Time to act

The following excerpt makes for sobering reading. Whilst I am convinced that Barry is indeed as duplicitous as this passage would suggest, I do not believe he is quite as competent as this author allows. However, that does not mean that he is not being directed by extremely competent strategists and alternate powers-behind-the-throne as it were. His history suggests that this is indeed a probability and again his history suggests that this 'brains trust' is more than capable of capitalising on any and all events:

Obama understands this base so well because he is one of them. Obama is not merely playing for short-term political interest. He actually believes in what he is doing. He agrees with the happy talk about how great it is to pivot to a pro-Iran policy. He, too, feels the personal satisfaction of seeing the Israelis in trouble and fear.

In this sense, the president is cynically taking advantage of the ObamaCare panic in his own party. Democrats at risk of losing their seats will allow him to push an appeasement policy so dangerous that normally he would be stopped by outraged bipartisan opposition.

Because of the blow ObamaCare has dealt the party, Democrats can't afford to embarrass the president with a foreign policy failure. They, too, are desperate for cheerful New York Times reading for their voters. Letting Iran go nuclear, even a Mideast war, is not as important to them as their doomed feeling from the ObamaCare launch.

This is irresponsible politics as its worst: the ObamaCare of foreign policy

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/11/desperate_democrats_bow_to_iran.html#ixzz2m5HwbKpF

And yet I cannot say I am surprised. Unfortunately it indicates that the gloves have come off in the undeclared culture wars between conservative and 'progressive'(the TRULY fascist) ideological values in the Western cultures. In Australia the hard left perspectives of the 'Green[Gramscian]/Labor[Fabian]/main-stream-media[useful idiots]' have now been unveiled and they no longer disguise their Judeo-Christian culture crippling agendas any more. You only have to read the Fairfax mouthpieces and/or listen to the ABC to see and hear that.

Good! Let the battle commence. Conservative and traditionally minded people and governing parties have got to start fighting fire with fire. Conservatives are notoriously dis-inclined to manipulate and play the nepotistic game, hence 'conservative values', however there needs to be a scorched earth policy put in place before the conservatives can begin to build.

 In Australia the Abbott government must put aside its timidity and begin to cauterize the wounds created in our society by successive layers of ideological poison. Unions, higher (and lower) education needs to be addressed, the media mouthpieces must be matched by well funded alternative voices and where public money is being used to subvert coalition values such money flows must be stopped.

The inevitable bleating, screaming, and subsequent catatonic behaviours must be borne stoically but not listened to if this government is to put Australia on the path to greatness once again. The ABC must be neutered, if the enemies of Australia want to engage challenging the newly elected government, fine! But it is not right that 'we the conservative(majority)public' must pay towards our own demise. That is just stupid and suicidal.

The one thing that the conservative/traditionalists have in their favour is courage. The 'progressives' have so neutered their own value systems that there is nothing left that they will truly fight for, they lack the courage as well as the fortitude. What will be seen, and is being manifested all over the place is that the true ideological motivations and groups who hide behind the mealy-mouthpieces will emerge from the shadows and those are going to be tough...but we can still win. Not least because those behind the scenes are Godless and at this moment still in the minority. But time is of the essence.

Madness rules

Creeping (creepy?) totalitarianism:

If you ever wanted evidence that big government leads to small citizens, just take a look at the madness emanating out of the ACT’s health bureaucrats. According to a report, ACT bureaucrats want to ban any “high risk” food from being sold at community events.

What are the “high risk” foods? Box Jellyfish jelly? Stonefish with salad? Blue-ringed octopi with chips? If you guessed any of these things you’d be wrong, according to the report:

NOT content with interfering in fund-raising barbecues, the ACT government’s food safety bureaucrats have turned their attention to school fetes, telling parents they cannot sell their homemade quiches any more.

The government has this month enforced bans on a list of popular home-made dishes, telling parents they cannot sell foods it has labelled ”high risk”. That list includes spring rolls, casseroles or any other dishes containing meat or dairy, such as cakes containing custard or cream.

Astonishingly the article then goes on to identify that this proposal has been flagged despite:

ACT Health also [having] no data on food poisonings at school fund-raising events.

This is madness. Risk isn’t something to be avoided, it is something to be managed. The trade off from such a stupid proposal is that civil society is smashed for regulator’s piece of mind. It’s the perfect example of big government being the enemy of community.

- See more at: http://freedomwatch.ipa.org.au/marie-antoinette-bureaucrats-cry-dont-let-them-eat-quiche/#sthash.05YQRCs6.dpuf

To see or not to see......

One of the (many) reasons that the Post Modernist trashes history is because they consider themselves (evolutionarily thinking) to be further down the ever increasing track of intelligence formation and therefore above all that has come before. An illusion that holds profound and disastrous consequences.
In fact if the bible is true (and I believe it is) we are actually 'devolving' in both physical and mental capacity and it appears neuro-science backs me up in this assumption.

Discover magazine claims that the size of human brain is gradually decreasing for the past 20,000 years.“Over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimetres to 1,350 cubic centimetres, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball,” according to a Daily Mail report quoting Kathleen McAuliffe in Discover magazine.
 

What is so very tragic is that they sacrifice the vast stores of knowledge accumulated by other clever people over generations and that they do it all for an illusion. The truly intelligent like Newton acknowledged that it was not by their intelligence alone that brilliant men (and women) made huge advancements, but it was by standing on the shoulders of those who went before them.

Take for example Blaise Pascal. One of histories most creative geniuses. I love his perspicacious take on the modern human condition and in particular this extract about the way we ferret out amusements to occupy our every waking minute because we hate having to think to deeply.

Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he faces his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness. And at once there wells up from the depths of his soul boredom, gloom, depression, chagrin, resentment, despair.

Pascal says there are two ways people avoid thinking about such matters: diversion and indifference. Regarding diversion, he says we fill up our time with relatively useless activities simply to avoid facing the truth of our wretchedness. "The natural misfortune of our mortality and weakness is so miserable," he says, "that nothing can console us when we really think about it. . . . The only good thing for man, therefore, is to be diverted so that he will stop thinking about his circumstances." Business, gambling, and entertainment are examples of things which keep us busy in this way.

The other response to our condition is indifference. The most important question we can ask is What happens after death? Life is but a few short years, and death is forever. Our state after death should be of paramount importance, shouldn't it? But the attitude people take is this:

Just as I do not know where I came from, so I do not know where I am going. All I know is that when I leave this world I shall fall forever into oblivion, or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing which of the two will be my lot for eternity. Such is my state of mind, full of weakness and uncertainty. The only conclusion I can draw from all this is that I must pass my days without a thought of trying to find out what is going to happen to me.

Pascal is appalled that people think this way, and he wants to shake people out of their stupor and make them think about eternity. Thus, the condition of man is his starting point for moving people toward a genuine knowledge of God.

Collectivist mania

The logical outcomes of the collectivist dystopia;

The famine swept through the Soviet Union in 1932-33 following Josef Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture. Fertile Ukraine, the Soviet Union's bread basket, was worst hit.

When its harvest failed to meet the Kremlin's targets in 1932, officials and activists were sent to villages to confiscate grain and food. The confiscations continued well into 1933, reducing entire families to starvation.
http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/ukraines_forgotten_holocaust

..........and yet many today who have grown up with the benefits and yes, in the excesses of 'capitalistic culture' still hold misplaced theories about the benefits of socialism. Perhaps because they fancy themselves as being in the driving seat and therefore isolated from such dire consequences.

Think again mush-heads, you and your ilk will probably be the first persons the barbarians will reduce to fertilizer. Who are these 'babrbarians you ask? They are the ones who take over once the opposition is reduced to weak, 'all-you-need-is love airheads and 'academic' minded 'girly-boys.'

A Christian conscience

It appears that Italy's catholic community are showing the worlds protestant communities the way forward. I pray we take it.

More and more doctors in Italy are conscientious objectors.

Each year the annual report on abortion of the Ministry of Health to the Italian Parliament reads like a broken record: fewer doctors and other medical personnel are willing to perform abortions while the number of abortions in Italy continues to trend downwards. The 2013 annual report was no exception.

Final data for 2011 show that 69 percent of doctors in Italy refuse to perform abortions compared with 59 percent in 1983. In one-third of all Italian regions 80 percent or more of gynecologists are conscientious objectors including Lazio, the region that includes Rome. The number of abortion compliant gynecologists in all of Italy (population 61 million) has declined from 1,913 in 2001 to 1,507 in 2011.

In Lombardy, Italy’s most prosperous region, the leftist Vice President of the Regional Council recently presented a medical report that indicated that in one of six hospitals all doctors refuse to perform abortions. In most of the others, the majority of doctors are abortion objectors and the same holds true for other medical personnel. Fearing that the availability of abortion may have a dim future, the leftist regional officials are anxiously looking for willing medical personnel.

As the number of doctors who are conscientious objectors grows, the number of abortions continues to decline. Abortion was introduced in Italy in 1978 via Law 194/78, the same legislation mandating an annual report to Parliament by the Minister of Health. As in any country when abortion is introduced the number skyrockets so that by 1982 abortions peaked at 234,801. Since then abortion numbers have declined every year, except for minor upticks in 1997 and 2005. Preliminary data for 2012 show that abortions in Italy numbered nearly 106,000, registered a 4.9 percent decline from the previous year and a 55 percent decline from the peak.

The total abortion tally would be even lower except for the high percentage of foreign women, nearly 34 percent in 2011, who are counted in the Italian abortion statistics. Most live in Italy but some reside elsewhere. The percentage of foreign women, most of whom are from Eastern European countries which have some of the highest abortion rates in the world according to the World Health Organization, seems to have stabilized and accounted for about one-third of all abortions in the past few years.

Considering that there were few foreign women undergoing abortions in the peak year 1982, the decline in abortions by Italian women alone actually dropped 69 percent by 2011. The abortion rate for all Italian women was 6.6 per 1,000 (2009 data) whereas for foreign women it was 24.1 per 1,000, indicating foreigners skew upwards the overall abortion rate for Italy.

For both Italian and foreign women, the main reasons given for resorting to abortion were already having the desired number of children – even though 60 percent of women had only one child – and economic problems. However, many foreign women also indicated they experienced failure with birth control methods, perhaps due to incorrect use.

Italian abortion rates have declined across the board for all age groups, from under 20 to 45-49. In the first decade of legalization, mostly married women underwent abortion. By 2011 the unmarried or formerly married exceeded currently married women by 57 percent to 43 percent. Interestingly, in the United States the latest data (2008) showed much greater disparity, with married women accounting for only 15 percent of all abortions.

Today Italy has one of the lowest abortion rates among developed countries, especially when compared with the United States. An international comparison of abortion rates per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44, for the period 2008-2011 showed Italy as having the fifth lowest rate among 20 countries at 9.4 per 1,000. By comparison the United States ranked fifth highest with 19.6 per 1,000. Switzerland had the lowest rate, 6.8 and Russia the highest at 40.3.

A comparison of abortion rates by age groups shows another considerable contrast with the United States. Sadly, the teen abortion rate in the United States is more than three times that of Italy. The same disparity can be observed in the 20-24 age bracket. Rates are roughly comparable only among groups of older women.

P C teachers

I do enjoy the wisdom of Thomas Sowell:

If education provides anything, it should be an ability to think — that is, to weigh one idea against an opposing idea, and to use evidence and logic to try to determine what is true and what is false. That is precisely what our schools and colleges are failing to teach today.

It is worse than that. Too many teachers, from the elementary schools to the graduate schools, see their role as indoctrinating students with what these teachers regard as the right beliefs and opinions. Usually that means the left’s beliefs and opinions.

The merits or demerits of those ideas is far less important than whether or not students learn to analyze and weigh those merits and demerits. Educators used to say, “We are here to teach you how to think, not what to think.”

Today, students can spend years in educational institutions, discussing all sorts of issues, without ever having heard a coherent statement of the other side of those issues that differ from what their politically correct teachers say.

There are students in our most prestigious law schools who have never heard arguments for the social importance of property rights — not just for those fortunate enough to own property, but for those who don’t own a square inch of real estate or a single share of stock. How they would view the issues if they did is a moot point because they have heard only one side of the issue.

People who go through life never having heard the other side of issues ranging from environmentalism to minimum wage laws are nevertheless emboldened to lash out in ignorance at anyone who disturbs their vision of the world. The self-confident moral preening of ignoramuses is perhaps an inevitable product of the promotion of “self-esteem” in our schools.

peek-a-boo

Worth a peek:

A discussion on the state of the left with Ophelia Benson, editor of the rationalist website Butterflies & Wheels and co-author of Why Truth Matters.

“...if a person doesn’t want an open debate to take place and wants to define in advance what kind of language is permissible and which subjects are off-limits, that usually indicates the weakness of their position and, more to the point, an awareness of just how weak that position is.”
 

"..................... DT: Well, as to what’s ‘left’ about the worship of dubious figures, I’m inclined to cough and mutter “Marx”, “Castro”, “Chavez” and “Che Guevara T-shirts.” Communist societies are surprisingly big on idolatry, aren’t they? It seems to be a practical consequence of egalitarian philosophy applied in the real world. Keeping everyone equally miserable requires some kind of deity, usually one with a firm hand. How many times have we seen Mao depicted as a god, complete with radiation beaming from his head, like some Communist Godzilla?

As a teenager I remember seeing CCCP badges and the people wearing them didn’t seem too concerned with the connotations of that project. Likewise, those on the left who seem smitten by Castro or Guevara don’t seem unduly bothered by the Cuban concentration camps for roqueros and other “bohemian elements.”

I suppose it’s not too much of a leap from identifying with Castro or Chavez because of their opposition to capitalism or American “hegemony” and identifying with the contortions of Derrida and Foucault for not dissimilar reasons. Both are postures of rebellion with no obvious moral foundation or practical usefulness. Ditto the white middle-class lefties who wave placards announcing “We are all Hizballah now.” I guess it’s something to do with “giving it to the man” or not liking one’s parents or something. It all seems a tad narcissistic to me, and just a little depraved.
 

".....................................I’ve some sympathy with Stephen Hicks, whose Explaining Postmodernism I read alongside Why Truth Matters. Crudely summarised, Hicks sees the rise of relativism, obscurantism and censoriousness on the left as marking a crisis of faith and a retreat from reality. As a practical blueprint, Socialism has been refuted. The question is what’s been left in the space it used to occupy, other than confusion, narcissism and a state of denial.

It strikes me as important to have some point of contrast to whatever the prevailing outlook is, but at the moment I’m pretty much repelled by the contrast that’s available, and I doubt I’m alone in this. I think we can safely dismiss the various tribes of the far left as a moral farce and practical irrelevance. So what we have, at least in the UK, is plenty of anti-US sentiment and oppositional posturing – what Nick Cohen called “the anti-imperialism of fools” – which leads to any number of absurd positions. Perhaps the most reprehensible of these were the protestations of “solidarity” with Hassan Nasrallah, despite his openly genocidal ambitions.

But I also think of the leftwing art critic, Julian Stallabrass, who wrote in the New Left Review about the spectacle of terrorism and seemed ever so slightly titillated by the “vanguard politics” of “Islamic revolutionaries” who “harden themselves against mundane sentiment.” And I think of the London Review of Books, which has published more than one strangely approving account of Hizballah’s “uncompromising” stance and use of suicide bombing.

I mention these things because they’re not just fringe curiosities - variations of these postures have come to define much of the mainstream left and can be found in the Guardian and Independent on a fairly regular basis. And it’s hard to miss mainstream commentators repeating the same relativistic denunciations of “Western ways of thinking” and the supposed “Eurocentric arrogance” of the Enlightenment. It’s easy to see what much of the left is against, if not the reasons why. It’s much harder to see what the left is for. I don’t see a coherent set of ideas. I see a patchwork of contradiction, often for its own sake, or the sake of appearance, or in some cases to enact some kind of personal psychodrama.

I remember Terry Eagleton’s description of jihadist suicide bombers - who murder and dismember people on a fairly arbitrary basis - as “tragic heroes” reacting to “injustice”, as if they had no agency of their own, and with the insinuation of some moral equivalence with their victims, including the people who leapt from the windows of a burning World Trade Centre. The fact that Islamist conceptions of “justice” are enormously loaded, unattainably so, and somewhat different from our own didn’t appear to be a detail worthy of comment. And if one suggests that it might be worth looking at Islamist theology, its lineage, and how it explicitly redefines these basic moral terms, one is very likely to be shouted down as an ‘Islamophobe.’

When I see attempts to ignore such details, or to stifle debate, or to control the terms of debate, or to shut down thought before it can happen, I most often find those attempts coming from the left. This wasn’t always the case, of course; but right now I don’t see too many leftists standing up for free speech and the testing of ideas. Those that do are, of course, assailed from the left. Instead I hear lots of talk about “sensitivity” and “respect for other cultures.” And if a person doesn’t want an open debate to take place and wants to define in advance what kind of language is permissible and which subjects are off-limits, that usually indicates the weakness of their position and, more to the point, an awareness of just how weak that position is. Which, I guess, brings us back to the issue of denial.

Lol and then weep for the future

One world government anyone?
Note the PoMo/neo-marxist over-the-top language. If it were not so serious it would be hillarious, like a Benny Hill skit. 

The regime’s PressTV ran an op-ed analysis on Saturday with a headline “Iran deals deathblow to U.S. global hegemony.” The analysis, by Finian Cunningham, an Irishman whom the outlet calls “a prominent expert in international affairs,” blames America for much of the world’s problems and warns of its decline.

“Iran, however, presents a greater and more problematic challenge to U.S. global hegemony,” Cunningham wrote. “The U.S. in 2013 is a very different animal from what it was in 1945. Now it resembles more a lumbering giant. Gone is its former economic prowess and its arteries are sclerotic with its internal social decay and malaise. … Iran exerts a controlling influence over the vital drug that keeps the American economic system alive – the world’s supply of oil and gas. Any war with Iran, if the U.S. were so foolish to embark on it, would result in a deathblow to the waning American and global economy.”

Cunningham said the story will not end there: “The attainment of world peace, justice and sustainability does not only necessitate the collapse of American hegemony. We need to overthrow the underlying capitalist economic system that gives rise to such destructive hegemonic powers. Iran represents a deathblow to the American empire, but the people of the world will need to build on the ruins.”

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/04/iran-warns-of-world-war-iii/#wbaj964zvw3o8hb6.99

Doubting Thomas

Thomas Sowell says it so well:

The last thing the political left needs, or can even afford, are self-reliant individuals. If such people became the norm, that would destroy not only the agenda and the careers of those on the left, but even their flattering image of themselves as saviors of the less fortunate.

Victimhood is where it's at. If there are not enough real victims, then fictitious victims must be created — as with the claim that there is "a war on women." Why anyone would have an incentive or a motivation to create a war on women in the first place is just one of the questions that should be asked of those who promote this political slogan, obviously designed for the gullible.

Cultural Seppuku

It is truly frightening when we read what a Russian President has to say and recognise it as not only the truth but sensible as well, certainly more practical than most, if not all, Western democracies who appear determined to commit cultural suicide.

"In Russia live like Russians. Any minority, from anywhere, if it wants to live in Russia, to work and eat in Russia, should speak Russian, and should respect the Russian laws. If they prefer Sharia Law, and live the life of Muslim's then we advise them to go to those places where that's the state law. Russia does not need Muslim minorities. Minorities need Russia, and we will not grant them special privileges, or try to change our laws to fit their desires, no matter how loud they yell 'discrimination'. We will not tolerate disrespect of our Russian culture . We better learn from the suicides of America, England, Holland and France, if we are to survive as a nation. The Muslims are taking over those countries and they will not take over Russia.

The Russian customs and traditions are not compatible with the lack of culture or the primitive ways Sharia Law and Muslims. When this honourable legislative body thinks of creating new laws, it should have in mind the Russian national interest first, observing that the Muslims Minorities Are Not Russians.”

The politicians in the Duma gave Putin a five minute standing ovation.

Cut the funding Tony

The ABC in Australia has become a leftist cancer on the body politic, it must be excised before it does any more harm to the country. Consider this revelation by Miranda Devine:

WHY did The Guardian sit on its bombshell allegations about Australia spying on Indonesia for five months?

The timing of its joint story with the ABC on Monday could not be more damaging. It came at a crucial point in Australian-Indonesian relations, when the new Abbott government had achieved fresh co-operation on people smuggling, and was beginning to “stop the boats”.
 

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

So it’s doubtful Scott is correct when he says his story was in Australia’s long term interest. But what is certain is that it has been an immediate diplomatic catastrophe which threatens to derail the Abbott government’s efforts to stop illegal boat arrivals.

The left-wing luvvies hate the new government because it stands in the way of their 'utopian dreams' (dystopian). They cannot and will not accept the decision of the majority of Australians as long as that decision is at odds with their power struggle and so they are using OUR MONEY to further their revolutionary ideas. This blight on society must be addressed. Free speech is well and good but when it steals other peoples money OUR MONEY to do so it is no longer free.
Cut the funding now Tony Abbott!

Art for Art's sake

About the issue of 'Art for Art's sake' I propose that CS Lewis held the finest judgement on the matter:

It is hard not to argue that all the greatest poems have

been made by men who valued something else much

more than poetry—even if that something else were

only cutting down enemies in a cattle-raid or tumbling

a girl in bed. The real frivolity, the solemn vacuity, is all

with those who make literature a self-existent thing to

be valued for its own sake.
 

....... Ultimate relativism, nihilism, and post-modernism are all forms of pride. If there is no objective reality outside of me, then I don’t have to submit to it. Lewis thought that such views would mean the “abolition of man.” In a book by that title he defended “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”  So Lewis devoted his life not to creating reality, but to seeing it and saying it well.

"An author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody interms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom. That is the response of humility to the world one is given by a Creator. It inclines one to love truth and to endeavor for all one’s ideas to fit the truth."

It seems like corruption

The politics of climate change is effectively portrayed by the bureaucratic career of Kevin Rudd...it's all about seeming rather than doing.
It's all about appearing to be morally superior, appearing to care more, appearing to have compassion whereas the actual results are diametrically opposite to all the seeming. In actuality this approach is a diabolical form of corruption.
The following short piece from MercatorNet says it all:

It's difficult to read about the devastation that Typhoon Haiyan has brought to the Philippines: more than 10,000 dead, hundreds of thousands homeless. I have friends with relatives in Tacloban. With all communications severed, they have heard nothing and they fear the worst. It may have been the most powerful typhoon ever to make landfall.

The first response to this calamity is "climate change". The Filipino negotiator at a UN-sponsored climate change summit in Warsaw plans to go on a hunger strike to focus the minds of the other delegates.

But the question that he really should be asking is why the island of Leyte wasn't better prepared for this ferocious storm.

Ultimately the answer is poverty but an important element is corruption. As Maria Paz Mendez Hodes, a Filipino journalist, points out, the government is reactive in the face of natural disasters, rather than pro-active. "The country desperately needs spending on preventive infrastructure. Hence the anger when a pork barrel scam funnels key funds away from those projects, resulting in a deadly nexus of geography, poverty and government inaction," she writes.

In the days ahead, there will be plenty of people calling for action on climate change after Typhoon Haiyan. But that's not what people living in the world's most disaster-prone country need most. Regularly buffeted by typhoons, volcanic eruptions, floods and earthquakes, what Filipinos need most is an efficient, forward-planning government where disaster funds don't dribble into the pockets of corrupt politicians. That will save far more lives than carbon trading schemes.

Despots of America

The state of America today, funny, tasteless and disturbing in equal measure.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/363531/drift-toward-despotism-mark-steyn/page/0/1

The hidden truth

Some of Peter Smith's arguments are too materialistic for me to digest with ease.
having said that this article not only makes sense but should be a curriculum necessity for high school students, if for nothing else other than its (politically incorrect) observations about backward cultures. However, its main premise of the unfortunate (and growing) gap between the producers/transporters/risk-takers and implications of free trade/commerce and the person/consumer in the street is of vital importance and needs to be recognised before the disconnect become terminal.
This article is definitely one that I will introduce my youngest son too during the coming year.

A fast boat to enlightenment

That the Greens’ fanciful economic prescriptions are taken seriously by many voters and sections of the commentariat testifies to a lack of reflection on how economies really work. A huge container ship makes a splendid classroom

 

I recently finished a twenty-seven-day voyage, as the only passenger, on a not-so slow-boat from Hong Kong to Southampton. Magellan (left) is apparently the third largest container ship in the world; theoretically able to carry the equivalent of 13,800 (standard-sized) twenty-foot containers, each with a capacity of ≈1170 cu ft. Its engine is equalled in size by only one other conventional ship (unsurprisingly, by the largest container ship). For the mechanically minded; it is a marine diesel, fuel injected, internal combustion, two-stroke engine with fourteen ‘giant’ pistons, each almost a metre in diameter; generating 109,000 hp. I can personally vouchsafe that it is very large and loud.

On this voyage, the ship was carrying the equivalent of nearly 10,000 twenty-foot containers. Each container, which can be more than double the length and taller than standard-sized, can hold up to about 28 tonnes of cargo. Why mention any of this? Its relevance will become clear after a short digression on pirates; recently in the news again when HMAS Melbourne, as part of Combined Maritime Forces combating Somalian pirates, nabbed nine of them and destroyed their boats.
I was assured that our ship was too big and too fast to be boarded by Somalian pirates. Nevertheless we travelled in an internationally recommended two-mile-wide transit corridor when in ‘pirate territory’(within which naval and military protection might be more quickly afforded if needed); had a citadel (akin to a panic room) in the hull, helmets and flak jackets on the bridge, a list of duties in the event of pirate attack, hoses at the ready to flood ballast-tank water over the aft sides of the ship to impede scaling up boarding ladders; and the security level was lifted as we approached the Horn of Africa on the way to the Red Sea. And all of these precautions were in place on a ship that, apparently, “couldn’t be boarded”.

A landlubber like me could get alarmed. This was especially the case when I read, in the on-board booklet dedicated to the threat, that pirates commonly attacked the bridge with rocket propelled grenades. What, not just with swashbuckling swords? What has the world come to? Fortunately, we successfully ran the gauntlet and came out unscathed. But make sure, if you do the trip, that the ship is big and fast or has armed guards, as some more vulnerable ships do.
Anyway this business with pirates is by the way as is my own experiences on board. To the point; a container ship provides a practical and grounding lesson on the realities of modern economic life that school children might be taught, rather than being brainwashed with fairy tales about sustainable development and the achievements of primitive indigenous populations who remained at the same level of bare subsistence century in and century out.

Our very way of life, our prosperity, our ability to help those among us in need, are all critically dependent on making things and trading things across both small and vast distances; for which we need the application of business acumen, skill, hard work and, critically, cheap and plentiful supplies of propulsive energy. That is the way the lesson might begin. A series of questions would follow to generate discussion and insight in the modern interactive classroom.
One question might go like this. If it takes around 4,700 tonnes of marine diesel fuel at US600 per tonne to shift, say, in round numbers, one-hundred thousand tonnes of cargo from Hong Kong to Southampton, how many batteries charged by windmills and/or solar panels would it take and how much would it cost? For mathematics students this would be a valuable introduction to the law of large numbers and to equations incapable of solution.

Another question might go like this. Is it possible for us to enjoy the ownership of mobile phones, computers, flat-screen TVs, cars, and all of our other modern conveniences without the taxing business of their manufacture and shipment? For philosophy students this would be instructive on the concept of cause and effect. For physics students, it may take them on whimsical and entertaining flights of fancy to matter transmutation (alchemy) and transference (beam me up Scotty). For anthropological students, it may throw light on the development of cargo cults among primitive peoples.

And talking of backward people, adult classes might also be held for those who vote for the Greens or for anyone, for that matter, who is prone to thinking that goods simply appear out of thin air and/or that more of them can be made available than are produced. This is a relatively modern malady – akin to the rise of a new cargo cult – prevalent among the intellectual elite in the media and the universities, and among charity and church office holders, as well as among many common people who otherwise display no proclivity to believe in magic.

What has happened, quite apart from the drift of industry to Asia, is that manufacturing and transport industries have become so efficient that they are remote from the lives of most people living in the Western world. Far fewer people are now down the pit, or on the factory floor, or on the docks, or on oil tankers and container ships; or have close relationships with such people.
For example, increasingly those working at sea have experience of manning an entertainment ship than they have of a working ship. Queen Mary II and Magellan provide an instructive comparison. On the side of using up value is QMII, with 1250 officers and crew. On the side of making value is the slightly bigger Magellan, with just 28 officers and crew. Moreover, this manning level will undoubtedly continue to edge down in future as will all “coal-face” jobs across mining, manufacturing, and transport industries.

The increasing lack of close familiarity with what it takes to make and transport commodities has proved to be fertile ground for breeding a fast-spreading form of infantile mindset, which is as divorced from economic reality as the mindset of primitive cargo cultists. As experience is providing progressively less of a countervailing force, the remedy has to lie in public education.
Instead of vacuously and mindlessly teaching kids the virtues and moral equivalence of patently backward and inferior cultures, ancient and present-day, they should be given the opportunity to understand and appreciate what underpins our material prosperity; and what is required to maintain and increase this prosperity, if we are to live comfortable lives and also help those in need.
Time spent at mine sites; at manufacturing plants; at agricultural enterprises; at construction sites; at ship building plants; at docks and at transport hubs, would be as well spent as at museums and art galleries. They also need to understand that however rich we are, or we become, we can never be so rich that we can collectively spend more than we collectively earn. They need to be disabused of magic to prevent them from adding to the numbers of those with adult bodies yet with childish preconceptions.

When it comes to adults, instead of, or in addition to, spending money on dissuading people from smoking, or drinking too much, or eating fast food, governments might start informing people about what it has taken to give us our present standard of living (where, among other more beneficial things, we can smoke, drink and eat too excess) and what it will continue to take to allow us the luxury of taking care of the disabled and an aging population while maintaining our living standards.
We’ve arrived at the ridiculous situation where the Greens’ fanciful economic policy prescriptions are taken seriously by large numbers of voters and by sections of the intellectual commentariat. We even have, believe it or not (no, I don’t bel ieve it!), union bosses supporting a jobs-destroying carbon tax. Is there any more proof required that reason has given way to infantile posturing. “Let us all grow up”, would be fitting heading for an Abbott-inspired campaign to educate children and the childlike.

Peter Smith, a frequent Quadrant Online contributor, is the author of Bad Economics

Left-wing mendacity

I have included this large extract from David Thompson's blog because it gives a number of different (yet strangely consistent) perspectives from the leftist worldview of society. A worldview that is/has systematically and increasingly rapidly underminined reason, morality, law & order and sanity in the developed nations.

Tim Blair on the self-regarding eco-guru David Suzuki:

Self-importance comes with the territory when you’re a warmist. After all, you’re saving the planet. Who could be more important than you? This elevated sense of self manifests itself in curious ways, such as Tim Flannery’s prediction of a universal belief system or his insistence that everybody is always writing about him, or Will Steffen’s fear that a retired public servant wanted to shoot climate scientists and Michael Mann’s mistaken Nobel Prize claim. But those three are mere junior narcissists compared to David Suzuki, who is now starring as a global climate martyr in a “powerful live theatre and public engagement project” about himself.

Tim Worstall on the myths and omissions of the “gender pay gap”:

Women who work part time earn more than men who work part time. Women in their 20s earn more than men in their 20s. Women who don’t marry and don’t have children earn more than men. What kills the average wage of all women, in comparison to the wage of all men, is that women - and it’s important to note that this is on average - take career breaks to have children and often then either more time off or lighter workloads to raise them. We might want to say that this isn’t a good idea. We might think that it’s just fine that people who make different life decisions earn different amounts of money. But what this isn’t is a gender pay gap. And anyone who wants to change matters has to recognise that it isn’t a gender pay gap so it isn’t something that is going to be changed by blathering on about gender. It’s about children and the having of them. And, if we’re to be honest about it all, as long as more women than men decide that they want to take those breaks and changed workloads in order to raise their children, then we’re always going to have that motherhood pay gap. Whether it’s a good or bad thing is entirely reliant upon your personal definitions of good or bad.

Theodore Dalrymple on modern priorities:

The slowness [of the police] to react - infinite slowness, in fact, since they did not react at all - contrasted oddly with an experience I had the previous Sunday. A couple of American filmmakers came to Paris to interview me… and decided that the little park opposite my flat would be a good place to do so. They set up the camera, but a few seconds later, before they could ask me a single question, a municipal policeman arrived. They were not allowed to film here without a permit from the mairie of the arrondissement, he said. I explained that these were Americans, come all the way from Texas expressly to interview me. He, a very pleasant and polite man of African origin, phoned his chief to see whether an exception could be made. As I suspected, it could not. I told the film crew that we should make no fuss; the man was only doing his job, silly as that job might be. As it happens there were several drunks in another part of the park making aggressive-sounding noises and breaking bottles, but them he did not approach, perhaps wisely, as they were several and he was only one. He thought he would have more luck with someone wearing a tweed jacket and corduroy trousers as I was.

And Jack Dunphy on our student intelligentsia:

Only on a college campus, and nowhere more so than an Ivy League one, does it take a committee to figure out the obvious. Which in this case is that a group of coddled elitists, none of whom would dare set foot in the New York neighbourhoods that benefited most from the NYPD’s “stop-and-frisk” tactics, decided that their opinions… are the only ones deserving of a public airing, and that anyone whose opinion may differ is therefore worthy of mockery, shame, and contempt.

Marx = god

As a young poet Karl Marx was already exhibiting his God complex as well as a marked indifference towards human suffering. Onreflection it does sound awfully like something the god of this worldmight say:

..........

Then the gauntlet do I fling

Scornful in the World's wide open face.

Down the giant She-Dwarf, whimpering,

Plunges, cannot crush my happiness.

Like unto a God I dare
Through that ruined realm in triumph roam.
Every word is Deed and Fire,
And my bosom like the Maker's own.

 

Read the entire regurgitation @ http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1837-pre/verse/verse20.htm

 

UPDATE:

The historical 'fruits' of this 'god'.

Michael Moynihan on the reprehensible fantasist Eric Hobsbawm:

In a now infamous 1994 interview with journalist Michael Ignatieff, the historian was asked if the murder of “15, 20 million people might have been justified” in establishing a Marxist paradise. “Yes,” Mr. Hobsbawm replied. Asked the same question the following year, he reiterated his support for the “sacrifice of millions of lives” in pursuit of a vague egalitarianism. That such comments caused surprise is itself surprising; Mr. Hobsbawm’s lifelong commitment to the Party testified to his approval of the Soviet experience, whatever its crimes. It’s not that he didn’t know what was going on in the dank basements of the Lubyanka and on the frozen steppes of Siberia. It’s that he didn't much care.

Readers of How to Change the World will be treated to explications of synarchism, a dozen mentions of the Russian Narodniks, and countless digressions on justly forgotten Marxist thinkers and politicians. But there is remarkably little discussion of the way communist regimes actually governed. There is virtually nothing on the vast Soviet concentration-camp system, unless one counts a complaint that “Marx was typecast as the inspirer of terror and gulag, and communists as essentially defenders of, if not participators in, terror and the KGB.” Also missing is any mention of the more than 40 million Chinese murdered in Mao’s Great Leap Forward or the almost two million Cambodians murdered by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge.

Similar sleight-of-hand and attempts to isolate Marx from the practical fallout of his totalitarian blueprint can be found here. And for sheer tragicomic delusion, this is tough to beat. As is this.

Gloria in excelsis Deo

The older I get the more these wise words from Malcolm Muggeridge ring true:

“I feel so strongly at the end of my life that nothing can happen to us in any circumstances that is not part of God’s purpose for us. Therefore, we have nothing to fear, nothing to worry about, except that we should rebel against His purpose, that we should fail to detect it and fail to establish some sort of relationship with Him and His divine will. On that basis, there can be no black despair, no throwing in of our hand. We can watch the institutions and social structures of our time collapse – and I think you who are young are fated to watch them collapse – and we can reckon with what seems like an irresistibly growing power of materialism and materialist societies.

“But, it will not happen that that is the end of the story. As St. Augustine said – and I love to think of it when he received the news in Carthage that Rome had been sacked: Well, if that’s happened, it’s a great catastrophe, but we must never forget that the earthly cities that men build they destroy, but there is also the City of God which men didn’t build and can’t destroy. And he devoted the next seventeen years of his life to working out the relationship between the earthly city and the City of God – the earthly city where we live for a short time, and the City of God whose citizens we are for all eternity.

“You know, it’s a funny thing, but when you’re old, as I am, there are all sorts of extremely pleasant things that happen to you. One of them is, you realize that history is nonsense, but I won’t go into that now. The pleasantest thing of all is that you wake up in the night at about, say, three a.m., and you find that you are half in and half out of your battered old carcass. And it seems quite a toss-up whether you go back and resume full occupancy of your mortal body, or make off toward the bright glow you see in the sky, the lights of the City of God. In this limbo between life and death, you know beyond any shadow of doubt that, as an infinitesimal particle of God’s creation, you are a participant in God’s purpose for His creation, and that that purpose is loving and not hating, is creative and not destructive, is everlasting and not temporal, is universal and not particular. With this certainty comes an extraordinary sense of comfort and joy.

“Nothing that happens in this world need shake that feeling; all the happenings in this world, including the most terrible disasters and suffering, will be seen in eternity as in some mysterious way a blessing, as a part of God’s love. We ourselves are part of that love, we belong to that scene, and only in so far as we belong to that scene does our existence here have any reality or any worth. All the rest is fantasy – whether the fantasy of power which we see in the authoritarian states around us, or the fantasy of the great liberal death wish in terms of affluence and self-indulgence. The essential feature, and necessity of life is to know reality, which means knowing God. Otherwise our mortal existence is, as Saint Teresa of Avila said, no more than a night in a second-class hotel.”

And I am so thankful to the 'lover of my soul' for this truth and hope.

Cultural dynamics

Wise words from retired judge R Bork:

“The enemy within is modern liberalism, a corrosive agent carrying a very different mood and agenda than that of classical or traditional liberalism. That the modern variety is intellectually bankrupt diminishes neither its vitality nor the danger it poses. A bankrupt philosophy can reign for centuries and, when its bankruptcy becomes apparent, may well be succeeded by an even less coherent outlook.

“That is what is happening to us now. Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason. The response of liberalism was not to turn to religion, which modernity had seemingly made irrelevant, but to abandon reason.”

“Modern liberalism is powerful because it has enlisted our cultural elites, those who man the institutions that manufacture, manipulate, and disseminate ideas, attitudes and symbols – universities, churches, Hollywood, the national press (print and electronic), foundation staffs, the ‘public interest’ organizations, much of the congressional Democratic Party and some congressional Republicans as well, and large sections of the judiciary, including, all too often, a majority of the Supreme Court.

“This, it must be stressed, is not a conspiracy but a syndrome. These are institutions controlled by people who view the world from a common perspective, a perspective not generally shared by the public at large. But so pervasive is the influence of those who occupy the commanding heights of our culture that it is important to understand what modern liberalism is and what its ascendancy means.”

Shock/horror

The most persecuted people on Earth at the moment and it is only going to get worse.
http://www.watoday.com.au/comment/age-of-intolerance-the-war-on-religion-20131101-2ws4o.html

Institutions captured

An excerpt from David Thompson:

The issue of classroom political advocacy crops up here quite often and Evan Maloney’s documentary, Indoctrinate U, illustrates just how far advocacy can go, and how corrosive to probity it can be. A key scene in Maloney’s film concerns psychology professor Laura Freberg, who faced a campaign of harassment by left-leaning colleagues and was told, “We never would have hired you if we knew you were a Republican.” Freberg’s students later admitted they’d known she was a “closet Republican” precisely because she didn’t use the classroom to air her political views.
 

Try getting a lecturing job in the 'Fine arts' if you are a Christian!

....some educators make great efforts to justify telling students how they should vote and seem untroubled by the implications of growing political uniformity across much of the humanities, where bias is most common and has the greatest scope. A view made explicit by Grover Furr of Monclair State’s English department:

[C]olleges and universities do not need a single additional “conservative”… What they do need, and would much benefit from, is more Marxists, radicals, leftists – all terms conventionally applied to those who fight against exploitation, racism, sexism, and capitalism. We can never have too many of these, just as we can never have too few “conservatives”.
 

......The problem is that adversarial role-play, like that of Furr and Garelick, has little to do with reason, refutation or how the world actually is. It does, however, have a great deal to do with how those concerned wish to seem. In order to maintain a self-image of heroic radicalism - and in order to justify funding, influence and status - great leaps of imagination, or paranoia, may be required. Hence the goal posts of persecution tend to move and new and rarer forms of exploitation and injustice have to be discovered, many of which are curiously invisible to the untutored eye. Thus, the rebel academic tends towards extremism, intolerance and absurdity, not because the mainstream of society is becoming more racist, prejudiced, patriarchal or oppressive – but precisely because it isn’t. 

[sarc]

Graffitti is just so cool and transgressive and like arrty...............!

the Socialist disease....

The following excerpt is from a letter that Vaclav Havel wrote to the Czech Dictator Husák in April 1975.
It could (should?) have been written to both Gillard and Rudd.

"So far," Havel scolded Husák, "you and your government have chosen the easy way out for yourselves, and the most dangerous road for society: the path of inner decay for the sake of outward appearances; of deadening life for the sake of increasing uniformity; of deepening the spiritual and moral crisis of our society, and ceaselessly degrading human dignity, for the puny sake of protecting your own power."

War myth

Speaking to the myth that religion is the cause of all wars:

Philip and Axelrod’s three-volume Encyclopedia of Wars, which chronicles some 1,763 wars that have been waged over the course of human history. Of those wars, the authors categorize 123 as being religious in nature, which is an astonishingly low 6.98% of all wars. However, when one subtracts out those waged in the name of Islam (66), the percentage is cut by more than half to 3.23%.

 

     

That means that all faiths combined – minus Islam – have caused less than 4% of all of humanity’s wars and violent conflicts. Further, they played no motivating role in the major wars that have resulted in the most loss of life.

The truth is, non-religious motivations and naturalistic philosophies bear the blame for nearly all of humankind’s wars. Lives lost during religious conflict pales in comparison to those experienced during the regimes who wanted nothing to do with the idea of God – something showcased in R. J. Rummel’s work Lethal Politics and Death by Government:

Non-Religious Dictator Lives Lost

·         Joseph Stalin - 42,672,000

·         Mao Zedong - 37,828,000

·         Adolf Hitler - 20,946,000

·         Chiang Kai-shek - 10,214,000

·         Vladimir Lenin - 4,017,000

·         Hideki Tojo - 3,990,000

·         Pol Pot - 2,397,0003

Rummel says: “Almost 170 million men, women and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed or killed in any other of a myriad of ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners. The dead could conceivably be nearly 360 million people. It is though our species has been devastated by a modern Black Plague. And indeed it has, but a plague of Power, not germs.”4

The historical evidence is quite clear: Religion is not the #1 cause of war.

“What is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is not the source your pleasures that wage war in your members? You lust and do not have; so you commit murder. You are envious and cannot obtain; so you fight and quarrel” (James 4:1–2).

In the end, the evidence shows that the atheists are quite wrong about the wars they claim to so desperately despise. Sin is the #1 cause of war and violence, not religion, and certainly not Christianity.

 

 

 

 

A feral journo!

The thoughts of a typical left-wing turkey:

As regular readers will be aware, Ms Penny is inclined to hyperbolical nihilism and has some intriguing views on the subject of violence and on whom it may be inflicted. In August 2011 on the BBC’s World Tonight, Laurie offered her “intelligent analysis” of the aforementioned criminal spree. What frightens her, she said, isn’t the beating and murder of pensioners, the mugging of children or the gleeful attempts to burn people in their homes, but the use of the word “feral” to describe the people doing so.

Marriage a No-No!

Oh how I long to say "I told you so" to my fellow believers in America who fell under Obama's spell. However being a forgiving and benign brother I shall refrain and say instead; be of good cheer, hardships and persecutions develop perseverance and perseverance hope....now where have I heard that before?

The heinous intrusions into our lives as a result of ObamaCare swell each day. Now, in true Marxist form, the ludicrously named "Affordable Care Act" mounts an all-out attack on marriage. In 2010, in a Web Memo, the Heritage Foundation pointed out that Under the bill, couples would face massive financial penalties if they marry or remain married. Conversely, couples who cohabit without marriage are given highly preferential financial treatment. If the Senate bill becomes law, saying 'I do' would cost some couples over $10,000 per year.

In fact, the "... anti-marriage penalties and heavy 'cohabitation bonuses [were] built into the Senate ObamaCare bill [.]'" Furthermore, "low income couples are not immune from the bill's aggressive wedding taxes. A 60-year old husband and wife, each with an income of $15,000 would pay over $4,000 per year if they remain married. Put in other terms, the government would offer an annual bonus of $4,212 if the couple divorces and then cohabits."
Well, ObamaCare is now law and the effects are being felt nationwide. As a continuing job killer, ObamaCare will now adversely impact clergy, wedding halls, caterers, musicians, singers, floral arrangers, and other party planners.
 

Consequently, "an all-out war on 'old and outdated' institutions like marriage and family" is being conducted "so dominance of the state can be achieved." In

Communist Russia this was euphemistically known as "unions of affection and comradeship."

In Russia in 1920, abortion on demand arrived. Hence, how convenient that via ObamaCare, every American must now pay for someone else's abortion -- a direct assault on religious freedom. Thus, the state's monstrous power keeps enlarging under the dictator occupying the White House.
 

........Eric Hoffer in his 1951 book entitled The True Believer writes that "one of the most potent attractions of a mass movement is its offering of a substitute for individual hope" (15). Obama and the Democrats keep undermining Americans ability to succeed, inculcating the idea that there is no future in America unless it is totally guided by the government. Obama continues to destroy individual hope when jobs are scarce, college tuition is exorbitant, unemployment benefits are worth more than solid, honest work -- each of these disaffects far too many Americans who see no future before them.

Obama, an ideologue who is "so fanatically committed to this cause that no amount of reality can make him abandon it" keeps offering his empty "hope and change" speech. But, as the evidence mounts and the facts become known, it is up to us to come out of our stupor and halt this battering ram that is deliberately grinding down the people. It is equally important to remember Pascal's advice that "...the embarrassment wherein [a person] finds himself produces in him the most unjust and criminal passions imaginable, for he conceives a mortal hatred against that truth which blames him and convinces him of his faults." As Obama is thwarted, be prepared for the true vision of this demagogue

The true cost of Anthropogenic global warming.

The latest 'prediction' from the AG warmists would have us believe that the worlds food harvests are going to suffer catastrophic failure in the years to come. However like all of their 'warnings' to date; the rainfall, wild weather, water shortages, overpopulation, commodity scarcity etc, it is nothing more than a stand-over tactic to extort more money from the public purse. It's like a giant ponzy scheme wherein taxpayers money can be funnelled into the few warming-elites pockets at the top of the pyramid. Take note of how wealthy these warming-elites have actually become. How many houses they own, their lifestyles which make a joke of their apocalyptic warnings...it is no wonder that they fight so hard even in the face of increasing factual evidences,to maintain their hold on the levers of power.

Such manufactured scaremongering is not going to go away just because the warmist 'facts' are disproved. It is going to take a transformation of the power structures to bring this lot of snake-oil salesmen down, because as Blaise Pascal once stated:"...the embarrassment wherein [a person] finds himself produces in him the most unjust and criminal passions imaginable, for he conceives a mortal hatred against that truth which blames him and convinces him of his faults."

Consider this small example of their epic failure to 'predict' the future:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2001 predicted global warming would cut wheat and rice production in India:

Acute water shortage conditions combined with thermal stress should adversely affect wheat and, more severely, rice productivity in India even under the positive effects of elevated CO2 in the future.

That prediction of 12 years ago has so far proved completely false. The news from India a fortnight ago:

India looks set for bumper harvests of winter crops such as wheat, chickpeas and rapeseed in the wake of a strong monsoon that has left the soil moist and topped up reservoirs.

The crops will follow bountiful summer harvests of rice and soybeans due to the rains… With next year’s wheat output seen matching 2013’s strong 92.46 million tonnes, the government ... could allow more exports.
 

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

Global production of corn, wheat and rice have all more than doubled since 1970 as global warming occurred. Corn production, the current flavor of the week for Internet fear-mongering, has more than tripled since 1970. So, too, has global vegetable production as a whole.

The New York Times’ claim that “sweeping impacts from climate change [are] already occurring across the planet” is also false, contradicted last month by the very IPCC that the Times now cites as its source:

It was embarrassing enough for the IPCC in the summary released last Friday to admit there has been a 15-year pause or dramatic slowdown in global warming, and that its climate models didn’t predict that or the increase in Antarctic sea ice.
But now the IPCC can’t be sure at all we’re suffering from many extreme weather events, either. It even admits its past warnings of more droughts were “overstated”.

Examples are legion, everywhere their predictions are falling into disrepute. However, as with all such dissemblers they are nimbly adapting to the changing circumstances. Whereas they once claimed that the rain in Australia had dried up and was never going to return and even if it did the ground was going to be so dry that the rain would just evaporate and therefore not fill our dams and waterways. When the rains did come in such abundance that floods were the order of the day and all the dams filled and all of the salt-water purification plants built at an enormous waste of taxpayers money have now been mothballed.....they are now claiming that these excessive rains were caused by....global warming!

It would be a joke if it had not been so expensive and that so much of the money had not been diverted into so few pockets and if genuine ecological problems had not been ignored or starved of funds because all available capital had been diverted into 'stopping' an imaginary problem.

As it stands the 'catastrophic scare' of AGW has been a myth but the catastrophic 'solutions' have created untold havoc.

Cough, cough, gasp.....

It has been said; here, there, and everywhere, that a countries treatment of its Jewish citizens reflects on the spiritual atmosphere of that country in much the same way as a canary in a coal mine warns  miners of toxic gases befouling the mines air.

If so this excerpt from Ireland offers a dim view of the prevailing Irish atmosphere:

It would be nice if we could all raise our eyebrows and dismiss such anti-Semitic rants as the ramblings of impotent fundamentalists, but in the light of the growing power of Iran, its funding and support of terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and the worrying rise of anti-Semitism worldwide, we would do well to sit up and listen.

Last week it was reported that there had been a 58 per cent rise in anti-Semitic attacks in France and a 30 per cent rise in Belgium; 2012 was the third worst year on record for anti-Semitic attacks in the UK. These figures are mirrored worldwide as anti-Semitic political parties gain ground during these austere times.

Here in Ireland of course, as has recently been indignantly pointed out in the wake of the 'Caherciveen scandal' we are not anti-Semitic at all. Just anti-Israel. So that's all right then.

When Sarah Honig wrote about the anti-Semitic ramblings she heard from a few schoolchildren in Co Kerry, she was immediately vilified as a liar and propagandist. As Honig later wrote: "Apart from two follow-ups which I initiated, the news reporting was astoundingly uniform. . . Simplistic, one-sided news accounts of what was presented as my attack on virtually the entire Irish nation bordered on the hysterical."

Well yes, the responses to Honig's piece were a little astonishing. They included such gems (published on Irish newspaper websites) as: "The state of Israel is the most racist state on the planet"; "They (Israelis) have been playing the 'anti-Semitic card' to justify their greed for Lebens-raum"; "Typical Israeli overreaction to everything – play the Jewish card" and "Screaming anti-Semitism is the most powerful Israeli weapon used in their colonisation of the Middle East" and many, many more in similar vein (these are the polite ones).

As Honig notes, there is a "3-D" test for "Judeophobia". It occurs when "purported criticism slips into demonisation, delegitimisation and double-standards". Does our coverage of Jewish and Israeli affairs pass it?

Eh, yes. Irish critics routinely demonise Israel. They question its right to exist. And they hold it to a standard not required of its neighbours. But, as they keep insisting, they are definitely not anti-Semitic, how dare anyone suggest it? Criticising the motives of people who routinely single out the state of Israel for demonisation is not tolerated in Ireland.

Suggestions that there may be other enemies of the Palestinian peoples who deserve censure are met with indignation and derision. Well-orchestrated campaigns ensure that anti-Israeli bias is kept in the headlines.

The double standards of those who seek to demonise democratic Israel yet are strangely silent on the atrocities committed by its neighbours would seem (to outsiders anyway) to support the accusation that many Irish "human rights campaigners" are indeed motivated by anti-Semitism.

But to even suggest that there's something strange about the way in which so-called "pro-Palestinians" routinely and defiantly ignore the injustices inflicted on these people by countries other than Israel, is to risk personal abuse and censure – at best.

That a leading Irish political commentator can describe Israel, the democratic home of Jewish people, where Christians, Muslims and atheists

– be they male, straight, gay or female – enjoy far more civil rights than they do in neighbouring countries, as "a cancer" on national TV and be applauded by many, is more than worrying.

Being gay is punishable by death in Gaza. No one is protesting that, are they? But of course, that doesn't mean we're anti-Semitic does it? Just anti the Jews that live in Israel.

Last October, on Arab- News.com, Abdulateef Al-Mulhim, a former Royal Saudi Naval officer wrote a ground-breaking op-ed piece called 'Arab Spring and the Israel Enemy'. In it he called for Arabs to stop demonising and blaming Israel as the source of their problems.

He wrote: "The real enemies of the Arab world are corruption, lack of good education, lack of good health care, lack of freedom, lack of respect for human lives and, finally, the Arab world had many dictators who used the Arab-Israeli conflict to suppress their own people."

He added: "Many Arabs don't know that the life expectancy of the Palestinians living in Israel is far longer than in many Arab states and they enjoy far better political and social freedom than many of their Arab brothers. Even the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank enjoy more political and social rights than in some places of the Arab world."

Where are the Irish activists protesting against the lack of rights afforded to Palestinians by Arabs? Non-existent. But that doesn't make our "pro-Palestinians" anti-Semitic, does it?

The facts and history of the Middle East support Al-Mulhim's comments. But just suggest to the many vociferous Irish critics of Israel – including the Catholic charity Trocaire – that their energies may be better directed elsewhere and you'll get a blast of abuse as they righteously defend their attitude.

(Irish Independent)
 

You would think that Ireland has enough problems of its own to deal with without having to import a biblical curse as well (Genesis 12).