Fact vs. opinion

To those who believe in the mystical myth of wind-power and would consign enormous amounts of finance better used elsewhere (almost anywhere else!), please do us all a favour and read this article:
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2012/12/wind-power-by-the-numbers

Every person is entitled to their own opinions, but no one is entitled to their own facts.

Through a mirror darkly.

It is fine to watch the ABC because the adverts are less frequent, but it is also very important to understand that Australia's national broadcast media is ideologically corrupt; that is they claim to be unbiased whilst being un-apologetically so. Consider this article:

When Robyn Williams recently equated skeptics to paedophiles on the ABC “Science” Show the skeptic-most-targeted was Maurice Newman, former chairman of the ABC itself. Newman responds to these deplorable and unscientific insults in today’s Australian and throws down the challenge to the current board.

ABC clique in control of climate

• by: MAURICE NEWMAN
• From: The Australian
• December 18, 2012 12:00AM

On November 24, Robyn Williams intoned to his audience on ABC’s The Science Show, “if I told you that pedophilia is good for children, or asbestos is an excellent inhalant for those with asthma, or, that smoking crack is a normal part and a healthy one of teenage life, you’d rightly find it outrageous. Similar statements are coming out of inexpert mouths again and again, distorting the science”. My article was given as an example of an anti-scientific position.Really? Questioning climate science is like advocating pedophilia, abetting mesothelioma and pushing drugs to teenagers? Well yes, according to the ABC’s science man. Stephan Lewandowsky, a guest on the program, asserted that those with a free market background were, according to his research, more likely to be sceptical of science. As well as climate science, “they are also rejecting the link between smoking and lung cancer; they are rejecting the link between HIV and AIDS”, the professor said. Happily, it was extremely difficult to detect people on the “Left side of politics who are rejecting scientific evidence”.
Williams confirmed that after “a learned lecture” by one of the world’s most famous scientists, bankers remained unconvinced.
So there you have it. No more proof needed. Free marketers, bankers and science contrarians are simply despicable flat earthers. Best to keep away from them.

Ordinarily it should be unnecessary to object to such appalling commentary. It should have been automatically withdrawn. But no. An ABC response used sophistry to satisfy itself “that the presenter Robyn Williams did not equate climate change sceptics to pedophiles”. Tell that to his listeners.

Newman points out this is more politics than science: No deceit is too great. Character assassination is the name-of-the-game and he found comments from a skeptical scientist who once lived under a communist regime to be apropos.

Lubos Motl, a climate commentator and string theory physicist, said about the ABC’s Science Show: “We used to hear some remotely similar (Czech) propaganda programs until 1989 … but the public radio and TV simply can’t produce programs that would be this dishonest, manipulative, hateful and insulting any more”.

The ABC Charter is clear, it is supposed to represent all Australians:

ABC editorial policies require a diversity of perspectives to be presented so that “over time no significant strand or belief is knowingly excluded or disproportionately represented”. They also speak of “a balance that follows the weight of evidence”. But who does the weighing? Who re-weights and when? Or is it set and forget?
We have seen the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change discredited. We know the science is less robust. And, for the past 16 years, mother nature has been kind to the sceptics. Because Williams says the entire globe is threatened in a way that is pretty dire doesn’t make it so. Yet the “weight of evidence” argument is often used as a licence to vilify holders of alternative views. As a taxpayer-funded organisation, the ABC shouldn’t even have a view on global warming. What it does have is a duty to all Australians to broadcast honestly the best available evidence on both sides of the argument so that we can make up our own minds. This is not happening.
I retain a deep affection for the ABC. But, like the BBC, there are signs that a small but powerful group has captured the corporation, at least on climate change.
It is up to the board and management to rectify this

Cuckoo, cuckoo!

And these are the sort of people that call people like me nuts:

The death penalty

In this article I am going to suggest that the death penalty is an appropriate punishment for influential GW deniers. But before coming to this surprising conclusion, please allow me to explain where I am coming from.

I have always been opposed to the death penalty in all cases, and I have always supported the clear and consistent stand of Amnesty International on this issue. The death penalty is barbaric, racist, expensive, and is often applied by mistake. Apparently, it does not even act as a deterrent to would-be murderers. Hopefully, the USA and China will come to their senses soon.

Even mass murderers should not be executed, in my opinion. Consider the politically motivated murder of 77 people in Norway in 2011. Of course the murderer does not deserve to live, and there is not the slightest doubt that he is guilty. But if the Norwegian government killed him, that would just increase the number of dead to 78. It would not bring the dead back to life. In fact, it would not achieve anything positive at all. I respect the families and friends of the victims if they feel differently about that. I am simply presenting what seems to me to be a logical argument.

(an example of eco-fascist thinking from Richard Parncutt, a Professor at the University of Graz, Austria. Parncutt, an expert on the psychology of music, originally from Australia, has an interesting take on combining the precautionary principle with David Hume’s John Stewart Mill’s philosophy of ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’ (in this case the as yet unborn), and Adolf Hitler’s ‘final solution’ and its potential application to ‘the denier problem’. Richard Tol wryly refers to Parncutt’s DeSmogBlog denier list link as ‘Death Row’.)

Needless to say his take on abortion would, I suspect, not equate it with murder at all. The only people monsters like this want to kill are people who are helpless or who dare to disagree with them.

If his 'logic' is really what passes for logic in today's world, and I think that this might be the case, then his logic is like the logic found in Alice's Wonderland. The logic of a madman!

Why do so many of today's most notorious 'intellectuals' (and most deceived) come from Australia?
And why are Eco activists and 'human rights' nutters beginning to show their true totalitarian colours?

UPDATE  from Jo Nova's site:
His (Parncutt) killer “maths” (if you could call it that)

… given the inherent uncertainty surrounding climatic predictions, even exaggerated accounts must be considered possible, albeit with a low probability. Consider this: If ten million people are going to die with a probability of 10%, that is like one million people dying with a probability of 100%.

He repeats this:

For the purpose of argument, let’s give the GW deniers the benefit of the doubt and imagine that the scientists are wrong with a high probability, say 90%. If they are right, some 100 million people will die as a direct result of GW. Probably more like a billion, but this is a conservative estimate. If the probability of that happening is only 10%, then effectively “only” 10 million people will die. These are the numbers that GW deniers are playing with while exercising their “freedom of speech”.

So even if “Deniers” are right, they are still murderous and should still be executed. Ooo-K
Apparently it didn’t occur to him that if skeptics are right, and the world doesn’t warm, hardly anyone will die from global warming. That’s “zero”, right? (I know children in infants-school who can get this.)
Worse, the failure of his theory could kill far more people than the failure of skeptics: hundreds of thousands of people in the third world have already starved as we fed their corn into cars, kids are suffering from green pollution in Brazil, others will die waiting for medicine or mosquito nets while we build sea walls to hold back a tide that may never come. Others are suffering a life of blindness, dysentery, malaria, or dehydration and could be cured if we spend money on doctors, or clean water supplies, rather than solar farms. If the world cools and we are not prepared, millions will starve from wheat crops that were killed by frost.
How meaningless is a Professorship at a university these days? Where “higher education” doesn’t teach people to reason, doesn’t teach them the value of free speech, and doesn’t teach them the humility to say nothing when they know nothing.
I don’t think it’s worth writing to a man who can’t reason, but there are people at his university who need to know what Parncutt is saying. Is the University of Graz a serious university?
Prof Parncutt also thinks we need global taxes on wealth (guess that means a global bureaucracy, to manage those global funds?). Since he recommends The World Future Council, that’s a red-flag, I recommend skeptics read it carefully. They say they’re the voice of future generations. But they’re not speaking on behalf of my descendants.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A COMMENT ON JO NOVA'S BLOG (About Parncutt) BY SOMEONE I CONSIDER VERY KNOWLEDGEABLE ABOUT ART IN THE 21ST CENTURY.
Peter Miller

December 24, 2012 at 10:12 pm · Reply

Sounds like systematic musicology is one of those utterly useless subjects, whose practitioners delight in surrounding themselves with what they hope is an almost impenetrable barrier of gobbledegook, designed to impress/mislead the uninformed into thinking that it is something useful.
Hmm, so systematic musicology is similar to ‘climate science’, as it is practiced today

Ideas have consequences

What a massive tragedy this slaughter of so many innocent children is. I cannot imagine the depths of grief that these parents are experiencing and can only pray that Gods amazing grace will settle over their lives.
I partially sympathize with the calls for gun law and agree that there should be tighter controls on the sale of weapons of wholesale slaughter. What 'hunter' needs automatic machine guns, sniper rifles and/or combat shotguns? Unfortunately though the facts show that excessive gun control does not work the way we would like it to:

Thomas Sowell puts it this way: “You might never know, from what they and other gun control advocates have said, that there is a mountain of evidence that gun control laws not only fail to control guns but are often counterproductive. However, for those other people who still think facts matter, it is worth presenting some of those facts.

“Do countries with strong gun control laws have lower murder rates? Only if you cherry-pick the data. Britain is a country with stronger gun control laws than the United States, and lower murder rates. But Mexico, Russia and Brazil are also countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States – and their murder rates are much higher than ours. Israel and Switzerland have even higher rates of gun ownership than the United States, and much lower murder rates than ours.

Which rams home the unfortunate truth which is that worldviews not guns are at the very centre of this tragedy. Guns are the tool, worldview is the motivation.

Gun control advocates will call for a crackdown on guns and petition President Obama for reform to make it more difficult for people to buy their hardware but how many Americans will address the shredding of the fabric of their society.

It has not gone unnoticed that this murderer came from a broken home, as did Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik, the man who killed 77 people in a bombing and shooting rampage in July, 2011, as have almost every mass killer in modern times.

This is not to say that most single mothers are not capable of raising a child alone, just that the record shows that killers are more likely to have been raised in single parent homes.

Single parent homes are rapidly becoming the norm in the US – they are a symbol of the social collapse.

....But as the parents of the fortunate survivors hug their children to them, Americans should consider the greater risk their society faces, the loss of the family and ultimately the bonds that make a civilisation.
 

Boldly said Piers.
Unfortunately Our PC society is quick to blame everything else but the deliberate destruction of the Judeo-Christian philosophy that used to underpin American society. Someone wise once said that when the fabric of the 'inner policeman" i.e. conscience, has been ripped apart, no amount of community policemen will be able to control the ensuing anarchy:

"Banning guns or knives or box cutters or stones will not prevent such attacks. Evil is what must be addressed, and evil does not lie in guns or rocks but in every human heart. As Solzhenitsyn once rightly said, “It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.” (Bill Meuhlenberg)

Unless there is a change of direction in the Western world at large the inevitable result is going to be increased chaos:

If chance be
the Father of all flesh,
disaster is his rainbow in the sky
and when you hear
State of Emergency!
Sniper Kills Ten!
Troops on Rampage!
Whites go Looting!
Bomb Blasts School!
It is but the sound of man
worshipping his maker.

Steve Turner, “Creed,” his satirical poem on the modern mind

UPDATE:  To those who wish to eliminate guns consider this morsel:

There are photos of Israeli teachers with guns slung around their bodies. Strangely, Israel does not have a mass shooting in a school every so often:

“Israel began the program of armed citizen guards in the schools after the Maalot massacre in the 1970s, when a large number of children were slain in a terrorist incident. The volunteer parents work in plain clothes, armed with concealed semi-automatic pistols, and are trained by Israel’s home guard. It is significant that in the more than a quarter century between Maalot and the incident mentioned above when the citizen guards shot down the terrorist in the school in 2002, not a single child was murdered in an Israeli school!
The reason is that Israel wisely publicized the fact that the civilian volunteer guards, indistinguishable from the regular teaching and administrative staff, would be in place. It served as a tremendously effective deterrent.”

Alas, poor baby boomers!

This tongue-in-cheek 'observation' on the decline of Western 'culture' shines a spotlight onto the ills that plague the arts and education in Australia today.

A perspicacious take when considered against the backdrop of recent statistics regarding the examination of the level of reading/comprehension education amongst year 4's.

Australia scored last amongst developed nations and on the same level as non-English speaking countries like Slovenia, Lithuania etc. This besides the fact that the labor government have poured countless billions into 'education'.

Surely any thinking person would question why these results are as they are. Unfortunately most are blinded by the Gramscian assault on the 'instituions of meaning'. The minority (consciously or unconsciously neo-Marxist) subversives have won this long march through the institutions.

What now remains to be seen is  whether or not the silent majority have been sufficiently brainwashed to allow it to continue. Time will tell.

In the meantime this excerpt exposes our current 'educational' paradigm for what it is.

Longfellow, wrong fellow

by Christopher Akehurst    December 12, 2012

---

I came across some lines by Longfellow I remember my mother singing in the kitchen, a song learnt in her schooldays at University High in Melbourne in the late 1920s. They seem to me to illuminate some of the changes in our society since then.

---

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints that, perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

 

Inspiring though they were considered in the past, if anyone today suggested singing those words in a school, or anywhere, imagine the objections. Patriarchal language - men, brother. Elitism - great. Discredited top-down history - lives of great men all remind us. Judgmentalism towards diverse lifestyles - forlorn and shipwrecked brother. How can we know that the brother's lifestyle is not an alternative one with which he is perfectly content, and is merely perceived as forlorn and shipwrecked by those blinded by bourgeois notions of success?

 Sexism - why shouldn't the "brother" be a sister, or transgender? Seeing? Well, there are other ways of apprehending, and "seeing" might just be a bit inappropriate towards the visually impaired. Take heart? [S]he doesn't need to take heart, whatever that means, just to have her/his human rights recognised, to be affirmed as a person and to have a suitable recompense paid for the disadvantages inflicted by "society" in the course of shipwrecking her/him.

 As for footprints on the sands of time, well, we would be told there have been quite enough of those, thank you, in the form both of the culturally genocidal footprints of colonisers and imperialists the world over and the carbon sort we selfishly leave today. What we want today is fewer footprints, not the encouragement to leave more.

 If Longfellow were writing today he would be instructed, at the risk of losing an arts grant, to put some lines together not about our egotistically aspiring to make our own lives sublime, but exhorting us to devote our efforts to restoring to the planet the sublimity it had before all those "great men" came along and with their discoveries and inventions mucked it up.

Ho Ho Ho! Amusing but sadly very true.
I know,as a practitioner of the fine arts how 'politically correct' (insert neo-Marxist here) the art-world is and how confining the unwritten (but strictly enforced) 'rules' are.

Anyone confessing to an orthodox Christian worldview need not even apply.
All heterosexual white males from the age of 50 need to understand that they are the perpetrators of all the disgusting crimes visited upon all of the 'innocent' cultures (Avatar!), and are therefore not in a position to contribute, assess, judge or participate in any future 'cultural' activities...thank you very much!
"Off with their heads" cry the matriarchal queens.

When is too much enough. Rise up Gideon!

Rabbits beware

DOWN THE HOLE AND THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

We live in a world inundated with mad hatters, unreasonable queens and sycophantic assistants; such is the reality of our fallenness. However, despite all of our human frailties and weaknesses it is also a world that has borne fruit such as Mother Teresa, William Wilberforce and C S Lewis. If the Christian scriptures are to be believed, both the former as well as the latter are bearers of the Imago Dei as remarkable as such a claim might appear.  

There are more and more ‘intellectuals’ who would have us believe that this concept of the Imago Dei is not only wrong but a potentially dangerous ‘virus’ infecting the worldviews of many, and that this virus is the leading cause of the violence, madness and ‘specieism’ that is destroying ourselves and the natural world that we inhabit (it's only a matter of time before Christians are classified as mentally disturbed). According to the acolytes of this worldview we ought to approach life on the basis of equality with all living things and only by adopting that stance can we guarantee our existence and save Gaia. These are the same loons who argue that inter-specie' ‘sexual-relations’ are also acceptable as are assorted other madness’s.

A leading proponent of these notions of ‘equality’ and ‘anti-speciesism’’ is the Movie director James Cameron, and his powerful position as an imagination 'implanter' within popular culture makes his worldview of significant importance, particularly in how the concept might be ‘massaged’ into the mainstream consciousness.

In his hit movie ‘Avatar’ (a word that means a Hindu deity) the Na’vi live in trees, worship mother earth and like Gaians today talk of an energy that flows through all living things. They chant around a tree that whispers of their ancestors and they are unusually non sexist for a forest tribe but like the most fashionable of Hollywood stars hold Buddhist-like views of reincarnation and ‘life-energy’. These Na’vi also live a technology free life enjoying “the wealth all around us”, they are free of greed and competition, and live compassionately within a low emission paradise. The only menaces to their paradise are the almost uniformly sadistic 'humans'. Misanthropy on display? 

Nothing new in the basic concept,  Thomas More wrote of a similar paradise in 1516 calling it Utopia.

In perfect harmony with the acute blindness that seems to be part and parcel of the messianic preachers of the Anthropogenic Global Warming disorder, Cameron  depicts his creation scorning material possessions and living ‘close to nature’ while he himself lives in capitalistic overabundance and plain old fashioned greed. He creates a race who shuns technology whilst himself creating and benefiting from a technological marvel. He decries consumerism whilst stoking an advertising and marketing bonanza. The hypocrisy could fill (shrivel) pages and pages.

His entire philosophy is built on smoke and mirrors; but reflects the philosophy of the ‘populist worldview’ a worldview that many who inhabit our global society are attracted to and is in short, an unreflective and unexamined worldview.

An inconvenient truth

Miranda Devine hits the unfortunate nail on the head:

Judeo-Christian ethics underpinned our society and gave people a code of behaviour to live by.

But along with religion, we have been dispensing with manners and mores as if they are quaint and unnecessary in a modern connected world, when they probably have never been more needed.

As society becomes less harmonious we have had to invent all sorts of new laws to stop us irritating each other. They are the imperfect artificial replacement of social norms, which only heighten aggravation. And now all sorts of impolite and anti-social behaviour once forbidden by community consensus must be tolerated, from swearing in public and spitting to road rage and cheating.

We are witnessing the Boratisation of our culture, where decent people are deliberately offended and taken advantage of to enhance the social standing of their tormentors. In the movie Borat, a fictional journalist from Kazakhstan travels around America being rude and making fun of real people. He pulls such pranks as defecating in plastic bags and pretending it is the custom in his country so that his hosts seem ridiculous when they are courteous in return.

The movie’s contemptible schtick was to exploit the politeness and hospitality of Americans and show them up as gullible rubes. It divides the world between the cool insiders who are in on the joke and the excluded idiots who aren’t.

The movie was hailed a great hit but it was peppered with lawsuits by people who felt humiliated. Once we understood that to humiliate and shame those in a less powerful position was bullying behaviour. Now it is just harmless fun.

After all, the whole point of a radio prank call is to hold up to ridicule people who are trusting or gullible, exploiting good will for a cheap laugh, corroding the bonds of trust and friendship in society.

In our rush to free ourselves of the constrictions of morality, we have created a society increasingly overrun by laws and regulations, less free than ever, and certainly less gentle.    (this truth illustrates the paradox in 2 Peter 2:19) 
 

You don't have to think of yourself as a grumpy old man (or women) to notice that the level of manners/discipline/civility and/or common decency within the public at large has deteriorated significantly. Sure there are still good 'kids' and decent adults in the community, lots of them, but in general I do not think that it is being to pessimistic to notice the general decline in culture.

Perhaps those who desire the church to return to a 1st century dynamic are about to have their wishes granted.

Is the end nigh?

I am aware that the New Testament has awarded first place to those who believe in Jesus as the Way the Truth and the Life, but having said that I do not for one moment believe that God has abandoned his first family, the Jewish people (Ephesians 3:6). In fact I believe that the Genesis curse (Gen 12:4) still applies.

Therefore it is with a heavy heart that I read of the Judeo-phobia that has broken out in the West because of the stranglehold that the left-leaning (read: Neo-Marxist): main-stream-media types, Hollywood-ites, craven politicians and most education 'authorities' exercise, on reporting what they deem as 'news' and of the propaganda they promote as 'education'.

I abhor the vehicle for smut and degradation that the net has become, but I welcome its 'democratisation' of the news. At least there is a semblance of different perspectives regarding world events being broadcast through the WWW.

Interestingly this is also under attack by government's who do not want the truth of their deceptions and graft to become widely known. Why are we surprised when countries like Russia, China and North Korea are a the forefront of policing the web efforts. What is truly shocking are the Western countries who are lining up to support these moves. Western countries who now seem to be firmly in the hands of left-wing (and surprisingly incompetent) ideologues.

Note well the atrocities taking place in Edinburough at the higher 'seats of learning' that these days are little more than hotbeds for Islamic radicalisation:
http://melaniephillips.com/jewish-students-running-gauntlet-of-hate-welcome-to-21st-century-britain

These are so many instances of similar experiences that I cannot even attempt to list them all.

I am sure that generations past have imagined their days to be the last ones, and I could imagine that during the second World War many would have had far more reason to think so that we do now. But I cannot help think of how so many revelatory 'signs' seem to be coming together for these to be near, if not at, the end.
I am certainly praying more earnestly for those I know and love to make a commitment now.

Be of good cheer, tis the season to be jolly.

The hard truth of this world is that reason really matters very little.

Yes our post-modern society has set up a paradigm where perception counts for more than truth, but I think the problem is much more simple than that. There is a god who rules this world and he has blinded minds (2 Corinthians 4:4).

Truth and facts matter very little to those who believe fanatically. One only has to think of the Islamicists amongst us. Of course many religious fanatics of all persuasions would fall into this category as well, including those of the no-fixed-religion type such as; environmentalists, human rights campaigners, animal right activists and misanthropes in general.

We can but keep our fingers in the dyke to enable as many as possible to be saved from drowing in this cesspool we call the world.

And now on a lighter, more economical note a message from another doomsayer:
 

A book that could have booted Obama from office was all but ignored. It shouldn't be any longer

By Thomas Sowell 

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | If everyone in America had read Stephen Moore's new book, "Who's The Fairest of Them All?", Barack Obama would have lost the election in a landslide. (Buy the book for 39% off the cover price by clicking here or in KINDLE at a 44% discount, $12.04 by clicking here)

The point here is not to say, "Where was Stephen Moore when we needed him?" A more apt question might be, "Where was the whole economics profession when we needed them?" Where were the media? For that matter, where were the Republicans?

Since "Who's The Fairest of Them All?" was published in October, there was little chance that it would affect this year's election. But this little gem of a book exposes, in plain language and with easily understood facts, the whole house of cards of assumptions, fallacies and falsehoods which constitute the liberal vision of the economy.

Yet that vision triumphed on election day, thanks to misinformation that was artfully presented and seldom challenged. The title "Who's The Fairest of Them All?" is an obvious response to liberals' claim that their policies are aimed at creating "fairness" by, among other things, making sure that "the rich" pay their "fair share" of taxes. If you want a brief but thorough education on that, just read chapter 4, which by itself is well worth the price of the book.

A couple of graphs on pages 104 and 108 are enough to annihilate the argument about "tax cuts for the rich." These graphs show that, under both Republican President Calvin Coolidge and Democratic President John F. Kennedy, high-income people paid more tax revenues into the federal treasury after tax rates went down than they did before.

 There is nothing mysterious about this. At high tax rates, vast sums of money disappear into tax shelters at home or is shipped overseas. At lower tax rates, that money comes out of hiding and goes into the American economy, creating jobs, rising output and rising incomes. Under these conditions, higher tax revenues can be collected by the government, even though tax rates are lower. Indeed, high income people not only end up paying more taxes, but a higher share of all taxes, under these conditions.

This is not just a theory. It is what hard evidence shows happened under both Democratic and Republican administrations, from the days of Calvin Coolidge to John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. That hard evidence is presented in clear and unmistakable terms in "Who's The Fairest of Us All?"

Another surprising fact brought out in this book is that the Democrats and Republicans both took positions during the Kennedy administration that were the direct opposite of the positions they take today. As Stephen Moore points out, "the Republicans almost universally opposed and the Democrats almost universally favored" the cuts in tax rates that President Kennedy proposed.

Such Republican Senate stalwarts as Barry Goldwater and Bob Dole voted against reducing the top tax rate from 91% to 70%. Democratic Congressman Wilbur Mills led the charge for lower tax rates.

Unlike the Republicans today, John F. Kennedy had an answer when critics tried to portray his tax cut proposal as just a "tax cut for the rich." President Kennedy argued that it was a tax cut for the economy, that changed incentives meant a faster growing economy and that "A rising tide lifts all boats."

If Republicans today cannot seem to come up with their own answer when critics cry out "tax cuts for the rich," maybe they can just go back and read John F. Kennedy's answer.

A truly optimistic person might even hope that media pundits would go back and check out the facts before arguing as if the only way to reduce the deficit is to raise tax rates on "the rich."

If they are afraid that they would be stigmatized as conservatives if they favored cuts in tax rates, they might take heart from the fact that not only John F. Kennedy, but even John Maynard Keynes as well, argued that cutting tax rates could increase tax revenues and thereby help reduce the deficit.

Because so few people bother to check the facts, Barack Obama can get away with statements about how "tax cuts for the rich" have "cost" the government money that now needs to be recouped. Such statements not only promote class warfare, to Obama's benefit on election day, they also distract attention from his own runaway spending behind unprecedented trillion dollar deficits.

Ignore History = repeated mistakes.

Whilst the frappacino fruitloops flap their limp wrists about regarding the next centuries 2 degree heat 'crisis' (a belief without evidence or credence) a real calamity is already upon Europe and is growing like a virus in Australia. Note what that prescient British 'bulldog' said more than a hundred years ago:

Sir Winston Churchill in his book The River War (1899)

"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.

The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.

A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity.

The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.

No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome."

Hey big spender...

An interesting take from Selwyn Duke on the difference between a conservative thinker and a 'progressive' (think labor in the UK and Aus, Liberal in the USA) and the sad reality that these 'progressives' are always big spenders; of other peoples money that is!
 

Hey, idiots, they're not going to stop spending. Capisce?

Yes, I screamed that. How do I know they won't stop? Ooh, maybe because they haven't stopped for 50 years? Maybe because the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior? It's also because a liberal is a liberal is a liberal. A scorpion stings, a cuttlefish expels ink, a skunk sprays mercaptan fluid, and a liberal spends. It's what the species does.

Many conservatives don't grasp this, however. They make a common mistake: they assume that others think as they do. They're largely rational, so they expect rational behavior from their fellow man. But as I explained recently, emotion prevails in people's decision-making far more than you may think. What feels right often trumps what is right, even when the former is downright stupid.

Absurd Greenalism

I am well aware that as a practising Christian HATE is a dirty four letter word and we are to avoid this emotion assiduously. However I am really beginning to hate the false religion masquerading as environmentalism a.k.a. Green.
Therefore I thought that printing this blog entry in its entirety serves as the perfect example of  the absurdity that is greenalism:

GREEN CONSEQUENCES

Tim Blair         Monday, December, 03, 2012, (10:06am)

New South Wales has a long tradition of exporting trash to Queensland. This is generally referred to as Schoolies Week.

But we also export actual garbage. Huge reeking truckloads of it, hauled for hundreds of kilometres along highways by diesel-burning semis before being deposited in Queensland garbage dumps.
Naturally, this environmentally-harmful circumstance came about due to a desire to improve the environment. The NSW Waste and Environment Levy was introduced during the 1990s, requiring waste facilities to pay for the garbage unloaded at their sites. “The levy aims to reduce the amount of waste being disposed of and promote recycling and resource recovery,” the government’s website reports.

Problem is, the levy keeps going up. It’s now reached a point where recycling and resource recovery are giving way to elemental market forces. “The government here has created a waste levy of $95.20 per tonne,” Tony Khoury, executive director of the Waste Contractors and Recyclers Association of NSW, told the ABC last week. “It’s increasing by $10 plus CPI every year.” And Queensland, which imposes no waste levy, suddenly becomes an option.

“When the waste levy in Sydney was $70 per tonne, there was no talk of waste going to Queensland,” Khoury continued. “When the levy was $82.20 per tonne, there was talk of waste to Queensland.
“At $95 per tonne, the trucks are on the road.”
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And thus we have the latest case of environmental do-goodery leading to both greater costs for consumers and no environmental benefit. This is an almost universal outcome for any environmental initiative. Consider Labor’s carbon dioxide tax, which was supposed to change Australian buying habits. “There will be price impacts,” Prime Minister Julia Gillard promised in 2011. “The whole point of pricing carbon is to say that goods that have got a lot of carbon pollution in them get relatively more expensive.”

Now the government is gloating that the impact of the carbon tax is sufficiently concealed so as to have no impact on consumer behaviour. What with a welter of wealth-shifting compensation arrangements, the “whole point”, as the Prime Minister put it, has been missed.

Similar examples abound. Solar power sounds just dandy, until you strip away government rebates. There’s also the matter of where most solar panels are manufactured. China’s environmental record with photovoltaic cells is remarkably anti-environmental. Last year villagers in Zhejiang stormed a solar panel maker accused of dumping toxins in a local river. Local solar fans have the blood of innocent fishes on their hands.

Wind turbines are great for … well, I’m not sure they’re great for anything, unless you enjoy turning birds into mince ‘n’ feathers. Or setting fire to bushland, as sometimes happens when these pointless turbines ignite.

Battery-assisted hybrid cars offer marginal fuel economy advantages, but this is offset by complexity of manufacture and eventual disposal. And the greater purchase cost, which basically erases all of your fuel economy benefits. It’s much cheaper to buy a used V8.
The introduction of bike lanes in Woolloomooloo sure helped the environment. Too bad they were built so wide that they stopped buses from using Bourke st.

Remember the Port Kembla sea-power experiment that scored nearly $3 million in federal funding? It sank after just two months, causing a 45-minute power outage as it gurgled towards the ocean floor.
South Australia’s ban on sales-point plastic bags led to a boost in purchases of plastic bin liners. The same thing happened when Canberra banned plastic bags. Also, Canberra shoppers began driving to nearby Queanbeyan, where no ban applied.

Nobody is immune from the tyranny of unintended green consequences. The faith’s leader, former US vice president Al Gore, went on a greening binge a few years ago after investigators discovered that his Nashville mansion was a massive energy gobbler. But, as the Beacon Center of Tennessee reported in 2008: “Despite adding solar panels, installing a geothermal system, replacing existing light bulbs with more efficient models, and overhauling the home’s windows and ductwork, Gore now consumes more electricity than before the green overhaul.”

Gore has always been a perfect symbol of the green movement: wealthy, bossy, impractically idealistic, hypocritical and utterly unaware of various economic realities. But now, thanks to NSW environmental regulations, he finally has a rival.

The next time someone pitches up some kind of clean-green planet-saving notion, simply imagine the likely outcome. History is your guide. Instead of ecological harmony, an accurate image of life under green law may be found as you drive along the Pacific Highway.

It’s a semi-trailer, blowing diesel smoke and loaded with garbage.

A Wolfe in Armani clothing

One of the reasons I keep my Tom Wolfe books on the shelf for repeated referrals:

Wolfe described his initial attempt to write the story as a cheap dismissal: “Don’t worry, these people are nothing.” He realized in California that he had been wrong. These people were something, and very influential within their own circles, which were far larger than anyone on the outside had hitherto noticed.

“Max Weber,” Wolfe tells me, “was the first to argue that social classes were dying everywhere—except, in his time, in England—and being replaced by what he called ‘status groups.’ ” The term improves in Wolfean English: “Southern California, I found, was a veritable paradise of statuspheres,” he wrote in 1968. Beyond the customizers and drag racers, there were surfers, cruisers, teenyboppers, beboppers, strippers, bikers, beats, heads, and, of course, hippies. Each sphere started off self-contained but increasingly encroached on, and influenced, the wider world.

“Practically every style recorded in art history is the result of the same thing—a lot of attention to form plus the money to make monuments to it,” Wolfe wrote in the introduction to his first book. “But throughout history, everywhere this kind of thing took place, China, Egypt, France under the Bourbons, every place, it has been something the aristocracy was responsible for. What has happened in the United States since World War II, however, has broken that pattern. The war created money. It made massive infusions of money into every level of society. Suddenly classes of people whose styles of life had been practically invisible had the money to build monuments to their own styles.” If Wolfe’s oeuvre has an overarching theme, this is it.

One of the 20th century's most perspicacious minds.

 

Hamas hubris

To those who believe that Hamas (the terrorist organisation) is merely another voice in the middle east muddle, take note of the public pronouncements by this organisation.

...most of the media coverage of the war was based on the noxious premise that there was a moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas, regardless of the fact that the latter is a proscribed terrorist organisation which seeks to achieve the extermination of Israel and every Jew.

This is what the Hamas put up on the screen during a music video last week on its al Aqsa TV station:

‘Killing Jews is worship that draws us close to Allah’.

Lyrics of songs on this video included these little ditties:

‘[Oh] lovers of the trigger: Killing the occupiers [Israelis] is worship that Allah made into law...’‘Brigades - we kidnap soldiers, Brigades - we kill Jews’            and

‘Repeat in the name of your Jihad: Death to Israel.
 

I would also recommend to all Christians to read the book Son of Hamas by Mosab Hassan Yousef...it is instructive.

Sargent Gilly

I know nuffing!

The cultural War of the Worlds!

Let us now agree to put aside politik-speak and start calling a spade a spade:

For what it illuminates is nothing less than our ongoing culture war, in which political correctness — which should really be called cultural Marxism — is being used by the Left to revolutionise society by undermining and subverting its core beliefs.

So, fundamental values embodied in issues such as immigration, national identity, marriage and family and many others are under systematic assault, while all who seek to defend them are vilified as bigots, swivel-eyed extremists and lunatics.

This has not been achieved by any one organisation imbued with mythical and conspiratorial powers. It has occurred over decades as a result of two main factors.

The first was the steady rise into power, across the universities, media, professions, political parties and civil service, of those whose opinions were shaped in the Sixties and Seventies by the New Left, which believed in the cultural transformation of society

This 'New Left' as Melanie Phillips describes them are, I believe, in equal parts a manifestation of Nietzsche's 'will to power' married to the neo-Marxist ideology of Antonio Gramsci.

Power is achieved by the 'long march through the institutions', where Western society is not conquered by physical revolution but by infiltrating and subverting the 'organs of education and culture' i.e. the Churches, schools, Universities, carriers of 'popular culture' (TV, Movies, documentaries etc) and most importantly the main-stream-media.

I make particular note of the infiltration of Churches and look with suspicion on ideologically driven philosophies such as; liberation theology, the 'social' gospel and seeker sensitive 'churches' to name but a few. The notable attack on approaching the gospel with any hint of intellectual examination (not bilical by the way) found in the average western church has resulted in the body of Christ being infiltrated by ideologies that most do not even know exist. Note how Paul describes how the god of this world has blinded the minds of people. (2 Cor 4:4)

If we read church history and in particular the philosophical attacks that occurred on the churches during the first century and the calibre of Christian who stood against these attacks, it is easy to see how far short we have fallen in this new age, the age touted to have produced the most 'educated' of generations.

Honest to God!

From the mouth of a confused but endearingly honest unbeliever, the respected atheistic philosopher Thomas Nagel:

"I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear (of religion) myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning and design as fundamental features of the world."
 

He touches on a very common and perpetuating truth; most unbelievers do not want there to be a God. Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it is that it has been thought too difficult and not tried at all.

Welcome to the 'new' age!

To those who advocate calm in the Middle East, i.e. politik speak  for Israel to 'withdraw from the 'occupied' territory', consider this:

But led by the Islamists in Iran and their proxies, over recent years Israel’s enemies have chosen the tactic of terrorism rather than invasion to achieve their ends. On occasion, as in Lebanon in 1982, Israel has responded by strategically occupying land to prevent such attacks. Each time it has given up such land — as in Gaza in 2005 — its withdrawal has been met with terror, not peace. Over recent years more than 12,000 rockets have been fired on Israel from Gaza.In the background of all this is an Iranian regime which has as its repeatedly stated aim the eradication of the world’s only Jewish state. Among those stories lost during last week’s fighting is the IAEA’s discovery of a massive increase in centrifuge building at Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Like the Mullahs, the Brotherhood and other Islamists have very clear aims, and a very clear drive. Their brands of revolutionary politics are noticeable for two things in particular: fundamentalism and patience. While many groups — al-Qa’eda for instance — possess one of these traits, until now, few possessed both.
The overthrow of the dictators is recognised as one of the great stories of our time. And so it is. But the rise to power and consolidation of the Islamists is that story’s overlooked sequel. Today the complexities of the region look in danger of clarifying. Obviously this development matters very much to Israel. But anyone who thinks these forces are only a problem for Israel should reflect on the fact that — by their own unanimous admission — the Islamists only intend to be a problem for Israel first. (Douglas Murray, The Spectator.)

No amount of surrender from Israel or any other Western nation will satisfy the Jihadists now occupying the seats of power from Cairo to Tehran. They believe in a 'second coming', the Mahdi, a saviour and instigator of an 'Armageddon'. But the Islamists are not content to allow God to make it happen, they want to usher it in all on their own, thus they have no aversion to annihilating millions if need be. Note the end of the article where it says...Israel first.

Too true!

Is it humanly possible not to be impressed by the sheer erudition of the following passage:

Comparisons are odious, generalisations dangerous and stereotypes invidious, but without them conversation would be tedious and talk nothing but an endless regression of subordinate clauses, each qualifying what the previous one had asserted. It is cowardly and dishonest to refuse these means of arriving at truth, nor would we approach any nearer to truth were we to do so. Refusing to generalise is often a form of denial.
 

The author of this superb (and very true) piece of writing is Theodore Dalrymple a nom de plume of course, and as delicious as is his name, his writing is even better. A retired surgeon and psychiatrist; his insight into the human condition is acute, funny and disturbing. Perhaps he could even be considered prophetic in some of his observations. A writer well worth taking the trouble to read.

Personal archive

After a moment of introspection I believe that I am using this blog as a way of preserving titbits of information for my archives as much as it is a venue for me to express my dissatisfaction with events happening out there in realworldland. That said the following is a must include in documenting the last few years:
Read it and weep.

Adjournment Debate: Five Years of Labor Failures
Josh Frydenberg MP
26 November 2011

It was John Kenneth Galbraith who once said ‘Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.’

This may be all well and good for the politician who has committed the original sin but for the public who bear the brunt of that politician’s bad policy there is little forgiveness. And there is no worse government that what we have seen over the last five years, or 1,827 days, of the Rudd-Gillard government.
Let us recount just some of Labor’s greatest failures over the last five years. I am sure there are many to add but here it goes.
We have the carbon tax from a Prime Minister who said there would be no carbon tax under the government she led and a PM who promised a citizens assembly to generate a consensus and said she was from a party of ‘truth telling’.
The mining tax which was first announced with no industry consultation and then introduced with so much industry consultation it produced zero revenue.
The company tax cut which was never delivered and saw Labor members like the Minister for Small Business and the member for Deakin tell their constituents the day before the announcement saying the company tax would be delivered.
The Henry tax review report which sat in the Treasurer’s cupboard for six months before he released it, only to announce he was only going to accept one out of 138 recommendations—no surprise from a government that conducts itself by review, setting up more than 200 inquiries and reviews, the daddy of them all being the 2020 Summit.
Then there are the 2012-13 surplus that was a rolled-gold guarantee, then a commitment, then an objective, then a guiding principle, now an expectation that will never be delivered.
The four biggest budget deficits in Australia’s history.
A net debt of $147 billion with an interest bill of $20 million a day and a debt ceiling of $300 billion from a starting position of having $70 billion in the bank and a debt ceiling of only $75 billion.
An NBN which started at just over a $4 billion commitment, that had no cost-benefit analysis, the proposal for which was prepared by the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy on the back of an envelope, has now blown out to $50 billion and has more than 1,300 staff and only 7,000 customers.
A bungled Australia Network tender which led to a police investigation and the government being forced to make compensation payments.
There has been government waste on a grand scale, from the pink batts that led to hundreds of house fires to the overpriced school halls, the set top boxes that were cheaper at Gerry Harvey’s and the $70 million being spent on government advertising to sell a carbon tax no one wants.
The embarrassing, costly and public failures of the green loans, GroceryWatch, Fuel watch and clash for clunkers.

There is the introduction of more than 20,000 new or amended regulations with only 104 repealed, strangling small business in a sea of red tape and burdensome regulation.
The failure to protect our borders with more than 30,000 unauthorised arrivals and 500 boats with hundreds of lives tragically lost at sea, riots in our detention centres and a budget blowout of more than $6 billion, not to mention the farce of the East Timor solution the Timorese government did not want and the Malaysia solution the High Court would not allow.
The dramatic and dangerous cuts to defence spending which has fallen to the lowest level since 1938.
And the misdirection of our aid spending that has seen Australian taxpayers funding a statue in New York that commemorates the end of slavery in the Caribbean.
We also have the farce of the live cattle export issue which cost millions of dollars and thousands of jobs.
The dumbing down of our foreign policy by our Prime Minister, who would rather be sitting with a class of schoolkids than representing the country meeting fellow world leaders abroad; an Asia Pacific Community that never got off the ground but only damaged our relationships in the region; the leaking of a private telephone conversation with President Bush over the G20; calling the Chinese ‘rat somethings’; and the bypassing of a trusted partner in Japan on Mr Rudd’s first visit overseas. The current Foreign Minister Senator Carr has also launched into Papua New Guinea, calling for sanctions against them. If that is what a rehearsed kabuki actor behaves like, then save us all.
The list goes on: the backflip and embarrassment over the supertrawler; the copying by the Leader of the House of lines from The American President in a speech to the Press Club; a Treasurer who pretends he is Bruce Springsteen and then goes on to call Republicans in the United States ‘cranks and crazies’ to support his political base; a Prime Minister who belittles our parliament with a trumped up and false charge of misogyny only to then back the then Speaker Peter Slipper after the substance of some repugnant text messages became public, not to mention the Attorney-General giving Mr Slipper privileged access to the judges car park; and there was the Australia Day riot that had its origins in a confected anti-Abbott manoeuvre.
The list goes on and on.
The faceless men in the Labor Party removed Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister—now the Australian people want to have their say so let them have their say in an election tomorrow

The Harpies cry!

The tragic truth in this world of pro-death journalism is that facts matter little in the face of overt and manipulative emotionalism: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/irelands_abortion_furore

Wheeeeeeeeee!

Welcome to the cabaret my friends, the magical mystery tour.

Athens on the Potomac

by Peter Smith

November 13, 2012

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After Obama’s election win, the head of the major union umbrella body, Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO President, called for increased taxes on the rich, no cuts to entitlement programs, and a relaxed attitude to the budget deficit. In other words, welcome to Greece writ large.

---

Obviously, along with numbers of union bosses, he sees himself as a future commissar once the capitalist system has been destroyed. There can be no better illustration as to why the GOP should hold fast to its conservative economic principles, despite all the post-election blues and soul searching.
After all, what are these principles that so offend the sensibilities of the left. They are small government and individual self-reliance. They are designed to produce a more self-fulfilled, prosperous society, better able to help those in real need. These are principles worth prosecuting and defending.
The economic principles of the Democratic Party, and of the left more generally, are wrapped around big government dispensing largesse to increasing numbers of the population. This is regarded as a caring and empathetic response to disadvantage. But there is no end game. The whole rationale depends on government getting bigger and bigger. The effect is to undermine self-reliance and promote dependency. That is caring and empathetic only in the mind of would-be despots.
Moreover, dispensing largesse doesn’t pay the bills. To what extent do leading Democrats, and all those on the left, factor paying the bills into their worldview? I simply don’t know. I have never been able to pin them down

Musing on art

A thought: Perhaps we make art with too much emphasis on 'making art' rather than employing art as a means to express an idea, an emotion, a love, a hate, a passion or a fear, much like a musician uses a guitar or a poet uses words to express his desires.

I certainly have been guilty of this, perhaps I have always made 'art' rather than used it to express my own or even others emotions. Perhaps I need to follow Alice into the rabbits tunnel.

But to use art merely to express something is also not enough. If art is a method of communicating  ideas and emotions then it needs to take into account the understanding of those who receive it. And what if the communities concept of what 'art' is has not been achieved by the artists because that group has neglected the role of art as an expressor, or indeed even felt the need to communicate with the wider audience?
Does that mean that the wider communities 'artistic literacy' will have deteriorated?
Perhaps something that was never established cannot deteriorate!
Is there is a form out there that fulfils all the necessary criteria.

Thoughts from a tiny mind.

Unfortunately the Church today just does not equip the average believer to walk in the real world.

Lutzer reminds us that the Western church has largely fallen into the same trap that the German church had: a bifurcated church. Hitler told the church to just stick to their business, and leave the rest to him. We are hearing the exact same things today with many believers thinking their faith has no connection at all with the political, social and cultural world around them.

And various types of hate crimes laws, and vilification and discrimination legislation are reinforcing this. Increasingly the church is being told it cannot enter the public arena with its beliefs, but must simply remain silent in the public square. And many believers are foolishly going along with this. (Meuhlenberg 12.11.12)
 

The re-election of Obama is a classic illustration of this. Nowhere else in American history has a man more opposed to everything that made America great, i.e. its Judeo-Christian heritage, been able to pull the wool over evangelical Christians eyes. Yes he sometimes calls himself a Christian, so did Hitler at the very beginning of his tenure as 'Fuhrer'. Yet this mans history (Obama) and those who have discipled him his whole life are there for any person to research. How can an estimated 8 million 'evangelicals' still vote for such a man. It boggles my tiny little mind.

Dangerous!

I believe that this is an essential documentary to watch...go on, I dare you!
vimeo.com/52009124 You only have 25 days of free viewing available after that you have to buy it @  agendadocumentary.com/

Sobering

A sobering and insightful observance of where the church is at in today's society.
http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2012/11/09/weeping-in-babylon/
I am moved to self-examination and not impressed by what I discover. God help me in my weaknesses, what a wretch I am...thank God for the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus!

New friendships!

I have discovered a new (for me) philosopher, Pascal Bruckner, and he is interesting:

"One could cite such quotations forever, given the spread of apocalyptic literature. Authors, journalists, politicians and scientists compete in their portrayal of abomination and claim for themselves a hyperlucidity: They alone see the future clearly while others vegetate in the darkness.

The fear that these intellectuals spread is like a gluttonous enzyme that swallows up an anxiety, feeds on it, and then leaves it behind for new ones. When the Fukushima nuclear plant melted down after the enormous earthquake in Japan in March 2011, it only confirmed an existing anxiety that was looking for some content. In six months, some new concern will grip us: a pandemic, bird flu, the food supply, melting ice caps, cell-phone radiation.

The fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, with the press reporting, as though it were a surprise, that young people are haunted by the very concerns about global warming that the media continually broadcast. As in an echo chamber, opinion polls reflect the views promulgated by the media.

We are inoculated against anxiety by the repetition of the same themes, which become a narcotic we can't do without.
 

and..............

 In classical Judaism, the prophet sought to give new life to God's cause against kings and the powerful. In Christianity, millenarian movements embodied a hope for justice against a church wallowing in luxury and vice. But in a secular society, a prophet has no function other than indignation. So it happens that he becomes intoxicated with his own words and claims a legitimacy with no basis, calling down the destruction that he pretends to warn against.

You'll get what you've got coming! That is the death wish that our misanthropes address to us. These are not great souls who alert us to troubles but tiny minds who wish us suffering if we have the presumption to refuse to listen to them. Catastrophe is not their fear but their joy. It is a short distance from lucidity to bitterness, from prediction to anathema.

Another result of the doomsayers' certainty is that their preaching, by inoculating us against the poison of terror, brings about petrification. The trembling that they want to inculcate falls flat. Anxiety has the last word. We were supposed to be alerted; instead, we are disarmed. This may even be the goal of the noisy panic: to dazzle us in order to make us docile. Instead of encouraging resistance, it propagates discouragement and despair. The ideology of catastrophe becomes an instrument of political and philosophical resignation.

Mr. Bruckner is a French writer and philosopher whose latest book is "The Paradox of Love" (Princeton University Press, 2012). This article, translated by Alexis Cornel, is excerpted from the Spring 2012 issue of City Journal

Vote responsibly.

I realize that my voice in these elections is tiny, but I will do what I can if it means that the inevitable collapse of America is delayed. If for no other reason than the collapse of the worlds' most prominent democracy will lead to the more rapid disintegration of western societies around the globe, and though I hold no fear of my future I do wish at least some future for my children.

I hold  therefore to what bill Meuhlenberg has to say in this excerpt:

“I would hope that all who love the Scriptures would agree that we should not vote for President Obama. There are compelling reasons why a Christian should be distressed with the current administration. The President’s unqualified support of abortion goes beyond anything we saw from previous Democratic leaders like President Clinton. His public endorsement of same-sex marriage is well known. His fiscal policy has launched the federal government into reckless spending which runs up our deficit at a rate of more than a trillion dollars per year—that is, more than $3250 of additional debt per year for every one of our 312 million people. At present, our government is in debt more than $51,000 for every person living in our nation. People have documented his socialist agenda for the government to use its coercive power to steal wealth from some in order to redistribute it to others as its officials see fit.”

He then deals with the usual objections to voting in the only man who can stop Obama. What about Mormonism? “It is outside the bounds of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It adds other writings and so-called prophecies to Scripture as the Word of God. However, we are not electing a pastor. We are electing the President of the United States. We do not live in a political system where the head of state leads the established religion of the nation. We live in a system of religious liberty where our Constitution says no religious test must be passed by a candidate for public office.

“Christians can in good conscience support the political office of non-Christians. If godly Daniel was able to serve in the administration of the pagan king Nebuchadnezzar, then godly believers can support a President who is not a believer in the God of the Bible. The President’s job is not to teach sound doctrine, but to punish wrongdoers and to protect good citizens (Rom. 13:3–4), as the head of the executive branch of the government. To vote for Mitt Romney is not to endorse his views of religion, but to support him politically.

“I might also point out here that as far as I can see in Mr. Romney’s past political record, at no point has he promoted his Mormon views upon the people he has served. I cannot find a single instance where he has tried to impose unsound Mormon theology on those whom he has governed.”

After looking at other objections, he concludes, “Your vote is precious. Please do not throw it away when you could use it to defend our children against a future of abortion, sexual perversion, socialism, crushing debt, and tyranny.

Addiction anonymous

Well put Steven Kates:

In miniature, this captures the problem of the right in dealing with the left. The right has a vision of how a world can be best constructed by leaving each of us the freedom and opportunity to find our own way. It is always an adventure and nothing can be guaranteed, but there are satisfactions in being allowed to build our own lives ourselves and in our own way. But it comes with fewer forms of open-ended government support.

BY contrast, the left is filled with plans for what it will do for us: for “the poor”, “the disadvantaged”, for women, migrants, Aboriginals, or whoever can be transformed into a victim group and induced to become dependent on government programs, grants and handouts. Socialism is a drug of dependence. It is a narcotic addiction very hard to break.

The US election will be a test of the America's will to break free of this addiction. We will have our own opportunity to do the same sometime in the following twelve months.
 

I pray for the power to help break this addiction off Australia.

Sesquipedalianism!

This is a passage taken from a description of an artists inspiration for a new body of work:

This project, while it is more physically engaged, follows on from MacKenny’s on-going interest in examining the intersection of different visual conventions (illusionism and flatness occupying the same frame), and the conflation of potentially oppositional vocabularies which provide a locus for exploring perception within a worldview that is personal yet contextually aware. Her works investigate ‘solastalgia’ – a term coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe the effects of global warming on the mental states of Australians. The combination of solacium (comfort) and algia (pain) infers an emotional disquiet that results from nostalgia firmly rooted in the now. The pain of nostalgia comes from taking comfort in the things that have given one pleasure in the past, but realising that those things are no longer. Solastalgia, however, indicates a present that is becoming a past before one’s very eyes; the environment, which we imbue with so much meaning, is disappearing as we watch it.
 

The artist is an old friend and a once mentor and teacher of mine. I have always been inspired by her abilities as a painter and it pains me to witness such a talent in the service of such a farce. The pretensions in this verse reflect the disease that has gripped many segments of Western society not only the arts. The essay in its entirety is an explanation of what the exhibition is about as well as what has motivated the artist to make the works in it.

Art today must have a rationale, it is no longer acceptable just to make art because you feel like creating something. Today we must be motivated by something bigger, more 'universal' (the Quixotic quest) something of a 'religious' nature. In the pursuit of a questionable freedom, Western intellectuals have turned from a reasonable faith; Christianity (which they insist is irrational) to an 'upper-storey' (unreasoned and truly irrational) faith; namely Gaia.

Tom Wolfe writes about the literary arts thus:

"It is at this point that poetry, if it is to be considered serious, becomes difficult. The serious poet begins to make his work hard to understand in order to show that he is elevating himself above the rabble, which is now known of course, as the bourgeoisie. He is writing for what the French critic Catulle Mendes referred to as 'a charming aristocracy," "an elite in this age of democracy." There was something vulgar and common about harping on 'meaning.'"

In the visual arts you find millions upon millions (ad nauseaum) of words trundled out in support of the new(old)age neo-paganistic cult of Gaia (It was classified a cult in the 1st Century!). And the words visual artists embrace to explain their art and motivations are like those the Wolfe poet above uses; esoteric in nature and arranged in ways intended to confuse the non-initiate (bourgeoisie). The fact that such language tends to confuse the wannabe initiate (often even the initiates are baffled) is besides the point, the myth of the Emperors clothes is alive and thriving in the 'world of art'. The pretensions behind such buffoonery are almost amusing if they were not so tragic in their consequences.

Lord: May those who truly seek find true truth.

Cooling it!

This technique as discussed by Thomas Sowell sounds hauntingly familiar to Australian followers of political news:

Confidence men know that their victim — "the mark" as he has been called — is eventually going to realize that he has been cheated. But it makes a big difference whether he realizes it immediately, and goes to the police, or realizes it after the confidence man is long gone.

So part of the confidence racket is creating a period of uncertainty, during which the victim is not yet sure of what is happening. This delaying process has been called "cooling out the mark."

The same principle applies in politics. When the accusations that led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton first surfaced, he flatly denied them all. Then, as the months passed, the truth came out — but slowly, bit by bit. One of Clinton's own White House aides later called it "telling the truth slowly."

By the time the whole truth came out, it was called "old news," and the clever phrase now was that we should "move on."

It was a successful "cooling out" of the public, keeping them in uncertainty so long that, by the time the whole truth came out, there was no longer the same outrage as if the truth had suddenly come out all at once. Without the support of an outraged public, the impeachment of President Clinton fizzled out in the Senate.

Manipulation

I have always tried to instill a healthy skepticism into my children, myself and my friends regarding the claims of Hollywood that the latest movie blockbuster is based on 'history'. I have not always been successful because the power of celluloid is mighty.

Consider what Francis Schaeffer said more than 40 years ago:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A place for Hollow people.

For any who might be enthralled by that hollow.org that is the United Nations...read this and weep!
http://freedomwatch.ipa.org.au/free-speech-is-a-gift-from-the-united-nations/

Homeschooling; A subversive activity!

Homeschooling, particularly by Christian parents is beings viewed as a subversive activity in Europe at the moment. It has come under fire in America as well and who knows how much time before the same laws are applied in Australia. The Greens and large sections of the far left in Labor currently seek to change the laws on homeschooling and religious schools funding, that is they want to abolish them and force children to attend public schools where the government sets the agenda.

Swedish authorities forcibly removed Domenic from his parents in June 2009 from a plane they had boarded to move to Annie’s home country of India. The officials did not have a warrant nor did they charge the Johanssons with any crime. The officials seized the child because he was home-schooled, even though home schooling was legal in Sweden at the time he was taken into custody.

“The government shouldn’t abduct and imprison children simply because it doesn’t like home schooling,” said Alliance Defense Fund legal counsel Roger Kiska. “We encourage Swedish authorities to release Domenic to his parents in light of the court’s ruling, and we hope the European Court of Human Rights will reconsider its recent rejection of Domenic’s case in light of the Swedish court’s determination. This family’s human rights have been unimaginably violated.”

In December 2009, a Swedish court ruled in Johansson v. Gotland Social Services that the government was within its rights to seize the child. ADF and HSLDA attorneys filed a lawsuit, Johansson v. Sweden, with the European Court of Human Rights in June 2010 over the matter.

And in Germany.................
BRUSSELS, September 27, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The European Court of Human Rights gave another setback to German homeschoolers by affirming that the interests of the State trump the rights of parents to educate their children. Yesterday, the Court denied a request from the parents of Joshua and Rebekka Konrad to rule Germany’s ban on homeschooling violates their human rights as parents to educate their own children under the European Convention on Human Rights.
Fritz and Marianna Konrad filed the human rights complaint in November 2003 on behalf of their children arguing that Germany’s compulsory school attendance severely endangers their children’s religious upbringing, and promotes teaching inconsistent with their Christian faith, especially the State’s mandate of sexual education.
The Konrads had appealed under Article 2 of Protocol No. 1 of the Convention which states, “No person shall be denied the right to education. In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching is in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.”
However, the Court decided in favor of Germany, stating that “Parents may not refuse the right to education of a child on the basis of their convictions” and adding that the right to education in Article 2 “by its very nature calls for regulation by the State.
 

These German parents had to flee the country to avoid their children being forcibly removed from the family and put into state care. Wow!

In South Africa we were aware that we broke the law by allowing Black friends to sleep over at our house even and by having black firnds, but never in our wildest dreams would we have thought that  we being subversive by teaching our children to love God...how the world changes.