Post-post-modern!

Would you like some insight into our future? Read this: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/sauntering_beyond_good_and_evil/
...and then go buy yourself a cabin in the deepest, most isolated rural environment that you can access, or pray like never before.

Welcome to 1984.

Miranda Devine comments on what is happening under current Federal Government policies:

 It’s about using language to correct people’s thoughts.

For instance, a friend studying education was astonished to find in a textbook that the new national history curriculum is to require people to use the term “BP”, rather than the traditional “BC”.

BC, of course, was the historical term used to denote the time “before Christ”. This is now deemed an offensive idea, which must be erased from the minds of Australian children. So instead we are to replace it with the nonsensical BP, which stands for “before present”, in an effort to stamp out Christ in the curriculum.

History is ripe for politically correct redesign, as we saw in Sydney City Council’s rewriting of all its official documents to insert the term “invasion”.

And, as the 10th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks looms, there is even a quarrel over whether Muslims should be mentioned.

Never mind that the men who flew planes into New York’s twin towers were Islamist terrorists bent on jihad against the satanic West. Those inconvenient facts must be sanitised from a colouring book for children, which has drawn the ire of America’s PC brigade.

Nearly sixty two years ago George Orwell wrote this:

“This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs-to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary.” (p 42)

Define correctly, communicate effectively!

One of the more irksome journalistic obfuscations (among many) is the one where they refer to the 'left' and 'right' factions within the Labor Party.
Its own constitution refers to the labor party as a 'Democratic Socialist Party' and I am quite sure that no self respecting 'Socialist' in their right mind (excuse the pun) wants to be called 'right-wing'.
Equally; few conservatives like to be referred to as 'left-wing', therefore I would suggest that it is perhaps time for reporters to find a more accurate term for the various factions.

Honest prayer.

Philip Yancy said something to the effect that it was only the truly helpless that could honestly pray. I am beginning to understand the truth of that claim.

Blogsense!

I concur with Tim T's reason for blogging: 'Random meaningless outbursts by people of exceeding eccentricity'.

Hypocrisy writ large.

This is an email I sent to The Newspaper and Lainie Anderson about her column on page 27 of the Sunday Mail.

”Few people are more loathing of Tony Abbott than my amicable husband Max. ”

A letter to Max.

What a way for your wife to introduce her attack on Tony Abbott. The word ‘loathing’ and ‘amicable’ in the same sentence...if that doesn’t set up a bias from the outset then I am a monkey’s uncle.

It’s an even bet your ‘amicable’ self has never even met Tony Abbott and your ‘loathing’ is probably little more than an ideological difference. A little shallow don't you think or perhaps merely a tautological error on your wife’s behalf? 

I too am becoming heartily; “...sick of the white-anting, the relentless negativity.” Mr Amiable, but not of the alleged attack on this worthless government which deserves no less (especially from the Opposition!), but rather of the ideologically blinkered attack on Tony Abbott by media harridans such as your wife and, by inference; rather callow and allegedly amiable hypocrites such as yourself.

Your ‘loathing’ is directed at a man who has proven intellectual ability (a Rhodes scholar), and a successful family who love him, who is reputed to be honest, kind and generous, who is physically adept through hard work and discipline, and who is not rich but struggles like most of us with school fees and a mortgage (unlike Rudd or Turnball). Yet you believe it acceptable to embrace the unrelenting vitriol as expressed by the unfortunately subjective main-stream-media, oh please forgive me, your wife is one of the comrades...might that be another clue to your ‘loathing?”

Speaking about your wife, note well the language she uses to push her agenda:  ‘Mr Abbott's band of merciless men’, ‘...score political points at any cost’, Captain Abbott push full throttle into reverse’, Tony Abbott’s ‘bellowing his way to power’, and these just a few paragraphs into the diatribe.

She then goes on to make the point that Newspoll expressed voter dissatisfaction with both leaders. I can fully understand why Gillard is down, but am constantly amazed that Tony Abbott has anyone on his side given the extreme bias against him. When last did you read something positive about Abbott or do you actually believe he is the Devil incarnate? It makes a mockery of those who question Abbott's constant 'negativity' doesn’t it. In short the correct word is HYPOCRISY.

Allow me two minor questions regarding both of your political positions:

To the charge of Abbott pushing the many and abysmal decisions taken by this most incompetent of Governments into reverse...would you prefer it that he should maintain the disastrous course Gillard has forced us (dishonestly by the way) onto?

And secondly; do you believe that bankrupting the country to serve the prejudices of a ‘Watermelon’ minority is in the country’s best interest?

The article gives me reason to believe that both of you do, which makes your agendas far, far more; “weird and worrying”, than Tony Abbott’s could ever be.

Mr ‘Amiable’, you say that we should 'give him what he wants' in order to stop the ‘white-anting’. The inference that Abbott desires power more than anything else is rich in irony considering the moral vacuity at the heart of the current Labor government who are blatantly breaking all moral boundaries to remain in power. Again HYPOCRISY springs to mind...or perhaps the blinkered mind is just unable to comprehend these connections?

Needless to say that when the electorate, whom I have no doubt you and your kind think stupid and ill-informed; give power to Abbott in the near future, I look forward (occasionally) with amusement, to the bile and impotent rage that splatters these columns in the future.  

Mike of Sheidow Park, Adelaide.

Eureka!

Facts trump theory every time:

The (extremely generous) test Darwin set for his theory was this: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."

Thanks to advances in microscopes, thousands of such complex mechanisms have been found since Darwin's day. He had to explain only simple devices, such as beaks and gills. If Darwin were able to come back today and peer through a modern microscope to see the inner workings of a cell, he would instantly abandon his own theory.

It is a mathematical impossibility, for example, that all 30 to 40 parts of the cell's flagellum -- forget the 200 parts of the cilium! -- could all arise at once by random mutation.

The more we have learned about molecules, cells and DNA -- a body of knowledge some refer to as "science" -- the more preposterous Darwin's theory has become. DNA is, as Bill Gates says, "like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we've ever created." (Plus DNA doesn't usually crash when you're right in the middle of reproducing.)

Evolution fanatics would rather not be called on to explain these complex mechanisms that Darwin himself said would disprove his theory.

Instead they make jokes about people who know the truth. They say that to dispute evolution means you must believe man walked with dinosaurs.

Galileo's persecutors probably had some good guffaws about him believing in Fred Flintstone.

This is why the brighter Darwiniacs end up sounding like Scientologists in order to cling to their mystery religion.

Crick, winner of the Nobel Prize for his co-discovery of DNA, hypothesized that highly intelligent extraterrestrials sent living cells to Earth on an unmanned spaceship, a theory he set forth in his 1981 book, "Life Itself."

Beam me up Scotty!

Media bigotry.

If anyone needed further evidence of the bias behind the main-stream-media then consider this:

The New York Times – the touchstone of elite opinion in the US – barely reported World Youth Day.

Really, this is peculiar -- a gathering of 2 million young people is not news, especially after a few hundred in the same age bracket trashed London? Isn’t anyone out there connecting the dots?

But why complain? The media and the intelligentsia are good at froth and bubble, but abysmal at deep undercurrents. Did they predict the rise of militant Islam, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the fizzing of the Population Bomb or the Global Financial Crisis?

The biggest stories are the hidden stories. Benedict XVI knows this. As he told journalists, “God's sowing is always silent; it does not appear in the statistics, and the seed that the Lord sows with World Youth Day is like the seed of which the Gospel speaks: part falls on the road and is lost; part falls on stone and is lost; part falls on thorns and is lost; but a part falls on good earth and gives much fruit.”

Unnoticed by the media, 2 million young people have embarked upon a journey which will lead many of them to infuse their home countries with  their deeply held Christian beliefs. Slowly the world is going to change. Thirty years from now, the media is going to have one hell of a surprise.

I hear the writers heart, but I do not believe the gathering was 'unnoticed' by the media. I think it was noticed but ignored like the current 'popular opinion' in Australia remains 'unnoticed'. Media bias,...no wonder the average person holds journalists in less esteem than used car salesmen (I apologise to the salesmen to even mention them in the same sentence.)

Partying hard?

Well said Melanie

The suggestion that Breivik’s behaviour resulted from political rage – let alone from reading thinkers such as John Locke, John Stuart Mill or Winston Churchill – is frankly itself an opinion in need of treatment. The man is either in the grip of a psychosis or he is a psychopath – in other words, a grossly abnormal personality incapable of human feelings of empathy (my money is on the latter). What he himself says about his own opinions or state of mind therefore does not bear examination. Yet throughout the west, apparently intelligent people have been not only ascribing to him rational thought processes but have been poring over his own words to extract clues about what made him do this. Repeat after me very slowly: Breivik did not murder dozens of teenagers because he was ideologically opposed to cultural Marxism; he mowed them down because he was grossly mentally abnormal.

Aren't we all sick and tired of the handwringing, 'marshmellow watermelons', anti-Western, self loathing, tofu socialists blaming everybody but the perpetrators of crime for their misdeeds. As a prescient sage once said; if the fear of Almighty God was what it used to be, less people would be partying on the precipice of Hades.

Brett Stephens observes:

... that Breivik was neither Christian nor conservative but intended to detonate an apocalypse, Stephens writes about this particular pathology:

What it is is millennarian: the belief that all manner of redemptive possibilities lie on just the other side of a crucible of unspeakable chaos and suffering. At his arrest, Breivik called his acts ‘atrocious but necessary.’ Stalin and other Marxists so despised by Breivik might have said the same thing about party purges or the liquidation of the kulaks.

These are the politics that have largely defined our age and which conservatives have, for the most part, been foremost in opposing. To attempt to tar them with Breivik's name is worse than a slur; it's a concession to a killer with pretensions of intellectual sophistication. And it's a misunderstanding of what he was all about.

Spiritual blindness wrapped in philosophical ignorance.

The cult of New is not new at all!

 A blast from my grumpy past:     Saturday 22nd August 2009:           Adelaide

While channel surfing today I chanced upon an ABC Stateline segment featuring the Australian Dance Theatre's contemporary production of ‘G’, a Post-modern re-interpretation (execution) of the classical ballet ‘Giselle’. What compelled me to document my reaction to this programme was the unbridled hubris contained in the sneering comments of Garry Stewart regarding the original piece.

He mentioned that his work was an attempt to: “…deconstruct one of the icons of modern culture”, and referred to all such icons lack of relevance in today’s society. Aside from the assumption that this approach is de rigueur in 'cutting edge art' his worldview exemplifies the Hegelian myth of ‘contemporaneity’ which asserts that anything new is automatically better than the old.

The truth is that more attention to the past is essential if what passes for 'art' today is purportedly 'better'! 

We were then subjected to segments from the dance piece itself. My wife (a former dancer) and I have been supporters and participants of art, dance and theatre for more years than I care to remember, and I do mean all types of dance. We are not fossilised into classical vs contemporary mode or even Balanchine's [1] expression, which is to say that we love the various new dance styles exemplified by programs such as ‘Think you can dance’. However, what this appalling 'deconstruction' of the majesty of the many expressions of Giselle offers in their stead, was a soggy and revolting melee of self-indulgent, convulsive, contortionist activities wrapped in dodgy choreography with 3^rd rate gymnastics thrown in for Circe de Solei devotees.

The cult of ugly trumps beauty these days.

Unfortunately the ‘Couture Emperor' syndrome thrives within elite circles, and whilst I confess to having been complicit in the past, I now echo Bob Dylan’s prescience; ‘I was so much older then than I am now’. The passage of time seems to clarify ones perspective, perhaps assisting us in becoming more child-like or merely more able (or willing!) to spot the nakedness of hubris?

I end with this little observation; Tom Wolfe lamented in his book The Painted Word about the jargon embodied in most discussions and/or descriptors of 'modern art'. Note well how the ADT website describes Garry Stewart's newest work: “…Be Your Self , investigates the primary ‘self’ and the ‘I’ while disrupting the illusionary sense of unity and centrality that we inherently feel about ourselves.”

What ho! step forward to self-immolation please! Art as an expression of the self-disgust felt by the Western elite. Talk about pretentious, PoMo psycho-babble!
Welcome to Artsville in 21st Century. 

---

[1] Although I think his work is rarely surpassed in its beauty of form and movement.

Philosophical accuracy.

To the anti-religionist an observation from Zac Alston:

In the end we can either reform religion or replace it; there is no third option. The anti-religious atheist is – unwittingly – the inspired prophet of a new religious movement. Whatever ideas he plants in the fertile soil of the human mind, we can rest assured that something religious will eventually grow. The answer to all the religious evils on the tip of an atheist’s tongue is perseverance in religious goods.

Bad religion, like bad science, bad ethics, bad politics and bad arguments must be challenged for being bad, not for being at all.

Don't forget the artistic urge.

These are all realities of human interactions and a manifestation of human needs and desires. To blame the manifestation for human folly misses the point. 'Politics' is not to blame for bad policies...humans are!
Etc, etc,etc.  

Vote 'undermenschen'

Replace Democrat with Laborite and the ideology sounds rather Australian:

The vast and permanent underclass created by the welfare state is a great success story for the Democratic Party, which now has a loyal constituency of deadbeats who automatically vote for the Democrats to keep their Trojan horse "benefits" flowing. It's the Democrats' "heroin dealer" model of government.

Apparently, it takes a lot of government workers to minister to the poor, inasmuch as government employment has skyrocketed in tandem with the family's disintegration. As long as Democrats are serving their principal constituency -- recipients of taxpayer money -- they don't care what happens to the rest of society.

They champion any mob that will increase their political power. Liberals (lefties) promote welfare dependency, class warfare, endless government programs staffed with public sector workers, street protests, coddling criminals and physical attacks on their ideological opponents. This is how they create reliable Democratic voters.

Sound familiar?

Apotheosis

Well spoken Janet Daly:

The Left-liberal camp is in overdrive in its campaign to rewrite history (or, in its own vocabulary, to alter consciousness): you did not see thousands of jubilant thugs rampaging through the streets, destroying livelihoods and property for the sheer exultant joy of it. What you saw were society’s victims responding to any or all of the following: bankers’ bonuses, MPs cheating on their expenses, unemployment, government spending cuts, poverty, social inequality, etc, etc. Their crimes were simply part of the same package of callous selfishness displayed by (as one particularly bizarre equation had it) tabloid phone hackers.

What is not ludicrous and insulting to common sense in these propositions is contradictory in its own terms. There are indeed views of the human condition which hold that all species of wickedness are connected, because they are all rooted in the fact that man is a fallen creature. But somehow I doubt that the ardent liberal secularists who were piping up last week were believers in original sin or the machinations of the Devil.

The brilliant soothsayers, the sagacious, the philosophers and the merely hubristic go round and round the mountain until they achieve the summit only to discover that the saints have occupied it for millennia.

What else were these terrible events but the definitive disproof of a doctrine that had subverted adult authority in all its official and unofficial forms?

That doctrine goes back a long way. In fact, the politics of the Sixties were just a late incarnation of an 18th-century philosophy. We have Jean-Jacques Rousseau to thank for the basic principle that men are born good and will only behave badly if they are corrupted by authority and repressive institutions: that we need only liberate them from those false limitations and their natural moral instincts will come to the fore.

So hugely influential was this view in education and social policy that it almost succeeded in extinguishing the truths that arise from experience: people (especially young ones) will behave badly just because they can, because no one is stopping them, or has ever inculcated in them the conscientious discipline that would make them stop themselves.

The capacity for self-control, and the willingness to suppress one’s innate selfishness or cruelty, is something that adults must consciously instill in children and reinforce in other adults by their attitudes to them. The indispensable tools of social stigma and moral judgment that communities used to have at their disposal for this purpose have been stripped away, and the result – the fearless defiance of helpless authority – is what we saw in its terrifying logical conclusion on the streets. That is what real people know: that they were right all along.

Unfortunately we seem to have reached a point in modern Western culture that even the inculcation of values into children by the immediate family is overwhelmed by the tsunami of immorality heaped on them via the media, popular culture and subversive education. The question now is; is it too late?

Unpossible!

Unobtanium: A pseudo-scientific, deeply philosophical yet amusingly 'hip' new addition to the English lexicon.
i love it!

Killer logic.

What is it about the ideological 'luvvies' who push fanatically for the execution of unborn babies (as well as some who are born), the infirm, the old, (and some have even 'jokingly' suggested death to global warming sceptics!!!) and always under the rubric of 'compassion'? Yet these self same 'good samaritans' and their press propagandistas screech like scalded cats at the very thought of a legal death penalty imposed on murderers, serial killers, and recidivist paedophiles!
Where do these people get their 'morality' from...the lower reaches of Dante's Inferno?

Beware vigilantism!

Mark Steyn http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/4359/:

Her Majesty’s cowed and craven politically correct constabulary stand around with their riot shields and Robocop gear as young rioters lob concrete through store windows to steal the electronic toys that provide their only non-narcotic or alcoholic amusement. I chanced to be in Piccadilly for the springtime riots when the police failed to stop the mob from smashing the windows of the Ritz and other upscale emporia, so it goes without saying that they wouldn’t lift a finger to protect less prestigious private property from thugs. Some of whom are as young as nine years old. And girls.

Yet a police force all but entirely useless when it comes to preventing crime or maintaining public order has time to police everything else. When Sam Brown observed en passant to a mounted policeman on Cornmarket Street in Oxford, “Do you know your horse is gay?”, he was surrounded within minutes by six officers and a fleet of patrol cars, handcuffed, tossed in the slammer overnight, and fined 80 pounds. Mr. Brown’s “homophobic comments,” explained a spokesmoron for Thames Valley Police, were “not only offensive to the policeman and his horse, but any members of the general public in the area.” The zealous crackdown on Sam Brown’s hippohomophobia has not been replicated in the present disturbances. Anyone who has so much as glanced at British policing policy over the last two decades would be hard pressed to argue which party on the streets of London, the thugs or the cops, is more irredeemably stupid.

The problem as I see it is going to be when the general public can take it no longer and begin to enact vigilante justice. It happened in South Africa after the police had become so politicised they no longer represented the general public, only the political bosses. The macabre results of such 'justice' are forever memorialised in the horrible and unspeakably cruel spectacle of 'necklacing'. If we believe that such a thing could never happen here consider the end results of Nazism, which happened in one of the most 'civilized' countries in Europe. 

UPDATE  29.8.2011
Some words of wisdom on this dilemma from Toynbee and Miranda Devine:

British historian Arnold Toynbee once described this “schism” between the elites and the masses in his analysis of the rise and fall of civilisations, “A Study of History”.

He says when a civilisation starts to decay, a schism develops between a “Dominant Minority,” also called the “insiders” or “elites”, and the “Internal Proletariat” who become disenfranchised.

“First the Dominant Minority attempts to hold by force a position of inherited privilege which it has ceased to merit; and then the Proletariat repays injustice with resentment, fear with hate, and violence with violence.”

As the civilisation fails, it falls prey to an External Proletariat, an envious “bevy of barbarian war-bands”.

Toynbee argued that “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”

At a time when the masses are restive, the West’s self confidence is fading, American power is waning, European economies are failing, the Middle East is boiling, and China is increasingly arrogant, his words have new resonance

Ironic morons

Nic Cohen from the Standpoint blog writes about the death and work of Indian Artist MF Husain. Husain's work was controversial not because he deliberately made it so but because religious fanatics in India believed it was beyond the purview of a Muslim to be inspired by the Hindu religious texts. Sadly ironic when one considers it is usually the type of rationale employed by the Islamicists against all others. Nonetheless the article calls into question  the Art establishments 'cahoney's'(or lack thereof) for doing nothing in the face of such religious persecution against a fellow artist as well as against an artistic establishment in Enland.

Editors usually look for controversy the way that boozers look for brawls. The furore that Husain provoked — entirely innocently, I should add — ought to have made him famous here. But as we pointed out, the most telling aspects of the assault on the Asia House exhibition was that it raised barely a squeak of protest from the British cultural establishment. When making a stand involves tackling religious bigots, cultural contrarians, who boast of their edginess and willingness to transgress boundaries, fall into a cowardly silence. The fear of accusations of racism or prejudice shut up those who ought to have defended Husain, as surely as the fear of violent reprisals.

This reluctance to offend religious sensibilities has been documented numerous times in the recent past...except when that attack has been directed at excoriating the Christian religion. When that happens Artsville is quick to respond with outcries of applause and the reward of instant fame. The artists are lionised as; brave, courageous, cutting edge, breaking boundaries, shattering stifling mores, evolutionary revolutionaries etc, etc. It appears that the only religious mores the art establishment deems worthy of ridicule are those of the Christian variety...probably because it is the only one which has been taught to turn the other cheek.
Perhaps it is nothing more sinister than the obvious self-hatred the Western intellectual appears to have for his/her own culture, or could there be another, more metaphysical reason?

Matt Hayden: http://www.cultureofthearts.com/ writes rather eruditely as well as amusingly on these hypocritical tendencies exhibited by the artistic establishment:

The lazy act of provocation is typical of the talentless weasels of Artsville. Firstly, he didn't even create his own images, as the article describes:

Pople photographed the altar piece last year, then used digital technology to add pornography taken from magazines found by his wife, curator Felicity Fenner.

Secondly, it's clearly meant to shock and offend. But it's only aimed at one group: Christians. The elephant in the, er, gallery is the absence of treasured symbols from another religion whose followers are easily offended. Like so many arty types before him, he's avoided using his searing and courageous creativity to offend Islam.

.

A 'riot' of intellectuals (collective noun)

There appear to be remarkable similarities between the 'intellectuals as described by this passage (gleaned from): http://www.martindurkin.com/blogs/real-global-warming-consensus-or-why-intellectuals-hate-capitalism

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. 

The intellectuals are not grateful to the rest of us.  They are parasitic on industrial capitalism and yet they despise it.  They reach for more State spending like a flower gropes for the Sun.  They call for more regulation and planning, because they are the regulators and planners.  Having been found wanting by the market, they nonetheless believe they should be in charge.  They say the ‘anarchy’ of the market needs to be contained and directed (by them).

and the rioters Dalrymple talks about (see previous blog 'FEED THE BEAST'):

...he may well have lived his entire life at others’ expense, such that every mouthful of food he has ever eaten, every shirt he has ever worn, every television he has ever watched, has been provided by others. Even if he were to recognize this, he would not be grateful, for dependency does not promote gratitude. On the contrary, he would simply feel that the subventions were not sufficient to allow him to live as he would have liked.

It appears that the only difference between the intellectual and the riotous mob relates to domicile.

Pesky questions!

I am finding it somewhat amusing as I comment, usually negatively, on the role of the 'intellectual' in today's society. It is amusing in that by many of the apparent 'qualifications', appearances and tendency's I should be classified as one. I am not, and would resist the appellation vigorously if 'accused',  but by all outward manifestations I could be and that is what makes my position so uncomfortable. I am by whatever circumstances have caused my predisposition, an outsider. I do not 'fit' an easily defined mold. For example I have been accused of being 'right-wing' by colleagues in Australia and of being a communist by others in South Africa. I attended a lecture on Wednesday by a Philosopher of the neuro-sciences and when I questioned what seemed to me to be obvious flaws in her ontology, was accused of being a 'pest'.  
Perhaps the latter is the most accurate, but I hope not!         

Little green men have landed!

From the confessional of a former BBC media 'liberal' (leftie in Aus):

But we were not just anti-Macmil-lan; we were antiindustry, anti-capital-ism, antiadvertising, antiselling, antiprofit, antipatriotism, antimonarchy, antiempire, antipolice, antiarmed forces, antibomb, antiauthority. Almost anything that made the world a freer, safer and more prosperous place – you name it, we were anti it.

Sounds familiar doesn't it, and a little bit green as well.
The article from whence it is drawn makes for fascinating reading: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2240427.ece

updates, that is; another qoute:

We were not Marxists but accepted a lot of Marxist social analysis. We also had an almost complete ignorance of market economics. That ignorance is still there. Say “Tesco” to a media liberal and the patellar reflex says, “Exploiting African farmers and driving out small shopkeepers.” The achievement of providing the range of goods, the competitive prices, the food quality, the speed of service and the ease of parking that attract millions of shoppers does not register on their radar.

Wind-bags to the rescue

This is an extract from James Delingpole on the extraordinary imposition of wind 'farms' over the countryside of England. The principle behind it applies to Australia as do the rather prescient observations:

If there were one single argument in favour of wind farms then maybe at least a smidgen of the suffering they cause might be justifiable. But there isn’t, not one. I’ll spare you the full litany — read Christopher Booker; read John Etherington’s definitive The Wind Farm Scam. Suffice to say that even in terms of saving the environment (their supposed raison d’être), they fail dismally, not just because of the birds and bats they destroy, and the poisonous rare earth minerals used in their manufacture, but because — owing to the erratic nature of wind — they require 100 per cent back-up from conventional power kept humming on standby just in case.

One day, when it’s all over, historians are going to look back on this era as one of the most extraordinary outbreaks of collective madness there has ever been. ‘However could any democratically elected government have allowed such damage to be inflicted on Britain’s single greatest asset — its countryside — to so little benefit?’

And what will particularly incense the more socially conscious of those historians is the method by which this despoliation was achieved: the compulsory transfer, via taxes, tariffs and artificially inflated energy bills, of money from the pockets of the poor and the middle classes into those of rich landowners like Sir Reginald Sheffield, Bt, who — in the teeth of local opposition — has put up eight 400-foot wind farms on his 3,000-acre Lincolnshire estate and stands to make up to £3.5 million a year from them. With a bit more research they might even discover who Sir Reginald’s son-in-law is. O Tempora, O Mores, they’ll say.

Feed the Beast

Theodore Dalrymple is writing about the English but exactly the same can be said about a portion of the Australian population. It is reflective of the welfare state and the results show how the misguided (and often manipulative) intentions of the 'tofu socialists' can create a Frankenstein monster...a monster one German philosopher called the; 'lumpenproletariat', and whose most obvious impulse appears to be the desire to bite the hand that feeds it.

Theodore Dalrymple:

The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form. A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice. It believes itself deprived (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class), even though each member of it has received an education costing $80,000, toward which neither he nor—quite likely—any member of his family has made much of a contribution; indeed, he may well have lived his entire life at others’ expense, such that every mouthful of food he has ever eaten, every shirt he has ever worn, every television he has ever watched, has been provided by others. Even if he were to recognize this, he would not be grateful, for dependency does not promote gratitude. On the contrary, he would simply feel that the subventions were not sufficient to allow him to live as he would have liked.

Though the recent riots have illustrated this alienation amongst the welfare class quite graphically I wonder how many 'middle-class' folk feel that they are just as 'deprived'. 20th century greed has possessed us to such an extent that we can no longer see how rich we are, only how much less than another we have.
We are all going to have a lot to answer for.

Vote for chaos

Facts speak volumes about the Australian population. The 'lucky country' as is purports to be, is, I think, more by good 'luck' than good judgement. Perhaps the beneficence of God looks over this country even as they spit in His face.

A recent Nielson poll shows that 29% of the population would vote for Rudd, 29% for Turnball and 21% for Abbott.

Abbott is a Rhodes scholar, physically impressive a devoted and successful family man as well as an ordinary mortgage 'battler'. Both Turnball and Rudd are both millionaires out of touch with the the 'battlers', and both 'unfrocked' liars and manipulators, yet this moronic population still prefers them. The only reasonable explanation can be the outspoken religious views of Abbott...Australians would (do) still prefer a declared atheist living in sin who is demonstrably incompetent to anyone who dares to believe in something.

The country deserves what it gets and let the record show that those who promote chaos will be those who whine the most loudly when that chaos actually arrives.

Climate hysteria

For those who are still prevaricating on the Climate change debate read this:
http://asiancorrespondent.com/62435/a-short-history-of-climate-science-hysteria/

Rioter Creed

"...but for the sheer pleasure of assisting entropy in its great work of returning the world to chaos."

The rioters creed, I wonder at its root?

Multi-culti

Melanie Phillip's explains clearly what Multiculturism really means and what is doesn't. This is a philosophy which has been and continues to be at the very root of so many problems in the world today. It needs to be exposed for what it is:

Multiculturalism is a baleful creed which, far from bringing people together drives them apart. That is because multiculturalism is not a synonym for people from different cultures all getting along together. If this were so, it would be no more than a re-statement of how all decent and civilised societies should behave.

No, multiculturalism is the doctrine which says that no culture can ever claim precedence over any other. So there can be no hierarchy of values, and no society can uphold its historic traditions and values against any challenge. It is therefore by definition impossible for a multicultural society to uphold liberal values over their opposite – or, indeed, to uphold the fundamental democratic axiom of ‘one law for all’.  It is also an oxymoron; for without an overarching set of cultural values to which everyone equally subscribes, there is no cultural glue to keep together a society -- which then disintegrates into a war of group against group, value against value and the strong versus the weak.

Or as the 20th century prophet Nietzsche proclaimed: The will to power! Witness the current government in Australia and what they are willing to do in order to stay in power and consider the impact that these compromises are going to have on our future.

Ideological claptrap

The following extract reveals the true truth behind the London riots and often behind much of the unrest in various Western cultures. Ideologues who find ways to excuse the criminals and thugs are usually the same people whose words and actions reveal that they are philosophically opposed to Western cultural norms and are trying to undermine them by any and all means. Unfortunately they have, via Gramsci’s ‘long march’ strategy, captured much of the main-stream-media, the education departments from secondary to tertiary, the arts and large segments of government funded science programs who together have cowed governments into fear and ‘political correctness’, thereby diverting much of the taxpayer monies into supporting radical and subversive agendas.

If you believe I am being unreasonable I challenge you to read the manifesto's of the radical environmentalists, The Australian Socialist Party, the Fabians and the Greens and let them tell you about their aims themselves.

Segueing back to the extract, it is from Andrew Bolts blog, Saturday 13^th of August and encapsulates the motivation of the rioters rather well I would say:

The second is a BBC interview with two looters, giggling young women swigging stolen wine:

Girl 1: It’s the Government’s fault.

 Girl 2: I know ...

Girl 2: Conservatives!

Girl 1: Yeah, whatever who it is - I dunno.

Girl 2: It’s not even a riot - it’s showing the people we can do what we want.

Girl 1: Yeah, that’s what it’s all about - showing the police we can do what we want, and now we have.

Reporter: So do you reckon it will go on tonight?

Girl 2: Yeah hopefully, I want a few more things!

These are the two scenes I recall when I hear cause-pushers trying to excuse the jeering mobs of thieves, thugs and punks who rampaged through a dozen British cities.

These are the low-lifes I hear being described as revolutionaries, protesters and the deprived, understandably angry at cuts to government youth services.

The gap between what happened and what ideologues now describe is ludicrously, monstrously wide.

The sad truth is that much of what these ideologues see (as do most clear thinking people) is corrupt. The fact that they blame it on ‘Western Culture’ reflects their collective thinking. The reality is that it is the people who are corrupt (fallen humanity) and no 'system' is going to change that. Unfortunately for them, if one puts any stock in the lessons of history, the Democratic system of western government though faulty is, as Churchill put it: "Better than all the other systems".

Gillards past informs her future

Gillard's past is beginning to be examined for an insight into why she supports so many radical policies. What's being discovered is that the policies which many think (and say) that she has been coerced into adopting are in fact directives that she has endorsed and embraced in the past. When she was an active part of the Socialist Left and an editor of their published views, one of their stated aims for the direction of Australian society was this:.

 “Mechanisms which have been proposed for value change range from enhancement of ‘green’ education to revival of those religions which respect Nature.

As Minister for education Gillard has been the prime-mover in many of the programs being pushed through the education department which are little more than extreme propaganda...I know, I am working in schools  and observe the sort of garbage that is contained in the text books.

Regarding the revival of 'religions which respect nature; Moloch has been well re-established in society for some time now and Gaia is well on her way to achieving significant status, whilst in England (soon in Aus) Pagan police persons are given paid leave to enjoy their 'celebrations':

Astonishingly, around 100 members of the Armed Forces now classify themselves as pagans, and a further 30 as witches. There are thought to be about 500 pagan police officers. A Pagan Police Association has even been set up to represent officers who ‘worship nature and believe in many gods’. http://melaniephillips.com/from-human-rights-to-pagan-rites

Don't let Gillard's 'mild' manner lull you into a false sense of security, she is enacting exactly what she promulgated many years ago. Everything she now promotes, from the dissemination of propaganda to the denigration of the import/export industry, the crippling of mining and the ultimate destruction of the Australian economy has been documented as a part of her socialist past.
Why then are we amazed at what she is doing now?
What we need to do is remove her from power as soon as is legally possible.

Deep stuff

Do we need any more convincing that the 'deep greenies' have gone off the deep end?

One of the activists, Derrick Jensen, allegedly even believes those who destroy the environment should be summarily executed: “If it were up to me, all the people associated with the Gulf oil spill, which is murdering the Gulf, would be executed. That would be part of the function of a state,” said Jensen.

In addition to Jensen, the two other environmentalists interviewed in the article – Lierre Keith, and Aric McBay — have spearheaded a fringe movement called the “Deep Green Resistance” that calls for “direct attacks on infrastructure” and an annihilation of civilization as we know it.

The three monkeys

Whenever I read a magazine or publication associated with the arts I discern almost immediately the extreme left-wing bias permeating the whole thing.
What is it about the arts today?
Is it because of the supposed need to 'exist outside of the petty bourgeoisie, or is it a natural contrariness?
Is it perhaps merely the prosaic reality that the hierarchy of the arts across the various disciplines, have been so successfully 'occupied' (Gramsci's 'long march') that anyone with an alternative paradigm is silenced or shunned?
Having served in the hierarchy myself  I am of the opinion that it is a dash of all three with a preponderance of the latter.
My point:
John Spoehr in the Adelaide Review opines: "It is time to take the political heat out of the climate debate"
implying that it is only politics that causes opposition to what every right thinking MORAL person knows, i.e. that Global warming is TRUE!!! For goodness sake the consensus is in people, to disagree is to be disruptive, dysfunctional, disrespectful and downright immoral!
Spoehr then attempts to denigrate both Abbott and Howard for their being 'wedge politicians' (oh how I wish Howard was back!!!) and then goes on to attempt to scare people witless about what is going to happen if we don't take action on climate change now. These are the folk who incidentally call Abbott a fearmongerer!
Of course any philosophical awareness of irony and/or hypocrisy appears to be absolutely absent from the worldviews of almost all left wingers, the ones I read at least. its almost like most of them just expect people to listen to what they say and believe it...irrespective of any evidence to the contrary. Kind of like Bob Brown, Tim Flannery and AL Gore pontificating about rising water obliterating seasides up to X metres deep and then going out and buying residences and offices right on the waterline.
DO AS I SAY ! they thunder...(subtext: not as I do.)

The wisdom of the prudent is to give thought to their ways, but the folly of fools is deception.
Proverbs 14:7-9

School of learning!

If anyone believes that this quote is untrue:

Of course it is true that few have jobs, learn anything useful at school, live in decent homes, eat meals at regular hours or feel loyalty to anything beyond their local gang.

This is not, however, because they are victims of mistreatment or neglect.

It is because it is fantastically hard to help such people, young or old, without imposing a measure of compulsion which modern society finds unacceptable. These kids are what they are because nobody makes them be anything different or better.

A key factor in delinquency is lack of effective sanctions to deter it. From an early stage, feral children discover that they can bully fellow pupils at school, shout abuse at people in the streets, urinate outside pubs, hurl litter from car windows, play car radios at deafening volumes, and, indeed, commit casual assaults with only a negligible prospect of facing rebuke, far less retribution.

...then I would invite them to spend a week at any school of their choice and witness how the bullies, the anarchic, the stupid children victimise the vast majority...and they do it with impunity.
If learned at school, why then will they not do it ex-curricula?

PRAY

Regarding the latest 'animal cruelty' outrage see: http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/ once again we witness the manipulation of facts to suit an agenda. Incidentally I saw the same manipulation of facts whilst working as a 'gopher' for an ITV English broadcast crew in South Africa during the early eighties.
I think it is about time that the Australian public begin to complain (perhaps via buying choices) about the bias exhibited by so many supposedly 'objective' 'journalists'. Note the inverted commas over journalists, which is because too many are little more than propagandists for some cause or another. These idiots live in a world where they actually believe that what they say makes a difference...when are they going to wake up to the realisation that journalists today are regarded by the wider public as lower in integrity than lawyers, i.e. lower than snake s...t. The problem with that is that few people believe anything outside of their own narrow prejudices and the accumulation of actual knowledge suffers. The powers in charge don't care because it suits their purpose to have the greater populace ignorant of what is actually going on, I know I lived in South Africa!
However ignorance lasts only so long and the propaganda chickens will come home to roost. Witness the chaos in London. After years of mocking civility, compromising law & order and attacks on the family, the consequences are being experienced by the 'ordinary folk' of England. We hear stories of people barricading themselves in to escape the carnage. Do we in Australia think we are immune to these consequences?
My family is experiencing personal heartache as a result of the anti-family bias inculcated into the Australian 'Youth Services'. I know that others have experienced the same and we are ordinary, middle class citizens. There is a Tsunami of rebellion coming down the pipeline and I don't think any of us are equipped to deal with the consequences. 
PRAY for revival, it is the only solution to the blackened heart of humankind.
PRAY for Australia, it has been prophesied as the land of the last great revival, may it be so!

End of the beginning?

I think the only people who could disagree with Melanie Phillips assessment of the London riots might be those who are the cause:

What we are seeing, in the sluggish and unprepared reaction of the police and political class to these events, compounded by their serial failure to grasp from previous such disturbances just what is going on here, is a catastrophic combination of professional inertia and incompetence, serial eyes off the ball, paralysing political correctness, an apparent reluctance to identify, name and deal with subversive activity, a capital’s police force in systemic disarray, a criminal justice system that has become an insulting joke, a refusal from the top to draw clear lines in the sand and to exercise moral and political leadership, a pandering instead to mob rule, tyro politicians who have never had a grown-up job and couldn’t run the proverbial whelk-stall let alone get a grip on a culture teetering on the edge of the cliff, a third-rate civil service machine that no longer can be relied on to keep the show on the road, a culture of narcissistic selfishness on an epic scale and a general breakdown in education, morality and elementary codes of civilised behaviour, much of it deliberately willed on for the past three decades by a grossly irresponsible and politically motivated intelligentsia that set out to smash the west. And now London is being smashed as a result.

What we are witnessing is Western civilization in its death throes...is it the 'End Times?'
I wouldn't claim that prophetic an insight, but I do believe it might be the beginning of the end, if not the end of the beginning!!!!!!!!      Now where have I heard that before?

Give 'em the finger!

I think that the truth behind the attempted 'deep-green revolution' is as Vaclav Klaus describes it:

“Today’s debate about global warming is essentially a debate about freedom. The environmentalists would like to mastermind each and every possible (and impossible) aspect of our lives.”
Vaclav Klaus - Blue Planet in Green Shackles

All those who wish to live quiet and productive lives must now find ways to counter the garbage being throw our way at every opportunity. Be it re-addressing the propaganda 'return to sender', taking part in demonstrations or 'truck caravans', blogging, speaking out and or just making themselves heard.
We must not allow ourselves to become a Banana Republic without raising our voices in protest. The agitators of the new Marxist 'green brigades' must be stood up too at every opportunity...I am about to confront a few in a staffroom tomorrow, wish me luck!

Reject fakery

My wife and I love wildlife, we spent much of our free time when living in South Africa visiting various game reserves where we would sit for hours watching animals interact with each other (sometimes eating one another) and acting instinctively, and amusingly as animals do. We have therefore enjoyed wildlife programming on TV particularly the well made ones...which makes the new crop so irritating.
I think it probably started with Attenborough but the anthropomorphising of wildlife has reached ridiculous proportions.
Tonight I started watching the 'Migrations' program with Alex Baldwin narrating. It soon reached such absurd levels of emotional manipulation that I had to switch it off even though the photography was fantastic.
The green religion and its superficial emotionalism has influenced everyone and everything to such a degree that  they are ruining even the natural world, the very thing that they say they are trying to'save'. But this is exactly what the law of unintended consequences illustrates. I have spoken of it in earlier blogs so will not repeat myself save to say that until we reject these imposters and their fake belief system we and the world we inhabit will suffer the consequences.

Churchillian cooling

Perhaps as Churchill so eruditely opined; 'this is not the end nor even is it the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning" (or words to that effect) and so too do we at last observe some evidence that the world wide scam, aka: Anthropogenic Global warming, has also tipped its zenith. Read the  following blog:

http://joannenova.com.au/2011/08/blockbuster-planetary-temperature-controls-co2-levels-not-humans/

...to gain some hope that the deep-green (neo Marxist) attack on Western democracy/capitalism has begun to crumble at the edges (like the Arctic ice cap perhaps!!). The only problem now is that environmentalists, scientists, journalists and politicians have been seen to be mendacious, deceitful and manipulative, which makes empirical evidence, genuine environmental concerns, information dissemination, the rule of law and common civility the real victims of this abomination. Chaos wins...for now!

Truth & Lies

Many are the lies spread about the Jews and Israel. Frequent are the untruths and many are undoubtedly motivated by an anti-Semitic impulse. I know that I have been astounded by some 'Christians' who bristle with indignation that the Jews are still referred to as a 'chosen people' and claim that the New Testament transfers that honour to us (as I am one as well) and us alone. Again I believe that such a claim harbours at the very least, a soupcon of anti-Semitic 'flavouring'.

The current impasse in Israel is in truth not an intractable issue at all, particularly if, as is claimed, prior possession is the imprimatur of ownership (i.e. pre 1948). Of course those who make these claims are nearly all from the Pro Palestinian camp, but like too many ‘intellectuals’ within the contemporary Left-wing political commissariat, they are ‘bitten on the bum’ by their own woefully inadequate grasp of history. For example; consider the truth claims within the following extract to ‘whet your archaeological whistle’ as it were:

Jerusalem: The Biography By Simon Sebag Montefiore;Orion, 696pp,

To the educated British mind, mention of Jerusalem generally conjures up, at best, impatience with the apparently intractable problem of reconciling two equal and rival claims to the city, Jewish and Arab; at worst, fury at a presumed ‘occupation’ by Israelis who have no right to claim it as their capital at all.

Such people would doubtless be amazed to learn that, some 10 centuries before the birth of Christ and 17 centuries before the birth of Mohammed, the city of Jerusalem was created by King David as the capital of the united kingdom of Israel and Judea. The Jews were in fact the only people for whom the land of Israel was ever actually their national home.

And the Arabs knew it. ‘Who can contest the rights of the Jews to Palestine?’ the then mayor of Jerusalem, Yusuf Khalidi, told the Chief Rabbi of France in 1899: ‘God knows historically it is indeed your country’—even though, he added, the problem was that now there were others living there too.

Unfortunately for those who scream blue murder at any and all Israeli attempts to defend themselves from annihilation, no amount of truth, true or otherwise, will convince them to give up their assault. For what they are driven by is a lot less complex that the situation has been called. It is the same spirit that drove the Nazi's, the Russians and even the religious fanatics who claimed to persecute in the name of the Church, and He will never give it up, He can’t; for it is His very nature.

Left/Right

King Solomon in the bible was reputed to be the wisest man in creation. He is also strongly suggested to be the author of Ecclesiastes, which means that the following quote is by definition a wise one:

Ecclesiastes 10:2..."The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left.

Makes you think doesn't it!

thwarted ambitions

I am not an advocate of conspiracy theories, but I do believe that we can and ought to be feeling a little nervous about the authoritarian nonsense emerging from the throats of some of Australia's most prominent policy influencers:

Dalliances with authoritarianism are never far from the fringes of the green movement.

Prominent green activist, Clive Hamilton, for instance, has suggested that the ‘suspension of democratic processes' might be a necessary ‘emergency' response to the threat of climate change. Sydney Morning Herald columnist Elizabeth Farrelly recently wrote that ‘Australia's ludicrous dithering on a pollution tax' was evidence that voting should be a ‘privilege' rather than a right and that China should be envied because it need not ‘pander' to voters.

...Like Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, Tim Flannery is not averse to using the power of the state to enforce his views. He has openly fantasised about judicial punishments being handed out in the future to those who doubt climate science today. ‘Perhaps the day will come when a prosecutor in some yet-to-be-formed international court will appear with a copy of Scorcher under his arm,' he has said, referring to Clive Hamilton's book attacking the ‘greenhouse mafia' of citizens and businesses who are sceptical about man's contribution to climate change.
(James Patterson from  the Institute of Public Affairs)

These are but a few of the thoughts beginning to be spoken out as these closet authoritarians are being frustrated in their aims to shackle the economy.

First scare!

A marvellous capture of the stupidity behind the AGW scare, a must read for a laugh: http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/toads_to_mussels_a_world_of_warming_firsts/

Bloggers excuse

Haven't been blogging because I have been busy trying to finish my entry into the Fleuriou Landscape prize. Tell me what you think!! Will it make it on? Will it win? hahaha.