Category Archives: Cultural

“What are you made of, George?” Now we know

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Never try to outdrink an Aussie. As the story says, “John Newcombe, who was with the the former president on the night he was pulled over DUI, has revealed what really happened, and how the politician was a bit of a ‘party boy’ back then.” Well, we knew that about GWB, and in fact, this may have been the moment Bush decided to give it all up.

The sportsman, who was inducted into the Australian Hall of Fame on Friday evening, had not met the younger Bush, but as they were similar ages they decided to go out with Bush’s younger sister and his father’s press sectary Peter Roussol.

During the evening Bush tried to ‘keep pace’ with Newcombe, then 32, while drinking ‘reasonably-sized’ mugs of beer and played a ‘silent game’ with him.

Newcombe told Melbourne radio station SEN: ‘After about four of these, I picked the glass up in my teeth without my hands and skulled it straight down and I said, “What are you made of, George?” And so he had to do that.’

What’s more amazing is that Newcombe could live like that and still return serve. There were giants in their time.

“In the hands of a system whose reach is unlimited but whose safeguards are not”

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There is some controversy over the damage Snowden did but given how easily he was able to pull off what he was able to do, every spy agency in the world had been there before. The American intelligence networks are as open as a pubic library. The rest of the world taps into anything they want. Secrecy to our enemies is nil. The only people this vast network of domestic espionage was unknown to were we citizens of the West. The startling part about the entire story was how someone like Snowden could penetrate the system in the way he did and download what he was able. If you think the Russians, the Chinese and the Iranians had not been there before, you are as blind to the incompetence of the American bureaucratic establishment as it is possible to be.

To be released on October 24.

We glibly assume

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I went to hear Frank Furedi on Monday who spoke along with Nick Cater, and the message was that we must be brave and speak out because silence is the great betrayal of our values and yada yada yada etc. So I spoke to them both after and pointed out that there are major consequences for stepping out of various lines of conformity. And in speaking with Nick Cater, I was also asking him to sign my copy of A Better Class of Sunset, a collection of Christopher Pearson columns he had edited, which I highly recommend. But then when I got home I opened the book at random and found myself on the first page of the section on the Culture Wars and at a column titled, “The political correctors”. And there I found this quote from Les Murray who says exactly what I was trying to say myself:

We glibly assume in Australia that there is such a thing as freedom of speech but for most people there is not. If they express opinions which aren’t on the agenda, they are punished with extreme social opprobrium. They can lose their social life, their sexual life, their jobs. Ours is, for all its pretence of liberty, an age of timidity and terrible conformity.

Two of my close associates have in the past month or so lost their jobs for statements that their employers refused to have associated with their organisation. It is a risk that anyone who blogs or tweets or says anything in public that is not part of organisational policy runs. We have freedom of speech in the sense that the government will not put you in jail for what you say, but there are so many other ways to make you pay very dearly, it is no longer necessary. To be brave requires bravery, and not many of us have the kind of bravery that allows their entire careers to be shot to pieces through some gesture that will not deflect the world in its way by so much as an inch.

Grass does major harm

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OK, we don’t ban the sale of alcohol but that is not a reason to encourage the sale of marijuana. Another study has come out saying what common sense and casual empiricism should render obvious without argument: The terrible truth about cannabis: Expert’s devastating 20-year study finally demolishes claims that smoking pot is harmless.

One in six teenagers who regularly smoke the drug become dependent on it,

Cannabis doubles the risk of developing psychotic disorders, including schizophrenia,

Cannabis users do worse at school,

Heavy use in adolescence appears to impair intellectual development,

One in ten adults who regularly smoke the drug become dependent on it and those who use it are more likely to go on to use harder drugs,

Driving after smoking cannabis doubles the risk of a car crash, a risk which increases substantially if the driver has also had a drink,

Smoking it while pregnant reduces the baby’s birth weight.

It ruins their own lives, the lives of the people around them, total strangers are harmed because of the additional car crashes they cause and their own children are not as robust. And the pluses are . . . you get to do your own thing while others have to pick the pieces up.

Australia is still the best there is

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This was done and published by the Macquarie University Muslim Student’s Association and what is as exciting as the result is the positive appreciation of the students themselves about the country in which they live. This is from the text of the accompanying story:

It’s the reaction of passersby that makes you proud to be Australian; in every single scene, people young and old, rush to the defence of those being mistreated.

Saleh was overwhelmed by the positive response and shared on his Facebook page his delight at how inclusive and instinctively protective Australians are.

“I’m not going to lie… the lady at the end of this video almost made me cry,” he wrote.

“This social experiment was possibly one of the most eye opening experiences ever. EVERY SINGLE PERSON STOPPED and interfered. NOWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD have we seen such a response!”

“This video is hard proof that the Australian public do not welcome hate against Muslims. Yes it does occur.

“But it is clearly not welcome.”

From Andrew Bolt.

The mainstream Australian view

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This is the mainstream Australian view provided by Peter Costello, the best almost-Prime Minister this country will unfortunately never have:

This idea that Australia’s treatment of Muslims is to blame for terrorism is so fanciful you would wonder how anyone could believe it. But it is standard-issue opinion among university academics, ABC journalists and Greens senators. They act on the principle that “My enemy’s enemy is my friend”. Since they don’t like open liberal Western capitalist society, they feel natural support for those who regard themselves as at war with Western civilisation. The brutality of Islamic State does not seem to worry them nearly so much as the imagined “brutality” of the Australian Government.

Thank heavens, real people don’t fall for such rubbish. They know our society, for all its faults, is worth protecting. They are not taken in by the claims of the extremists or their odd bedfellows on the Australian political Left.

The people on the front line in the effort against terrorism are not the problem, they are a crucial part of the solution.

Obama and Team America

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I understand America is filled with people of goodwill who find it hard to truly appreciate human evil and depravity. I suppose none of us who have lived in the cushy world of the West have faced true adversity and serious evil. It is why, even now and in spite of everything, ISIS and its reflex cruelties are hard to absorb and accept.

But the true horror of the moment is that Obama is himself entirely part of the problem and in no way whatsoever part of any solution. He is a man filled with hatreds for our Western civilisation. If you cannot see it in the way he has dealt with economic issues, and then with the rise of militants of the ISIL variety, perhaps now, with his response to the Ebola virus, it will begin to dawn on people that Obama is not part of Team America, or indeed Team Western Civilisation. Factor this into the notion of Obama as a man who cares about the country he was elected to lead:

The Obama administration is not considering a ban on travelers from countries most affected by the deadly Ebola virus outbreak, the White House said on Monday.

“A travel ban is not something that we’re currently considering,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters at a daily briefing.

“We feel good about the measures that are already in place,” he said.

Ebola is easily contained in first world countries is the mantra of the moment from the people who think that global warming is the greatest problem facing us today. I just hope that this time they do have it right. What ultimately brought the Athenians down in their war with Sparta these 2500 years ago was the plague that overcame Athens. Just for the record:

The Plague of Athens was a devastating epidemic which hit the city-state of Athens in ancient Greece during the second year of the Peloponnesian War (430 BC), when an Athenian victory still seemed within reach.

For more, you might look at Viruses, Plagues and History which as I recall discussed in part how various pathogens at various times have changed the course of history. Everyone, always lives in interesting times.

Disgust at our immodesty, disrespect, materialism and impatience

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The lack of insight by Americans into how strange American ways of being are to the rest of the world is almost perfectly captured in this story: American Sex and the Middle East. The point of the story is that people in the middle east find American actions and attitudes in regard to sexual relations incomprehensible and baffling. This is the final para:

I don’t know how California’s sexual consent on campus code will strike Middle Easterners once they get wind of it. When they learn that the codes are being imposed because elite young Americans are so often hammered, let alone that on a regular basis they cavort around their coed dorms like horny satyrs and nymphs, they will not be surprised. Their default expectation of us is already one of disgust at our immodesty, disrespect, materialism and impatience. Will they find any of this as funny as I do? Well, I’m headed back to the Arab Gulf for a few days later this month, and I intend to ask. I’ll let you know what I find out.

What’s so special about the Middle East when it comes to this? I suppose having been brought up in the culture and having watched it evolve, I have some understanding of what is going on but it is still incomprehensible and baffling, specially if the aim of it all is to find peace, contentment and a satisfying life. It just looks to me as a world that has spun out of control with absolutely no mechanism to bring it back into a sensible orbit.

[From Instapundit]

Wondering why people with low IQs don’t do nuclear physics

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This is a story that even though it is reported in the newspapers I refuse to believe is true. Rooly truly this is what it’s supposedly about: Feds Wonder Why Fat Girls Can’t Get Dates:

The federal government is spending nearly a half a million dollars to find out why obese teenage girls have a hard time getting dates.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded a $466,642 grant last week for the study, which will examine whether social skills have an impact on why obese girls have fewer dating experiences than their less obese counterparts.

“Mounting evidence demonstrates that weight influences intimate (i.e., dating and sexual) relationship formation and sexual negotiations among adolescent girls,” the grant’s abstract states. “Obese girls consistently report having fewer dating and sexual experiences, but more sexual risk behaviors (i.e., condom nonuse) once they are sexually active.”

“The conceptual framework that has guided this research presumes that differences in the social skills for relating to peers and intimate partners along with differences in the relationship experiences of obese and non-obese girls account for these differences,” it said.

“However, no studies have actually examined whether the interpersonal skills and intimate relationships of obese and non-obese girls differ.”

I would not presume to know the answer myself. Even in this day of high debt and deficits, I only hope half a million is enough. But if you want more proof there are some crazy people in high places, try this out.

California [has passed] an affirmative consent bill (SB-967) that effectively declares all sex between drunk people to be rape, and requires consent to be conveyed verbally or otherwise, adding that lack of resistance or objection does not constitute consent. Enthusiastic and on-going consent must be present in order for sex to not be rape. And once again, any sane person realizes that, under this bill, it is men who are required to obtain ongoing consent from women, and that when two drunk people have sex, the man will be held to adult standards and the woman will be treated as a child incapable of consenting to activity because she did a few shooters beforehand.

Again hard to really treat this as actually true.

[Both found at Captain Capitalism.]