Open your eyes

The misanthropic impulse behind many conservationist demands is on loud display in this piece:
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/mirandadevine/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/a_tasty_dish_for_a_very_big_fish_and_its_all_our_fault/

When are people going to wake up and take note of the actions of nature on our own doorsteps (perhaps too many of these 'conservationaists' actually never move beyond their urban concrete boxes). If you leave nature to do its own thing the end result is chaos. Gardens left unattended become weed patches, elephants left un-culled in Africa cause immense damage which unchecked would result in their own demise.

If you are a Christian you would recognise the effects of the curse, if you are not religious surely common sense and everyday observations would suffice.

Labor's pants are an inferno

It appears that the Labor party is most successful in breeding leaders who lie through their teeth:

"...why did Shorten falsely suggest we gave too little?

“Australia subsidises its car manufacturing in the order of about $17 (per Australian per year),” Shorten complained, “ whereas the Germans do it at about somewhere between $65 and $90 and the Americans, $250.”

False. For instance, Shorten’s US figures — taken from a highly atypical year in the global financial crisis — include an one-off $80 billion rescue package of which most was a loan, since repaid.

The Productivity Commission gave the real figures last month. In fact, every Australian must donate $US17.75 a year in budgetary assistance to their car industry, Germans $14.43 and Americans only $5.41. We aren’t the least generous but the most.

Here is another comparison. We give $US1885 per car in subsidies and the US only $166. Every Australian car worker is subsidised by more than $10,000 a year. No industry in Australia is subsidised so much. No developed country subsidises car makers more and, as the Productivity Commission says, it’s just money down the drain."
 

Truly the Australian Labor party should be renamed the Lie-bore company.

Media bias

Why is it that the left side of politics is usually considered to be the most compassionate, less racist and more compassionate than the conservatives when all the evidence points to the fact that the opposite is almost always true?

 

Bess Price, a conservative Aboriginal politician from the Northern Territory, has been vilified by the Left, often in racist terms:

Because I have spoken out on this issue and others close to my heart, I have been routinely attacked by the left. Professor Larissa Behrendt claimed that what I say is more offensive than watching a man having sex with a horse. Her white professional protester colleague, Paddy Gibson, told the world that I was only doing it for the money and frequent flyer points. The Queensland educationist, Chris Sarra, said that I was ‘pet Aborigine’ who only said what the government wanted me to say. Chris Graham, the white editor of Tracker magazine called me a ‘grub’. A white woman in Victoria, Leonie Chester, calls herself Nampijinpa Snowy River, on the internet. She tells the world that my people, the Warlpiri, are ‘her mob’. She and her friends have obscenely insulted me on the internet, over and over. Marlene Hodder, a white woman from Alice Springs and her protesting friend, Barbara Shaw, have called me a liar several times. The Crikey blogger, Bob Gosford, who calls himself ‘the Northern Myth’, calls me Bess ‘Gaol is Good for Aboriginal People’ Price and accuses me of ‘vaguely malevolent and populist buffoonery that is designed to capture the attention of the tutt-tutterers and spouted by politicians that inevitably have a short tenure in power’. In Brisbane, Tiga Bayles, using an Indigenous community owned radio station, told the whole world that I am ‘a head nodding Jacky-Jacky for the government’ and that I am ‘totally offensive and arrogant’ because I do not want people like Tiga who know nothing about us, speaking about my people. He and his friends laughed as they told the world that I am only interested in money

Magic is in the air

Magical thinking married to wishful longing, bolstered by government grants = AGW theory.

And so the evidence to support the theory that ‘climate change’ has caused the storms is… that there’s no evidence to falsify what is merely a supposition.

Truly, AGW is a magical theory that explains absolutely everything – including diametrically contradictory phenomena, lack of logic and absence of evidence – whenever people observe profoundly, ‘Something funny’s happening to the weather’.

I have another theory to explain the current deluge. It is Galileo, Newton and Einstein weeping uncontrollably from above.

Equal to what?

The faulty reasoning behind the post modern concept of 'equality'.

Thomas Sowell has written much on this as well. The Black American economist and social commentator knows full well why something like freedom is to be championed and aimed for, but not equality. Indeed, he thinks the word ‘equality’ is one of our most misused and abused words around.

He once wrote a piece entitled “Meaningless ‘Equality’”. In it he says in part, “Anyone who questions or opposes equality is almost certain to be regarded as someone who believes in inequality – in ‘inferiority’ and ‘superiority.’ But all of these concepts suffer from the same problem: For equality, inferiority, or superiority to have any meaning, what is being compared must first be commensurable. A symphony is not equal to an automobile. Nor is it inferior or superior. They are simply not commensurable.”

The Obama debacle

To the many who are aghast at the use of Obama tactics, that is; the use of American agencies to intimidate and 'stand-over' ordinary American citizens particularly those who would stand up to expose the neo fascist/socialistic underbelly that is the Obama administration, read this and weep:

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2014/02/07/true-the-vote-president-catherine-engelbrecht-slams-irs-abuse-weaponizing-of-government-n1791240?utm_source=thdailypm&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm

The precursor to anarchy

Been on holiday and enjoyed being away from the keyboards. The following extract is about the phenomena euphemistically known as 'squatting', more correctly phrased as stealing:

It’s Protest So It’s Righteous

Alexander Vasudevan is a lecturer in “cultural and historical geography” with an interest in “radical politics” and “cartographies of protest.” He also, naturally, writes for the Guardian. Which may help explain his belief that proposals to criminalise squatting would create “jarring archipelagos of wealth and poverty” and, more importantly, remove “a potent symbol of protest.” Squatting, see, isn’t opportunist theft, it’s a form of political protest and therefore righteous by default:

The seizure and reclamation of space (temporary or otherwise) has become a key and potent symbol of protest here in the UK, from campus occupations to the playful interventions of groups such as UK Uncut.

Yes, we’ve seen those playful interventions and the people they tend to attract, many of whom wish to play with unsuspecting members of the public. And note the word reclamation, as if what’s being taken, often forcibly, somehow already belongs to the people who’ve decided to take it. Because… well, being terribly radical, they’re entitled, obviously.
As, for instance, when squatters invaded and occupied the home of Lisa Cockin’s mother, recently deceased, then used it as a venue for some rather lively parties. When the intruders were finally evicted, the Cockin family were left with repair costs and legal bills of several thousand pounds. Or when squatters stripped the home of Denise Joannides – even ripping up its floors - in what I’m sure could be construed as an act of radical protest.

What is at stake here is the further criminalisation of occupation-based tactics, which could severely limit the ability of vulnerable communities in particular to assert and stake their own geographical “right to the city.”

Protestors - at least those of a kind congenial to Mr Vasudevan - apparently have a right to storm and occupy a private business, a private home. How liberating it must be to have such moral certainty and a convenient disregard for boundaries and reciprocation. Note too the deployment of the Vulnerability Card, thereby implying that the nation’s squats are currently heaving with the frail, the elderly and the disabled. A strange insinuation, given that squatters are very likely to be young people like these, also gorged on “radical politics,” and whose only obvious disability is a failure to perceive their own absurd double standards.
Readers who wish to reclaim the belongings of Mr Vasudevan – say, his laptop or his phone – should head for the University of Nottingham.
Update, via the comments:

As Mr Vasudevan is keen to excuse the “seizure and reclamation” of other people’s belongings as a “potent symbol of protest,” it seems only fair – and important – to bring that sentiment back to his own doorstep, or that of his employers, if only rhetorically. Of course our academic radical has little to worry about. Readers of this blog are likely to have strong inhibitions regarding the invasion or theft of other people’s property, unlike some enthusiasts of the “radical politics” that Mr Vasudevan finds so exciting.
Vasudevan’s article links to a recent squatting news story, one of a dozen or so such incidents, reactions to which are apparently “an attempt to further sanctify the virtues of private property.” For readers overseas, the incident involved the film director Guy Ritchie, whose partly-renovated home was “seized and reclaimed” by a troupe of squatters known as the Really Free School. Once inside, the group fired up their iPhones and issued an open online invitation to other “occupiers” to join them and “sleepover in the most rah property in London.” A property that isn’t theirs and which they chose to violate because, hey, they could.
When not tweeting furiously, the group decorated Mr Ritchie’s house with banners exhorting “strike,” “occupy” and “resist.” It seems these radical souls imagine they’re being oppressed, though as so often it’s not particularly clear how or by what. A dozen or so presumptuous middle-class “activists” armed with BlackBerrys and iPads are hardly the most plausible members of a “vulnerable community.” The squatters, who refused to leave when confronted by police, claimed they would be engaging in a “collective learning process” with topics including how to steal from public transport and “classes in tarot.”
Update 2:
An anonymous commenter takes exception to my description of squatting as opportunist theft. “Squatting,” we’re told, “is more like borrowing.”
Well, borrowing usually implies consent and the voluntary return, intact, of whatever’s being borrowed. As opposed to a person whose property has been invaded then being forced to use costly legal means to recover it. And on top of this indignity, then having to pay for any repairs and outstanding utility bills. Maybe the borrowers, as our unnamed friend puts it, should just steal the owner’s credit cards and run up a hefty bill. It would save everyone a lot of hassle.
The borrowing shtick is repeated by a squatter in the Guardian comments, with an air of “so what’s the big deal?” A tone that reminds me of the ridiculous Da! Collective, a member of which confidently announced: “Squatting is not a criminal offence. If the owners want to kick us out they’ll have to apply for an eviction notice.” Both comments suggest a belief that the moral onus is, conveniently, on the owner of the property, not the people invading it, damaging it and occupying it without the owner’s permission. So presumably if the actual victim of the trespass doesn’t complain formally via a solicitor, or complain quickly enough, or simply doesn’t know their property has been invaded… hey, it’s their fault, innit?
That must be the “social justice” we hear so much about.