Dhimmitude

Talk about a picture being worth more than a thousand words....yay for originality...being a girls school probably makes these little ones lucky that they are allowed to draw at all...except that this is at a 'cathedral school' in England!!!!!!

Penetrating the hive-mind

A more balanced review of Maggie's legacy:

Much rubbish has been said of Thatcher in the last week. We’re told that her deregulation of the City (which broke the old boy network and let in the barrow boys) ushered in an era of greed and was the cause of the great crash. Let’s spell it out so even Robert Peston can understand. The crash was the result of the preceding credit boom. Credit booms are the result of governments pumping too much money into the economy – which Thatcher was adamantly against. She knew why politicians like doing it: phony booms make them look good and it’s a way of stealing money from savers without the saps even noticing. Thatcher also knew the terrible consequence: pumping money in lowers interest rates, encouraging debt and discouraging saving. If only Thatcher had privatised currency too, to prevent politicians abusing their monopolistic control of it!

We’re also told that Thatcher damaged manufacturing. Again, let’s set the record straight. Manufacturing does well when it makes a good profit. Higher taxes mean lower profits. It is the burden of supporting Britain’s obese public sector (now roughly the same size as our private sector) which is crushing the life out of capitalism (manufacturing included).
 

The leftards are as profligate in their hatred of Thatcher's legacy as they are in their hatred of individual freedom, preferring as they do the bowing of the knee to the collective and therefore statist authority.

Oh how they hated the gains she made and the many ordinary 'working class' people she helped...this was their 'turf' this was their collective hive-mind until Maggie came along and reached into their hearts and minds. She represented the true 'working-class', the true spirit of hard work and aspiration that so many knew instinctively was their ticket out of the collective misery of the statist ideologues.

How the thugs hated her, just witness the macabre dancing and drinking on her grave. But it is in reality a measly few sad souls who are documented on the news and so  many of them are children in captivity to the misplaced hatred of their forebears, just look at the ages...most were not even born when Maggie ruled. Pathetic!

Into the lions den

Nice, a fresh perspective on a potentially worrying subject.

Thus the mass immigration of Muslims into Western lands is a mixed blessing. In terms of them not fitting in, and seeking to subvert our culture, our values, and our way of life, it is bad news indeed. But in terms of God bringing them to us so that we might share the gospel with them, it is a very good thing indeed.

After all, we are not free to share the gospel openly with them in Muslim-majority countries, so God is allowing them to come here so that they might be exposed to the gospel of Jesus Christ. But tragically most Christians in the West are not taking advantage of these opportunities.

And worse yet, many have fallen for the deception of the interfaith dialogue movement, where everyone is told we all basically believe the same thing, and we just need to get along. Sorry, that is not what we are called to do – we are called to tell them that ‘Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and that no man comes to the father but by him’ (John 14:6).

Snake oil sales-people

Wow...The plain speaking Miranda (aptly named) Devine!!! has pulled no punches in describing the current malaise that exists as a result of the entitlement era. Way to go Miranda!

If the Australian Labor Party’s affirmative action/"EMILY’s List” had been in place in Britain when Margaret Thatcher was making her rise, she never would have reached the top.

The late British prime minister’s life was the antithesis of the deadbeat philosophy behind such gender quotas, which reward mediocrity above worthiness.

A woman who favoured self-reliance over collectivism, individual effort over institutional preferment, integrity over compromise, a renegade, a non-conformist, would never have fitted into such an egregiously unjust system.

Quotas are designed to promote the worst sort of people. They benefit the spivs, the cheats, the slackers, the fakes and the incompetents. At heart they are just another socialist redistribution mechanism, and are as doomed to failure as all the others.

Quotas reward cheap Machiavellianism, a career spent greasing up to vested interests, engaging in office politics and intrigue, gaming psychometric tests and pandering to human resources departments, plotting coups, and forging alliances with like-minded con-artists. Such people are singularly unsuited to lead a nation or a business.

Thatcher would not have been chosen, nor been willing to be drafted under such a corrupt system.
 

Have I seen such a system employed in the Arts? Indeed I have.

Gellatinized Worldviews

This single issue has massive implications for believers in the Western world and, I believe, will eventually usher in a new Neronic era.
The following is an excerpt from the article highlighted at the bottom of this entry and I would recommend that the piece be read in its entirety...it says something about the quality of worldviews in our society.

The conformism around gay marriage cannot be put entirely down to handfuls of campaigners, of course, and certainly not to any conscious attempt on their part to enforce political and moral obedience. The fragility of society’s attachment to traditional marriage itself, to the virtue of commitment, has also been key to the formulation of the gay-marriage consensus. Indeed, it is the rubble upon which the gay-marriage edifice is built. That is, if lawyers, politicians and our other assorted “betters” have successfully kicked down the door of traditional marriage, it’s because the door was already hanging off its hinges, following years of cultural neglect.

It is society’s reluctance to defend traditional views of commitment, and its relativistic refusal more broadly to discriminate between different lifestyle choices, that has fuelled the peculiar non-judgmental tyranny of the gay-marriage campaign, which judges harshly those who dare to judge how people live.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/breathtaking_conformity

Collectivist spin

Wisdom from the 20th century's greatest female politician:

Under the Rudd-Gillard governments we have the culture Thatcher warned us against. In 1976, in one of the first speeches she made in Australia, she told a Canberra audience the real difference between conservatives and their socialist political opponents is that conservatives believe that government should act to enlarge the freedom of the individual to live his own life whilst socialists believe the government should diminish it.

“Our way upholds the importance of the individual and makes provision for him to develop his own talent. To us, all individuals are equally important, but all different. It is this difference which gives richness and variety, and strength, to the life of the community,” she said.

She also touched on “social justice” - the term used by members of the Rudd-Gillard government to justify increasing intrusion into private lives.

“Common to all collectivist theories is the presumption that ‘social justice’ is more equitable than justice to the individual; that the ‘social wage’ is more desirable than the income a man or woman earns, and spends or saves; that ‘classes’ matter more than people; above all, that ‘collective rights’ are more important than the rights of the individual citizen,” she said.

Thatcher demolished the concept of “collective rights” and used as her example the Soviet Union, where, she said, more than anywhere else, the collectivist dogma had - in the name of the “people” - made the state the owner and manager of all the means of production, distribution and exchange. And the result?

“Far from abolishing poverty, socialism has kept the vast majority of the Soviet people miles behind the western world in standards of living and quality of life,” Thatcher said.

“Instead of ‘superior productivity’ based on workers’ control, its state-owned industries and collectivised farms are steadily falling further and further behind those of the west. Socialist ‘realism’ has meant neither artists nor writers have been free to express their own ideas. Anything that conflicts with the collectivist mystique is feared, and is condemned and banned.
 

If I hear the words "for the people" usher from the mouths of these collectivist union puppets again I shall smash the TV (no I won't) but the verbal 'bovine faeces' these leftards spew is akin to fingernails scraped across an old-fashioned blackboard. 

A parallel universe perhaps?

Welcome to Australia (almost) in 2013...it appears we are merely 30 something years behind the UK.

The entire economy was in the hands of an intellectually corrupt, Luddite trade-union confederation, which chose most of the delegates to any conference of the governing Labour party, and whose shop stewards and craft-unit heads could shut down an entire industry in mid-contract for any reason, from an individual work grievance to the sour grapes generated by a poor round of darts in their local pub (on working hours).

In the year preceding the 1979 election, in what became known as “the winter of discontent,” almost every industry in the country had been shut down by capricious strikes, including the airports, trains, electric power, coal mines, garbage collection, and undertaking. The captains of industry and finance in the City, the style-setters in Mayfair and the West End, the doyennes of Bloomsbury and Knightsbridge, and the denizens of the chancelleries and ministries of Belgravia and Westminster huddled in the cold and dark, dead or alive. Government-owned operations, from the steel industry to the airports, were a cesspool of inefficiency and, in the private sector, large numbers of fictitious jobs were salaried and the proceeds went as sinecures to union favorites or into a pot to be divided at the pleasure of the union bosses. It fell to Margaret Thatcher to redeem Britain from the slough of despond and lassitude in which it had been totally immersed by overindulgence of the workers’ leaders in guilt over the inequalities of British life.
 

Perhaps the strikes are not as obvious (more manipulative?) but give the corrupt union leaders half a chance and they would be, perhaps our taxation system is not quite as injurious (yet) but give Swanee a sniff and see what happens. The behaviour of corruption within trade union ranks is certainly mirrored in the numerous cases pending before Australian courts and even the guilt over inequalities is reflected in the guilt over the 'orginal inhabitants' that Australia suffers under.

UPDATE
How about the premise of this essay also from one on Thatcher and how similar it is to the Australian bogeyman...Abbott, Abbott, Abbott...it appears the leftards are quite limited in their approach to politics, but limitations on the part of ideologues is, I suppose, par for the course

Thatcher – or rather “Thatcha”, always said with a dramatic sneer – has become the Left’s catch-all explanation for why it isn’t taken seriously by the masses anymore. Thatcher brainwashed the plebs into becoming materialistic, they say, making them love “stuff” more than community and turning them off Big Picture politics. Thatcher turned people individualistic, they claim, making it more difficult for Leftists to pursue a politics based on collectivity. Thatcher stole working-class voters from their natural home of the Labour Party, they argue, fatally denting that party’s standing among the masses. (This overlooks the fact Labour’s support had been declining long before Thatcher allegedly colonised the fickle brains of Joe Public: among manual workers, Labour’s support fell from 62 per cent in 1959 to 38 per cent at the opening of the 1980s.)

Time and again, the failures of the Left – to convince the public of its agenda, to win the working classes to its cause – is projected on to Thatcher. She and her ideology are transformed into an all-powerful force that corrupted the little people’s minds and singlehandedly finished off Socialism. That is why Thatcher became, if anything, even more hated in recent years, long after she left office, including among new radical Leftist who weren’t even born when she was PM: because Thatcher-bashing is fundamentally an expression of Leftists’ fury and frustration at their own increasing insignificance in public debate and among the demos. How much easier it is to claim that the public have being mentally kidnapped by an awesomely powerful leader than to have a serious think about why latter-day Leftism failed. The question is: now that Thatcher is dead, who will the Left blame for the indifference and even hostility it is met with in communities up and down the country?.
 

Useful idiots, it would be a laugh if the implications were not so dire.
UPDATE # 2
From yet another article on Maggie where the insights given her sound remarkably like someone on the Australian political scene...that figure the leftard media like to make such fun of perhaps?

This is why her great career is so worthy of study. She is the almost exact antithesis of the contemporary politician, whose craft is largely a matter of technique. She possessed integrity. She had a clear sense of herself. She scarcely possessed what is known today as a "media strategy". She rarely uttered words for effect. She cared about substance. She sought power for a purpose. Having attained it, she knew how to use it.

There was therefore an umbilical connection between what she said and what she did. The Left, aided by her media allies, often made out that she was a liar. But she was in fact strikingly honest. She was scrupulous in her personal dealing and (despite the Leftist mythology) the anonymous author of countless acts of personal kindness. She was driven by a profound sense of public service.

And here is the greatest lesson of all: she was a living, breathing disproof of the facile theory that history is the product of vast, impersonal forces. In fact the world is formed by remarkable individuals of great insight and, above all, courage.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/comment/the-outsider-who-changed-the-course-of-history-20130409-2hicq.html#ixzz2QD7Hmyhg