The unfortunate illusions of youth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pants ablaze

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

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

Wise words

A man of uncommon wisdom, Thomas Sowell:

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

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

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

Utopian>Dystopian

AGW Vaccination

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

Roots & fruits

I like what John Armstrong has to say:

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

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

Orwellian perspicacity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post Education, or pooed for short!

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

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

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

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

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

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