Time to act

The following excerpt makes for sobering reading. Whilst I am convinced that Barry is indeed as duplicitous as this passage would suggest, I do not believe he is quite as competent as this author allows. However, that does not mean that he is not being directed by extremely competent strategists and alternate powers-behind-the-throne as it were. His history suggests that this is indeed a probability and again his history suggests that this 'brains trust' is more than capable of capitalising on any and all events:

Obama understands this base so well because he is one of them. Obama is not merely playing for short-term political interest. He actually believes in what he is doing. He agrees with the happy talk about how great it is to pivot to a pro-Iran policy. He, too, feels the personal satisfaction of seeing the Israelis in trouble and fear.

In this sense, the president is cynically taking advantage of the ObamaCare panic in his own party. Democrats at risk of losing their seats will allow him to push an appeasement policy so dangerous that normally he would be stopped by outraged bipartisan opposition.

Because of the blow ObamaCare has dealt the party, Democrats can't afford to embarrass the president with a foreign policy failure. They, too, are desperate for cheerful New York Times reading for their voters. Letting Iran go nuclear, even a Mideast war, is not as important to them as their doomed feeling from the ObamaCare launch.

This is irresponsible politics as its worst: the ObamaCare of foreign policy

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/11/desperate_democrats_bow_to_iran.html#ixzz2m5HwbKpF

And yet I cannot say I am surprised. Unfortunately it indicates that the gloves have come off in the undeclared culture wars between conservative and 'progressive'(the TRULY fascist) ideological values in the Western cultures. In Australia the hard left perspectives of the 'Green[Gramscian]/Labor[Fabian]/main-stream-media[useful idiots]' have now been unveiled and they no longer disguise their Judeo-Christian culture crippling agendas any more. You only have to read the Fairfax mouthpieces and/or listen to the ABC to see and hear that.

Good! Let the battle commence. Conservative and traditionally minded people and governing parties have got to start fighting fire with fire. Conservatives are notoriously dis-inclined to manipulate and play the nepotistic game, hence 'conservative values', however there needs to be a scorched earth policy put in place before the conservatives can begin to build.

 In Australia the Abbott government must put aside its timidity and begin to cauterize the wounds created in our society by successive layers of ideological poison. Unions, higher (and lower) education needs to be addressed, the media mouthpieces must be matched by well funded alternative voices and where public money is being used to subvert coalition values such money flows must be stopped.

The inevitable bleating, screaming, and subsequent catatonic behaviours must be borne stoically but not listened to if this government is to put Australia on the path to greatness once again. The ABC must be neutered, if the enemies of Australia want to engage challenging the newly elected government, fine! But it is not right that 'we the conservative(majority)public' must pay towards our own demise. That is just stupid and suicidal.

The one thing that the conservative/traditionalists have in their favour is courage. The 'progressives' have so neutered their own value systems that there is nothing left that they will truly fight for, they lack the courage as well as the fortitude. What will be seen, and is being manifested all over the place is that the true ideological motivations and groups who hide behind the mealy-mouthpieces will emerge from the shadows and those are going to be tough...but we can still win. Not least because those behind the scenes are Godless and at this moment still in the minority. But time is of the essence.

Madness rules

Creeping (creepy?) totalitarianism:

If you ever wanted evidence that big government leads to small citizens, just take a look at the madness emanating out of the ACT’s health bureaucrats. According to a report, ACT bureaucrats want to ban any “high risk” food from being sold at community events.

What are the “high risk” foods? Box Jellyfish jelly? Stonefish with salad? Blue-ringed octopi with chips? If you guessed any of these things you’d be wrong, according to the report:

NOT content with interfering in fund-raising barbecues, the ACT government’s food safety bureaucrats have turned their attention to school fetes, telling parents they cannot sell their homemade quiches any more.

The government has this month enforced bans on a list of popular home-made dishes, telling parents they cannot sell foods it has labelled ”high risk”. That list includes spring rolls, casseroles or any other dishes containing meat or dairy, such as cakes containing custard or cream.

Astonishingly the article then goes on to identify that this proposal has been flagged despite:

ACT Health also [having] no data on food poisonings at school fund-raising events.

This is madness. Risk isn’t something to be avoided, it is something to be managed. The trade off from such a stupid proposal is that civil society is smashed for regulator’s piece of mind. It’s the perfect example of big government being the enemy of community.

- See more at: http://freedomwatch.ipa.org.au/marie-antoinette-bureaucrats-cry-dont-let-them-eat-quiche/#sthash.05YQRCs6.dpuf

To see or not to see......

One of the (many) reasons that the Post Modernist trashes history is because they consider themselves (evolutionarily thinking) to be further down the ever increasing track of intelligence formation and therefore above all that has come before. An illusion that holds profound and disastrous consequences.
In fact if the bible is true (and I believe it is) we are actually 'devolving' in both physical and mental capacity and it appears neuro-science backs me up in this assumption.

Discover magazine claims that the size of human brain is gradually decreasing for the past 20,000 years.“Over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimetres to 1,350 cubic centimetres, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball,” according to a Daily Mail report quoting Kathleen McAuliffe in Discover magazine.
 

What is so very tragic is that they sacrifice the vast stores of knowledge accumulated by other clever people over generations and that they do it all for an illusion. The truly intelligent like Newton acknowledged that it was not by their intelligence alone that brilliant men (and women) made huge advancements, but it was by standing on the shoulders of those who went before them.

Take for example Blaise Pascal. One of histories most creative geniuses. I love his perspicacious take on the modern human condition and in particular this extract about the way we ferret out amusements to occupy our every waking minute because we hate having to think to deeply.

Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he faces his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness. And at once there wells up from the depths of his soul boredom, gloom, depression, chagrin, resentment, despair.

Pascal says there are two ways people avoid thinking about such matters: diversion and indifference. Regarding diversion, he says we fill up our time with relatively useless activities simply to avoid facing the truth of our wretchedness. "The natural misfortune of our mortality and weakness is so miserable," he says, "that nothing can console us when we really think about it. . . . The only good thing for man, therefore, is to be diverted so that he will stop thinking about his circumstances." Business, gambling, and entertainment are examples of things which keep us busy in this way.

The other response to our condition is indifference. The most important question we can ask is What happens after death? Life is but a few short years, and death is forever. Our state after death should be of paramount importance, shouldn't it? But the attitude people take is this:

Just as I do not know where I came from, so I do not know where I am going. All I know is that when I leave this world I shall fall forever into oblivion, or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing which of the two will be my lot for eternity. Such is my state of mind, full of weakness and uncertainty. The only conclusion I can draw from all this is that I must pass my days without a thought of trying to find out what is going to happen to me.

Pascal is appalled that people think this way, and he wants to shake people out of their stupor and make them think about eternity. Thus, the condition of man is his starting point for moving people toward a genuine knowledge of God.

Collectivist mania

The logical outcomes of the collectivist dystopia;

The famine swept through the Soviet Union in 1932-33 following Josef Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture. Fertile Ukraine, the Soviet Union's bread basket, was worst hit.

When its harvest failed to meet the Kremlin's targets in 1932, officials and activists were sent to villages to confiscate grain and food. The confiscations continued well into 1933, reducing entire families to starvation.
http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/ukraines_forgotten_holocaust

..........and yet many today who have grown up with the benefits and yes, in the excesses of 'capitalistic culture' still hold misplaced theories about the benefits of socialism. Perhaps because they fancy themselves as being in the driving seat and therefore isolated from such dire consequences.

Think again mush-heads, you and your ilk will probably be the first persons the barbarians will reduce to fertilizer. Who are these 'babrbarians you ask? They are the ones who take over once the opposition is reduced to weak, 'all-you-need-is love airheads and 'academic' minded 'girly-boys.'

A Christian conscience

It appears that Italy's catholic community are showing the worlds protestant communities the way forward. I pray we take it.

More and more doctors in Italy are conscientious objectors.

Each year the annual report on abortion of the Ministry of Health to the Italian Parliament reads like a broken record: fewer doctors and other medical personnel are willing to perform abortions while the number of abortions in Italy continues to trend downwards. The 2013 annual report was no exception.

Final data for 2011 show that 69 percent of doctors in Italy refuse to perform abortions compared with 59 percent in 1983. In one-third of all Italian regions 80 percent or more of gynecologists are conscientious objectors including Lazio, the region that includes Rome. The number of abortion compliant gynecologists in all of Italy (population 61 million) has declined from 1,913 in 2001 to 1,507 in 2011.

In Lombardy, Italy’s most prosperous region, the leftist Vice President of the Regional Council recently presented a medical report that indicated that in one of six hospitals all doctors refuse to perform abortions. In most of the others, the majority of doctors are abortion objectors and the same holds true for other medical personnel. Fearing that the availability of abortion may have a dim future, the leftist regional officials are anxiously looking for willing medical personnel.

As the number of doctors who are conscientious objectors grows, the number of abortions continues to decline. Abortion was introduced in Italy in 1978 via Law 194/78, the same legislation mandating an annual report to Parliament by the Minister of Health. As in any country when abortion is introduced the number skyrockets so that by 1982 abortions peaked at 234,801. Since then abortion numbers have declined every year, except for minor upticks in 1997 and 2005. Preliminary data for 2012 show that abortions in Italy numbered nearly 106,000, registered a 4.9 percent decline from the previous year and a 55 percent decline from the peak.

The total abortion tally would be even lower except for the high percentage of foreign women, nearly 34 percent in 2011, who are counted in the Italian abortion statistics. Most live in Italy but some reside elsewhere. The percentage of foreign women, most of whom are from Eastern European countries which have some of the highest abortion rates in the world according to the World Health Organization, seems to have stabilized and accounted for about one-third of all abortions in the past few years.

Considering that there were few foreign women undergoing abortions in the peak year 1982, the decline in abortions by Italian women alone actually dropped 69 percent by 2011. The abortion rate for all Italian women was 6.6 per 1,000 (2009 data) whereas for foreign women it was 24.1 per 1,000, indicating foreigners skew upwards the overall abortion rate for Italy.

For both Italian and foreign women, the main reasons given for resorting to abortion were already having the desired number of children – even though 60 percent of women had only one child – and economic problems. However, many foreign women also indicated they experienced failure with birth control methods, perhaps due to incorrect use.

Italian abortion rates have declined across the board for all age groups, from under 20 to 45-49. In the first decade of legalization, mostly married women underwent abortion. By 2011 the unmarried or formerly married exceeded currently married women by 57 percent to 43 percent. Interestingly, in the United States the latest data (2008) showed much greater disparity, with married women accounting for only 15 percent of all abortions.

Today Italy has one of the lowest abortion rates among developed countries, especially when compared with the United States. An international comparison of abortion rates per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44, for the period 2008-2011 showed Italy as having the fifth lowest rate among 20 countries at 9.4 per 1,000. By comparison the United States ranked fifth highest with 19.6 per 1,000. Switzerland had the lowest rate, 6.8 and Russia the highest at 40.3.

A comparison of abortion rates by age groups shows another considerable contrast with the United States. Sadly, the teen abortion rate in the United States is more than three times that of Italy. The same disparity can be observed in the 20-24 age bracket. Rates are roughly comparable only among groups of older women.

P C teachers

I do enjoy the wisdom of Thomas Sowell:

If education provides anything, it should be an ability to think — that is, to weigh one idea against an opposing idea, and to use evidence and logic to try to determine what is true and what is false. That is precisely what our schools and colleges are failing to teach today.

It is worse than that. Too many teachers, from the elementary schools to the graduate schools, see their role as indoctrinating students with what these teachers regard as the right beliefs and opinions. Usually that means the left’s beliefs and opinions.

The merits or demerits of those ideas is far less important than whether or not students learn to analyze and weigh those merits and demerits. Educators used to say, “We are here to teach you how to think, not what to think.”

Today, students can spend years in educational institutions, discussing all sorts of issues, without ever having heard a coherent statement of the other side of those issues that differ from what their politically correct teachers say.

There are students in our most prestigious law schools who have never heard arguments for the social importance of property rights — not just for those fortunate enough to own property, but for those who don’t own a square inch of real estate or a single share of stock. How they would view the issues if they did is a moot point because they have heard only one side of the issue.

People who go through life never having heard the other side of issues ranging from environmentalism to minimum wage laws are nevertheless emboldened to lash out in ignorance at anyone who disturbs their vision of the world. The self-confident moral preening of ignoramuses is perhaps an inevitable product of the promotion of “self-esteem” in our schools.

peek-a-boo

Worth a peek:

A discussion on the state of the left with Ophelia Benson, editor of the rationalist website Butterflies & Wheels and co-author of Why Truth Matters.

“...if a person doesn’t want an open debate to take place and wants to define in advance what kind of language is permissible and which subjects are off-limits, that usually indicates the weakness of their position and, more to the point, an awareness of just how weak that position is.”
 

"..................... DT: Well, as to what’s ‘left’ about the worship of dubious figures, I’m inclined to cough and mutter “Marx”, “Castro”, “Chavez” and “Che Guevara T-shirts.” Communist societies are surprisingly big on idolatry, aren’t they? It seems to be a practical consequence of egalitarian philosophy applied in the real world. Keeping everyone equally miserable requires some kind of deity, usually one with a firm hand. How many times have we seen Mao depicted as a god, complete with radiation beaming from his head, like some Communist Godzilla?

As a teenager I remember seeing CCCP badges and the people wearing them didn’t seem too concerned with the connotations of that project. Likewise, those on the left who seem smitten by Castro or Guevara don’t seem unduly bothered by the Cuban concentration camps for roqueros and other “bohemian elements.”

I suppose it’s not too much of a leap from identifying with Castro or Chavez because of their opposition to capitalism or American “hegemony” and identifying with the contortions of Derrida and Foucault for not dissimilar reasons. Both are postures of rebellion with no obvious moral foundation or practical usefulness. Ditto the white middle-class lefties who wave placards announcing “We are all Hizballah now.” I guess it’s something to do with “giving it to the man” or not liking one’s parents or something. It all seems a tad narcissistic to me, and just a little depraved.
 

".....................................I’ve some sympathy with Stephen Hicks, whose Explaining Postmodernism I read alongside Why Truth Matters. Crudely summarised, Hicks sees the rise of relativism, obscurantism and censoriousness on the left as marking a crisis of faith and a retreat from reality. As a practical blueprint, Socialism has been refuted. The question is what’s been left in the space it used to occupy, other than confusion, narcissism and a state of denial.

It strikes me as important to have some point of contrast to whatever the prevailing outlook is, but at the moment I’m pretty much repelled by the contrast that’s available, and I doubt I’m alone in this. I think we can safely dismiss the various tribes of the far left as a moral farce and practical irrelevance. So what we have, at least in the UK, is plenty of anti-US sentiment and oppositional posturing – what Nick Cohen called “the anti-imperialism of fools” – which leads to any number of absurd positions. Perhaps the most reprehensible of these were the protestations of “solidarity” with Hassan Nasrallah, despite his openly genocidal ambitions.

But I also think of the leftwing art critic, Julian Stallabrass, who wrote in the New Left Review about the spectacle of terrorism and seemed ever so slightly titillated by the “vanguard politics” of “Islamic revolutionaries” who “harden themselves against mundane sentiment.” And I think of the London Review of Books, which has published more than one strangely approving account of Hizballah’s “uncompromising” stance and use of suicide bombing.

I mention these things because they’re not just fringe curiosities - variations of these postures have come to define much of the mainstream left and can be found in the Guardian and Independent on a fairly regular basis. And it’s hard to miss mainstream commentators repeating the same relativistic denunciations of “Western ways of thinking” and the supposed “Eurocentric arrogance” of the Enlightenment. It’s easy to see what much of the left is against, if not the reasons why. It’s much harder to see what the left is for. I don’t see a coherent set of ideas. I see a patchwork of contradiction, often for its own sake, or the sake of appearance, or in some cases to enact some kind of personal psychodrama.

I remember Terry Eagleton’s description of jihadist suicide bombers - who murder and dismember people on a fairly arbitrary basis - as “tragic heroes” reacting to “injustice”, as if they had no agency of their own, and with the insinuation of some moral equivalence with their victims, including the people who leapt from the windows of a burning World Trade Centre. The fact that Islamist conceptions of “justice” are enormously loaded, unattainably so, and somewhat different from our own didn’t appear to be a detail worthy of comment. And if one suggests that it might be worth looking at Islamist theology, its lineage, and how it explicitly redefines these basic moral terms, one is very likely to be shouted down as an ‘Islamophobe.’

When I see attempts to ignore such details, or to stifle debate, or to control the terms of debate, or to shut down thought before it can happen, I most often find those attempts coming from the left. This wasn’t always the case, of course; but right now I don’t see too many leftists standing up for free speech and the testing of ideas. Those that do are, of course, assailed from the left. Instead I hear lots of talk about “sensitivity” and “respect for other cultures.” And if a person doesn’t want an open debate to take place and wants to define in advance what kind of language is permissible and which subjects are off-limits, that usually indicates the weakness of their position and, more to the point, an awareness of just how weak that position is. Which, I guess, brings us back to the issue of denial.