BRING IT ON!

This excerpt is from an article on one of the 'brave new intellectual' magazines that has hit the online (and print) world called the Jacobin. I do love the artwork by the way...I wish a few conservative magazines would take a leaf out of their book!

 

It promotes left-wing socialism (calls itself Marxist) yet embraces 'capitalistic' methodologies to exist and grow and sees no conflict in its actions...typical of today's 'young intellectuals' who view the world as owing them something and are therefore entitled to break any and all rules to achieve their 'rights'.

"This kind of business sense — what Sunkara calls “petty-bourgeois hustling” — has always been a part of his management of Jacobin. Back in 2010, when he realized the digital-only publication was drawing only a small audience, he used all the revenue he had from 100 four-issue subscriptions to fund the first print run. Between issues one and two, he gained another one hundred subscribers, the revenue from which he used to finance another issue. Slowly, but not without risk, the magazine grew and approached stability.

“I want to run the magazine productively, as efficiently as a business would run it,” Sunkara says. He’s trying become more comfortable running the company at a small deficit if it means growth in the longterm. Someday in the near future, he might even draw a full-time paycheck.

 “Even though we’re the most Marxist publication out of this new wave of publications, I think we’re very much the most in tune with making our business strategies and our development strategies integral with everything else,” he says. “I think a lot of times when people look at young publications, and want to see what they’re doing right, they often talk about enthusiasm and other things that people like to associate with young people, instead of looking at their success and just seeing solid fundamentals.”[E R Goldstein

They recognise no logical inconsistencies in their approach because they have no logical training and are therefore by definition; not truly intellectual at all. Their delusional modus operandi embraces a form of self-blindness all the while navigating the slippery slopes of the moral high ground, a logically dangerous practice for the simple reason that like the mythical Ouroboros,

.......the very people they attract are probably the same ones who will likely cause their demise, just like the leader of the historical Jacobin's was killed by the very revolutionaries he led and inspired and just as we are witnessing how many left-wingers are currently being attacked by the more extreme Social Justice Warriors in their midst...it is precisely the sort of behaviour that has allowed both Brexit and Trump to emerge.

SOME MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

Socialism in the old USSR worked the way it always works in every country its ever been established in...everybody is equal but some are more equal than others.

The 'tofu socialists' in Australia are no different, take Alan Joyce's boast about the Qantas Chairman's lounge and how he uses it as a political tool to manipulate politicians:

But the problem with the Qantas CEO is that he wields a disproportionate amount of
power and influence in this town, because everyone who’s anyone wants to belong to his invitation-only “Chairman’s Lounge”.
Talk about elites. It’s the hottest ticket around.
“If you’re unhappy with a company that’s involved with the [Marriage Equality] campaign you won’t be able to bank and you won’t be able to fly anywhere,” Joyce boasted to the gay and lesbian newspaper the Star Observer.So when Joyce turns Australia’s beloved national airline into a tool of the same-sex marriage lobby, few people dare criticise, even if they disagree, as many of his passengers do.

The national carrier of the world’s most egalitarian nation ironically boasts the most elitist VIP lounge of any airline.
Joyce himself once boasted that the Chairman’s Lounge was: “probably the most exclusive club in the country”.

Inside, in the Jetsons-inspired honeycomb-carpeted hush you will find politicians, media heavyweights, CEOs, judges, union leaders, models and celebrities, noshing companionably on free Neil Perry “inspired” gourmet meals on demand and lapping up fine champagnes and boutique beers.
It’s all truffled vinaigrette, Schultz bacon and sesame seed noughatine for lounge denizens, although last weekend’s champagne selection was more pedestrian than expected, featuring a Seppelt 2012 sparkling white.
There you’ll find such working class heroes of the political classes as Labor Senator Doug Cameron and Independent Jacqui Lambie.In the Chairman’s Lounge you always score a complimentary flight upgrade, and obsequious staff will whisper in your ear when it’s your turn to board, so that you waste no time queuing with the hoi polloi.
While Qantas is believed automatically to bestow Chairman’s Lounge membership on all Federal MPs, and their partners, not everyone declares the gift on the parliamentary register of pecuniary interests. Maybe that’s because they don’t use it, or perhaps, because if “everyone has it,” as one pollie puts it, it’s not worth mentioning.
“It’s the crack cocaine of travel,” says another member of the exclusive club. “You know it’s wrong but you don’t want to give it up.”
Among the more than 100 politicians who have declared membership are Liberals Tony Abbott, Julie Bishop, Josh Frydenberg, Julian Leeser and Kelly O’Dwyer. Labor’s Bill Shorten, Terri Butler, Jim Chalmers, Jason Claire, Emma Husar and Cameron also are among the Qantas elite, as is Lambie and the Greens’ Adam Bandt and Sarah Hanson-Young and Scott Ludlam." [M Devine]

Perhaps this is why Abbott lost his way and eventually the respect of the 'deplorables' in Australia. I love the way Jackie Lambie, Sarah Hanson-Young and other communards are part of the witches brew...talk about hypocrisy on steroids....but then why should we expect anything different...and these sybaritic hypocrites whinge about Trump.

I wish there was a Trump on Australia's political horizon.

HARK! CHURCHILLIAN IRONY

Professor Thomas Sowell captures the spirit behind the curse of the Wests 'progressive elite' succinctly and with a dash of historical irony in this quote:

"In the anointed we find a whole class of supposedly 'thinking people' who do remarkably little thinking about substance and a great deal of verbal expression," Sowell observed. "In order that this relatively small group of people can believe themselves wiser and nobler than the common herd, we have adopted policies which impose heavy costs on millions of other human beings, not only in taxes, but also in lost jobs, social disintegration, and a loss of personal safety. Seldom have so few cost so much to so many."

His wisdom will be sorely missed and the world of ideas will be much the poorer. His work has not only inspired many conservatives to hope but has also changed a few leftist mindsets as well, which as we all know is not an easy thing for another human being to do:

The former leftist playwright David Mamet, in his 2008 manifesto, "Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal," cited his exposure to Sowell, whom he dubbed "our greatest contemporary philosopher," as a critical factor in his conversion. Whether tackling the "bait and switch media," the "organized noisemakers," or the lawless enablers of "social disintegration, Thomas Sowell's dozens of academic books and thousands of newspaper columns have sparked generations of his readers across the political spectrum to think independently and challenge imposed visions.

A BROBDINGNAGIAN AFFECTATION

It behoves us rational folk to recognise talent when we see it.

The socialist left have become past masters at NEWSPEAK...that is; the ability to take ones own position and twist it in such a way as to use it to damn ones opposition.

Take Rachel Sylvester for example....here resides a model citizen of left-wing-world journalism whose raison d'etre is to push the benefits of emotionalism over logic which many in the left regard as so 'last century' (post-modernism hey!) and have been at the forefront of pushing the 'what-is-truth' (relativity) movement, making the case that excess 'emotionalism' (prejudice is an emotional position) and an opposition to 'truth' is what drove many to vote against their betters in both the Brexit move and Trump in America:

In this year of the demagogue, Donald Trump tweeted his way to victory in the US while his mini-me, Nigel Farage, shaped events in Europe and then became the face of Britain abroad. The photograph of the US president-elect and the former UK Independence Party leader smiling in the gold and diamond-studded Trump Tower lift was the image that defined the past 12 months. Marine Le Pen is waiting in the wings in France, hoping to capitalise on the anti-establishment mood. Emotion has trumped intellect, and prejudice overwhelmed truth, as populism goes mainstream.

These are the same people who fly in on private aeroplanes to rail against the common people flying excess air-miles and damaging the planet with their selfishness...they rail against 'capitalism' from one of their many private properties scattered around the globe, use Trumps lack of personal tax paying status to smear his character while their own fortunes sit in tax havens around the globe,  call Trump a hater because he indulges in locker-room sexist banter (not excusing bad behaviour here) all the while protecting and ignoring shocking behaviours on the part of Democratic Presidents and community 'leaders'. I could go on ad infinitum, but you get the hypocrisy.

It takes a special form of a whitewashed conscience (or none at all) to be able to publicly pontificate on those issues that you know you are guilty of (or worse) without a sense of shame.

I have no doubt that all politicians, irrespective of their affiliations do these things, but within the new-left it appears to have reached Brobdingnagious proportions.

A FRAGILE FREEDOM

We are in danger when we take our Liberal Democracy for granted.
Just as we are in danger when we take friendships, or marriages, or partnerships for granted.

We did not just arrive at our current state of being!
It is not some self-evident evolutionary accident that comes about as the result of time + chance.
It is the result of a worldview; a paradigm if you will, a way-of-seeing the world and its potential and taking that perspective and marrying it to hard work, sacrifice, painful lessons learned, chances taken, lives lost and a solid framework of freedom, liberty, property rights, law and goodwill that has made Australia into the successful nation that it currently is. These 'fundamentals' are under attack.

21st Century Australia has reached a point where the Fabian/Gramscian 5th Columnists have almost completed their occupation of the cultural 'high ground', that is; education, law, State & federal bureaucracies, the arts, academia and the media and in doing so have lulled many average Aussies into a false sense of security and a belief that our culture will continue on its present peaceful and prosperous path without a hiccup.

For example we are confronted with carpetbagging politicians on all 'sides' voicing syrupy, sanctimonious, infantilising untruths selling the plainly illogical lies that would have us believe that it is possible to hand out masses of 'free' goodies ad infinitum, all the while building up crippling debts but doing so without penalty and/or making any sacrifices.

All we have to do is ask ourselves if we could run our personal accounts like that.

But our itching ears want to hear such things and the fantasy continues, but the real 'twist' is that these occupiers of the cultural 'high-ground' are actually waging a subtle war on the very things that they are promising to us. These ideologues are not happy with the current state of the Western ideas of freedom, either economic or personal. Many are radicals who are violently opposed to the fundamentals that have provided for our current levels of civilisation and success and they are committed to destroying our way of life and replacing it with the models they view as the 'correct' one.

And one of the ways they are doing it is by scaring the population: the Anthropogenic Global Warming scam began as the Global Cooling danger of the 60's. The overpopulation fears, Y2K, the running out of water, food, oil, space, etc,etc. The activists use these scares to inveigle huge sums out of money the taxpayer. Of course there is nothing new about this, these struggles for power and cash have been going on since time immemorial the only things changing are the scares and those who are being ripped off.

A new wrinkle has been that social media and the internet are making many of the heretofore hidden details of motivations and intentions quite accessible if one is prepared (or has the time) to read and research through the masses of conspiracy theories, obvious lies, misinformation and methods so readily available on the net.

Our way of life is not inevitable nor is it able to survive without a struggle. There will always be forces striving to gain power, prestige or comfort at others expense. The theory's that sound so good usually are too good to be true and appear that way because they seldom take human nature into account, and most of the 'replacement philosophy's' these days are academic rather than real. The 'models' rather than the data.

George Orwell — 'Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.'
The problem we face for our children's sake is that if we surrender our culture through ignorance it is probably true that it will be lost forever...of at the very least, for a very long time.

Hence the importance of the following article:

http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/6723/full

FAKE NEWS EXPOSED

Some truth out of the Syrian conflict and how Obama's America (not the 'real' America) is assisting in the wars raging in the Middle East:

http://www.xyz.net.au/evidence-msm-lies/

PERSUADE THEM TO EAT EXPERTS!

I watched some mindless TV over lunch today. An entertainment/info program but was struck (once more) by the whole fake news idea. Many of these programs trumpet that they provide the latest, up-to-date news but are in reality little more than propaganda for the producers/telehosts/writers to push their ideologies on the unsuspecting viewer. 

Hans Rookmaaker once said that propaganda only works when it operates as a 'hidden persuader' and in my opinion, many of these daytime 'entertainment' shows are operating as hidden persuaders.

Anyway, today's drivel concerned shark nets....and their 'expert' concluded that shark nets are a barbaric invention designed to brutally 'murder' defenceless sharks and that they are in use not to defend people but to prevent people from litigating against the State Government if there is an attack. In today's litigious environment I have no doubt that such a prospect does exist, but I grew up in a non-litigious society and whose shark nets provided protection for decades. Anyway his whole approach was permeated by anthropomorphism and reinforced my observation that too many of these eco-warriors who scream blue murder at the death of a cold blooded fish are quite cool in the face of mass murder of humans and in particular babies....in fact many of these Social Justice Warriors are quite misanthropic in their ideology, which begs the question; what is their motivation?

His solution?...To use the latest technology...sound familiar Green energy people? 

He then pontificates on the use of drones (I have no objection to drones or technology BTW)...and provides us with entirely fictitious costings such as: " it costs 10$ per hour to keep a drone in the air. Anyone who has a drone or knows anyone who operate commercial drones will know immediately that such costings are straight out of Green ideology's;  Environmentally friendly book of fantastical, wish-fulfilling costings for masters of the universe!  

in other words completely fictitious and intended to subdue arguments of a 'capitalistic' nature.

The problem with the experts trotted out by TV shows is that they all seem to read from the same playbook. When last did you see a dissenting argument against the eco-friendly, saccharine sweet, politically correct, mumbo jumbo, psycho-babble advanced by the 'progressive' left?

For a more balanced take on the subject lets look at the EVIDENCES...

Whoa! who swore? Aaaaargh!....take me to my SAFE PLACE quickly before I faint or start crying.

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2016/12/sharks-ate-experts/

FAKE FAKERY

The big news at the moment is FAKE NEWS....what universe have these people been living in? 

Fake News has been around since the 1980's when the university's, then in the first stages of the left-wing takeover ala Antonio Gramsci, began touting the Post Modern 'truth' that there is no truth, only opinion...in fact schools of 'journalism' began to teach that its OK to express your opinion on any given subject rather than searching for 'objectivity' which is unattainable anyway. 

Anyone ever heard the phrase 'relative truth'? 

Its just the first manifestation of what they now call FAKE NEWS with the small twist that now the Fake news is all from the alt-right! 

Go Figure!

BREAKFAST SHOW LOONY TUNES = DANTES INFERNO

My wife taped the weekend morning 'Sunrise' program for the competition words and I have to watch and find the correct password to enter on her phone while she sleeps off last nights late-night shift, fair enough.  But watching these smug, arrogant, self-satisfied 'journalistic' hacks makes for a queasy stomach and some frenetic fast forwarding finger-work on the remote.

What really got to me during this mornings taping was the irony of these morons complaining that 'nutjobs' (their description) like Cory Bernardi and other conservative politicians were not allowing the climate change inspired new taxes on the taxpayer to: " even be discussed". Of course they prefaced this claim with the statement that all of the scientists and the truly 'clever' people of course agreed with them that AGW was happening.

The irony in this is how the climate change preachers have had FREE RUN OF MOST OF THE LEFT-WING PRESS for decades now and have tried every which way  they could to close down debate on the issues often resorting to quite fascistic means to quieten the 'sceptics':

Today’s climate science, as Ian Plimer points out in his chapter in The Facts, is based on a “preordained conclusion, huge bodies of evidence are ignored and analytical procedures are treated as evidence”. Funds are not available to investigate alternative theories. Those who express even the mildest doubts about dangerous climate change are ostracised, accused of being in the pay of fossil fuel interests or starved of funds; those who take money from green pressure groups and make wildly exaggerated statements are showered with rewards and treated by the media as neutral.

Look what happened to a butterfly ecologist named Camille Parmesan when she published a paper on “Climate and Species Range” that blamed climate change for threatening the Edith checkerspot butterfly with extinction in California by driving its range northward. The paper was cited more than 500 times, she was invited to speak at the White House and she was asked to contribute to the IPCC’s third assessment report.

Unfortunately, a distinguished ecologist called Jim Steele found fault with her conclusion: there had been more local extinctions in the southern part of the butterfly’s range due to urban development than in the north, so only the statistical averages moved north, not the butterflies. There was no correlated local change in temperature anyway, and the butterflies have since recovered throughout their range. When Steele asked Parmesan for her data, she refused. Parmesan’s paper continues to be cited as evidence of climate change. Steele meanwhile is derided as a “denier”. No wonder a highly sceptical ecologist I know is very reluctant to break cover.

Jim Hansen, recently retired as head of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies at NASA, won over a million dollars in lucrative green prizes, regularly joined protests against coal plants and got himself arrested while at the same time he was in charge of adjusting and homogenising one of the supposedly objective data sets on global surface temperature. How would he be likely to react if told of evidence that climate change is not such a big problem?

Michael Oppenheimer, of Princeton University, who frequently testifies before Congress in favour of urgent action on climate change, was the Environmental Defense Fund’s senior scientist for nineteen years and continues to advise it. The EDF has assets of $209 million and since 2008 has had over $540 million from charitable foundations, plus $2.8 million in federal grants. In that time it has spent $11.3 million on lobbying, and has fifty-five people on thirty-two federal advisory committees. How likely is it that they or Oppenheimer would turn around and say global warming is not likely to be dangerous?

Why is it acceptable, asks the blogger Donna Laframboise, for the IPCC to “put a man who has spent his career cashing cheques from both the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Greenpeace in charge of its latest chapter on the world’s oceans?” She’s referring to the University of Queensland’s Ove Hoegh-Guldberg.

These scientists and their guardians of the flame repeatedly insist that there are only two ways of thinking about climate change—that it’s real, man-made and dangerous (the right way), or that it’s not happening (the wrong way). But this is a false dichotomy. There is a third possibility: that it’s real, partly man-made and not dangerous. This is the “lukewarmer” school, and I am happy to put myself in this category. Lukewarmers do not think dangerous climate change is impossible; but they think it is unlikely.

I find that very few people even know of this. Most ordinary people who do not follow climate debates assume that either it’s not happening or it’s dangerous. This suits those with vested interests in renewable energy, since it implies that the only way you would be against their boondoggles is if you “didn’t believe” in climate change. [M Ridley]

The loons then presented a segment on 'fake news' and how damaging it had been to the Hillary Clinton campaign, citing only how false accounts had influenced and probably rigged the election, thus continuing the campaign against democratic elections in America only because 'their side' lost. To be sure there was indeed lots of 'fake news' and in fact much of it (if not most) was on the 'side' of the Democrats. As for the leaking emails....this was not fake, these were actual emails generated by the individuals involved, what irks the left is that the public were given access to the information, information that proved Hillary Clinton was a liar, a political prostitute, an anarchist and probably was going to bring America to destruction more swiftly than current estimates. At least it now has some time to recover and perhaps make the necessary arrangements.

Our civilisation is truly imploding from within and I fight against these loony tunes only because I find it impossible to sit still in the face of blatant and hypocritical 'useful idiots (Lenin's words), plus the truth is that I want a little more peace-time with my children because one thing is for sure; that the policy's of these useful idiots and their demonic cronies (Soros) are going to send the whole world into a massive conflagration in the not-to-distant future.

HOW TO COOK FOOD WITHOUT COOKING THE PLANET

...and other verbal excretions from the (mouth)holes of global warming catastrophists such as:

Fight global warming by reducing CO2 emissions from your spaghetti bolognaise! This is the recommendation of two academics associated with Melbourne’s RMIT University whohave found that the farm-to-fork “Global Warming Potential” (GWP) of pasta with meat sauce can be significantly reduced by eliminating beef and substituting kangaroo. They recommend that for an even greater impact on global heat, rising seas, coral bleaching, tempests, bushfires and ocean acidification, you should dispense with the kangaroo too, and make your spagbol topping with lentils and kidney beans.

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

A Conversation commenter, William Hollingsworth, self-identifying as “a Marxist monarchist”, suggests another planet-saving refinement to our favorite family fare. “Reduce the footprint for spaghetti bolognaise even further by cooking it in one pot, not by boiling the spaghetti separately which doubles the amount of energy needed for cooking and adds another pot to be washed up. Tastes just the same,” he says.

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

The authors see their rankings of 168 kitchen foods’ footprints and the GWP of 1718 food stuffs’ values as relevant to the concerns of Gaia-loving householders and catering companies. If you’re fretting about your food emission “hot spots” from buffalo milk, eel, brassica, pollock, pepo, swedes, carp, hesperidium, true berries and pinto beans, just use their ready reckoner for planet-saving purposes.
But the researchers lament that the emissions intensity of peanuts, goat, turkey, duck, quinoa, ostrich, emu, and rabbit are not yet calculated – a task crying out for hefty research grants if ever there was one. Even the carbon footprint – rather, macropod print – of kangaroos needs re-calculation. “Such information is critical if attempts are made to inform dietary choice for environmental purposes,” the authors say. Perhaps “critical” is over-stating things a bit; I’d rank cancer cures, rice yields and dark matter higher in the “critical” research category.

Seriously, these media tarts are almost beyond a comment other than to mention briefly that the decision by Australian State governments to deinstitutionalise ww.aph.gov.au/~/media/wopapub/senate/.../mentalhealth.../addinfo003_pdf.ash)
has overlapped with an outbreak of peculiar subject matter being discussed in academic contexts.

Is this a coincidence or is there a correlation?

This cries out for a hefty research grant don't you agree?

POST-TRUTH, POST-CHRISTIAN, POST-REALITY

When are people going to realise that the Marxist inspired (and they no longer deny it) 'Left/Green' ideology is anti-work, anti-family, anti-jobs, anti-social, anti-successful business small or large, in short they are anti everything that modern civilisation holds dear and they believe that if only they can get a hold of the institutions of learning they can manipulate people into believing as they do:

"....the fundamental problem with the Left is what Friedrich Hayek called the fatal conceit: the delusion that experts are wise enough to redesign society."

Their whole intention is to bring down Western civilisation through propaganda, re-education, social programs and the re-writing of history in order to replace it with a new 'feudalism' where they are the aristocrats and we are the serfs:

 “….today’s progressives promote social control and the consolidation of a cognitively determined world order. Its promise amounts to forging a kind of high-tech middle ages in which the new aristocracy—techies, media grandees, financial moguls, academics, high-level bureaucrats—dominate while the middle class becomes increasingly serf-like. (J Kotkin 2016)

Take careful note that the majority of Green movers and shakers are rich, they have reached a position in society that protects them from the banality's and consequences of their ideologies (for now!) and now that they have made comfortable lives for themselves they want to protect them at all cost from the 'deplorables'. These are the masters-of-the-universe behind the Utopian daydream that the 'ideal society' is a socialist one. 

They refuse (alternatively: too ignorant?) to learn from other deterministic social experiments such as; Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, China, Angola, Zimbabwe et al, where the only ones who live in 'paradise' are the ones at the top of the heap (and who annihilate the 'intellectuals' [Stalin's useful idiots] on their way up!), everyone else is kept in a state of penury and starvation; as Robert Mugabe remarked: "it is easy to control one whose primary needs can only be met by government". 

These are fanatical, ideologically driven bozo's and the sooner we learn to ignore their constant wailing the sooner Australia will be a better place.

Unfortunately they are assisted by the 4th estate acting as a 5th column within Australia because the training, education and employment of journalist is undertaken by those who are by far more ideologically opposed to the Western model than the average man-in-the-street:

The faculties of journalism are churning out a conga line of brainwashed robots who all sing from the same songbook. They are totally indoctrinated - first at high school and then at the journalism schools - and have precisely no exposure to or understanding of business and its importance to our life, of conservative politics, of the legitimacy of differing opinions, or of the fundamental structure of a true democracy.

The educational systems have been almost entirely captured by the Left:

A whole course for Years 9-10, involving ten lessons, is devoted to the book “This Changes Everything”, an anti-capitalism, anti-fossil-fuel polemic by Canadian activist Naomi Klein.[2] She advocates populist uprisings – “Blockadia” — against fossil-energy developments, and for gigantic dollar transfers to (mostly corrupt) Third World governments to repay the West’s (mythical) “climate debt”. She attacks even the major green groups such as WWF and Nature Conservancy as sell-outs to the fossil-fuel industry.

Not only students are being targeted by the left but the teachers as well, those who have not yet capitulated to the left already that is:

News today that Australian “Safe Schools” operatives are pushing a global teacher training program designed to shame people who believe in marriage between one man and one woman and who resist radical gender theory should be of concern to parents.
“It is alarming that Australian ‘Safe Schools’ organisers want the next generation of teachers to view anyone who believes marriage is between one man and one woman as ‘modern homophobes’,” Australian Christian Lobby managing director Lyle Shelton said.

When are we, the ordinary citizens, going to wake up and vote in a man (or woman; P Credlin?) of power and character who will shut down these anti-Australian misanthropes and cause them to gnash their teeth like their comrades are in America!

SLOW LEARNERS OR OBSTINATE OSTRICHES

When will people learn.

The death of Castro has prompted liberals of all stripes to focus on how he 'helped' his people when the truth is he helped himself to all the money and left his 'people' impoverished. 

He was supposed to have helped Venezuela yet observe what has happened there with the richest family being Chavez's and the rest impoverished. 

Yesterday I watched a TV program where an Angolan woman who had emigrated to America defended Castro as being the countries 'saviour'...look at Angola now:

Angola, which liberal reporters and economists often cite as proof of economic growth in Africa, is another family-run kleptocracy, with the president’s daughter Isabel reportedly worth $3 billion and the IMF reporting $32 billion in oil revenues as simply “missing.”

Anyone spot the common thread?

A POX ON THE 'PRIVILEGE' MEME

This could be misconstrued but I think the author provides a compelling theory at the very least:

"South American countries could become wealthy if they followed the time-honoured way. This has been proven repeatedly. Small, accountable governments, low taxes, stable currency and strong property rights. That is how the USA (and Canada) became wealthy.

What Latinos should stop doing is blaming America for their problems. They shouldn’t expect the right to move to the USA en-masse and automatically be granted full citizenship rights. US citizens would never be entitled to those rights in Latin America.

In 1450, before Columbus made his epic journey, almost everyone thought the world was flat (not true! this is an unfortunate anti-christian myth promulgated in the late 19th century and not acceded to by most historians today, a fact which gives me pause as to the veracity of the rest of this authors work, but I once again encourage research rather than ignorance and the rest of his theory passes the smell test for me, if scoring somewhat high on hyperbole[mike m]). South America was rife with human sacrifice, North American Indians killed and scalped their rivals and the other kind of Indians were torching widows on their husbands' funeral pyres.

Slavery was the norm throughout Africa and the Islamic empire. Head shrinking and cannibalism were common in the East Indies.
Fast forward to 1950 and all these things had been abolished. People had televisions, radios, fridges, washing machines, cars, jet aeroplanes, antibiotics, anaesthetics, flush toilets and too many other things to name.

We had democracy, human rights, free speech, the rule of law, habeas corpus, the separation of powers and the separation of church and state.
Now perhaps I’m showing my ignorance here, but I can’t think of a single innovation, either social or technological, which happened during that five-hundred-year period that didn’t originate from white European nations or their offshoots.

I don’t want to claim credit for that fact at all mind you, because I wasn’t even born by 1950. By the same token however, I don’t see why I should throw myself into a fit of self-flagellation over every evil deed that has ever been committed by a white man.
I also don’t see why I should throw open the borders of my country to compensate the billions of people who have failed to create viable societies in their own nations. Neither do I see why I have an obligation to become an ethnic minority in every single country on the planet.

I also don’t see why I should throw open the borders of my country to compensate the billions of people who have failed to create viable societies in their own nations. Neither do I see why I have an obligation to become an ethnic minority in every single country on the planet.

In fact, I have come to believe that I have an obligation to my descendants to ensure that they inherit a nation which is for the most part, ethnically and culturally homogenous. I believe that is important because these type of nations have proven to be the most peaceful and prosperous.

[Harry Richardson]

PETA FOR PRIME MINISTER

Larry Pickering puts forward an interesting candidate for a future (near?) Prime Minister....Peta Credlin! I absolutely agree and would throw my vote behind her immediately.

http://pickeringpost.com/story/libs-better-find-a-new-pm-or-prepare-to-cop-shorten/6650

SOROS VS. TRUMP

Make of this posting what you will, my natural scepticism always looms to the fore when reading such potentially scandalous stuff. But that nagging urge to self-censor is what political correctness and its fairy godmother 'conspiracy theory' have done to us... a tool quite well documented in Orwell's 'now 'factional' novel 1984;  

Although the social media displays of ideological opposition by leftist minions are very real for them, it’s not really why Trump has faced such stiff opposition before and after the election. Trump is a marked man because he is not a retail politician owned by a segment of the oligarchy who really run the show. He’s his own man. To the true shadow elite, this is completely unacceptable.

What makes Trump so hated by the oligarchic elite who use social engineering to direct political processes around the world is that no-one owns him. He is not a stooge for the Koch brothers, Soros, the New York banksters or some shady billionaire Mohammed. He cannot be blackmailed like a usual puppet politician, and he has made it clear that he wants to change the political paradigm by draining the swamp in Washington.

The oligarchs love the swamp. They are the alligators that rule the swamp. What Trump is proposing to do is not just an insult. Should Trump succeed in draining the swamp and laying bare the creatures who have thrived in it for all to see, the oligarchs can expect pitchforks outside their gated compounds the next day.

While many billionaires, banking interests and corporate entities pay to play the game of oligarchic puppet master, none can rival the organisational machinery and ideological zeal of George Soros. And while Hillary has pimped herself out to just about every guy with a private jet, her main John has been and will remain Soros.

There is a mountain of evidence linking Clinton and Soros, including the information contained in the Podesta emails. Soros was Clinton’s chief donor, giving $25 million to Clinton’s campaign for president. Chelsea and Marc Mezvinsky were even married in Soros’ mansion. It’s a close bond.

What is becoming clear due to brave investigative work by journalists such as Wayne Madsen and leaked documents being analysed by the centipedes on reddit and 4chan, is that Soros does far more than just donate money. It has been known for years now that Soros runs his own tax-exempt organisations that he uses to destabilise nations, foment revolutions and install politicians he owns. The scale and magnitude of Soros’ operations, however, are only recently becoming clear.

and.....

What makes Soros so scandalous and his exposure to the public so important, however, is the revelation that Soros is a hardcore leftist. He’s a fanatical Cultural Marxist. He’s a globalist whose central vision is the destruction of the Western nation-state. He has written repeatedly that the existence of the United States is the greatest impediment to human freedom on the planet, and only funds politicians who will advance socialism and globalism in the West. He has also been agitating for war with Russia for years.

THE FUTURE BECKONS

An erudite comment by D C Alan:

The Play-Doh generation might not have the mettle to slog it out on the Western Front, but that doesn't mean that they are not ready and willing to fight. These are exactly the types who get motivated to savage mob violence very quickly and easily, which is the ultimate goal of the Left's infantilization of the culture. (Steyn: "The scale of solipsistic compliant ignorance is totalitarian -- and terrifying, in that it will inevitably be exploited for catastrophic and evil ends." July 31, 2015)

PIN SHARP

Mark Steyn excoriates the new (left-wing) American 'symbol of solidarity', the safety pin...now used to...err...trumpet ones significant moral superiority...yet more virtue signalling by the comrades:

Strangely enough, all these people swaggering about insouciantly demonizing millions of their fellow citizens as haters and Satanists profess to feeling "scared" and "unsafe" from the terror all around. Fortunately, in the midst of their fears they've found a marketing opportunity:

Days after Donald Trump was named president-elect, Americans are spreading a message of unity with a simple symbol: a silver safety pin.
And what "message of unity" could be simpler than that one in every two Americans is a violent hater-racist-misogynist-homophobe-Islamophobe-transphobe Satan fridge-magnet?

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

Like almost every other schoolhouse in America, my own kids' principal sent out a morning-after email blast bemoaning the way elections are determined "not by reasoning but by emotions". Somewhat oddly for a chap draping himself in the banner of reason, he then blathered on about hope and love and the power of love to triumph over hate with more hope so that love wins, etc. And he seemed not to notice that, having bemoaned the way elections are decided by emotion, he'd discussed this one entirely in terms of his feelings. To return to Churchill, the schoolmaster's object was to substitute emotional exhibitionism for argument.

And what of the "reasoning" behind the exhibitionism? There is something grim and trivializing about snowflakes with safety-pins. Are they truly feeling "unsafe" in their safe space? If so, the safety-pin will come in handy for holding their recyclable diapers on. As I said to Howie Carr last week, these delicate blooms are professing to be traumatized because, after years of civics class, they had no idea America wasn't a one-party state and that once every few years a fellow with a different opinion gets to win. If we indulge this, what silver-pin decorative brooches are left for the 60 per cent of the planet without free elections?

MM + PP = PC

Australia needs a moral, intelligent, perspicacious, strong man (or woman...see me being pc) who can resist the slings and arrows of mendacious media hacks and the back stabbing of pusillanimous politicians, we need someone who is unlike those Peter Smith describes:

"Most leaders of the centre-Right in the Western democracies appear to be the prisoners of their own anxieties: the fear of proscription by the self-appointed guardians of self-righteousness; the fear of humiliation for failure to flatter those who parade their status as victims; and the fear of oblivion for simply ignoring the clamour to do something when there is nothing useful to be done. The watchword of many a conservative statesman used to be masterly inactivity; now it is miserly depravity. There seems no place for the old-fashioned conservative who steers a steady course, is frugal and firm yet decent and honest; who, rather than pick people’s pockets, leaves their money to fructify there—in short, the John Howards of this world."

PYGMY GIANTS

Could this become the clarion call for the conservative voice in Australia against the 'elites' who have 'ruled' over us for too long:

It is a ruling class of pygmies who walk on stilts and call themselves giants. They are not giants and the moment the rest of us realize this, the long con is over.

PC POSEUR

Wow! Daryl Mccann has articulated the PC, hypocritical madness of identity politics in the West today more succinctly and with greater depth than many a philosophy academic:

PC Identarianism allows Beyoncé, one of the more dazzling and venerated celebrities on the planet, to play the victim card. This no-expense-spared woman, who inhabits the rarefied air of global superstardom, might have been listed by Time magazine in 2013 and 2014 as one of the most influential women in the world and by Forbes in 2015 as the most powerful female in entertainment, she might even possess a net wealth of as much as $US450 million, and yet Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter self-identifies as a victim. The melanin in her skin allows this revered idol to pose as a member of the modern-day Left’s rainbow of discontents. It is not so much a matter of “white skin privilege” holding Beyoncé back as “black skin privilege” shielding her from accusations of extreme privilege.

SNEERS, QUEERS AND POOR DEARS...

One of my favourite atheists Brendan O'Neill, writes eloquently (as always) on the reasons for Trumps success...it is well worth a read:

If you want to know why Trump won, just look at the response to his winning. The lofty contempt for ‘low information’ Americans. The barely concealed disgust for the rednecks and cretins of ‘flyover’ America who are apparently racist and misogynistic and homophobic. The haughty sneering at the vulgar, moneyed American political system and how it has allowed a wealthy candidate to poison the little people’s mushy, malleable minds. The suggestion that American women, more than 40 per cent of whom are thought to have voted for Trump, suffer from internalised misogyny: that is, they don’t know their own minds, the poor dears. The hysterical, borderline apocalyptic claims that the world is now infernally screwed because ‘our candidate’, the good, pure person, didn’t get in.

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/11/sneering-response-trumps-victory-reveals-exactly-won/

VIVA FREEDOM!

Dennis Prager tells it like it is...:

The American Revolution, unlike the French Revolution, placed liberty above equality. For the left, equality is more important than all else. That’s why so many American and European leftists have celebrated left-wing regimes, from Stalin to Mao to Guevara to Castro to Chavez, no matter how much the regimes squelched individual liberty. They all preached equality.

 http://www.dennisprager.com/the-scariest-reason-trump-won/

CULTURAL SUICIDE

It is truly diabolical that we the taxpayer are funding those organisations most dedicated to bringing our values and civilisation down:

"The Australian Human Rights Commission embodies the elitism that is spurring a global renaissance of populism. It is an activist organisation funded by the taxpayer that acts against the interests of the people by advocating porous borders, manufactured minority politics and the suppression of dissent. Its elitism is expressed in the vast waste of taxpayers’ money on overseas junkets, the reversal of formal equality and the prosecution of freethinkers under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act...

The AHRC is an activist organisation, the purpose of which has expired. It should have been retired after formal equality was introduced across Australian jurisdictions...
To justify their appalling waste of taxpayers’ money, activists curate a culture of complaint in which citizens are grouped by state-designated “attributes” such as race or sex and encouraged to complain about perceived offence. Section 18C is the perfect tool to sow endless division and the culture of complaint that sustains the human rights industry...

But under 18C, discrimination means feeling averse to the truth and having a state-sanctioned, taxpayer-funded right to punish those who reveal it. That’s not anti-discrimination. It’s a licence to silence dissidents...
The AHRC is ­redundant, so too state discrimination and equal opportunity commissions. Their members can fund their own activism on their own time... The AHRC has become a force for social discord and division. Let it go. [Jennifer Oriel]

BLOW IT UP...AND REPEAT!

When Emma Rice took over Directorship of the Globe theatre in England, she proceeded to demolish Shakespeare as he has been conceived of for the past 400 years:

The Bard’s plays, she says, are “tedious” and “inaccessible.” Perhaps, with such a dim view of the source material and its creator, she should have taken a different job, but instead she chose to make Shakespeare more “relevant.” For instance, [in A Midsummer Night’s Dream] “Away, you Ethiope,” was changed to, “Get away from me, you ugly bitch.” Rice knew that plenty of Shakespeare purists would find her coarse edits appalling, so she had an actor walk on stage in a spacesuit and say, “Why this obsession with text?” She also placed identity politics front and centre. She mandated, for instance, that 50 percent of the cast be female regardless of the gender of the characters. “It’s the next step for feminism,” she said, “and it’s the next stage for society to smash down the last pillars that are against us.”

Unsurprisingly after her first season the board responsible for keeping Shakespeare recognisably Shakespeare sacked her and the 'progressive' press have exploded with their classic, divisive, fall-back position of class consciousness (some might even call it the 'snobbery of the banal') and attacked the decision by calling it........'snobbery':

"It’s hard to shake the idea of what the Globe regulars want: period finery not Adidas tracksuits; Received Pronunciation not London street slang; theatre’s Eve Best not EastEnders’ Maddy Hill. Shared light or no shared light, it’s straight-up snobbery."[M Trueman, The Telegraph]

I would suggest that Mr Trueman is living in his Hollywood namesakes make-believe world if he believes that the only way to advance 'culture' is to destroy all the best of the past cultural norms.

That route leads only to the same sort of world that ISIS envisages.

Grow up Matt and make a valiant attempt to look beyond the 'progressive' bubble that is cultural Marxism, and you might even learn something from the past. If not I fear you are going to repeat it.

SEE THE SLEIGHT OF HAND

A classic Labor & Green [aka Socialist/Marxist] diversionary tactic is to blame our current economic ills on the rapacious rich. Labor's union stooge, Billious Shorty in particular has been running a diabolical class war rhetoric nightly with the help of their propaganda media arm the ABC, and the basis of it is not only disingenuous it is downright mendacious.

Walter Williams has written very eloquently about the lies that are fed to us and how devious they actually are, devious in the sense that they distract and divert our attention from the real enemy...BIG GOVERNMENT....:

"Bill Gates cannot order you to enroll your child in another school in order to promote racial diversity. He has no power to condemn your house to make way for a casino parking lot. Unless our elected public officials grant them the power to rip us off, rich people have little power to force us to do anything. A lowly municipal clerk earning $50,000 a year has far more life-and-death power over us. It is that type of person to whom we must turn for permission to build a house, ply a trade, open a restaurant and do myriad other activities. It's government people, not rich people, who have the power to coerce us and rip us off. They have the power to make our lives miserable if we disobey. This coercive power goes a long way toward explaining legalized political corruption."

GREEN KOOL-AID

Truly, truly there are moments when I am forced to believe that Australians are living in a small dark place (coming soon via 'renewable energy'!) somewhere down Alice's rabbit hole.

Thankfully many are waking up (at last) to the spurious and noxious (pun) claims of the 'global warming' chicken little's. Yet there are still intelligent(?) people who parrot the babel of 'renewable energy' as though it were a magical mantra. 

Their cultural doppelgangers are observed living amongst the self-delusionals who populate the kingdoms of magical thinking; aka 'the universities' and trendy, lefty, political party's.

These are the 'brains trust' of the country, 'intellectual' titans who believe that their 'socialism' will never fail like the socialism of the USSR, Mao's China, Pot's Cambodia, Chavez's Venezuela, Castro's Cuba etc,etc ad nauseum.
To much green Kool-aid people!!!!!!

YOU ARE INSANE, THE COMPUTER SAYS SO!

Wow....Some truly scary stuff is being promulgated in the press these days. Some years back Chuck Colson wrote about the day when Christianity is going to be viewed as a mental deficiency or an aberration from the 'norm'. I remember being shaken by his insight because the way he explained it it made perfect sense in an abstract sort of way. The roots of this idea are found in evolutionary psychology and its impetus behind the Utopian philosophy that regards human beings a ciphers that can be moulded and manipulated, tinkered with and retooled, all to fit the visions of the social planners, or our 'betters' as many would like to think of themselves...the Titans, those 'born to rule' etc, etc.

What brings me to these sombre thoughts you ask? An article in the latest Review Magazine [issue 441, Nov 2016] I picked up when dropping off an entry to an exhibition.Allow me to quote from the article by Jessica Paterson:

"A study published in Current Biology demonstrated that there were structural differences in the brains of students with different political attitudes. Students with conservative political beliefs had an enlarged amygdala. On the other hand, students that tended towards liberalism (in the American sense) had more grey matter in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that enables us to effectively process complex information. This is also the part of the brain that helps to regulate our response to an emotional event or emotional information....or as Darwin puts it; "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than knowledge."

Now I have to ask: which would you rather be? 

Ignorant and emotionally incontinent, with their..."brains literally paralysed by fear" (the theory behind why people are voting for Trump), or in charge of your responses, able to process complex information and in complete control of your universe.

Actual anecdotal experience of course sings a completely different tune, but Hey, lets not let facts get in the way of a good theory...after all; to identify another very powerful 'progressive' meme...isn't global warming all about what the computer models tell us and not about reality?

QUIXOTES RAINBOW

In the new world order we see Leftist 'debaters' (an oxymoron?) focusing on their opponents moral or physical failures rather than rebutting the argument itself. This is a common 'escape mechanism' for anyone who lacks either the facts or the skills to carry an argument. 

In today's 'intellectual' climate of fearing to say, do or even appear to be thinking the 'wrong thing' most debates have degenerated into 'softly softly' mass general agreements usually focusing on how devilish the 'conservative' elements of society are. Incidentally very rarely are the maligned 'conservative bogeymen/women' ever invited to these 'debates' nor are they given much opportunity to defend the conservative position within the bulk of the mainstream media who are almost entirely in thrall to the so-called 'progressive' will, somewhat reminiscent of The Pravda in the now defunct USSR.

Talk about falling through the rabbit hole!

'Progressive' perspective's have held sway for about 50 years now, and because the Gramscian moles and Alinskyite parasites have been so successful in their 'long walk through the institutions', shaping the worldviews of those at the helms of; Politics, Constitutional Law, Education, Commerce, Media, Religion and Entertainment.....they believe they have won the culture war.

In truth perhaps they have.

When one looks at late modern (post modern?) society there is little to admire other than the amazing technological and medical advances made upon the shoulders of ground breaking discoveries from the past. Unfortunately without a moral imperative many of theses so-called advances are being used in ways that monsters of the past such as Mengele and Heydrich would have drooled over.

There are some indications however that Joe&Jane McOrdinary are beginning to emerge from their entertainment induced, rip van twinkle. The internet has played some part in this 'awakening' and it is because of this that the Tech giants are attempting to self-censor the net. Recent examples of Google and Facebook censoring conservative views have been brought out into the open and this trend will only get worse if the 'ordinary citizen' remains apathetic. But the greatest obstacle that the champions of the Left are facing is that they have grown flabby and unskilled in meaningful debate.

Most people of the left whom I encounter and who are willing to debate, descend very rapidly into the realm of insult and derision because they simply have no answers nor do they employ logic; in fact many do not even believe in logic, preferring to hold to a religious 'faith' position that requires them to believe that everything is a 'social construct', including presumably their belief that everything is a 'social construct'.

Mark Steyn is a skilled debater (possibly because he is usually outnumbered and as a conservative believes in the principles of logic) who in the 2016 Munk debates in Canada, humiliated his opponents whose putrid responses to his uncomfortable observations about the perils of mass immigration, were to sneer and attempt to belittle him. Neither worked:

To some audience members Steyn dwelt excessively on the sexual crimes we’ve all read about in Cologne, Hamburg, Malmö and elsewhere. So it apparently seemed to Arbour and Schama, because they mocked Steyn for it in their rebuttals. Arbour sneered at both Steyn and Farage as “newborn feminists” (she got a laugh), while Schama disgraced himself with “I’m just struck by how obsessed with sex these two guys are, actually. It’s a bit sad, really.” (That got a very big laugh.) I took one look at Steyn’s glowering face after that remark — Schama will regret having said it to his dying day, I know it — and I kind of felt sorry for those two liberals, because I knew what was coming.

Steyn slowly rose and riposted, in a tone of withering contempt, “I wasn’t going to do funny stuff. I was going to be deadly serious. (But) I’m slightly amazed at Simon’s ability to get big laughs on gang rape.” Vigorous applause. He went on, “Mme Arbour scoffs at the ‘newfound feminists.’ I’m not much of a feminist, but I draw the line at a three year old … and a seven year old getting raped.” Vigorous applause.
I think that was the moment those of the audience who did change their minds got it. The pro side was happy to talk about “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,” because they’re abstract images, which liberals like. The words were fresh and meaningful then, but today merely a nostalgic homage to a 19th century immigration adventure with no deep similarities to today’s situation. They’re feel-good words but that shouldn’t make the poet who wrote them in 1883 the author of global refugee legislation in 2016. When Arbour and Schama didn’t like the opposition’s message — no images, just descriptions they interpreted as racist — they chose to shoot the messenger with ridicule, a debating error and an intellectually dishonest strategy.

A civilized culture, which takes centuries of painstaking collaborative work to create, can be easily destroyed, and quickly. This is a reality conservatives understand, but liberals, consumed by guilt for past collective sins, and morally disarmed before the Other, choose to ignore. The Munk debate illuminated this important distinction, and for a change, realism won. [Barbara Kay, When Mark Steyn Struck Back]

I am not sure that we can do much to 'save' our rapidly collapsing civilisation, but then the course of human destiny was always to follow a downward trajectory, just as everything in science upholds the second law of thermodynamics; entropy.

Perhaps the best we can hope for and work towards would be that like salt on meat we can delay the decay, for to believe that we can stop it altogether is at best a Quixotian tilt at rainbow coloured windmills.

TO SEE OR NOT TO SEE THAT IS THE QUESTION!

In today's emerging, new world order the main stream press no longer even attempts to reflect objectivity. The moral quagmire personified by Hillary Clinton; the lies, murders, treasonous behaviour, political incompetence, the attacks on Bill's mistresses...it is all treated as: "move along, nothing to see here".

And yet Trump daring to indulge in some locker room talk (as odious as it is it is not a fraction of the actually destructive behaviour by the Clinton's) and the sky falls in. 

The hypocrisy and the danger to our culture (as ruined and broken as it is, it is still preferable to every known 'other') is staggering. The main stream press are blatantly antagonistic towards Joe&Jane McOrdinary. Given the ideology's espoused by many of them I suspect that they are (either unconsciously, naively or just to stupid to realise otherwise) fifth columnists dedicated to our civilisational collapse and are therefore my enemy.

Brent Bozell of Townhall ruminates on the disgusting behaviour of liberals (in America Liberal is different to Liberal in Aussie...although the two are beginning to conflate) in Hollywood and the lack of bad press regarding it (just imagine if Trump were to say the same thing!)"

"On Oct. 19, Madonna even introduced liberal comedian Amy Schumer at Madison Square Garden this way: "One more thing before I introduce this genius of comedy. If you vote for Hillary Clinton, I will give you a blow job, OK?" As if that gutter talk wasn't bad enough, she promised, "I'm good" at it, "I take my time. I have a lot of eye contact," and worse.

This woman is 58 and still perpetually making herself the worst rebuke of her holy namesake.

Have you ever noticed that liberal celebrities can say or do anything in support of the liberals, and it never seems to backfire in the "objective" press?

SMALL GOVERNMENT; YES!

Take note my fellow Australians who believe that the answer lies in stronger government!

"Venezuelans are now suffering the perilous nature of authoritarian rule, brought on by the fact that they voted for people who espoused this notion that an all-powerful government could enact social change. All they got was starvation, looting, crime, and economic torpor.

STINKY PRESS

Hillary Clinton has has the stink of corruption hanging over her every utterance. Trump is a fool and a bully but there is not even one tenth the level of corruption surrounding him that dogs her every footstep. And a real problem for Western culture is that now a great majority of the main-stream-media are a part of the problem:

The Project Vertias videos exposed a corrupt political machine journalists would have been proud to expose in the past. The Wikileaks emails pulled back the curtain on why that didn’t happen – journalists are in on it. I can’t pretend otherwise, and I have no choice but to oppose it.

NO DISSENSION ALLOWED

So you think that same sex marriage is not going to affect you and its all about 'equality' so why not?

Do you really believe that the activists are interested in marriage...the same activists who a mere three years ago spoke out AGAINST marriage as a 'bourgeois institution':

During the discussion, Dow acknowledged that the gay movement's support for same-sex marriage has been a recent development. He added that gays have "gone from quite a radical critique of the whole institution of marriage" to support for same-sex marriage in just 10 years.
And herein lies the problem. Australia is a socially conservative nation. In 2002 the radical Australian-born gay activist Peter Tatchell opposed the very concept of "the nuclear family", depicting it as a bourgeois institution. Yet earlier this year he condemned Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott for not supporting same-sex marriage. [G Henderson, Sydney Morning Herald]

No; they are interested only in finding a legal wedge to force everyone to adhere to their worldview.

Its has begun with the bakers and will end only when everyone is forced to toe the official line...we will not be allowed to 'believe' anything that differs from 'official' dictates.....welcome to the Brave New World of 1984:

"The Christian owners of a Northern Ireland bakery have lost their appeal against a ruling that their refusal to make a "gay cake" was discriminatory.
Appeal court judges said that, under law, the bakers were not allowed to provide a service only to people who agreed with their religious beliefs.
Two years ago, the family-run firm refused to make a cake iced with the slogan: "Support Gay Marriage".
The order was placed at its Belfast shop by gay rights activist Gareth Lee." [BBC News Northern Ireland]

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

The university said the refusal to use gender-neutral pronouns when asked would be discrimination.
“These laws are the first laws that I’ve seen that require people under the threat of legal punishment to employ certain words, to speak a certain way, instead of merely limiting what they’re allowed to say,” Peterson said. “So the law’s put words into our mouths.”  [A. Artuso]

CONCEPTUAL ECHO CHAMBER

An interesting perspective by Theodore on the use of 'experts' in court cases...it also provides an insight into how being surrounded by like minded people can lead to an 'echo chamber' thus exposing the vaunted (and over-utilised in certain circles) phrase: "93% of experts agree" to being just what it really is...pompous balderdash:

" If I were seeking experts, I should not choose the most eminent men in their field. This is for two reasons. The first is that, being so eminent, that have often grown unused to having their opinion challenged. Not all are like this, naturally, but many are. They suffer from what a student friend of mine, now an eminent professor himself, called a hardening of the concepts." (T. Dalrymple)

HUMANITY IS SIGNIFICANT!

Many Green fanatics these days hold extreme views about the future of the world. Consider this quote from Paul Ehrlich's book 'the Population Bomb' published during the 60's 'revolution' of 'peace and love':

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate."

Completely overstated as it turns out but who in the lame-stream-media would point that out: (BTW in 2011 Ehrlich was quoted as saying that his book was too 'optimistic'...so not only not acknowledging his error but adding to it...sheer arrogance!).

However such catastrophic views of how humanity is damaging 'nature'(aka Gaia) are neither new nor are they liable to ever go away. Consider the current 'global warming' scare which strangely enough once again involves humanity acting in destructive ways towards Gaia.

One of the triggers for me writing this short article was a report yesterday on how an animal 'rights' advocate looks at humanity:

Australian Seabird Rescue spokeswoman Rochelle Ferris, quoted in an ABC News report on a protest against shark nets on NSW’s far north coast, Sunday:

The question we’re facing here is whether wildlife is more important than human life, and I’m conflicted over the answer to that myself.

A major contributor to 'modern' Green ideology is the Norwegian philosopher, and creepy ‘mystic' Arne Naess. In 1973 he claimed that the then 'science' of ecology was faulty because it looked at the world from a human perspective, and argued that:

"..... the human species has the same ‘intrinsic value’ as a bacterium or an earthworm."

Interestingly, my youngest son and I stumbled upon some fascinating mythology whilst researching for a school project of his. It concerns one of the origin myths of ancient China and a 'creator' named Pangu. Like many ancient myths it is quite stimulating and imaginative but of particular relevance was the perspective on humanity; i.e. that humans were created from the parasites found on Pangu's body, lice, maggots, fleas...in other words humans are parasites on the body of the earth

After another 18,000 years Pangu died, his body forming the various parts of the earth, and the parasites on his body forming humans.

At the risk of invoking 'godwins law' I feel it necessary to point out that it was an overt 'green' fanaticism that drove many of the Nazi Party's most destructive ideologies:

But environmentalist ideology was not an accidental, optional-extra to National Socialism. As we shall see, green ideas were at the core of Nazi thinking. The German Volk and Nazi movements marched beneath the banners of ‘Nature’ and the ‘organic’.(http://www.martindurkin.com/blogs/nazi-greens-inconvenient-history)

 I am not saying that humanity is blameless and never trashes nature. I am fully cognisant of the destructive potential within human beings in fact I even have a worldview that points to the inevitability of such behaviour. But I am also a believer in 'common grace' and that many human beings have dedicated their lives to helping and transmogrifying nature in beautiful and beneficent ways. Culture plays a significant part in this equation and I do not believe that all cultures are equal in this respect...such a worldview is ridiculous and illogical because it carries within in itself a contradictory bias.

What I do hope to say rather forcefully however, is that human beings are valuable. They are important. They are noble, and they are made in the image of a marvellously creative and beneficent God and are the pinnacle of His creation, which makes them significant even in their folly.

GOAD THE GOAT

 A somewhat amusing yet no doubt teeth grinding (to certain people groups) article in the Taki magazine:

When did “masculinity” become a dirty word? And is “toxic masculinity” sort of the crack cocaine version of it?
According to some femsplainers, “toxic masculinity” is actually harmful to men, but just as the idea that “patriarchy” is harmful to men, this is a horridly flimsy lie and and a transparent excuse for women to nakedly seize social power. We are told that patriarchy—rather than testosterone—mangles men into remorseless murder machines and that men would fare much better if they simply grew the hell up and succumbed to feminism’s salmon-scented wiles. These estrogen-addled illogicians would have us believe that men somehow unfairly benefit from patriarchy while it kills them left and right.
We are told that masculinity has no roots in biology and is merely a social construct. It’s a miracle that all these “social constructs” happened to be constructed almost identically throughout every culture in history.
We are told that in order to protect their famously delicate egos, men must resort to homicidal and suicidal public displays of strength and brutality. Anyone who speaks of the “fragile male ego” has apparently never encountered a female ego.
For those who are willing to concede even a smidgen of biology in determining gender roles, we are sternly warned that testosterone is an evil demonic elixir responsible for 80% of all violent crime. We are never told, because it would be too embarrassing for feminists and their perpetually bewildered gelded boy-ponies, that the sort of fearless risk-taking behavior that testosterone induces may also be responsible for the fact that men account for 94.5% of commercial patents, because the only possible reason for that lopsided stat is obviously sexism, which comes to us via patriarchy, which originates in toxic masculinity.
This is anti-male blood libel posing as justice. Just as these types reduce all of white history to the Holocaust and slave ownership, these Haters of All Things Male would like to distill everything male into one endlessly troglodytic cavalcade of rape and murder. Why, it’s as if all of the technological gadgets they use to demean men weren’t designed by men, and it certainly isn’t true that nearly all of the technological infrastructure they use to endlessly slander maleness was built with the sweat and blood of male laborers.
They claim that patriarchy and toxic masculinity cause men to cut off their emotions, but the moment that men sincerely try to express any emotional pain, they are derided as tiny-dicked man-babies whose “male tears” are cause for endless sadistic joy.
Since it is clearly feminism—rather than patriarchy or “toxic masculinity”—that robs men of their humanity and mocks even the slightest display of male emotion, it is fair to surmise there may be a heaping helping of psychological projection going on here.
This is why the peddlers of such idiotic notions as “toxic masculinity” are loath to discuss the many-tentacled manifestations of loathsomely destructive behavior by modern entitled females who see “sexism” as a sin the fairer sex is incapable of committing.

http://takimag.com/article/reclaiming_toxic_masculinity_jim_goad/print#ixzz4NyIyNWnz

COPYRIGHTING INJUSTICE

And now for a spoonful of entrepreneurial Social Justice Warriors:

But when there isn’t nearly enough racism to justify the “social justice” contingent’s pre-booked outrage, on which their status depends, what are they supposed to do? Well, being pious, righteous beings, they make some up. And by some, I mean lots (http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2013/12/because-lying-and-resenting-is-what-angels-do.html.) And so we find student “activists,” self-imagined heroes, whose preferred form of heroism entails sending anonymous racial threats to their equally brown classmates and making their own nooseshttp://fox6now.com/2012/02/06/student-on-uw-parkside-hit-list-admits-to-hoax/, and educators who daub racial slurs on their own cars, before slashing their own tyres, much to the bewilderment of onlookers https://issuu.com/chuckwalla1022/docs/kerri_dunn_coverage.

If these sad sacks would only turn their ideas into products the market could value, the world might actually benefit...as it currently exists these phoneys are indeed the 'Panguian' parasitical bugs hanging off the taxpayers teet.

A REASONABLE LIST

This (non-exhaustive) list of competing motivations between the classical ideal and a (post)Modern intellectual position is culled from an erudite essay by Eric Voegelin entitled:  On the Classics, and reflects on the emasculated approach by most ‘institutes of Higher Learning’ in the Western world towards the teaching and learning of Classical studies. 

I find the list rather compelling though I have prefaced it with a verse from another ‘classical’ source of greater importance (IMO) than every other one written since the beginning of time and motivated by the Platonic idea that reason and logic have their source in Reason and Logic, i.e. The LOGOS!

Proverbs 16:9 In their hearts humans plan their course, but the LORD establishes their steps

The effort of the Greeks to arrive at an understanding of their humanity has culminated in the Platonic-Aristotelian creation of philosophy as the science of the nature of man. Even more than with the Sophistic of their times the results are in conflict with the contemporary climate of opinion. I shall enumerate some principal points of disagreement:

1. Classic: There is a nature of man, a definite structure of existence that puts limits on perfectibility.
Modern: The nature of man can be changed, either through historical evolution or through revolutionary action, so that a perfect realm of freedom can be established in history.
2. Classic: Philosophy is the endeavor to advance from opinion (doxa) about the order of man and society to science (episteme); the philosopher is not a philodoxer.
Modern: No science in such matters is possible, only opinion; everybody is entitled to his opinions; we have a pluralist society.
3. Classic: Society is man written large.
Modern: Man is society written small.
4. Classic: Man exists in erotic tension toward the divine ground of his existence.
Modern: He doesn’t; for I don’t; and I’m the measure of man.
5. Classic: Man is disturbed by the question of the ground; by nature he is a questioner (aporein) and seeker (zetein) for the whence, the where to, and the why of his existence; he will raise the question: Why is there something, why not nothing?
Modern: Such questions are otiose (Comte); don’t ask them, be a socialist man (Marx); questions to which the sciences of world-immanent things can give no answer are senseless, they areScheinprobleme (neopositivism).
6. Classic: The feeling of existential unrest, the desire to know, the feeling of being moved to question, the questioning and seeking itself, the direction of the questioning toward the ground that moves to be sought, the recognition of the divine ground as the mover, are the experiential complex, the pathos, in which the reality of divine-human participation (metalepis) becomes luminous. The exploration of the metaleptic reality, of the Platonic metaxy, as well as the articulation of the exploratory action through language symbols, in Plato’s case of his Myths, are the central concern of the philosopher’s efforts.
Modern: The modern responses to this central issue change with the “climate of opinion.”

 In Locke the metaleptic reality and its noetic analysis is transformed into the acceptance of certain “common opinions” which still bear an intelligible relation to the experience from which they derive. The reduction of reality to opinion, however, is not deliberate; Locke is already so deeply involved in the climate of opinion that his awareness for the destruction of philosophy through, the transition from episteme to doxa is dulled. Cf. Willey’s presentation of the Lockean case.

Hegel, on the contrary, is acutely aware of what he is doing when he replaces the metaleptic reality of Plato and Aristotle by his state of alienation as the experiential basis for the construction of his speculative system. He makes it explicitly his program to overcome philosophy by the dialectics of a self-reflective alienated consciousness. 

In the twentieth century, the “climate of opinion” has advanced to the tactics of the “silent treatment.” In a case like Sartre’s, metaleptic reality is simply ignored. Existence has the character of meaningless facticité; its endowment with meaning is left to the free choice of man. The choice of a meaning for existence falls with preference on the opinion of totalitarian regimes who engage in mass-murder, like the Stalinist; the preference has been elaborated with particular care by Merleau-Ponty. The tactics of the “silent treatment,” especially employed after the Second World War by the “liberation rabble,” however, make it difficult to decide in individual cases, whether the counterposition to metaleptic reality is deliberate, or whether thelibido domimndi is running amok in a climate of opinion that is taken for granted, without questioning, as ultimate reality. On the whole, I have the impression, that the consciousness of a counterposition is distinctly less alive than it still was at the time of Hegel. Philosophical illiteracy has progressed so far that the experiential core of philosophizing has disappeared below the horizon and is not even recognized as such when it appears in philosophers like Bergson. The deculturation process has eclipsed it so thoroughly by opinion that sometimes one hesitates to speak even of an indifference toward it.
7. Classic: Education is the art of periagoge, of turning around (Plato).
Modern: Education is the art of adjusting people so solidly to the climate of opinion prevalent at the time that they feel no “desire to know.” Education is the art of preventing people from acquiring knowledge that would enable them to articulate the questions of existence. Education is the art of pressuring young people into a state of alienation that will result in either quiet despair or aggressive militancy.
8. Classic: The process in which metaleptic reality becomes conscious and noeticaIIy articulate is the process in which the nature of man becomes luminous to itself as the life of reason. Man is the zoon noun echon.


Modern: Reason is instrumental reason. There is no such thing as a noetic rationality of man.
9. Classic: Through the life of reason (bios theoretikos) man realizes his freedom.
Modern: Plato and Aristotle were fascists. The life of reason is a fascist enterprise.
The enumeration is not even remotely exhaustive. Everybody can supplement it with juicy items gleaned from opinion literature and the mass media, from conversations with colleagues and students. Still, they make it clear what Whitehead meant when he stated that modern philosophy has been ruined.

UNCONSCIOUS MENDACITY

Steve Taylor sort of nails the zeitgeist:

Therefore, the single most important mind-control technique is what Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stephen Hunter calls “the narrative”:

The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It’s so powerful because it’s unconscious. It’s not like they get together every morning and decide “These are the lies we tell today.” No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it’s a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they’ve never really experienced that’s arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they have chosen to live their lives.

For instance, consider the question of why blacks tend to get shot by the cops more than Asians do. The simplest, most Occamite answer is: for the same reason blacks get shot by other blacks so much—on average, African-Americans are more violent than Asian-Americans.

The overwhelming abundance of social-science data supports that view. But that’s definitely not part of the narrative. Instead, as Hillary instructs us, we must subscribe to fashionable conspiracy theories of “implicit bias” and “systemic racism.”
Hillary, in effect, is running for president on a dumbed-down version of Malcolm Gladwell’s 2005 best-seller Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, which advised going with your gut reactions, except when they are factually wrong or politically incorrect.

http://takimag.com/article/from_orwell_to_gladwell_and_back_steve_sailer/print#ixzz4Ng0i17Y4

MISSING THE TARGET

It is vital to view issues in perspective, Mark Steyn so obviously does. Many of us waste our time arguing for a position that is clearly not the true 'front' of the battle.

He correctly identify's that in the case of 'our' Australian Human Rights Commission, the battle is not between whatever issue the AHRC deems unacceptable but the fact that this 'commission' exists in the first place:

The likes of [Race Discrimination] commissar Soutphommasane are not interested in a debate with you; they’re interested in eliminating you from the debate, banishing you from public discourse, and shrivelling that discourse to the ever tighter bounds of a state ideology.

DESPICABLE CULTURAL QUISLINGS

A fitting sobriquet for despicable parasites:

This is complemented by another component, which involves the collapse of the culture that sustains the civilization, usually involving the treason of the intellectual and political elites. These become cultural quislings, turning their backs on the very culture that sustains them in their privilege, proudly declaring themselves enemies of their own civilization, and working actively to undermine it, effectively handing over control to the aggressive invaders.

The paradigm for this intellectual treason was established by the Comintern nearly a century ago, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, when Lenin decided that the new Soviet Union slave state would only survive if it was able to foment revolution in the West and could mobilize the intelligentsia to achieve this. The poisonous message these intellectuals were to carry, an ideological contagion, was enunciated vividly by the leading French communist ideologue, Louis Aragon, in 1925:

“We will destroy this civilization that you cherish … Western world, you are condemned to death … We will awaken everywhere the germs of confusion and malaise. We are the agitators of the mind … those who will always hold out our hands to the enemy.”

This treasonous, self-lacerating, and nihilistic worldview is now institutionalized throughout Western academia and it has an ideological stranglehold over political activism, as we see in Australia with the Green-Left. These academics and activists live in a parallel universe where the source of all evil in the world is their own society, in which they posture as reluctantly privileged rebels. Consequently, as Pascal Bruckner observes in The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (2010), “nowadays all it takes to attack Europe is a bit of conformism” to the all-pervasive hatred of the West that constitutes the intellectual monoculture of our society.

Truly it is time for a 'spring clean'.

HISTORY & REASON

As one who has been passionate about education for many years, and in that passion have been frustrated, blocked and blessed in equal proportion, I am paradoxically depressed and elated all at once.

Depressed when I read and observe how effectively neo-Marxist thinking has impacted Western society and knowing history as I do, I realise what is in store for the majority.

Elated when I reflect on the fact that there appears to be something of an awakening taking place in the West:

So, there is hope that we can end the Millennial/Generation Z’s tryst with far left politics, with more job opportunities and educations programs from VOC that shows the catastrophe that occurs when these government run out of money, which always happens. If they thought debt and no job was bad, how about no electricity, no food, no medicine, no emergency services—a complete societal collapse from this dalliance with the left wing. I wonder if there’s a country where all of this is happening right now after promising people free stuff. Oh wait; that would be Venezuela, where things are so bad due to their experiment with 21st Century Socialism that a scraped knee could mean death thanks for shortages of about pretty much everything.

However, and herein lies the rub, I am not sure if this realisation of consequences is too little too late nor whether or not the spiritual component is strong enough (interestingly the Christian world is very 'advanced' in its ignorance of history, politics and reality in general...perhaps because many of the self-appointed 'leaders' are often ignorant, sclerotic, real-world agoraphobes  or are so compromised in their doctrinal beliefs that they may well be referred to as wolves amongst the sheep).

And fundamentally I believe that unless the core of this belated 'revival' is spiritual, it is doomed to fail. Why? Simply because history teaches us that people need more to life than mere prosperity..... they need a reason to live.

MADNESS PERSONIFIED

America's education has long been on the downward path, as has the Australian system, not least because of the Marxist nature of teacher unions. Even knowing that the following results from a recent survey in America boggle the brain, but I am sure that similar, if not worse results would be apparent if the survey were to take place in Australia:

"The Victims Of Communism Memorial Foundation did a poll about Millennial attitudes for far left using YouGov and found that one-third of them believe George W. Bush killed more people than Joseph Stalin. I would say it could be due to an overdose of MSNBC viewing, but that network doesn’t rally have an audience, especially when compared to Fox News and CNN. Seventy-five percent don’t know that communist governments have murdered more than 100 million people."

Our most precious 'inheritance' (excuse the irreverent term) our children, have been brainwashed and starved of true knowledge in the elites attempt to control the population, just as they did in communist Russia, China, Cambodia, Nth Korea, Cuba, etc etc....and look where those countries have ended up.

I have been reading a fascinating account of the History of Australia and of its profound moral and legal underpinnings. I have been made aware of beginnings and motivations I was completely unaware of as are millions of Aussies young and not-so-young because of the interminable brainwashing that has been undertaken by schools, universities and the media, most effectively the ABC. Aussies like American's are ignorant of their 'roots' and many are falsely ashamed of their heritages not because of the truth of that past, but because of the lies that they have been force fed since childhood. 

Did you know for example that Australia is the only continent in the world never to have had legalised slavery.....? That is something to be rejoiced about, yet what are we bombarded with on a daily basis...'invasion day', the Australian 'gulag' ad nauseam...all fabrications and distortions of truth shamelessly pushed by the anarchists seeking to bring down the culture of this marvellous country so that they can replace it with the hideous version of that which has kept large parts of the world in misery and servitude BUT HAS AFFORDED THE RULERS LUXURY AND POWER! 

That is what driving these sick few, these madmen (and women, actually often women!) to bring about the transformation of our current system, but the truly astounding thing about it all is that these same fools are so ignorant of history that they cannot see that the very forces that they are trying to unleash in order to seize power, are the very forces that will devour them when (if) it happens...just as Robespierre became a victim of the revolution he headed and the 'intellectuals' became the victims of the Russian, the Chinese, the Cambodian, and all of the other Marxist revolutions on earth. 

Mad Fools! Isn't the definition of madness doing the same thing over and over and each time expecting a different result?

MOCKERS OF VIRTUE

Little did Edmund Burke know that when he wrote this on reflection of the revolutions he had witnessed, the American, the French, the Industrial it would really only reach its apotheosis of reality at the end of  sexual/cultural revolution of the 1960's. I fear that we have entered into the final chapter:

The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprize, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

VACUUM, SCHMACKUUM!

I love to read and the internet has opened up a vast storehouse of material to indulge this passion, though of course within every cornucopia there exists a dark side, which in this case is that the more I read the more depressed I become.

Why?

Because I observe how quickly the world is degenerating into madness. I see how formerly rational people will believe in almost anything other than a benevolent and gracious God because to do the latter would mean becoming responsible to someone greater than ourselves...and for an increasing amount of human beings there is no one greater than themselves. Unfortunately because nature abhors a vacuum when the belief in a creator goes out the back door; belief in anything/everything comes roaring in the front door.

This is all comic-book stuff. Believe any of it and you will believe anything. But people do. Welcome to godless credulity; to the age of science fiction made real. It has a prosaic side to it too. Global warming (GW) is the example, par excellence.

The symptoms of a belief in GW are everywhere to be seen as the worship of wind and sun totems. These, for some, fill the yawning gap, which belief in God might have previously occupied. People from every land and their governments have not only embraced a tenuous scientific theory that burning fossil fuels will bring catastrophe to the human race but, bizarrely, and against all reason, that it is possible to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar farms and, at the same time, preserve the prosperity that fossil fuels have brought to large swathes of humanity since the industrial revolution.
Something is going on to make otherwise sane and sensible people believe this kind of thing.

There also exists a peculiar victim-hood zeitgeist within Western thinking which divides victims and perpetrators into tribal, racial or gender ghettos. The ruling oligarchy has not only succeeded in delineating these differences but they have also set up our society in such a way as to prevent these disparate groups from ever reaching some form of reconciliation, thus fermenting social chaos, which is in many ways the intent of this new 'elite' whose playbook can be traced back to the oft stated aims of Marxist agitators such as Gramsci and Alinksy with Labor's Fabianist philosophy thrown in for good measure.

Welcome to the Hotel California!