We just came back from the pictures where we saw Boyhood.
According to IMDb it is rated as the 48th best movie ever made in their list of the Top 250.
An exceptional film in every way. No spoilers from me other than if you like the movies, this is a film you should see. Will only say that the actors age during the film because they really are getting older as it was filmed across twelve years.
Here’s why we should go nowhere near amending the constitution. These are the opening words of a story in The Australian today on constitutional change:
AUSTRALIANS want to address inequality in the Constitution . . .
We are now such a low grade constituency who cannot tell the difference between setting up the rules for governing ourselves and fixing some particular problem that captures our fancy at the moment. I can hardly think of anything that has less place in a constitution than trying to make ours a less unequal society. Merely raising the spectre of such a divisive question as a constitutional matter makes me very nervous about how capable we now are of dealing with such a serious issue in a serious way.
Frank Furedi wrote the best book on World War I that I know and has now bought in on our most recent episode of attempted terror. Having been part of a generation that had the same sense of alienation that he uses here to explain, I am somewhat sympathetic to this assessment. But my own conclusions from my days on the très-très bored left of my student “rebellion” has left me with the firm conviction that the only way to deal with such people – the kind of people that I was myself – is to provide no leniency of any kind. Do you want to protest? Fine, but you should also understand there are real risks to your life and future. Not that we are here dealing with the kind of larks we were on protesting in front of the American embassy or whatever. These people are violent criminals, and while we can try to understand them, there should be not an ounce of tolerance for any of this. This is from his article in today’s Oz, Youth rebellion that embraces authority:
In Australia and elsewhere the attraction of radical Islamist ideology is preceded by a rejection of society’s Western culture. Many young people who find it difficult to gain meaning from their lives in their wider community life react by rejecting it. Their Muslim peers sometimes go a step further and express their alienation through the medium of a jihadist outlook. The appeal of this is that it provides a coherent and edgy identity. It offers the cultural resources for the constitution of a distinct Islamic youth subculture.
Radical young Muslims self-consciously distance themselves from the moral and social conventions of a society they claim to loathe. However, their rebellion against the way of life of their community is coupled with a rejection of the customs and behaviour of their elders and family members.
Invariably such a response bears the hallmark of a generational reaction against the behaviour and way of life of the parents. That reaction is also directed towards the way their elders express their cultural and religious identity. One manifestation of this reaction against the conventions of their elders is the adoption of the outward markings of an in-your-face Islamists cultural identity. That is why young Australian Muslims are likely to be more religious and anti-Western than their parents. They are likelier to sport a beard as symbol of piety, wear the veil or go on a pilgrimage to Mecca. They are likelier to perceive the West as a threat to Islam.
Well as long as they understand in return that we now see Islam as a threat to the West then they will understand where we are now at. This is a two-way street. No one attacks them first in any part of the world so what they think of as “attacks” are complaints along the lines of “I hit him when he hit me back”. Whatever they may feel about the glories of their own way of life, no one can see it from the outside looking from our own worldview in our very sweet, kind and gentle westernised communities.
From Drudge today:
UPDATE: RUSSIAN NUKE BOMBERS INTERCEPTED NEAR ALASKA…
Buzz Northern Europe…
Warplanes intentionally violate Swedish airspace…
And then there’s this:
Disagreements how to fight war mount between Obama and military leaders…
General: Airstrikes tougher as militants blend in…
Congress votes to arm Syrian ‘rebels’…
FLASHBACK: Syrian rebels pledge loyalty to al-Qaeda…
Threaten West…
And finally this:
CHRISTIE LAUNCHES COMEBACK…
Trump praises…
GOP primary organizers cheer…
Not a ray of sunshine to be seen.
Buying into these controversies is so fraught with difficulty given how massive the various sensitivities are, that the dangers are nearly too large even to wish to say anything at all. But saying nothing is the way of cowardice.
There is no religion that has never killed someone else because their religion was different and unacceptable, or because they wished to convert others to their own. But one of the great advances made in the West, and it is recent and it is even here still tentative, is that everyone’s religion is no one else’s business but their own with, however, this one additional provision: everyone must live their lives in conformity with the civil law of the nation they are in.
It is also the case that everyone else’s religion looks ridiculous to people who were not brought up within it. Each of us was fortunate to be born into the one true religion, but the people who ended up being born to the wrong parents with the wrong religion will have to wait until they have passed on into the next world to have their errant ways explained to them in the afterlife. In the meantime, it is the cause of the greatest imaginable destruction of civic peace for others to seek to convince us of the righteous path in any other way but through words and example.
There are now low IQ pathological nutters running loose who believe it is their religious duty to kill others on behalf of their own religion. It should not just be illegal to try to kill other people for their religion, it should be illegal to say it should be done or advocate such acts or in any way imply that it is a personal virtue to harm others of a different religion because of their belief in that religion. The potential for a year or two in jail would fit right in with the needs of the times in which we live.
‘UNITED NATIONS IS THE LEADING GLOBAL PURVEYOR OF ANTI-SEMITISM’
On September 9.
At the moment being anti-semitic is still a negative in some places but how long will that last?
Here is what seems to have happened:
7News reporter Robert Ovadia has received information about an alleged plot to kidnap a random person from the streets of Martin Place in Sydney’s CBD, execute them by beheading …
AFP swooped in pre-dawn raids to disrupt plans to commit a violent attack on Australian soil.
They executed 25 search warrants in Sydney, arresting 15 people, one of which has been charged with serious terror offences.
And this has been the reaction:
A Facebook page has been launched today calling on Muslims to attend a “snap protest” at Lakemba station tonight.
The page has invited 1500 people to attend to “stand as one tonight” to “denounce this demonisation and oppression of Muslims”.
Is this a normal reaction? Do they know it is not true? How can they know anything about any of it? Madness and insanity.
I was a second generation Canadian brought up in the 1950s, the grandchild of Eastern European Jews. But from my earliest days I was a Canadian to my very roots and when I went to visit Crecy and Agincourt last month, I went to visit the battlefields in which “we” had won, the first time in 1346 and the second in 1415. I felt just as much pride in going to Vimy Ridge, the Canadian memorial in World War I, as I did in going to Villers-Brittoneaux, which is where the Australian memorial is found. I am a citizen of the West and my culture is the culture that channels back through European history as far as the eye can see. It is perhaps an odd notion, but there were Jews in Europe long before there were Christians. If I have a cultural homeland, that is where it is. One cannot think outside one’s own self, but what we have established in our cultural traditions – the freedom, the prosperity, the ethical dimensions that have been derived from our Judeo-Christian history – is what I value and want to see continue.
There is therefore a very sharp article I would draw your attention to by David Solway, The New Colonizers. We are dealing now in the West with new migrant communities who do not value what they find but disdain everything about our way of life. These are the final paragraphs but you should read it all.
Anyone with a modicum of perceptiveness must be cognizant by now that Islam is advancing its millennial agenda in two ways, that is, via a classic pincer movement: the tactic of terrorism, and the strategy of immigration as elaborated by the Muslim Brotherhood, the latter project an immensely powerful force owing to its stealthy and insidious nature, abetted by leftist and liberal sympathies and policies. By this time its cover should have been blown, and we must begin to speak out, to agitate for legislation to revise our immigration protocols, to reject outright the social camouflage of political correctness, to expose “outreach” and “interfaith” programs for the confidence games they are, to investigate the hotbed mosques spreading like bunkers throughout the land, and to lobby our congressional and parliamentary representatives to pass laws militating against the depletion of our welfare resources, the exploitation of our legal system to silence critics of Islam (known as “lawfare”), and the use of our human rights tribunals that deprive us of our…human rights.
It is obviously an uphill battle, not less because our politicians and political parties, themselves responsible for the immigration debacle, are deliberately trawling for votes among the burgeoning Muslim enclaves and boroughs. Yet it is equally obvious that failing such a reformation — or revolution — in our concessionary attitudes, the result will be that what we once took for granted as a social habitus founded on mutual recognition and a civic arena accessible to all will shrink to an uneasy and perhaps soon intolerable confinement in our own domain.
There is no longer any excuse for apathy, distraction or ignorance, for the evidence of our approaching dispossession is all around us. It is equally an affront and a tragedy to find ourselves colonized in our own land. To paraphrase the prophet Ezekiel (33: 2-6), those who hear the sound of the warning trumpet and do not take the warning, their blood shall be upon them. Regrettably, far too many of us still cannot or do not or will not hear the trumpet.
There are two models from the Middle East I think are broadly likely looking out fifty years, although others are possible. There is the Israeli model where its Muslim population live in an uneasy peace with the non-Muslim majority. And there is the Lebanese model where the two sides have ended up as two warring camps, the two sides never mix, with the territory divided between the two. The fact of the matter however is that our “political elites” intend to establish a world without borders in which everyone lives with everyone else since history and cultural traditions make no difference. That has been the aim for a long time and we are seeing the world they have created. It will never work in practice but the potential for a protracted Dark Age as the outcome is a very real possibility given how things are now progressing.
There is a kind of glibness in this presentation of “The Great Unravelling”. They don’t really believe it, but I do.
Then there is this article about a CBC program warning Canadians that cash may be seized from them by “law enforcement” officers in the US and is quite an eye opener. The title says it all: Canadian News Outlet Warns Canadians That US Law Enforcement Officers Will Pull Them Over And Seize Their Cash. Thus in answering the question posed in the video, this is from the comments:
this country is closing up shop. won’t be here 50 years from now
The wolves are circling but no one seems to be paying attention. Nothing lasts forever, but the fracturing of the United States is happening before our very eyes, something I never thought even remotely possible not all that long ago. The question is no longer will it fall apart, but how can it be made whole again? To this I cannot think of any answer at all. And while the decay is not as advanced in Australia, without the US where do we go from there? What’s fifty years in the scheme of things? Most people alive today will still be alive then. Lots of surprises but there is a brutality in history that you would not want to ignore.
Yesterday it was merely the price of houses (discussed in the AFR today). Now it is our dairy farms that will have, so far as I can tell, absolutely no Australian content or input other than the physical existence on this continent.
ONE of China’s biggest milk companies is buying up dairy farms in Australia, convinced it can generate higher milk production and bigger profits here than most local dairy farmers are achieving.
The Ningbo Dairy Group says that to produce as much fresh milk as it would like to fly to China from its Victorian farms, profitably and rapidly, it needs to bring in Chinese employees, fast-track construction of a new milk processing plant and cut through government red tape. . . .
Ningbo Dairy vice-president Harry Wang said the key to its profitable Australian dairy investment lay in vertically integrating the group’s Australian operations, with it owning and controlling all parts of the supply chain.
They come here, bring their own workers, build their own infrastructure and export the produce back home. What’s in it for us I am not at all sure. He does, of course, put his finger on the problem faced by our own domestic producers:
The downside of Australian dairying to the Chinese newcomers is the low milk price paid by Australian processors to farmers, high labour costs, excessive red tape, a slowness to innovate and the lack of good young workers.
I will just repeat my conclusion from yesterday’s post. We used to pay for our balance of payments deficits through increased investment and the revenues that previous investments had brought about. Now we pay for our imports by selling off the farm. The first could go on for ever and made us prosperous. The second will be a disaster but no one is willing to stop the inbound flow of funds.
Law of Markets 