"Since it is so likely that children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage.” C. S. Lewis
Friday, 29 June 2012
I hope they are merely stupid!
I have been reading recently about the period of Egyptian history between 1923 and 1952 when there was a level of political freedom unseen before or since in that benighted land.
I was drawn to this exploration by a marvellous sculpture of Mahmoud Mokhtar's entitled 'Nahdit Misr'(Egypt's Awakening). I love that style of art and was thrilled to see such an excellent example in a place most would not consider to be of great significance to the 'Deco' period.
However what I discovered in my reading was how the political situation was manipulated by cynical, seditious and anarchic factions and how effective these strategies became:
The Nasser-led regime which emerged did not take long to devastate the entire Egyptian economy, and its civil society, even more thoroughly than the great fire of early 1952 had destroyed Cairo. Egypt would never recover. The regime’s destructive power prepared the perfect wasteland conditions for the Islamist recruiting sergeants of the 1970s and beyond.
I can’t help but think of the similarities that exist in our current political situation in Australia. This Labor government appears to be hell bent on destroying the Australian economy and the social fabric on which the country built its current prosperity . The decisions that they have taken and are continuing to pursue do not make any sense unless there is a hidden agenda somewhere.
If I stand back and look at what I am saying I think ‘how did I become a conspiracy theorist’? Yet there doesn’t seem to be any logic to the decisions that this government are taking.
One does not have to be an economic genius to observe how the irrational decisions being enacted are going to destroy this economy. To what purpose? To appease some UN committee, I think not. From the evidence readily available I can only assume that there are powers who wish to create chaos and unstable political and economic conditions sufficient to enable them to step in and rule by fiat.
Mugabe when asked why he allowed the ruinous policies that led to the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy replied in words to the effect that a people who rely on the government to eat are completely within that government’s power. So it appears a strategy emerges from a government that embraces deliberately bad economic policies; that is, another route to the ‘will to power’.
Who said History repeats itself:
The regime (Egyptian) which came to power with US support would soon abolish all vestiges of civil society that were not dependent on the state. Over the next several years, it proceeded to destroy economic property rights and the rule of law. All significant private businesses, and all publishing houses and media, were seized by the state. Thousands of Egyptians were ruined overnight. Many journalists and writers were sent away to camps for years.
Thursday, 28 June 2012
Fascists in sheeps clothing
Unfortunately the exact same thing is happening in Australia. Substitute Obama for Gillard and Bush for Abbott and the situation is almost identical. Read the attached essay and weep for our country:
Socialist or Fascist?
By Thomas Sowell
It bothers me a little when conservatives call Barack Obama a "socialist." He certainly is an enemy of the free market, and wants politicians and bureaucrats to make the fundamental decisions about the economy. But that does not mean that he wants government ownership of the means of production, which has long been a standard definition of socialism.
What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector.
Politically, it is heads-I-win when things go right, and tails-you-lose when things go wrong. This is far preferable, from Obama's point of view, since it gives him a variety of scapegoats for all his failed policies, without having to use President Bush as a scapegoat all the time.
Government ownership of the means of production means that politicians also own the consequences of their policies, and have to face responsibility when those consequences are disastrous — something that Barack Obama avoids like the plague.
Thus the Obama administration can arbitrarily force insurance companies to cover the children of their customers until the children are 26 years old. Obviously, this creates favorable publicity for President Obama. But if this and other government edicts cause insurance premiums to rise, then that is something that can be blamed on the "greed" of the insurance companies.
The same principle, or lack of principle, applies to many other privately owned businesses. It is a very successful political ploy that can be adapted to all sorts of situations.
One of the reasons why both pro-Obama and anti-Obama observers may be reluctant to see him as fascist is that both tend to accept the prevailing notion that fascism is on the political right, while it is obvious that Obama is on the political left.
Back in the 1920s, however, when fascism was a new political development, it was widely — and correctly — regarded as being on the political left. Jonah Goldberg's great book "Liberal Fascism" cites overwhelming evidence of the fascists' consistent pursuit of the goals of the left, and of the left's embrace of the fascists as one of their own during the 1920s.
Mussolini, the originator of fascism, was lionized by the left, both in Europe and in America, during the 1920s. Even Hitler, who adopted fascist ideas in the 1920s, was seen by some, including W.E.B. Du Bois, as a man of the left.
It was in the 1930s, when ugly internal and international actions by Hitler and Mussolini repelled the world, that the left distanced themselves from fascism and its Nazi offshoot — and verbally transferred these totalitarian dictatorships to the right, saddling their opponents with these pariahs.
What socialism, fascism and other ideologies of the left have in common is an assumption that some very wise people — like themselves — need to take decisions out of the hands of lesser people, like the rest of us, and impose those decisions by government fiat.
The left's vision is not only a vision of the world, but also a vision of themselves, as superior beings pursuing superior ends. In the United States, however, this vision conflicts with a Constitution that begins, "We the People..."
That is why the left has for more than a century been trying to get the Constitution's limitations on government loosened or evaded by judges' new interpretations, based on notions of "a living Constitution" that will take decisions out of the hands of "We the People," and transfer those decisions to our betters.
The self-flattery of the vision of the left also gives its true believers a huge ego stake in that vision, which means that mere facts are unlikely to make them reconsider, regardless of what evidence piles up against the vision of the left, and regardless of its disastrous consequences.
Only our own awareness of the huge stakes involved can save us from the rampaging presumptions of our betters, whether they are called socialists or fascists. So long as we buy their heady rhetoric, we are selling our birthright of freedom.
Socialist or Fascist?
By Thomas Sowell
It bothers me a little when conservatives call Barack Obama a "socialist." He certainly is an enemy of the free market, and wants politicians and bureaucrats to make the fundamental decisions about the economy. But that does not mean that he wants government ownership of the means of production, which has long been a standard definition of socialism.
What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector.
Politically, it is heads-I-win when things go right, and tails-you-lose when things go wrong. This is far preferable, from Obama's point of view, since it gives him a variety of scapegoats for all his failed policies, without having to use President Bush as a scapegoat all the time.
Government ownership of the means of production means that politicians also own the consequences of their policies, and have to face responsibility when those consequences are disastrous — something that Barack Obama avoids like the plague.
Thus the Obama administration can arbitrarily force insurance companies to cover the children of their customers until the children are 26 years old. Obviously, this creates favorable publicity for President Obama. But if this and other government edicts cause insurance premiums to rise, then that is something that can be blamed on the "greed" of the insurance companies.
The same principle, or lack of principle, applies to many other privately owned businesses. It is a very successful political ploy that can be adapted to all sorts of situations.
One of the reasons why both pro-Obama and anti-Obama observers may be reluctant to see him as fascist is that both tend to accept the prevailing notion that fascism is on the political right, while it is obvious that Obama is on the political left.
Back in the 1920s, however, when fascism was a new political development, it was widely — and correctly — regarded as being on the political left. Jonah Goldberg's great book "Liberal Fascism" cites overwhelming evidence of the fascists' consistent pursuit of the goals of the left, and of the left's embrace of the fascists as one of their own during the 1920s.
Mussolini, the originator of fascism, was lionized by the left, both in Europe and in America, during the 1920s. Even Hitler, who adopted fascist ideas in the 1920s, was seen by some, including W.E.B. Du Bois, as a man of the left.
It was in the 1930s, when ugly internal and international actions by Hitler and Mussolini repelled the world, that the left distanced themselves from fascism and its Nazi offshoot — and verbally transferred these totalitarian dictatorships to the right, saddling their opponents with these pariahs.
What socialism, fascism and other ideologies of the left have in common is an assumption that some very wise people — like themselves — need to take decisions out of the hands of lesser people, like the rest of us, and impose those decisions by government fiat.
The left's vision is not only a vision of the world, but also a vision of themselves, as superior beings pursuing superior ends. In the United States, however, this vision conflicts with a Constitution that begins, "We the People..."
That is why the left has for more than a century been trying to get the Constitution's limitations on government loosened or evaded by judges' new interpretations, based on notions of "a living Constitution" that will take decisions out of the hands of "We the People," and transfer those decisions to our betters.
The self-flattery of the vision of the left also gives its true believers a huge ego stake in that vision, which means that mere facts are unlikely to make them reconsider, regardless of what evidence piles up against the vision of the left, and regardless of its disastrous consequences.
Only our own awareness of the huge stakes involved can save us from the rampaging presumptions of our betters, whether they are called socialists or fascists. So long as we buy their heady rhetoric, we are selling our birthright of freedom.
Tuesday, 26 June 2012
Cut from the same cloth?
The reality of the enviromentalist vs 'ordinary' human existence is; that the Australian flora and fauna are in a much better shape than the average Aussie 'battler'.
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2012/06/unesco-butt-out
Hopefully the upcoming Aussie government will take a more realistic approach to reality than the current 'earthians' but given recent mutterings from the Liberal back-benches perhaps that future is no foregone conclusion.
One can but hope!
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2012/06/unesco-butt-out
Hopefully the upcoming Aussie government will take a more realistic approach to reality than the current 'earthians' but given recent mutterings from the Liberal back-benches perhaps that future is no foregone conclusion.
One can but hope!
Culture wars
The foundational centre-piece of socialism's cultural war strategy:
When are conservatives going to emerge with courage?...Courage to confront the ideologically driven and immeasurably stupid....the fundamental attack on objective truth, moral authority and bedrock cultural values — (nor) the hijacking of language which effectively redefined the centre ground in leftist terms.
Sunday, 24 June 2012
Wierdo!
Erudite word-smithery that perfectly captures the magical mystery tour that is Julian Assange:
"Irony doesn’t quite capture the mordant weirdness of Assange seeking sanctuary in a country where the suppression of information is a flagship government policy."
Saturday, 23 June 2012
Climate scam
No matter how committed you may be to the crackpot theory of Anthropogenic global warming, this extract from a paper by the former chief atmospheric scientist of the CSIRO must give you pause...if not then you are motivated by ideology and not fact which makes your contribution nothing more than uninformed and possibly criminally tainted opinion.
But the real worry with climate research is that it is on the very edge of what is called postmodern science.... Postmodern science envisages a sort of political nirvana in which scientific theory and results can be consciously and legitimately manipulated to suit either the dictates of political correctness or the policies of the government of the day....and
Climategate scandal of 2009, wherein thousands of emails were leaked from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England, showed that certain senior members of the research community were, and presumably still are, quite capable of deliberately selecting data in order to overstate the evidence for dangerous climate change…
Climate science has transformed itself from a research backwater a few decades ago into one of the greatest public-good scientific cash cows ever devised. In Australia, for instance, there is a separate federal Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency specifically devoted to implementing (buying?) the social change required to limit global warming. The livelihood of many of the climate scientists within the CSIRO and elsewhere is now dependent on grants from that department. It is not a situation conducive to sceptical outlook and balanced advice…
No doubt these scientists genuinely believe in their own perception of the climate change story. But why do mainstream scientists go along with the inevitable overstatement associated with the activism business?
One factor is a form of loyalty to colleagues. Another, bearing in mind the singular nature of the funding source, is the need to eat.
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