I know my rights!

Joseph Conrad's description of a man many of us may have had the misfortune to meet, serve with, work with or perhaps in a moment of deep and serious self-evaluation, mirrored in some unenviable way:

This clean white forecastle was his refuge; the place where he could be lazy; where he could wallow, and lie and eat—and curse the food he ate; where he could display his talents for shirking work, for cheating, for cadging; where he could find surely some one to wheedle and some one to bully—and where he would be paid for doing all this. They all knew him. Is there a spot on earth where such a man is unknown, an ominous survival testifying to the eternal fitness of lies and impudence? . . . He was the man that cannot steer, that cannot splice, that dodges the work on dark nights; that, aloft, holds on frantically with both arms and legs, and swears at the wind, the sleet, the darkness; the man who curses the sea while others work. The man who is the last out and the first in when all hands are called. The man who can’t do most things and won’t do the rest. The pet of philanthropists and self-seeking landlubbers. The sympathetic and deserving creature that knows all about his rights, but knows nothing of courage, of endurance, and of the unexpressed faith, of the unspoken loyalty that knits together a ship’s company. The independent offspring of the ignoble freedom of the slums full of disdain and hate for the austere servitude of the sea.

Amen

this comment by Miranda Devine speaks the truth about conservation. The truth is that nature unsupervised turns to weeds, disintegration and ultimately destroys all and sundry. This, as Christians are aware, has to do with the Genesis curse.
Leave your garden to return to nature and see what happens...'nature' will be strangled by weeds, and as any game park ranger will testify, cultivation is the key to conservation.

The night after Ludlum gave his nasty little speech, Abbott delivered his own speech around the corner, in the Great Hall of Parliament House, at the annual dinner of the Australian Forest Products Association. It was an ode to the timber industry that could only be interpreted as a giant finger to the green movement.

“I salute you as people who love the natural world, as people who love what Mother Nature gives us and who want to husband it for the long-term best interests of humanity.”

He called foresters the “ultimate conservationists”. Which of course they are. They were taking care of trees long before middle-class professional Greens showed up to destroy their livelihood.

A well-kept forest is a joy for flora, fauna and human economic interests. Forest locked away as national parks, on the other hand, we have seen become incinerated moonscapes. After deadly runaway bushfires, the silence of the koalas is deafening and nothing will grow for years.

The scorched earth of a burned out national park can be seen as a metaphor for what the green movement has done to Australia. From Tasmania’s rotten supplicant economy to the corporate victims of the carbon tax, from bulging immigration detention centres to vast green bureaucracies sucking the taxpayer dry for zero environmental gain.

Abbott’s words fell on the room of foresters like a chorus of angels signifying the dawning of the light.

“Man and the environment are meant for each other. The last thing we should want — if we want to genuinely improve our environment … is to ban men and women from enjoying it, is to ban men and women from making the most of it …

Hallelujah.

Surrender

One of the more disturbing comments I have read recently:

"Political correctness might have become so insidious that it is now a thought-crime to support the repeal of laws that stifle free speech lest we be tarred with the words of others. Far from emulating Voltaire’s famous line on free speech, the political class surrenders."

Hosing down the neurons

From the horses mouth, so to speak:

But don’t take my word for it. Lesbian Tammy Bruce, former president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women, put it this way: “During my activism in the feminist and gay communities, the conditioning was nonstop. The effort, using the mass media primarily, was and is to brainwash the public into believing that certain sexual practices are merely ‘alternative lifestyles’… I was told that my describing S&M as a sickness put gay people at risk. Why? Because if any ‘alternative’ sexual practice was condemned, there would be the slippery slope, and no gays would be safe from those maniacal Christian fundamentalists. By default, it was argued, we had a responsibility to embrace and support anyone who challenged the sexual and social status quo.”

Bummer ahead

The following article illustrates how artists in Australia today (that is those who 'play the game' so as to receive 'official' acceptance and the filthy lucre that flows from said acceptance), are no longer independent in the true sense of the word. Such sheep are happy to accede to the demands of their left-wing patrons irrespective of what  they might feel personally about any issue, and they will do it in ignorance of the logical consequences because who in the world would think it is the artists duty to think logically?

Puhlease my brother...we are artistes!

In the past when the funding dried up they ran bleating to the government and begged for more moolah and when the lefties were in power they got it.

I suspect that it will not turn out so comfortably this time.

Watch this space for the bleating, hand-wringing and emotional diatribes.

Australian artists demonstrate the collective instinct that distinguishes the mediocre, the intolerance of difference that distinguishes the totalitarian and the contempt for consequences (as in the death of 1100 boat people thanks to policies they never protested) that distinguishes the adolescent. In other words, the Left has won:

The Biennale of Sydney has announced it will sever ties with its founding partner Transfield, caving into pressure from artists angered by the company’s links to Australia’s offshore detention centres.
The board of the Biennale of Sydney also announced on Friday that Luca Belgiorno-Nettis had resigned as chairman, less than two weeks before the event is scheduled to begin. Mr Belgiorno-Nettis’s resignation after 14 years and the severing of ties with Transfield represents a huge win for artists and refugee advocates and an embarrassing backdown for the Biennale board, which claimed the Biennale could not exist without Transfield and pledged its loyalty to the Belgiorno-Nettis family two weeks ago.

Forked tongues

The BBC (Beeb) knocks Orwellian 'doublespeak' out of the ballpark when it comes to their 'correspondents' (commissars?) habit of manipulating the facts, take this comment for example:

And Daniel Hannan on unflattering facts:  

One of my constituents once complained to the Beeb about a report on the repression of Mexico’s indigenous peoples, in which the government was labelled right-wing. The governing party, he pointed out, was a member of the Socialist International and, again, the give-away was in its name: Institutional Revolutionary Party. The BBC’s response was priceless. Yes, it accepted that the party was socialist, “but what our correspondent was trying to get across was that it is authoritarian.”

Great Scott

One of France's most famous contemporary philosophers interviewed by Der Spiegel speaks on the failures of multi-cultural immigration in France.
Like France, Australia's loopy left-wing sentimentalists have condemned us in the past to such a fate, the evidence of which is in the news on an almost daily basis, and the continued flood of such unsuitable 'citizen' candidates has only been circumvented by the boldness (in the face of socialistic savagery) and fortitude of immigration minister Scott Morrison.
An excerpt: (red highlights mine for emphasis)

Finkielkraut: Immigration used to go hand-in-hand with integration into French culture. That was the rule of the game. Many of the new arrivals no longer want to play by that rule. If the immigrants are in the majority in their neighborhoods, how can we integrate them? There used to be mixed marriages, which is crucial to miscegenation. But their numbers are declining. Many Muslims in Europe are re-Islamizing themselves. A woman who wears the veil effectively announces that a relationship with a non-Muslim is out of the question for her.

SPIEGEL: Aren't many immigrants excluded from mainstream society primarily for economic reasons?

Finkielkraut: The left wanted to resolve the problem of immigration as a social issue, and proclaimed that the riots in the suburbs were a kind of class struggle. We were told that these youths were protesting against unemployment, inequality and the impossibility of social advancement. In reality we saw an eruption of hostility toward French society. Social inequality does not explain the anti-Semitism, nor the misogyny in the suburbs, nor the insult "filthy French." The left does not want to accept that there is a clash of civilizations.
 

The full interview: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-french-philosopher-finkielkraut-on-muslims-and-integration-a-937404.html