Monthly Archives: November 2015

And where will we be a generation from now?

Posted on by
Reply

Niall Ferguson has an article on the fall of Rome which he discusses as a warning. It’s not a warning but a prognostication. It won’t be exactly the same, but the circulation of elites is an old story. Even if every political leader in Europe understood everything he said, and wished to reverse the tide of history, I cannot imagine what could be done. Let me quote:

A new generation of historians has raised the possibility the process of Roman decline was in fact sudden — and bloody — rather than smooth.

For Bryan Ward-Perkins, what happened was “violent seizure … by barbarian invaders”. The end of the Roman west, he writes in The Fall of Rome (2005), “witnessed horrors and dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope never to have to live through; and it destroyed a complex civilisation, throwing the ­inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times”.

In five decades the population of Rome itself fell by three-quarters. Archaeological evidence from the late 5th century — inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle — shows the benign influence of Rome dimin­ished rapidly in the rest of western Europe.

“The end of civilisation”, in Ward-Perkins’s phrase, came within a single ­generation.

This is the view of another historian, Peter Heather:

The Visigoths who settled in Aquitaine and the Vandals who conquered Carthage were attracted to the Roman ­Empire by its wealth, but were ­enabled to seize that wealth by the arms acquired and skills learnt from the Romans ­themselves.

“For the adventurous,” writes Heather, “the Roman Empire, while being a threat to their existence, also presented an unprecedented opportunity to prosper … Once the Huns had pushed large numbers of (alien groups) across the frontier, the Roman state became its own worst enemy. Its military power and financial sophistication both hastened the process whereby streams of incomers became coherent forces capable of carving out kingdoms from its own body politic.”

I don’t mean to be so down about the future, but it is hard to see how things could change.

Paris and the left’s support for Palestinian terror

Posted on by
Reply

A large part of the problem for the West in dealing with Islamic terrorism is the deep anti-Israeli animosity on the left. The left has built its attitudes to Islamic terrorism by defending Hamas and the Palestinian Authority in their attacks on Israel.

To admit that there is an incompatibility between the values of the West, however defined, and the values of radical Islam, is to admit that the Israelis have a valid point. The insanity of the left is that they would rather see the suicide of their own culture, see it submerged beneath the flood of Islamic radicals into our Western nations, than admit that the fight against sharia is legitimate, and that Israel, in standing up for our Judeo-Christian values, has been largely in the right.

Conscious capitalism and central banks

Posted on by

I made it into the media twice during the weekend. Here I am in Alan Kohler’s column from the Business Section of The Oz: Central banks risk becoming economic wreckers. You can find my quote if you’d like to look, but Alan’s point is the one that matters:

After Thursday’s stunning employment figures for October, the chances of another rate cut in December have disappeared. Or at least they should have.

That there remains the chance of a further rate cut in Australia, despite clear evidence that the economy doesn’t need it, is a reflection of the modern paradox and problem of central banking: low and falling inflation.

Central banks everywhere have switched from fighting inflation to ardently desiring it. In the process, they are in danger of becoming economic wreckers.

Central bankers are no better than the theory they apply, and at heart they are all Keynesians. I met Janet Yellen years ago at some OECD meeting I was attending on behalf of Australian employers, and it was an experience I have not forgotten, even though she was years from becoming the Chairperson of the Fed. Her rabid Keynesian views astonished me since by then it was clear enough that no approach to economics was less enlightening than starting from the premises found in just about every introductory text. That Keynesian thought has poured into central banking practice was inevitable. She didn’t cause it, but is a symptom of it. Our own central bank is the most resistant to it, but no bank can withstand the ignorant pressures to lower rates to stimulate growth. That such reductions in rates have never worked ever is just so much data as far as economic practice is concerned.

I also showed up on the ABC’s Sunday Extra where I was in a debate with Denis Kilroy over an intellectual entity described as “conscious capitalism”. It would not be easy for me to say in respect of our economic system that we are on the same side of the fence. Nevertheless, he is in favour of a modified capitalist system, one in which business decisions are guided at every turn by our conscious wish to serve the whole of humanity. From their website:

Conscious Capitalism differs from Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) by virtue of its origins from within the company as an expression of an overall perspective on how to conceive and build a business, rather than as a response to external notions of what counts as “socially responsible” or external pressure. Conscious Capitalists are unapologetic advocates for free markets, entrepreneurship, competition, freedom to trade, property rights, and the rule of law. They recognise that these are essential elements of a healthy, functioning economy, as are trust, compassion, collaboration, and value-creation. Conscious Capitalism is the system-level effect of a substantial number of companies practicing the four tenets of a Conscious Business as defined below.

So far so good. I am with them on all that. And, in fact, I would say that for the most part, capitalist enterprises are ethical organisations. Aside from personal values, a market system automatically punishes dishonest behaviours, although there is no doubt there is plenty of dishonesty about. But can any economic system embrace all of this:

1. HIGHER PURPOSE

Conscious Businesses adopt a higher purpose that transcends profit maximisation. A compelling sense of purpose can create an extraordinary degree of engagement for stakeholders and catalyse tremendous organisational energy.

2. STAKEHOLDER ORIENTATION

Conscious businesses are managed for the simultaneous benefit of all of their interdependent stakeholders, including customers, employees, investors, suppliers, the environment and the larger community in which the business participates. By creating value for each stakeholder in various and often differing ways the whole system advances.

3. CONSCIOUS LEADERSHIP

Conscious Leaders adopt a holistic worldview that moves beyond the limitations of traditional machine metaphors for business. Conscious Leaders see that profit is one of the important outcomes of the business, but not the sole purpose. Most importantly, they reject a zero-sum, trade-off oriented view of business and look for creative synergistic win-win approaches that offer multiple kinds of value simultaneously to all stakeholders.

4. CONSCIOUS CULTURE

The culture is a conscious business is captured in the acronym TACTILE: Trust, Authenticity, Caring, Transparency, Integrity, Learning and Empowerment. The culture of a conscious business can be felt immediately upon walking in its doors.

I met John Mackie, who started this movement in the US, at Freedomfest so he and his movement are definitely considered within the tent. I won’t even say I am cynical and that it is hopelessly naive. What I do think is that it is unnecessary since the owners of our businesses need a sympathetic understanding from within the community of both their role and the pressures entrepreneurs are under. What they do not need in my view is this kind of approach which seems to side with those who are anti-capitalist and who incessantly rattle on about the immorality of business. If there is immorality about, it is embedded within the anti-capitalist mentality that is the home territory of the left.

Understanding the war we are in

Posted on by
Reply

The Herald-Sun editorial on Sunday represents the naivety of far too many. It is titled, “We will never understand such hatred” as if the massacres in Paris were a form of irrational madness driven by some unknown motivation. Here is the central point of that editorial:

“Whatever name the terrorists may use to describe themselves, we already know exactly who they are: monstrous, bigoted and cruel Islamic murderers who have betrayed the very mothers that gave birth to them in their deliberate relinquishment of all that humanity holds dear.

“We will never understand what motivates such hatred. To do so would require a guided tour of the most blackened and fouled souls.”

So let me explain. The Islamic State is at war with us because they wish to convert us to Islam. You may think that the way the war is being waged is cruel and monstrous, but it is no more cruel and monstrous than many a war in the past.

What makes this war so bizarre is that the kinds of people who write such editorials do not even know we are in the midst of a war. It is a war for control of territory, in just the same way every other war in history has been fought.

They are attacking us and our civilisation relentlessly. They are attempting to do the same as the Nazis or the Soviet communists attempted to do. They are trying to change our way of life into their way of life through force of arms. They are trying to take our territory from us and replace our way of doing things with theirs.

This is a war that has been on-going for the past 1500 years, with Islamic expansion the aim since the seventh century. What makes this war novel is that until now, each invasion has come in the form of an actual army, and the battles have been in the form of an armed conflict. There are many such battles where Islam has won, such as across the whole of North Africa in the seven century and Constantinople in 1453. And there are others that it has lost, such as Lepanto, the Battle of Tours or on two occasions at the Gates of Vienna. But the war has never stopped, although our modern ignorance of history has made all of this invisible to the vast majority of the population of the formerly-Christian West.

They have a value system and we have a value system. The reality is that in any territory only one of these systems can prevail at any one time. The Western view, our view, is that we can all get along together, with religion a private matter between each of us as individuals and our own conscience. That is not the view of those who are waging war on behalf of the Islamic State. For them, there is only one true belief, and if in some territory it’s not their beliefs that prevail, then, according to them, they have the right to kill us, enslave our women and force us to convert to Islam at the point of a sword. You can see all of this unfolding at the moment across the Middle East.

That is the war we are in. Because we are not fighting this in the same kind of desperate way we fought the Nazis and the Soviets we are losing. They are playing on our ignorance, which has allowed a million invaders to enter Europe, the ultimate aim of their leaders to convert each and every one of us to Islam.

You may deny that is the intent, but it is. You may think they could not possibly do it, but they can. And if we do not resist this invasion, they will succeed. It may already be too late, so that by 2084 – a century after 1984 – most of what had once been the West will be under Sharia law. History is like that. Nothing is pre-ordained.

You will never understand what motivates those on the other side of this conflict if you do not make at least make the effort to see what their war aims are. And so long as our political leaders fail to recognise, or refuse to recognise, what they are trying to achieve, we will continue to lose ground until it is too late, which it almost certainly now is in Europe.

When the going gets tough, the not-so-tough turn to climate change

Posted on by
Reply

There is a quite insightful article on Instapundit by Ed Driscoll on Freudian displacement. He began with this:

Tough language is borrowed from the war on terror and applied to the war on weather. “I really consider this a national security issue,” says celebrity activist and “An Inconvenient Truth” producer Laurie David. “Truth” star Al Gore calls global warming a “planetary emergency.” Bill Clinton’s first worry is climate change: “It’s the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it.”

Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can’t deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV. Forget the Patriot Act, it’s Kyoto that’ll save you.

But then a quarter of an hour later, having thought about his original post, Driscoll went on with a much fuller discussion on how fighting climate change gives some people the pretence of being tough. Link to it all since it is short but subtle, and explains quite a lot. A sample:

While the hawks among us worry about preventing the Armageddon that’s coming, our modern-day hippies just want to make sure the planet is pristine when it does. In fact, the more menacing terrorism becomes, the more some people seem to worry about the weather. Scared and unsure how to fight terrorists, they confront “climate change,” which only requires spending trillions of other people’s dollars on something that may not need fixing or may not be fixable. No wonder some of these people chain themselves to trees – they think money grows on them.

It’s funny when you put it that way, but it’s actually not funny at all. That the US could twice elect Obama at such a moment is the surest sign that we would happily sign the surrender documents if only it wasn’t all too obvious to the other side that this is what we have in effect already done.

How did we end up with such a dud for PM?

Posted on by
Reply

All this is pulled from Andrew Bolt under the heading, Turnbull wrong, Abbott right: the boats must be stopped.

Malcolm Turnbull chose the wrong time to rebuke Tony Abbott on border policy – just hours before the French attacks:

MALCOLM Turnbull has delivered a slap-down to Tony Abbott for lecturing European leaders over their refugee policies as he arrived in Berlin…

As Mr Turnbull cemented his alliance with Dr Merkel – a successful conservative German Chancellor for a decade and the most powerful leader in Europe – he also rebuked Mr Abbott for criticising her stance on refugees fleeing war in the Middle East.

Mr Abbott last month used a speech in London to urge European leaders to copy his tough policies against people smugglers by turning back boats at sea and denying entry to asylum seekers who have passed through other safe countries…

Asked about Mr Abbott’s comments after his meeting with Dr Merkel in Berlin, Mr Turnbull said he would not lecture other countries about their policies.

“We had a very good discussion but I have no intention or desire to give advice on these matters to the German Chancellor,” Mr Turnbull said.

“Each country faces very different circumstances, not least of which are geographic…”

Same spin in the Financial Review:

Malcolm Turnbull has repudiated Tony Abbott over his warnings to Europe about asylum seekers, whilst standing alongside Angela Merkel, the German chancellor who has offered to take in 800,000 people fleeing the Syrian war.

Same spin before the meeting from the well-briefed Australian:

Malcolm Turnbull will break with Tony Abbott’s message on the flood of refugees into Europe after landing in Germany for talks on defence, trade and border protection…

… there will be no “lecture” to Ms Merkel about the lessons from Australia’s policy of turning back asylum seeker boats, weeks after Mr Abbott used a speech in London to declare that Europe needed to adopt the same approach.

The Australian understands the Prime Minister will emphasise Australia’s success at resettling thousands of refugees every year and note the ethnic diversity that has come from each wave of new migrants.

But now we read this:

The holder of a Syrian passport found near the body of one of the gunmen who died in Friday night’s attacks in Paris passed though Greece in October, a Greek minister said.

“The holder of the passport passed through the island of Leros on Oct. 3, 2015, where he was identified according to EU rules,” said Greece’s deputy minister in charge of police, Nikos Toskas, in a statement.

A Greek police source said the passport’s owner was a young man who had arrived in Leros with a group of 69 refugees and had his fingerprints taken by authorities there. Police declined to give his name.

Abbott today:

FORMER prime minister Tony Abbott has warned the risk that terrorists are hiding among the flood of refugees fleeing Islamic State underlines his warning on the need for tougher border controls.

The battle map since the seventh century

Posted on by
Reply

Today there is a difference put all too plainly by Mark Steyn: The Barbarians Are Inside, And There Are No Gates.

In the end, the decadence of Merkel, Hollande, Cameron and the rest of the fin de civilisation western leadership will cost you your world and everything you love.

Without Christian civilisation we cannot even tell what to defend or even understand why.

Joe Hockey – contemptible buffoon

Posted on by
Reply

Running true to form, the article exposing the treachery of Joe Hockey in betraying his Prime Minister is displayed by von Onselen as somehow Tony Abbott’s fault. The headline writer gets it sort of right, but there is more to the story than this: How Joe Hockey added an $80bn insult to Abbott’s injuries. Let him van Onselen tell the story:

[Hockey] insisted on the $80 billion of cuts to health and education funding beyond the forward estimates being included in the budget, in those terms. They didn’t need to be; in fact, standard practice would mean such long-term forward projections (well out beyond 2020) never would be ­included.

Abbott, showing political common sense, a commodity utterly absent in his Treasurer, was adamant that these projected cuts not be included. “The PMO insisted,” writes van Onselen, “the $80bn in cuts come out of the document”. Why invite trouble when dealing with the Senate was already likely to be difficult.

But team Hockey reinserted it without PMO approval or even awareness, [which] shows Abbott and his office were aware of the political challenge such sizeable cuts would represent, all the more so in the context of Abbott’s promise that there would be no cuts to health and education in the SBS interview — the areas targeted for an $80bn haircut.

Yes, they were aware of the political challenge, due to the likes of columnists like van Onselen who under no circumstances would have said a positive word on Abbott’s behalf when it might have been some use in getting a budget passed. Who knows where Joe took advice at that stage, from whichever treacherous scum there might also have been among Liberals in cabinet. But at least, if it could be said that Joe’s judgement was vindicated then at least there would be that. Back to van Onselen:

Hockey’s standing in the electorate sank after the first budget, ending his hopes of one day leading the Liberal Party. Talk of Hockey as a future leader was quickly replaced by calls for him to be sacked as treasurer. The mutual self-interest of survival helped Hockey and Abbott overcome the colossal mistake [!!!] in that first budget. But distrust between the off­ices never went away, and Credlin in particular never trusted Hockey or his staff again.

She never trusted Hockey again! What a terrible woman no longer to trust such a duplicitous lying deceiving rat ever again. You may be sure that no one ever trusted Hockey again. Meanwhile, van Onselen cannot bring himself to state that obvious, that Abbott had been dudded in such a way at such a time by someone he had put into a position of trust. It is one of the most disgusting stories I have ever come across, and the fact that Hockey allowed this story to reach the light of day shows what a political imbecile he is and obviously always had been.

France in lockdown

Posted on by
Reply

Paris attacks: many killed in shootings and Stade de France explosions.

The President has closed the borders amid chaos after six shooting attacks, two suicide bombings and 100 people taken hostage in a theatre.

Along with this in The Oz which was written before any of this unfolded: Police chiefs step up protection for terror target officers. The article begins:

Police officers have emerged as the target of choice for Islamic State jihadists in the West, prompting the nation’s top police chiefs to take unprecedented steps to protect their officers from the threat of terrorism.

The Weekend Australian understands much of the chatter being detected now by authorities in relation to potential attacks has focused heavily on police.

Australia’s top three police chiefs — Australian Federal Police commissioner Andrew Colvin, acting NSW police commissioner Nick Kaldas and Victoria Police commissioner Graham Ashton — have told The Weekend Australian their officers are in the crosshairs of radicals ­inspired by Islamic State.

Live coverage France News
Live coverage SkyNews