Original Green

It is interesting to read about the origins of the anti-Semitic and misanthropic attitudes that seem to permeate the thinking of many 'Green' obsessed Utopianists.
http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2012/7-8/the-roots-of-green-politics-in-german-romanticism

Batman slays the dragon

I would hazard a guess that Frank Miller, author of Batman: Dark Knight Rises, doesn't think too highly of the 'Occupy movement':

“Occupy” is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness. These clowns can do nothing but harm America.

“Occupy” is nothing short of a clumsy, poorly-expressed attempt at anarchy, to the extent that the “movement”  HAH! Some “movement”, except if the word “bowel” is attached - is anything more than an ugly fashion statement by a bunch of iPhone, iPad wielding spoiled brats who should stop getting in the way of working people and find jobs for themselves.

This is no popular uprising. This is garbage. And goodness knows they’re spewing their garbage “ both politically and physically “ every which way they can find.

Wake up, pond scum. America is at war against a ruthless enemy.

Go Frank!

To write or not to write?

Postman postulates on the effects of technology on the human mind. He quotes philosophers who questioned these issues more than 2500 years ago. I wonder whether the ignoramuses of modern education are even capable of reflecting on the potential pitfalls associated with making information
(take note: not knowledge!) so readily accessible.

In his collection of essays Technopoly Neil Postman demonstrates the argument against the use of writing through an excerpt from Plato's work Phaedrus (Postman, Neil (1992) Technopoly, Vintage, New York, pp 73). In this excerpt the scholar Socrates recounts the story of Thamus, the Egyptian king and Theuth the inventor of the written word. In this story, Theuth presents his new invention "writing" to King Thamus, telling Thamus that his new invention "will improve both the wisdom and memory of the Egyptians" (Postman, Neil (1992) Technopoly, Vintage, New York, pp 74). King Thamus is skeptical of this new invention and rejects it as a tool of recollection rather than retained knowledge. He argues that the written word will infect the Egyptian people with fake knowledge as they will be able to attain facts and stories from an external source and will no longer be forced to mentally retain large quantities of knowledge themselves.

Whilst this is not an argument against writing and therefore not against the irrevocable march of technological 'progress', nevertheless it is a warning against those who would champion each new development without guarding against its corollary influences.

Empty shells

This is Piers Ackerman at his descriptive best and talking about the open cesspool that is called (ironically) the Kings Cross. 

Those who come to gawk at the hookers or engage in ritual drunkenness are products of an education system that was debased by the Whitlam era libertarianism and is now firmly in the hands of ideologues who were taught by the Whitlamesque purveyors of hollow philosophies like moral relativism. Good manners and civility are sneered at. Empty-headed clothes horses and knuckle-headed sports figures are paraded as role models and fashions aren’t based on the aspirational, they are derived from the institutional.

Pour a morally rootless crowd into a 300m sliver of real estate bounded roughly by Bayswater Rd, Kellett St and Darlinghurst Rd, let them mass around the El Alamein fountain when they’re as full as state school buses and violence becomes a certainty.

In this hollow culture the added ingredients of booze and pyscho-stimulants are as volatile as nitro-glycerine. A glance is enough to spark an explosive outburst with lethal consequences.

 He nails the underlying worldview issues that are beginning to emerge as a cancer on our society  and are also shapers of the world to come. It is really quite depressing, particularly (I imagine) if you don't have a transcendent faith.
His mention of the 'hollow culture' resonates with me because one of my favourite poems of all time is the 'Hollow Men' by TS Eliot:

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats' feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom

Remember us - if at all - not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men. This is progress then in the Gillard era. We have moved from individually being 'hollow men' into the collective, that is into becoming a 'hollow culture'.

Lord of technology

What an encouraging initiative. http://www.mercatornet.com/sheila_liaugminas/view/10989

This type of creative thinking in spreading the gospel and in serving the needs of others whilst doing so brings a spring back into my step.
Thank the good Lord that people like this are more plentiful than we or our secular 'leaders' acknowledge.

Mealy-mouthed liars.

Dang, this fellow tells it like it is-no holds barred. Away with the PC nonsense lets call a spade a spade.
I like it.
Pity there are not more like this in politics, life and church leadership. Sometimes our 'gatekeepers' try to be 'nicer' than Jesus...trying to accommodate the world.
http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2012/07/25/more-apostate-wolves/

Mr face-both-ways (Janus)

The statement by Barack Obama about Islam being a 'part of the fabric of America' reflects his aim to fundamentally transform American society. He is without doubt the most destructive president America has ever had and I find it difficult to believe that Christians could even think about voting for this deluded 'man'(?).
Read this for a theological perspective on his thinking: http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2012/07/22/welcome-to-the-islamic-states-of-america/

Knee-jerk, anti-gun reaction!

I believe that this link http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2012/07/21/on-the-colorado-killings/
provides a well argued perspective on the terrible shootings in Colorado.
Well worth the read.

Phillistines

The last paragraph of this short article is the most thought provoking.

Imams of Islam and the Environment

by Victor Davis Hanson

Ideology and affluence make it possible to ignore history — and destroy its monuments.

In the Arabic media, there are reports that Muslim clerics — energized by the sudden emergence of Egypt’s new president, Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood — are agitating to demolish the Egyptian pyramids. According to the imams, the pharaohs’ monuments represent “symbols of paganism” from Egypt’s pre-Islamic past and therefore must vanish.

Don’t dismiss such insanity too easily. Islamists in Mali are currently destroying the centuries-old mausoleums of Sufi Muslim saints in the city of Timbuktu, the historic site of early Islamic scholarship and jurisprudence. But perhaps the most regrettable recent Islamist attack on the past was the Taliban’s 2001 dynamiting and shelling of the huge twin sixth-century statues of Buddha carved into a cliff at Bamiyan in Afghanistan. “We are destroying the statues,” Taliban spokesmen at the time bragged, “in accordance with Islamic law, and it is purely a religious issue.”

Ideologically driven and historically ignorant violence is not an Islamist monopoly. Sometimes postmodern, politically correct Westerners can be every bit as zealous — and as potentially destructive of the past — as premodern Islamists.

A balanced 'green' argument

I have not read this book but I intend to do so based on the following review. 

I have been searching for an argument that looks at the earths ecology from a balanced and nuanced perspective rather than the banshee apocalyptic howling we are all too frequently assaulted with from the neurotic tree-hugging fraternity.

Perhaps this review will do the same for you.

Green Philosophy

Roger Scruton suggests how to think seriously about planet Earth.

 Too often the debate about climate change, global warming or ecological concerns in general has descended into acrimony and opposing factions. Thus those on the Left, who insist that drastic, global measures must be enacted to save the planet, are attacked by those who query the scientific basis for such attitudes and who point out that “ecology” has become a fashionable new religious crusade to replace the conventional orthodoxies. For someone caught in between these two extremes, it is hard to know whom to believe or what to think.

 

Here at last is a book that sheds some real light on what is at stake and how to be effective in what we decide to do. Roger Scruton is a philosopher and his book is a beautiful demonstration of philosophical training in how to think clearly. To those who might be tempted to think of philosophy as an abstract discipline with little bearing on “real life”, his book is a refutation; indeed, Scruton demonstrates with eloquence as well as elegance that it is only by clarity of thought that we can come to sensible and realistic conclusions. Not to listen to reasoned argument is to be at the mercy of demagogues and their apocalyptic warnings – and the issue of climate change has attracted its fair share of these.

Scruton is a conservative (with a small “c”). Since the last war there has been a general drift to the Left on the part of the intelligentsia, so that it has become harder to argue for conservative values without being condemned as “Right-wing” and therefore blinkered, old-fashioned and possibly racist. In the UK, where, for instance, the great national institution of the BBC has been hijacked by Left-leaning secularists, the voice of conservatism hardly gets a hearing. Modern generations, influenced by the enormous power of the media, are hardly aware that for centuries conservatism was an entirely respectable intellectual position. Here Scruton provides a courageous and intelligent argument for it.
As with his other books, he takes his inspiration from the eighteenth century political writer, Edmund Burke. (Incidentally, it was Burke who wrote that oft-quoted axiom, “Evil flourishes when good men do nothing”). For Burke, as for Scruton, society is an association of the dead, our forefathers, to whom we should show respect and piety; the living, the “little platoons” of organic local communities in which people flourish best; and the unborn, our descendants, to whom we have obligations as they will inherit the planet as we leave it to them. He comments that “conservatism means nothing as a political idea if it does not support and amplify the reach of these three ideas, since they form the primary motives on which enduring societies are built.”

Scruton’s definition of conservatism implies “oikophilia”, a word he has coined and used before, which he defines as meaning “love of home”, the hearth or the household. He argues strongly that environments are best maintained where this “oikophilia” is strong, as in the Scandinavian countries and in the English-speaking world. They are most neglected and degraded where this “oikophilia” has been deliberately destroyed, as under totalitarian systems such as Communism. As the author points out, twentieth century systems of revolutionary socialism have caused vast pollution to the environment – precisely because they have trampled over or “re-settled” the small local societies that know and love their locality best.

In his preface he sets out his position, transparently at odds with what one might call the “Al Gore” stance of hectoring the global community with a nightmare scenario of imminent natural disaster. “I defend local initiatives against global schemes, civil associations against political activism and small-scale institutions of friendship against large-scale and purpose-driven campaigns.” Scruton think it a paradox that environmental issues are now dominated by Left-wing voices, when in the past it has been conservatives who have protected the landscape from the folly of anonymous planners. This, he argues, is what “responsible stewardship” means; responsibility for and attachment to a particular territory and the corresponding desire to protect that territory from erosion and waste; to conserve and preserve it.

Critics might argue here that such an outlook takes no account of national (or international) need, such as the demand for housing because of population migration and immigration, and that it can lead to a purely selfish “nimbyism” – a “not in my back yard” refusal ever to countenance change that might interfere with one’s individual lifestyle. There will always be a necessary tension between governmental policies looking at society as a whole and local communities and organisations who want to resist what they see as insensitive and impersonal diktats from above.
Scruton would argue here that it is precisely the achievements of small-scale but determined lobbyists and conservatives that have preserved the beauty of the landscape for the benefit of all. He cites the “Green belt” movement in the UK, the Swiss planning laws and the creation of the national parks in the US, as examples of what those who have an organic understanding of their landscape can do in the face of faceless bureaucracy. He reminds us that the evidence of history demonstrates that “human beings are creatures of limited and local affections...and territorial loyalty [who] honour their dead ...and make provision for their descendants.”

The author also reminds us that it is governmental “panics” that bring about “emergency measures” that usually cause havoc and misplaced, wasteful activity. He cites the late Paul Ehrlich’s influential book, The Population Bomb as an example of such a “panic”: that the earth will soon be grossly over-crowded; millions will then starve to death; so we-must-do-something-immediate-and-drastic to avert this doomsday. In the event, Ehrlich’s predictions proved to be those of a false prophet – but they haven’t stopped his disciples, such as Bill and Melinda Gates, the billionaire philanthropists, from recycling his dangerous ideas in a new form.
Scruton makes an eloquent plea to both those on the Left and the Right, the “engineers” and the “individualists”, to combine forces against the real evil, “the habit of treating the earth as a thing to be used but not revered.” His concluding chapters, on “Beauty, Piety and Desecration” and his explanation as to why the English countryside has been preserved as a thing of lasting loveliness over the last 200 years, despite the Industrial Revolution, the wartime bombing and the theories of socialist planners, is worth reading to see how the “little platoons” who set up, for example, the National Trust or English Heritage, managed to protect a lasting resource for the benefit of everyone, tourists and inhabitants of these islands alike.

This book should be read by anyone who appreciates clear and reasoned argument, written in limpid prose that eschews jargon and sloppy, emotive language, and who wants to be properly informed about the ecological debate. The bibliography is extensive and thus a useful resource in itself.

Education

I shall from time to time, publish arguments in favour of home schooling.
Please do not take this as a move intended to win arguments or convince all others that homeschooling is what every body must do.
In fact it is more like a running defense of the choices that we have made. A defense because we are becoming quite tired (and even irritated) by continually having to defend our decision to home school our youngest.

The second undeniable truth of Homeschooling is that all parents are Homeschoolers. It’s just that some parents Homeschool more than others.

It would appear that educational bureaucrats do not like this, because they continue to invent things which undermine parental authority and which bypass parental responsibility. There are government educational documents out there which both implicitly and explicitly state that they want to prevent parents from passing their values on to their children; and that parents and families are the cause of the problems of society, and the government education can fix the problems only if they reduce and control the parents’ role in education.

They’ve come up with many ingenious proposals to accomplish this purpose, such as: The Parents as Teachers Program which is essentially a retraining program to get parents to think and to act in conformity with the government’s vision for education.

And, of course, there is everybody’s favorite, the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. (sometimes referred to as "Hillary’s Baby.") In this treaty, the world government grants to children "fundamental" rights against their parents. (Does anybody know where the world government ever obtained any authority to grant anybody any rights? I know this much — they did not get it from God!)

WE have already experienced these 'rights' in action...and it is not pretty.

I am not saying that there is no place for others to help parents in the process. What I am saying is that the work of educating children is what the family is all about. When educational bureaucrats and social psychologists and religious education specialists take over this task, leaving the parents largely in observer status, the family suffers greatly. Both the parents and the children are cheated out of a huge portion of God’s ordained process for sanctification. (You could write an entire book on that one subject.)

As we continue down this road of separating children from their parents we are tearing apart the sinews of our culture. Parents and children are hurting badly. We need to teach our children — for our sake. Our children need to be taught by us — for their sake.

The way to destroy the family is to divide the children from the parents. And the way to divide the children from the parents, is to remove from the family its authority in education.

Wolves in sheeps clothing (their actual logo!)

Gillard and her pack of miscreants are all Fabians and the more I read about this organisation the more I see the resemblance's to what is going on in Australia at the moment...and it both infuriates and scares me. It scares me because I feel for the future my children are going to have to cope with.
God grant them wisdom and strength.

The Fabian Strategy

The aims of the Fabian Society were developed by Webb from what Englishman John Ruskin (1819-1900) taught at Oxford University. Ruskin, a teacher at the Working Men's College (founded in 1854 by Christian-Socialist philosopher J. F. D. Maurice), a professor of Fine Arts at Oxford, an artist and writer, based his views on those of Socialist Robert Owen. He advocated a utopian society, and espoused theories developed from the teachings of Plato (428-347 BC), who had studied under Socrates, and became the greatest philosopher in history. Plato established an academy which operated for 800 years, producing many great men, including Aristotle. In his work, The Republic, he outlined his ideal society, which was an aristocratic society ruled by the elite. It included the elimination of marriage and the family, and introduced selective breeding by the government which would destroy all inferior offspring. In Plato's utopia, sexual equality dictated that women would fight alongside the men in times of war.

The Fabians were working towards a new world by indoctrinating young scholars who would eventually rise to power in various policy-making positions throughout the world by infiltrating educational institutions, government agencies, and political parties. Their strategy was called the "doctrine of inevitability of gradualism," which meant that their goals would be gradually achieved. So gradual, that nobody would notice, or "without breach of continuity or abrupt change of the entire social issue." The secret was evolution, not revolution, or what Webb called "permeation." Shaw (whose mistress, Florence Farr, was a witch in the Order of the Golden Dawn), revealed that their goal was to be achieved by "stealth, intrigue, subversion, and the deception of never calling Socialism by its right name." In fact, that's how they got their name. The name originated from the Roman Consul, General Quintus Fabius Maximus, the Cunctator ('Delayer'), who through patient, cautious, delaying and elusive tactics during the early phases of the Second Punic War (218-201 BC) enabled the Roman army to regroup and defeat Hannibal's stronger Carthaginian army.

Fellow pilgrims read about these schemers and their Machiavellian schemes. Research their methods, it will amaze you to discover how successful their 'long march through the institiutions' has been. Then form yourselves into the 'little platoons' and remember that our battle has already been won in the places most vital to victory. Do not struggle against 'flesh and blood' but rather the powers and principalities .

Emerald mendacities.

Forget about all of the threats that exist in today's world; murder, robbery, Islamic terrorism, mob violence, depravity, anarchy, vandalism, disrespect, impropriety etc,etc and realise that the greatest threat comes in the guise of saving the world.
Read the attached link http://www.green-agenda.com/agenda21.html and understand that the green agenda desires nothing less than world domination. This is not a conspiracy theory or a cheap hollywood comedy featuring a Mr Big. This is an actual published United Nations manifesto entitled Agenda 21.
It is frightening in the extreme and underlines Vaclav Klaus' warning about the true nature of the Anthropogenic Global Warming scare:

“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   

True, 'true grit'!

Christians of all stripes and denominations ought to be proud of this story. It illustrates an older and dare I say, distinctly biblical perspective on life and service to the community. I speak not from any high ground but with head bowed low when I consider my own lack of any track record in this respect. This story also shows the roots of many of the policies currently taken for granted as 'humanitarian' which were in fact anything but that.

The essentially misanthropic Communist ideology has bequeathed so much damage and hatred to the world one wonders how people can still, today be so deceived.

Read this story it is well worth the 5 minutes. 

The Missionary with 150 Wives

James Franklin
In 1956, the year of Quadrant’s founding, Angus & Robertson published a remarkable memoir, The Bishop with 150 Wives. It is as anti-communist as Quadrant itself. The author, François Xavier Gsell, describes in vivid detail his decades as a missionary in the Northern Territory. In view of the gross and continuing failures of Aboriginal policy since the time of the missionaries, it is well worth a look to understand how the missions created oases of peaceful and productive activity where others have failed.

Gsell was born in Alsace in 1872, apprenticed as a cotton-spinner, joined the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart and studied in Rome. After a dispiriting time in administration in Randwick, he spent a few years in Papua before being appointed Apostolic Administrator of the Northern Territory, charged with re-founding the Church there. He did so with success but was keen to move on to strictly missionary work among Aborigines. In 1911 he established a mission at Nguiu, Bathurst Island (fictionalised in the movie Australia). Naturally conditions were at first very difficult, but he made it a success. In contrast to the failures of recent times in those regions, he ran a peaceful settlement with children attending school and with real economic activity, including a market garden and a sawmilling business.

Gsell had some strokes of good luck (or, as he took it to be, help from God). On arrival he dug a well and, despite the appearance of a rainbow which the Aborigines believed was a warning to stop, found water without being struck dead. A few years later, he spent a large part of his funds having a schooner built at Thursday Island. The Filipino crew, disobeying their instructions to bring it along the coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria, tried to sail directly to Arnhem Land. Missing it, they were about to die of hunger and thirst near the Cocos Islands. Fortunately (for them) the First World War had just broken out and the Australian Navy was combing the area for the German cruiser Emden. They fed the crew, pointed the schooner towards the West Australian coast, and all was well.

Gsell’s book shows a close attention to Aboriginal culture. His interest is not anthropological, and he is neither interested in nor concerned by aspects of native culture that he sees as morally neutral, such as ceremonies. What he takes a negative view of are those aspects of traditional society that are severely incompatible with Christianity—as we would now say, violations of human rights. The perfect communism of Aboriginal society—“demand sharing”, as it is now called—has, he says, the same result as communism in Europe: it does not lead to equality, since everything is run in the interests of the Party (that is, the elders). Women are chattels, and he especially objects to the practice of betrothal of female infants and their addition to elders’ harems at young ages. (Other evidence suggests Gsell may have underestimated the independence of older women, but his picture of betrothal of the very young agrees with others’.) The burying alive of decrepit old people also attracts his criticism.

Actual missionary success was slow. There was not a single adult convert in thirty years. But in 1921 there occurred a remarkable event, the first of the incidents that give the book its title. Martina was one of the young girls about the mission. A “hairy anonymous man” comes to fetch her, his promised wife according to tribal custom. Martina refuses to go but Gsell accepts that tribal law is final and nothing can be done; “trying to stifle her sobs, she goes with that man to begin a life which, I know, has less joy than that of the lowest beasts of the forest”. Five days later she is back, speared in the leg but determined to stay at the mission. In the evening an angry mob of tribesmen arrive and demand her back. Not forgetting to call on God’s help, Gsell welcomes them with flour and tobacco and suggests a good sleep before talking in the morning. Overnight he lays out calico, tobacco, a mirror, pots of meat and tins of treacle. When the tribesmen have woken up and had a good look, he names the price: Martina is to stay. After an interminable council, they agree. Martina is brought up by the nuns and contracts a free Christian marriage with a mission youth. (Gsell appreciates that an attraction of the mission to young men is that they can marry without waiting for the elders to die off and free their harems.)

In the ensuing years, Gsell bought 150 girls, all considered under tribal law as his wives.
Although Gsell was sceptical of native customs, he was not exactly in favour of assimilation, in the sense of integration into wider white society. That is because he was sceptical of white society as well. The missionaries always preferred sites away from other white settlements, so that their Aborigines were not subject to exploitation by unscrupulous whites or to the temptations of an idle life on the fringes of white society. Gsell’s ideal, a self-sufficient semi-monastic community well away from cities, might seem to modern economic rationalists a touch communistic.

Gsell had trouble from real communists. According to Comintern policy as laid out in the Australian Workers’ Weekly in 1931, Aborigines were the subject of a campaign of mass physical extermination. The missions were party to a plan to kidnap children and sell them into slavery. Missions must be liquidated. In the late 1930s, Sydney communists, followed by those in Prague, attacked Gsell for buying native girls. As he put it, “Since, to the communists, the Aborigines as an ‘oppressed colonial people’ are already in a state of communistic grace, it naturally follows that the missionary is Enemy Number One.” Nothing much came of communist complaints at that time and the missions retained the support of government authorities. (At one point a telegram arrived from Canberra, “Please explain purchase of women”, but he had the support of the Northern Territory administration.)

Although the invasion of the mission by Japanese troops portrayed in the movie Australia is grossly unhistorical, Gsell did experience a Japanese invasion of another kind. In the late 1930s a Japanese pearling fleet visited Bathurst Island and outbid Gsell for women, resulting in the mission having to take on the care of twenty-five half-Japanese babies.
The problem of “half-castes” exercised Gsell considerably. As Bishop of Darwin in the 1940s, he oversaw in the Territory the Catholic Church’s share of the policy of child removal of infants of mixed blood, now called the Stolen Generation. He has this comment:

But, I may be asked, is it not cruel to tear these children away from the affectionate environment of their homes? The question is naive. What homes and what natural affection have these little ones? Yes, if they had families, and if they were surrounded by that love and affection family life offers to the young even amongst primitive peoples, it might be cruel. But these creatures roam miserably around the camps and their behaviour is often worse than that of native children. It is an act of mercy to remove them as soon as possible from surroundings so insecure. 

To accommodate the “half-caste” children, a settlement was made at Garden Point on Melville Island (Melville and Bathurst are the two islands in the Tiwi group) and after a period of difficulties Gsell reports visiting “my little City of Co-operation” and seeing houses and gardens built and industry well under way, and writes, “Garden Point seems well on the way to inaugurating a Golden Age.”

Is his account self-serving and inaccurate? It would be very desirable if there were a memoir by one of the inhabitants. As far as I know, there is no such account (although ex-Garden Point people became prominent in Territory society). But there is one from another mission that may serve as a proxy. It is Last Truck Out (Magabala Books, 2009) by Betty Lockyer, who lived as a young girl at the Beagle Bay mission. The mission, north of Broome, was founded by the Trappist order in the 1890s on principles similar to Gsell’s. Its church’s altar, elaborately decorated with pearl shell, is now a tourist attraction. Lockyer was born in 1942, the daughter of a Malay diver and an Aboriginal mother. She is critical of the actions of the Commissioner for Native Affairs in separating her parents (as she is entitled to be after researching and quoting from her file) and of child removal policies generally. But she is remarkably positive about most aspects of life at the mission, which she recalls as a “Garden of Eden” with enormous gardens full of vegetables and melons:

The men had their jobs to do, each going to their own workplace, whether it was the bakery, gardens or checking the windmills. The women stayed at home to look after the babies and little ones, or worked elsewhere for a few hours. Some helped out at the church, convent, presbytery or the Brothers’ houses. There was no such thing as idle hands. They all knew their jobs and did them well … Our people were shown how to live an orderly lifestyle and in that short time they learned to conform. 

The communists won. Although the Communist Party of Australia passed into history, the missions were liquidated and the Comintern’s theory of child removals became official policy. Their view of Aborigines as an oppressed colonial people needing self-determination was passed on to a later generation of activists such as Judith Wright and “Nugget” Coombs. Coombs was given his head with Aboriginal policy, resulting in the decades of disaster recounted in books like Geoffrey Partington’s Hasluck Versus Coombs and Gary Johns’s Aboriginal Self-Determination: The Whiteman’s Dream. In place of “no such thing as idle hands”, the ineffectual “job creation” and “training” schemes of CDEP and its successors. In place of Gsell’s sawmill, the collapse in 2009 of the timber scheme in the Tiwi Islands. In place of schools teaching literacy in English, a generation of children too tired from noise all night to even get to school. In place of vegetables and melons, alcohol and kava. In place of relative peace, endemic violence.

Afterword (from the Northern Territory News, May 20, 2012):

Young Kids Steal Petrol to Get High 

A remote shire council will not consider banning unleaded petrol from an island town—despite young kids stealing fuel from its work yard to “get off their trolley”.

Ten children were busted sniffing on the roof of the Wurrumiyanga [formerly Nguiu] primary school, on Bathurst Island, on Friday.

It’s the latest in an outbreak that began in January, police say.

James Franklin is Professor of Mathematics at the University of New South Wales. He runs the Australian Database of Indigenous Violence

Unreasonable

In  my (often flawed) opinion, many young people vote Green because they know it infuriates their parents. Even older friends of mine have voted Green merely to appear hip and trendy:

 Around the corner in a rented share house, David Squires, 28, has given little thought to any of the party’s policies. But the retail worker plans to vote Greens - almost instinctively, he says. ‘’It feels like what you should be doing when you’re 28 and living in inner-city Melbourne, I suppose,’’ he says. ‘’It seems like it’s an educated choice, but it’s not at all; there is no real reason behind it.’’

Re-evaluate

We are being overwhelmed by a tsunami of propaganda (Hollywood et al) promoting a new form of an old problem called Gnosticism.

"Heroism" is what people who've been bitten by radioactive spiders or born a shape-shifting mutant do. Until that happens to you, best to steer clear. And so a world of superheroes leads to a world without non-super heroes. A world, that is, without heroes.

Gnosticism means being awarded the gift of a special knowledge that enables you to rise above your current status (occupy the moral highground) to become greater than your fellow human beings:

...the teaching that the realisation of Gnosis (esoteric or intuitive knowledge) is the way to salvation of the soul from the material world.

The problem with this is that both ends of the continuum create a negative. On the one hand apathy and resignation are engendered and on the other, its mirror opposite, excessive hedonism. Without this special knowledge you cannot achieve your destiny. Without special powers you cannot be a hero. So increasingly the propaganda insidiously suggests that your only choices are to give up and be resigned to your fate, or dance, drink and be riotous for tomorrow you die!

Both positions are a sad but unfortunately compelling lie.

Courage is not the absence of fear but the overcoming of fear as opposed to a surrendering to it.

I believe that true heroism is found in everyday life when the 'ordinary' becomes the extra-ordinary through feats of courage, generosity, truth, love, kindness and my personal favourite; perseverance.
Gnosticism leads to a false duality whereas 'true-truth' (Schaeffer) ushers in an abundant life.

Woe is us!

Heads  I win, tails you lose.

That's the standard operating procedure presented by most of the Chicken Little's involved in the big Green AGW scare campaign.

Take for example the Englishman George Monbiot. A truly zealous, 'the end is nigh' sandwich-board wearer who flapped his wrists for years over the 'fact' (scientific consensus, absolute truth!!!?) that oil, the life-blood of the 'capitalist' economy was about to reach its turning point (peak oil) in 1995, then 1997, 2002, 2003 and so on.  These 'facts' were used to bludgeon suggestible politicans into accepting that alternative fuel options must be considered, i.e. the 'renewable energy sector' a Utopian concept at best and frighteningly expensive to boot. Western politicians stampeded lemming-like to the edge of sanity, embraced the Green zealots and filled their sackcloth Gucci pockets with taxpayer dollars creating in the process not a few Green multi-millionaires and at least one billionaire in the plus size form of Al Gore.

Wonder of wonders, Monbiot has now confessed that the 'peak oil' scare has proved to be misguided and that there is actually plenty of oil:

"We were wrong about peak oil: there’s enough in the ground to deep-fry the planet.

He is now wringing his hands about the fact that there is too much oil on the planet:

 Humanity seems to be like the girl in Guillermo del Toro’s masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth: she knows that if she eats the exquisite feast laid out in front of her, she too will be consumed, but she cannot help herself. I don’t like raising problems when I cannot see a solution. But right now I’m not sure how I can look my children in the eyes.

Poor George. I wonder how this 'fact' is going to play into the Chicken Little scare-book for the future, because don't believe for a second that George's cronies will allow the gravy train to stop while there are still taxpayer dollars to be had. No sir! 

Soul mates

We hear the rhetoric about raising taxes on the 'rich' ad nauseam from those 'moral titans' (lol) Wayne Swan, Julia Gillard and Anthony Albanese et al.
Yet wise economists have indicated on numerous occasions how such rationalisations are false and that the benefit of the rhetoric lies in a perception of the government caring for the less fortunate rather than in it actually doing so. Ditto Barry Obama, Ms Gillard's BFF.

A Democratic president — John F. Kennedy — stated the issue plainly. Under the existing tax rates, he explained, investors' "efforts to avoid tax liabilities" made them put their money in tax shelters, because existing tax laws made "certain types of less productive activity more profitable than other more valuable undertakings" for the country.

Ironically, the Obama campaign's attacks on Mitt Romney for putting his money in the Cayman Islands substantiate the point that President Kennedy and others have made, that higher tax rates can drive money into tax shelters, whether tax-exempt municipal bonds or investments in other countries.

In other words, raising tax rates does not automatically raise tax revenues for the government. Higher tax rates have often led to lower tax revenues for states, the federal government and other countries. Conversely, lower tax rates have often led to higher tax revenues. It all depends on the circumstances.

But none of this matters to Barack Obama. If class warfare rhetoric about taxes leads to more votes for him, that is his bottom line, whether the government gets a dime more revenue or not. So long as his lies go unchallenged, a second term will be the end result for him and a lasting calamity for the country.

 Sound familiar?

Turn a leaf

We have been seduced into a communistic perspective on human existence; that is that we are merely consumers...yes that is how Marx perceived the human to be, not capitalism...yet the market as we now know it, i.e. capitalism, has embraced the same ideology.

Karl Marx saw human beings as nothing more than consumers of resources. And he saw human history as nothing more than the struggle over those resources between the haves and the have nots

But that’s not true, and while Americans don’t think of themselves as communists, our free market system has been corrupted by the same flawed fundamental premise. (Chuck Colson)

I believe that a primary flaw in our understanding of the Judeo-Christian worldview on which Western societies have been constructed, is that we have lost sight of the original Biblical injunction...the Cultural mandate of Genesis.

But really from the biblical standpoint, these are just stepping-stones to the real culture. To put it biblically, culture is the fulfillment of the mandate given in the Garden of Eden to man. What did God say to man there? He said, fill the earth, subdue it, rule over it. The cultural mandate is the accomplishment of that great command that God gave to man. It is the execution of man’s divinely given stewardship over the creation, for we are the kings of the creation under God. It includes the development and the improvement of the creation that is about us. And then ideally, when this improvement and development takes place and is accomplished by the enabling power of God, man lays the whole thing down before the feet of him who is king of man and of nature and in whose image and for whom man and all things are created. So wrote one of the great thinkers about culture.

Now this completely contradicts the new 'Green consciousness' which claims that the world is perfect without mankind,  that in fact humans are a destructive force. Whilst there is indeed some truth to this position it is not the whole truth and is in fact the truth only of fallen humanity. Unfortunately too many modern Christians have forgotten the teachings of the cultural mandate (or have never heard it!) and continue to treat this world as if they were still fallen. We are earth-builders.

A Biblical worldview begins with a different and better assumption about human beings. That we were designed in God’s image, the Imago Dei, and tasked to care for, steward and cultivate the created order.

We certainly consume to survive. But, bearing His image, we were created to produce, to innovate and invest, to pour into others, to seek to improve things. That’s the free market at its best, but it requires that we form the character to desire creating above consuming, that we delay gratification and think of the welfare of future generations. And that character is in short supply these days.

Let us take a leaf out of JFK's book and ask not; what can we consume, but what can we create!

Beware the blinkered!

An astounding number of people I know still think of Tony Abbott the way the (real) 'hate press' (Fairfax) would have them think. Last night I was talking to a friend who is articulate, educated, and a clear thinker who was surprised about Abbott's having been a Rhodes scholar, a volunteer CFS, a Cambridge blue and a mortgagee etc etc. His perspective was Abbott as the "mad Monk'...until I outlined all of Abbott's positive qualities.

G K Chesterton once said:

"Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried."

 

And I think that the same could be said about Tony Abbott.

Most people appear to accept the opinions of the predominantly left-wing and usually vindictive main-stream-press instead of examining the truth for themselves.

Ditto the Greens. Too many accept them as a benign, tree-hugging minority whereas the ruling commissariat are vicious ideologues consumed with grabbing power at any cost in order to establish a totalitarian, misanthropic rulership over us all.

Enlightenment.

Fellow Christians if you believe that the relentless pursuit by the radical homosexual lobby to legalise same-sex marriage carries no consequences for you then read this article.
http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2012/06/30/the-never-ending-war-against-christianity/