TO LOVE YOUR CHILDREN IS AN ACT OF AGGRESSION

The mentally deficient worldview of Marxist maniacs should and still largely is, regarded as a laughing matter. However, the fact that many of these retards occupy influential positions in the university hierarchy, left-wing government departments and education departments in general should give pause as to what is coming down the turnpike:

"....ponder the deep ruminations of Marxist philosopher Adam Swift, who insists that reading to your children causes “unfair disadvantage” to the children of parents who are negligent and stupid, and should therefore induce feelings of guilt and discomfort. To our Marxist intellectual, being a competent, caring parent is something to atone for, being as it is an act of class oppression."

INEVITABLE OR AVOIDABLE?

Does any of this sound depressingly familiar to those who keep up with political developments, especially in the Western 'democracies':

In George Orwell's dystopian story 1984, the central character Winston Smith is a member of the Outer Party who works in the Ministry of Truth rewriting past news articles. The narrative is set in Airstrip One (once Great Britain), a province of the superstate Oceania.

Life in Oceania is a world of perpetual war, omnipresent surveillance, thought control, and public manipulation. An elite and privileged Inner Party governs the superstate through merciless persecution of individualism and independent thinking or "thoughtcrime". The leader of the Inner Party is Big Brother, a personified entity with no physical presence. Four omnipresent Ministries are the instruments that control all aspects of life in Oceania:

1. The Ministry of Peace ensures perpetual war and directs atrocity.

2. The Ministry of Plenty manipulates shortage through rationing and deliberate starvation. It subjects the outer party, the general citizenry, and the proletariats (the uneducated working class) to sub-standard living conditions while conversely, the Inner Party enjoys luxurious lifestyles.

3. The Ministry of Love manages torture and brainwashing. It ferments hatred of all 'enemies' of the superstate by publically executing war prisoners. Transgressors of state rules are tortured to extract meaningless answers and ultimately dehumanise.

4. The Ministry of Truth is concerned with producing lies. It oversees propaganda and historical transmutation.

WHAT A TOOL!

Thanks David Thompson for your amusing and educative blog:

I’m reminded of the Guardian’s Emer O’Toole, a “postcolonial theorist” and assistant professor of Irish Performance Studies, for whom all cultures past and present are equally vibrant and noble, except of course the culture in which she currently flourishes, on which opprobrium must be heaped ostentatiously and often.

Ms O’Toole bemoaned the colonial propagation of Shakespeare, whose works she denounced as “full of classism, sexism, racism and defunct social mores.” And worse, “a powerful tool of empire, transported to foreign climes along with the doctrine of European cultural superiority.” The possibility that at any given time one set of values and insights might be preferable to another, even objectively better and markedly so, is apparently something one mustn’t think about.

Her article was accompanied by a photograph of New Zealand’s Ngakau Toa theatre company performing Troilus and Cressida in a distinctively Maori style. To me, it looked fun and worth the price of a ticket. But this cross-cultural fusion offended Ms O’Toole, who dismissed notions of the Bard’s universality as “uncomfortably colonial.” She then presumed to take umbrage on behalf of all past colonial subjects, whose own views on Shakespeare and literature she chose not to relate. She did, however, get quite upset about “our sense of cultural superiority” – a sense of superiority that, she insisted, has long been “disavowed by all but the crazies.”

With that in mind, I can’t help wondering how Ms O’Toole might have felt had she been among the 19th century English colonists who encountered a Maori culture that was all but prehistoric, with no discernible literature or science, and no enlightened gender politics, and in which cannibalism was not unknown. Faced with such things, I’m sure Ms O’Toole would have resisted the wicked urge to think herself a little more culturally advanced.

Of course one Emer O’Toole is easy enough to mock. A classroom full of them is more of a problem. A generation schooled in the same kind of thinking, or rather unthinking, is culturally corrosive.

FAITH & REASON ARE COMPATIBLE

The clearest definition of Christian 'faith' is found in Hebrews chapter 11 and 1 Peter 1 and access to such faith comes through revelation NOT human intelligence.

However, I am constantly faced with the common misconception that faith is actually a form of throwing common sense and reason to the wind and believing in the unbelievable, a sort of 'magical thinking'. Human 'faith' does indeed encompass such blind, unsubstantiated belief; consider for example the 'faith' in evolution, something that masquerades as 'science' yet cannot be proved scientifically, nor can it be witnessed, nor can its theories be disproved because no one can go back in time and the only 'evidences' are 'interpreted' by those wedded to the belief, and worst of all, any contrary interpretations are decried as a heresy, and in most Western educational systems the alternatives are not even allowed to be voiced.

The real tragedy is when Christians confuse our faith with that of the human variety and the result is a form of 'ecumenically approved magical thinking' exemplified by the name & claim it cult, the 'emergent groups' and the more recent anti-church sects.

Think instead of the exhortation in Romans 12:2.

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will.

It is indisputable that our protestant tradition is founded on “reason and the scriptures” – whether it’s Martin Luther standing before the Diet of Worms, C.S. Lewis apologetically defending the faith via radio waves, or Jonathon Edwards detailing the philosophical argument for the captivity of the soul – we are a community founded on the ability to reason.

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

A tragic but accurate portrayal of the madness afoot in the West. The genesis of this article was a story about a 6 foot 2 inch man (Wolscht) in his 50's with 7 children who decided one day that he was in fact, a 6 year old female; abandoning his wife, family and job to become dependant on a twisted society:

Carl R. Trueman asks some hard questions here:

If everything else which shapes our identity can now be determined by mere personal preference, why single out age as an exception?… So when it comes to transgender people mewling and puking about how Wolscht is trivializing their cause, let me put this as simply and gently as I can: When you decide that categories of identity are merely psychological and that reality is constituted by language, you consequently have neither the right nor the ability to call a halt to the Promethean process which you have unleashed just because some of the results prove to be distasteful to you and unhelpful to your political cause. Indeed, whining like a bunch of, ahem, six year old girls is not going to help you at this point.

You do not believe me? Then perhaps it is time to call the spirit of Nietzsche’s Madman once more from the grave: You who have so derided any notion of human nature and external authority, do you now have the courage to face the world for whose birth you yourselves were the midwives? You who have “unchained the sun from this earth,” can you now live with the consequences of your own actions – where all things, even chronological age, must surely give way before the will to power? Face the reality you have made, where Mr. Wolscht is the Nietzschean Übermensch – or, to be precise, the Überkleinesmädchen—of the new order.

No doubt opponents will say that such a view will create chaos. Law courts must recognize an age of consent and an age of criminal responsibility; Schools need an objective standard of age to structure their curricula; And it is in everyone’s best interest that one-year-olds are not allowed to drive on the highways or drink Scotch or play in their cribs with loaded AK-47s. Well, yes, of course – but, please, do not shoot the messenger. I have not created the politics of repudiation which drives so much of the Left today. I am merely pointing out that its logic is inexorable. Those who accept its premises and yet seek to curb its power according to their own tastes are merely so many desperate postmodern Canutes, shouting impotently at the relentless waves of ecstatic nihilism that are even now crashing against the shore.

He concludes:

Still, it is the season of goodwill and I would hate to end this article in such a negative fashion. So let me make a small, positive, and I hope helpful, contribution to the political vocabulary of the New Left. In this age when every micro-identity and pseudo-victim needs some bit of rebarbative sociological gibberish to give credibility to their angry resentments, I offer a new piece of incantatory mumbo jumbo to help us all identify and demonize yet one more species of unacceptable bigotry: Heterotemporal heliocentrarchic transagephobia. This is the irrational, reactionary belief that time is significant, that age is a given, and that those who deny this are idiots, liars, or in urgent need of psychiatric help.

When, twenty years from now (forgive the heliocentrarchic heterotemporalism of that phrase), the U.S. Supreme Court magically finds the right to transageism in the Constitution, then remember, folks, you heard it here first. You’re welcome.

A DANGEROUS NAIVETE

Are the worlds 'leaders' (politicians) deliberately spitting in the tax-payer/ordinary person's face or what? I suspect that they are laughing at their cocaine fuelled orgy's about how they have scammed the taxpayers.

Guess who opened the Parisian fiasco of climate change? 

Robert Mugabe that's who.

If that doesn't shriek volumes about the nature of the scam then I don't know what does: "“Unless current trends are reversed, disaster stalks planet Earth,” [Robert Mugabe]

Disaster stalks Zimbabwe thats for sure, and is about to begin his stalk of the West in general through the auspices of the 'leaders of the free world'. 

The whole thing is a joke, the science, the scams, the largest 'redistribution of wealth' since Stalin, the whole kit & Kaboodle, and yet there are still intelligent(?) ordinary, people who read this and believe in the Climate faith...go figure!

A TOTAL WHAMMY

The left-wing have captured the educational high ground; primary, secondary and tertiary and are programming the new generations to believe that the Western civilisation has been nothing more than an invading, slave-owning, dominating, misogynistic, capitalistic band of Imperialists....in other words they have stolen our true history and the glories of Western civilisation. 

They are stealing our present by the enforced capture of education, the media and the arts, by enlarging the Welfare State, increasing taxes, overloading the economy with grander and grander spending, and not for capitol projects but giving the funds into the hands of tiny, activist led pressure groups.

And they are also attempting to steal the future by promoting scares like the farcical Global warming scam and diverting money away form genuine world building, environment saving, poverty diminishing projects towards the productive nations.

STATISM BAD

The brilliant Roger Scruton nails a definition of conservatism:

Conservatives believe that our identities and values are formed through our relations with other people, and not through our relation with the state. The state is not an end but a means. Civil society is the end, and the state is the means to protect it. The social world emerges through free association, rooted in friendship and community life. And the customs and institutions that we cherish have grown from below, by the ‘invisible hand’ of co-operation. They have rarely been imposed from above by the work of politics, the role of which, for a conservative, is to reconcile our many aims, and not to dictate or control them.

HOMAGE DUE

A major issue with our contemporary culture as I see it, is that we have become 'soft-boiled'.

We have lived in comfort and relative peace in the West for so long that we now take it for granted that this is the 'normal' state of affairs.

If you are any student of history you will have observed that this is very far from the truth. The 'normal' state of human doings has always been that of strife, discord, treachery and upheaval.

Yes the West has been fighting almost continual wars over the last 100 hundred years, but America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand; i.e. our most important frames of reference outside the UK, have not had a conflict in their lands for more than a century. Even Englands conflict was confined chiefly to the European continent and in saying that I do not in any way depreciate the aerial warfare waged over British soil during the 2nd World War. Equally I do not exclude those parts of Europe who used to adhere to the Western 'culture' but who have slipped almost entirely away over the past few decades. In fact the European continent was the main stage of the last big war, WW2.

Which brings me to the debt of gratitude that we today owe our forefathers, who fought for the peace we now take for granted, or as George Orwell so eloquently put it: 

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

Too many soft-boiled snowflakes in today's world pay no homage to those men and women, and in fact are contemptuous of them as 'warmongers', 'murderers' and the too often repeated journalistic mendacity 'terrorists'.  The fact that contemporary journalism conflates terrorism with those defending Western culture against 'actual' terrorism, is one of the greatest betrayals of press integrity in the 21st Millennium.

Another seed of our moral flaccidity is because the ideology of 'evolution' has penetrated to the very core of our being. Many actually believe that the 'peace' we enjoy is because the human race has 'evolved' past the slavish, warlike mode, thus we see the 'elite' castigating those 'rough men and women' who defend our shores.

Sadly the truth is that human nature is the same as it was in the garden, down through the centuries and remains the same today. History teaches us that those who ignore history are bound to repeat it; and I believe that our soft-boiled elites are going to suffer the same fate as their Eloi doppelgangers did in H G Well's Time Machine.

Thankfully I will not be around to see it because even if it were to occur in the next year or two, I for one will not surrender my soul for a little peace and prosperity on this, the dark side of eternity.

Cowards all....

It is both unnerving and dismaying that our elected public officials lack the courage or the will to make uncomfortable decisions. Few things illustrate this more than the willing surrender academics and politicians such as Di Natale, Shorten, Bishop and others make to Islam, when they blame jihadi terrorism on Western nations. To call such a response cowardly is but a part of its true nature. Its real name is 'dhimmitude' and it means submission and servanthood towards Islamic rule.

Never will I nor my family become slaves to this demonic structure.

This insistence that the latest Paris outrage is the result of the actions of the West has been repeated by Clive Hamilton, a Greens candidate for parliament and Professor of Public Ethics (sic) at Charles Sturt University. According to Hamilton, “our political leaders must carry much of the responsibility for the dangers Australians are now exposed to.” Islamic State made it clear it would carry out terrorist attacks against anyone who opposed its attempts to establish a global Caliphate and so, apparently, we must accept that we have none to blame but ourselves. As Hamilton puts it:

After all, IS identified France’s and Russia’s roles in the Syrian conflict as the reason for the Paris outrages and the downing of the Russian airliner departing Sharm el-Sheikh that killed 224 people.

And so Australia must expect to be punished by Islamic State for our resistance to its campaign for global domination, just as Russia and France have been punished.

The leader of the Greens, Richard Di Natale, echoed Hamilton’s call for capitulation in the fight against Islamic State, demanding an end to the Australian bombing campaign and an easing of anti-terrorism laws designed to control jihadists: “We can’t make Australia safer by making other countries more dangerous, but that’s exactly what the citizenship laws and our air strikes do.”

PRINCE OF PONCE

Miranda Devines response to ponce Charles:

"Talk about fiddling while Paris burns. This is what psychologists would call a serious case of denial by displacement.

It’s been inconvenient for climate alarmists that, just three weeks before the UN’s upcoming talkfest, the host city was the scene of an Islamic State terrorist attack. On that very day, Al Gore, of all people, had to abandon a climate alarm stand-up outside the Eiffel Tower.

These rarefied folk would really rather ignore the whole messy business of Islamism but it came up and shouted in their face in Paris. Bit hard to avoid mentioning it.

So, rather than admit the politically incorrect truth that Islamic State is driven by a certain extreme religious ideology bent on creating a worldwide caliphate, leftists scour their barren craniums for any other explanation — and inevitably they have come up with climate change.

This issue has become the leftist’s ultimate wet dream. Understood only by an easily manipulated scientific priestly class, it is the latest vehicle to dismantle capitalism and halt progress. It requires a massive supranational bureaucracy and seamlessly provides a new elite with the tools of social domination. Control the means of energy production, control the world. That’s the dream, anyway.

Linking climate change to Islamic State perfectly suits those who live in a theoretical utopia in which you can feel good and fool yourself into thinking you are solving the most intractable threat of our time — genocidal Islamism — by telling other people to pay more for their electricity.

Trust Prince Charles to fall for it."

WINNIE THE NAILER

Leave it to one of the world's great statesmen to nail the problem of Islam:

"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.

A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement, the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome." [Winston Churchill]

LOOK AT ME, MY COMPASSION OVERWHELMS ME!

The politics of seeming rather than doing:

" Equally embarrassing are the frivolities of tragedy, which include the pointless colouring of our Opera House and other landmarks red, white and blue, peace signs made out of the Eiffel Tower, platitudes of ‘solidarity’, twitter hashtags, Je Suis Charlie’s, weeping pop stars, mountains of rotting flowers, candle-lit vigils and all the other post-Diana trashy modern rituals of mass grieving. (Note: no such outpourings for dead Israelis). The endless, tiresome, empty symbols of our ‘compassion’ stand in stark, terrifying contrast to our inability to actually do anything concrete to obliterate the menace of extremist Islam." [ Rowan Dean

REWIND

Merv Bendle makes a point that is not only deeply worrying, but demonstrably true and my singular fear for my children, is that with such 'chamberlainistic' chi at the helm, we are doomed to chaos:

"Our leaders have failed us. Paris confirms it. Make no mistake, at the end of the day their loyalties lie not with the people who elected them, nor with the societies that they govern or the civilisation of the West that has dragged the world out of poverty and barbarism and onto the path of progress. What loyalty they possess is only to their own careers and ambitions and to the special-interest groups they serve."

BEHIND THE LABOR/GREEN MASK

The (Labor & 'others' including an increasing cohort of 'liberals') 'tribalism' of the voting bloc which votes Labor irrespective of how damaging the incumbents might be to the country or to the economy or to any of the disastrous policies we have witnessed over the years of Labor government is little other than soviet collectivism in a mild disguise, which in academic terms is also called 'cultural Marxism' and as a worldview it has successfully brainwashed a large segment of Western culture. 

It involves the insertion of certain ideas into the culture, the removal of restraints, and a breakdown of personal morality and economic independence as taught by the Judeo-Christian worldview, towards a culture where people turn instinctively to the State or the governing bodies for support on all things including morality.

If you are dismissive of this you are probably one of the useful idiots Lenin was so scathing about but who are also entirely necessary to change society into the image of cultural marxism's poster child; Antonio Gramsci whose stated aim is:...."to cut the roots (of Christianity), to change the culture, a long march through the institutions is necessary, only then will power fall into our laps like a ripened fruit" [Gramsci's Prison Diaries].  

We are currently in freefall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VggFao85vTs

FLEXIBLE 'FACTS'

The manipulation of Western youth by militant mullahs and leftist academics who ironically enjoy the freedom's of the West are succinctly captured in this article:

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2015/11/lefts-road-islamist-terror/

A Personal experience of such factual manipulation
I remember going to a religious debate many years ago; 1979 actually, between Ahmed Deedat the head of the Islamic Propagation Centre in Durban and Josh McDowell, Christian apologist.

Some friends and myself had prepared ourselves to listen to both sides of the debate with as much objectivity as we could muster and be prepared to pass  a sound philosophical opinion on the outcome regardless of who 'won'.

The actual event was a total anti-climax.

Ahmed Deedat was not only a completely incompetent debater, he was also extremely emotional and succeeded only in abusing McDOwell and ranting at him. McDowell in fact ceased trying to reason with the man and ended by trying to console Deedat with his(McDowell's)personal conversion experience and the love of the Gospel of Christ. The actual 'debate' was an embarrassing and illuminating experience.

But that is not where the story ends.

My wife who was the Marketing manager of a large clothing company in Durban as well as overseeing the staff of the company's factory floor, that is; a staff of many hundreds of personal, told me what ensued on the monday morning at work.

The staff who were predominantly Muslim, were each given a cassette tape of the 'debate' by someone from the Propagation centre. The tape had been cleverly manipulated, doctored and edited in a way that appeared to give Ahmed Deedat a resounding victory over the infidel MCDowell. How this was accomplished given the actual content of the interaction will be forever a mystery for me.

The re-writers of the story had obviously toiled through the night to edit and copy a vast number of tapes, because her factory was not the only recipient, it was widely distributed throughout the rather large Muslim community of Durban.

It was for me a very powerful, experiential, illustration of Winston Smith's job in Orwell's distopian novel: 1984. Spooky and very sinister.

STARSKY DOWN THE HATCH

Many years ago the late, great Francis Schaeffer wrote that the citizens of the Western Nations had become so addicted to soft living that they would at some time in the future sacrifice their freedom in order to obtain a "personal peace and prosperity"...in hindsight it appears that time has come and gone:

"Writers and journalists keep recalling the turbulent New York of the 1970s, when budget cuts and crime and unemployment had brutalized the city. I lived through those days, and the place was more fun than now. The cops were mostly white, wore their hair long, and had droopy mustaches. Blacks did the muggings and the arson attacks were daily. The place was gritty and magnificent. It was like living in a war zone. One had allies, the cops and others like oneself, law-abiding souls. No one, but no one took the side of the bad guys. Al Sharpton was in the future, as were all the “ community activists” who have sprung forth. Media types did not dare take the side of the bad guys. They now climb the ladder of success by doing just that. Bring back the ’70s anytime. Down with Disneyland New York."

PERFECT PRECIS

A perspicacious comment on an article that I have just finished reading.

It is a comment that I consider worth reproducing for the simple reason that it captures the contrary/suicidal worldview of the average Western, left-wing 'bird-brain' so effectively........apologies to the nameless swot who penned it:

The ‘left’ just loves totalitarianism, be it secular as espoused and practised by Lenin, Stalin and Mao, etc. or the theological totalitarianism of the Islamic variety. Most leftists have a sado-masochistic suicidal delusion that they will be able to take and establish their wonderful secular socialist workers totalitarian Nirvana after the Islamists have weakened the ]semi] capitalist west sufficiently. In centuries past the parasitic/non-wealth producing elite were connected to the aristocracy or the clergy. Today's parasitic elite are inner city government funded/subsidised bureaucrats haunting academia, the judiciary and the media, and other government bodies interfering with or controlling/regulating the wealth producing sectors of the economy.

FOOLS RUSH IN....

Relative truth makes room for fakery (nature abhors a vacuum)...witness this excerpt and of course the whole fake 'warming controversy':

"There is something of Salem about this:

Dr. Dale Brigham, considered one of the most beloved professors at the University of Missouri, has resigned after initially refusing to cancel an exam for students who claimed to feel “unsafe.”

“If you don’t feel safe coming to class, then don’t come to class,” Dr. Brigham told his students. “I will be there, and there will be an exam administered in our class,” he continued, imploring his students to stand up to the bullies on campus. “If you give into bullies, they win. The only way bullies are defeated is by standing up to them.”

Dr. Brigham was sharply criticized in the media for requiring his students to attend class and take their exam. Salon ran a story with the headline “White Missouri professor shames black students for heeding violent threats."The Washington Post featured similar coverage of “a white professor” who “challenged his students to come to class.”

Those upset with Dr. Brigham’s decision to hold class took to Twitter calling for Brigham to be fired and calling him “a failure as a human being.”

And so much of it based on fake scares, professional offence takers, victim politics and lies. For instance:

It was a rough night on the campus of the University of Missouri, thanks in large part to Student Body President Payton Head. Head posted on Facebook earlier in the night that the KKK was confirmed on campus and that he was working with “the MUPD, the state trooper and the National Guard.” Here’s a screenshot:   image

The only problem with that terrifying statement is it wasn’t true and Head was forced to delete the post and apologize...

BACK TO BABEL

Bolt nails it:

I’M no tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist. But I wish the Left would stop talking about a one-world government. Scarier still, the United Nations bureaucracy seems to be preparing for one at next month’s Paris Climate Conference on global warming.

Already in 2012, then Greens leader Bob Brown proposed an “Earth Parliament … under the grand idea of one planet, one person, one vote”, somehow forgetting China and India would then outvote the rest of the world.

The Global Greens Congress then backed a “United Nations Parliamentary Assembly … directly elected by the world’s citizens” to be involved in “all important intergovernmental treaty negotiations”.

Now I read the draft agreement for the Paris climate talks, which will include Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Article 11 has three options up for discussion to make countries do what they’ve promised to “stop” global warming — promises that fundamentally affect their economies and their finances. Control those and a UN world body has a country by the throat.

PEACE REDEFINED

Dennis Prager is a perspicacious debater and quite unafraid of how he is perceived by the world's press which makes him very courageous as well. This small extract from his latest article exposes the lie of the 'Israeli conflict' for what it is:

Israel, it ought to be recalled, is the only country in the world targeted for annihilation. That has been true from the day it was proclaimed as a state in 1948 until today. It was true before Israel was forced to conquer East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank, where the Palestinians (outside of Jordan) live. It was true before there was a single Jewish settlement on the West Bank. It was true after three Israeli prime ministers -- Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, and Ehud Olmert -- agreed to give up virtually all of Gaza and the West Bank to Palestinians to set up a Palestinian state. It was true after Israel gave every inch of Gaza to the Palestinians.

All of which proves that when Palestinian spokesmen say they want peace, they do not mean peace with Israel. They mean peace without Israel.

This is a related, concise, and excellent debate from the heart of academia:

https://www.facebook.com/StepUpforIsrael/videos/vb.223294577713389/988534447856061/?type=2&theater

ECHO'S OF DAYS PAST

For those who stand amazed at the rank hypocrisy, the vile tantrums and the potty-mouthed denunciations of Tony Abbott...read this excerpt by the historian Paul Johnson concerning the conspicuous animus directed against Margaret Thatcher during her term in office.

http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/6281/full

The essential difference was that for the first two terms at least, her colleagues supported her against all the evil, unlike Tony's and to their eternal shame.

Unfortunately over the preceding years these 'fifth columnists' have gained more power and influence in Western society due to the success of Gramsci's 'long march' and much of what went on as a sort of fringe rebellion in Britain during Thatcher's years is now mainstream...a hint as to why our civilisation is in such strife!

I have little doubt that some of my left-leaning friends still bridle at her name. So be it!
I for one believe that she was the last bulwark against civilisational collapse and managed to push back the apocalypse a decade or two for the UK.

Unfortunately those who succeeded her did not learn from her courage or her morality, instead they learned how not to 'poke the bear'. Politicians have learned that in order to be 'liked' they must toe the line of the minority activists, they learned that popularity (and therefore keeping your job) means adapting to populist trends and giving the eternal needy what they want, when they want it and in the exact form that they want it regardless of the greater majority who pay the bills. That is until civilisational collapse reaches full term, the you-know-what-hits-the-fan and it is too late to do anything about it.

I am still hopeful of the fourth man in the furnace. Daniel 3:25

SELF CHOKING SYNDROME

Merv Bendle on the future of Australia if Victoria is any gauge...it concerns the walking out of 40 muslim students during the national anthem:

"It’s not surprising that this attack was mounted in this fashion. Firstly, it occurred in Victoria, which has slipped in four decades from being the jewel in the Liberal crown to the jewel in the pommel of the sword of the barbarians, led by a Socialist Left government beholden to the unions and other corrupt bodies, and where the population has become accustomed to comprehensive statist intervention and social engineering. Secondly, it was at a primary school, where the crucial early years of socialisation are undertaken and the future worldview of children is shaped. Progressivists know it’s vital to undermine any developing sense of national identity at this early age. Thirdly, the attack involves teachers who are taught in the most politically radical faculties in the country, supported by the most extreme unions, and endowed with a fierce anti-Western animus, along with a deep sense of ideological purity and moral self-righteousness."

AS IN AMERICA

Ditto the Greens in Australia and an increasingly larger slice of the new Green-lite party; Labor:

"....the Democrats are no longer a working-to-middle-class party but an alliance of ultra-rich capitalists with liberal social views, middle-class progressives, and public sector unions with a membership tilted towards low-paid immigrants."

HOT STUFF!

Reading an article such as this [http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/why-i-call-my-son-he-against-my-better-judgement-a6710851.html] because it was part of another story I was interested in and because it was so 'out there' that I felt compelled to read it; left me with a feeling of hopelessness for our current 'civilisation'.

In light of the atrocities being committed by ignorant savages in the middle east, the slave trafficking of more than 27 million young souls, the huge increases in suicide, drug abuses, mental breakdowns, and depression in our societies; the unreflective narcissism and unblemished pig-ignorance of this article was like a blow in the face.

Such folk and their potty-mouthed, militant, shills are being given unprecedented access to the ruling elite (many of whom share their peculiar bondages) which in turn affects government processes and outcomes resulting in unprecedented social engineering on a scale never before imagined outside of Orwell's '1984' and Huxley's 'Brave New World' (now) prophetic utterances.

As our world auto-indoctrinates itself through deconstruction, political correctness, and the various guises of self delusion thrown up by the Post modern psycho-babble establishment, so we move 
purposefully onwards, lemming-like, towards our rose-coloured, socially engineered demise, until as so aptly put by Mike Tyson: "we get punched in the face".

By then it will be too late.............Like Shadrack & Co we are headed for the furnace.

But be of good cheer, there is the 'fourth man'.

THE MATRIX REINTERPRETED

Malcolm Muggeridge, a famous journalist at the time, wrote these words in 1966:

“Some future historian, I suppose, will one day survey this curious time with the ironic detachment of a Gibbon[i]. He is to be envied. What a rare harvest awaits him! – always of course, assuming that we do not, in obedience to the death wish which seems to possess us, destroy ourselves and all our records. Even if the records survive they will, in any case, be difficult to make out. Such a vast accumulation of lies and slanted information! Such contradictory conclusions and conflicting evidence! How will it ever be disentangled? A recent newspaper correspondent in Moscow was asked by a wide-eyed visiting leftist, when Stalin’s purges were in full swing, how far the court proceedings were to be believed. Everything was true, he replied, except the facts. It might be our epitaph. Never have so many facts been accumulated; never have such an ingenious and efficacious means of propagating them far and wide been devised, but only to weave a great web of deception. 

The Dark Ages were noontide compared to our light.”[emphasis mine]

Remember this was before ‘Post Modernism’ and its deconstruction of ‘truth’, facts, and objectivity.

How much more must this be ‘true’ today? The Matrix of today is not technological it is philosophical.

---

[i] The Historian not the primate.

SUBVERSIVE EDUCATION

The ruling elite who have gained power over the past few years appear to be increasingly, and acquiescently wedded to ideologies that not too long ago used to called treasonous:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/424860/New-York-City-Honors-Communist-Monster-Ethel-Rosenberg?target=author&tid=903320

Why are we, the ordinary people, the large 'silent majority' allowing such subversive doctrines to be openly disseminated and promoted by the new polysexual 'chatterati?'

I accept that it has something to do with what the late, great, Francis Schaeffer called; 'the drive towards personal peace and prosperity', but it has increasingly become much more than that alone.

I would contend that we have been seduced by our educational authorities (experts?) to not think critically about issues, but to follow the 'expert opinion' of our 'betters'(the experts?). And I would also posit that it has not only been the curricula of our primary, secondary and tertiary educations that are the culprits (though they do share some of the blame), but to echo Marshall Mcluhan's pithy educational mantra: 'the message is the medium', a significant portion of the blame can be laid at the feet of the actual educational systems.

I did not begin home-schooling out of an ideological conviction, it was a purely practical response to our circumstances at the time. However, the more I pursue it, the more convinced I am that home-schooling is the best way to educate and civilize a child. Anecdotal references would be that we have sent two children through the school system and are home-schooling our third.

One of the first questions I have to field when I mention that I homeschool is: "how well is your child socialised?"....generally meaning: "does home-schooling deprive the child of other children's acceptance/enjoyment/company etc". It is instructive that this is always the first question that is thrown at me. (I wonder if it is the same for others...I do believe I shall indulge in a small poll in the future!)

Whilst my early response used to that I would point out how school was originally intended as a place of learning rather than socialising, I would then defend our decision with the fact that we are fortunate to have a number of children in our neighbourhood that my son is friendly with, plus that he has made some good friends at church and within the sports clubs that he participates in. In other words my response would be defensive..............I have changed my response.

I now counter with the fact that schools were indeed intended to be places of education but that the original intent was so much more than that; that the early systems were also intended to train the children for participation in the factories, mills and workhouses of the industrial revolution. That both sociological statistics and anecdotal reference indicate that bringing children up together in a 'closed system' adds power to such issues as bullying, peer pressure, conforming to the groups 'accepted' norms, shaming, dislocation of loyalties, distrust of authority outside the peer group, rebellion against those who would seek to control or dissipate the impact of the peer group etc, etc......all of which were articulated brilliantly in William Golding's book Lord of the Flies. Here is another authors view of what takes place on 'educational' campus's all over the West:

Everyone will conform to the predetermined mindset of the school – a mindset determined by the loudest and most fascist minority groups – and no dissent will be permitted. ‘We are not here to teach you how to think, but what to think.’ Welcome to modern education in the West.

This is commonplace now, not just in Australia, but throughout the once free West. I have now documented heaps of these cases where faith, freedom and family are all under attack as our PC schools act as thought police, banning any recalcitrants from offering a differing spin from the party line.

Meredith wrote that the concept of political correctness is not about “promoting respect for others” but is “rapidly being turned into a weapon of intolerance to silence those whose views or actions don’t chime with a liberal-fascist agenda”.

“This isn’t about protecting the vulnerable and the marginalised. It’s not about ‘duty of care’. In fact, it’s censorship masquerading as enlightenment. If in doubt, ban it: that’s the prevailing credo”, she commented.  [B.M. 8.10.15]

BOVINE FAECES AND THE ART OF CONCEALMENT

The real tragedy surrounding the 'chicken littles' of the chatterati is how many people actually believe the rubbish that emanates from the poison pens of the Western lame-stream-media. Such a flood of leftist propaganda illustrates how deconstruction and its illegitimate brood have impacted on critical thinking in Western society:

"Alas, the nutrition nazis seem to lack the legs of the warmist crowd, which has made a prolonged art of extracting cash from the improbable, contradictory and absurd. A climate scientist leads a shipload of weather worrywarts to Antarctica to observe ice he says has melted, gets caught fast in that which is no longer supposed to exist and has to be rescued at enormous cost and inconvenience. Do the dire prognostications cease? Does embarrassment silence those who have proven themselves so spectacularly and repeatedly wrong? Not at all. Here we are, more than 18 months after the Ship of Fools wedged itself in an icefloe, and yet the alarmist absurdities continue to pour forth. The latest: that killing sharks  somehow boosts global temperatures."[Roger Franklin]

How did I arrive at my title? Read Neil Postman's 1969 essay:Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection. 

MEDIA THE DRUG

The 'game' of politics is the scab on top of an 'open wound' which is; contemporary Western civilisation. That 'open wound' is nowadays crawling with septicemia, gangrene, and cellulitis and is well on its way towards that mysterious bright light at the end of the tunnel.

Most of the media these days operates like that renowned rat-poison 'Warfarin', a drug that weakens the bloods ability to clot, thus rendering the scab notably less effective and prone to breaking down at the most inopportune times. Unfortunately the longer the wound takes to heal the more infected the body becomes until eventually limbs are amputated and ultimately the heart stops beating.

Thus the true villain is the media?...well we all know that's not true. There are a few good people in the media. The media is merely another 'brick in the wall' (popular cliches abound) towards the fomented collapse of Western civilisation when Marxists, anarchists and utopians will rejoice...that is for the short time before totalitarianism raises its head to take control of the chaos.

As Francis Schaeffer said many years ago, the Arts (which includes the media, the 'fine' arts, movies, TV radio etc) are indicative of the path that society in general is doomed to take.

Encouraged anyone?

I am but only because I have read the end of the story.

EVOLUTIONARY HYPOCRISY

A deep sigh!!!!!...for the hypocrisy (stupidity?) of the emotive age...further reflections on Cecil the dead lion:

"....if humanity owes its existence, along with the lions, to millions of years’ worth of brutal bloodshed in the struggle to survive and pass on our genes, any antipathy against animal cruelty seems a little naïve and counterproductive. After all, if natural selection got us here in the first place, one more dead lion is hardly a tragedy. According to evolutionary opinion, lions appeared on the scene about 700,000 years ago. This means that at least 10 billion lions would have died before Cecil did. And I would hazard a guess that most lions, like Cecil, have not died peacefully in the wild. If the evolutionary story is true, we actually have very little basis to care.

In fact, looking at this from the perspective of all the other animals which have been killed and would be killed by Cecil, it’s hard to see why we should lament rather than rejoice that Cecil finally got his just desserts. What grounds does evolution give us to choose between being a lion-lover instead of an antelope-lover? And why is it commendable to film, for entertainment, animals torturing and killing each other, but wicked and cruel for human “animals” to do the same? A male lion can kill all the lion cubs of another pride, and no petitions are put out for justice to be served, yet when a human kills a lion, culpable of mass animalicide, in the late stages of its retirement, the international community cries ‘foul’.

If nature is intrinsically “red in tooth and claw”, what grounds do we have to protest any bloodshed or cruelty in the world? Within the evolutionary model, death and cruelty are not only necessary for natural selection, but according to Charles Darwin himself, these evils should be seen as “most beautiful and most wonderful”. Thus Charles Darwin wrote in Origin of Species:

Evolution fails to explain why caring for animals is morally superior to torturing them.
“It may be difficult, but we ought to admire the savage instinctive hatred of the queen-bee, which urges her instantly to destroy the young queens, her daughters as soon as born, or to perish herself in the combat… maternal love or maternal hatred… is all the same to the inexorable principle of natural selection.” [Martin Duboisée de Ricquebourg]

THE TROJAN OUROBOROS!

I agree with Merv Bendle. The new 'progressive' initiatives which have seduced the majority of Australians are very dangerous to the future of Australians in general and yet many otherwise intelligent people appear blinkered to the risk...why?:

All of these areas of public policy share one crucial characteristic – they involve the mobilization of state power to impose vast new structures of tightly regulated behaviour upon society that would not otherwise have evolved of their own accord. They also necessitate massive bureaucracies based on the Promethean assumption that the almost infinite intricacies of social, economic, and ecological life can be grasped, modelled, manipulated, and directed by the apparatus of the state (in which, of course, much of Turnbull’s progressivist constituency would be employed).

And let there be no doubt about it, this is the progressivist agenda: systematically to erode the power and autonomy of the individual, the family, the community and civil society, and to replace them with the Leviathan State, with its great tangled mass of bureaucratic tentacles reaching down to surveil, regulate and ultimately strangle the most intimate of personal and social relationships, covering every area of life.

I believe that the promotion of these invasive new dictates has succeeded because they have been couched in the emotive packaging so beloved of societal 'guru's' such as Oprah and the myriad of women's 'table talk' forums that have erupted on daytime television, and are of course echoed by their morning and late-night male counterparts who have been equally seduced or cannot dare be seen to be 'patriarchal' in any sense of the word. Thereafter these emotionally laden catch-phrases and literary Trojan horses are widely picked up and disseminated throughout the main-stream-media who add their peculiar prejudices into the mix, prejudices that are to a massive extent left of the left.

'marriage EQUALITY',  a myriad of RIGHTS with little to no responsibilites, PRO CHOICE, REFUGEES rather than illegal immigrants etc.

Political Correctness, which is one of the foundational 'attack dogs' of the new 'progressive' worldview, has set the scene for these freshly minted, manipulative initiatives currently in vogue amongst the chatterati/twitterati. That plus the reality that there has been an almost total domination of the university/higher education sector by neo-Marxist post-modernists who have deconstructed the search for truth and meaning into a quixotic quest and redefined truth down to an 'expert opinion.' 

Thus we find ourselves awash in 'experts' all of whom bear the mark of the university stamp of approval...Ouroboros anyone?

HAT TIP; ROOKMAAKER

Modern Media and the death of a culture:

"And pride ourselves we now do. Nothing has shaken me more (and, be it remembered, I was professionally involved in talking to burglars, muggers, blackmailers, kidnappers, rapists, and murderers) than the utter indifference or even hostility to the achievements of the past and the need to preserve and pay them honor of many educated young people in Britain and France. Nor is this indifference or hostility spontaneous; rather, it has been programmed into them by indoctrination that the past is nothing but the slave trade and the oppression of women. Moreover, their visual education has been crude, as a visit to any modern toy shop or modern municipal playground will confirm. Aesthetically illiterate and ideologically convinced that the past was nothing but a moral mistake that they will correct, it is little wonder they do not care for the fabric of the past or worry much about its disappearance." [Theodore Dalrymple]

STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES

The stupidity of today's 'elite':

"I noticed that Richard Dawkins, the biologist–turned–Savonarola of atheism, tweeted that the destruction of Palmyra demonstrated the power of religion: the doleful power, of course. It seemed to have escaped his notice that temples are generally built in the first place from a religious impulse, and that Palmyra had survived for two millennia in a region to which religion was by no means entirely unknown." [Theodore Dalrymple]

RE-DEFINED

The new, re-defined 'trickle down' theory....Tony Abbott's finger has been removed from the left-wing dyke.
First a trickle, then a flood.

FATHER CHRISTMAS FOR PRESIDENT

David Goodheart writes contemptuously about what he considers an erroneous view of the British voting populace by the political masters of British Labour:

The Labour Party is a self-consciously progressive party dominated by highly educated people who believe that they see the world more clearly and understand people’s interests better than those people themselves do, which is the default instinct of both the highly educated and the left-of-centre.

Australian political elites in Labor and the Greens (and in smaller proportion amongst the Liberals, though today’s vote will ascertain to what extent that view is aspirant) provides an almost identical ideological perspective towards the ‘average’ citizen.

However, given that the Labour/labor governments of both countries have, over time, put into place certain laws, systems, policies and educational ‘initiatives’ that facilitate the aforementioned ideology as a type of self-fulfilling prophecy, it is conceivable that such a worldview could soon (if not already) become the prevailing zeitgeist.

The ubiquitous infantilising of the citizenry is remorseless and constant, and given that the ‘long march’ has captured most institutions of education and ‘cultural arbiters’ such as the arts, media, and entertainment industry’s; it goes without saying that the channels through which most information is fed to the populace are compromised towards a Marxist rather than a conservative view of the world and therefore add impetus to the push towards Statism.

Socialist ideology positioning the State as provider, care-giver, organiser and benevolent overseer from birth to death has been massaged into vast segments of the population, engendering a worldview that surrenders personal autonomy into the hands of political overlords.  For example; within our post-modern communities are large tracts of people who cannot even conceive of the necessity to find gainful employment, because ‘who wants to work when it is not absolutely necessary’ and when they are discovered to be holding down a paying job and ‘double dipping’ from welfare, choose to give up the job rather than the welfare. The old idea of work as being a responsibility has been superseded by the idea of a right to having those things traditionally earned by working now being provided by the State. The view of work having moral as well as material value has been replaced by work as an unnecessary evil. 

The left have also succeeded in portraying free enterprise producers (and ultimately job providers) in society as evil and grasping and have successfully inculcated a false ‘class war’ theme into Australian society. Classic divide and rule techniques promulgated by Marxist anarchists such as Gramsci and Alinsky for decades. The ongoing results? More un/under-employed thus more dissatisfaction, and because the media is biased towards Marxist thinking the blame is placed at the feet of private enterprise thus exacerbating the situation until an inevitable downward spiral of blame and causality produces economic and social chaos.  

Unfortunately socialist governments as well as the ideology in all its disguises have been shown to fail all around the world with the inevitable consequences of social, economic and structural destruction, violence and anarchy resulting in civilizational collapse which in turn ushers in a dictator or ‘strong-man’(woman?) to a position of power because in the face of desperate lawlessness, they appear the only hope for peace. Hence we witness throughout history people such as, to name but a few:  Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Franco, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Amin, Mugabe, ad nauseum….

Who will be the natural heir to the coming chaos of the 21^st Century I wonder?

CRY BABIES ALL.....

The new WMD...........emotionalism as a weapon of mass distraction.

The chatterati have programmed Western populations for decades to live existentially, that is; to 'live in the moment', to do what 'feels right', to 'go with your heart' in other words to place emotion on the throne of your life, to deny reason and words as devices of 'patriarchal imperialism'.

Thus Spake Zarathustra...or rather Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard.

Now we are about to reap the whirlwind.

People respond only to emotion and if you bring reason to bear on a problem you are immediately labelled a: racist, homophobe, Islamophobe, hater, misogynist, etc etc. Discussion is shut down and you spend the rest of your time defending what you are not. The problem with that is that when discussion breaks down all that is left is violence and the 'gate-keepers of the West have been de programmed to countenance violence (save a few specialist warriors): thus we shall be  overrun.

The burr meme...

On that persistent meme so beloved of  global warming grant recipients:

Suzuki really unleashes his full fantasy ad hom. Fossil fuels are funding practically every player in the US, UK and Canada: Heartland, GWPF, ICSC. Even the unfunded, volunteer run, Watts Up is an “industry funded website”  – I bet Anthony Watts can’t wait for those cheques to start arriving. (Neither can I). For the record, Climate Depot gets 80% of it’s support from citizens. It has thousands of supporters.

Deniers are all over the map; climate realists all over the world, David Suzuki, National Observer

“Part of the problem is that fossil fuel interests spend enormous amounts of money to sow doubt and confusion, often by funding or setting up organizations like the Heartland Institute in the U.S., the Global Warming Policy Foundation in the U.K., Ethical Oil and Friends of Science in Canada and the International Climate Science Coalition, based in this country but affiliated with similar organizations in Australia and New Zealand and with close ties to Heartland. A number of industry-funded websites also promote fossil fuels at the expense of human life, including Climate Depot and Watts Up With That?”

This line of attack is so old, it’s like Suzuki got trapped in 2007, but the world moved on. When Suzuki finds out that Royal Dutch Shell has been lobbying against coal, funding “progressive” think tanks, and promoting carbon capture, he’s in for a headache. When he finds out Exxon paid four times more to the Stanford Global Climate and Energy project, than they every gave to “deniers” he’ll have to become a skeptic. [Jo Nova 4.9.15]

A double negative truth!

John Carroll writes rather eloquently about cultural tensions that exist in today's society. This extract concerns the man I consider to be one of the more perspicacious 'prophets' of our new emerging zeitgeist: 

Nietzsche argued that the clerisy—which includes the clergy and the intelligentsia—is of its nature impotent, compared with people who live active lives, who direct and make things, who are decisive, and who enjoy themselves. The clerisy, in its tortured inwardness, becomes rancorous—and above all moralistic. Out of disgust at itself, and irritation with its life, it launches into bad-tempered projections.

Whilst Nietzsche oversimplified—given that we humans are often composed of diverse personae blended into one complex form—strains of his central theme may be noted today. The clergy in mainstream churches hardly ever talk of faith, redemption, or God. They seem embarrassed by their core mission, which is to provide convincing answers to the big meaning questions of why we are here and what happens when we die. They rather don the ethical robes of empathy for the disadvantaged and rail against government callousness—appearing more like politicised social workers than apostles of the faith. Churches have traditionally acted as defenders of the moral order—notably in relation to the family. And they have taken on a significant social role: much of their admirable work remains in running nursing homes, shelters, centres for drug addicts, and providing meals for the homeless. My concern is when the moral and social agenda becomes politicised, and becomes a substitute for the quest for meaningful interpretations of the human story. It begins to stray into that search for a redemptive politics—for salvation through politics—which cursed the twentieth century. Religion and politics do not belong together—as Jesus himself taught.

What is NOT being said however, is that people who hold a religious worldview should not be in politics, in fact I would posit that the opposite is true.

PEAS & PODS

What do Labor and Climate warmists have in common (other than enriching themselves at our expense)? A belief system so far removed from honesty and truth that they can twist it any which way they choose!

Early in the contest fr Canning the Labor rusted-ons were crowing over their coming victory which would seal Tony Abbott's fate as Prime Minister. They went so far as to employ lying media hacks and treasonous snakes to try and poison Andrew Hastie's record as an elite SAS soldier and proven leader of men. They failed in the face of the man's courage, humility and forthrightness. Good on him!

What do the laborites say now?

They are not contesting the seat because they want Tony Abbott to stay as leader because they are sure he can be beaten in a general election.

How on earth are they going to handle the thrashing he is going to hand them?

POSTSCRIPT
Well Labor now have the Liberal party hacks themselves to thank...who needs Labor when you have labor-lite in the Liberal party?
I am not sure Andrew should join such a bunch of 'girly-men' to quote a fellow politician.

Education today

Is there anything more absurd than a handful of academics retailing their revolutionary left-wing fantasies in the Grand Ballroom of a luxury hotel? These are among the obvious reasons why the public no longer takes humanities education seriously.  If students actually had to pay their own hard-earned money for this education the drain would be cataclysmic.

Biology as social construct...

"A penny for the old guy"

Old Man and a Bucket of Shrimp

This is a wonderful story and it is true. You will be glad that you read it, and I hope you will pass it on.

It happened every Friday evening, almost without fail, when the sun resembled a giant orange and was starting to dip into the blue ocean.

Old Ed came strolling along the beach to his favourite pier.

Clutched in his bony hand was a bucket of shrimp. Ed walks out to the end of the pier, where it seems he almost has the world to himself. The glow of the sun is a golden bronze now.

Everybody's gone, except for a few joggers on the beach. Standing out on the end of the pier, Ed is alone with his thoughts...and his bucket of shrimp.

Before long, however, he is no longer alone. Up in the sky a thousand white dots come screeching and squawking, winging their way toward that lanky frame standing there on the end of the pier.

Before long, dozens of seagulls have enveloped him, their wings fluttering and flapping wildly. Ed stands there tossing shrimp to the hungry birds. As he does, if you listen closely, you can hear him say with a smile, 'Thank you. Thank you.'

In a few short minutes the bucket is empty. But Ed doesn't leave. He stands there lost in thought, as though transported to another time and place.

When he finally turns around and begins to walk back toward the beach, a few of the birds hop along the pier with him until he gets to the stairs, and then they, too, fly away. And old Ed quietly makes his way down to the end of the beach and on home.

If you were sitting there on the pier with your fishing line in the water, Ed might seem like 'a funny old duck,' as my dad used to say. Or, to onlookers, he's just another old codger, lost in his own weird world, feeding the seagulls with a bucket full of shrimp.

To the onlooker, rituals can look either very strange or very empty. They can seem altogether unimportant ....maybe even a lot of nonsense.

Old folks often do strange things, at least in the eyes of Boomers and Busters.

Most of them would probably write Old Ed off, down there in Florida ... That's too bad. They'd do well to know him better.

His full name: Eddie Rickenbacker. He was a famous hero in World War I, and then he was in WWII. On one of his flying missions across the Pacific, he and his seven-member crew went down. Miraculously, all of the men survived, crawled out of their plane, and climbed into a life raft.

Captain Rickenbacker and his crew floated for days on the rough waters of the Pacific. They fought the sun. They fought sharks. Most of all, they fought hunger and thirst. By the eighth day their rations ran out. No food. No water. They were hundreds of miles from land and no one knew where they were or even if they were alive.

Every day across America millions wondered and prayed that Eddie Rickenbacker might somehow be found alive.

The men adrift needed a miracle. That afternoon they had a simple devotional service and prayed for a miracle.

They tried to nap. Eddie leaned back and pulled his military cap over his nose. Time dragged on. All he could hear was the slap of the waves against the raft...suddenly Eddie felt something land on the top of his cap. It was a seagull!

Old Ed would later describe how he sat perfectly still, planning his next move. With a flash of his hand and a squawk from the gull, he managed to grab it and wring its neck. He tore the feathers off, and he and his starving crew made a meal of it - a very slight meal for eight men. Then they used the intestines for bait. With it, they caught fish, which gave them food and more bait....and the cycle continued. With that simple survival technique, they were able to endure the rigors of the sea until they were found and rescued after 24 days at sea.

Eddie Rickenbacker lived many years beyond that ordeal, but he never forgot the sacrifice of that first lifesaving seagull... And he never stopped saying, 'Thank you.' That's why almost every Friday night he would walk to the end of the pier with a bucket full of shrimp and a heart full of gratitude.

Reference: (Max Lucado, "In the Eye of the Storm", pp...221, 225-226)

PS: Eddie Rickenbacker was the founder of Eastern Airlines. Before WWI he was race car driver. In WWI he was a pilot and became America's first ace. In WWII he was an instructor and military adviser, and he flew missions with the combat pilots. Eddie Rickenbacker is a true American hero. And now you know another story about the trials and sacrifices that brave men have endured for your freedom.

As you can see, I chose to pass it on. It is a great story that many don't know...You've got to be careful with old guys, you just never know what they have done during their lifetime

CRUMBLING PILLARS

Reading about the recent riots in Melbourne, the corruption at the heart of Labor politics (and in some nooks and crannies of the Liberals as well), Labor's woeful defence of union thievery and thuggery, the mendacious and subversive theories regurgitated on a daily basis by 'their' ABC, and so-called 'academics' chosen for conformity to ideological prejudices and affirmative action quotas who propagate flawed, illogical and dissembling claptrap from their bully pulpits and stifle any/all dissenting voices,............ gives the following excerpt a peculiarly familiar tone:

Among Lenin’s contributions was the theory of the vanguard. Since it was apparent that the proletariat masses were unlikely to rise up, Lenin argued that it was necessary for a relatively small number of vanguard leaders -- professional revolutionaries -- to advance the revolutionary cause by working themselves into positions of influence. By taking over the commanding heights of labor unions, the press, the universities, and professional and religious organizations, a relatively small number of revolutionaries could multiply their influence and exercise political leverage over their unwitting constituents and society at large.

It was Lenin who introduced the concept of the “popular front” and coined the phrase “useful idiots” in describing the masses who could be manipulated into mob action of marches and protests for an ostensibly narrow cause of the popular front, which the communist vanguard was using as a means for a greater revolutionary political end.

The malevolent and corrosive worldview called communism did not die with the collapse of the Berlin wall, it merely metamorphosed into the Alinskyite swill we witness controlling the minds and actions of so many of our political and media elites. 

We need to encourage a revolution of political will on the part of conservatives to make the necessary choices to repair the broken walls of our culture and in doing so to suffer with courage the 'slings and arrows' of the legion of media loudmouths (useful idiots) which are sure to follow. 
Even if it means losing their seats at the next election. 
That takes real guts and implies that the necessary decisions are significant enough to irrevocably change the direction of the country within three short years.

Look at Labor in Victoria, they at least have had the courage to make decisions based on their convictions. Unfortunately these 'convictions' do not serve the majority of ordinary citizens, but the unions and ideological masters controlling Labor. 

Our only hope is a return us to the structures and values that made Western culture the foundation of most that is good in this dangerous world.