Toxic zeitgeist

Theodore Dalrymple (a nom de plume) writes exceptionally well and with perspicacity about the human condition. He is credited as being a perceptive social commentator who: “…worked for many years as a Psychiatrist and doctor in a large British inner city hospital and the large prison nearby”.

This is a brief excerpt from his book “Spoilt Rotten: the toxic cult of sentimentality”, a book I would recommend as necessary reading in order to understand better the collapse of social values in the West today:

“The Christian view is much less sentimental than the secularist. The secularist sees victims everywhere, hordes of suffering people who need rescue from injustice. In these circumstances, it has become advantageous to claim victimhood for oneself – psychologically as well as financially – because to be a victim is to be a beneficiary of injustice. This is why so many highly privileged people, who by the standards of all previously existing populations, lead lives of outstanding comfort, freedom and possibilities, claim the status of victim.” (pg 203)

I have no idea whether or not the good Doctor is a Christian or merely an older person who has grown up within a Christian zeitgeist, but I do know that his observations and experiences are uncannily precise and offer insightful glances into the human eccentricities we see so much in evidence around us.

Truth and not!

What truth is not
1. Truth is not what works. Pragmatism says an idea is true if it works. Cheating and lying often work, but that does not make them true. How do we measure what works? Says Geisler, “An idea is not true because it works; it works because it is true.”
2. Truth is not what feels good. Mysticism and subjectivism both affirm personal feelings as the basis of truth. But feelings can be misleading. And if two person’s feelings conflict, who decides whose is true? Feelings may or may not correspond with what is true.
3. Truth is not whatever you want it to be. Relativism says that truth is whatever I declare it to be. But no one can live this way. If I say a traffic light is green when it is really red, there will be serious consequences.
4. Truth is not just what we perceive with the senses. Empiricism says that only what we can measure empirically (with the five senses) is true. But truth is more than this. What about things like beauty and truth and justice and love? They cannot be discovered by the five senses. Plus our senses can mislead us.
5. Truth is not what the majority believe. Majoritarianism says truth is what most people agree to. But the crowd can be wrong. Most Germans believed Hitler was right in the 30s and 40s. But they were clearly wrong. Truth is not based on majority vote. Indeed, truth can easily not be known by the majority.
What truth is
1. Truth is universal. Truth is something true for all people, for all places, for all times. Different cultures, different historical eras, different nationalities, do not change what truth is.
2. Truth is absolute. It is not relative. An absolute is needed for standards. There can be no standards without absolutes. Indeed, there can be no measurement without absolutes. A builder knows that if he wants a number of pieces of lumber the same exact size, he will use one piece as the standard.
3. Truth is objective. It is “independent of the knower and his consciousness” as Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli put it. It is not based on subjective feelings or personal opinions. Truth does not reside in us or in our opinions. Personal experience is not the basis of truth. Truth is something that is external to us. We discover truth that already exists. We don’t make it up or create it.
4. Truth corresponds with reality. It corresponds to the way things really are. Truth is what corresponds to the actual state of affairs being described. Truth is ‘telling it like it is’.
5. Truth is based on God. God is the basis of truth. Only God provides an unchanging, universal reality upon which truth is based.
6. Truth is personal. Truth is more than just abstract theories and propositions. Truth is something that demands a personal response. In the Old Testament, the Hebrew root usually translated true or truth means ‘something which can be relied upon’ or ‘someone who can be trusted’ as Alister McGrath notes.
7. Truth is knowable. We may not know truth exhaustively, but we can know true truth. God has made us and the world in such a way that truth can be known. That is, while the finite can never grasp the infinite, if the infinite takes the initiative and reaches out to the finite, then that infinite truth can be known to some extent.

Misplaced pathogens

We have all read about the Ehrlich's of this world describing the human population as a 'virus' and the Suzuki's of the world describing us as 'maggots defecating on the earth'  and other Gaia enthusiasts advising that the best means of environmental protectionism should be the 'culling' of the 'human herd'.
Implicit within all of these misanthropic utterances is the belief that those who make such egregious  pronouncements are somehow removed from, or better yet morally above this herd and are therefore not to be included in the fate meted out to the common person.

“…even if there were a population explosion, it would still be inhuman to say that there are too many humans on the planet. You can say there are too many people in a lift (‘eight persons max’) but not on Earth. To wish to reduce the number of living, breathing humans on this planet is an obscenity.”

Exactly. Because if there are too many people on Earth, then presumably some people are in the “too many” category. And who do you think those people are? The one child family in London consuming massive amounts of resources in a Western standard of living? Or the family with eight children living in a shanty town consuming so few resources that they are under-nourished in some poor country that is difficult to locate on a map and somewhere overthere? Generally, the overpopulation drum-beaters are worried about too many people being born in poor overseas countries. The implicit racism in such a view has been canvassed before. After all, we in the enlightened West are not the problem, we’ve reached the state of perfection of small families that do not naturally replace our population. Newman draws a parallel to early twentieth century England:

“Today's overpopulation hysteria is not a patch on what it was a hundred years ago, however, when mainstream intellectuals such as HG Wells, WB Yeats, Virginia Woolf and DH Lawrence were proposing not just sterilisation but actual extermination. Back then, there were fewer people in Britain, of course, but many more of them were homeless. It was thought that homelessness came from there being too many people. It was a population problem. Simple as that. But then voters – as opposed to intellectuals – realised that homelessness was caused not by too many people crowding too small a country, but by too few people owning too much land.
 

If there truly is a pathogenic virus at loose upon this earth it is the intellectual vanity that has become de rigueur amongst the higher educational facilites of the western world, particularly within the humanities departments.

Al Shabaab shishkibab.

Terrorist groups like most anti-everything organisations end up hating each other as much as their avowed enemies:

Al Shabaab also damaged itself earlier this year after a power struggle in which its former commander, the US-born Omar Hammami (alias Abu Mansoor al-Amriki) was toppled. Hammami, who was on the US most wanted list, together with his colleague from the UK Usama al-Britani, were ambushed and shot dead earlier this month by allies of the new leader, Ahmed Abdi Godane. It is Godane who was instrumental in establishing Al-Shabaab’s affiliation with al-Qaeda in 2012. A little earlier, Godane had planned the July 2010 bombing in the Ugandan capital of Kampala to retaliate against Uganda’s participation in AMISOM.

To consolidate his power base earlier this year, Godane – who is also known as Mukhtar Abu Zubayr – executed four top commanders of Al Shabaab, including the group’s co-founder known as Sheikh Ibrahim al-Afghani, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. His brutal assumption of power compelled the group’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, to flee for his life. The Somali government subsequently captured Aweys.
 

And for that small grace we are thankful. However, even though a snake might have had its head chopped off, reflex actions and the fact that the fangs are still loaded with venom make the decapitated part still lethal, as witnessed by this horrible organisations current strike in Kenya.

Bureaucratic overdrive.

Sounds like Canberra:

"Where do you go to get a piece of this action? As the old saying goes, bank robbers rob banks because that’s where the money is. But the smart guys rob taxpayers because that’s where the big money is. According to the Census Bureau’s latest “American Community Survey,” from 2000-12, the nation’s median household income dropped 6.6 percent. Yet, in the District of Columbia median household income rose 23.3 percent. According to a 2010 survey, seven of the nation’s 10 wealthiest counties are in the Washington commuter belt. Many capital cities have prosperous suburbs – London, Paris, Rome – because those cities are also the capitals of enterprise, finance, and showbiz. But Washington does nothing but government, and it gets richer even as Americans get poorer. That’s very banana republic, too: Proximity to state power is now the best way to make money. Once upon a time, Americans found fast-running brooks and there built mills to access the water that kept the wheels turning. But today the ambitious man finds a big money-no-object bureaucracy that likes to splash the cash around and there builds his lobbying group or consultancy or social media optimization strategy group."

"Saint" Suzuki

Privatise the ABC now!
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2013/09/solo-suzuki-could-use-a-sidecar

Doing not seeming

It appears that a new and welcome change is happening within the Australian zeitgeist...go Tony!
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/abbott-begins-his-revolution/story-fni0ffxg-1226722279195

A tale of two despotic philosophies.

Fabianism is the accepted philosophical framework that motivates Australia's Labor party, it is not a hidden agenda it is widely articulated and aggressively promoted.

Fabian Society: Slow Conquering Socialism

The Fabian Society of Britain was named after Roman general Fabius Maximus, famed for a warfare style that eked out victories via patience and attrition. Fabian socialists likewise seek to take over their host countries by slowly changing standards until the dumbed-down populace no longer has the wit to notice or care. A sociological analogy might be—how predators groom their victims, often waiting years for a chance to exploit their prey. An author sums up their strategy:

Like their namesake, today’s Fabians avoid open confrontation with the forces of freedom and, subsequently, tend to shield their true agenda from the light of day.
The creed of the Society, written in 1887, was as follows:
“It (The Fabian Society) therefore aims at the reorganization of society by the emancipation of land and industrial Capital from individual and class ownership…The Society accordingly works for the extinction of private property in land.”
The Fabian plan was to infiltrate America by targeting our legal system. Fabian convert Felix Cohen, a law professor at Yale, wrote the following:
“It is possible to attempt the overthrow of capitalism as an economic system without at the same time attacking the substance of capitalist law…Socialists can learn from their adversaries that it is always possible to attack existing law, in the name of democracy, justice, and liberty, in the name of the great ideals of the American Constitution, and in the name of law itself.”
Fabians sought to overthrow our system by changing the meaning of our stated legal concepts, and to codify those changes with cases brought by Fabian lawyers before Fabian Judges. The effect of this has been that while the technical wording of American law hasn’t changed much, the implementation has been transferred from the citizen and his elected representatives, to appointed bureaucrats. The Fabians have, diabolically, used our own laws to change the law. Freedom is the victim of these Socialist manipulations.
 

Gramsci's theories are even more dangerous. Read more about him @  http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/758715/posts

To be or not?

Thomas Sowell writes about the corruption that has perverted truth within the law and  academia...both of which have been targeted by Gramscian acolytes as 'instruments of power' within the Western ideological 'enemies' camp.

These examples though shocking, are played out in the main-stream-press of many Western countries on a daily basis.

This was not about winning a case. It was about winning an election.

Nifong could not allow a standard lineup to be used to have the accuser identify her alleged attackers, or else her unreliability would have been exposed early on, depriving him of a case to use to get the black vote in his election.

There is not the slightest reason to believe that Nifong was deceived or mistaken. He was not some kid fresh out of law school. He had decades of experience as a prosecutor. He knew exactly what he was doing.

Nor was the New York Times a naive ingenue in these matters. It had backed Al Sharpton's fraudulent accusations of rape in the Tawana Brawley case, which had the same politically correct elements of a black woman accusing white men of rape.

Nor were the 88 Duke faculty members who promoted a lynch mob atmosphere naive. Most were from departments promoting the "race, class, and gender" vision of victimhood.

This case served their purposes. That trumped any question about whether the charges were true or not.

Don't expect any of these people to recant or apologize. But be aware of how wide and how deep the moral dry rot goes.

That such people are teaching students at an elite university is a chilling thought. That they promote a campus atmosphere where political correctness trumps the search for truth is painful.

That such attitudes and such atmospheres are not peculiar to Duke University, but are common on elite college campuses from coast to coast is a time bomb with the potential to destroy individuals and ultimately undermine the whole society.
 

I trust that the conservative government currently elected to power in Australia, takes the bull by the horns and begins to chip away at the anti-Western ideologues within the professions of Law and Academia.
However I do not actually believe such a thing will happen because the rot exists even in the conservative camp.

To send your child to study the Humanities in almost any University in the Western world these days, is to expose them to propaganda, lies, degradation and a sniff of Hades...such a pity because I have always been an advocate of higher education and in particular the Humanities.
It's enough to break ones heart.

Defeatist? Maybe, but its enough to know that in the end God will prevail.

Hark! The sound of gnashing!

The staggering hypocrisy of labor continues to grind on seemingly unimpeded by its worst electoral thrashing in 100 years.
Can no single person in this most incompetent of political parties ever tell the truth.
Is truth so trashed in our modern society that no one even bats an eye when this political 'leader' stands up to tell an outright lie?

Kenny again: The gender imbalance brought a stinging rebuke from acting opposition leader Chris Bowen, who noted that war-torn Afghanistan had more women in its cabinet.

Context overlooked:
Afghanistan’s cabinet in fact includes all government ministers - which we would call “the ministry” - and numbers 25, including the president. Three are women. Abbott’s ministry numbers 30, of whom five are women. Comparing like with like, the claim that Afghanistan’s cabinet (actually ministry) has more women than Abbott’s ministry is false both in number and proportion. Anyone repeating it is either ignorant or deceptive.

But here is the bottom line: What we should demand most from Cabinet ministers is not that they wear skirts, look diverse or have a range of exotic backgrounds and sexual preferences. Performance should be what counts as we roll back this Age of Seeming and restore an Age of Doing.
Overall, I’d rate Abbott’s Cabinet, person for person, as potentially better than any we’ve had over the past six years. If this team delivers, it will already be more admirable than any that boasted even a Wong. I don’t care how a Minister seems; I care what he or she does.
 

About time that we had a responsible, truthful, adult government in this country, regardless of the gnashing of rotten teeth from the blowhards and debauchees of the chatteratti.

UPDATE
An amusing take on the obsession the chatteratti seem to have with gender equality:
http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2013/07/two-balls-bad-no-balls-good.html

The unfortunate illusions of youth.

If I hear the word 'freedom' coming from the mouth of an unthinking person (usually youth) again, I think I shall react rather negatively.
This excerpt from an article by Bill Meuhlenberg....  http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2013/09/15/atheism-and-freedom/
....rather captures the illusion too many have about the nature of freedom:

And notice what she especially relishes, what her new god is: freedom. As she says, “freedom from a life centered around obedience and submission, freedom to think anything, freedom from guilt and shame, freedom from the perpetual heavy obligation to keep every thought pure.”

In other words, she is relishing the fact that she has cast off all restraints, rejected all boundaries, spat upon all restrictions, and embraced radical freedom. The sad truth is however, she is living a life of illusion. There is no such thing as perfect freedom.

Indeed, to seek to cast off all yokes and contemptuously reject all limitations simply puts one in new and even far worse bondage. We in fact live in a moral universe which has built-in limitations. Seeking to pretend those boundaries do not exist does not mean they are not there.

And a life full of such rejection of absolutes (for that is what she is in fact rejecting here) means she will not be able to properly enjoy life at all. No one can enjoy a game of chess in a rule-free world. It is exactly because there are rules, boundaries, and restrictions that a game like chess is so enjoyable.

Cast off the boundaries and you no longer have chess. That is true for all of life. We are designed to live in a world full of boundaries and restrictions, and our real freedom comes in acknowledging and fitting in with those restrictions. Rejecting them does not mean freedom – it means greater bondage.

Biblically speaking there was only one person who thought he was completely free: the prodigal son. Yet all his freedom in the end meant was that he had the whole pigsty to himself. You are welcome to it bud – that does not sound like real life to me.
 

Note also that it was written by a young woman who lives in a country that enjoys real political freedom. Freedoms that have quite likely cost many people their lives. I wonder how she would react in a world in which the freedoms she would like to live are punishable by death. Arabia, Iran, etc...for example. Would she be so 'free' with her opinions I wonder?
 

Pants ablaze

Piers Ackerman's description of KRudd's lying is a gem of diplomatic obfuscation:

"He had actually done neither, but his relationship with the concept of truth and fact is unconventional at best."

Wise words

A man of uncommon wisdom, Thomas Sowell:

Individuals and groups of all sorts have always differed from one another in many ways, throughout centuries of history and in countries around the world. Left to themselves, people tend to sort themselves out into communities of like-minded neighbors.

This has been so obvious that only the intelligentsia could misconstrue it — and only ideologues could devote themselves to crusading against people's efforts to live and associate with other people who share their values and habits.
Quite aside from the question of whose values and habits may be better is the question of the effects of people living cheek by jowl with other people who put very different values on noise, politeness, education and other things that make for good or bad relations between neighbors. People with children to protect are especially concerned about who lives next door or down the street.

But such mundane matters often get brushed aside by ideological crusaders out to change the world to fit their own vision. When the world fails to conform to their vision, then it seems obvious to the ideologues that it is the world that is wrong, not that their vision is uninformed or unrealistic.
 

Utopian>Dystopian

AGW Vaccination

A review of a book cataloging the bias's of those in charge of the IPCC. This is particularly shocking because the IPCC is the organisation charged with exploring the science upon which most of the Western Nations formulate their strategic energy policies.
Shocking, explosive and illuminating.
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/thomas/2013/09/chapter-and-verse-on-the-great-climate-con

Roots & fruits

I like what John Armstrong has to say:

At root, democratic voting reflects a radical Christian attitude. In the moral sphere Christianity took the breathtaking leap of saying that everyone has a soul and every single soul is of equal value in the eyes of God – the soul of the shirker is as precious to God as the soul of the hard worker. The soul of the peasant weights the same in the divine balance as that of the king.

And this is the beautiful moral idea at the heart of modern democracy. It never looks at a person and says you are not worthy of voting. It says, instead: whatever you are like (almost), the vote belongs to you.

Orwellian perspicacity.

Do you think that Anthropogenic Global Warming is a mere side issue reflecting the concerns of kind, environmentally responsible people?
Think again folks.
Vaclav Havel had it sussed when he spoke of the Global Warming cult as wanting more than to 'fix' what they said was wrong with our climate (A King Canute delusion?).
His view was that it is in fact all about the will to power and an insidious way of achieving it.
C S Lewis once said that the worst type of a tyranny was from those who actually believe that they knew best and what they did was for the 'betterment' of all, Jo Nova points out one of these manifestations in the hills above Adelaide.
It sounds like something out of Orwell's 1984:

Australia has more poisonous critters than any other continent – including the spooky, spiky officials of the ever-expanding Natural Resources Management Borg, who now outnumber police officers by a handsome margin in the country districts, where former precinct houses and cop-shops have been Assimilated and are now nests of Borg, dedicated to the eradication of farming throughout South Australia in the name of Saving The Planet against non-existent “global warming”.

Farming is Australia’s biggest business. Or, rather, it was. The number of farms in this vast, desert continent is down by 100,000, and, remarkably, the state of Victoria has already become the first in the Federation to become a net importer of food – in Australia, of all places, where a vast continent the size of Europe feeds a tiny population the size of greater London. Peter Manuel is determined that South Australia shall not be the next net importer of food.

The pretext for the Borg’s cruel attacks on farmers is Agenda 21, the U.N.’s sinister plan for global domination via environmental over-regulation.

The Borg, a universally-hated bureaucracy, are actively putting the U.N.’s nihilistic, anti-irrigation, anti-pesticide, anti-farming, anti-business, anti-environment, anti-population, anti-human, anti-capitalist, anti-Western, anti-everything Agenda 21 program into ruthless effect.
 

Misanthropy disguised as environmentalism....be warned ladies and gentlemen, soon coming to a paddock near you.
Read more about these parasitical leeches here:  http://joannenova.com.au/2013/09/monckton-the-bull-and-the-borg/#more-30390

Post Education, or pooed for short!

This:
http://www.readthehook.com/110081/uva-expat-how-nobel-winner-coase-got-pushed-charlottesville#.UicyC9rSbq5.twitter

…is a very short article on how a prominent American University conspired to rid itself of what the ruling (moronic) elite considered an academic with unacceptable views (read conservative).

The fact that the university shot itself in the foot is par for the course, but of particular consequence is that it illustrates how so many University (in most Western educational institutions) faculty members have over a long period of time, colluded to eradicate what their ideology has determined to be unwanted or disagreeable colleagues (read conservative).

After decades of pursuing such pogroms, the educational institutions of Western societies have been reduced to homogenous hotbeds of anti-Christian, mono-political, anti-Western, neo Marxist claptrap with a whiff of Perdition on the side.

 As the obvious outcome of such a standardized swamp we; the taxpaying public who in a direct debit kind of way are their employers, are treated to the increasingly duplicitous and mendacious activities that pass for academic excellence amongst these condescending comrades.

I say that it is time for a great big reality check.

The most important idiots in Australia

The hubris of the chatterati is here for all to see:

Sydney Morning Herald  snob Sam de Brito sneers at “the voting public’s moral indifference”: Of these plasticine people the poet Virgil said: “Let us think no more about them, but look once and pass on.” Pity they’ll decide our next PM.

 Roger Foley recalls: Two weeks before election day the Labor Party and Prime Minister Keating were very gloomy as all opinion polls pointed to a landslide victory for the Liberal Conservative party. Everyone, including all but two Labor supporters considered the election was ‘unwinnable’.

The idea for a concert, an event to show support for Paul Keating, was generated at The Screen Producers Conference in Canberra in December 1992 … Over dinner a mutual understanding was reached that the arts community should do something to help the Labor Party and Paul Keating.
On February 28, 1993, the nation witnessed Arts For Labor’s great celebration. And history was changed:
A re-invigorated Paul, knowing he was loved by the most important people in the country, the arts community, then went on to win the election 13 days later.

Sort out the bully boys/girls/persons!

First the ABC and now the faux 'educationalists' are bleating about possible changes to 'their' educational curriculum's. The leftists are so blinded by their own prejudices that they blame every opposing view as doing the very thing that they themselves do.
How they constantly carp about how everybody but their own are biased is almost beyond belief.

As an educationalist past and present I am appalled at how left wing subversives have politicised education, yet if you read their spin they are convinced that it is only the conservatives who would dare to do such a thing; the Abbott, Abbott, Abbott meme.

Unfortunately history shows that the exact opposite is true and I for one think that it is about time that the conservative side of politics take the gloves off and do what they have been accused of doing ad nauseam.

Let the incoming government actually reverse the trend within the ideologically driven teacher unions and turn Australia back to its former, life affirming path rather than filling the heads of our children with ideological garbage, self abuse, and a victim mentality.

Mr Howard used his Australia Day address to the National Press Club on the 10th anniversary of his leadership to call for a "coalition of the willing" to promote changes to the teaching of history, which he said was neglected in schools, slanted towards apologising for the past and questioning national achievement.

"Too often, it is taught without any sense of structured narrative, replaced by a fragmented stew of 'themes' and 'issues'," Mr Howard said. "And too often, history, along with other subjects in the humanities, has succumbed to a postmodern culture of relativism where any objective record of achievement is questioned or repudiated.

"Part of preparing young Australians to be informed and active citizens is to teach them the central currents of our nation's development."

NSW Teacher's Federation president Maurie Mulheron said Mr Abbott was seeking to "politicise" the curriculum.

"It's a shame because of the extraordinary work of so many teachers involved in writing the syllabus, and now they are going to start questioning the professionalism of those teachers," he said.
Read more: http://www.news.com.au/national-news/federal-election/coalition-government-to-review-unions-and-alp-presence-in-history-curriculum/story-fnho52ip-1226709301143#ixzz2dynk7VTQ

 

What is this c**p about 'questioning the professionalism' of the teachers? It is another classic red herring thrown out to distract the argument from its true intent. That plus the worshipful attitude most 'intellectuals' have towards 'expertise' that is unless said expertise regards real world experience.

Our new government must not be swayed by pressure from those 'useful(?) idiots' of the press who will whinge increasingly loudly if their 'realignment of Western values project' goes astray. Nor must they listen to the 'educational establishments' because all have become hotbeds for the subversive elements, the anarchists and nihilists.

Rather our new incoming government must somewhere find the balls to realign, to jump start again, to pick up the pieces, to reestablish something of the foundational, faith based greatness that made Australia into the country it has been and can once again be, other wise this new government will be nothing more than a hiccup in the decline towards chaos and darkness.

'Educated' fools = barbarians

Unfortunately academia has become the rock under which the ideologues are hiding from the light.
Once again I invoke the spectre of Gramsci and his 'long march through the institutions' as the person and dystopian vision behind the dramatic decline in sholarship and the concomitant increase in propaganda being forced down children's throats in the name of education.

From David Thompson:

Sarah Knopp, a teacher, Marxist and Occupier, tells us she wants to peddle the “enlightenment” of communism to the children in her care. Because when they believe as she does – and only as she does – then they’ll be “critical thinkers.” Then they’ll be “emancipated.” Just like her. The second speaker, Megan Behrent, merely intends to subvert the proprieties of the classroom in order to propagate her own communist politics at someone else’s expense. The preferences of parents, students and those who her pay her salary are to be circumvented in the name of “social justice.” Again, the students in her care will be “thinking for themselves” when they think and act “radically,” i.e., just like her.
 

From the American campuses:

Resistance requires a sense that there is something worth defending. But decades of dumbed-down education have produced people with no sense of the importance of a moral framework within which freedom and civil discourse can flourish. Without a moral framework, there is nothing left but immediate self-indulgence by some and the path of least resistance by others. Neither can sustain a free society. Disruptive activists indulge their egos in the name of idealism and others cave rather than fight.

It’s not just academics who won’t defend decency. Trustees could fire college presidents who cave in to storm-trooper tactics. Donors could stop donating to institutions that have sold out their principles to appease the campus barbarians. But when nobody is willing to defend civilized standards, the barbarians win.

Whether on college campuses or among nations on the world stage, if the battle comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are bound to win.

Little wooden people

What John Ellis thinks of the 'special courses' at university such as gender studies, peace studies, heteropatriachal studies, etc:

Just as Pinocchio went off to school with high hopes, only to be waylaid by J. Worthington Foulfellow, minority students are met on the way to campus by hard-left radicals who claim to have the interests of the newcomers at heart but in reality prey on them to advance their own selfish interests. Of course, what black students need is the same solid traditional education that had raised Irish, Italians, and Jews to full equality. But that would not serve the campus radicals’ purpose. Disaffected radicals wanted to swell the ranks of the disaffected, not the ranks of the cheerfully upward mobile. Genuine progress for minority students would mean their joining and thus strengthening the mainstream of American society - the mainstream that campus radicals loathe.
 

The same Gramscian ideology is being fed to our Australian students. As a holder of four tertiary Qualifications, a teacher and a lecturer for more than a decade, I would counsel young people now to either get a job and work their way up, learn a trade (something useful) or if needs be go to university only if it is for engineering, medicine or architecture.
The university's have become recruiting grounds for the disaffected, the rebellious and the anarchists.
Avoid them to become a culture builder rather than a destroyer.

Wilting before the barbarians

More Wisdom from the pen of Thomas Sowell:

Resistance requires a sense that there is something worth defending. But decades of dumbed-down education have produced people with no sense of the importance of a moral framework within which freedom and civil discourse can flourish. Without a moral framework, there is nothing left but immediate self-indulgence by some and the path of least resistance by others. Neither can sustain a free society. Disruptive activists indulge their egos in the name of idealism and others cave rather than fight.

It’s not just academics who won’t defend decency. Trustees could fire college presidents who cave in to storm-trooper tactics. Donors could stop donating to institutions that have sold out their principles to appease the campus barbarians. But when nobody is willing to defend civilized standards, the barbarians win.

Whether on college campuses or among nations on the world stage, if the battle comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are bound to win.

Godwin's law

I believe that the genesis of Rudd's Abbott, Abbott, Abbott, meme began here:

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.~Adolph Hitler

Divorced, I wish

I don't like the idea of divorce and I never take it lightly when it does occur especially between friends and/or colleagues, but in this case it raises a well earned laugh.

DIVORCE AGREEMENT


Dear Australian Laborites, leftists, social progressives, socialists, Marxists and Gillard, et al:

We have stuck together since the late 1950's for the sake of the kids, but the whole of this latest
election process has made me realize that I want a divorce. I know we tolerated each other for many
years for the sake of future generations, but sadly, this relationship has clearly run its course.

Our two ideological sides of Australia cannot and will not ever agree on what is right for us all,
so let's just end it on friendly terms. We can smile and chalk it up to irreconcilable differences and go our
own way

Here is a model separation agreement:
Our two groups can equitably divide up the country by landmass each taking a similar portion.
That will be the difficult part, but I am sure our two sides can come to a friendly agreement. After that, it
should be relatively easy! Our respective representatives can effortlessly divide other assets since both
sides have such distinct and disparate tastes.

We don't like redistributive taxes so you can keep them. You are welcome to the ACTU, the
Fabian Society and every member of Emily's List. Since you hate guns and war, we'll take our firearms,
the cops and the military. We'll take the nasty, smelly oil industry and you can go with wind, solar and
biodiesel. You can keep the ABC left wingers (particularly Kerry O'Brien) and Bob Brown. You are
however, responsible for finding an electric vehicle big enough to move all of them.

We'll keep capitalism, greedy corporations, pharmaceutical companies, Woolworths and the
Stock Exchange. You can have your beloved lifelong welfare dwellers, dole bludgers, homeless, homeboys,
hippies, druggies and boat people. We'll keep the budgie smuggling, bike riding, volunteer firemen and
lifesavers, greedy CEOs and rednecks. We'll keep the Bibles and the churches and give you SBS and the
Greens.

You can make peace with Iran, Palestine and the Taliban and we'll retain the right to stand up
and fight when threatened. You can have the greenies and war protesters. When our allies or our way of
life are under assault, we'll help provide them security.

We'll keep our Judeo-Christian values. You are welcome to Islam, Scientology, Humanism,
political correctness and Penny Wong. You can also have the U.N. But wewill no longer be paying the bill.

We'll keep the 4WDs, Utes and V8s. You can take every hybrid hatchback you can find.

We'll keep "Waltzing Matilda" and our National Anthem. I'm sure you'll be happy to keep in tune
with Peter Garrett as he sings "Imagine", "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing", "Kum Ba Ya", "We Are The
World" and his recent big solo hit "Beds and Batts are Burning".

We'll practice trickledown economics and you can continue to give trickle up poverty your best
shot. Since it so often offends you, we'll keep our history, our name and our flag.

Would you agree to this? If so, please pass it along to other like-minded conservative
Australians and if you do not agree, just hit delete. In the spirit of friendly parting, I'll bet you answer
which one of us will need whose help in 15 years.

Sincerely,
John Wall
Australian Law Student

P.S. Also, please take Lindsey Tanner, Wayne Swan, Alan Griffin, John Faulkner, Kevin Rudd and
Jenny Macklin with you.

P. P. S. And you won't have to press 1 for English when you call our country.

Church of the Three Monkeys II

I read the blogs, facebook and various other sites and see that many (obviously dysfunctional) people are still supporting Australia's most corrupt, inefficient and mendacious government for generations.
What does it take for these people to reject such corruption? Plus, unfortunately some of these morons claim to be Christian to boot.
How can the latter, in good conscience defend the current government given the unbiblical and downright disgusting behaviours evidenced over the past 6 years?
Either these people are illiterate, deceivers, they do not care, or they have no brains.
Economically this article should sprinkle their self deception with a little doubt.
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/smith/2013/09/a-surplus-of-black-holes

The new Sideshow Bob

When first directed (in a blog) to reading Bob Ellis's blog; 'Table Talk', I was incensed that someone could write such bald-faced lies and expect to get away with it. In fact at one point I commented that Tony Abbott should personally sue the b%&#@*!d because of the blatant, slimy slander that 'Table Talk' promoted.

 
Ever since that first encounter some foul compulsion draws me back intermittently, (perhaps anthropologically?), to pick over the entrails of the sewer-mind that this Ellis turd possesses, just to try and make some sense of his absurdity's and extreme self-delusions. After each vigilant excursion my response thereafter was to immediately try and cleanse my mind of the grime that unfortunately attaches itself to the imagination when confronted with materiel of this nature.

 
Then, after a while I began to realise that another more mystifying reaction was beginning to assert itself. I found myself increasingly enveloped by a strange, almost reluctant, emerging compassion. I was amazed...perhaps it is because this fellow is so obviously unhinged that even the most belligerent lefties could not take his bloviating seriously.

 
I began to sense that these petulant scribbling’s were the result of a damaged psyche, that this poor fool had, at some time in the past tipped over the edge and has plunged down through all 9 circles of Dante's inferno and was being tortured every moment of every day after opening his eyes in the morning, and thus I cannot help but feel sorry for the wretch.