Red sunset, black night, bright new day!

Welcome to our new world reality; rapidly deepening its roots in Australia if we are not careful:

Silent Night

December 24, 2011 2:10 P.M.

By Mark Steyn    

On this Christmas Eve, one of the great unreported stories throughout what we used to call Christendom is the persecution of Christians around the world. In Egypt, the “Arab Spring” is going so swimmingly that Copts are already fleeing Egypt and, for those Christians that remain, Midnight Mass has to be held in the daylight for security reasons. In Iraq, midnight services have been canceled entirely for fear of bloodshed, part of the remorseless de-Christianizing that has been going on, quite shamefully, under an American imperium.

Not merely the media but Christian leaders in the west seem to be embarrassed by behavior that doesn’t conform to their dimwitted sappiness about “Facebook Revolutions”. It took a Jew to deliver this line:

When Lord Sacks, chief rabbi in England, rose in the House of Lords to speak about the persecution of Christians, he quoted Martin Luther King. “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

Do not be ignorant of the reality that our own self-loathing, lefty, 'useful idiots' are unwittingly preparing the ground for more and more sharia intimidation to gain ascendancy in this still marvellous country.
We are engaged in a never-ending battle and its current 'black knights' include those representatives of the 'religion of peace'.

Ah...hollow men indeed!

Mark Steyn notes well the root cause of much of the 'hollowness' at the centre of Western lives today:

The notion of life as a self-growth experience is more radical than it sounds. For most of human history, functioning societies have honored the long run: It's why millions of people have children, build houses, plant trees, start businesses, make wills, put up beautiful churches in ordinary villages, fight and, if necessary, die for your country. A nation, a society, a community is a compact between past, present and future, in which the citizens, in Tom Wolfe's words at the dawn of the "Me Decade," "conceive of themselves, however unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream."

Much of the developed world climbed out of the stream. You don't need to make material sacrifices: The state takes care of all that. You don't need to have children. And you certainly don't need to die for king and country. But a society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for: It's no longer a stream, but a stagnant pool.

Christmas Cheer

I hope that these comments by the well qualified Jennifer Fulwiler prove to be prescient as opposed to wishful:

I’ve thought for a long time that the pro-life position will be the default position in the future. I fully believe that 100 years from now, the vast majority of people will consider abortion morally wrong—modern technology has made it too hard to deny the dignity of human life within the womb. The only question was when the shift would finally happen, when society would finally stop clinging to the antiquated, unscientific ideas about unborn children. Survey data has been looking promising for a while, but the internet reaction to the Duggar photos seals it. There is no question that our society has far more respect for unborn human life than it used to.

Ten years ago, the average person would have felt uncomfortable admitting it if she thought abortion were wrong; in the future, I think that public opinion will have shifted to the extent that it will not be socially acceptable to be in favor of abortion. And I believe that history will point to 2011 as the year the balance of public opinion tipped, and the momentum began moving in a pro-life direction.

I believe that we have just witnessed the tide turn.

Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/pro-lifers-the-tide-just-turned/#ixzz1hPXVDgbe

THWACK!!!!!!

Stephen Kates hits the ideological nail on the head with this statement:

And when you look at every other value the left runs with, the will to interfere in our everyday lives is not merely a nuisance but is frequently a very large problem with each separate failure leading to more government involvement to repair the damage the previous sets of involvement have caused.

http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2011/12/havel-vs-kim

And Martin Durkin does the same with this:

Who poses the greater threat to freedom?   Colonel Gaddafi?  The Taliban?  Or let’s look closer to home, at a sinister group with far, far greater influence on the future of Western civilization.

The Green zealots, with their bicycles and wispy dresses and organic fruit juice, should have us quaking in our boots.  With terrifying single-mindedness, the Green movement is waging war against freedom, for more State control.   And they’ve been at it from the start. 

In his Population Bomb (written in the 60s) Paul Ehrlich says, ‘The policeman against environmental deterioration must be the powerful Department of Population and the Environment.’   Sounds scary, but when the future of the planet hangs in the balance, there’s no room for half measures.   

E. F. Schumacher, in his classic green text Small is Beautiful, advocates, in place of capitalist free markets, a ‘national plan’ imposed by ‘some central agency’.  And he reminds us, in sinister tones, ‘Planning (as I suggest the term should be used) is inseparable from power’.  National planning by a central agency would, he says, give us ‘a more democratic and dignified system of industrial administration’.    And, with topsy-turvy logic, he equates State control with freedom, ‘private ownership of the means of production is severely limited in its freedom of choice of objectives, because it is compelled to be profit-seeking, and tends to take a narrow and selfish view of things.  Public ownership gives complete freedom in the choice of objectives and can therefore be used for any purpose that may be chosen.’   How free they must all have felt in the old Soviet Union!

NB the similarities

When Vaclav Klaus speaks about the communism he lived under and its intellectual partners, it sounds like he is describing the Labor/Green/ABC alliance in Australia today:

The communist politicians needed their intellectual fellow-travelers.  They needed their “dealings in ideas”, their “shaping of public opinion”, their apology of the inhuman, irrational and inefficient regime. They needed their ability to supply them with general, abstract and utopian ideas. They especially needed their willingness to deal with the hypothetical future instead of criticising the very much less rosy reality.

...The question is what kind of ideas is favoured by the intellectuals. The question is whether the intellectuals are neutral in their choice of ideas with which they are ready to deal with. Hayek argued that they are not. They do not hold or try to spread all kinds of ideas. They have very clear and, in some respect, very understandable preferences for some of them. They prefer ideas, which give them jobs and income and which enhance their power and prestige.

They, therefore, look for ideas with specific characteristics. They look for ideas, which enhance the role of the state because the state is usually their main employer, sponsor or donator. That is not all. According to Hayek “the power of ideas grows in proportion to their generality, abstractness, and even vagueness”. Hence it is not surprising that the intellectuals are mostly interested in abstract, not directly implementable ideas. This is also the way of thinking, in which they have comparative advantage. They are not good at details. They do not have ambitions to solve a problem

...They were not “valued” (or evaluated) by the invisible hand of the market but by the very visible hand of the rulers of that society. To my great regret many intellectuals were not able (or did not want) to understand the dangerous implications of such an arrangement.

As a result of this, and, again, it was no great surprise to me, after the fall of communism, in our suddenly free society, where many (if not all) previous constraints were removed practically over night, the first frustrated and openly protesting group were the intellectuals – “journalists, teachers, publicists, radio commentators, writers of fiction, and artists” (to quote Hayek). They were protesting against the unpleasant constraints created by the market. They found out very rapidly that the free society (and free markets) may not need so much of their service as they were used to in the past. They especially understood that their valuation by the impersonal forces of supply and demand may be not only less favorable than their own self-valuation (and Robert Nozick is right when he says that “intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people”) but even less favorable than that of politicians and bureaucrats of the old regime. They became, therefore, the first visible and noisy critics of our new free society we had been dreaming of having for decades.

The compplete text of the article is @ : http://www.klaus.cz/clanky/2171 and makes for interesting reading.

Sanity prevails

David Cameron appears to be emerging from his straitjacket. Melanie Phillips reports:

For against a background in which Christian belief is constantly denigrated and ridiculed, eyebrows are raised if politicians talk about God and even the Church of England seems embarrassed to do so, Mr Cameron nevertheless defended Christianity as essential to British society.

...Mr Cameron honed in on the real cause — the replacement of Biblical codes of behaviour by moral neutrality.

He was absolutely right to say that bad choices have too often been defended as just different lifestyles, and that ‘live and let live’ has too often become ‘do what you please’. Nowhere is this more disastrously true — although he did not spell this out in his speech — than in the breakdown of the traditional family

 ...He was right to say that this mentality helped cause some of the social problems that lay at the heart of the anarchic lawlessness in this summer’s riots, and also that the absence of moral codes had allowed some bankers and politicians to behave with scant regard for the rest of society.

And he was also right — and brave — to stress that Britain remains a Christian country, and that it is vital to acknowledge that the belief in universal human dignity and equality is rooted in the Bible.

You don’t have to be a Christian to grasp that the decline of religious belief in Britain has, in turn, eroded the social glue that keeps society together. So, bravo to the Prime Minister for an unexpectedly traditional speech.

Indeed bravo to him for saying what he has, however, Christianity was never meant as a social panacea, it is the Truth; therefore let us pray that truth will prevail and then watch as the benefits flow on to society as history shows it will.
A question remains, is it too late? And by this I do not mean for those who might be redeemed by Truth, but for Western civilisation in general.
Some comments would be welcome.

Be of great courage my son!

Paul Johnson musing on the value of university:

Indeed, the study of universities and the great men and women who have attended them leads me to think that the best of these schools are characterized not so much by what they teach and how they teach it but by the extent they provide opportunities and encouragement for students to teach themselves. The best also help to instill certain intellectual virtues in young minds, including respect for the indispensable foundation of democracy, the rule of law; the need to back up opinions with clear arguments, empirical evidence and hard work; the varying importance of resolute conviction and friendly compromise, when appropriate; open-mindedness at all times; and the perpetual need for courage in the pursuit of truth.

Can't argue with that!