>Birds of a political feather wreck economies together

>The Australian public has now had more than six months to get a feel for new Labor opposition leader Kevin Rudd. Opinion polls have favoured Labor over the Coalition since he became leader and he still leads in the preferred prime minister stakes.

With the next federal election still six months away I do not believe that opinion polls provide an accurate forecast of the outcome. The polls are slightly higher than where Labor has been at the same time of year in the previous two election campaigns, one of which they lost narrowly and in the other they were quite rightly hammered when they somehow endorsed the mentally unstable Mark Latham as leader.

With the announcement that Labor will appoint a petrol commissioner it occurred to me that Kevin Rudd is quite similar to a former US president who caused chaos at the petrol pump by trying to control the price of petrol when supply was freely available.

Birds of a feather – Jimmy Carter and Kevin Rudd

From the press release on Labor’s web site:

Increasing petrol prices have become a number one weekly budget issue for many families across the Australia.

In recent years, petrol price spikes have become the norm rather than the exception over long weekends, the Easter break, and school holidays.

While international oil prices are the dominant factor in price fluctuations, motorists need to know that prices are being set fairly.

That is why a Federal Labor Government will task an Office of the Petrol Commissioner – within the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) – with the sole purpose of ensuring Australian families are paying not one cent more to fill up their car than they should.

One shudders at the similarity with the policy of the USA’s most incompetent President ever, Jimmy Carter.

>The disease that is Anti-Americanism

>The Arab world blames its lack of progress over the last century on the West and Africa blames it on its imperial predecessors. The norm is to blame those more powerful than themselves.

For the Europeans the only people they can blame for their decline into moral decadence are the Americans, as this CBN report on European Anti-Americanism shows

Part 1

Part 2

>Australia’s aboriginies expose the destruction of leftist post-modernism

>Two days ago, Director of the Cape York Institute Noel Pearson spoke on the ABC’s Lateline program with Leigh Sales about the issues facing remote Indigenous communities. The interview followed Prime Minister John Howard’s decision to intervene most strongly in remote Aboriginal communities in order to deal with child abuse, assaults on women and a general societal deprivation in which many Aboriginal men spend their welfare payments on drugs and alcohol and neglect completely their families.

In a remarkable interview featuring the frankness for which he has become known, Pearson really laid the boot into those who were calling the policy ‘racist’ and ‘paternalistic’ but who have supported the catastrophic policies inflicted upon the Aboriginal people over the last 30 years in which they were given money to live on without having any requirement to behave responsibly and appropriately.

LEIGH SALES: There might be some out there who would have expected that the majority of Aboriginal leaders would say, “look, thank goodness, we’ve been calling for action on this for so long, now something’s going to happen”. Why have we seen this negative reaction?

NOEL PEARSON: Well, you would think so. You would think so. This is almost a form of madness. I can’t understand it myself. But I suppose it is an explanation, it gives you some kind of explanation as to why we have not done anything effective to prevent this abuse hitherto. It does provide some kind of explanation as to why we have never done anything effective up to now. We haven’t come up with the ideas to prevent the abuse. Did we – we’re in fact saying, I hear people saying in the commentary, that this abuse has been known about for a long time. People say in defence of, in objection to what the Government is doing. people say, “oh, the Government should have known, we’ve known about this problem for 20 years.” Geez, if we’ve known about it for that long, why is it not that we’ve come up with any kind of effective solution to the problem?

LEIGH SALES: So it’s not just the Government’s fault, it’s the people’s fault as well?

NOEL PEARSON: Absolutely. I mean, you know, the first and best defenders of an Aboriginal child has got to be Aboriginal people. You know, these are our children at stake here. You know, it’s quite, it’s quite to be expected that the first people who should have regard for our children are ourselves, and, you know, it’s just an absolutely miserable show that we see people who have never come up with any solution to prevent this suffering in 20 years of knowledge about the problem, but the minute somebody suggests trying to do something decisive about it, you’ve got all of them finding every excuse under the sun not to do anything.

LEIGH SALES: We heard accusations today that rumours are being spread in Mutitjulu that the police and army are going to be coming in to take children away. Who would be spreading such disinformation, and why?

NOEL PEARSON: Well, you know, I think that – I mean, I’ve been taking the stick quite a bit to progressives in relation to Aboriginal policy. People on the – people who have always professed a regard for Aboriginal people, and you know, there’s something mad going on from in the midst of many of our traditional supporters because they’re putting quibbling about politics and putting all kinds of objections in the road. For example, the suggestion that this is about land rights. You know, I’ve got as much objections as anybody to the ideological prejudices of the Howard Government in relation to land, but this question is not about a ‘land grab’. The Anderson Wild Report tells us about the scale of Aboriginal children’s neglect and abuse. This is what this is about. It’s an absolute alibi to try and characterise this debate as being about land grabs and so on. Who wants a land grab in main street Hopevale, for goodness sake?

The problems facing Aborigines in, especially, remote communities have been a blight on Australia for more than 20 years. The usual crowd of do-gooders have spent that time criticising successive governments for their failure to address the issue effectively. When a government finally summons up the political will to take the tough action required then these same people, seemingly affronted by the fact that the solution doesn’t involve simply throwing good money after bad, come out of the woodwork to denigrate it.

NOEL PEARSON:…There is within every community good people, and it’s an absolutely shameful thing that those good people are misled by people whose children sleep safely at night. You know, that’s the horrendous thing here. That the people who are nay saying any kind of intervention are people whose children, like my own, sleep safely at night. And I think that’s a terrible indulgence.

When our children sleep safely at night, we seek to put road blocks in the way and we wish failure, we wish failure upon any decisive action that’s going to deliver some relief of suffering to vulnerable children.

Those are powerful words. ‘Good people are misled by people…’ is exactly right but the situation is made worse by ‘…we seek to put roadblocks in the way and we wish failure…’ Those who are opposed to this plan have no legitimate role to play in the repairing the damage done.

LEIGH SALES: With the Federal Government now seizing control, what will it take from here on to persuade the Prime Minister, whether John Howard or Kevin Rudd in the future, to devolve power to the Aboriginal people, or has the moment for self-determination now passed with this move?

NOEL PEARSON: Listen, self-determination – in the proper meaning of the world, if self-determination means that we should be put in artificial office, we should be given titles, we should be given travel allowances and all of the trappings of office, but we don’t care about the suffering of the children and we don’t do anything about the disintegration of social circumstances in our own communities, if that’s the meaning of self-determination, then I don’t want any part of it. But if self-determination is about taking real responsibility for your people’s solutions and for your people’s problems, if that’s what self-determination means, if it means hard work and responsibility, and accountability, not just saying, “well listen, our children are miserable, they’re malnutritioned and somebody else is to blame for that”, that’s not self-determination in my view. But real self-determination is about Indigenous people taking responsibility for the results, and I can tell you the results that are out there at the moment are very, very miserable and shameful. And, you know, it is a measure of our performance that – it’s a measure of our performance in fulfilment of what we have called self-determination, that the results are so miserable.

Successive government departments focused on Aborigines – from the Department of Aboriginal Affairs to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Commission – have been wracked by high levels of incompetence, corruption and self-interest that has seen billions of dollars poured into finding solutions to problems but that, in fact, simply made matter worse.

LEIGH SALES: Long term – when this immediate crisis is hopefully stabilised – do you think there’s a role for another body, similar to ATSIC, perhaps on a better model, to be developed to help Aboriginal people take greater control over their own futures?

NOEL PEARSON: Absolutely. We’ve got the take charge. We’ve got to be given back responsibility. Might I say the collapse of responsibility that we see, the wasteland of responsibility in Indigenous Australia is the consequence of government and bureaucracies and welfare organisations, including NGOs, who have intervened in Aboriginal affairs and said, “listen, you don’t have to take responsibility. You have a whole suite of rights, including the right to welfare, the right to drink, the right to party all night, the right to have the trappings of office without being accountable for any return on your role.”

You know, it’s been the intervention of government and bureaucracies in this way that has really crumbled what were strong and proud people. You know, when – in Aboriginal families that are functional, there’s no greater love of children than Aboriginal people who nurture and look after their own children, and you witness that time and time again. But, you know, in recent decades, this very precious thing of the Aboriginal love for their own people has come under severe assault and has severely unravelled because responsibility has been taken away from us and we’ve abandoned it. We’ve been quite happy to abandon it, and ultimately the solution to our problems will require us to pick up the mantle of responsibility and take it up because nobody can save us as surely as we can save ourselves.

The reason that Pearson has attracted so much criticism by ‘progressives’ is that he is rejecting outright their platform that Aboriginal people cannot look after themselves and be masters of their own future.

NOEL PEARSON:…You know, I hear people bleat uphill and down about self-determination and in my view self-determination is about people taking responsibility for themselves, for their own families and for their communities and, you know, it’s an absolutely shameful hour that has descended on us, absolutely shameful hour where even an emergency intervention to protect the safety of our children is hindered, is hindered by people who supposedly have good will for Aboriginal people and in fact, those people are willing, they are willing the protection and succour to Aboriginal children to fail in the same way and as vehemently as they will failure in Iraq.

And having nailed the issue at every stage of the interview he ends up kicking yet another goal when he points out that it’s the same schadenfreude crowd barracking for failure in Iraq who want to see the government’s intervention fail in Aboriginal communities. It tells you something about the lack of moral fibre of Pearson’s opponents that they are defined by their criticisms and not by their track record of success.

There is an aspect to the immiserisation of Australia’s Aboriginal population over the last 30 years that has not been mentioned, for fairly obvious reasons. The plight that Aborigines find themselves in is exactly the result you’d expect of the leftist post-modern ‘solutions’ that have been implemented in that time.

There are no examples of any society benefiting from giving money to specific groups and not attaching any responsibility to the payments. There are no examples of any society benefiting from giving special access to education or employment to any specific groups. There are no examples of society benefiting from favouring minority groups over the majority.

None. Nil. Nada.

These ideas come from the immature minds of social sciences professors, left-wing do-gooders and those with the deliberate intention of undermining society such as union officials.

From Affirmative Action to Multiculturalism, no society has benefited from leftist post-modernism.

There’s a simple explanation why they haven’t – their ideas fail to take into account what motivates people. Not only that but throughout history the improvement in standards of living has been as a result of the success and failures of all manner of ideas. Those that are good are woven into the fabric of society while those that are bad are discarded. One stark feature of leftist thinking is denial – the denial of reality, the denial of the spectacular failure of socialism wherever it’s been tried, the denial that people really are motivated by their own selfish interest and the denial that a free market is the best way for society to improve.

Make no mistake. What has happened to Australia’s Aborigines is a microcosm of what awaits any nation that embraces, or has inflicted upon it, the misery of socialism.

Don’t believe me? How is what’s happened to Aborigines different to what Robert Mugabe has done to Zimbabwe in the same period? If the price of oil were to return to $20/barrel then what do you think would be the result for Venezuela?

The fact that Noel Pearson’s statements, and the government’s intervention, have been received so positively by the Australian public, as demonstrated by ninemsn’s poll showing a 3:1 result in favour, may be a signal that the public is getting sick of leftist elites talking the talk, putting their hand in that taxpayers’ pockets and delivering no positive result. Let’s hope so.

>Jews supply military equipment to Muslims

>No. It’s not what you think. Israel is not supplying arms to Fatah. At least not as far as I know.

Israel is, though, supplying an unmanned aerial vehicle to Turkey in order to help that country deal with PKK terrorists in its south.

From the Turkish Daily News:

The Turkish military has leased an Israeli-made unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) mainly to combat increasing terror attacks in the country’s southeast. The lease period is one year.The UAV, manufactured by Israeli Aerospace Industries (IAI) will be delivered to Ankara next week. It will be stationed in Batman and operated by an Israeli squad, defense officials in Ankara said. Turkish military personnel will only perform the sensor operation duty for the UAV.

Turkish military officials have gone for the lease option to meet their urgent operational requirements in the southeast. PKK attacks have killed nearly 50 Turkish troops this year.”This is a non-standard aircraft and to operate it we would have to spend a lot of time for training,” a military official said. “The Israelis will operate the aircraft to meet our urgent operational requirements in the southeast.” The Turkish military has been operating one UAV in the southeast for the past 15 years. That one, delivered by U.S. General Atomics, fails to meet the increasing operational need in the face of the latest wave of PKK attacks against Turkish targets.

In 2005, IAI won a separate Turkish contract for the supply of three UAV systems and 10 aircraft in a $180 million deal. But the deliveries of these critical systems, originally scheduled for April 2007, are now facing delays for about one year.

How does it come about that Turkey would even consider involving the ‘Little Satan’ in its military affairs? Isn’t Israel the main cause of instability in the Middle East? Aren’t the Jews the enemies of all Muslims.

Once again, Turkey demonstrates that it’s actually possible to be a Muslim country and be civilised. In doing so, they make a mockery of the thuggish regimes in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran and elsewhere.

>Undermining the West

>When you watch these videos from 1984 of Soviet KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov you will understand how the Soviet Union worked hard to undermine the West through psychological means.

It’s fascinating to compare today’s Useful Idiots with those of a quarter century ago to find that there really is no difference. Morally confused, factually barren – the postmodern leftist Useful Idiot is impervious to reason and reality.

When will this ahistorical social phenomenon end? Probably never but the time will come when totalitarian ideologues, mainly from the Baby Boomer generation, that shape public opinion from their positions in the mass media or education institutions will retire from the system and then, maybe, there will be a period of greater balance. We’re still around ten years away from this point.

Marxism and Useful Idiots

Demoralisation

Demoralisation continued

Mass Media

The Soviet System

Yoga and brainwashing

Fascinating stuff.

(h/t – Jack from Montreal)

>Rudd backs himself into an Iraq War corner

>Having backed himself into a corner on climate change, Labor leader Kevin Rudd has now done the same thing with the Iraq war by demanding the Prime Minister John Howard announce an exit date.

Labor leader Kevin Rudd has described Australia’s involvement in the war in Iraq as the country’s greatest error on national security in more than 35 years.

He called for Prime Minister John Howard to announce an exit strategy for Australian troops before this year’s federal election.

“I think it’s high time we had from the prime minister a clear-cut statement of his exit strategy for Iraq,” Mr Rudd told the Nine Network.

“Are we going to go into the next election with him saying ‘just trust me’.

“He did that last time and he said he wouldn’t increase troop numbers, then he increased them by another 500 after the election.”

Mr Howard on Sunday again declined to fix a timetable for the withdrawal of Australian troops from Iraq but Mr Rudd said he should.

“I fear this on national security, this has been the greatest single misfire and miscalculation of Australia’s national security interests since Vietnam,” he said.

“Mr Howard always seems to say ‘trust me, I’m safe hands’.

“If Iraq is a barometer of the future on national security, I get really concerned about the lack of balance if we go forward with Mr Howard if he wins the next election.”

Rudd is either not as smart as he likes to think, has a view that Australians are not that smart and won’t work out what he’s saying is bollocks or is getting really bad advice.

How, exactly, was Vietnam a great threat to our national security interests?

We didn’t expect the Viet Cong to follow us home. We didn’t expect them to target Australian interests around the world.

Australia did understand that the threat of communism to peace in the region, which was quite correct, as the three million subsequent victims prove.

Rudd also fails to mention the war in Afghanistan, which preceded Iraq by about 18 months. Isn’t this war also a threat to our national security interests? Isn’t the goal to fight Al Qaeda wherever they are? Isn’t that why we’re now fighting in Iraq and the US has made strikes in Somalia?

The war may not be popular but one thing that Australians know and that is that it must be prosecuted until Al Qaeda is utterly destroyed in an meaningful sense.

It would be nice if we could get that done by Christmas but if not then we must continue the fight.

>Sunday night Aussie rock

>From Wikipedia: Rose Tattoo is an Australian blues/hard rock band, led by Angry Anderson and slide guitarist Peter Wells. Among their best known songs are “We Can’t Be Beaten”, “Scarred for Life” and “Bad Boy for Love” (co-written by Ian Rilen.) Their first four albums were produced by Harry Vanda and George Young who also worked with AC/DC. Along with AC/DC and The Angels, Rose Tattoo helped establish an Australian rock sound in the 1970s that was copied around the world.

Lead singer Angry Anderson has spent many years helping charities for kids, which led to him being awarded a well deserved Order Of Australia.

Bad Boy For Love

We Can’t Be Beaten

>The fallacy that education drives economic success

>One of the great fallacies of the last 30 years or so is that by educating the population economic success is guaranteed.

In Australia, Opposition leader Kevin Rudd has been pushing this wheelbarrow for all it’s worth. In a recent speech he revisits the failed Labor Knowledge Nation policy:

Labor leader Kevin Rudd says his party has a “galvanising vision” to make Australia the best-educated nation in the world.

“For us education has always been the engine room of equity as well as being the engine room of the economy,” he told the annual Mick Young Scholarship Trust race day at Royal Randwick in Sydney.

Here just a few nations over the last 50 years that had a strong focus on educating all of the population to a high standard.

Soviet Union
China
Cuba
North Korea

In spite of their undeniably high education levels, which saw the Soviet Union churn out heaps of talented engineers and scientists they were economic pygmies with an immiserised population. The fault, of course, was that socialism is not an economic system in which creativity and innovation have much room to flourish and so all of that good education is for nought.

Equally, in China the people’s education generally went to waste until the economic shackles were released and its educated workforce was able to take advantage of the new opportunities presented to it. A very similar thing happened in India, which threw off the shackles of socialism, embraced free market economics and is now a global IT powerhouse.

Former prime ministers Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke were among several Labor figures who attended the event, which is a major fundraiser for the trust.

Mr Hawke made a speech that criticised Prime Minister John Howard’s government for failing to invest in education, saying is was the sole reason for the current skills shortage.

He said it was not industrial relations, but a lack of education funding that was standing in the way of economic growth.

And he said Mr Rudd understood that.

Australia has had its share of post-War economic ups and downs with the nadir being during the turbulent Whitlam period and again during the Keating era with the ‘recession we had to have’.

In each of those periods the education levels of Australians didn’t change from the prosperous years preceding the decline through to the recovery afterwards.

Clearly, if Australia is going to maintain its position in the top bracket of nations in the medium to long term then its population needs to be highly educated to deal with an increasingly knowledge based world economy. If education were all that mattered then wouldn’t North Korea’s future be assured?

“Let’s take the talent and enthusiasm and the initiative of this great Australian people and turbocharge it into the future by making sure we are the best educated country and economy and society in the world,” Mr Rudd said.

I don’t know anybody who would disagree with the sentiment he expresses. Given that the education unions and bureaucracies have turned Australia’s education system into an international embarrassment is Kevin Rudd saying that he intends to solve the issue by breaking the power of the education establishment and introduce, for example, school vouchers?

An educated workforce is like an engine in a motor car. If you don’t have a sound chassis to run it in then you’re not going to get the results you seek. It seems that many on the left are yet to grasp this concept.

>How are Radical Islamists different to the Ku Klu Klan?

>Why do Radical Islamist terrorists – aka ‘freedom fighters’ and ‘militants’ – cover themselves up?

Aren’t they proud to be fighting in the name of Allah?

Are they protecting the ‘right’ of their women to be completely covered up and not be allowed out in public alone or only with other women or their male relatives?

The fact is that you cover your face because you know what you’re doing is wrong.

Covering their faces proves what cowards these people really are.

How are Radical Islamists different to the Ku Klux Klan?

• The Klan believes that God is on their side
  
• The Klan cover their faces and, in fact, wear fully body suits not unlike the niqabs above
• The Klan does not allow women to hold formal positions in the organisation
  
• The Klan hates Jews and is anti-Zionist
  
• The Klan hates homosexuals
  
• The Klan used terror tactics of burning and bombing churches and the homes of its opponents
• The Klan lynched innocent blacks (Islamists behead innocents)
  

So how, exactly, is Radical Islam different to the Ku Klux Klan?

Answer. It’s not.

Radical Islam and the Ku Klux Klan inhabit the same moral vacuum.

If you can’t recognise that Radical Islam and the Ku Klux Klan are kindred spirits and this is the type of evil we’re fighting against then you really are a moral idiot.

>Ron Paul supporters seem just a little bit loopy

>Ron Paul is to the Republican candidates’ field what Dennis Kucinich is to the Democrats – a parody of the stereotypical member.

His supporters have spent the last half a dozen months spamming online Republican opinion polls, as demonstrated clearly by Charles Johnson at LGF. When they’re called on their activities they don’t back down and actually increase their invective against those who disagree with them.

Even in this little backwater of the Internet my tongue in cheek post linking the states’ debate about letting the insane vote to Ron Paul supporters resulted in a small swarm of activity.

Ron Paul is 50/1 with bookmakers to be next US President, which is about 950/1 under his true odds if you ask me, and is in a different polling galaxy in any of the major opinion polls yet his supporters insist that he is a serious candidate.

So what is it with the Ron Paul crowd?

Here are some of my theories.

1. Ron Paul only exists on the Internet. Has anyone ever seen Ron Paul? Was that him at the debates? Sure, you can watch him on YouTube but with the quality of computer generated graphics these days are we really sure it’s a real person? The fact that he gets so many votes in Internet polls and none when conducted over the phone or face to face lends weight to this theory.
2. Ron Paul has tapped into a rich vein of hitherto unknown right wing/libertarian nutroots in the same way that John Edwards has the nutroots supporting him for the Democratic nomination.
   
3. Ron Paul supporters are actually from the normal left wing nutrootery and are pretending to be on Paul’s side in order to destabilise the Republican field. The fact that they use such foul, hateful language so often, in the style of the nutroots, makes this a very distinct possibility.
4. John Edwards supporters, realising that the only way he can win is to be up against Ron Paul, are spamming the polls.
5. A large number of Internet connected Americans whose major concern is that the US return to the Gold Standard in order to prevent an economic meltdown have pinned their hopes on the Ron Paul campaign.

Who knows what’s going on with Ron Paul supporters. It sure seems like they’ve let a few bees out of the old intellectual apiary, though.

Ron Paul is a non-serious candidate who has one of those ‘strange uncle’ personalities. Like Paul, his supporters also seem to be just a little bit loopy.