LoL

HaHa! One of the better imports from England.

THE £50 LESSON

Recently, while I was working in the flower beds in the front yard, my neighbours stopped to chat as they returned home from walking their dog.

During our friendly conversation, I asked their 12 year old daughter what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be Prime Minister someday.

Both of her parents - liberal Democrat and New labour - were standing there, so I asked her, “If you were Prime Minister what would be the first thing you would do?”

She replied, “I’d give food and houses to all the homeless people.”

Her parents beamed with pride!

“Wow...what a worthy goal!” I said. “But you don’t have to wait until you’re Prime Minister to do that!” I told her.

“What do you mean?” she replied.

So I told her, “You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and trim my hedge, and I’ll pay you £50. Then you can go over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the £50 to use toward food and a new house.”

She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, “Why doesn’t the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the £50?”

I said, “Welcome to the Conservative Party.”

Her parents aren’t speaking to me anymore.

The name that cannot be spoken

This is the thinking that is happening right now in Canada:

Part of Quebec’s “problem” with religion might be that it listens too closely to its secularist academic elite. An anecdote shows how at least some Quebec academics regard religion. I was asked by the Ottawa Citizen to write an article responding to the question: “What is currently the world’s most dangerous idea?” I questioned some of my law school colleagues as to what they thought; without exception, they all answered “religion.”
 

This is the attack that is taking place throughout the Western world. Unfortunately this attack is restricted to one religion, namely Christianity...makes you think doesn't it.

relative reality?

Novelist Phillip K. Dick defined “reality” as “that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

Life exacts consequences from choices. Take the object lesson of Detroit: governed for a generation by overspending, Liberal scoundrels and incompetents, groaning under Michigan’s heftiest per-capita tax burden and the country’s (!) highest home and commercial property tax. The result? Motown’s collapse.

The political Left, meanwhile, harrumphs and scratches its head, flummoxed by that city’s awfulness.

Re-BUTT-al

Its about time conservative academics start defending family values, well done Professor Adams.
http://clashdaily.com/2013/08/an-embarrassment-to-higher-education/

P C warfare

....Thus she revealed herself to be just another politically correct zealot, standing for the secular sectarianism of group rights.

For far from serving the whole of society, each such interest group exists to gain power over everyone else – and damns anyone who stands in its way.

Indeed, this is why ‘political correctness’ is not remotely liberal at all, but viciously oppressive. It is simply a mechanism for re-ordering the world according to a particular dogma – and thus inescapably stifles all dissent.

Innately hostile to traditional morality, it paves the way for a secular Inquisition in which today’s Torquemadas are the ideologues of such group rights – and it is Christians and other religious believers who are the heretics to be silenced by force.

It is, indeed, the principal weapon of unholy war wielded by the forces of militant secularism, which are intent upon destroying the Judeo-Christian basis of western morality.

It supplants traditional morality and the concepts of right and wrong, truth and lies by a creed which says in effect, ‘Whatever is right for you is right’.

It also seeks to replace patriotism and service to one’s country by serving ‘the community’. This is yet another slippery concept, which today can simply amount to membership of just such an interest group, which is in the business of elbowing out other interest groups in the greedy clamour for entitlements.

So the new Guiding promise is all about being true to me, myself and my beliefs, whatever they may happen to be. It represents the antithesis of duty to others. It says, more or less, ‘I promise to serve myself’.

It is a promise for a narcissistic, self-centred and morally vacuous age. (Melanie Phillips 27.8.13)

Barack O'phoney

Thomas Sowell on the phony Barack Obama:

Argentina has recently been demanding that Britain return the Falkland Islands, which have been occupied by Britons for nearly two centuries. In 1982, Argentina seized these islands by force, only to have British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher take the islands back by force.

With Argentina today beset by domestic problems, demanding the return of the Falklands is once again a way for Argentina's government to distract the Argentine public's attention from the country's economic and other woes.

Because the Argentines call these islands "the Malvinas," rather than "the Falklands," Barack Obama decided to use the Argentine term. But he referred to them as "the Maldives."

It so happens that the Maldives are thousands of miles away from the Malvinas. The former are in the Indian Ocean, while the latter are in the South Atlantic.

Nor is this the only gross misstatement that President Obama has gotten away with, thanks to the mainstream media, which sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil when it comes to Obama.

The presidential gaffe that struck me when I heard it was Barack Obama's reference to a military corps as a military "corpse." He is obviously a man who is used to sounding off about things he has paid little or no attention to in the past. His mispronunciation of a common military term was especially revealing to someone who was once in the Marine Corps, not Marine "corpse."

Like other truly talented phonies, Barack Obama concentrates his skills on the effect of his words on other people — most of whom do not have the time to become knowledgeable about the things he is talking about. Whether what he says bears any relationship to the facts is politically irrelevant.
 

The last paragraph's instructive and is wonderfully representative of this shallow Alinskyite as it is of Australia's current prime minister (the wizard of oz) who is cut from the same cloth. Both say whatever is necessary to remain in power, they lie to the liars, spin to the spinners and both lie and spin about the truthful and behind all the fabrications they are shallow and superficial.
Superficial persons for a superficial age, perfect!

Wisdom of the ages

In 1837 Daniel Webster recognized the character of manipulative men in power when he said:

There are men, in all ages, who mean to exercise power usefully; but they mean to exercise it. They mean to govern well; but they mean to govern. They promise to be kind masters; but they mean to be masters. They think there need be but little restraint upon themselves. Their notion of the public interest is apt to be quite closely connected with their own exercise of authority. They may not, indeed, always understand their own motives. The love of power may sink too deep in their own hearts even for their own scrutiny, and may pass with themselves for mere patriotism and benevolence.
 

And from Todd Conrad in April of 2013:

 Let us hope that the internet and the free flow of ideas about freedom continue to hamper the planners and world-savers who intend to remake the world in their image and reduce us all under absolute tyranny.

 

Engage politically, the war is on!

The inability to reason through consequences has led many to the belief that the gay marriage agenda is both inevitable and that it is nothing more than a human 'right' that should be accessible to all. I say: wake up and read the writing on the wall. 

If marriage is redefined, believing what virtually every human society once believed about marriage—that it is the union of a man and a woman ordered to procreation and family life—would be seen increasingly as an irrational prejudice that ought to be driven to the margins of culture. The consequences for religious believers are becoming apparent.”

But this is just one case of many. And behind it all, as I already mentioned, is the radicals’ intention to fundamentally transform society. It is not about “equal rights” or “tolerance” and so on. It is about a revolutionary attempt to destroy the West altogether and replace it with an alien and destructive ideology.

Hilary White has just written on this. He speaks about “The revolution of the family: the Marxist roots of ‘homosexualism’.” He discusses British homosexualist Peter Thatchell and a recent article of his: “Tatchell’s Guardian piece was a paean to a document put together in 1971 by what he describes as a collective of ‘anarchists, hippies, leftwingers, feminists, liberals and counter- culturalists’ to bring about ‘a revolution in consciousness’.

“He called the ‘Gay Liberation Front: Manifesto’ ‘a pioneering agenda for social and personal transformation’ that started with the proposal that ‘subverting the supremacy of heterosexual masculinity was the key to genuine liberation.’ Tatchell said it was the book that changed his life.

“The Manifesto sums it all up, Tatchell says, by ‘critiquing’ ‘homophobia, sexism, marriage, the nuclear family, monogamy, the cults of youth and beauty, patriarchy, the gay ghetto and rigid male and female gender roles’ … the whole kaboodle of the sexual revolution.

“The Manifesto itself is quite blunt about identifying the main enemies to defeat: ‘The oppression of gay people starts in the most basic unit of society, the family. Consisting of the man in charge, a slave as his wife, and their children on whom they force themselves as the ideal models. The very form of the family works against homosexuality.’
 

..... His whole article is worth reading, but he finishes with these words: “The main problem with the homosexualist version of the Marxist dream is that you have to get everyone to agree. And I mean everyone. Marxist theorists have always known that utopia will only work if no one is allowed to raise any objection. Everyone has to agree, and no voice of dissent can be tolerated to pop the soap bubble logic of the enterprise.

If you love your family, hold conservative values in the spiritual, economic, and cultural arenas of life then you are a threat to this agenda. Do not think for a moment that because you are silent these wolves will leave-you-be. As soon as they have eradicated all the opposition that precedes you it will then be your turn to bear the malice and by that point there will probably be no one left to fight for you.

This has been said many times and in many different ways, but the truth is beginning to emerge from behind the smokescreen.

WE ARE ENGAGED IN AN ALL OUT WAR.

It is not a war against flesh and blood but its manifestations are of this world and these political machinations indicate the front line. Therefore we cannot sit in the background and indulge our fears we must engage wherever we can and in Australia that means we must vote and vote where it counts.

Do your homework. Access the manifestos of those organisations who masquerade as compassionate and caring but whose political intentions are as vicious and catastrophic as Mao's, Stalin's and Mussolini's were to their respective countries.

I am under no illusions that a liberal government is going to stop this assualt on conservative values because unfortunately many in the LNP are philosophically compromised (as are many Christians), but I believe that a vote for the coalition will slow down the advance, maybe enough to gather our breath and provide more time to spread truth and rebuild the family values that have stood this nation in such good stead.

Unhealthy partnerships

Read Saul Alinsky's 'Rules for Radicals' at: http://www.bestofbeck.com/wp/activism/saul-alinskys-12-rules-for-radicals  and realise that the Labor Party is operating directly from this playbook.

Obama's career and his political campaigns have both been influenced by Alinsky, and where have the Labor crew sourced their political strategy from....even to the point of importing some key strategists (on 457 visa's no less)? You guessed it, from Obama's campaign.

The intriguing part of it all is that Alinsky's book features an interesting dedication on its coverleaf:

"He dedicated his book Rules for Radicals to Lucifer, whom he described as "the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom". In old age he said, "Once I get into hell, I'll start organizing the have-nots over there".
 

Oz Guinness once wrote something to the tune of;  'if you plan on supping with the devil, be sure to bring a long spoon.' 

Applauding his own intended demise.

This is the founder of the organisation that Barack Obama paid tribute to in April of this year.

"But obviously this is a special national conference, because it’s been nearly a hundred years since the first health clinic of what later would become Planned Parenthood opened its doors to women in Brooklyn. And for nearly a century now, one core principle has guided everything all of you do -- that women should be allowed to make their own decisions about their own health. (Applause.) It’s a simple principle." (B.O. April 26, 2013)

..."if there’s one thing the past few years have shown, it's that Planned Parenthood is not going anywhere. It's not going anywhere today. It's not going anywhere tomorrow. (Applause.)"
 

The implicit irony of this stupid statement frankly beggars belief. But then this hopeless moron ends his hapless speech with this gem:

"Thank you, Planned Parenthood. God bless you. God bless America. Thank you."

Well we all know which God he is referring to and it is not YHWH, if anything it is more like Moloch.  (Leviticus 18>which incidentally seems to be relevant to more and more of Western civilisations cultural 'habits')

Zeitgeist

Tales from a female investigator of workplace corruption...sound familiar?

"Over the past 11 years, I have been called upon to investigate many people for workplace misconduct. The hardest people to investigate are high-achieving, high-profile women executives. Their starting position is always a haughty refusal to answer questions or participate in investigations they consider beneath them. Next they attempt to retain control by trying to impose their conditions and time frames on the investigation. They attempt to distract from their own conduct by focusing on the poor conduct of others. Some flail about, claiming the status of bullying or sexism victim.

Towards the end, in the face of overwhelming evidence, where others would walk away in shame, they deny everything and come out fighting. I have had some stand up, in the middle of being dismissed, and stalk out of the room declaring they are too busy for all this as they have a business or hospital or hotel to run."

....or a country?

Even though our Prime Ministership has changed hands, this ‘spirit’ still resides in the halls of power. Imagine this investigator interviewing P Wong, or T Plibersek?

Too right!

This brief excerpt expresses the truth of this current Australian election more eruditely than I could:

Terrifying stuff! Shake in your boots. For the umpteenth time Penny Wong tells us that if the polls are right and the election had been held Tony Abbott would be prime minister. Ms Wong never tires of this horror story and clearly believes it has enormous impact in scaring the pants of us. Why wouldn’t it, she thinks?

---

A dose of a thoroughly decent family man, a volunteer without fanfare for charitable causes, someone with a longstanding commitment to helping Aboriginal communities, who has extensive experience as a minister in the most stable and successful government in memory, and who is an author and Rhodes scholar too boot, and who leads a stable, loyal and experienced team. Now that is all a disconcerting change of pace.

 Ms Wong obviously believes that we have become used to (comfortable with, even) dysfunctional, double-dealing, incompetent spendthrifts running things. Here we all are, she thinks, wallowing in union corruption, seedy deals, deficits and debt, instability and waste, grandiose un-costed visions and thought bubbles, without a care in the world. Mr Abbott would spoil it.

The test of Character

The testimonies on this blog say it all...this should win the election hands down for Tony Abbott, and that fact that it matters little, is an indictment on the culture that is today:
 

Who won last night’s debate? Ask make-up artist Lily Fontana:

Just finished doing Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott’s makeup for the People’s Forum at the Broncos Leagues Club.
One of them was absolutely lovely, engaged in genuine conversation with me, acknowledge that I had a job to do and was very appreciative. The other did the exact opposite! Oh boy, I have ever had anyone treat me so badly whilst trying to do my job. Political opinions aside...from one human being to another...Mr Abbott, you win hands down.

(Thanks to reader Josephine.)

UPDATE

Reader ausebell has a similar measure:

At the end of the night when Abbott invited the crowd to ‘ask more questions of him’ we saw Abbott swamped with people, while Rudd looked a lonely figure as a couple of young men wanted a selfie with him. No-one wanted to speak with him. He left after 5 minutes while Abbott stayed for another 1/2 hour, with a line of people wanting to meet and speak with him. I don’t think they noticed Rudd leave and I doubt they really cared.

UPDATE

Abbott’s staff confirms: OPPOSITION Leader Tony Abbott’s office has confirmed Lily Fontana did his make up before the forum.

“It wasn’t Tony that was rude to her,” his spokesman said.

So do other make-up artists:

Friends of Ms Lily Fontana were quick to respond to her Facebook comment:

“Anybody that has ever spent time with both men (which I have ) will tell you exactly the same,” one friend posted. “Abbott a genuine decent man, Rudd an elitist grub who thinks he is superior to all!!!!”
Another said they had also had a “very similar experience”.

“I second this Lily. I have had a very similar experience! Must run in the family as Mr Howard and Mr Costello were gentlemen with a capital G. Mr Abbott is following in their footsteps. The other, I could not even face book how he treated the crew. Just abhorrent!”

True History

Do not let people intimidate you into thinking that it was Christianity that perpetrated the vile deeds of 'colonialism' on the original Aboriginal population of Australia.
Indeed it was those of a more 'scientific' and decidedly atheistic caste whose deeds were truly vile:

Evolution and the first Australians

Darwin considered the Australian Aborigines as primitive and not much evolved from the ‘anthropoid apes’. He anticipated that the ‘wilder races’ would become extinct because survival of the fittest meant they would be superseded by the evolutionarily-advanced ‘civilised’ races. An evolutionary view of human origins underlies the World Heritage listing of the Lake Mungo site. Such a view was not good for the first Australians. Many atrocities were perpetrated on Aboriginal communities because of these evolutionary beliefs.

Incredibly, in the 1800s, it was not uncommon for Aboriginal people to be hunted and shot as specimens for science. Their remains were sent to Europe to illustrate evolution displays in museums. Only now are these remains being returned to their communities.

But the Bible records our true human history. The first Aboriginal settlers to Australia were descended from people as intelligent and inventive as any other culture at that time. Like everyone else, they were descended from Noah, who built and managed the Ark, and from a people who developed an advanced civilization around the Tower of Babel.

The Aborigines of Australia lost some of their technological know-how—it can happen in a generation if parents do not pass it on to their children. (Perhaps it was because of isolation and the pressure to cope with a worsening climate as the continent dried out after the Ice Age.) They, like other peoples, are made ‘in the image of God’ (Genesis 1:26).

Choose wisely brothers & sisters.

I would like to draw the analogy of Rudd being a wolf in sheep's clothing but I fear it would be injurious to wolves in general.
Take for instance this latest article about the creeping assault on faith based schooling:

That education is a politically sensitive issue is proven by the fact that low-fee, non-denominational, Christian schools in marginal seats, where parents are voting with their feet choosing such schools, are most at risk because of the ALP’s education policies.

http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2013/08/the-sly-assault-on-faith-based-schools

Solving your own 'solutions'.

The inimitable Thomas Sowell:

It is hard to read a newspaper, or watch a television newscast, without encountering someone who has come up with a new "solution" to society's "problems." Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than there are problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today's problems are a result of yesterday's solutions.

Education is a field with endless reforms, creating endless problems, requiring endless solutions. One of the invincible fallacies among educators is that all sorts of children can be educated in the same classroom. Not just children of different races, but children of different abilities, languages, and values.

Isn't it nice to think so? I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination, rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.

The result is that many very bright children are bored to the point of becoming behavior problems, when the school work is slowed to a pace within the range of students who are slower learners.

By federal law, even children with severe mental or emotional problems must be "mainstreamed" into classes for other students — often in disregard of how much this disrupts these classes and sacrifices the education of the other children.
Parents who complain about the effect of these "solutions" on their own children's education are made to feel guilty for not being more "understanding" about the problems of handicapped students.

Nothing is easier for third party busybodies than being "understanding" and "compassionate" at someone else's expense — especially if the busybodies have their own children in private schools, as so many public school educators do.
 

Amongst the many reasons why I have chosen to homeschool my youngest.
The main problem with school funding in an ideologically charged political environment is that the union see schools as places where more teachers means more union members, thus school becomes a vehicle to provide jobs for teachers, rather than education for students, and the union will not tolerate challenges to its politically correct dogmas.

Zarathustra's rule!

This was lifted directly from a blog comment...it makes you think doesn't it.

I worked for a Labor MP as recently as six years ago, and the true believers really do call each other “comrade”. I nearly fell off my chair laughing the first time I heard it and wondered if it was an in-joke between two mates. But no, it was very common amongst members.

Supporters really are unthinking sheep, and when they have little to defend they resort to personal insults, like children in a playground. Sadly they appear to have lost their moral compass, if they ever had one!

Truly unbelieving of NSW (Reply)
 

When people go out of their way to identify themselves with Marxist ideology then campaign on the basis of Capitalism and democracy what does that make them?
Thus spake the ALP.

Church of the Three Monkeys

Willful ignorance is a choice and with increasing frequency it is not faith that leads us down the path of scientific irrationality, but intellectual vanity.
Never let it be said that Christians follow a path of 'blind faith' (though inevitably some will), I believe it is the evolutionists who in fact fit that description rather well:

Purpose and design have always been evident in the universe but the past few hundred years have enabled mankind to look increasingly further and deeper than ever before into the nature of matter, space and life and we are faced with layer upon wonderful layer of design, complexity and information. On the basis of our knowledge and experience of cause and effect, we should know that there is a supreme being to whom our worship and obedience are due.

This is why evolutionists have to purposely and consciously deny a creator. All of their observations and experience of life tell them that certain objects are designed, but “since they did not see fit to acknowledge God” (Romans 1:28), they have to deny the evidence of their own eyes. In a sense they are denying the observations of the very science they claim to represent. This is why a brilliant scientist like Francis Crick says “biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed”.⁶ If you constantly keep telling yourself a lie, you might come to believe it, so goes the hope.

Gramsci marches on

I had to re-publish this letter (originally sent to Quadrant) because it so eruditely sums up my understanding of the cultural battle.

The Malevolent Elite

SIR: I have read Nick Cater’s recent book, The Lucky Culture. I have read Greg Melleuish’s Australian Intellectuals: Their Strange History and Pathological Tendencies. Now I have read your Chronicle in the June Quadrant.

I can’t help thinking that all these works are too generous to the “elite” classes. It takes real malevolence to accuse your own countrymen of genocide and then fabricate the evidence to support it. It takes real malevolence to dream up a climate scare and then fabricate the evidence to support it. The identification of this deep malevolent intent, and its origins, are completely missing from these texts. There are references to the left leanings of this group, but the description of the radical environmentalists who support the global warming scare as “watermelons” is now too widespread to need explanation. Your own scholarship of the “Stolen Generations” traces the origins of the myth to the Victorian Communist Party in the 1930s. The fact that the activities of the new “elites” and the Gramscian agenda run parallel suggests to me that this may be no coincidence and that this left leaning requires much more exploration.

Peter Saunders, looking at the “elite’s” push for same-sex marriage, sums up my concerns:

gay marriage will not bring the bourgeois social order crashing down, but it is one more step in Antonio Gramsci’s call in the 1930s for a revolutionary “march through the institutions”. Gramsci, an Italian Marxist, realised that Western capitalism would not be destroyed by economic class struggle, for it is good at meeting people’s material needs. What was needed, therefore, was a long-term campaign against the core institutions through which bourgeois culture is transmitted to each generation. Break the hold of the churches, take over the media, subvert the schools and universities, and chip away at the heart of the citadel, the bourgeois family, and eventually, the whole system will fall.

While describing the natural history of the “elites” in these recent publications, an analysis of their tools of trade, their principal weapons—“political correctness”, “critical theory” and “cultural relativism”—should never have been left out. This may not be economic Marxism or political Marxism, but it is certainly cultural Marxism.

Clearly, not all of the new “elite class” are self-identified Marxists, but they are arguably remnants of Joseph Stalin’s “useful idiots” and fellow travellers, still engaged in Mao’s “Long March”, but without a Mao to bring it to an end.

Alistair Crooks
Walkerville, SA

A take on philanthropy

Well stated matthew Hanley:

The essential problem with capitalism is not inequality; the problem with capitalism is MTV. Problems with capitalism proliferate in proportion to its detachment from moral values. In one sense, capitalism even has something in common with communism: its ideology of materialism. Not that capitalism is morally equivalent to the bloody inhumanity of its erstwhile rival, but it does corrode moral and cultural values. -

....Philanthropy anyone? Such consciously “big business” behavior is considerably worse than what T.S. Eliot had in mind when he wrote:“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”

It seems to me that the philanthropist (the lover of man) should, as a prerequisite, be finely attuned to the human condition – and, like Eliot, on guard as to how he may compound rather than alleviate problems. -
In places, Buffet seems to want to go there. Ultimately, however, what he calls a “crisis of imagination” in the philanthropic industry is, in essence, really better classified as a crisis of values, which is to say a deep conflict of perspectives about the dignity of man. The biggest problem we face, then, is that parting with one’s money is easier than parting with one’s ideology. The utopian notion that the right combination of financing, technology, and ingenuity – critical components as they each are – can compensate for neglect of the underlying moral dimensions at the root of our crises must be resisted. Apprehending this moral dimension can only be the byproduct, as Pascal argued, of our efforts to think well. Inheriting bad ideas, even along with a fortune, only ensures that authentic human development will remain elusive – even if the “non-profit” world thrives. - See more at:

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/big_philanthropy_a_crisis_of_values#sthash.xDuLZDzv.dpuf

Tolerantly intolerant

Daryll McCann:

For more than four decades, our “new class” has marginalised anybody with the temerity to challenge PC dogma, and yet its members continue to define themselves as “open minded” folk whose bottom line is tolerance – unless, of course, you are a “Denier”. The Culture Cult was published long before the CAGW theory transmutated into the CAGW hoax, and yet its anti-bourgeois bohemian thesis tells us why Warministas won’t let go of the thing. Roger Sandall, were he alive today, might raise a wry smile at a junior high school history textbook used to teach Labor’s new national curriculum, especially when the author speaks of global warming as proof positive that industrial modernity is not superior to nomadic existence. Chalk that up as one for cultural relativism.
 

The excerpt is amusing in that the bohemian-laborites are determinedly hypocritical, but it is also disturbing in that these loons have control of the education system...another reason why I am homeschooling (until it becomes banned as a subversive activity like in Europe, after which I shall willingly become a conscientious objector). 

'Ne'er the Twain shall meet'

Thomas Sowell is a social essayist whose work I solemnly and avidly advocate for. His insights into America and the black-white polarisation which affects social, political and familial relationships are remarkable as well as perspicacious.
The following excerpt provides a powerful perspective into the post modern reductionism that is sweeping the globe; namely a dualism of worldviews which increasingly reduces most of politicised mankind into two diametrically opposed camps with seemingly no hope that the Twain shall meet.

US political commentator Thomas Sowell has written much on all this. In his incisive 1987 volume, A Conflict of Visions, he contrasts the constrained vision with the unconstrained. The former sees mankind as limited morally, intellectually and socially, and eschews the push for radical change, either in man or in society. The latter sees man and society as unbounded in potential, and seeks for radical change to bring in utopia now.

The former follows the Judeo-Christian view of the fallenness of man, and the impossibility of changing human nature and society without outside help. The latter sees human nature and society being capable of being moulded into a new man and a perfect society. Says Sowell:

“The great evils of the world – war, poverty, and crime, for example – are seen in completely different terms by those with the constrained and the unconstrained visions. If human options are not inherently constrained, then the presence of such repugnant and disastrous phenomenon virtually cries out for explanations – and for solutions. But if the limitations and passions of man himself are at the heart of these painful phenomena, then what requires explanation are the ways in which they have been avoided or minimized. While believers in the unconstrained vision seek the special causes of war, poverty and crime, believers in the constrained vision seek the special causes of peace, wealth, or a law-abiding society.”

The differing outcomes of these philosophies are becoming increasingly apparent. Detroit is a city which reflects emphatically on the one; let us hope and pray Austrlia does not suffer the same fate.
The full transcript is available @ http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2013/08/07/on-revolution-and-competing-worldviews/

Sowell for president

This is the African-American who should be leading America not Alinsky's acolyte.

Whole books could be filled with the unequal behavior or performances of people, or the unequal geographic settings in which whole races, nations, and civilizations have developed. Yet the preconceptions of the political Left march on undaunted, loudly proclaiming sinister reasons why outcomes are not equal within nations or between nations.

All this moral melodrama has served as a background for the political agenda of the Left, which has claimed to be able to lift the poor out of poverty, and in general make the world a better place. This claim has been made for centuries and in countries around the world. And it has failed for centuries in countries around the world.

Some of the most sweeping and spectacular rhetoric of the Left occurred in 18th-century France, where the very concept of the Left originated in the fact that people with certain views sat on the left side of the National Assembly.

The French Revolution was their chance to show what they could do when they got the power they sought. In contrast to what they promised — “liberty, equality, fraternity” — what they actually produced were food shortages, mob violence, and dictatorial powers that included arbitrary executions, extending even to their own leaders, such as Robespierre, who died under the guillotine.

In the 20th century, the most sweeping vision of the Left — Communism — spread over vast regions of the world and encompassed well over a billion human beings. Of these, millions died of starvation in the Soviet Union under Stalin and tens of millions in China under Mao.

Milder versions of socialism, with central planning of national economies, took root in India and in various European democracies.

If the preconceptions of the Left were correct, central planning by educated elites who had vast amounts of statistical data at their fingertips and expertise readily available, and were backed by the power of government, should have been more successful than market economies where millions of individuals pursued their own individual interests willy-nilly.
 

Read the blog in full @  http://www.nationalreview.com/article/352704/lefts-central-delusion-thomas-sowell

Harbinger of doom?

Is the sad tale of Detroit the harbinger of things to come in the 'progressive' West?

Tim Blair –, Wednesday, August, 07, 2013, (1:26pm)

“In the city of Detroit, 47 percent of adults are functionally illiterate,” reports Katie Pavlich. “Students in Detroit’s public school system have a higher chance of going to prison than they do of graduating high school.” The doomed city’s problems start at the top:

Just a few years ago, now former president of the school board Otis Mathis, fondled himself during a public meeting. Naturally, his inappropriate behavior was defended by a school board colleague who argued Mathis, 55-years-old at the time, was simply a “naive young man” about appropriate behavior.

 There’s also the small matter of Mathis’s own functional illiteracy. Following is an email from the former president of Detroit’s school board:

 If you saw Sunday’s Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason’s he gave for closing school to many empty seats.

 

Narcissus and the modern elite

Ha Ha, sad but unfortunately all too true:

For many young people, especially those who’ve been exposed to the arse-end of academia for longer than is wise, whininess is now regarded as a virtue. It’s how some people hope to make themselves interesting, if only to other idiots. Apparently stoicism is terribly old hat. Whingeing is what the sexy and enlightened people are doing now. And so by some accounts, nothing is too small or banal to be unjust or oppressive, or emotionally crushing, from hairstyles that are racist to the traumatic names of nail polish colours. Apparently these things are “microaggressions” that are “extremely triggering” and making the intellectuals of tomorrow weep into their pillows.

And as I’ve said before, this farcical unrealism is being taught and cultivated.

Back to feudalism

I know I am showing my conservative colours by quoting Bolt, but the truth is that he make accurate observations:

I’m generalising about the Left. But that’s the romance that often marks them off from conservatives - the rule of mates over the rule of law; the tribe over principle.

Think of building union protesters ignoring court orders, shouting “touch one, touch all”.

Think of the pagan anti-McDonald’s protesters stopping the sanctioned construction of an outlet at Tecoma, or the mates rates that has now crippled NSW Labor.

Add also the multiculturalism push which has tribes negotiating not for equal treatment but favors.
 

Tribalism is a return to feudalism and the problem with that is that feudalism breeds a hierarchical elitism that is, in essence; totalitarian. This of course fits the goal of the 'intellectual' radicals because they actually believe that they are the ones who should be in charge, having all that outward compassion and important knowledge, you know; nous, the concern about population explosions, the illegal immigration, the plight of endangered lady bugs, the rape of Gaia etc.

The only problem being that when these morons have ultimately succeeded in bringing the Judeo-Christian civilisation to its knees, the ones who take charge will not be the sensitive, seaweed nourished metro-sexual but the barbarians who know only violence and the will to power...can you imagine a shrimp shouldered, green leaning, limp wristed, effete, 'scholalry', tofu eating, inner-city, wimpy lawyer Eloi coming up against some of these steroid driven, pumped up, suicidal Morlock's aimed at them by a psychopathic group of ruthless controllers. Think Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, Ceausescu et al

If it were not so devastating to the vast majority of 'ordinary'folk it would be amusing.