A sobering thought

Makes you think:

The sociologist  Gunnar Heinsohn pointed out that 1,000 German men had 480 sons while 1,000 Afghan men had 4000 sons. (http://theblogprof.blogspot.com/2011/01)

To lose your only son in a distant war is devastating. For your third, fourth, and fifth sons, what else is there for them to do?

A 'progressive' future

An amusing anomaly in my life is that I tick pretty much all of the boxes that should paint me as a 'progressive' in typecasting circles. Indeed I have been called a 'communist' but that was merely because I dared to stand up against injustice in South Africa. Most 'right' (excuse the pun) thinking folk in South Africa would have worn that mantle at some time in their lives.

Yet now living in Australia I feel like a fish out of water primarily because I cannot and will not adopt the stupidity that is daily/weekly/monthly/yearly evidenced as 'progressive thinking' (an oxymoron if ever there was one).

Consider as a pertinent example, the effects of 'progressive thinking' on the American city of Detroit and how much of that tragic cities collapse could so easily have been avoided had the 'rulers' (a word used deliberately) of the Detroit metropolis used but a modicum of good sense, the same good sense and philosophical foundation that originally built it for example.

However the 'elites'  chose another way, an anarchic destruction of all the positive virtues that established America and then embraced that peculiar platform of greedy (and I use that word to describe the union movement[check the facts] rather than the boring demonisation of 'big business') nihilistic, syphilitic, negative, racial hyperbole, 'green' apocalyptic claptrap and immigration 'compassionata' rhetoric that passes for intelligence amongst the 'progressives' and in a surprisingly short period of time look where they ended up.

Be very careful if you think that the same cannot happen here. Just review Gillard's brief 'reign' and the immense damage it has wrought and will still be causing many years from today to catch a glimpse of where the 'progressive' agenda leads...and if you truly believe that Krudd is any better, then you are obviously no history student. In fact it would be quite rational to consider you barking mad; because the very definition of mad is someone who insists on doing the same thing day in and day out yet expecting a different result each day.

The Downfall of Detroit
It took only six decades of “progressive” policies to bring a great city to its knees.

ByMark Steyn

 

One of the thousands of blighted homes in Detroit.

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By the time Detroit declared bankruptcy,  — 40 percent of its streetlamps don’t work; 210 of its 317 public parks have been permanently closed; it takes an hour for police to respond to a 9-1-1 call; only a third of its ambulances are driveable; one-third of the city has been abandoned; the local realtor offers houses on sale for a buck and still finds no takers; etc., etc. — Americans were so inured that the formal confirmation of a great city’s downfall was greeted with little more than a fatalistic shrug.

 

But it shouldn’t be. To achieve this level of devastation, you usually have to be invaded by a foreign power. In the War of 1812, when Detroit was taken by a remarkably small number of British troops without a shot being fired, Michigan’s Governor Hull was said to have been panicked into surrender after drinking heavily. Two centuries later, after an almighty 50-year bender, the city surrendered to itself. The tunnel from Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit, Michigan, is now a border between the First World and the Third World — or, if you prefer, the developed world and the post-developed world. To any American time-transported from the mid 20th century, the city’s implosion would be literally incredible.
.......
.......Given their respective starting points, one has to conclude that Detroit’s Democratic party makes a far more comprehensive wrecking crew than Emperor Bokassa ever did. No bombs, no invasions, no civil war, just “liberal” “progressive” politics day in, day out. Americans sigh and say, “Oh, well, Detroit’s an ‘outlier.’” It’s an outlier only in the sense that it happened here first. The same malign alliance between a corrupt political class, rapacious public-sector unions, and an ever more swollen army of welfare dependents has been adopted in the formally Golden State of California, and in large part by the Obama administration, whose priorities — “health” “care” “reform,” “immigration” “reform” — are determined by the same elite/union/dependency axis. As one droll tweeter put it, “If Obama had a city, it would look like Detroit.”

Masks away!

Do not be fooled into thinking that the left-wing represents a more compassionate choice. The truth of the matter is that the left leaning ideologues are all about power and Chris Kenny nails it with this exposure of one of the lefts most ostentatious 'compassionatas'...an excerpt:

But Burnside [Julian] takes the cake. Last night on Twitter he sent out this message: “Let’s face it: the PNG Arrangement is a shabby deal, but at least if might stop Scott ("illegals") Morrison becoming Immi Minister.” There you have it. All the gnashing of teeth, all the railing against Howard, all the moral vanity boils down to partisan point-scoring. The shabby deal is okay – the human suffering is tolerable – if it drives a party political outcome more desirable for the Melbourne QC. Words fail me.

Barbarians at the gates

A perspicacious excerpt from the brilliant Mark Steyn's After America

A New York Times feature on Berlin graffiti reported it as an art event, a story about ‘an integral component of “Berliner  Strassenkultur”. But it’s actually a tale of civic death, of a public space claimed in perpetuity by the vandals (like graffiti, another word Italy gave the world, as it were). At the sidewalk cafes, Europeans no longer notice it. But it is in a small, aesthetically painful way a surrender to barbarism-and one made even more pathetic by the cultural commentators desperate to pass it off as ‘art’. And it sends a signal to predators of less artistic bent: if you’re unwilling to defend the civic space from these coarse provocations, what others will you give into?

It’s strange and unsettling to walk through cities with so much writing on the wall, and yet whose citizens see everything but. Bernie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia is right: once upon a time, you were certainly an ass if you didn’t know where the ‘writing on the wall’ came from. It was part of the accumulated cultural inheritance.....

.....Instead of paintings and oratorios and other great art about the writing on the wall, Europeans have walls covered in writing, and pretend that its art. Today I doubt one in a thousand high-school students would have clue whence the expression derives. And one sign that the writing’s on the wall is when a society no longer knows what “the writing on the wall” means.
 

Do you know? That is the question.

This is a pastel drawing of an amusing but serious battle between graffiti vandals and a concerned citizen. It takes place on the flyover bridge of the Southern freeway in Adelaide on a road very close to us which is an important artery into the city. The vandals desecration usually lasts for a very short time before the citizen paints over it, and it must be very frustrating (also expensive) but the vandals do not give up that easily, this is a struggle that has gone on for more than a decade so far.
It is a visual demonstration of the need for vigilance and a dogged determination to keep the barabrians at bay.

The real educational slump

[Lucy] Sullivan claims that the socioeconomic distribution of sole parents benefit invites the conclusion “that many sole parent births were not unintended, and that unmarried motherhood has become something of a profession” among less-skilled women with low wage-earning potential… “By the early 1990s it could be declared with confidence that the social theories and associated polices foisted on society by the Progressive Left in the second half of the 20th century were fallacious and destructive.”
 

Such welfare tragics now make up the bulk of the 51% who prefers a duplicitous, left-wing (progressive?)snake-oil salesman as prime minister rather than a moral, successful family man.
Australia is no longer the lucky country it was, because the successful, neo-Marxist: 'long march through the institiutions' campaign has succeeded in rendering it the 'stupid country'.

Phwaaa!

What quote sums up tertiary education these days?

"what’s the opposite of diversity? University."

Bravery personified

A profound and exceptionally brave speech by Lucinda Creighton on the abortion bill in Ireland:

Compassionate, clinical care is what is needed and the government should put all possible resources into providing this for young, vulnerable women. Abortion solves nothing.

I know a number of women who had abortions and deeply regretted it. I genuinely do not know any woman who has had a baby and regretted it. No matter the circumstances, the initial stress, anxiety fear, stigma or concern, we must support women in their hour of need. That is simply our moral and constitutional duty.

Lucinda Creighton is Ireland’s Minister of State for European Affairs.
 

Listen to the speech:  http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/down_with_stifling_groupthink_says_irish_minister