Mother's correct!

Leave it to Mother Teresa to get it right again:

 Mother Teresa says, ‘Abortion kills twice. It kills the body of the baby and it kills the conscience of the mother.’ Abortion is profoundly anti-women. Three quarters of its victims are women: half the babies and all the mothers.”

To care or not to care...that is the

One of my overwhelming joys amongst the multitude of reading I do through numerous blogs and news sites is in the superior articulation of prescience and communication exhibited by those whose political affiliation would be considered 'conservative'.
Most left-wing blogs/articles are so laden with invective and potty mouthed adumbration's of deep political/societal truths (even by so-called 'academics') that to read a mere light hearted review of a Zombie horror experience by journalistic luminary Mark Steyn, is to luxuriate in sybaritic philological bliss at such elucidation of the English language.

The new management had left in place the dangling shingles and abandoned store windows and hired a bunch of Equity-minimum extras to rampage through the joint terrorizing those in search of an authentic "horror immersion experience." It was so authentic there wasn't even a welcome area: Participants met at the former mall's padlocked, graffiti-defaced delivery entrance. The bona fide decrepitude added an eerie frisson of verisimilitude to the zombie apocalypse. Not to mention that it's oddly poignant when something that was once real is reduced to no more than a stage set for dystopian fantasy. For a while, back in New Hampshire, every time we passed a shuttered building or an abandoned pasture, we'd joke about opening Zombie Sawmill or Zombie Dairy Farm.
 

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Read the full article: http://www.steynonline.com/5527/undead-reckoning

Truth exposed

More people are at last waking up to the worlds biggest scam;

With each passing year, it is becoming increasingly clear that global warming is not a scientific theory subject to empirical falsification, but a political ideology that has to be fiercely defended against any challenge. It is ironic that skeptics are called “deniers” when every fact that would tend to falsify*(see attached website for an explanation of falsify)  global warming is immediately explained away by an industry of denial.
 

I tend to believe in Vaclav Klaus' understanding of the Warmist philosophy:

“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
 

*Falsify: http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2013/04/the-settled-science-and-its-leaning-tower

Who cares?

Virginia Trioli sneers from her leftard moral high-ground that we care less about those dying in Baghdad than we do about 'rich white people in America'. She's probably right, which begs the question why should we worry about any of them?

In the ancient world, the misfortunes of other people were of no great interest. The Greeks believed that only they were fully human; everyone else was a barbarian. The Old Testament Hebrews were not interested in the calamities afflicting the Canaanites and the Philistines, let alone the Babylonians and the Assyrians. Even today villagers in remote valleys in Papua New Guinea are said to regard residents of the neighbouring valley as less than human. The natural philosophy of man is beggar thy neighbour, not bind up his wounds.

Compassion became the natural response to a stranger’s distress only with the parable of the Good Samaritan. The Christian belief that each and every human being is a child of God gave compassion a metaphysical foundation. It was no longer a question of convenience or self-interest, but a response to a universal brotherhood under a divine Father.

So the very fact that Trioli and Green think that the disproportionate coverage given to the tragedy in Boston is unfair is a tribute to the residual Christianity in their outlook. The natural impulse of the Christian is to pray for “brethren” in distress, wherever they are. And this spiritual solidarity eventually gives rise to formidable networks of charity, many people working silently, anonymously, to help victims of tragedy and to restore peace to shattered nations. Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.

Neronic times acoming!

Evangelical Christians look out. Check out some of the things being said against us in the land of the 'free'. http://www.infowars.com/all-over-america-evangelical-christians-are-being-labeled-as-extremists-and-hate-groups/

What about being identified along with Al Quaeda and the Klu Klux Clan?

Beware the ideologues

The hypocrisy illuminated by the desire to control the press by the Western Governments of America, Australia Canada and the UK is breathtaking in its mendacity.
In fact I would go so far as to call this desire deeply evil. Consider this report from the UK:

Open season on the press
casts a chill on freedom
When the journalistic world protested almost as one after the publication of the Leveson proposals to regulate the Press, others dismissed these objections on the grounds of: ‘Well, they would, wouldn’t they?’

Fears that the Press was suffering from a ‘chilling effect’ even before the Leveson proposals were enacted, that these proposals would prevent journalists from doing their job and that they would stifle the free flow of information, were scorned as overblown special pleading.

Reporting that was truly in the public interest, we were assured, would be protected — of course.

Whistleblowers would be protected — of course. Freedom of the Press, openness and justice would be protected — of course.

Well, now look at what’s happened.

On Friday, it was revealed that the entertainer Rolf Harris had been arrested on suspicion of sexual offences.

No one at present knows whether such suspicion is well-founded. But the circumstances of this revelation should cause intense disquiet.

For Mr Harris was first questioned by police last November and arrested and bailed at the end of last month. Yet although it was an open secret on the internet, no newspapers or broadcasters identified him until last week.

This was partly because his lawyers, Harbottle & Lewis, used a passage in the Leveson report — which suggested that the public should be prevented from knowing the names of arrest suspects in all but ‘exceptional’ circumstances — to intimidate the media into silence.

The firm threatened newspapers with ‘serious consequences’ if they published Mr Harris’s name. One was warned it could be hit with an expensive damages bill even if its report was entirely accurate.

What a frightening state of affairs, where newspapers are being bullied into self- censorship on the grounds that it is considered unacceptable to tell the truth!

Worse still, such intimidation attacks one of the bulwarks of a free society — the principle of open justice whereby the identity of someone who is arrested is not concealed from the public.

Yet now, emboldened by Leveson, no less than the Association of Chief Police Officers — backed up by senior judges, lawyers and the Information Commissioner — has suggested that in general the police should be prevented from confirming to journalists the names of those who have been arrested.

As has been observed, it is but a small step between keeping secret the names of people who are arrested and arresting them in secret.

And Messrs Harbottle and Lewis used this proposal, too, as grounds for putting the thumbscrews on the Press to keep Rolf Harris unidentified — until the Sun finally blew the whole rotten process open.

This climate of intimidation is spreading fast. A local newspaper, the Cumberland And Westmorland Herald, reported that Cumbria’s Police and Crime Commissioner, Richard Rhodes, had charged the taxpayer £700 for journeys to two dinners in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes.

The commissioner, who had not revealed these expenses, paid the money back after this was exposed and issued a partial apology. But he also reported the three whistleblowers to the police — who promptly arrested them on suspicion of misconduct in a public office and perverting the course of justice.

The only reason this commissioner’s questionable expenses had came to light was the newspaper story using the whistleblowers’ information.

For him to report them to the police and — much worse still — for the police then to arrest them represents a chilling assault on the freedom of the Press to report apparent wrongdoing. And before Leveson, this would have been unthinkable.

But his inquiry seems to have served as a kind of starting pistol for an open season on the Press, declared by a coalition of everyone with a score to settle against it — including rogues, cheats, the sexually debauched and others desperate to avenge their being called to account for their indefensible behaviour.

We should not forget the veiled threat made to the Telegraph by an adviser to Culture Secretary Maria Miller, in response to journalists preparing a story about the minister’s expenses claims, that in the light of her role in drawing up the new Press rules, such a story could be ‘ill-timed’.

Then there’s the case of the New Milton Advertiser, which described local Tory councillor Goff Beck as ‘controversial’ and revealed he had been accused of making bigoted remarks to an openly gay colleague. It also said he had been reprimanded for bullying a female councillor.

The paper was then phoned and visited by Sergeant Paul Beale of the Hampshire constabulary, who complained that Mr Beck’s ‘credibility as a person of good standing was being undermined’.

Excuse me? Since when did a police officer put pressure on a newspaper on the grounds that someone didn’t like what it had said about them?

The answer is: since the Leveson Inquiry . . . the shocking consequence of which is that journalists are all too likely to find the police fingering their collars merely for reporting what is going on.

It is no exaggeration to say that this intimidation of the Press and the development of political policing are more akin to what we would expect from a totalitarian state.

All this while the moral authority of the Leveson Inquiry itself is crumbling by the day. From the start, there was a disturbing closeness between the inquiry team and Hacked Off, the lobby group trying to fetter the Press.

That smell of collusion then extended to the Labour Party. For who should have been found closeted in the office of Ed Miliband, on the night when he was stitching up the Royal Charter on Press regulation with Nick Clegg and Tory minister Oliver Letwin, but Hacked Off.

Last week, an audience at a Glasgow literary festival rounded on the organisation’s founder, Brian Cathcart, for once again refusing to reveal the identity of his backers.

The hypocrisy from a lobby group that vilifies the Press for lack of transparency about its own dealings, but refuses to say who is pulling its own strings, is simply breathtaking in its shamelessness.

Now, however, the question of collusion is turning positively farcical. At the weekend, it was revealed that Carine Patry Hoskins, Lord Justice Leveson’s supposedly utterly impartial junior counsel, and David Sherborne, counsel for many of the high-profile complainants to the inquiry, were, ahem, an item.

They insist their affair did not begin until after November 2012, when the inquiry’s report was published. Yet they had holidayed together on the Greek island of Santorini in August 2012, days after the inquiry closed.

According to them, during the holiday they discussed the ‘possibility of a future relationship’. But not, apparently, to exchange even a word about the inquiry in which both were so heavily involved.

Talk about wriggling on the head of a pin! Not so much Leveson as the Loverson Inquiry, then.

Quite apart from the serious questions of possible conflict of interest to which this gives rise, the irony, of course, is exquisite.

Here is a tribunal that denounced the Press for, among other things, exposing sexual misdemeanours we were told could not possibly be in the public interest, itself now potentially compromised by a relationship between the lawyers on supposedly opposite sides — revealed by none other than the reviled Press.

Someone could make a black comedy out of all this. But we can guess what would happen if they did.

On the grounds that Lord Justice Leveson’s ‘credibility as a person of good standing was being undermined’, doubtless the police, backed up by Messrs Harbottle and Lewis and assorted luvvies, libertines and other loathers of liberty, would raid the theatre and shut it down.

Viva the revelucion!

How the lamestream media continue to confuse the issue of what the term 'working class' constitutes. 

SHUT your eyes and think of Margaret Thatcher (twin-set, hair-do, hand bag, smells nice) and Fidel Castro (combat fatigues, bushy beard, revolver, smells of backy). Which one is the firebrand working-class revolutionary? The answer, of course, is Mrs Thatcher. The vile tyrannt Castro enslaved and impoverished the lower orders in Cuba. Thatcher enriched and liberated them in Britain.

The reason the Left hates Thatcher so much is that she stole the working class from them. And she was able to do this because she understood and shared their aspirations.

Behind the bluster about her death this week are two very different visions of the working class. According to the Left, the proles are oppressed, and the source of that oppression is economic freedom. The Left wants the working class living in state housing, travelling on state transport, working in state-controlled jobs, receiving a state education. The Left fights not to change, but to preserve working practices and “working class communities”, as it offensively calls them.

Mrs Thatcher had a sneaking suspicion that people wanted to own their own home, perhaps in a leafy suburb rather than a council estate. She had the idea that “working class” people wanted the things she wanted – to leave money to their children, to own a few shares, maybe start a little company, go on foreign holidays, own a car – maybe even two cars! She was right. They did want this, which is why ordinary working people voted for her in huge numbers.

Snap!#*!

Too true blue:

This is not morality as it was once understood: telling the truth, paying of debt, offering parental respect, and doing no voluntary harm. It is not the morality that asks for sacrifice. It is what Philip Roth calls "the tyranny of propriety ... the de-viralizing pulpit virtue mongering". Appropriate is "the current code word for reining in most any deviation from the wholesome guidelines" providing inspiration for personal posturing.

 The decadence of wrist-band politics, in which a plastic bracelet denotes not only a point of view but the moral worth of the bearer, has had a destructive effect on civic debate, turning the battle of ideas into a contest of personal integrity.

 Compromise, the saving grace of democratic civil debate, is simply not on the table; debate becomes polarised between two incompatible positions and it is impossible to sit on the fence. The challenge of accommodating Australians from both sides of the cultural divide, the insiders and the outsiders, has become the chief dynamic of political debate.The split does not follow traditional party lines; there are insiders and outsiders on both sides of politics. For Labor, however, the task of accommodating two very different constituencies has brought the party almost to its knees. From the election of Gough Whitlam as Labor leader in 1967 to the Rudd and Gillard governments four decades later, the challenge of appealing to one group without upsetting the other has seemed an intolerable burden.

Historical blindness

In the Western media the god of hypocrisy reigns supreme.

In June of 2012, Western-backed Syrian rebels fighting Assad’s government troops entered the city of Homs and desecrated its churches, some of which date back to the 6th century. Bibles were torn up for use as toilet paper, soldiers posed for pictures wearing looted priests robes, and the sacramental wine was used to celebrate. The story- unlike the Koran burning by a Floridian pastor that same year- didn’t produce even a ripple of journalistic interest.
 

Consider also the motive behind these atrocities:

  In 2010 an al-Qaeda front group attacked one of Baghdad's main cathedrals during Sunday mass. More than 50 people were slaughtered. The militants had a clear and simple explanation for this atrocity: "All Christian centres, organisations and institutions, leaders and followers, are legitimate targets for the muhajideen wherever they can reach them. We will open upon them the doors of destruction and rivers of blood."

An enlightening read:  http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/indifference_to_the_fate_of_middle_east_christians_has_ancient_roots

End notes

Once again Melanie Philips hits the nail on the head, and what she says about Britain applies equally as much to Australia:

It is indeed becoming a selfish, brutalised, uncaring society. But this is the result of fundamental social and cultural changes -- like the fragmentation of the family, the refusal to transmit a common culture through education, the balkanisation of Britain through multiculturalism, the victim culture which gives a free pass to certain privileged groups for their bad behaviour.

All these changes flowed from the tremendous onslaught by the left upon the Judeo-Christian values of the west, and the replacement of the bonds of duty which keep a society together by a rampant hyper-individualism and group rights which break it apart on the rocks of selfishness.
 

Are we too far down the road of ideological suicide I wonder.
The anarchists (leftards) have occupied the high ground for many years; the educational fields both lower and higher, Hollywood, the unions, politics, philosophy and almost completely the concern with the environment.
We are going to have to completely rewire the populations worldview which has been shaped almost entirely by TV and the movies not to mention brainwashing at school, into believing that the only way is the 'collective' way.
My pessimism fears that we are too far gone and the only way anything is going to change is as a result of the apocalyptic.

Torn fabric

And truth peeks out from beneath the curtain:

Ineluctably, the issue of “gay” rights is about far more than sexual practices. It is, as lesbian advocate Paula Ettelbrick proclaimed, about “transforming the very fabric of society … [and] radically reordering society's views of reality”.

Dhimmitude

Talk about a picture being worth more than a thousand words....yay for originality...being a girls school probably makes these little ones lucky that they are allowed to draw at all...except that this is at a 'cathedral school' in England!!!!!!

Penetrating the hive-mind

A more balanced review of Maggie's legacy:

Much rubbish has been said of Thatcher in the last week. We’re told that her deregulation of the City (which broke the old boy network and let in the barrow boys) ushered in an era of greed and was the cause of the great crash. Let’s spell it out so even Robert Peston can understand. The crash was the result of the preceding credit boom. Credit booms are the result of governments pumping too much money into the economy – which Thatcher was adamantly against. She knew why politicians like doing it: phony booms make them look good and it’s a way of stealing money from savers without the saps even noticing. Thatcher also knew the terrible consequence: pumping money in lowers interest rates, encouraging debt and discouraging saving. If only Thatcher had privatised currency too, to prevent politicians abusing their monopolistic control of it!

We’re also told that Thatcher damaged manufacturing. Again, let’s set the record straight. Manufacturing does well when it makes a good profit. Higher taxes mean lower profits. It is the burden of supporting Britain’s obese public sector (now roughly the same size as our private sector) which is crushing the life out of capitalism (manufacturing included).
 

The leftards are as profligate in their hatred of Thatcher's legacy as they are in their hatred of individual freedom, preferring as they do the bowing of the knee to the collective and therefore statist authority.

Oh how they hated the gains she made and the many ordinary 'working class' people she helped...this was their 'turf' this was their collective hive-mind until Maggie came along and reached into their hearts and minds. She represented the true 'working-class', the true spirit of hard work and aspiration that so many knew instinctively was their ticket out of the collective misery of the statist ideologues.

How the thugs hated her, just witness the macabre dancing and drinking on her grave. But it is in reality a measly few sad souls who are documented on the news and so  many of them are children in captivity to the misplaced hatred of their forebears, just look at the ages...most were not even born when Maggie ruled. Pathetic!

Into the lions den

Nice, a fresh perspective on a potentially worrying subject.

Thus the mass immigration of Muslims into Western lands is a mixed blessing. In terms of them not fitting in, and seeking to subvert our culture, our values, and our way of life, it is bad news indeed. But in terms of God bringing them to us so that we might share the gospel with them, it is a very good thing indeed.

After all, we are not free to share the gospel openly with them in Muslim-majority countries, so God is allowing them to come here so that they might be exposed to the gospel of Jesus Christ. But tragically most Christians in the West are not taking advantage of these opportunities.

And worse yet, many have fallen for the deception of the interfaith dialogue movement, where everyone is told we all basically believe the same thing, and we just need to get along. Sorry, that is not what we are called to do – we are called to tell them that ‘Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and that no man comes to the father but by him’ (John 14:6).

Snake oil sales-people

Wow...The plain speaking Miranda (aptly named) Devine!!! has pulled no punches in describing the current malaise that exists as a result of the entitlement era. Way to go Miranda!

If the Australian Labor Party’s affirmative action/"EMILY’s List” had been in place in Britain when Margaret Thatcher was making her rise, she never would have reached the top.

The late British prime minister’s life was the antithesis of the deadbeat philosophy behind such gender quotas, which reward mediocrity above worthiness.

A woman who favoured self-reliance over collectivism, individual effort over institutional preferment, integrity over compromise, a renegade, a non-conformist, would never have fitted into such an egregiously unjust system.

Quotas are designed to promote the worst sort of people. They benefit the spivs, the cheats, the slackers, the fakes and the incompetents. At heart they are just another socialist redistribution mechanism, and are as doomed to failure as all the others.

Quotas reward cheap Machiavellianism, a career spent greasing up to vested interests, engaging in office politics and intrigue, gaming psychometric tests and pandering to human resources departments, plotting coups, and forging alliances with like-minded con-artists. Such people are singularly unsuited to lead a nation or a business.

Thatcher would not have been chosen, nor been willing to be drafted under such a corrupt system.
 

Have I seen such a system employed in the Arts? Indeed I have.

Gellatinized Worldviews

This single issue has massive implications for believers in the Western world and, I believe, will eventually usher in a new Neronic era.
The following is an excerpt from the article highlighted at the bottom of this entry and I would recommend that the piece be read in its entirety...it says something about the quality of worldviews in our society.

The conformism around gay marriage cannot be put entirely down to handfuls of campaigners, of course, and certainly not to any conscious attempt on their part to enforce political and moral obedience. The fragility of society’s attachment to traditional marriage itself, to the virtue of commitment, has also been key to the formulation of the gay-marriage consensus. Indeed, it is the rubble upon which the gay-marriage edifice is built. That is, if lawyers, politicians and our other assorted “betters” have successfully kicked down the door of traditional marriage, it’s because the door was already hanging off its hinges, following years of cultural neglect.

It is society’s reluctance to defend traditional views of commitment, and its relativistic refusal more broadly to discriminate between different lifestyle choices, that has fuelled the peculiar non-judgmental tyranny of the gay-marriage campaign, which judges harshly those who dare to judge how people live.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/breathtaking_conformity

Collectivist spin

Wisdom from the 20th century's greatest female politician:

Under the Rudd-Gillard governments we have the culture Thatcher warned us against. In 1976, in one of the first speeches she made in Australia, she told a Canberra audience the real difference between conservatives and their socialist political opponents is that conservatives believe that government should act to enlarge the freedom of the individual to live his own life whilst socialists believe the government should diminish it.

“Our way upholds the importance of the individual and makes provision for him to develop his own talent. To us, all individuals are equally important, but all different. It is this difference which gives richness and variety, and strength, to the life of the community,” she said.

She also touched on “social justice” - the term used by members of the Rudd-Gillard government to justify increasing intrusion into private lives.

“Common to all collectivist theories is the presumption that ‘social justice’ is more equitable than justice to the individual; that the ‘social wage’ is more desirable than the income a man or woman earns, and spends or saves; that ‘classes’ matter more than people; above all, that ‘collective rights’ are more important than the rights of the individual citizen,” she said.

Thatcher demolished the concept of “collective rights” and used as her example the Soviet Union, where, she said, more than anywhere else, the collectivist dogma had - in the name of the “people” - made the state the owner and manager of all the means of production, distribution and exchange. And the result?

“Far from abolishing poverty, socialism has kept the vast majority of the Soviet people miles behind the western world in standards of living and quality of life,” Thatcher said.

“Instead of ‘superior productivity’ based on workers’ control, its state-owned industries and collectivised farms are steadily falling further and further behind those of the west. Socialist ‘realism’ has meant neither artists nor writers have been free to express their own ideas. Anything that conflicts with the collectivist mystique is feared, and is condemned and banned.
 

If I hear the words "for the people" usher from the mouths of these collectivist union puppets again I shall smash the TV (no I won't) but the verbal 'bovine faeces' these leftards spew is akin to fingernails scraped across an old-fashioned blackboard. 

A parallel universe perhaps?

Welcome to Australia (almost) in 2013...it appears we are merely 30 something years behind the UK.

The entire economy was in the hands of an intellectually corrupt, Luddite trade-union confederation, which chose most of the delegates to any conference of the governing Labour party, and whose shop stewards and craft-unit heads could shut down an entire industry in mid-contract for any reason, from an individual work grievance to the sour grapes generated by a poor round of darts in their local pub (on working hours).

In the year preceding the 1979 election, in what became known as “the winter of discontent,” almost every industry in the country had been shut down by capricious strikes, including the airports, trains, electric power, coal mines, garbage collection, and undertaking. The captains of industry and finance in the City, the style-setters in Mayfair and the West End, the doyennes of Bloomsbury and Knightsbridge, and the denizens of the chancelleries and ministries of Belgravia and Westminster huddled in the cold and dark, dead or alive. Government-owned operations, from the steel industry to the airports, were a cesspool of inefficiency and, in the private sector, large numbers of fictitious jobs were salaried and the proceeds went as sinecures to union favorites or into a pot to be divided at the pleasure of the union bosses. It fell to Margaret Thatcher to redeem Britain from the slough of despond and lassitude in which it had been totally immersed by overindulgence of the workers’ leaders in guilt over the inequalities of British life.
 

Perhaps the strikes are not as obvious (more manipulative?) but give the corrupt union leaders half a chance and they would be, perhaps our taxation system is not quite as injurious (yet) but give Swanee a sniff and see what happens. The behaviour of corruption within trade union ranks is certainly mirrored in the numerous cases pending before Australian courts and even the guilt over inequalities is reflected in the guilt over the 'orginal inhabitants' that Australia suffers under.

UPDATE
How about the premise of this essay also from one on Thatcher and how similar it is to the Australian bogeyman...Abbott, Abbott, Abbott...it appears the leftards are quite limited in their approach to politics, but limitations on the part of ideologues is, I suppose, par for the course

Thatcher – or rather “Thatcha”, always said with a dramatic sneer – has become the Left’s catch-all explanation for why it isn’t taken seriously by the masses anymore. Thatcher brainwashed the plebs into becoming materialistic, they say, making them love “stuff” more than community and turning them off Big Picture politics. Thatcher turned people individualistic, they claim, making it more difficult for Leftists to pursue a politics based on collectivity. Thatcher stole working-class voters from their natural home of the Labour Party, they argue, fatally denting that party’s standing among the masses. (This overlooks the fact Labour’s support had been declining long before Thatcher allegedly colonised the fickle brains of Joe Public: among manual workers, Labour’s support fell from 62 per cent in 1959 to 38 per cent at the opening of the 1980s.)

Time and again, the failures of the Left – to convince the public of its agenda, to win the working classes to its cause – is projected on to Thatcher. She and her ideology are transformed into an all-powerful force that corrupted the little people’s minds and singlehandedly finished off Socialism. That is why Thatcher became, if anything, even more hated in recent years, long after she left office, including among new radical Leftist who weren’t even born when she was PM: because Thatcher-bashing is fundamentally an expression of Leftists’ fury and frustration at their own increasing insignificance in public debate and among the demos. How much easier it is to claim that the public have being mentally kidnapped by an awesomely powerful leader than to have a serious think about why latter-day Leftism failed. The question is: now that Thatcher is dead, who will the Left blame for the indifference and even hostility it is met with in communities up and down the country?.
 

Useful idiots, it would be a laugh if the implications were not so dire.
UPDATE # 2
From yet another article on Maggie where the insights given her sound remarkably like someone on the Australian political scene...that figure the leftard media like to make such fun of perhaps?

This is why her great career is so worthy of study. She is the almost exact antithesis of the contemporary politician, whose craft is largely a matter of technique. She possessed integrity. She had a clear sense of herself. She scarcely possessed what is known today as a "media strategy". She rarely uttered words for effect. She cared about substance. She sought power for a purpose. Having attained it, she knew how to use it.

There was therefore an umbilical connection between what she said and what she did. The Left, aided by her media allies, often made out that she was a liar. But she was in fact strikingly honest. She was scrupulous in her personal dealing and (despite the Leftist mythology) the anonymous author of countless acts of personal kindness. She was driven by a profound sense of public service.

And here is the greatest lesson of all: she was a living, breathing disproof of the facile theory that history is the product of vast, impersonal forces. In fact the world is formed by remarkable individuals of great insight and, above all, courage.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/comment/the-outsider-who-changed-the-course-of-history-20130409-2hicq.html#ixzz2QD7Hmyhg

Watching the Barabarians

Another short extract that highlights the defective thinking behind many of the neo-Marxist 'progressives' in western society today.

Consider also that assault rifles are rarely used by criminals, because they are neither easily portable nor easily concealed. In Chicago, the murder capital of America—a city with draconian gun laws—pistols are the weapon of choice, even for gang-related executions. But of course there are the horrible exceptions—the mass shootings in recent years—and certainly we must keep assault weapons with high-capacity magazines out of the hands of people who are prone to commit such atrocities.

The shooters in Arizona, Colorado, and Newtown were mentally ill persons who, by all accounts, should have been incarcerated. Even the Los Angeles Times admits that “there is a connection between mental illness and mass murder.” But the same progressives who advocate gun control also oppose the involuntary incarceration of mentally ill people who, in the case of these mass shootings, posed obvious dangers to society before they committed their horrendous acts of violence. From the point of view of the progressives who oppose involuntary incarceration of the mentally ill—you can thank the ACLU and like-minded organizations—it is better to disarm the entire population, and deprive them of their constitutional freedoms, than to incarcerate a few mentally ill persons who are prone to engage in violent crimes.
 

Truth be told these activists are not concerned with creating a 'better world' as their catch cry would suggest, they like those of their ilk who preceded them, are committed to reducing western civilisation to rubble in order to rebuild it so that they can usher in the ideological utopia wherein they are the elite.
The problem with that is that just as soon as they have succeeded in destroying the culture the true barbarians will take over and the first to go will be the 'useful idiots'.
If the consequences for all were not so diabolical it would almost be amusing.

Shades of Nero

Does anyone smell the scent of burning crosses in the morning?

Example three comes from the US military. It has long been a promoter of political correctness and the homosexual agenda. And in doing so, it has been waging war against religion. Consider this incredible headline: “Army Reserve training material lists Catholics, evangelical Christians and some Jews in ‘religious extremism’ category along with the KKK, Hamas and Al Qaeda.”

The story opens, “A slideshow presentation shown to US Army Reserve recruits classifies Christians, including both evangelicals and Roman Catholics, as religious extremists, placing them in the same category as skinheads, the Ku Klux Klan, Hamas and Al Qaeda.

troubling times

makes sense to me:
...................................................................................
April 10, 2013

Guns: The Left's True Aim, and How to Thwart It  -- By Lewis Dovland

We must not lose focus on the end goal of progressives regarding guns. Make no mistake; regardless of what they say, their ultimate goal is confiscation of all guns in America. And a "universal background check" will get them closer to this nirvana than the banning of a few selected weapons ever could.

To understand progressive methodology, let's use another similar issue: the gay marriage agenda. Say the current definition of "marriage" as it has been for thousands of years is represented by "A" on a continuum of A to Z, with "Z" being the left's ultimate goal. Asking for "Z" now would be a major overreach (and "Z" is much farther than just gay marriage), so progressives ask for "N," which is just enough of a stretch to make people push back only a little.

So to protect a foundation of society, the people of California overwhelmingly vote a law that defines marriage -- an appropriate state's rights issue. The left goes to court and has California's decision overturned. The people next pass a state constitutional amendment, and again the left gets it overturned, and now it is in the Supreme Court. The left also applies public pressure through the media to brand anyone who doesn't agree as a homophobe or hater, all the while controlling the educational curriculum so only one side of the argument is taught to our children.

Eventually, progressives will get only "C" this time, which is really all they wanted for now. But note something powerful here. "C" becomes the new "A." So there is never a way to back it up to the original "A." Over time, they will win another "C" that becomes "A."

Before long we find that we are at "H" on the original A-Z scale, but "H" is now considered "A". And so it continues.

Note the steps:

• Ask for more than you know you can achieve. In fact, ask for something you don't even want. Then everyone will be focused more on that than on your real goal.
• Use all media and educational tools to inculcate your view in the public and low-information voters.
• Develop your own lexicon, redefine words, and then keep pounding those words into the psyche each time you speak.
• Attack your opponents not on logic or facts, but by name-calling and emotion, and accuse them of being "obstructionist."
• When you concede, always be sure you've moved the marker a little farther toward your goal.
• Reset the measures so that the new position is now considered "normal," which makes it impossible for anyone to argue against or reverse.
• Never, ever give up or stop pushing, even when you (temporarily) lose.

How does this strategy apply to the gun issue? At this time, the left does not expect to restrict the sale of "assault weapons." That effort is a deliberate misdirection to throw us off-base so we are jousting with the wrong target and using up energy.

What the left wants is universal background checks. If leftists get that, they actually leapfrog the restrictions on certain weapon types. How?

No one can buy a modern operational firearm from a licensed dealer today without a background check. Period. There is no "gun show loophole," because to buy a gun at a gun show from a licensed dealer -- the only entity permitted to sell at gun shows -- one must pass the background check or show a firearms license.

Not controlled are sales of guns between private parties. You can sell me your gun in a face-to-face transaction without requiring that you get a background check on me.

Look at where this is going. The left is asking to ban the sale of "assault" weapons. Using the marriage example above, this is moving the marker from "A" to about "N" on the scale, since "Z" would be the total ban and confiscation of guns. The left knows that a ban is not possible, although "Z" is their ultimate goal. But what are they doing?

Ask for "N" when you know that "C" is possible, use the media and lexicon ("assault weapon," "gun show loophole") to pound home the message, demonize those who disagree, and get media support. Use emotion -- see Obama's recent "shame on us" speech with the Newtown families standing behind him.

And then, the final, sneaky step. Say, "Well, the American people just don't understand the need to ban these assault weapons, so at least give us background check legislation. That is not too much to ask for the children's sake." And if we don't agree to that, they call us "obstructionist" and other names, trying to shame us into action. If they succeed, we will have just moved from "A" to "S" on the scale, well past "N." How?

Enforcing the universal background check will require registration of all guns in a national database; otherwise, how and where do we prevent private sales without background checks? And the details of how to enforce the background checks will be handled by the legislation, neatly out of the direct view of the public. Once that occurs, the government will have a list of all legal guns and owners in the U.S., making confiscation extremely easy when the time comes.

And where are the teeth to make a gun owner register a gun, when he never expects to sell it? All the left needs to do is make possession of an unregistered gun a felony -- a "minor" clause in the law when they craft it. Then, when you defend yourself at 3 a.m. from an armed home invasion and your gun is found, you will be in more trouble than the perps. As a felon, you then lose your right to own any guns.

That is the goal here. Watch for the left to cave on the assault weapon ban and "settle" for just universal background checks. Sounds innocuous, right? If granted, it will provide the left with much, much more than they ever hoped to get at this juncture.

Our answer must be: "Never, never, never -- not one inch." No universal background checks, ever. Enforce the laws we have now. Otherwise, game over for us.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/guns_the_lefts_true_aim_and_how_to_thwart_it.html#ixzz2Q2x5fHLJ
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Maggie the prophet

Maggie Thatcher's speech to her party conference in 1975 pretty much sums up the Labor party of Australia in the 21st century. Who knew that she was prescient as well as tough.
..........................................................................................................................
The economic challenge has been debated at length in this hall.
Last week it gave rise to the usual scenes of cordial brotherly strife.
Day after day the comrades called one another far from comradely names, and occasionally, when they remembered, they called us names too.
Some of them, for example, suggested that I criticised Britain when I was overseas. They are wrong.
It wasn’t Britain I was criticising. It was-Socialism. (Applause).
And I will go on criticising Socialism, and opposing Socialism because it is bad for Britain—and Britain and
Socialism are not the same thing.
As long as I have health and strength, they never will be. (Applause).
But whatever could I say about Britain that is half as damaging as what this Labour Government have done to our country?
Let’s look at the record.
It is the Labour Government that have caused prices to rise at a record rate of 26 per cent a year.
They told us that the Social Contract would solve everything. But now everyone can see that the so-called contract was a fraud—a fraud for which the people of this country have had to pay a very high price.
It is the Labour Government whose policies are forcing unemployment higher than it need have been—thousands more men and women lose their jobs every day.
There are going to be men and women many of them youngsters straight out of school—who will be without a job this winter because Socialist Ministers spent last year attacking us, instead of attacking inflation.
And it’s the Labour Government that have brought the level of production below that of the 3-day week in 1974. W’ve really got a 3-day week now,—only it takes five days to do it. (Applause).
It’s the Labour Government that have brought us record peace-time taxation. They’ve got the usual Socialist disease—they’ve run out of other people’s money. (Laughter).
And it’s the Labour Government that have pushed public spending to record levels.
And how’ve they done it? By borrowing, and borrowing and borrowing.
Never in the field of human credit has so much been owed. (Laughter). End of section checked against ITN News at Ten, 10 October 1975.
But serious as the economic challenge is, the political and moral challenge is just as grave, perhaps more so.
Economic problems never start with economics. They have deeper roots—in human nature and in politics.
They don’t finish at economics either.
Labour’s failure to cope, to look at the nation’s problems from the point of view of the whole nation, not just one section of it, has led to loss of confidence and a sense of helplessness.
With it goes a feeling that Parliament, which ought to be in charge, is not in charge—that the actions and the decisions are taken elsewhere.
And it goes deeper than that. There are voices that seem anxious not to overcome our economic difficulties, but to exploit them, to destroy the free enterprise society and put a Marxist system in its place.
…
I sometimes think the Labour Party is like a pub where the mild is running out. If someone doesn’t do something soon, all that’s left will be bitter. (Laughter). And all that’s bitter will be Left. (Laughter).
Whenever I visit Communist countries, their politicians never hesitate to boast about their achievements.
They know them all by heart and reel off the facts and figures, claiming that this is the rich harvest of the Communist system.
Yet they are not prosperous as we in the West are prosperous, and they are not free as we in the West are free.
Our capitalist system produces a far higher standard of prosperity and happiness because it believes in incentive and opportunity, and because it is founded on human dignity and freedom. (Applause).
Even the Russians have to go to a capitalist country, America to buy enough wheat to feed their people. And that aftermore than 50 years of a State controlled economy.
Yet they boast incessantly while we, who have so much more to boast about, forever criticise and decry.
Isn’t it time we spoke up for our way of life? (Applause) After all, no Western nation has to build a wall round itself to keep its people in. (Applause).
So let us have no truck with those who say the free enterprise system has failed. What we face today is not a crisis of capitalism, but of Socialism. No country can flourish if its economic and social life is dominated by nationalisation and state control.
The cause of our shortcomings does not therefore lie in private enterprise. Our problem is not that we have too little socialism. It is that we have too much

Exposed!

One of Australia's few remaining genuine journalists nails it again:

Thatcher should have been a feminist hero, but ideologues like Greer could never stomach the fact that a conservative woman had risen to the top on her own merits, making a mockery of their quota systems.

Feminists of her era treated Thatcher like a gender traitor, and ignored or derided her achievements, proving that their real ambition was not female equality but advancing the collectivist statist ideology she spent her life demolishing.

LOL

isn't this a classic:

I just want to highlight again just the last part of that last paragraph from that report from 1817:

…..the Eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have so far never ventured so far North, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds. Within a few years it is predicted that, due to the ice melt, the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable.”

What surprises me is that this meme is still doing the rounds these days, almost 200 years later.

People (mainly those who support CAGW) STILL think that the melting Arctic Ice will lead to humungous seal level rises, flooding coastal regions.

It always makes me smile, and it almost got me into trouble once, that smiling bit. One person saw my smile, and in an almost aggrieved tone told me that this was no joking matter to be smiling about.

I mentioned to him that this was Sea Ice. He gave me a somewhat puzzled look and added the standard comeback ….. “And your point is?”

I just politely mentioned the phrase Archimedes Principle.

The dumbfounded look that followed was absolutely priceless. He had no idea, so I mentioned that the ice already floating in the ocean (Sea Ice or North Polar Ice) was already in the water and even if it all melted, it would not raise sea levels at all.

He still couldn’t see the point.

What absolutely amazes me is that people like this will believe what is the most complex science that some CAGW Scientists come out with, accept that verbatim, and then have no idea at all about the High School Science they actually learned themselves while at school.

He was still absolutely certain I was lying to support my own views.

It’s not isolated either. In the five years I’ve been following this. that position is not just occasional, but is actually the belief of a lot of people.

Tony.
 

way to go Tony!

Creeping totalitarianism

I have been very remiss of late in my blog pontifications.
Perhaps it is because I have had a school-terms worth of teaching and have thus been able to express my issues with a select but attentive group of worthy thinkers.
However, I am once again motivated to share with you; my few remaining blog surfers, the columns/information which provide a close proximity to my own train of thought.
Therefore, and in that vein, I think this article worth reading. http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2013/04/if-the-jackboot-fits
It deals with how the term fascism has been subverted to mean only totalitarianism of the right where in fact it applies equally (perhaps more so) to the left and is the most accurate term for the creeping (accelerating) hegemony that embodies the current 'government' of Australia's worldview.
The article expresses rather eloquently a perspective that I agree with.