hink of it all - of the life that is! Study your friends and foes!
Study the past! And answer this: "Are these times better than those?" The life-long quarrel, the paltry spite, the sting of your poisoned pride! No matter who fell it were better to fight as they did when the world was wide.
Boast as you will of your mateship now - crippled and mean and sly - The lines of suspicion on friendship's brow were traced since the days gone by.
There was room in the long, free lines of the van to fight for it side by side -
There was beating-room for the heart of a man in the days when the world was wide.
With its dull, brown days of a-shilling-an-hour the dreary year drags round: Is this the result of Old England's power? - the bourne of the Outward Bound?
Is this the sequel of Westward Ho! - of the days of Whate'er Betide? The heart of the rebel makes answer "No! We'll fight till the world grows wide!"
The world shall yet be a wider world - for the tokens are manifest; East and North shall the wrongs be hurled that followed us South and West. The march of Freedom is North by the Dawn! Follow, whate'er betide! Sons of the Exiles, march! March on! March till the world grows wide!
Corrupt Australia offers an alternative to politically correct channels of debate in order to reveal and scrutinize the emerging direction of our society and culture: standardisation via globalisation, banality and non-sustainability via our emerging dedication to the 'quantity over quality' religion of materialism.
"AUSTRALIANS are sharing their own accounts of life-and-death family decisions after newsreader Tracey Spicer told how she almost killed her mother who was dying of cancer.
There has been an outpouring of support from NEWS.com.au readers for Spicer, who has relived the night she held a pillow a foot away from her critically ill mother's face, preparing to end her suffering by suffocating her.
[...]
The euthanasia debate was re-ignited after Shirley Justins was convicted of the manslaughter of her partner Graeme Wylie, who died from an overdose of Nembutal. He had Alzheimer's disease."
At least in cases where there is the consent of the clearly dying person, forcing someone to slowly decay away towards the inevitable seems sadistically attached to various dogmatisms. Perhaps its humanism as a religion gone mad, the kind of dogmatism that holds that human life is sacred and to be enforced in all instances no matter the objective stupidity of the situation.
We humans are currently overpopulating ourselves globally, with absolutist rhetoric we defend the 'rights' of some decadent and neglectful welfare dependent people to be indefinitely supported by society, and we increasingly engineer some children who are severely disabled after birth for 'survival' despite condemning them and their families to a lifetime of pain. Is humanism becoming a sadistic religion?
"CHILDREN are increasingly exposed to highly sexualised images, a Senate committee has found - but it has stopped short of calling for tougher government regulation, which has angered parent groups.
Although the committee rejected tighter standards on what television and advertisers can show, it recommended a national sex education program as a way to teach children about healthy relationships and to help them "deconstruct" sexualised images.
The professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University, Clive Hamilton, said: "The report fails to understand or reflect the level of community concern about the ways in which children are being sexualised by the media and advertisers and has largely ignored the evidence of harm presented to the inquiry by psychologists and other experts working with children."
Great. Many adults, let along their children, can't conceptually 'deconstruct' the advertising they are confronted with.
After all the grand-standing and emotional talk artist Bill Henson sparked amongst figures in the public sphere with his photos of nude children, this is the meager outcome. Does it reflect a society in control of its own standards or a 'liberal' society dependent on an aloof political system which protects parasitical commercial practices so as to not rock the boat - and at the expense of the whole/greater good?
We need a new alternative to decision making that acts in the interest of society as a whole and not simply one aspect of it, namely commerce.
"My point is that, in Australia today, at the level of ideas, the neo-liberal opposition to constructive governance and nation building is eclipsed or even exhausted.
My survey of middle Australian attitudes showed that even 10 years ago there was no consensus for economic reform and, more to the point, that the broad middle was waking up, even then, that more economic reform meant more pressure on families, run down public health and education services, less job security, more stressful workplaces, urban degradation, uncertain retirement incomes, and probably declining whole-of-life incomes.
We might yet insist anew that governments should make the economy work for the people - not the people for the economy. I think I hear that bit of the story coming at us like a steam train in a tunnel."
Thankfully, in their own ways, some more Australians are waking up the false reality of the 'economics will do and fix everything' mentality. This is not to say that people are coming to disregard things like good wages, stable employment, good economic management etc, but that a few more are realising economics is simply the answer to the economy and not necessarily to the other important aspects of life like planning, the environment, extra-monetary standards of life and general happiness.
We need intelligent and holistic minded human beings to make decisions again, not abstract economic models with their swag of naive assumptions. Join us and give your support to this realistic mindset.
"Not all of "Questions without notice" (aka Question Time) is gunk, but most of it is. It is meant to be where the executive is held to account by the people's representatives, but instead revolves around tactics, the "horse race" and maintaining the "psychological advantage."
"In a way, its sorry state reflects the general reporting of politics. As one becomes increasingly superficial, so does the other.
[...]
See what I mean? The dross is all most of us wanted to know, and it only required an hour and a half's observation. The things that really matter would need hundreds of tedious hours - and probably make dull reading."
This is nothing more than a report on democracy in action. Most people do not have any real understanding of the complexity of most issues, nor do they want it. They're simply into the emotional, grand-standing, more 'superficial' stuff, and so this is exactly what the commercial/globalist media compete to cover and present. In no time at all the politicians have become hip to this and increasingly construct careers around all the superficiality and crowd-pleasing hype to enhance their personal career aspirations (read: popularity).
Neither the politicians nor the public can be blamed for this hideous state of affairs: the public vote but a logical, philosophical, or critical approach to the world and its political and social issues is not taught in schools, and many people simply are not that good at thinking for themselves in matters of society in the first place (we're not all equal in our abilities and interests, despite the claptrap).
The blame lies, again, not with any one group of people but with the design. The design of our politics, or mass democratic theory itself, simply ignores the reality of the world. Mass democracy is a Utopian dream that is allowing those with lots of power to manipulate vital issues to their own personal advantage via the minds of an unwitting public who are supposed to be capable of independent thought and an executive, more than fleeting dedication to issues when in fact they aren't.
"WHAT does the Rudd Government stand for? Good question. Craig Emerson has sought to fill the vacuum his boss has left, but his proposed "unifying political philosophy" is quite unbalanced.
If we're to take the views of the Minister for Small Business, Dr Emerson, in a recent speech as representative, which I doubt, the Government is committed to returning to the economic rationalism of the Hawke-Keating years after the drift under John Howard.
[...]
His ideal world fits John Kenneth Galbraith's ironic summation of the conservatives' position: the rich need more money as an incentive and the poor need less money as an incentive.
Emerson's "unifying political philosophy" is no such thing. It's merely an economist-centred view of the universe, focusing on material concerns and ambitions, with the implicit assumption that the world consists of markets and not much else."
Both sides of mainstream politics are increasingly ascribing themselves to the Liberal agenda which holds that economic models are the key to all of human life and its various issues.
Growth in the amount of products on the shelves, in the profits of large corporations (the 'trickle down effect'), in the centralisation of economic power (the logical result of *free* markets), in the quantity of the national population for labour reasons, in jobs, and in the amount of money circulated through communities meet the requirements of social 'progress'.
What about all those aspects of society which fall outside of the scope of notions of demand & supply, productivity, efficiency, and the distribtuion of resources?
"A poll has found that almost 80 per cent of voters want the federal government to intervene directly to cut fuel prices.
And the Nielsen poll, published in Fairfax newspapers on Monday, found that three-quarters of those demanding action support a cut in fuel excise, as proposed by the Opposition, instead of the government's FuelWatch price information scheme."
If the government 'intervenes' to reduce the price of fuel at the pump then demand will rise, further adding to the tide of global demand that is the initial cause of rising fuel prices. The whole problem is a structural one which is simply being caused by global demand rapidly exceeding global supply. Only high prices will encourage the eventual switch to a more abundant and more environmentally clean energy sources that is, ultimately, the only medium term solution to this problem of demand dwarfing supply (aside from reducing the world's population and level of economic activity).
The knee-jerk reaction to rising prices that the public has displayed would be detrimental to all of us in the long run if it were enacted, for prices would soon rise again. This is an emotional-subjective response to an issue that needs objective thinking, and our politicians love issues like this that are surrounded by emotion. We can already see some of them competing to pander to the cry for lower prices with the stupid proposal to cut fuel excise.
The modern political system is increasingly being flooded with crowd-emotion and the parasites that feed off this.
'AFL kicking goals in Israel' - From the ABC's 7.30 Report - 19/06/08
~
"It's remarkable to be standing here in Israel on the shores of the Mediterranean and watching an Israeli and a Palestinian boy in a marking competition. And they're kicking and they're running and they're hand-passing in a way we thought only Australian kids knew how to do"
[...]
"...the inner stress that they have they wanna get out and instead of taking it out on the kid next to him in a violent way, they can take it out on a footy pitch in the proper way...I think it will be really good here in Israel. I think it will work"
~
Please. This sort of outlook is so utterly simplistic and delusional that its offensive. It makes out that Israeli (Jewish) and Palestinian (Arab) people are fighting each other because they are backward people who have not yet discovered the 'Australian' or 'Western/progressive' way of dealing with their inner tension: on the footy field, for instance.
The report ignores the fact that Jews have been flooding into Palestine from other countries since around the time of WWI, and that just after WWII, with newly thriving numbers (and with the aid of Britain and the UN), the Jews declared a large part of Palestine their own with the announcement of an Israeli state, displaying expansionist behaviour ever since to the anger of the Arab population.
This, and not some mysterious sort of 'inner stress', is the root cause of the ongoing bloodshed between Jews and Arabs in Israel and Palestine. Western ignorance of the peculiarities of the region has already contributed to enough instability. Lets stop scheming about places on the other side of the world and worry about our own cultural problems.
"On September 13, 2007, the UN General Assembly adopted its Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The assembly recorded 143 votes in favour, 11 abstentions and four votes against. The last were cast by Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US.
The Howard government said it objected on the grounds that the declaration would impair the territorial and political integrity of the Australian state by supporting the creation of separate indigenous states. The declaration makes it clear that this is indeed its aim. Article 4 says indigenous peoples have the right to freely determine their political status and to pursue self-determination and autonomy. In short, it supports the old Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission demand for a sovereign black state.
Does the Australian state possess any 'political integrity' by purporting to speak for all people, no matter their unique differences? Does any political entity posses any integrity if it is so generic that it tries to cater to everyone, thereby becoming increasingly standardised and of the lowest common denominator (pure economics with no higher specific cultural orientation)?
Let the aboriginals, and all peoples, stand on their own feet and thus either succeed with their autonomy, unique characteristics and culture intact or fail with historical dignity. Perhaps us Western nations fear such an honest outlook because it reminds us that 1) unique ethnic groups (including our own) require autonomy to remain unique and 2) all cultures are ultimately mortal and alone, that if they do not stand up and address reality they WILL fail: that there is no God who is leading us by the hand down the path of 'eternal progress'.
"...The expectation among Aborigines is that they do not have to work, and the welfare model that was supposed to be temporary became permanent when Aborigines were exempted from the obligation to seek work. They were free to pursue land claims, which left them stranded on uneconomic land seeking rent from mining companies, and to practise self-determination, which left them at the mercy of those who controlled the purse strings within their own communities, not to mention an army of "helpers"."
Leaving aside the other arguments presented in the article which I've quoted, echoed here is a basic tenant that Corrupt has always held: the fact that welfare creates dependency and often perpetuates the problems it was intended to solve. We must learn to leave all people to stand on their own feet, propping them up for all time is neither dignified nor logical.
Whilst you're working hard for your living, (including on Fridays), your politicians are engaged in practical jokes and emotional jibes mirroring a junior school classroom gone anarchic. Remember, though, that the people in this centralised forum in Canberra are amusing themselves with our issues like this because parliament has become so far removed from reality that arguing like school kids whilst dropping the appropriate 'key words' about current happenings gets your through the sitting. Interestingly we don't seem to care.
I wonder if it has anything to do with that old 'all votes are equal' thing?! For this makes it hard for any intelligent voice to stand out, speak the truth and be heard above the mass of other voices which might possibly be moronic. Majority rules is just another manifestation of our quantity over quality mentality, which has led to situations like the above mess.
"Sol Trujillo's payout when he leaves Telstra will be 93 million dollars and some of us will ask how he earned it. 93 million dollars would keep ten small theatre companies going for a thousand years on the interest alone. 93 million dollars would fund a month of the Iraq War.
It's a thousand times the annual wage of a New York fireman. It's three hundred times the annual wage of Kevin Rudd. In a bank earning seven percent interest, it would make him 17,835 dollars a day. 743 dollars an hour. 12 dollars a minute. A dollar every five seconds.
[...]
But a CEO is not motivated at all. If he stuffs up he gets, oh, four, five million dollars to walk away. That's 280 thousand a year, or 355 thousand a year, in interest for the rest of their lives for failing. How can they be said to be motivated to succeed? A government minister, a public servant, is punished when things fail. A CEO is rewarded."
The main issue here is not income inequality per say as is advanced in the main body of the article quoted above. It is the fact that those with the most power in today's system are not geared towards the benefit of the whole: the fact that society has allowed those at the top of our current power-system to create a slovenly environment for themselves which, yes, rewards failure. Those individuals who work hard at manipulating and moving up the ranks with an eye on the cash are not to be blamed: its the corruption of the system which is faulty.
If anything is indicative of a failing system it is when so called 'elites' begin loosing sight of reality and rewarding themselves for screwing up.
"As Israel delivers its clearest warning yet that it will attack Iran, Antony Loewenstein ponders the West's insatiable appetite for military intervention.
[...]
While Iraq has undoubtedly changed the rules of the game, Rieff conveniently ignores the concept that Western nations, especially the United States and Britain, will never intervene in a nation merely for benevolent reasons. There is gross hypocrisy in even debating military intervention in war-torn countries when places such as Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq remain mired in Western-caused carnage.
Are the Burmese people suddenly more worthy of help than the Palestinians in Gaza? Should the people of Harare be "rescued" from Robert Mugabe but the citizens of Baghdad have to suffer years more of US-backed Shia militias? A true internationalist either believes in equal rights for all or nothing. Tragically, the "war on terror" has unleashed lashings of moral outrage from the political and media elite but little reflection on the effects of military action. While major reform of the UN and international systems of government are essential, a rush to arms is rarely the best course of action."
Those with an eye for the truth are slowly waking up to the disasterous effects the globalist regime, which our government is all too frequently a part of, is having upon the globe. Talk of 'freedom' and 'justice' and 'peace' is a big fat smoke screen for the regime, run by an international economic elite, that carefully chooses who it plans to 'save' next based on financial gain and who defends their actions with moral absolutist rhetoric that mocks reality.
We need not associate ourselves with the narrow and short sighted thinking of these people who aim to reduce the world into one giant market place and who do not understand that political systems are relative to the conditions in each society, that uprooting systems we don't happen to like can cause disaster and death on a massive scale. We need to stop this internationalist mindset, conduct our economic processes in our own shores, and worry about ourselves.
"Nearly 60% of international students in Victoria could be receiving below minimum wage rates, a study by Monash and Melbourne university academics has revealed.
Interviews with 200 international students drawn from nine universities across Victoria revealed that up to 58.1% of students surveyed were paid below $15 an hour, with 33.9% receiving less than $10 an hour.
The results from a $3 million Australian Research Council-funded study come just a month after hundreds of taxi drivers, many of whom were students from India, protested against conditions in their industry outside Flinders Street station."
This type of thing all too often represents the other side of the constantly invoked 'multicultural dream': migrants who are exploited for the benefit of business profits, lowering the conditions of the national working environment overall; or who are used simply to plug gaps in the economy, furthering the practice of placing the economy before all other aspects of society.
The leftist and also marxist voices in our society often forget that multicularalism is actually furthering the agendas of those they dogmatically despite most, and that industry leaders in the economy are beginning to champion immigration, when needed, behind the scenes even more than they themselves do.
"In findings that will add to public alarm about teenage drinking, researchers have found that many more youths are ending up in hospital due to alcohol abuse than previous studies might have suggested.
The latest study, published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, used data from Victorian hospital emergency rooms and compared it with other research that relied on people reporting how much they drink.
The emergency room data showed that between 1999-2000 and 2005-06, there were "rapid increases in alcohol presentation rates" in people aged between 16 and 24. Their symptoms included alcohol dependence, mental and behavioural disorder due to alcohol, alcohol poisoning, alcoholic gastritis and alcoholic liver cirrhosis."
Such findings come as little surprise to anyone who steps out of their house on a friday or a Saturday night in a built up area. But while they are interesting the real interest needs to be kindled around the cause of why the new generations of Australians, aged 15-30, are generally piss heads to the degree that some emergency staff in hospitals are asking themselves why they bother rocking up to a long weekend night at work when all they do is carry sick bags around and nurse drunks.
This current affairs report that was aired last night on ABC illustrates that our current rate of alcohol consumption should be taken as a warning that aspects of our current social design are askew, and actually raises some interesting questions. So why are we becoming increasingly pissed and violent? A couple of important causes suggest themselves when things are looked at through nihilist lenses.
Firstly, our society supports the view that intense individual gratification by whatever means, and often at the short term hindrance of others, benefits everyone in the end: an idea which is simply absurd.
Secondly, our society currently encourages extreme hedonism as opposed to a balanced amount of self discipline.
Lastly, we are encouraging less and less natural social consensus with aggressive multiculturalism and one-size-fits-all mentalities for the whole nation like pluralism which is resulting in a population with less common ideals and interests so that, in the words of one guilty man in his late 20's interviewed on the Four Corners report linked above, if you want to socialise and meet people in this day and age you have to get pissed and act like a monkey.
"AUSTRALIANS are the least likely in the world to take their entitled annual leave, a global survey has found.
The survey found that one in three Australians say financial pressures have affected their holiday plans this year.
It also found 32 per cent blamed the credit crunch and higher interest rates, while 34 per cent said work commitments were too great to take a break. "
Great. More evidence of 'progress' I assume? Despite all the rhetoric, we're working damn hard for a design that is increasingly out of our hands and controlled by a small economic 'elite' which does not recognize concepts like community, autonomy or intangibility.
"She might not have been in the running for the David Jones gig (and more's the pity). But Aboriginal Australian model Samantha Harris has just scored her first music video cameo.
In 2006 Harris told the SBS program Living Black that she wanted to be "the world's first Aboriginal supermodel".
Just six months ago the fashion press was agog with the lack of diversity on the runways."
The interest here lies not with Harris herself but the society surrounding her. Do we possess any real understanding of Multiculturalism or is it simply another trendy fad that everyone likes to be seen to be supporting, kind of like a herd mentality? More to the point, does worrying about something as obscure as the lack of non-white women on catwalks reflect a concern with other cultures and their unique aspects or an obsession with hoisting our own 'culture' upon people of all others? Would 'diversity' really be reflected by scores of anorexic Aboriginal women stalking like moving mannequin-clones up and down a catwalk?
We should avoid the slavish subconscious mentality, suspicious and nervous about difference, which is at work within the Western world at the moment and which seeks to transform traditional cultures everywhere, including those of the West, into a collection of generic behaviours and beliefs concerned with nothing higher than products.
hink of it all - of the life that is! Study your friends and foes!
Study the past! And answer this: "Are these times better than those?" The life-long quarrel, the paltry spite, the sting of your poisoned pride! No matter who fell it were better to fight as they did when the world was wide.