leading the caravan of opprobrium against me was Treasury, acting as an arm of government. Repeatedly they said Australia had no problems. They avoided that it was not the size that was the concern, it was the rate of growth, a very small active melanoma. We fell into trap of saying we are in a better position than others because our melanoma is tiny compared to theirs.

In a speech last week Dr Martin Parkinson said "efforts to reduce government net debt should be the immediate focus." Mr Parkinson I'll give you the tip, it would have been easier to control back in 2009.‪ It has taken a couple of years, but now Marty and I appear to be on the same page.‪

You can see Australia's gross debt grow almost every week, like a chia pet, by visiting the front page of the Australian Office of Financial Management website. ‪I imagine it is there because the people we borrow from want a fully transparent view of exactly how much we have borrowed. If you start hiding it they get very, very suspicious.‪

Everything is moving into unfortunate focus as we approach at a rapid rate our third debt ceiling under this government's watch, and Europe and America come to the realisation that the problem is debt.

To understand debt ceilings you must understand gross debt.‪ On 10 March 2009 Mr Wayne Maxwell Swan increased our debt limit from $75 billion to a "temporary" level of $200 billion. According to Wayne we needed this increase because China and India were going to "slow markedly" and the mining boom was "unwinding".

‪The mining boom didn't, but we not only hit our new debt ceiling but it is now at $215 billion, or over $17,000 for every Australian taxpayer. Our next ceiling is at a quarter of a trillion dollars.‪

This debt does not include state government debt (heading towards $250 billion), the debt of fully owned government entities, such as the NBN, or the debt of local governments.‪

To make a budget based on blue, sunny days is not only fraught with danger, it is naïve. It is the old adage of keeping money aside for a rainy day.‪

School halls and ceiling insulation are not the only reasons we now have so much debt, it is generally just poor day-to-day cost management.‪ Labor talk of budget cuts now but why did they ignore people like Gary Banks, Chairman of the Productivity Commission, and Dr Warwick McKibbin, who both said they should have been cutting spending two years ago?

Those with the purse strings either don't have the strength, or don't have the competency, to remain within our means.‪ Labor’s cabinet is lacking the real business experience where what you bill or sell is what you earn and the cheques you write over the long term better be less than that.

What happened to the $11 billion that Labor borrowed in six weeks? Are there new aircraft carriers in Sydney Harbour with the Australian ensign fluttering off the back? Is there a big new freeway somewhere that I am not aware of? Are there big new dams in Northern Australia delivering water to vast new agricultural areas to feed the world? ‪

If you were to go searching for this money, the place I would humbly suggest you start looking is Canberra. Not the people of Gungahlin, but generally to the Ministers who are in charge of departments that are just not controlling costs.

Barnaby

Tales of Twisted morality.

I'm with Matt Hayden on this one:

Frankly, I think this whole tortured artist myth has a lot to answer for. A helluva lot of cultural and artistic taste-makers and trendsetters really seem to get off on it. They'll sing the praises of an artist who is screwed up but mediocre over one who is brilliant but emotionally stable every time. If you're a performer of some kind it's a pretty good career move to have a raging drug habit and a history of failed, dysfunctional relationships. Then all your work will be seen through this "tortured artist" prism. So even if it's just some crap you cranked out in a few weeks to fulfill contractual obligations to your record label it will still be seen as some kind of brave artistic experiment that ultimately failed.

In South Africa, at the highest point in an otherwise relatively non-dramatic artistic career I was interviewed by a 'progressive', 'cutting-edge', art/design magazine for a profile. When they discovered that I was quite an ordinary family man with no (or hidden) destructive habits they declared that I was not 'interesting enough' for the magazines readership.

I know that I could have curled the interviewers toes with some less than laudable exploits during my youth (and not-so-youth!), however I chose to keep my non-salubrious actions to myself, simply because I was not proud of them. Perhaps I am a dinosaur, perhaps we should let it all hang out for every readers voyeuristic delights, perhaps the myth is worth cultivating in order to gain some more sales, goodness knows I could always use that. But I wonder about the wisdom of making a virtue out of human frailty. Amy Winehouse gives pause to the embracing of such indiscretion.

I know fellow artists who choose to live on the edge of society solely because they art in the arts. Inhabit that dimension for an extended period of time and you begin to lose sight of reality, of whats true, noble, worthy, i.e. of the truly creative. Is it any wonder therefore that so much artwork today celebrates ugly, destructive and rotten. Perfectly respectable youngsters would arrive at the university to study art and within months they would be transformed into anti-social misfits whose raison detre appeared to be destruction as opposed to creativity.

Many, too many young lives have been negatively impacted and possibly wasted as a result of this false worldview. Perhaps the era of the anonymous painter/designer/sculptor should be the one thing to be hauled out of the closet again.

UPDATE:  22.11.2011
Even though we live in an image saturated and artistically prolific culture, interest in the 'fine arts' is lukewarm at best, and generally restricted to the few...most of whom don't even have a clue whats going on but enjoy the 'frisson' of being part of the 'elite', thereby reinforcing the Emperors' clothes myth.
The Australian reports on how even Aunty ABC has abandoned the arts:

Yet the attitude persists that arts journalism is somehow indulgent, unimportant and dispensable, attracting too few readers or viewers to warrant the media space.

ABC1 is dropping Art Nation, its only general-interest arts magazine, because it costs $2 million a year to produce and attracts only 60,000 viewers.

The broadcaster also has scrapped two of its specialist cultural programs on Radio National, The Book Show and Artworks, and rolled books and arts into a single daily program.

Reality has a way of slapping down the Utopianist and all of the the hand-wringing, pathos laden, anti-everything, immoral, insane vibe of post modern art has eventually tired even the most hardened of viewers, leaving only those directly involved in the game...the last, thin foundation. Unfortunately such a scenario falls well within the definition of a cultural collapse which, as history indicates, often signals the end of the beginning of general civilizational implosion.

No doubt the 'arty' elites will scream 'phillistines' at the uncaring mob and in the sheltered niche cafes and green enclaves they will excoriate all whose tastes do not match their own jaded, often twisted perspectives on 'artistic sensibilities'.

And the world will continue to turn.

The sound of bells?

Donne wrote: "Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."

Independant schools beware, Gillard claims Joan Kirner as a powerful influence on her (Gillards) philosophy and this is what her guru has to say about schooling:

Kirner once declared that education had to be re-shaped to be “part of the socialist struggle for equality, participation and social change, rather than an instrument of the capitalist system”.

Talk about channelling Gramsci.
And........................:

A further illustration that the Gonski funding review represents a danger to non-government schools and that the ALP federal government harbours a dislike for such schools is the failure of the last three education ministers to guarantee that non-government schools will not suffer financially as a result of the review.

Julia Gillard, Simon Crean and now Peter Garrett, while stating that no school will lose funding, have all refused to promise that any new model will index funding on an annual basis. When he was interviewed soon after the launch of the four research papers in late August, Garrett, on being asked three times, refused to clarify the matter.

That non-government schools are in danger of losing funding in real terms and having their autonomy compromised is made more likely given that the Greens are able to exert so much pressure. Julia Gillard depends on the Greens for her government’s political survival and the extreme-Left party is no friend of Catholic and independent schools.

Not only does the Greens’ education policy call for funding to non-government schools to be frozen at 2003-04 levels, that funding to wealthy schools be withdrawn and that funding be reduced to take account of money raised by schools and their communities, the Greens also seek to force their radical social agenda on schools. If the Greens have their way, the right of faith-based schools to employ and enrol those sympathetic and supportive of such schools’ religious beliefs will no longer be permitted. 

Dr Kevin Donnelly is Director of the Melbourne-based Education Standards Institute and the author of Australia’s Education Revolution (Connor Court).