Think Well

Theodore Dalrymple has most certainly become one of my favourite sages. This latest brief extract is out of his book 'Spoilt Rotten:  the toxic cult of sentimentality',  a corker of a book if I may say.

“Sentimentality has triumphed in field after field. It has blighted the lives of millions of children, creating a dialectic of overindulgence and neglect. It has destroyed educational standards and caused untold emotional instability because of the theories of human relations it has espoused. Sentimentality has been the forerunner and accomplice of brutality wherever the policies suggested by it have been put into place. The cult of feeling destroys the ability to think, or even the awareness that is necessary to think. Pascal was absolutely right when he said:

Travaillons done a’ bien penser. Voila la principe de la morale.

Let us labour, therefore, to think well. That is the principle of morality.”

Dalrymple nails it!

As always Theodore Dalrymple articulates our cultural dis-ease:

“No age is golden to those who live in it, and it is not often in human history that men are more grateful for progress than worried by current imperfections.

Even so, our current age seems exceptional in the peculiarity of its unease. Never in human history have people lived such long and pain-free lives; never have so many people, and so high proportion of people , had such freedom to choose how to live, what goals to pursue, and how to divert themselves. On the other hand, never have so many people felt anxious and depressed, and resorted to pills to ease their distress. Mankind has laboured long and hard to produce a cornucopia for itself, only to discover that the cornucopia does not bring the happiness expected, but only a different kind of anxiety.”

Pork pies & satanic plots

As all of us have discovered through life (and no doubt to our chagrin), little lies lead to larger lies multiplying at an exponential rate until we are enmeshed in an ocean of lies. (The pun is intended with regards to the following story).

Lies form the very bedrock of the myth of Anthropogenic Global warming.

The following excerpt from Jo Nova's blog shows how while the 'experts' are blaming global warming the actual truth of this 'flood' is distinctly more prosaic.

Christopher Booker explains in The Spectator that it’s not global warming that caused such ghastly floods in the UK, but incompetence and a Green EU wetland plan. He lives near Somerset, (SW England) so he started investigating the rising water six weeks ago — which has now become widespread inundation there, with damages estimated at over £100 million.

As usual, this was a process of small government becoming collectivized big-government. In the Spectator he writes that before 1996, local groups of farmers and engineers managed the drains, but in 1996 the EA (Environmental Agency) took over. Regular dredging stopped happening, the pumping stations were neglected (or stopped, see the link to the note from the Ghost below), and the local drainage boards found it hard to get anything done with the EA red tape. Then things got worse. In 2002, “the Baroness Young of Old Scone, a Labour peeress, became the agency’s new chief executive”. As Booker goes on to note, she used to run the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Natural England, not that that’s a bad thing per se, just that she had different aims to the people who lived there. The locals saw what was coming, they feared that the river had become choked and silted, they wanted control back. Instead, what they got was some parts of Somerset suddenly “returned to wetland” — but that, it seems, was kinda the goal.

Booker and Richard North pored through documents and found remarkable quotes. According to the Baroness, the cheapest way to get a wetland was to “stop drainage” and let “nature take its course”.

From Christopher Booker  in “Revealed: How green ideology turned a deluge into a flood“

“A key part in this had been played by those EU directives which govern almost everything the Environment Agency gets up to — including two with which Baroness Young was already familiar when she presided over the RSPB — setting out the EU’s policy on ‘habitats’ and ‘birds’. But just as important was a 2007 directive on the ‘management of flood risks’, which required ‘flood plains’, in the name of ‘biodiversity’, to be made subject to increased flooding.
“This was just what Lady Young was looking for. She had already been giving lectures and evidence to a House of Lords committee on the EU’s earlier Water Framework directive, proclaiming that one of her agency’s top priorities should be to create more ‘habitats’ for wildlife by allowing wetlands to revert to nature. As she explained in an interview in 2008, creating new nature reserves can be very expensive. By far the cheapest way was simply to allow nature to take its course, by halting the drainage of wetlands such as the Somerset Levels. The recipe she proudly gave in her lectures, repeated to that Lords committee, was: for ‘instant wildlife, just add water’.
“In 2008 her agency therefore produced a 275-page document categorising areas at risk of flooding under six policy options. These ranged from Policy 1, covering areas where flood defences should be improved, down to category 6, where, in the name of ‘biodiversity’, the policy should be to ‘take action to increase the frequency of flooding’. The paper placed the Somerset Levels firmly under Policy 6, where the intention was quite deliberately to allow more flooding. The direct consequences of that we are now seeing round the clock on our television screens.

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

Ultimately this was about wilderness over people:

…. in no nation has this ‘green’ ideology found such a sympathetic response as in Britain, where the senior officials of the EA — 14 of them earning more than £100,000 a year — have long been more swayed by those Agenda 21 doctrines of ‘sustainability’ and ‘biodiversity’ than by any practical concern for the needs of people, homes, businesses and farmland.
Read the whole feature: Revealed: how green ideology turned a deluge into a flood
 

One of the seminal lies of the AGW movement is that nature left alone will not only 'heal itself', but it will form a better world for all. Our life experience tells a different story. Weeds, predators, and human civilisation cannot co exist without some form of management. One choice currently being touted by some elite/greenies proposes a; 'culling of the human population':

A top scientist gave a speech to the Texas Academy of Science last month in which he advocated the need to exterminate 90% of the population through the airborne ebola virus. Dr. Eric R. Pianka's chilling comments, and their enthusiastic reception again underscore the elite's agenda to enact horrifying measures of population control.

Pianka's speech was ordered to be kept off the record before it began as cameras were turned away and hundreds of students, scientists and professors sat in attendance.

Saying the public was not ready to hear the information presented, Pianka began by exclaiming, “We're no better than bacteria!”, as he jumped into a doomsday malthusian rant about overpopulation destroying the earth.

Standing in front of a slide of human skulls, Pianka gleefully advocated airborne ebola as his preferred method of exterminating the necessary 90% of humans, choosing it over AIDS because of its faster kill period. Ebola victims suffer the most tortuous deaths imaginable as the virus kills by liquefying the internal organs. The body literally dissolves as the victim writhes in pain bleeding from every orifice.
 

and.......

At the end of Pianka's speech the audience erupted not to a chorus of boos and hisses but to a raucous reception of applause and cheers as audience members clammered to get close to the scientist to ask him follow up questions. Pianka was later presented with a distinguished scientist award by the Academy. Pianka is no crackpot. He has given lectures to prestigious universities worldwide.

One horrified observer was able to make notes on the speech and our gratitude goes to Forrest M. Mims for bringing this sickening display to the attention of the world.

Throughout history elites have invented justification for barbaric practices as a cover for their true agenda of absolute power and control over populations. Up until the 19th century, the transatlantic slave trade was justified by saying that the practice was biblical and therefore morally redeemable in nature, despite the fact that no such bible passage exists.

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

In the foreword to his biography If I Were An Animal, Prince Philip wrote, "In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation."

National Security Memo 200, dated April 24, 1974, and titled "Implications of world wide population growth for U.S. security & overseas interests," says:

"Dr. Henry Kissinger proposed in his memorandum to the NSC that "depopulation should be the highest priority of U.S. foreign policy towards the Third World." He quoted reasons of national security, and because `(t)he U.S. economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less-developed countries ... Wherever a lessening of population can increase the prospects for such stability, population policy becomes relevant to resources, supplies and to the economic interests of U.S."

Kissinger prepared a depopulation manifesto for President Jimmy Carter called 'Global 2000' which detailed using food as a weapon to depopulate the third world.

One of the most chilling admissions of deadly intent came from the lips of the late Jacques Cousteau, the sainted environmental icon. In an interview with the UNESCO Courier for November 1991 the famed oceanographer said:

"The damage people cause to the planet is a function of demographics — it is equal to the degree of development. One American burdens the earth much more than twenty Bangaladeshes. The damage is directly linked to consumption. Our society is turning toward more and needless consumption. It is a vicious circle that I compare to cancer...."

Tumour rumour

A cancer at the heart of Australian education; Marxism:
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/were-paying-for-the-teaching-of-marxist-politics/story-fni0ffxg-1226828632591

Media bias?

Why is it that the left side of politics are always considered to be the most compassionate, least racist and always considerate when the facts actually indicate the opposite?

A case in point is that of Bess Price, aboriginal elder and member of the liberal party in Northern Australia:

 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.

Oops!

Unintended consequences that we are all paying for on a daily basis:

The project began in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when liberalism embraced the sexual revolution. In place of traditional standards of sexual morality, which held that the proper expression of human sexuality was within marriage and with a view to the generation of new life, liberals began to preach a message of sexual liberation. In matters of sex, they announced, whatever is done between “consenting adults” is none of society’s business.

The tradition had held that sexual conduct is properly governed by both procedural and substantive norms. The procedural norm was provided by consent: forcible sex was condemned as the crime of rape. But consent was not the only issue, because sex was not governed only by a procedural norm. A substantive norm was provided by marriage and procreation. Thus, according to the tradition, adults might consent freely to certain forms of sex—fornication, adultery, or sodomy, for example—that would nevertheless still be wrong because of their inconsistency with the substantive purposes of human sexuality. The sexual revolution sought to strip sex of its substantive norms and leave only the procedural norm in place. This was the effect of slogans affirming the legitimacy of anything “consenting adults” might do.

As this kind of thinking was put forward by a certain kind of liberal, thoughtful conservatives warned about its revolutionary consequences. The liberal claim—that consent is the only ethically relevant concern in relation to sex—has the potential to erode all traditional sexual morality and all legislation based upon it. If consent is all that is required, then fornication cannot be wrong, prostitution cannot be wrong, and homosexual intercourse cannot be wrong.

The sexual revolution could not have succeeded to the extent that it did—that is, the public could not have embraced the liberal reduction of sexual ethics to “consent”—unless these radical consequences were ignored or denied. Those who warned about the ultimate consequences were disregarded. No decisive cultural change, no radical alteration in the nation’s way of life, was in the offing: just a little “loosening up” with regard to sex. Such claims have been proven wrong: with regard to sexual morality, the America of 2014 would be unrecognizable to the America of 1964. If the liberals of that era did not lie about the consequences of what they were doing, they were not fully honest, either. Like an unscrupulous merchant, they did not fully inform their customers of all the consequences of what they were buying.

Perhaps, however, the liberals of that era did not acknowledge all the consequences of what they were doing because they themselves did not fully understand them. Many of the liberals of that era probably would have agreed, if pressed, that certain forms of sexual intercourse were improper whether or not they were consented to. With a residual decency that far exceeded their theoretical acuity, they probably took it for granted that certain forms of sex would remain outside the moral pale. For such liberals, rhetoric about “consenting adults” was probably intended to do no more than legitimize premarital sex. Such people were duping themselves as well as those upon whom they practiced such rhetoric, and therefore could not be accused of willful dishonesty. In any case, it is difficult to accuse a political movement of breaking faith over the course of two generations. Today’s sexual revolutionists may be the heirs of the liberals of the late 1960s and early 1970s predecessors, but they are not, for the most part, the same people.(Excerpt from Carson Holloway's article in Mercatornet 14.2.2014)  

U.N. hypocrisy

For many years extreme left wing Utopianists have pushed for one world government:

GREENS leader Bob Brown - whose party assumes sole balance of power in the Senate tomorrow - wants Australia to join an international push for a global parliament.

This ''people's assembly'' would be based on one person, one vote, one value and was being vigorously promoted in Europe and the United Nations, he said yesterday.(Age, June 30, 2011)
 

Who would assume the mantle of the world's policeman? One assumes that 'honour' would fall to the UN and this article tells us what that would be like:
 http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/the_uns_zero_compliance_with_zero_tolerance_of_abuse