Hi Sheila, The worlds largest Islamic population is in Indonesia. Egypt #5, Turkey #6
http://www.religionfacts.com/islam/places/top_50.htm
There is a list of conquests here...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquests
During the 19th century, the Ottoman empire (which had subjugated the Balkans for many generations) was in decline, as all empires eventually decline. European states were able to reassert independence from the Ottoman empire through violent overthrow. It was, during the 19th century called the "Sick man of Europe". We could perhaps say the same about the USA! The Ottoman empire ceased to become a problem for the west.
These incursions aside, of which there were others in Europe, Islam spread largely due to the lack of cohesive political and religious systems in these regions beforehand, and a political/organisational vacuum. Islam provided a powerful socio-political movement and religion, of which, once established, or once enough power was gained, defended it's gains with force. It was an irreversible change, so to speak, at least outside of Europe. Islam was not able to conquer Europe, nor hold onto the Balkans (or convert it, except for two states).
Certainly, there are examples of countries which are almost completely Muslim being (relatively) stable. Turkey is an example, as were some Middle Eastern states. Egypt and Turkey are mostly Sunni Iran is 90% Shia. Libya is almost completely Sunni.
Iraq, which descended into violence after the authoritarian rule of the Baath party is more equally split, with 15-20% being Kurdish as well. Nigeria, is about 50% Muslim. Islamic violence in Africa is generally at the frontier. While not a 100% rule, the possibility of violence and conflict is (as usual), where two groups meet and complete. The more stable states are the more homogeneous ones. Syria is complex again, consisting of a slight majority of Sunni Muslims, but also a sizeable Christian and Shia population. Sunni's still form much of Assads powerbase though (which is what keeps him in power). This might be a testament to his popularity, I'm not sure. Certainly, it seems that a 'big man' is required to keep such a population together and working, and Assad is such a man.
The two major problems for US, are the two constant and persistent frontiers with Islam. The support of Israel as a western proxy state and energy interests, and the growing frontier at home. It is these frontiers where I think conflict of interests will arise, in particular as Islam rather than being strictly religious, straddles both religion and political movement. I don't see this frontiers disappearing any time soon. The Islamic population in Western nations is projected to increase (unless there is a drastic change to immigration policies), these are people who will likely demand more power and representation, and the support for Western proxy states in the Middle East and energy interests will also continue.
There is one other point, that Islam seems to adapt to the region. After all, Indonesia contains the worlds largest Muslim population, and most Muslims are in S.E. Asia, yet Islam there manifests itself differently from Middle Eastern or North African Islam. The "war against Islam" which some say is going on, seems to barely involve the majority of Muslims in South East Asia.
Comments
Australian political landscape is a sad joke
One can only envy other nations who have leaders who can communicate, think, talk and reason.
An American think tank, the CFR has labelled Abbott the most incompetent leader in the industralised world. I would say, by a wide margin. LNP apologists say that the issue is conveying the message, but the message itself is a dud.
It's not just Abbott though, its the entire entrenched "political class" which is the issue. There are barely better alternatives. A few elected members do exemplify good political stewardship, but they are exceptions, and without the support.
I think the Australian culture has an influence. Tall Poppy Syndrome holds back the capable, and there is a mistrust of those who want to be politically active and solve problems. Quite simply, our standards are low. Australia is run in the same manner that the British Raj ruled India. Just a resource to be used by the select few. Cronyism and corruption seems to not raise ire. Decisions and actions that would cause riots, protests and action in Europe seems to barely cause a murmer
Mr Dutton reveals a difficult time for immigration during 2009
Appearing on Channel Nine this morning, Immigration Minister Mr Dutton was asked about reports that one of the men who planned the terror plot entered Australia illegally. One came from Kuwait, and the other from Iraq.
"The initial advice to me allegedly one of the suspects may have come to Australia with some false documentation," he said.
"At that stage, bearing in mind it was in 2009... over that long period about 50,000 people came on 800 boats. "It was a difficult time for our intelligence agencies."
With such stresses on our Immigration Department, not only from "boat people" but during the "big Australia" of Kevin Rudd's period of ramped up immigration, it's not surprising that such soft border control has leaked through the system these misfit, terrorists.
Arrivals of migrants in the 1990s and 2000s contributed to the increase in the overseas-born population, with their proportion of the overall resident population rising to 27% by 30 June 2010. While the public were diverted by the debate on how to address the flow of boat people, the masses were arriving by plane - as the default driver of our economic growth!
Another piece of irony is that Saudi Arabia is building great wall — or rather, a great chainlink fence with razor wire — to “protect against ISIS” in Iraq.
Saudi Arabia wants to “insulate itself from the chaos engulfing its neighbours,” and it’s doing so with a supremely high-tech wall. Two high fences, 90m apart; 40 watch towers; over 1400km of fibre optic cable; underground movement detection. The International Organisation of Migration reports that 40,000 have people have died in the past decade alone trying to cross borders.
Walls are springing up across our world with incredible speed, which contradicts many cliches about globalisation. Saudi Arabia, one of the richest countries in the world, is bordered to the south by the poorest and most resource-scarce country in the region, Yemen, which has also become hotbed of terrorism. Human overpopulation, exposure of great ideological divides, resource protection, conflicts over limited land, and increasing porous international borders all fly in the face of the benefits of globalisation, and the one-world living in harmony idea.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar funding extreme Islam
Islam is growing, and so is their global influence. This is about numbers, and migration and the spread of the ideology. Thanks to liberal immigration into the West, and high fertility levels, it's spread across the world. Part of the problem is that it's spread from ancient cultures, and primitive countries, and thus there's clashes with the modern world.
Qatar and Saudi Arabia responsible for spread of radical Islam through funding. The two Gulf states have spent billions of dollars on promoting a militant and proselytising interpretation of their faith derived from Abdul Wahhab, or the original followers of the Prophet.
Many Saudis are known to have supported jihadist movements in Afghanistan, North Africa and the Middle East.
Islamic extremism is driven by a totalitarian interpretation of Islam that believes in a global Islamic state. Today, throughout the world, there has been a wave of radical movements, which sometimes turn militant, whose source can be traced to the Wahhabi movement. Now "Wahhabi" followers have taken up an increasingly confrontational standpoint attempting to impose their ideology in many regions around the world. The Wahhabi mentality asserts that Islam may be reformed by means of the sword. Under this modern ideological extremism, Islam's essential principle of tolerance has been abolished. The 18th century Wahhabi movement, which is a puritanical movement, initially aiming to return people to the right path of Islam.
Wholly different from peaceful followers of the Muslim faith, the adherents of radical Islam threaten the free expression of faith worldwide because they refuse to tolerate any religious, social, and political views but their own.
Middle East countries taken one by one
Dennis,
Given that Syria is a secular state, would you not support the government there?
And, regarding your feeling that militant Islam would be a problem independently of Western intervention, what about Libya? It was also relatively secular. Ditto Iraq. Until intervention.
Iran's reactionary religious extremism seems to be calming also.
This is my take on things: Arab and Islamic states take many forms. Not all of them militant and expansionist.
I would also suggest that militant Islam was not exactly a problem in the mid 19th century. It's a new problem.
It may have been a problem during the Ottoman Empire, if you were one of its colonies, but since the retreat of Islam from Europe, there was a long period of quiet. Interrupted by the oil-explorers and a couple of world wars.
What have I left out?
Sheila N
Commonwealth moves to tighten scrutiny of foreign investments
The Federal Government says it will tighten scrutiny of farmland sales to foreign buyers from next month.
Speaking at a sheep grazing property outside Canberra, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said Australia was "built" on foreign investment from Britain, the United States and Japan. Yes, there was lots of "investment" in Australia's land during our Colonial past, which meant that settlers from Britain and America etc could come and grab land at bargain prices - land that was being looted from the traditional owners! Many of the "foreign" buyers actually became citizens, not remote owners!
Australia was also "built" on immigration, but that doesn't means we can keep the fantasy of youth young forever! It's childish to stay holding on what we did as a nation when we were young. Growth in middle age means growing fat around our waistlines, potentially causing medical conditions, and obesity. We must accept maturity as a nation, and that our land is a finite resource, and policies must be trimmed accordingly.
As it is now, the Foreign Investment Review Board is required to scrutinise farmland sales to foreign private entities of more than $240 million. So, with such as massive bottom-line, low, bargain-basement price, it's no wonder that not many properties have passed any "review"!
There's tighter FIRB restrictions already written in to the free trade agreements Australia struck with Japan, Korea and China last year, which lowered the threshold for scrutiny of farmland purchases to $15 million, and agribusiness purchases to $53 million. Being "open for business' means selling off our sovereignty bit by bit!
Commonwealth moves to tighten monitoring, scrutiny of foreign investment in farmland on ABC Rural (11 Feb 15 – updated 3.40pm)
The details of these "new" rules are not clear, but with Australia's identity being continually diluted by neo-liberalism, Multiculturalism, and globalisation, those patriotic enough to be concerned by the sale of Australia are probably feeling war-weary and defeated!
The Middle East, Terrorism and Skepticism
The M.E. is a clustermess of a problem.
There are two issues at play here, Militant Islam (which I think exists) and failed, botched Western interventionism. This has resulted is a "worst case" scenario, we no longer can agree whether a problem exists! For a national integrity viewpoint, this is a big issue.
Some point out that Islam is a violent religion whose spread had been largely by force and coercion, and others point to Western interventionism as the "cause". It's not exclusively one or the other. I don't think ending ME wars will help much, if at all (not that they shouldn't end, only that their cessation won't make much of a difference). The problem now is people cannot decide whether to interpret events like this in the context of militant Islam, or the context of the result of Western policy failure, or both. So there is then credence, reason to suppose false flags, overblown reactions, hype, but also reason to suppose a true clash of civilisations. Which interpretation is correct?
I view it as a problem with Islam, exacerbated by interventionism. The other issue is Israel, a problem in that our support of Israel is a major factor. No ending of wars in the Middle East can hope to ease relations, unless it comes with a decision to no longer militarily and financially and morally support Israel. As few are willing to face the antisemitism label which will result, there is little than can be done politically.
ECOENGINE mentioned a very basic point. Immigration from the third world involves importing these issues. Any area which demographically changes, comes to resemble the region the people moved from. There is a lot of tortured discussion to "explain away" this observation, but decades of observation of the mass immigration social experiment, I think solidly supports this observation. I've been to many European cities, and this observation holds true regardless of the country and their specific policies. The populations revert to a mean.
Demographics matters. The unprecedented population transformation WILL have effects on the economy, yet our neoliberal model says you can make wholesale changes to a population, and this will have no effect at all. This is ridiculous.
How long can terror threats in Australia be averted?
Mike Baird, New South Wales state premier, said a potential "catastrophic" incident had been avoided. Two men, aged 24 and 25, were arrested in a raid on a property in Sydney's western suburbs on Tuesday and have been charged with undertaking acts in preparation for a terrorist act.
A number of items were located including a machete, a hunting knife, a home-made flag representing the proscribed terrorist organisation Isil, and also a video which depicted a man talking about carrying out an attack.
Last year it was reported that pre-dawn raids across Sydney and Brisbane led to the arrest of fifteen people and the reported seizure of a scimitar, a gun, machetes, balaclavas and military fatigues which authorities said were to be used in a plot to “shock, horrify and terrorise” the community.
The raids involved more than 800 security officers and marked the biggest counter-terrorism operation in Australian history. Australia's national alert level was raised to high in September last year, classifying a terrorist attack as likely but not imminent.
Just how long can these terror threats be averted, and minimized? Each time there is a terrorist attack on a Western country, they all but trip over themselves and each other to condemn - at times not even waiting for anyone to confirm the actual motives of those ultimately held responsible.
The same set formula, the same mantras are reported. "We condemn. It has nothing to do with us or our faith." The last statement is probably true - the terror has nothing to do with their faith!
The reality is that the "faith" of Islam is what's "peaceful" about it. It's worship, obedience to a high power, and spiritual. What's not "peaceful" is the political and revenge agendas of Islam - of attracting the mis-fits, the unemployed, the discontented youths, the arrogance of their superiority, and justification for war and terror.
The world is not an oyster, and closed system of nations that we had in the past. Our soldiers went "off" to war, to defend our realm and that of our allies. Now, with borders shrinking, globalisation, finite resources and overpopulation causing mass migrations and the mixture of ideals, cultures and values, any involvement of Australia in global conflicts means that it comes to us - and doesn't stay out-there! Third world immigration brings third world problems, and rather than Fortress Australia we are embroiled in global problems bleeding across into our nation, and some of them today seem to have no end in sight. We can't even be sure of the "side" we are on! The Howard Government supported the disarmament of Iraq during the Iraq disarmament crisis. Australia later provided one of the four most substantial combat force contingents during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, under the operational codename Operation Falconer. Australian troops were deployed to remove a government without the sanction of the UN.
For more than two years, U.S. policy has quietly fueled the escalation of the conflict in Syria and undermined every effort to bring the Syrian people the ceasefire and peaceful political transition they need and want. The critical covert and diplomatic role the United States has played in a war that has killed at least 100,000 people means that their blood is also on our hands.
Australia was part of opening the Pandora's Box of a vacuum of leadership in Iraq, and a abyss of discords and conflicts that may not be peacefully resolvable.
Former president: Police or armed forces planted 2nd Bali bomb
From YouTube:
Wahid on SBS Dateline: Bali Bombing 2002
Uploaded on Jun 16, 2006
This is a clip from SBS Dateline, an Austrailian news show, in which former president of Indonesia, Abdurrahman Wahid, points to the involvement of the Indonesian Military Intelligence and Police in the 2002 Bali bombing. The transcript of this program has been removed from the archives of the SBS, Australia's Special Broadcasting Services. The whole transcript can be found on : Inside Indonesia's War on Terror (12 Oct 2005)
Shrinking opportunity and space
I think a good name for it is 'shrinking opportunity' economics.
New Islam development in Penrith
Last week, a group of 18- to 30-year-olds came together at a leadership forum in Penrith to discuss the Australian identity in the 21st century, and how best to overcome cultural differences. They concluded that, increasingly, there is not one single cultural identity. It's easy to manipulate the public and soften our nationhood and borders if we have little identity as a nation. Not having a clear identity means easy access into Australia, for immigration, globalization of our resources and culture, and more opportunities foreign interests.
Protestors were shouting their opposition to a proposed Islamic community centre in nearby Kemps Creek. A Protect Penrith group, of which Councillor Cornish is a member, will hold a meeting on February 22 in St Marys to further protest against the approval of the development application. "I grew up in Auburn and their first mosque in 1979 and now they have three and it is not a safe place to walk around at all," he said at a council meeting.
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2015/01/23/08/08/police-to-keep-close-e...
Australia First is running a Penrith candidate at the March 28 election. Victor Waterson lives in Epping, and suggested that in light of terrorist attacks at home and overseas, residents should have a say in who to accept into the community.
Child brides, forced marriages, terror, conflicts, massacres of Christians, fighting within themselves, misogyny and apostasy and just a few of the evils! There must only be ONE law in Australia - not sharia law.
Saudi Arabia has spent billions of dollars promoting Islam and building muslim centres and mosques all over the world. Australia is gagged by stupidity and political-correctness!
Lets call it what it is, and it's not growth
I've seen plans for a new apartment block near the city that has 30 something square meter sized "apartments". Tiny!
Growth? Um, if unit sizes are shrinking, GDP per capita shrinking, space shrinking, opportunities shrinking, size of chocolate bars and packets of chips shrinking, where is the growth? wages are stagnating, shrinking in real terms. When I ask people what progress there is, all I get is smart phones. It seems if it were not for smart phones, there would be no notable meausurement of progress.
It is pretty much taken for granted now that the best days are behind us, not just here in Australia.
It's "cramming", "densification". It's "shrinking". It's "consolidation of wealth". I think people are too generous calling this "growth". It's proliferation, not growth. It's selling of what weve built up to benefit a few rent seekers.
It's the big 'crunch' of an unsustainable system running for inhuman purposes. As long as growthists can continue to maintain the facade that they represent "growth", then they'll get away with it, hiding behind the flawed judgement people make.
There is no growth. Only increase in the mose base of measurements, the number of breathing members of Homo sapiens who are not tourists here.
Cyclic propagation of population growth
The reports says that "extremely high-density developments...is facilitating rapid population growth in concentrated city areas, without consideration of whether the neighbourhood and local infrastructure can support these residents".
So, while our population growth for the nation is tweaked and manipulated at Federal level, to boost the vague metric of GDP, Victoria is actually feeding into and funnelling people into Melbourne by creating the apartments and facilitating the growth!
It's always a race to "catch up" with needed infrastructure, and the cost is defrayed onto the public purse! What other commercial industry has so much liquidity and flexibility that their costs can be passed onto the public, under the smoke-screen of being in their benefit?
Plan Melbourne is about catering for our "projected" population growth, but at the same time it will actually facilitate the growth - as a self-fulfilling prophecy!
The legacy of liberal Planning in Melbourne - a high density mes
High-rise apartment towers in central Melbourne are being built at four times the maximum densities allowed in some of the world's most crowded cities, including Hong Kong, New York and Tokyo, a scathing new report finds. Despite all the claims of developers and governments trying to create "affordable housing", this aim is trying to be achieved through smaller and smaller housing, an higher densities!
Leanne Hodyl is the co-ordinator of city plans and policy at Melbourne City Council. Her report said that "construction of skyscrapers in central Melbourne should be supported, because a big jump in the CBD's population had many benefits for residents, including easy access to jobs, shops and entertainment". And it made the city "more lively and animated".
Certainly it's "more lively and animated"! There's a crush of people and traffic, crime, homelessness, poverty and pollution!
It assumes that the big jump in population has nothing to do with governments tweaking our immigration rate, or that population growth is funnelled into Melbourne deliberately to pump up the housing BOOM!
It's about investors, maximising opportunities, not creating a city that's liveable or sustainable.
Construction was approved "with little regard on the effect on the residents within, the impact on the streets below or on the value of neighbouring properties", the report found.
"Melbourne's planning controls offer "cheap density" to developers as they are able to build unlimited density with limited need for a community contribution.
"Not one of the five cities that I studied – New York, Vancouver, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Seoul - is choosing to develop in this way. What cities have to cope with the rapid population growth that city is supposed to cope with, and one that's being captive for the benefit of property developers, and all the hidden local and overseas "investors" in real estate?
"There was general consensus from the planning and design experts that I interviewed who manage and study these established, globally successful cities that the densities being delivered in central Melbourne are too high and many questioned whether they could deliver long-term liveable outcomes."
Social outcomes in Hyper Dense high rise residential environments
Hong Kong carefully manages and caps density in order to protect the liveability of the city for its residents. It requires developers to provide open space for their residents. In Hong Kong, significant density bonuses are not offered as increasing the numbers of people living in a neighbourhood above what is planned for is not accepted as there would be insufficient local infrastructure, for example schools, to support these greater residential densities.
Here, we end up with chronic "shortages" of social housing, jobs, schools, hospital beds and overloaded transport and roads!
It's the result of a dead-end economy, heavily embedded in real estate, stamp duty revenues, and profits from housing growth!
This is the legacy of the Liberals in Victoria, or deregulation of planning principles and ad hoc approvals of high density constructions, under our "planning" Minister, Matthew Guy! He was the antithesis of Planning - of deconstruction of principles and professionalism.
It's neo-liberalism applied to urban design, not people or environmental focus, but pure profits and opportunism.
Prescribed burning failed in Western Australia
Perth Premier Colin Barnett has declared the Northcliffe bushfire a natural disaster. It threaten lives and homes in Northcliffe and the subdivisions of Parkfield, Bracken Rise and Double Bridge.
The Northcliffe bushfire south of Perth, which prompted demands for more prescribed burns, started in a forest block that had a controlled burn five years ago, the Wilderness Society says. Shannon National Park was burnt in December 2009 by the old Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC).
Wilderness Society spokesperson said that "the fire has burnt through very large areas of forest and other vegetation that has also been recently prescribed burnt so it simply demonstrates that prescribed burning is of little or no benefit, especially under extreme weather conditions."
This information disputed claims that heavy fuel loads, due to a lack of controlled burning, were to blame.
Burning is a disaster in our bush, for plants and animals, and can't be solved by more burning! The fire lobby use this fire to promote more prescribed burns. There have been massive amounts of prescribed burns in the Northcliffe area in the last 20 years.
The problem itself can't be solved by the problem itself!
Northcliffe blaze started in forest block where controlled burn undertaken (ABC News, 7 Feb 2015)
VICTORIAN households now risk being charged up to $1000 a year
Our living standards are increasingly under attack. St Vincent de Paul Society research reveals electricity supply charges have more than doubled in five years. Gas is up 62 per cent.
Energy analyst Gavin Dufty said the industry appeared desperate to protect revenues in the face of falling consumption. If consumption of electricity and gas falls, so are our living standards. Do we go back to kerosene lamps, and the community fire in a 40 gallon drum, for cooking and heating?
Some households could potentially be charged up to $1000 a year for combined gas and electricity supply fees, depending on their retailer, type of tariff and residential location. Melbournians are particularly at risk because of extremes of temperatures, and cold and windy winters.
While price deals usually offered discounts on electricity and gas use, they rarely discounted the supply charge as well. It's actually the supply charge that overwhelms the costs - not the actual power used! We have gold-plated poles and wires, for electricity, in which private companies can charge for over and over again! Multinational gas mining companies can set the own prices, and we must pay the same rates, for OUR GAS, that export customers are forced to pay!
Herald Sun: Households slugged up to $1000 per year before turning on electricity and gas
Private companies are making great profits, and determining our eroding lifestyles.
Heavy TAFE cuts causing skills shortages
TAFE institutions around Australia are struggling under the impact of state budget cuts, and underfunding.
Courses are being cut, student fees have risen, campuses are closing and teachers are losing their jobs.
Communities across the country are rallying to support their highly regarded, world-class TAFE system.
Yet, our we have so-called skills shortages, of needs that can't be met in Australia? So, we have 457 visa holders and other categories of imported skills when the budget for TAFE has been axed!
With increasing unemployment, especially youth unemployment, how are they to get the skills, and if they do, they are then by-passed in favour of imported skilled workers. Multinational corporations are so powerful they are able to set and implement their own agendas, and dictate to governments the policies they want.
We don't have any skills shortages, but government bereft of ideas and patriotism for Australia. It's all about globalising Australia, and eroding our sovereignty to dumb-down the country as a global resource for mining quarries, cheap labour, and high rise apartments to warehouse them in!
Sign the Petition: Stop Tafe Cuts
Not true about Ian Lowe and Mark's ACF population motion
No it’s not true. Ian Lowe had already stepped down when Mark O'Connor moved a motion on population in November.
He did oppose an earlier motion, by Geoff Mosely, that the ACF advocate for the last federal election that people write in a particular slogan “Reduce immigration”— perhaps because he felt it was too closely associated with a particular person and and his oddities.
Ian’s view on population have not changed.
Sheila, You might want to alter that item.
Candobetter.net Editor: Okay. Thanks. That 'reduce immigration' thing is becoming a divisive factor on the population front. People don't mind doing it, they just don't want to be associated with the driving personality.
Transitioning to Direct Democracy
Direct democracy cannot be brought about overnight, for it to work properly it really needs years or decades, as it requires the establishment of major changes in the education system. For it to be truly democratic the majority of citizens must be involved, well informed and able to participate and make sound ethical judgement and decisions that form outcomes.
It also requires to some extent freely available means of communication to the machinery of government.
{Telstra taken back under the wing of government and made free (cost covered by taxes)}
This would allow... A dynamic constant referendum on all decisions of government. (Very do-able)
Similarly the privatisation of many government assets and services needs to be reversed. These need to be owned by the community once again....
Finally the direct democratic community cannot include the corporate community.....
Individuals in corporations can vote.... but the corporation itself cannot !
There are ideas gathering on:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Transitioning-to-Direct-Democracy-Globally/522137594485915?ref=hl
It appears that you need a Facebook account to view this page. You can get a free account from the Facebook home page. - Ed
What is "ecologically sustainable" population?
There seems to be a large chasm between official ACF policy and what they actually support!
Australia may have below-replacement fertility levels, but our population growth is overwhelmingly driven by immigration rates, at about 60% of our growth. The other 40% "natural" growth (of births over deaths) will also be highly influenced by immigration levels too. It's a political decision, with bipartisan agreement.
Australia can hardly address the rapid and impoverishing levels of population growth in developing countries while our own economy and GDP has become irrevocably linked to population growth!
"Ecologically sustainable" is too vague, subjective and unquantifiable. Already we have the highest rate of mammal extinctions of the modern world. Even our flagship species, such as koalas, are dwindling in numbers because of competition for resources.
As for consumption levels, Australia has great climate variations, of cold to extreme heat. This means the use of power for air conditioners and heating. It's inherent in a country that was never meant to support a high population.
Australia, the driest continent, now has 6 (?) desalination plants, consuming massive amounts of energy and emitting copious greenhouse gas emissions. Living in high rise apartments will further increase base consumption levels, through loss of natural vegetation and being a slave to switches and inside power.
We might be able to reduce and recycle on individual levels, but absolute "consumption" levels will only continue to rise. Migrants who come here must adopt our lifestyle, and this means projecting our population towards 70 million by the end of the century - unless the greedy "big Australia" policy is faced head-on! No conservation or environmental organisation can ignore the elephant-in-the-room of high population growth without hypocrisy.
ACF
Sheila I concur with your sentiments to the extent that e-mailed the ACF informing them of my disgust on their stance on population and the environment. Below is their "position" on population and it's a doozy:
ACF position on population and consumption
ACF believes that the unsustainable consumption of resources by a large and growing human population is at the core of most environmental problems facing Australia and the world. We believe it is essential that human population numbers and consumption patterns be brought within nature’s limits, and that this goal can be accomplished consistently with the values of justice, equity and respect for social and cultural systems.
The policy articulating ACF’s position on matters relating to human populations and demographic change can be found here.
In summary, ACF calls on the Federal Government to set a population policy that will:
• stabilise Australia’s population and resource use to ecologically sustainable levels;
• drive adequate infrastructure for the environmental consequences of demographic changes in Australian population settlement and distribution;
• develop and fund strategies that minimise the environmental impact of population growth and maximise biodiversity outcomes;
• maintain healthy regional and remote communities that include aboriginal communities and actively working on reducing Indigenous demographic disadvantage;
• assist other nations to achieve population stabilisation and ecologically sustainable lifestyles through non-coercive, holistic development programs;
• encourage migration policy that fulfils environmental, social and ethical obligations, rather than perceived economic needs.
ACF advocates for population policies that put ecological sustainability first, however we do not run dedicated campaigns on this issue at this time. This is for two reasons.
The first is because we believe that population growth is global issue with most of the world’s population growth occurring outside Australia. Our belief is supported by the following:
• The United Nations predicts that half of future global population growth to 2050 is expected in just 10 nations - US, India and central and northern African nations.
• Australia’s current birth rates are 1.9 children per family and are below replacement rates, meaning Australia’s population growth from birth is in decline.
As an Australian environment organisation, ACF has limited ability to affect global population dynamics, although we are supportive of those internationally focused organisations that are influential on this issue.
The second reason is that ACF has a responsibility to focus its resources on issues where we can have a significant environmental benefit for Australia. This includes consumption of natural resources and the resulting environmental impacts and pollution.
Australians have one of the highest ecological footprints on earth per person, 13th out of 152 countries included in WWF’s 2014 Living Planet Report. The report shows that ecological footprints in high income countries like Australia are significantly higher than medium and lower income countries because of consumption patterns. The same report shows that carbon pollution, mainly from burning fossil fuels, has been the dominant component of humanity’s ecological footprint for more than half a century, and remains on an upward trend. In Australia, carbon pollution makes up over half of our ecological footprint, highlighting the need for decisive action to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.
ACF is addressing this threat through our Energy Revolution campaign to accelerate the shift from polluting fuels such as coal and gas to renewable energy. Achieving this will halve Australia’s ecological footprint and environmental impact and, through reducing export of fossil fuels, the emissions of trading partners. This will be a significant and transformation outcome which is why it is the focus of our efforts.
ACF campaigns on another major driver of unsustainability - the Australian economy – which is one of the most resource intensive and polluting economies of all developed nations. Our campaign aims to shift that economy to one that regenerates natural capital rather than deplete it which will require significant transition to economic policy in Australia and of course how we measure progress.
It is important that ACF continues to raise concerns about unsustainable population growth, however our limited resources require us to focus on the issues where we can make the biggest difference.
Having said that, ACF believes that it is important to challenge ourselves and our thinking to focus on what matters the most to Australia’s environment. Over 2015-16 ACF is reviewing the drivers of unsustainability in Australia and the pathways towards sustainability, and we will use this information to inform our future campaigns. This way we will be sure to focus on the major contributors to unsustainability in Australia and decline of our natural resources, and form campaigns to build a sustainable country.
You're right, they are spineless, their ignorance is appalling!
Yugoslavia fell apart soon after Tito died
Yugoslavia fell apart soon after Tito died, because Tito is what held Yugoslavia together. The independent states did not go back to Communism. There are Communist parties in Eastern Europe, and they don't get much of the vote. The KKE in Greece poll lower than Golden Dawn!
Yugoslavia is an interesting case, because Tito wasn't really aligned with the Eastern Bloc. Yugoslavia remained somewhat separate for various reasons, but mainly because Yugoslavia wasn't 'liberated' by the Soviets, and Tito wasn't a Soviet trained Stalinist.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/51216/aleksa-djilas/tito-s-last-s...
Tito's Yugoslavia was undoubtedly not a totalitarian state of mass terror, but merely a moderately authoritarian, semi-efficient, corrupt, and somewhat farcical state, similar to many others in the world. The main guarantors of Yugoslavia's unity were the communist police and army. No force in the country could challenge them, and Tito always had complete control of both. So he did not need great political skills to neutralize any opposition, including nationalists and separatists. After all, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, the other two multinational countries in Eastern Europe, also were never threatened with disintegration so long as communists and their repressive police and army ruled them.
Which is how many Yugoslavs describe it. This was a 'soft' authoritarianism, but again, not a condition I would find desirable.
Can't you see that your own personal preferences are somewhat beside the point?
Actually, I think they are the point! What other point is there? Are my preferences less valid than yours? Aren't you arguing based on what in your opinion is preferable?
What point is the human endeavour of civilisation, if not to provide a better life, which is by definition, the life people want to have? I don't quite get why I should want something I don't find desirable (having my life and society run by bureaucrats), because of some abstract axioms and principles.
Isn't that the very problem we face now? That people are forgoing what they REALLY want (open spaces, less competition for jobs, less industrial scale migration, more affordable housing), for abstract ideals like "growth" which we are supposed to want, and accept despite the outcome being yuk? These economic ideals, are supposed to be 'good' in and of themselves, but we are told to keep rooting for them, despite the outcome being undesirable (say, globalisation), because they are 'good'.
Some people don't mind a more Communist system, some prefer freedom. I prefer to to able to use my own ingenuity, skills to profit as I see fit. I'm developing a product, which I think is useful, and if so, will be sold to companies. To have to be assigned what to do by a beauracry, no thanks.
But I also get that some people may prefer to be 'looked after', and that's their choice. I have no issue with society finding ways to accommodate that either. There are a range of psychologies, and good governance would allow them to coexist in niches.
We are trapped in the Ponzi pyramid
It's assumed that high population growth and the housing "boom" is the solution to our economic stagnation and debts in Australia, but actually it's the cause. It's an unsustainable Ponzi pyramid of property investors all with vested interests in high volume real estate sales, riding on high population growth! Our economy has become trapped into the "growth" model, and with record low numbers of first home buyers, the properties must be marketed to international investors. It's to keep the housing bubble inflated for as long as possible.
The real estate Ponzi scheme has a life of its own, and it's a monster that's consuming us. Urban growth means that former industrial sites are being swallowed by housing growth, adding to the unemployment rate. Hence, immigration rates are pumped up to increase the number of buyers, and then the public are locked into inter-generational infrastructure debt, and heavy mortgages or rents.
It's like the movie, The Matrix! It depicts a dystopian future in which the reality as perceived by most humans is actually a simulated reality called "the Matrix", created by sentient machines to subdue the human population. In this present dystopia, people are being stacked and warehoused in the Ponzi pyramid, and are forced to pay for high costs and see their jobs and skills being over-ridden and ignored while foreigners benefit. We are gagged by PC (political correctness), and with only a shred of democratic powers to avoid the heavy costs being placed onto the public, and treated as economic units.
ALP already a land-speculator
It's not like the ALP actually needs the money. It's one of the richest parties in the world already, due to land speculation and banking investments. I expect that the Liberal Party is the same.
There is no way the people can win with political parties that are really corporations working with corporate governments.
Chinese developer gives big bucks to ALP
The Ever Bright Group: Housing projects
'Exclusive' Stonnington development.
The Australian Electoral Commission yesterday released financial disclosure data
for the 2013-14 financial year, revealing that the single largest donor to
the ALP was an unknown China-based person named Zichun Wang. Crikey can reveal that
Zichun Wang appears to be the deputy general manager of Chinese property
development firm Ever Bright
Group, responsible for several large developments in Melbourne’s eastern
suburbs.
Wang gave
$850,000 to the national ALP Secretariat in two parcels that year, the
largest donation to either party.
An article
about the “mystery Chinese donor” in Fairfax provoked much speculation as to the
identity of the generous figure, with Business
Spectator discovering links between Wang and
Australian real estate investment.
But Crikey can reveal the
man behind the money appears to be Melbourne-based Ever Bright Group’s deputy
general manager.
Ever Bright Group is responsible for building a range of large property
developments primarily across Melbourne and Shijiazhuang, the largest city in
Hebei province. Property developers have been banned from donating to
political parties in New South Wales since 2009, but there are no Victorian
or federal rules against it.
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What hope do ordinary Australians have when their own government encourages this kind of unfair 'competition' for wages and for housing?
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Australia Day Awards - Order Of The Toad
AUSTRALIA FIRST PARTY-: Whatever will benefit Australia - that we are for;
whatever will harm Australia - that we are against. William Lane
PRESS RELEASE
Recipients Of The Prime
Native Australian
Australia Day Award 2015
Announced
THE ORDER OF THE TOAD
[Candobetter.net editor advises those interested to go to the site and seek the details of the award there.]
AUSTRALIA FIRST PARTY
Identity - Freedom - Independence
P O Box 223 Croydon 3136. National Contact Line 02 8587 0014 www.australiafirstparty.net email: ausfirst [AT] hotmail.com
AUSTRALIA FIRST PARTY -
RECLAIMING AUSTRALIA FOR AUSTRALIANS
The Protocol for
The Order Of The Toad
SALUTATION
In addressing a recipient of this Native Australian Award, “Toad”
replaces the common usage of Mr/Mrs, or any other norm of address,
such as those relating to profession, status, position or office.
The salutation “Toad” should be used in both verbal and written
communication as an acknowledgement of the personage of the
recipient.
Toad Award salutation surpasses accreditation attributes of any other
Australian award.
In personal conversation, when addressing a recipient as “Toad“, the
inclusion of a Christian or first name in the appellation is not required.
“Toad” is consummate.
In a personal greeting, particularly when in company, the addressing of
an award holder with the salutation “Toad”, should be as a loud
voiced shout, as a full acknowledgement and recognition of the
character of the recipient.
In written communication, it is not considered appropriate to use the
letters OT [Order of the Toad], following the name of a person issued
the award, This is a norm for certain bourgeois awards, but for
Toads, such is considered likely to decrease community regard for
same, and is therefore unsuitable. “Toad” at the start of the
appellation address fully completes the protocol requirement.
The appellation “Toad” continues in usage not only whilst the
recipient remains on our Native Soil, but also elsewhere. after either
voluntary departure, or deportation under an Australia First Citizens’
Community Order. It is a lifelong accolade.
Cuba, Yugoslavia and Vietnam
DennisK wrote
... but I don't consider that this makes the Communist system itself desirable.
Can't you see that your own personal preferences are somewhat beside the point?
We were discussing statements such as the following:
"There are no successful cases, ..."
"... ALL Communist countries end up like prisons."
"... making a country Communist would lead to tyrants and despots taking power."
"... each time [communism] is applied, turns ugly."
I have shown, notwithstanding the clearly biased sites that you have linked to, that in the case of Cuba, the above statements are untrue. They were also not true in the case of Yugoslavia (which was destroyed as a result of war by NATO countries in 1999) and are untrue about Vietnam.
Cuba
http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_2_havana.html
Cuba underwent many of the same tropes, albeit, not as starkly as Russia or China.
They include, not being able to freely leave, repressive actions against political dissidents, poverty. Not being able to leave freely is always revealing.
http://therealcuba.com
Credit where it is due, Cubans and Eastern Europeans were able to make it work, to a degree, but I don't consider that this makes the Communist system itself desirable.
I think we need to disassociate the historical elements and historical needs from the theoretical elements. There are times when war has needed to be waged, when revolution has been required, but this does not make such things good per se. If war was fought for freedom, it doesn't make war itself desirable. Communism was a reaction which may have had had justification, and we can point to necessity, but again, this does not automatically place the solution which was implemented as automatically desirable.
I'll have to read more on Napoleon, but European classical socialism is a different beast to Communism. The "Socialism" that exists in say, Scandinavia today, isn't 'Communism lite', but a different economic model altogether. It does not apply Marxist economic theory. Napoleon didn't apply it I think, as he preceded the invention of the system. Capitalists repeatedly state that taxation and government spending and welfare is "Socialism" which is just "Communism", but this is wrong, Dead wrong. In fact, these Capitalist "anti-communists" are quite ridiculous, as they are actually encouraging people to become Communists, by muddying the distinction between the two and suggesting that its either Capitalism or Communism. So some choose Communism, thinking it is like the Scandinavian Socialism that these detractors call "Communism".
To be honest, I'm not exactly what I'm arguing. Usually when I argue with Communists, they point out the 'benefits' of a centrally planned economy, why Marx's economic theories are right, why national and cultural barriers should be de-constructed and why the family should be de-constructed. I'm not sure whether these positions are being advocated or not? If you go to a Marxist conference (I have) and attend Socialist Alternative meetings, this is what they do.
This is from marxists.org
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm
What will this new social order have to be like?
Above all, it will have to take the control of industry and of all branches of production out of the hands of mutually competing individuals, and instead institute a system in which all these branches of production are operated by society as a whole – that is, for the common account, according to a common plan, and with the participation of all members of society
It involves.
(i) Limitation of private property through progressive taxation, heavy inheritance taxes, abolition of inheritance through collateral lines (brothers, nephews, etc.) forced loans, etc.
Abolition of private property. For those who have nothing anyway, such a system might seem desirable.
(v) An equal obligation on all members of society to work until such time as private property has been completely abolished. Formation of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
We have this issue
Society will take all forces of production and means of commerce, as well as the exchange and distribution of products, out of the hands of private capitalists and will manage them in accordance with a plan based on the availability of resources and the needs of the whole society. In this way, most important of all, the evil consequences which are now associated with the conduct of big industry will be abolished.
which results in failure, because WHO is going to organise this? Which institution or bureaucracy can possibly have the omniscience, objectivity and restraint to do this? Do intellectuals really have what it takes, to manage every detail of an economy?
We also have this, the wilful elimination of nationalities and ethnicities by policy.
The nationalities of the peoples associating themselves in accordance with the principle of community will be compelled to mingle with each other as a result of this association and thereby to dissolve themselves, just as the various estate and class distinctions must disappear through the abolition of their basis, private property.[3]
As I said, unless one is specifically advocating this Marxist economic and political system, then one is not advocating Communism. If it is social responsibility, acting in the collective interest, placing people before profits, again, this isn't specifically Communism.
Cuba
Maybe another indication of how strong Cuba has been, despite its poverty (especially since the fall of the Soviet Union, which had provided cheap oil) is the fact that the United States has resiled from its Cuba isolation policy after years of trying to destroy Cuba that way. It now looks as if it hopes to seduce Cubans into capitalism via baubles instead, in the same way it has done with China. I note that Castro's brother, who is now in charge, has also begun to allow land-sales.
If I were head of Cuba, I would introduce a version of the Napoleonic Code at this point, in order to keep housing a citizen's right. Some one is bound to make the remark that Cuban building structures are turning to dust and thus providing inferior shelter. There is a possible political conflict in preserving the remarkable pre-communist architecture, which I hope that Cuba would ultimately take care of as its patrimoine - as France does.
Another reason for the United States' new softly softly approach is, of course, the rising strength of the BRICs bloc, in conjunction with Russia. I think one would find that most or all BRICs countries have active communistic factions or have civil rights movements or even civil laws that conflict with market capitalism. The situations in these BRICs countries, with the exception of Russia were all or mostly the results of colonial interference. Note that the Tsars were part of a two caste system, like Britains, where the 'noble' caste was presumably an earlier colonising people. I don't know if it goes back to the Vikings or not. Would be interesting to investigate.
Cuba: another communist tyranny?
DennisK wrote:
Communism each time it is applied, turns ugly.
"Each time", Dennis?
How about Cuba?
The government of Cuba is formed by the Cuban Communist Party. The Cuban Communist Party is largely made up of what was formerly, the 26th of July Movement which came to power on 1 January 1959 in a country which was barely 150km south of the United States.
Almost immediately, the Cuban Communist Party government implemented reforms that was to transform Cuba from a capitalist society into a socialist society.
Contrary to your assertion, Cuba did not immediately become a ghastly police state which imprisoned or killed any Cuban who opposed the government. Not long after the triumph of the revolution, the United States sponsored an invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles on 16 April 1961. That invasion was known as the "Bay of Pigs" invasion. Had Cuba been the tyranny that you implicitly claim that it must have been, then surely the Cuban population would have embraced the invaders and risen up against Castro or, at most, remained neutral. Instead they rallied to the support of their government and drove the invaders back into the sea.
Cuba may not be 'paradise on earth' – as if paradise could be possible in a world in which many countries have suffered the terrible consequences of military aggression by the United States and its allies in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Ukraine, Vietnam, Cambodia, Egypt, Korea, ... – and it's government many not be perfect, but surely, given the adversity it has faced, the Communist government of Cuba deserves credit?
Given the success of Cuba, why not acknowledge that the extreme adversity faced by others who have tried to accomplish the same in the previous century, rather than any fundamental flaw in their plans, may have been one of the factors which caused the outcome?
Socialism, communism, dirigism and capitalist conspiracy
Here are some of my thoughts in this interesting argument.
I would still call attention to the fact that communism is a reaction to capitalism.
All revolutions require change of ownership of land.
Russian communism developed from the Tsars, who all used massive forced labor. It freed a huge amount of slaves and tried to integrate them into an economy. That was a change from the usual way of freeing European serfs, which generally meant freeing them from the land they had been bonded to and leaving them to fend for themselves with no capital, food or shelter - just as happened when indigenous people like the Australian aborigines were chased off their land.
An exceptional revolution with communistic/socialistic structure which has survived well is the Napoleonic system, starting in France and growing over several generations out of the initial revolution of 1789. In this evolution the church land and responsibilities were resumed by the State, along with the employment of the clergy. Peasants and low clergy from the north of France legally managed to get the King to admit representation for the lower classes but the king then tried to reverse this by violence, unleashing his foreign army on Paris. The people then fought the aristocrats, who fled the country into the arms of royalist countries all around who would continue to this day to fight against French-style democracy. The state-owned old church land plus some aristocrats' land was then auctioned to pay off state debts incurred during many trade wars with other Europeans. There was a constant struggle between educated business people, peasants, poor people in towns and the few serfs that had remained on the land for the rights and ability to acquire these lands. This led to many changes in law and many changes to parliament, many of them violent. Eventually Napoleon recodified the underlying Roman law prevailing south of the Rhine in the Napoleonic Civil Code. This code built on a pyramid of local representation and delegation to a central authority. Localities retained a lot of power and still do. This system passed to every country in Europe, with some variations. Royals who were now aligned with corporations in colonisation and industrialisation continually attempted to destabilise through war and propaganda what Napoleon had achieved. The same suspects continue to try to destabilise this long-lasting system, with Sarkozy damaging a key factor in inheritance law and signs of anglophone style meddling at EU level. Dirigism is the socialistic economy that we traditionally identify with France and this is something that propaganda bullhorns like the British Economist and US spokespeople constantly try to wreck.
More recently than the French and the Russian Revolutions we see other communistic or socialistic (often dirigistic) reactions to capitalist colonialism, such as Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia, Libya, Syria, maybe North Korea and Iraq (need to look these up myself). It is not as if the dirigiste or socialist or communist experiment has been conducted in a clean petri-dish.
Where communism was a reaction to capitalism, capitalism has not just given up and taken its ball and bat home, it has launched endless wars to retrieve its influence on those countries. And we see this today.
This is an interesting discussion which I would like to continue now were it not for a more pressing publication I must attend to.
I hope that Dennis and James will continue to discuss these matters respectfully. I would appreciate some detail on North Korea and Iraq, as well and other countries from James, since I know he has profound knowledge in these areas.
My own position still trends to relocalisation and dirigism.
Ian Lowe, SPA and the ACF
This has been going on for more than 20 years with the ACF. They have become a shelter for professionals seeking funding. They trade dishonestly on old credentials, like the Sierra Club. Most NGOs are like that. At least what you read is what you get with a loose association of people under a banner, like candobetter.net.
As for Prof Lowe - sad if true, but can't say I'm surprised, given his mainstream status. However he is a patron for SPA and SPA doesn't resile from criticising the major source of overpopulation in Australia, which is immigration.
Curious spinelessness, like so many things in the politics of populations or in all politics.
Show me where Communism worked
The only thing that matters in this world, is what actually happens.
Communism each time it is applied, turns ugly. Where has it resulted in a workers paradise?
Socialists and Marxists talk blue in the face about theory, about what ifs, about how it "should have worked". They have reasons why for it didn't work here, and didn't work there. Should have, could have, try again are not adequate arguments to put forward to reconsider a system which led to millions of deaths.
Does it work? Show me! Can you show me evidence that its worked, that it can produce a wealthier more prosperous society? Is there a case study reliable enough?
The fact that its failed each time makes alarm bells ring. If Communism was brutal because it was a response to adverse conditions, then that actually says more than you realise. If Communists had GOOD reason to do what they did, that says more than you realise. You then have to ask, why is it these conditions and only these conditions where people began to apply Communism? Why do people react this way? How can we avoid creating conditions which then result in force and labour camps becoming 'necessary'?
If Communism is a response to a problem, then how can we resolve this problem before it needs such a drastic response?
I make the EXACT argument with the far right in Europe. They are a response to a drastic problem, but my interest is, how can we address this problem, to avoid the need for a drastic response?
How can we address modern day Capitalism, so as to avoid a response where people are then killed and jailed for opposing a 'revolutionary' system?
I'd rather do that.
http://classroom.synonym.com/labor-camps-soviet-russia-1920s-8903.html
The development of labor camps followed quickly after the Russian Revolution in 1917. As early as November 1917, the new Bolshevik regime identified “enemies” of the revolution and subjected them to forced labor as punishment. In June 1918, Leon Trotsky suggested sending members of the urban bourgeoisie to remote camps, and less than two months later the first camps were established. The Soviets converted World War I prisoner of war camps to house a new category of inmate.
Here is Trotsky on how Socialism works
http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/museum/his1g.htm
"It is said that compulsory labor is unproductive. This means that the whole socialist economy is doomed to be scrapped, because there is no other way of attaining socialism except through the command allocation of the entire labor force by the economic center, the allocation of that force in accord with the needs of a nationwide economic plan."
So Lenin's government advanced to the next stage: sending the Cheka and the Red Army to seize grain directly from the peasant. This was ideologically justified by dubbing peasants who resisted grain as wealthy "kulaks," though rich and poor alike found themselves staring down the muzzles of the Cheka's guns. Once again, the resort to ever greater brutality did not bring the desired results. Minimal food was collected, and the peasants went into open revolt. Lenin, who in every other matter seemed to be the master of the temporary compromise, could not control his hatred of the resisting peasants. He ordered kulaks to be deprived of not only surplus grain, but even seed grain, while in his speeches he exhorted: "Merciless war against the kulaks! Death to them."
Dont' forget, we TODAY have hindsight. Russian peasants in 1917, indeed few people at all, could have know what we know NOW. Lenin may have tried to do good (so did Hitler and Stalin according to themselves), but we know NOW how it turned out. We know how Marxist Socialism applied elsewhere turned out.
Could ten invading armies have been defeated with harsh words?
DennisK wrote:
Even Lenin started labour camps.
I note that you have not cited sources to verify this claim about 'labour camps'. In any case, I already explained above why I thought it was necessary for Lenin to resort to harsh measures, just possibly including 'labour camps', to defend his government in the middle of a savage civil war. In that post I cited another post to another forum made nearly three years ago:
As others pointed out, Lenin was faced with a savage civil war and an invasion by the troops from over ten foreign nations, including Australia.
So is it fair to damn Lenin for having resorted to harsh measures to keep his government in power, especially given what his opponents, many professing to be for democracy, both outside the Soviet Union and within, have 'achieved' since his death?
No-one has bothered to attempt to refute that argument, there or here.
I will address the remainder of DennisK's fallacies, omissions, inconsistencies and baseless assertions on another occasion.
Factions during the Russian revolution
The people who led the first successful Communist Revolution in 1917 were not the same as those who committed the crimes which occurred under Stalin's rule.
True.
Had they lived and still been in control of the Soviet Union, there is every reason to expect that those crimes would not have occurred. They certainly don't deserve to be held culpable for Stalin's crimes.
Even Lenin started labour camps. The repression began before Stalin. Stalin just amplified it. But what about China? Cambodia? North Korea? Why is there a pattern in which countries which try Communism end up becoming prisons?
I think the argument that these crimes wouldn't have occurred is not based on historical precedent. We can see that the application of Communism has, multiple times, resulted in despotism, and millions dead. There are no successful cases, ones that we would want to move to.
One can argue that each case was due to specific circumstances, which had nothing to do with Communism, and it just is happenstance that ALL Communist countries end up like prisons. Or we can see that there is a trend, try to understand it and see if there is a simpler explanation.
I argue that if one is to advocate a system which has, in the past led to repression, political killings, starvation, then you would have to be absolutely sure, that those failures are NOT related to the system, and are just coincidences.
When you implement ideas, you don't usually just get the result you SAY will happen. When theory meets practice, it is often a turbulent collision and theory begins to lose out. People who subscribe to an ideology, can't accept that it doesn't produce the results they say it does. They then blame, not themselves, but those who they claim are anti-revolutionary, or who don't produce the result they say it should. Free Market Libertarians go into the SAME mode each time deregulation, self-regulation and letting the financial sector 'be free' fails. It's not the idea, its the fault of person X and Y. It's not the system, its the person fault. Its Mr X, Politician Y. It was Greenspan. Their THEORY says people are rational all the time, and people are rational, individual economic agents who can make correct market decisions.
Socialism couldn't, cant, survive implementation. It made assumptions about human nature which weren't true. It had economic theories that were just wrong. How can a system based on false assumptions work in practice?
We can see corollaries today, with our 'growth driven' system. It in theory, says that growth is good, limitless and endless. But in practice, this is simply not possible. So who's to blame when it fails? Why, those who point it out! The 'xenophobes' who don't want industrial strength immigration, the environmentalists, the scientists warning about Climate Change. These people MUST be sabotaging our system! Those who want to maintain decent living standards, well, they must be WRONG! How dare they argue for things which might 'slow growth'!
So I'm arguing that making a country Communist would lead to tyrants and despots taking power. The system would immediately conflict with human nature, and it would either 1) fail when people were free to think and question, which is what killed Communism in Eastern Europe, or 2) 'succeed' because the necessary action was put into place to deal with opponents, to make the centrally planned economy produce, and make the Communist state structure survive economic failures. Communism would either fail, or result in harsher and harsher measures. The party structure would see that highly motivated power hungry people are the ones who gain power.
Attempt by "political and religious ideologists" to prevent WW1
I wrote:
If you had read a little more history, you would know that a large number of people who labeled themselves "communists" in the early 20th century, including the Central Committee of the Russian Bolshevik Party, which led the revolution in 1917, did not consider Stalin, who was to commit nearly all of the crimes wrongly attributed to 'communism', a 'communist'.
... then DennisK wrote:
Politically speaking, this statement doesn't say anything. It applies to ALL political and religious ideologies. In all of them, there are some who claim to be the "one true faith" and denounce the others as not the true faith.
Our readers deserve better than this apparent attempt to trivialise such a gravely serious historical issue.
On 4 August 1914, the members of one "political and religious ideology", including its adherents who were running the Australian government at the time (see "Hell-Bent – Australia's leap into the Great War" (2014) by Douglas Newton), decided to start a bloody war that was to last over 4 years and cost the lives of 10 million combatants and 8 million civilians. Members of another "political and religious ideology," who had twice before – in 1911 and 1912 – prevented war, also tried to prevent that war breaking out, but, sadly, failed.
'Adherents' to the latter "political and religious ideology" included Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky in Russia and Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Germany. The latter two were murdered in January 1919 after they had participated a in failed revolt against those adherents to the other "political and religious ideology" which had led Germany into the First World War. They were killed by German FreiKorps mercenaries, many of whom were to form the core of Hitler's Nazi Party, which was to start another even more bloody and terrible war barely 20 years later.
Of the 21 members and 10 candidate members of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party of Russia in 1917, only Stalin, Trotsky, and two others were still left alive or not imprisoned by 1939. The then exiled Trotsky was to be murdered on Stalin's orders in August 1940.
The people who led the first successful Communist Revolution in 1917 were not the same as those who committed the crimes which occurred under Stalin's rule. Had they lived and still been in control of the Soviet Union, there is every reason to expect that those crimes would not have occurred. They certainly don't deserve to be held culpable for Stalin's crimes.
Some dairy farmers agree with Voiceless concern about cruelty
Animal welfare group Voiceless says consumers should stay away from milk because increasing numbers of dairy cows are suffering. Bobby Calves are male calves that can't be raised to produce milk. Cows must give birth often to ensure a consistent milk supply, just like all other mammals.
To acquire the milk, the calves must be removed from the mothers after a few short days.
If they give birth to a male it is likely to be sent to slaughter after a few days of life, or put down on the farm. Others end up in crates to be slaughtered for veal.
The bobby calf issue is a sensitive one, for the right reasons, and that unfortunately the dairy industry doesn't see any other options. They are the by-product of the seemingly benign dairy industry. Bobbie calves can be used for pharmaceutical products, leather and pet food, when not grown for veal.
Bobby calves are not worth a great value, dollar-wise, therefore it becomes uneconomic if they have to travel vast distances, and in an animal health and welfare sense they can't be on the road for too long, either.
Australia's dairy cow population of about 1.8 million has remained stable for the past 30 years, but annual milk production has doubled to 9.3 billion litres in that time, figures from the Department of Agriculture show. It means that cows are bred to produce more milk, and that there is a consumer drive towards alternatives. It also means that the modern dairy cow commonly suffers from mastitis, lameness, metabolic disorders, mutilation procedures and the inevitability of repeatedly losing her calf.
On top of the issue of overworked cows, it raises welfare concerns such as tail docking, dehorning, and disbudding, as well as the treatment of bobby calves.
SMH:Dairy cows suffer from doubling milk production in 30 years
Hundreds of thousands of new born calves are slaughtered each year, as a by-product of our milk consumption. Dairy is not an essential food for humans. Humans have no nutritional requirement for animal milk, in contrary to the advice of most nutritionists who encourage people to consume three servings of dairy a day. In multiple, peer-reviewed animal studies, researchers discovered they could actually turn the growth of cancer cells on and off by raising and lowering doses of casein, the main protein found in cow's milk. Ironically, the countries with the highest rates of osteoporosis are Australia, the US and the UK "where we have the highest intake of dairy"!
Communism is somewhat similar to Capitalism
This is maybe a non-sequiteur, but personally I think that communism is the response to capitalism.
I think the point is quite important. Communism was the implementation of Victorian Era economic theory, in response to the conditions of Capitalism at the time. The Tsars were also a major factor. Fascism was also a response to Communism. Modern Liberalism is a response to Fascism. The new politics emerging is a response to Modern Liberalism, and so it goes.
I don't think that Communism is an accurate reflection of historical communities. I note that Free Market Libertarians make the exact same argument, that somehow their system is more 'natural' and was the primeval state of human economics.
Communism (according to those who seek to implement it today), consists of children being raised by the state, the loss of any private property, the destruction of religious, national, ethnic and familial identities. Communism seems to aim to make human beings even more a tool of an economic system than Capitalism does. The devil is in the details. Sure, it's for 'equality', 'brotherhood', and so forth, but any ideology implemented with lofty moral goals, always ends up going sour.
Both Communism and modern day Capitalism see human beings, societies, countries as being objects based around an economy. Just as Communism called for social change, assimilation and removal of human identity and barriers for 'economic' reasons, so to does Capitalism, which calls for things like nations to destroy their identity for the sake of 'growth'. Instead of Goldman Sachs calling for European nations to implement population policies to eradicate the existing demographic status, you'll have beaurocrats and intellectuals deciding what should happen.
I get why people want to move away from a system which views human identity as an obstacle to arbitrary economic ideals which in practice only benefit a few, but in practice, Communism ends up being the same.
My take on the problem of Capitalism, is it's a power problem. A few people are calling the shots, and the state and economy is turning into an autocracy. The EU takes power away from nations to decide their fate, and puts it in the hands of unelected technocrats. Here in Australia, we put more and more decision making into 'experts' and 'leaders'. The media pushes the message that we must let people like Matthew Guy make the decisions, because we can't. This actually goes against the idea of the market economy, because they are going against what the market, ie, the people actually want. The trend seems to be "we need to control things, because its getting to 'complex' for us to allow you". That division, that there is a 'ruling' class which 'knows' what to do and should be entrusted with decisions is the problem. The solution is to reaffirm, and retake ownership over of communities, state and nation. Where the people can say, set immigration policy, instead of a few people doing it because they are 'business leaders' or somehow more authorised. The solution is kind of waiting, but it needs people to have the will to come alive.
I see it more as a power problem (ie, billionaires and entrenched political classes have power). We need to shift power away from those who have it, but I'm sceptical of the need to then completely replace or socio-economic system with one thought up by people who have never actually don't productive work.
Obvious is not always obvious.
I dont mean to be rude
Think of gravity. Obvious that things fall to the Earth, right? Through history till Newton, no one really thought about what it was.
Newtons theory that something MAKES the apple fall, is so simple, even children go "yeah, so what?". But it took a genius to make people think about the obvious. We would struggle to comprehend how people thought about it before newton, how they could not ask the question, but the fact is, no one really did .
My article is very obvious and basic, to those who know. Gravity is very basic, to those that know. To those who dont, its a revelation.
The problem is, so many people think that something or something is so basic, so trivial, they never think it worthwhile to just say it. But just saying it can be very powerful.
Truth is simple
At the core, are issues a 10 year old could understand. Problem is, the 10 year old is more likely to "get it" because thay havent taken on board all the crap we are given by those who have a vested interest in something other than plain truth.
How to fix it all? I'm not sure, but there IS a political change occuring. Mainstream everything is no longer what it once was. Media, politics, etc , people are shifting to alternatives. So things are changing, but it is innerving for the impatient. People dont view mainstream media as THE source of all information. Politics has always been criticised, but it is a joke now, and people are calling it out.
Greece has voted in a far left, non mainstream party. 10 years ago, people would have thought this a pipe dream.
I think patience is important. Don't think nothing is happening, because its not happening right now. Persistence pays off and the best thing one can do, is to just continually plug away spreading ideas. Commenting on news sites, blogs, speaking to people, spreading memes and just slowly weaving your narrative into the public discussion.
People tend to like flashy demonstrations, but they dont change much. Much political change happens due to tireless, disciplined people. The Comminists in Russia gained power by many means, but one of the more interesting strategies was just always turning up to meetings' whether it be a community organisation they have infiltrated or what not, and staying past the end. They were just there all the time. Seems silly, trivial and pointless,, but it worked!
Don't discount plugging away spreading ideas, I have seen it work before.
The ACF votes to implicity suport "Big Australia"
The Australian Conservation Foundation Council votes to implicitly support 'Big Australia’.
The Independent Australian:The Australian Conservation Foundation Council votes to implicitly support 'Big Australia’
ACF members were invited to the AGM held on 21st November 2014 at 6pm with the promise of meeting the new president, Mr Geoffrey Cousins, a prominent business man on the board of Telstra, and successful environmental activist who played hardball in successful campaigns against the Gunns paper pulp mill in Tasmania and the James Price Point gas project in the Kimberley. However, the connection between Australia's third world rate of population growth and environmental stress/degradation hasn't linked in their logic.
The ACF Council then met the next day. The council consists of 35 members elected by state and territory members for a fixed term of three years.
Mr Mark O'Connor, an ACT delegate, (who co-authored with William Lines the book Overloading Australia: How Governments and Media Dither and Deny on Population ) urged the ACF to speak out against the environmental costs of Australia’s rapid population growth and to call for a referendum on population. He moved a motion that Australia reduce immigration levels to 70,000 per year, rather than the 240,000 and 1.8 % growth we have now.
Many delegates spoke against the motion. Cousins was against the motion. It was defeated 21 to 7 with abstentions. The names of those voting were recorded. The desire to be PC is overwhelmingly stronger than logic, or any desire for real "conservation"!
Previous president, Professor Ian Lowe was none too subtly opposed the motion. He said that a slogan like “ 'Reduce Immigration' would probably be interpreted, without the sort of qualification that I have just written, as supporting a view that migrants pose problems while people born here don’t!
Overwhelmingly, it's migration that contributes to our population growth!
It's not "migrants" verses Australian-born that should be voted on, but population growth! They diverted and hijacked the argument totally!
In the book Australian Public Policy: progressive ideas in the neo-liberal ascendancy , Lowe has a chapter (p.239) in which he writes that the reason for the defeat was that the motion (to reduce immigration) would be perceived as discriminatory. Discriminatory against who? We should open our borders? The "C" in ACF should be changed to a "B A" for advocates of "Big Australia" and big corporate profits!
The Australians of future generations who will be forced to take on the challenges of an over-populated country, with depleting resources and lost natural heritage?
The ACF are trying to outmaneuver pot-holes created by their own lack of logic, and inconsistency. No doubt the ACF’s illogical and contradictory policy to ignore their own recommendations on reducing immigration rates is about ensuring government funding! No doubt they don’t want to ruffle any feathers, and still keep their jobs!
With the Australian economy riding on high population growth, it’s obviously contrary to any environmental conservation aims, and can’t be sustained economically, or ecologically!
Any “environmental” or planning organisation without a robust population policy is impotent, and internally flawed by contradictions and vested interests.
air and oxygen cylinders
As always, Joan's comments are insightful and pertinent.
There is one comment where I think she goes astray, that I would take issue with, and that is her reference to cylinders of compressed gas.
Joan is perfectly correct to write that LPG cylinders explode in fires - and not just major bushfires. Typical small LPG cylinders have minimal excess pressure relief, primarily intended for overfilled cylinders on normal hot days. For a standard house delivery cylinder (100 litre, I think) I suspect the radiant heat from a major bushfire could overwhelm the excess pressure relief valve, given that these are a wall of radiant heat.
The standard formula for radiant heat gives a reduction in intensity of 1/(distance from source)squared. This is not useful in bushfire, where the source is effectively a flat wall, not a point source, and so the radiant heat diminishes only slowly until the wall of fire starts to take on a smaller aperture: that is some considerable distance from the firefront. Think in terms of 100 to 1000 metres on open ground.
There is also the slightly odd claim that cigarettes and mobiles are banned in hospitals beause oxygen is used: cigarettes are banned for health reasons, and mobiles are, or were banned because the medical equipment is sometimes sensitive to EM fields (this is improving), and hospitals are required to be precautionary where the equipment involved could be part of life support. Mobiles can also interfere with some scanning equipment.
It is worth noting that *NO* single gas in a cylinder is explosive in so far as the gas as gas is concerned - a single gas, on its own, cannot burn (chemical explosion is a very fast form of burning, remembering that burning is exothermic combination of fuel and oxidant). Remember the old "burning triangle": fuel, air (oxygen), and heat. Remove any one, and the fire stops, or can't start. This is not to say that a cylinder of compressed gas, when heated, cannot be raised past the bursting pressure of the cylinder, which is precisely the above issue with LPG.
However, cylinders are built to withstand the maximum pressure possible in a properly filled unit, under worst case temperature, for reasonably likely conditions. Unsuprisingly, being at a bushfire front does not fall within that qualification. A fire bunker would fall within that limit, given that its purpose is to allow people to survive. That is to say, people would die of heat stress long before an air (scuba) cylinder would approach its pressure limit.
And I would like to reiterate her last point - unless you want your house to burn, start to prepare now, regardless of what time of year now is.
How to achieve this?
Nice one Dennis, I agree pretty much with everything you say here - and I don't mean to be rude, but much of it should be obvious to anyone with sense. But not our policy makers it seems, self interest trumps common sense nearly every time.
Anyway, it seems it is almost too late. We need Citizens Initiated Referenda, and then - use that to get a new constitution. But how? And every more important how before everything turns to sh--e? (i.e more sh--e than thing are already for many people - not sure what to do about the massive mortgages nearly everyone under 40 has).
Third Hand Awards
AUSTRALIA FIRST PARTY-: Whatever will benefit Australia - that we are for;
whatever will harm Australia - that we are against. William Lane :-
PRESS RELEASE
Nominations for the
Australian Peoples Movement Award
The Mao Tse-tung
Order of the Third Hand
are invited from Individuals of The Commonwealth
CRITERIA.
This Award is for Scabs who aid and abet the scourge of Chinese Imperialism in Australia, manifested in their conniving for unwanted exploitive “developments”; the selling and purchase of resources and assets of Our Commonwealth, and the accompanying demographic swarm and cultural recolonisation of our Native Land. It exemplifies a Traitor Class motivated solely by monetary gain, and devoid of any respect or loyalty to the Australian People, our identity, heritage, sovereignty and independence.
Award nominations are for the quarter ending 31st March , 2015.
The Order of the Third Hand Award is of ongoing character and our Australian Peoples Movement on the Day Of Reckoning will bestow further to recipients.
Please forward the name and address of the person to be nominated, with supporting references, to the address below. Include your own name and address.
AUSTRALIA FIRST PARTY
Identity - Freedom - IndependenceP O Box 223 Croydon 3136. National Contact Line 02 8587 0014 www.australiafirstparty.net email: [email protected]
Australia First Party - Reclaiming Australia for Australians
“By over-all planning, we mean planning which takes into consideration the interests of the 600 million people of our country. In drawing up plans, handling affairs or thinking over problems, we must proceed from the fact that China has a population of 600 million people, and we must never forget this fact”. Mao Tse-tung. 27/2/1957.
Windfall for Sea Shepherd!
Marine activists Sea Shepherd have struck it rich, winning an $11.8 million gift that will help it build a new faster ship for its Southern Ocean whaling battles. The fast, purpose built patrol ship will be used for a future campaign in the Antarctic against the Japanese whaling fleet, Sea Shepherd spokesperson said.
The gift came in an annual disbursement by the Dutch Postcode Lottery, which awards around 50 per cent of its proceeds to charities. Dutch ship builder Damen has drawn up a blueprint for the new vessel, which is to be built in Vietnam and take around 17 months to complete.
The chief executive of Sea Shepherd Global, Alex Cornelissen, said the organisation had been looking for years for a vessel that could become the Southern Ocean patrol flagship. But budget restrictions had until now made that impossible.
While its long range ship, Bob Barker, has had no trouble keeping up with the pirate fisher, Thunder, over the past five weeks in the Southern Ocean, the whaling fleet has been able to out-run the activists.
Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Senator Colbeck said in a recent statement, that the Australian Government did not support, and was in no way associated with, the activities of Sea Shepherd.
Obviously, our government has wasted $$millions of taxpayers' funds in shallow and ineffective "diplomatic" campaigns, all fruitless and empty rhetoric!
http://www.theage.com.au/environment/sea-shepherd-to-build-faster-ship-f...
No communism without capitalism
This is maybe a non-sequiteur, but personally I think that communism is the response to capitalism. Historically Engels and Marx were responding to the rise of industrial capitalism. Both big system political ideologies about organising land ownership, labour and commutation. Both were and are resisted by 'relocalisation' or 'anarchism'. One hardly dares utter the word 'anarchism' because it was given the same bad reputation as 'terrorism' by prevailing powers.
There was also historically an idea of local communities as 'communism', which the French Revolution to some extent brought about and which Napoleon codified quite successfully in a delegating hierarchy.
I know you have a new article to post, Dennis, but what would you suggest we do in the face of global savage capitalism? Given you do perceive we have some big problems.
Global workforce to destroy Trade Union movement
The Department of Immigration and Border Protection has reviewed skilled migration and in December, it quietly released its recommendations to relax entry requirements for short-term foreign workers. Its proposals include extending the six-month short term mobility visa to 12 months.
Australian government wants to let foreigners work for a year with no visa
As if there wasn't enough stress on the unemployed already, and enough visa categories, our Department of "Border Protection" is opening the gate to foreign workers even wider!
Overseas workers would not have to apply for a 457 working visa, which imposes stricter entry requirements including English language tests. Employers are also required to demonstrate they have looked for local workers before giving jobs to employees from overseas, under a 457 visa.
Now there's no English or skill level needed and employers do NOT have to employ available locals either! In a denial and insult to the public, especially the unemployed, and the government is justifying this open-slather jobs for foreigner as being "good" for us! It will secure business growth and ensure MORE jobs for Australians in the future??
The government's argument is that removing such regulations help ease the compliance burden on employers, which (so the argument goes) ultimately leads to a more productive workplace and more job opportunities. It could do harm by jeopardizing Australia's working conditions and wages, and it's probably intentional-to destroy all the work done by the Trade Union movement over the years through global competition. This was probably also the intention of the so-called "Labor" government.
And the undermining scheme is evident already:
Federal Labor fears the government's workplace review is so broad it could create a class of US-style working poor.
Penalty rates, the minimum wage and unfair dismissal laws are among the issues being reviewed by the Productivity Commission, which has called for fresh ideas on Australia's industrial relations system.
Review could lead to working poor: Labor
Mr Abbott agrees that businesses need more "balance" in hiring their workforce, which a euphemism for being able to hire anyone they want without visa/residency restrictions, and at what rates they want!
Communism is idealism
Presumably, given that communism has killed "between 85 and 100 million", according to that Wikipedia article, surely you must think it would have been preferable for Hitler have won the Second World War and to have succeeded in ridding the world of communism?
That is not the argument I have been making. Such matters are subjective anyway and it is presumptuous to think there is a universal answer to that question. Sometimes its a choice between two devils.
Everyone agrees that Nazism is evil, but it seems there is still 'love' for Marxist Communism. This is presumably because there are many academics and intellectuals, who actually get paid to talk and write about this, as if it still were some viable political option.
I argue this isn't due to the merits of the systems, but merely who took power over who, and who won a war over who.
If you had read a little more history, you would know that a large number of people who labeled themselves "communists" in the early 20th century, including the Central Committee of the Russian Bolshevik Party, which led the revolution in 1917, did not consider Stalin, who was to commit nearly all of the crimes wrongly attributed to 'communism', a 'communist'.
Politically speaking, this statement doesn't say anything. It applies to ALL political and religious ideologies. In all of them, there are some who claim to be the "one true faith" and denounce the others as not the true faith.
All that is being said here, is that some who claim to be communists think the other variants are. The exact same argument can be made about Islam, Christianity, National Socialism, Fascism, Libertarianism, Environmentalism, etc, etc etc. You just choose one group of self proclaimed Communists who claim the rivals aren't, and treat this as empirical truth.
I could say that the Catholics say they are the one true faith, so ergo, Eastern Orthodox Christians aren't really Christian. I could say that Sunni's claim the Shiites are wrong, therefore Shia Islam isn't true Islam.
Can you see where this leads?
Much of the death toll of up to 100 million, allegedly caused by communism, supposedly occurred in China, where the article claims that "at least 45 million" died 1 in the Chinese "Great Leap Forward" of 1958-1961 and "between 750,000 and 1.5 million people" were alleged to have died in the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976.
How Mao Zedong killed 45 million people in four years.
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2010/s3020355.htm
Here is some of the absurdities
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/stories/the-great-sparrow-campa...
Policy failure of the "Great Leap Forward"
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/great_leap_forward.htm
Famine by government policy. Marxist government at work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%9333
The famines, the loss of food, the decline in living standards were the result of Marxist economic theory. In an attempt to have intellectuals and beaurocrats control the ENTIRE economy, the system failed and was not able to meet the needs of the people. "Intellectuals" as it turns out, cannot command an economy. Marx's theory of labour was bunk and ignoring markets completely was a disaster.
These were Marx's theories, more or less put into practice. The states which put it into practice, use repression and death to prevent criticism.
Eventually, when Eastern Europeans just had enough freedom to question and discuss it, Communism fell apart.
The question is, does brutally enforcing a system which is leading to death count as murder or not?
I argue it does. I argue that if you are doing something that is resulting in death, famine, dispossession and so forth, you are responsible. No amount of "idealism" and "do goodery" exonerates you from the RESULTS.
There is the main point of difference between me and those who think Communism needs a look in.
Im a consequentialists. It is only the consequences, the actual physical results which in the end matter, not 'ideals', 'intentions'. Impersonal, non-idealistic, perhaps even somewhat cold systems which nevertheless still produce food, give people a dignified life, are better than those which result in impovershment, even if they are done with 'noble' intentions.
Much of the terrible destruction and bloodshed that occurred through the remainder of the 20th century and the early 21st century:
....
... may have been avoided.
Nietzsche predicted massive wars due to ideology, due to the cultural/spiritual shift and the rise of ideology based politics. I think this analysis is close. It perhaps was inevitable that major ideologies would fight.
Political ideology is somewhat new. Politically speaking, there weren't all encompassing grand ideologies prior to the French revolution. Not saying there were none, but they are less prominent. In the 19th and 20th century, ideology became more paramount, a proxy for religion.
Personally I think Marxism is a flawed philosophy (see Robert Heilbroner's "The Worldly Philosophers" of 1953), but in spite of that I think the Russian Revolution of 1917 presented humanity with its best opportunity to date to establish a workable and humane global society.
I disagree. And there is the problem.
Once someone subscribes to an 'ideology' to fix problems, it then becomes an immediate problem when not everyone wants it. You then have 'one true' ideology which saves the world, and when the future of humanity is at stake, then there is no limit to what oppression is justified to implement the system. After all, your opponents are not just rivals, they are threatening the very future of a free and prosperous humanity!
This is the danger of 'ideological' thinking. Once you start, it inevitably pushes towards totalitarianism and suffering. Once you start, it inevitably pushes one to thinking that force is necessary, that it must be universal.
I can't put it better than Peter Mlakar, who lived through Communism. Eastern Europeans know what it is about.
I tell you this: the worst government is always the most moral one. But when fanatics are on top, there is no limit to oppression. Morality, which is based on ideal, is unmitigated evil. - Peter Mlakar
QLD Gov sly accounting re Big Bad Debt
The Big Bad Debt, as calculated for the Qld. Govt's political agenda by independent auditor Peter Costello (ROTFLMAO), includes GOC operational debt. This is a standard business item on most any business balance sheet, public or private, and deserves no panic or rush toward it's elimination. Again the 4th Estate has been found with its hand deep in its own pants.
Petition to save Tootgarook Swamp from housing
Communityrun Petetition: Save, Protect and Rezone Tootrarook Swamp on the Mornington Peninsula
The Tootgarook Swamp is the largest example left of an Shallow freshwater marsh in the Port Philip bay region, at 381 hectares it is worthy of international Ramsar protection.
Much of the Tootgarook swamp is inappropriately zoned as residential, and industrial with only half of it inside the green wedge.
The 381 hectare swamp is found on the lower section of the Mornington Peninsula, called the Nepean Peninsula in Victoria, Australia.
Currently approximately 77 hectares is marked for future development proposals totalling almost a quarter of the entire swamp. After another almost 3 hectares was lost to a housing subdivision infill recently.
Read more on the AWPC website.
The northern section is under immediate threat from housing development.
One Australian of the Year is a conservationist
Four Australians of the year have been named, one of whom is a conservationist. She is "Senior Australian of the Year" a 61 year old children's author, Jackie French. Her passion is wombats and she has written a book entitled "Diary of a wombat".
There are many other conservationists out there "at the coal face" and we know who they are. Naming them now would be fraught with peril because of those who would be accidentally left out. Maybe we need a "Hall of Honour" somewhere in cyberspace for these warriors working under such adverse conditions and many seemingly losing battles where human activities are continually expanding
Terra Nullius mentality
It's assumed by human self-importance that what only matters, for most, is human lives and property. The rest of what's contained, such as flora and fauna, is Terra Nullius, or non-owned and not valuable. They are only considered to be incidentals, to be dispersed or destroyed, with little consequence. They can simply "recover" and Nature will look after it!
Why would Aborigines use fire to "farm"? Surely it's time to do more than acknowledge our Traditional Owners in more ways than a bland and meaningless ritual at public meetings?
Why not consult the Elders about how they managed the land, and actually remember that they maintained our land for 40 million years, without the mass extinctions and destruction that happened since European Settlement.
Australia Day has become a day to worship Multiculturalism, and new citizenships, rather than honouring the original custodians of the land, and our mega diverse heritage.
Burning is simply an easy no-brainer than actually fostering natural systems, and actually conserving forest densities and canopies so that Natural systems will ensure any natural fires will not spread!
Bob McDonald - fire
Thanks Bob for an excellent article. You make many extremely valid points, and I totally agree with you. I too have seen first hand the devastating effects of 'controlled' fires which were simply too hot, and inappropriate for the areas they were set in. I am glad that more and more people are questioning the validity of controlled burning. Nature does do its job very well, if we leave it alone!
Wikipedia communist "mass killings" page flawed, inconsistent
You have not responded to even one of the arguments I put in my previous post. Until you do so, I don't see why I should feel obligated to take you seriously.
Presumably, given that communism has killed "between 85 and 100 million", according to that Wikipedia article, surely you must think it would have been preferable for Hitler have won the Second World War and to have succeeded in ridding the world of communism?
Much of the death toll of up to 100 million, allegedly caused by communism, supposedly occurred in China, where the article claims that "at least 45 million" died 1 in the Chinese "Great Leap Forward" of 1958-1961 and "between 750,000 and 1.5 million people" were alleged to have died in the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976.
Whilst I was aware of these claims, I have not been able to find out whether or not they were true. Nonetheless, these claims can only be properly evaluated within their proper historical context. The Wikipedia article fails to do this.
The Chinese Communist Party Came to power in 1949 after years of bloody war against both the invading Japanese and the brutal regime of Chiang Kai Shek. Chiang Kai Shek and his armies fled to Taiwan in 1949 and brutally crushed an uprising of native Taiwanese.
Almost immediately after the civil war ended, the Chinese were faced with a war of aggression by the United States and its allies against neighbouring 'North' Korea. In that war 3 million out of a total of 23 million Koreans died. Most of those who died were from North Korea or were their supporters in the South. Whilst the article claims "Mass killings have also occurred in ... North Korea," no mention is made of the war against Korea or the brutal repression of Koreans, from 1945 until 1950, by the South Korean regime of former Japanese collaborators.
Also Stalin failed to give the aid that China desperately needed both to rebuild its economy and to defend itself. This was formalised by Nikita Khruschev when he announced the Sino-Soviet split in 1956. From that year until Gough Whitlam and US President Nixon visited Beijing, China was extremely isolated and vulnerable.
Most probably, extreme measures were adopted by the Chinese government to deal with these circumstances. Whether or not it resorted to deliberate starvation and mass murder as you claim, I am not yet able to say.
The section on the Russian Red Terror states:
During the Russian Civil War, both sides (my emphasis) unleashed terror campaigns (the Red and White Terrors). The Red Terror culminated in the summary execution of tens of thousands of "enemies of the people" by the political police, the Cheka. Many victims were 'bourgeois hostages' rounded up and held in readiness for summary execution in reprisal for any alleged counter-revolutionary provocation. Many were put to death during and after the suppression of revolts, such as the Kronstadt rebellion and the Tambov Rebellion. Professor Donald Rayfield claims that "the repression that followed the rebellions in Kronstadt and Tambov alone resulted in tens of thousands of executions." A large number of Orthodox clergymen were also killed.
...
Note that the numbers claimed to have been killed here are quite small in comparison to the other vast slaughters that occurred in the same era.
Given that those whom the Bolsheviks were defending Russia against had just gotten Russia and the rest of Europe embroiled in the First World War that had needlessly caused the death of ten million combatants and eight million civilians, (and were to do the same, on an even more terrible scale, barely 20 years later) it would have been folly for the Bolsheviks not to have resorted to whatever measures they judged necessary to keep those forces from resuming power in Russia.
Footnote[s]
1 ↑ The link at http://web.mac.com/dikotter/Dikotter/Famine_2.html to the source for this this claim by the Wikipedia article is broken, by the way. - Ed, (26/1/15)
Good riddance to Communism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4230/so_how_many_did_communism_kill
There are Many resources available, which try and estimate the death toll. The thing is, people lost count.
When I attended Socialist Alternative meetings I heard this same argument. That it wasn't Communism, it was 'something else', and therefore each and every place where Communism was tried that turned into a basket case couldn't be used to judge the ideology. You see, its only Communism if it matches exactly what the perfect system is supposed to be, as they define it, of course.
No sane adult can hear that and take this line as anything other than a punchline of a bad joke.
If the Russians laughed at Marxism in the beginning, the tragedy could have been avoided.
I suppose one could then argue that the problems of Capitalism are NOT due to Capitalism, as no true Capitalism country which implements Capitalist ideals perfectly exists. It is technically true. This is what Libertarians argue, that the failures of laissez fair capitalism and self-regulation are not failtures of the ideology, because they ideology was not applied PERFECTLY. Any deviation from total implementation allows them to wash their hands. We see the same with Islam.
Likewise, Fascism and National Socialism could absolve themselves of any wrongdoing, using the same argument.
I've met many real Socialists (they call themselves Socialists, but in private refer to themselves as Communists. "Socialism" is just a ruse for the public). They are (in private) just as statist, and just as willing to subdue and do 'what is necessary' to implement the theoretical vision. They sucker Palestinians into rallies "supporting their cause", when in reality their goal is not Palestinian statehood, but to deconstruct Palestine nationality. This is Leninism, entryism.
http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/lh/article/viewFile/24904/23098
I recommend you read "The Gulag Archipelago" to see how this system really was. I've worked and met people who escaped (not emigrated, literally jailbreaked) these countries. A former neighbour had to evade a machine gun placement to cross the border. You see, Communist countries have to use violence to keep people IN. The border between Communist Eastern European nations and the West was guarded with machine guns, not to keep people out, but keep them in. The Berlin was was built to keep people IN.
Why would they build it otherwise? Why does a country which isn't that bad, need machineguns and walls to keep people IN? They were prison countries.
It's worked NOWHERE. Marxism is silly, not flawed, silly and evil.
The Communists had their reasons. Anyone against Communism was against the Peace and Brotherhood of Man, and obviously insane. Communism literally treated objections as a mental illness. I posed an article a few days ago, highlighting how this thinking is taking root here.
Communism, as defined by the "Socialist" advocates of today, involves the deconstruction of nations and of the family. "Socialists" today plan for a future where children are raised apart from their family, communally by the state so they won't even know who their family are. Everyone belongs to the state, works for the state. As the state argues that is is the democracy of the proletariat, it claims to have the right to dictate human affairs, at every detail, for everyones own good, of course.
In no way is Communism desirable, even if it COULD work. It is a system for ants, for sheeple, for a humanity degraded to mere cogs. It outdoes Capitalism ten fold in degrading people down to 'human capital'.
Good riddance to it. It wasn't just Stalin. Trotsky and Lenin were brutal and their ideas, which they forced were deadly. Mao Zedong killed people on a scale that is a multiple of Hitler. Pol Pot killed a large percentage of his country. Deaths directly attributed to a political ideology, applied by force and protected from questioning. Some of the causes of mass death seem downright absurd, darkly comical even.
The response to this post is here. - Ed
Metastasis of conflicts and malignancy
Japan is determined not to give in to terrorism. Abe, speaking to public broadcaster NHK, said chances were high that a recording and an image of what appeared to be the decapitated body of Japanese captive Harman Yukawa. He demanded that Mr. Kenji Goto not be harmed and be immediately released. The government of Japan will, in its entirety, do its utmost in order to have him released.
Yukawa, 42, was seized by militants in August, after going to Syria in what he described as a plan to launch a security company. Goto, 47, a veteran war correspondent, went into Syria in late October seeking to secure Yukawa's release, according to friends and business associates.
The militant IS group gave Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe a 72-hour deadline — which expired Friday — to pay a $200 million ransom for the two hostages. The jihadist group has murdered five Western hostages since August last year but this is the first time it has threatened Japanese captives.
Japan, a constitutionally pacifist country has steered clear of the armed entanglements of the US, Britain and other Western nations in the Middle East.
Sharia law covers public behavior, private behavior and private beliefs. Of all legal systems in the world today, Islam's Sharia law is the most intrusive and strict, especially against women. Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Muhammad, has no legal code other than the Sharia, which is enforced without mercy.
It isn't that long ago that the US was supplying arms to ISIS and other rebel groups in Syria, and pouring scorn on Assad's description of insurgents in Syria as "terrorists".
The moral compass that lets us live relatively happy and peaceful lives in our own countries should be the same compass that we use in our diplomacy and activities around the world. What's needed is a rise of nationalism, and sovereignty. Globalisation and foreign invasions, greed for power and resources, and international trade, brings together conflicting values, religions, cultures, histories, legal systems, military strategies, and the metastasis of malignancy.
Fire management
The person who posted this comment has previously had a comment banned from candobetter. Were also banning this post. We are doing so because that person has used his influence to disrupt candobetter and other forums. If readers have any questions, please contact the editor. (26/1/15)
Communism has killed more than fascism?
DennisK wrote: "[Communism] killed even more people [than fascism]".
Could you show us what the figures are and where you got them from?
If you had read a little more history, you would know that a large number of people who labeled themselves "communists" in the early 20th century, including the Central Committee of the Russian Bolshevik Party, which led the revolution in 1917, did not consider Stalin, who was to commit nearly all of the crimes wrongly attributed to 'communism', a 'communist'.
By 1939, only Stalin, Trotsky and one other person, who was a member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party was still alive and not imprisoned. Trotsky, then in exile, was to be murdered by one of Stalin's agents in 1940.
During the great purges of the late 1930s, 70% of the senior officer corps of the Red Army, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the commander in chief of the Red Army, were murdered after secret trials. Stalin murdered them because he feared they might have a residual loyalty to their old commander-in-chief, Leon Trotsky.
The decapitation of the Red Army prior to the Second World War is the principle reason the Red Army suffered such a terrible death toll during that conflict. Those losses were of the order of at least 10 million in addition to many millions of Soviet civilians who perished. Had it not been for Stalin, the war would have been over much more quickly at a cost of vastly fewer lives lost and much less material destruction in both the east and the west.
The myth that Stalinist tyranny is 'communism' has been used to justify the misrule and of those responsible for nearly all of the appalling bloodshed in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The following is a post which seems to have demolished a claim by forum contributors that communism was tyranny and a threat to humanity. Nobody responded to that post and the discussion is now closed.
Feel welcome to resume that discusion in this forum.
Another myth is that Stalinist tyranny, mislabeled 'communism', killed more than fascism, including German Nazism.
For all the terrible crimes of Stalin, his crimes were only a fraction as monstrous as those committed by Hitler against Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, Russia, the Jews and Romanis and far less than what Hitler had planned should he have won the war.
The Russian Revolution isolated: Humanity loses its best chance to stop Nazism and the Second World War
This is republished from a post of 28/4/2012 to the forum discussion site JohnQuiggin.com.
Alan wrote:
Those Trostkyists tend to promote a good Lenin, evil Stalin theory of history that ignores Lenin's own conduct as head of the Soviet government.
At least acknowledge that as as Lenin lay in bed mortally ill in 1923, he instructed Trotsky to remove Stalin from the post of Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This is substantiated in many works including "Lenin's Last Struggle" of 1968 by Moshe Lewin and "The Prophet Armed" of 1954 by Isaac Deutscher, the first of his three volume trilogy on the life of Leon Trotsky. Had Trotsky acted on Lenin's instructions instead of largely sitting on his hands until 1927 (also documented by Deutscher) history would have turned out very differently.
Much of the terrible destruction and bloodshed that occurred through the remainder of the 20th century and the early 21st century:
Purges of both left and right wing opponents of Stalin, the bloody defeat of Chinese Communism in 1927, Nazi triumph in Germany in 1933, the triumph of Franco in Spain, the Second World War in which possibly as many as 70 million may have died, The Korean War in which 3 million North Koreans died, The Vietnam War in which as many as 5 million may have died, the murder of half a million communists by Suharto in 1965, the invasion of East Timor, the invasion of Yugoslavia, the invasions of Iraq in 1991 which may have killed as many as 2 million, the invasion on Libya in 2011, ...
... may have been avoided.
As others pointed out, Lenin was faced with a savage civil war and an invasion by the troops over ten foreign nations, including Australia.
So is it fair to damn Lenin for having resorted to harsh measures to keep his government in power, especially given what his opponents, many professing to be for democracy, both outside the Soviet Union and within, have 'achieved' since his death?
Personally I think Marxism is a flawed philosophy (see Robert Heilbroner's "The Worldly Philosophers" of 1953), but in spite of that I think the Russian Revolution of 1917 presented humanity with its best opportunity to date to establish a workable and humane global society.
Sadly, that opportunity was lost.
Mordechai Vanunu's silenced story of Israel's WMDs
Ask Netanyahu about Mordechai Vanunu and his silenced story of Israel's Weapons of Mass Destruction
From the Syrian Free Press
US Attorney General Eric Holder should order the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he shows up to address Congress next month, American politician Jim Condit Jr. says.
Hours after US President Barack Obama threatened to veto any Iran sanctions bill during his State of the Union address on Tuesday, US House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner invited Netanyahu to Congress to speak about the so-called threat from Iran.
Condit Jr., who ran against Boehner in Cincinnati, Ohio, said that the invitation is “another slap in the face to the American people whether the American people realize it or not."
This was clearly done because Obama said last night that he would veto any sanctions Iran," he added.
The invitation to Netanyahu to address Congress, extended without having consultations with the White House and the State Department, is a sharp rebuke to Obama, who asked the new Republican-dominated Congress to stay out of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.
"Netanyahu is being treated as if he is the president of the United States. We need him to come and straighten up the country by addressing Congress," Condit Jr. wondered.
How did Islam spread?
Christopher Hitchens Predicted Islamic State in 2005 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9jx4xE2pgY
Editorial comment: In the video,linked to above and embedded below, Christoper Hitchens criticises the United States for not invading Iraq after Iraq's land forces were defeated in Kuwait in the Gulf War of 1991!? The pretext for that war was that Iraq invaded Kuwait after having been assured by US ambassador April Glaspie that the United States would not object to Iraq taking military action against neighbouring Kuwait in reprisal for Kuwait's provocative 'slant-drilling' for oil beneath their common border.
Saddam Hussein, who had believed that he had the support of the United States for his rule over Iraq and for his war against Iran which had only concluded in 1988, clearly had been set up by April Glaspie to provide the United States a pretext to wage war against Iraq and impose sanctions, lasting nearly two decades. This caused the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
Also, I have no knowledge of Iran ever having supported terrorism since the Shah was overthrown in 1979 as claimed by Hitchens. They have provided moral and material support to those resisting aggression by Israel including to the Hezbollah group in Lebanon and the Syrian government, but I fail to see how that is 'supporting terrorism'.
I think stopping meddling in the Middle East may slow, slightly, the flow of refugees and emigrants, but it won't change much. It won't be a game changer.
The fact that Western countries will be preferable to Islamic countries will remain, even if we kept way out. Even if they kept all their resources. Even if we helped them.
The fact that Islam will continue to act as a political and cultural philosophy over and above religion will remain. The fact that Islam spread by force, pressure and submission will remain, and continue to remain. The western intervention seems more useful as an excuse for bad behaviour.
I don't think the situation would be different if there was no western involvement in middle eastern wars. There is no precedent to suggest it would be so.
Imagine a country like Saudi Arabia, with its massive natural wealth, and it still remain unfit for dignified human civilisation, with oppressive laws, stonings, beheadings and death sentences for blasphemy. Iraq, even before the first Gulf war, was a tyranny, it had to be so.
Europe is going to find out the hard way that 'tolerance' and 'sophistication' in the 20th century sense will count for nothing.
To Kiev: "Don't take Donbass' kindness for weakness" - video
republished from #Donbass twitter page
Prime Minister and head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DNR/DPR) Alexander Zakharchenko stated Kiev had taken the DNR forces' "kindness for weakness" and warned Kiev that he had no fear of their forces because the army "cannot fight, and cannot defend themselves" at a press conference in Donetsk, Thursday.
Story conveys devastation
This story conveys the terrible grief one must feel when one's home city and family are destroyed. The photographer's need to record and show the world is so understandable.
Hundreds gather at a pro-Islam rally in Sydney!
Candobetter.net Editor: Introduction to this comment.
Dear Anonymous,
We think that if the Australian Government announced that it was going to cease its misadventures in the Middle East, overnight such demonstrations and also threats of terrorism would begin to diminish. Overnight the stream of refugees and economic immigrants would cease. It is our governments which are generating these streams. When we talk about the violence in some of these diasporas we are looking at a mirror of the violence we generate in their own countries.
Thank you for making this comment. We don't censor comments but, since this comment touches on our foreign policy, Middle Eastern political position, and free press position, we will comment on this comment. Perhaps we will make an article out of this response as well. We are a bit flat to the boards at the moment, so this may be the only response. Sorry if it is a bit patchy, but it is important.
Much of what you report gives cause for anxiety, particularly the numerical demographics. However we believe there are more obvious but rarely spoken answers to these problems than come to mind in your comment.
Our first position must be to criticise the Australian government for its foreign policy which has been causing, in conjunction with NATO, increasing dispossession, conflict and the rise of militant sectarian identification in countries where most of our Middle Eastern immigrants come from.
We should also be aware that people who acted on behalf of the West in their countries, often of necessity betraying their own people, thence become likely refugees and immigrants, with a prior connection to the Western governments and corporations which may carry obligations to them. Since the West is increasingly supporting extremely religious rebels to act as leaders in 'revolutions', what kind of refugees and immigrants might we expect in future? The West was happy to accept and even to give new identities to high profile Nazis after the war because they thought they would be good agents against communism. We trust our governments at our peril. We must look beyond their express sentiments to their actual activities. Power corrupts so we cannot afford to take it on face value. Our 'free press' reports these face values because it has vested interests in maintaining their fictions.
We need to understand the history of those countries, which was were tribal and functional with relatively well drawn local territories before the end of the 19th century, when Britain, America, France and other European forces began to raid their mineral wealth on an industrial scale and dispossess and disturb their populations, by bribing or replacing their tribal leaders.
We should be criticising our government because it is supporting devastating military and economic interference in the countries where Muslim refugees and economic immigrants are coming from. The populations, having adapted with difficulty somewhat after the oil-shock of the early 1970s, through OPEC, have, through the assassination and bribing of their leaders again, been impoverished, fragmented, divided, conquered and brutalised. It is no wonder that many are becoming, with reason, completely adverse to the West. It is our government and its friends in NATO and the US which is the cause of any terrorist diaspora, flowing both ways.
As long as we continue to push into Islamic territory we will get this reaction. It seems likely that if we withdraw, local support for extreme religion will die down. At the moment it is probably one of few organising forces within the chaos. Local Mullahs are the only form of civil government which can organise practically in many cases and people rely on local militia, like Hezbollah, for survival.
In Iran, which was once dominated by extreme religious law, things have calmed as the state has grown stronger. However, the West is menacing Iran. What do you think will happen if Iran is drawn into war or invaded by 'rebels' supported by the West? As the state breaks down, religious leaders rise up, like religious defaults to now absent not particularly religious tribes and clans.
The more the West interferes, the worse things get for women in the Middle East. One could point to Saudi Arabia as an exception - because it is a 'friend' of the West and, with Qatar, the most extremely perverted with regard to civil rights. But being a friend of the West has had the same disorganising effect: As well as brutalising their women and their poor, the Saudis are devastated by early deaths from diabetes. There has been a loss of variations in tribes and local traditions which more kindly regulated relations between the sexes and traditional diets which did not contain fast foods and regulated consumption of sugar.
There is a need to acquire geographical knowledge to distinguish the difference between Islamic countries in the Middle East. If we don't do this we unfairly damn the moderates - Tunisia, Algeria, Iran, ... and risk losing the one remaining secular Islamic country - Syria. Libya was also a secular country, now brought down to chaos and sectarian wars by US, Australian, NATO interference of the worst, illegal, assassinating kind. In once relatively peaceful Egypt, Yemen, similar sectarianism developed with Western support. Western (including Saudi) interests continue to ravage Bahrain.
-There is a need to look at the pressure we are placing on the Middle East with our illegal interventions. At the moment we are supporting the US bombing Syria and arming anti-Syrian Government forces, in direct opposition to the will of the people. The history of international trouble in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan is the same.
The evocation of Western Free Speech must seem ironic to those still trapped in the wars and central economic dictates that Australia is supporting in the Middle East. Our 'free' press only represents the pro-war, pro-interference, pro-pillaging of the East by the West. It never represents the other side, although sometimes it misrepresents it as if nations and tribes there were entirely motivated by religious mania. Apart from some saccharine pretense at supporting multiculturalism as a way of preventing interpersonal conflict in the receiving countries, our press promotes the idea that the Middle East is populated by religious nutcases, justifying turning the region into a kind of internationally patrolled asylum. It also subtly promotes foreigners to join 'rebel' militias to carry out terrorist acts and war in Muslim countries as if this were something just and romantic. By preserving ignorance about the histories of these countries, it perpetuates the failure to teach geography and history to our school children. Our press promotes sectarianism as a solution to conflict in the Middle East, there where people existed together without much reference to religious differences.
We think that if the Australian Government announced that it was going to cease its misadventures in the Middle East, overnight such demonstrations and also threats of terrorism would begin to diminish. Overnight the stream of refugees and economic immigrants would cease. It is our governments which are generating these streams. When we talk about the violence in some of these diasporas we are looking at a mirror of the violence we generate in their own countries.
And we should also take into account the numerous discrepancies in the recent terrorist attack in Australia, which was strongly suspect of being a false flag and in the Charlie Hebdo attack, which contains hugely suspect elements suggestive of false flag. Both these acts of terrorism occurred in a context where the leaders of countries they happened in or their citizens, needed a reason to continue war in the East Europe and Middle East. In France President Hollande was going to drop sanctions against Russia and in Australia there may be a growing trend against supporting wars.
Unfortunately the motives not to cease warmongering lie in our economic growth paradigm and politics. We are participating in illegal wars because we have used up our supply of petroleum and we know that fracking and coal will only satisfy the growth machine for a very short time. The machine demands war. To be peaceful we have to let go of the growth paradigm, work less, produce less, share jobs, allow our populations to reduce and develop a truly conserver economy.
If our Press, which has long been a hostage of big money, were to become free, it would help us to reorganise by representing a realistically diverse, localised opinion here.
Original Comment of "Hundreds gather at a pro-Islam rally in Sydney.
Among the 800-strong crowd in the Sydney Muslim enclave of Lakemba, placards were held up with the slogan: "Je Suis Muslim" or "I am Muslim", evoking the same sentiment that became a touchstone for many in the wake of attacks in Paris. Their insecurities about their prophet and religion are rising to boiling point.
Western ideal of "freedom of speech" is a threat, for people who would rather live in silence and heavy control, despite choosing to live here!
Some say that "Freedom is the smokescreen with which Western politicians and media conceal the underlying issues. In reality free speech is one of the many political tools that are used to maintain dominance over the Muslims." Is it paranoia of exposure, a threat, in face of the contradiction of this ancient value system, way of life, in stark contrast to 21 century freedoms?
Hamzah Qureshi, a spokesman for the controversial group Hizb ut-Tahrir, which helped organise the event, questioned the prime minister's comments about "evil things done in the name of Islam" and the suggestion the event could incite violence.
Hundreds gather at Pro Islam rally in Lamemba
Islam is not simply a religion, nor is it a cult. In its fullest form, it is a complete, total, 100% system of life.
As well as the religious component, also has legal, political, economic, social, and military components. The religious component is a beard, or the flag, for all of the other components. It's a Trojan Horse, to hide their agendas. It's easy to hide behind a benign face, a "religion", when it's much more complex and malign.
When politically correct, tolerant, and culturally diverse societies agree to Muslim demands for their religious privileges, some of the other components tend to creep in as well.
As long as the Muslim population remains around or under 2% in any given country, they will be for the most part be regarded as a peace-loving minority, and not as a threat to other citizens. This is the case in:
United States -- Muslim 0..6%
Australia -- Muslim 1.5%
Canada -- Muslim 1.9%
China -- Muslim 1.8%
Italy -- Muslim 1.5%
Norway -- Muslim 1.8%
At 2% to 5%, they begin to proselytize from other ethnic minorities and disaffected groups, often with major recruiting from the jails and among street gangs. This is happening in:
Denmark -- Muslim 2%
Germany -- Muslim 3.7%
United Kingdom -- Muslim 2.7%
Spain -- Muslim 4%
Thailand -- Muslim 4.6%
From 5% on, they exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to their percentage of the population. For example, they will push for the introduction of halal (clean by Islamic standards) food, thereby securing food preparation jobs for Muslims.
They will increase pressure on supermarket chains to feature halal on their shelves -- along with threats for failure to comply. This is occurring in:
France -- Muslim 8%
Philippines -- Muslims 5%
Sweden -- Muslim 5%
Switzerland -- Muslim 4.3%
The Netherlands -- Muslim 5.5%
Trinidad & Tobago -- Muslim 5.8%
At this point, they will work to get the ruling government to allow them to rule themselves (within their ghettos) under Sharia, the Islamic Law.
The ultimate goal of Islamists is to establish Sharia law over the entire world.
After reaching 20%, nations can expect hair-trigger rioting, jihad militia formations, sporadic killings, and the burnings of Christian churches and Jewish synagogues, such as in:
Ethiopia -- Muslim 32.8%
At 40%, nations experience widespread massacres, chronic terror attacks, and ongoing militia warfare, such as in:
Bosnia -- Muslim 40%
Chad -- Muslim 53.1%
Lebanon -- Muslim 59.7%
100% will usher in the peace of 'Dar-es-Salaam' -- the Islamic House of Peace.. Here there's supposed to be peace, because everybody is a Muslim, the Madrasses are the only schools, and the Koran is the only word, such as in:
Afghanistan -- Muslim 100%
Saudi Arabia -- Muslim 100%
Somalia -- Muslim 100%
Yemen -- Muslim 100%
Unfortunately, peace is never achieved, as in these 100% states the most radical Muslims intimidate and spew hatred, and satisfy their blood lust by killing less radical Muslims, for a variety of reasons. With well under 100% Muslim populations, such as France, the minority Muslim populations live in ghettos, within which they are 100% Muslim, and within which they live by Sharia Law.
Muslims will exceed 50% of the world's population by the end of this century. High fertility levels, and immigration, serve this purpose.
Adapted from Dr. Peter Hammond's book: Slavery, Terrorism and Islam: The Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat
The Sydney rally ended "peacefully" according to the police, despite 14 people removed for breaking the peace!
Palast on the Greek elections
http://real-economics.blogspot.com.au/2015/01/palast-on-greek-elections....
Greg Palast seems to see the looming problem with Syriza, namely the ineffectiveness of their reforms. Jonathon Larson's comments below ring very true. Europeans do believe that being part of the EU, or some superstate is a sign of 'maturity' of 'having made it'. I heard this attitude all over touring Europe, and it is pretty much almost a religious belief.
One of the more puzzling phenomenon is the enthusiasm for the EU I have witnessed in my highly educated European friends. Once I carefully explained the damage certain to be caused by the Maastricht monetary agreements to some friends from Finland who looked at me as if I clearly didn't get it. For them, joining the Euro was a chance to prove to the world that formerly poor, isolated, colonized Finland had arrived in the big time. I am certain that the same sort of thinking was repeated in many of the other small entrants to the EU from Estonia to Portugal. This was a point of national pride. Unfortunately, the neoliberalism of Maastricht was designed to take advantage of the small and weak who were joining a yacht club they could clearly not afford to join. The fact that income inequality is a global phenomenon pretty much proves how effective these economic policies are in redistributing wealth upward.
Of course, the poster child for all the bad things that can happen to the little fish who joined the EU is Greece. Now they are about to elect a government that promises to abandon the EU-mandated austerity measures that are crippling their country. But notice, they still want to stay in the club. Veblen was right—the desire for status emulation is such a powerful motivation, it is even more powerful at times than the survival instincts. Example xxxx is Greece's Syriza Party. Palast mocks this silliness so much better than I could (see below).
Greece
The economic conditions in Greece cannot be remedied by any party unless it is able to effectively withdraw Greece from the EU. Greece is broke and despite austerity measures, continues to slide further into debt. The Coalition parties in Australia claim that we are on the same road, but this is completely untrue. A sovereign nation that issues its own currency can NEVER go broke. Greece does not issue its own currency. Australia does. Bill Mitchell's MMT blog deals with this idea in detail.
Greece should default on it's debt, leave the EU and return to using the drachma.
Ukraine and Axis collaboration
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_collaborationism_with_the_Axis_po...
I recommend people read up on the history of Ukraine, so they understand that this isn't the simply 'black and white' issue that many people think it is.
Odd though, that so many anti-fascists seem to have no issue with those who sympathise with Communism, which killed even more people!
Burning native habitat is State-sanctioned arson.
1. Contrary to myth, a vast number of Australian plant species are sensitive to frequent burning. I estimate this to be at a minimum one third of the Victorian flora. How and why did these species evolve and persists in the context of the ubiquitous fire-stick myth?
2. The non-random anecdote that comprises almost all observations of Aboriginal people's traditional practices in the SE Australia bush were made in those landscapes that we have cleared and occupied - i.e. Australia Felix or the fertile lowlands. These are very different environments to what remains of the native vegetation and as such, SE Aust anecdote relating to Aboriginal land use and burning practices is largely irrelevant to the prescribed burning debate.
Evidence that Ukraine putschists worship Nazi collaborators
The following was posted to a discussion on JohnQuiggin.com:
On January 21st, 2015 at 20:18 J-D asked:
How are Ukrainian collaborators with the Nazis worshipped by today’s Ukrainian government?
There is a vast amount of documentary evidence, including photographs and videos, which shows that those who came to power as a result of the CIA-instigates coup of 21 February 2014, openly endorsed the legacy of wartime Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazi German invaders.
One article, republished on my web-site, candobetter.net, and first published on Global Research, is Moment of Truth: "Fascism As It Is" in Ukraine (30 Jun 2014).
Another, also previously published on Global Research, is New York Times discovers Kiev's Neo-Nazis at war in Eastern Ukraine.
Articles about Ukranian Nazis, from the Russian news service RT, include Russia slams Ukraine's UN envoy for publicly justifying Nazi collaborators (4 Mar 2014) and Ukrainian neo-Nazism threatens to spread across Europe – Russian diplomat.
Keating and neoliberalism
The Labor government of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating set out to cut wages and restore profits as part of a neo-liberal restructuring program. By the time Labor left office in 1996 the government had virtually abolished tariffs and had ceded its control over interest rates to an “independent” Reserve Bank and to free markets. Ironically, Labor did more than the Liberal governments of either John Howard or Malcolm Fraser to increase inequality, decimate union strength and erode Labor’s own support-base in the working class. It was the Labor government who opened the doors to high immigration, under Hawke and Rudd! Hardly a "free" economy but forced-fed by increasing consumerism and capitalism!
In reality, both parties supported a neo-liberal agenda–the Liberals merely went further in following that “logic” to its inevitable path. Mr Rudd argued that "neo-liberalism and the free-market fundamentalism it has produced has been revealed as little more than personal greed dressed up as an economic philosophy". It's about free-range economy, at whatever cost!
The Keating government privatised the Commonwealth Bank and Qantas, and also retirement incomes with the introduction of compulsory superannuation in 1992. They deregulated the exchange rate and banking sector, and introduced enterprise bargaining. The union movement was hobbled and membership dropped away dramatically.
Under neoliberal policy prescriptions, governments should leave the market unregulated and let the strong eat the weak. But the exponents of neoliberalism always expected that capital — most importantly big capital — would be the biggest winner under such a setting!
The benefits are meant to "trickle down" to the public- but instead it gets wasted on the way down!
"Bleeding Heart" Keating imposed genocidal sanctions on Iraq
As former United States Attorney General, Ramsey Clark has revealed in the video story, republished from RT on candobetter, the illegal wars of 1990-1991 and 2003 against Iraq, in which Australia participated, and the genocidal sanctions against Iraq, from 1990 until 2003, cost many hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. One estimate put the death toll as high as 3.3 million including 750,000 children.
As Federal Treasurer from March 1983 until June 1991 and Prime Minister from December 1991 until March 1996, Keating was clearly complicit in this crime against the people of Iraq.
Curiously, 'Iraq' does not feature in the index of "Confessions of a Bleeding Heart", Paul Watson's 2002 Paul Keating hagiography, which found its way onto my bookshelf by no design on my part.
Polish students defy war-complicit govt and reactionary emigres
The following was posted to the Monday Message Board of johnquiggin.com.
The action by Polish students is particularly brave, given that:
1. The Polish Government is supporting the Kiev regime in its war against Russian speakers in the East with military 'advisors'.
2. There are large numbers of Ukrainian emigres within Poland, many of whom support the neo-Nazi anti-Semitic regime in Kiev.
Poland, in terms of the proportion of the pre-war population who died in the Second World War, suffered even more than the Soviet Union. That the Polish Government is supporting a government, which worships Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazi invaders, is one of the bizarre paradoxes of geopolitics in 2014. Another is that those Ukrainian collaborators, worshipped by the Ukrainian government of today, assisted the Nazi occupiers in their "ethnic cleansing" of Poles within Ukraine.
State of State report- Bank self-proclaiming bias
The Commsec survey ranks economies on the extent to which their current performance exceeds their decade-long averages on eight indicators, including economic growth, retail spending, equipment investment, construction work done and population growth.
http://www.smh.com.au/business/nsw-economy-shares-crown-with-nt-in-comms...
This is a banking business using their own performance indicators to give an assessment of Australia's States, in economic term. So, State "performance" is based on aspects of each that suits their own coffers, lending trends and profits.
Economic growth is dubious, as it can be stimulated by disaster such as floods, bushfires and drought. It's a raw measure of how much money is circulating and changing hands.
Housing and population growth are measured as economic pluses, and there's no measurement of quality of life, of housing stress, homelessness, crime rates, unemployment and non-tangibles that usually are more pertinent for the residents.
NSW sharing the top honour with the Northern Territory, pushing Western Australia from second into third place as its mining construction boom fades.
"NSW is on top because population has been growing in recent years and now home construction is responding to the shortage of accommodation," said CommSec chief economist Craig James. What "shortage" of accommodation? Housing is a guaranteed basic of life, and population growth is a sure guarantee of demand!
Victoria has the strongest population growth of any state but is ranked sixth on economic growth and seventh on equipment investment. Victoria's surging population is propping up housing growth. So, without population growth propping up the housing Ponzi pyramid, Victoria would fall into an abyss of recession! Our city must keep seeing more generic high density concrete apartments and endless suburban sprawl to keep the housing growth continuing as long as possible. Population growth is being used to camouflage a flawed and weak economy.
Infrastructure demands keep dominating our budgets, and there's no ultimate aim for our governments, and they keep swinging from one party to the next.
We may as well pay people to dig up holes and fill them again. At least this dead end activity would not inflate the infrastructure deficit, add to house prices, clog up our roads and add to unemployment!
Local gas prices set to soar
In late December, British energy giant BG Group sent the first ever shipment of liquefied natural gas from Australia's east coast, using gas from the state's booming coal seam gas industry. It will mean a dramatic increase how much households pay for gas used for hot water, cooking, or heating.
Not only was it the first time that CSG has been converted into LNG, the exportable form of gas. More importantly for consumers, it was the first time gas has been exported from the east coast of Australia
Globalization of Australia's natural resource should bring greater revenues, income and prosperity, but this will not happen. The public will share the high international prices set by international mining companies!
Origin Energy and Santos this year also hope to start pumping cargo loads full of the stuff, to be sold to buyers across China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia and other Asian nations.
We are effectively allowing multinational gas exporters to displace our manufacturing sector. The gas industry employs fewer than 25,000 people across Australia. That’s less than one third of 1 per cent of the Australian workforce. Coal mining companies are typically multinational; for example, Glencore-Xstrata (the two companies merged in May 2013) is listed on the London and Hong Kong Stock markets. Further, many of the companies have regional subsidiaries.
From 2015 gas reserves on the east coast would be opened to export with no regulation in place to ensure reliable and affordable gas remains available for domestic industry. A handful of multinational oil and gas companies will control the vast majority of gas reserves with ” unrestricted rights” to export it, and that industry and households would be ” forced to pay higher costs". With no limitations on exports of Australian gas, local manufacturers cannot secure long term contracts for gas, and what gas is available is increasing in price by up to 200 per cent.
A report by the Grattan Institute's Tony Wood last year estimated the average Melbourne household gas bill would jump $300 a year because of the changes over the next few years, while the average Sydney bill would rise by more than $100. How are jobs and households meant to absorb these cost burdens at a time of increasing economic hardships, budget constraints, unemployment and now unaffordable power? Surely cooking, manufacturing and heating are part of our pay of life as a developed nation?
Local gas prices set to soar as exports to Asia get under way
There's a conspiracy theory that Australia is to be dismantled, piece by piece, as a global mining resource and deconstructed as a nation. It will just be a warehouse of housing and consumers as a captive business resource.
A perfect analogy
Extremely well said, what a perfect analogy.
The rocket is overloaded and can't ensure adequate healthcare
Federal Health Minister Sussan Ley has three tough problems. She needs to cut growth in healthcare expenditure. Health care is basic to our well-being, and not something that should be politicized and subject to economic rationalization.
How can health care funding be cut while we have population growth? It means that each person will have less and less spent on them. If we have 1.6% population growth each year, mainly due to net overseas migration, then surely health care spending should increase by the same rate - and everything else.
Our Ponzi style of economic growth is becoming less generous, and more expensive to maintain. The "surpluses" generated are becoming increasingly inadequate to service the weight of our population's needs, yet the "growth" is not about to end!
The ill-fated Titanic didn't sink because it was overloaded by passengers, but because there were inadequate safety features for even their lower numbers. Our planet is already under stress trying accommodate the explosion of population since the 19th century - and can't assure the safety of the existing inhabitants.
Clearly, population growth isn't paying for itself, and not producing the promised "prosperity"! We need to backtrack to 2006 Costello Productivity Report, that only showed weak support for ongoing immigration - and limited benefits. It's been ignored by successive governments. The sheer numbers of people needing public health care is overloading the system and causing dis-economies of scale.
The population "Rocket" is carrying too many people to be efficient, and provide for human welfare. Population growth now is inter generational theft - of banking on the Nature's benefits and consuming them now, instead of leaving a deposit in Nature's "bank" for future generations.
Only a woman faced with adultery?
Surely it takes two people to commit "adultery" - of whatever definition? Islamic law (Sharia) requires that adulterers be put to death, since it was the example set by Muhammad. In practice, the women are executed far more often, since they are presumed to bear the burden of sexual responsibility (in Islam's male-dominated society) and are, perhaps, more likely to confess their discretion. Reporting a rape means a confession of adultery under Sharia law if four male witnesses cannot be found to confirm the victim's claim.
Women are more likely to be victims because they have less rights, and status, under Sharia law. Pregnancy is often interpreted as proof of adultery, and rape is often taken as adultery.
A man may marry up to four wives, over and above the several concubines with whom he may have sexual relations. A woman, on the other hand, has no such options. What is deemed perfectly legitimate for men is criminalized for women, leaving them vulnerable to sexual offences more often and far more easily.
If the US stopped selling arms and meddling in the Middle East, for power and resources, then there would not be the violent and surmounting clashes of cultures and ideals. They have produced a Monster, of injustice, resentment and an attractive movement for would-be criminals and anti-social behaviours. While Sharia law may have existed in small pockets of backward countries in the past, it's now escalated and spread- like interfering with a malignant cancer and causing a metastasis of human evil!
Cynical behaviour towards dingos
I fear that it is cynically committed with the intention of ridding the island of any wildlife except for tourists and then building from the alienated result, some heavy footprint tourist resort. I think it is an attempt to clear the way for 'development'. It must be resisted at all costs. There is a new book about to be published, by Jennifer Parkhurst, called First Nation Peoples of Fraser Island and their Dingos, which should make a good case to a lot of people if we all promote it.
WWI Women Working for Peace Exhibition Melbourne now
This is confronting. It is history that is not just history. Now at the Queen Victoria Women’s Centre,Ground Floor, 210 Lonsdale Street Melbourne 3000, until the 25th February, 9-5.30: FIRST WORLD WAR WOMEN working for peace in Melbourne 1914 - 1919.
This series of panels illustrates and documents in the women’s own words a peace movement that confronts us even today.
If you think Australians supported the First World War, the idea of civil liberties is new, non-Aboriginal Australians were, in the main, racist and conformist, come and see FIRST WORLD WAR WOMEN working for peace in Melbourne 1914 - 1919.
Or read it on http://www.womensweb.com.au on the 1914-1919 pages.
Please let me know if you would like to borrow this exhibition for a month or so.
Regards, Geraldine Geraldine RobertsonTel: 03 9486 1808 Mobile: 0412 8653 10
wmnsweb[AT]iprimus.com.au Women's Web - Women's Stories, Women's Actions http://www.womensweb.com.au Women Working Together suffrage and onwards http://www.womenworkingtogether.com.au Prejudice and Reason http://www.prejudiceandreason.com.au
Play behaviour in dingoes
I wondered if the "lunging" (as described in the press) by a dingo (now destroyed) at tourists was just the normal play behaviour that we see in domestic dogs. It would seem that this is the case. Have a look at the following video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGbh3VjP7J8
The treatment of these animals on Fraser Island seems reprehensibly unfair and cruel with no effort to understand.
Belgium terror threat averted but two dead
In recent weeks, European security services received indications of an ominous possibility: that ISIS may have started directing European extremists in Syria and Iraq to launch terrorist attacks back in their home countries, the Belgian counter-terrorism official said.
Two suspects were killed and one injured on 15 January after an anti-terror raid by Belgian police who acted to prevent "imminent, large-scale attacks," two officials from the Belgian state prosecutor office said. Police stormed the suspects' hideout only to be met by bullets fired from small and assault weapons. But unlike the Paris terrorists, who attacked the office of a satirical newspaper and a kosher grocery store, the suspects in Belgium were reportedly aiming at hard targets: police installations.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2912037/Anti-terror-raid-Belgian...
Belgium, which has long been home to a large Muslim population, is believed to have the highest proportion of citizens who have left to fight in the Middle East - even more than Britain and France. Muslims are about 6% of the population and are comprised mostly of Turkish and Moroccan immigrants, as well as a growing number of converts to Islam. They began arriving in Belgium in the 1960s as guest workers. Although the guest-worker program was cancelled in 1974, many immigrants stayed and, using family-reunification laws, brought over their families. There's nothing more permanent than a temporary worker!
Human overpopulation, globalisation, high fertility levels due to religious preferences, and the loosening of sovereignty and borders means that cultures, religions, politics, laws and ideals are clashing more and more, lethally, and increasingly threatening the host countries where migrants have settled. The hand that showed hospitality and put out the Welcome Mat is now being bitten, and the hosts even killed!
Security agencies in several European countries were intensely investigating several groups of returnees from Syria and Iraq, the official said, including the group that authorities confronted in Belgium.
SYRIZA sides with NATO against anti-Nazis to win Greek election?
On 15 January 2015 James G. Neuger and Eleni Chrepra of Bloomberg News reported: 1
"As it comes closer to gaining power in Greece, the anti-establishment SYRIZA party that once advocated a pullout from NATO and expulsion of the U.S. Navy from a base in Crete is moving toward the foreign-policy mainstream.
"Syriza is sacrificing its more revolutionary ambitions to the overriding goal of getting better terms for Greece’s economic aid package. With the party holding a slim lead in the polls for the Jan. 25 election, even Syriza's commitment to rolling back European sanctions on Russia is in question."
The European Union (EU) sanctions were imposed on Russia on 3 March 2014 for the alleged "violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity by acts of aggression by the Russian armed forces." This claimed pretext for the sanctions has been entirely fabricated. In spite of the ability of the United States and other Western powers to detect movements of Russian armed forces with spy satellites, absolutely no verifiable evidence has been produced.
The alleged "Russian aggression" was, in fact, Russian speakers in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine ousting the local political leaders imposed on them by the Nazi-controlled Kiev regime that came to power in the CIA-instigated coup of 21 February.
Footnote[s]
1 ↑ The article is "Syriza Massages Foreign Policy Goals as It Smells Power". It has been republished on ekathimerini.com, and the Chigago Tribune .
Duck shooting season announced for Victoria
Despite heavy lobbying and scientific evidence to the contrary, our new Victorian government has caved into the shooting and gun lobby by announcing a duck shooting season this year!
Waterbird breeding levels are the lowest on record. 'Game bird' numbers are nearly half the long-term average. Birds coming from the north where there's drought won't find peace and quiet, but will be threatened by potentially 20,000 licensed shooters, some as young as 12!
Wetlands are at drought-like lows and experts predict a hotter and drier summer than usual.
There'll be no reprieve or safety for native waterbirds.
Today, it is accepted by professionals and scientists alike that mistreating animals is not an isolated behaviour but part of a constellation of antisocial behaviours. Despite record crime rates on the streets and in domestic settings, our government is failing to end the violence towards gentle native waterbirds, and instead will celebrate it. How can human to human violence be counteracted if it's encouraged towards so-called "protected" native birds?
YouTube: Lay down you guns, by Daniel Gregory
Government accused in failing to act against poachers
Government accused in failing to act against illegal Southern Ocean toothfish trade. Instead of assisting Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and New Zealand, our ocean patrolling vessel, Ocean Shield, is on absence without leave in dock!
The Ship was promised to be in action for two 40 day patrols in the Southern Oceans, but they are AWOL!
New Zealand Defence Force on Tuesday said it had surprised a third unlicensed fishing boat, far south-east of Tasmania, hauling up the high-priced fish known as "white gold", or the flesh of the giant Patagonian and Antarctic Toothfish.
Sea Shepherd's boat, the Bob Barker, has been chasing the illegal vessel, Thunder, from Antarctic waters to Africa, while the Australian vessel is out of service, in dock at Christmas Island.
In contrast to Australia's efforts, NZ Foreign Minister Murray McCully said so far three ships had been intercepted by the offshore patrol ship, HMNZS Wellington. Sea Shepherd skipper Peter Hammarstedt called on New Zealand to arrest the ships.
Government accused in failing to act against illegal Southern Ocean toothfish trade (13/1/2014)
In 2007, most illegal toothfish vessels expanded their use of gillnet fishing methods, which are outlawed under CCAMLR regulations. Gillnets pose many threats. They are more effective than longlines, the level of incidental bycatch from gillnets is greater and lost or abandoned gillnets have the potential to continue to incur marine life mortality through ‘ghost fishing’. Controlling interests are linked to a handful of Spanish-based fishing outfits, the most notorious of which is Vidal Armadores.
State election 2015: LNP pledge to funnel money from state asset
Any extra money gleaned from the privatisation of Queensland’s assets above the expected $37 billion in proceeds will be split between paying down more debt and building new projects, Premier Campbell Newman has pledged.
They aim to reduce debt by $25 billion and save $150,000 a day on Labor’s interest payments and we will be able to spend at least $8.6 billion on infrastructure that creates jobs in Queensland.
So, the Government must sell State owned assets to pay debt, and build new assets. What happens when the State's jewels are all sold off? Surely running a business or household this recklessly would lead to ruin? When assets are privatized, it inevitably leads to increasing costs for the public, and it means less jobs for locals.
Premier Campbell Newman and his Liberal National Party stress that under their “strong economic management”, 1100 new jobs are being created every month and Queensland is on track to become the fastest growing state economy in Australia". Gross Domestic Income (GDI per-capita in Queensland) has decreased by 1% between June 2013 and June 2014. This is the second largest decline in the entire country. Queensland currently has the equal highest unemployment rate in the country (6.9%), matched only by Tasmania, even though this is only a few decimal points higher than the Australian average (6.3%).
Senior infrastructure planners believe the region of SouthEast Queensland will require 480,000 houses above the already projected 750,000 to built by 2040 to accommodate the influx. That means sacrificing State forests, pineapple farms, canefields and sensitive coastal zones for more housing!
Previously off-limits areas of southeast Queensland may need developing due to population explosion ‐ includes a 1:52 video featuring Bernard Salt.
Surely the government should hire some economic and planning experts to reassess their economic model, and a benefits/cost analysis done. What they have now is surely not sustainable. It may not be expedient to "grow" the economy without a blueprint, and a strategic plan for what they ultimately aim for. It's a dog chase tail exercise, of continually trying to create more jobs, raising money for infrastructure to pay for growth, and having to sell of more assets. When will we be "there", and arrived?
It makes no sense to "grow" when there's debt. If populations were stabilized, there might be a chance of enhancing what exists rather than keep spending and spending on infrastructure to fix congestion etc.
Attack on the homeless at Christmas
Former Immigration Minister "stopped the boats" and increased "border protection" but as Social Services Minister, his new department contacted housing advocacy groups and other community services providers before Christmas to inform them their funding had been cut and contracts with the Commonwealth would be discontinued.
While the public were making ready for the Festive Season, and distracted from political meanderings, the Federal Government sneakingly and callously cut funding to housing programs in an effort to make more budget savings before Christmas.
Several leading peak housing bodies shocked by the timing of the announcement! Instead of good cheer, and magnanimity, the Abbott government slashed funding to the most vulnerable and powerless people- the homeless and those on low incomes.
Community Housing Federation Australia's executive director Carol Croce said the organisation was told yesterday its funding contract had been rescinded and would be ceased in June 2015, a year earlier than planned. It's a stab in the back for not-for-profit organisations working on already over-stretched budgets, and the homeless will be cut free from our economy.
The government has previously warned it could satisfy just $800 million of the $3.9 billion in grants requested by the sector.
Australia's housing affordability crisis continues, and any price rises are celebrated as a sign of our economy's advancement. The victims are to be ignored and discarded from this real estate Ponzi pyramid scheme, without any compensation or recognition.
The Government is also cutting $241 million disability groups and financial counselling services.
It seems that the Abbott government's neo-liberal agenda, of favouring the economy's advancement over the welfare of the incumbents, is in full force! Third world conditions, and a polarization of wealth, can be "good" for minimal social services spending, and "economic growth" at the detriment of the masses!
Petition:Demand the government reinstates funding to housing and homelessness programs
Greece faces a much clearer choice on 25 January than Queensland
The following, without the embedded YouTube video, was posted to a forum discussion on the Queensland elections on JohnQuiggin.com
The choice facing Queenslanders on 31 January is grim. The least worst of the likely outcomes would be for the removal of the Newman government, and the election to government of the same Labor Party which, without any electoral mandate, flogged off a massive amount of Queensland's publicly owned assets after winning office in 2009.
It seems likely that a sizable number of small party and independent candidates will also be voted into Parliament. We can hope that a sizable portion of this group are not in the pockets of the corporations.
The choice on offer to Greek voters, when they vote 6 days earlier on Sunday 25 January is much clearer. On the one hand they have a government which is resolved to continue to inflict the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) dictates of savage austerity on them. On the other, there is the opposition SYRIZA Party led by the 40 year old Alexis Tsipras. Tsipras is resolved to tell the IMF and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to butt out of Greek affairs. Below is a link to a 2:46 length video of a rally of the Greek SYRIZA Party and part of a speech by Alexis Tsipras:
Hope is on the way
The most recent opinion polls indicate that not only is SYRIZA may win an outright majority.
Migratory shore birds at risk from urban sprawl
A new "Great Wall of China" is being built in the feeding grounds of migratory birds from Australia that will eventually see an urban sprawl along 1800 kilometres of the Yellow Sea, placing additional pressure on tidal flats now visited by shorebirds on their annual migrations between Australasia and Arctic Russia.
This final blow is added to a range of constraints of pollution and weed invasion, to the damming of rivers and construction of off-shore wind farms.
Some two-thirds of the tidal flat ecosystems have been destroyed, with a further two per cent disappearing annually. Some of the bird species at risk are the threatened curley, bar-tailed godwit and the great knot. Some of the birds weigh only "as much as couple of box of matches" and can double their weight in a couple of weeks at the vital feeding stops before continuing their journey.
The future is "grim", say researchers. Humans are killing the oceans, causing hypoxic dead zones and jellyfish blooms. They are all symptoms of an ecosystem in a decline that had to be halted immediately.
The Age: Australia's migratory shorebirds at risk from Asia's urban sprawl
Since 2001, according to the study, more than 40,000 hectares of coastal wetlands have been destroyed for ports, industrial parks and similar facilities
Separately, Chinese and American researchers who recently studied coastal development linked a dramatic decline in global biodiversity and ecosystems to wetland shrinkage in eastern China. Their findings, appearing in the November issue of Science magazine, warned that wetland losses are putting the country's ecological security and sustainable development goals at risk.
The Value of Weath
http://www.theautomaticearth.com/the-value-of-wealth/
We need to do a lot more thinking, and take a far more critical look at ourselves, than we do at present. We’re not even playing it safe, we’re only playing it easy. And that’s just not enough. The marches in Paris and numerous other cities today were attended by people who mean well, but who should ask themselves if they want to be part of what was predictably turned into a propaganda event by ‘world leaders’. One thing is for sure; the murdered Charlie Hebdo staff would not have approved of it.
The leaders hark back to usual suspect slogans like we defend ‘Liberty’, ‘Freedom of Expression’ and ‘Our Values’. But we can’t turn our backs on the fact that ‘our values’ these days include torture and other fine ‘tactics’ that make people in other parts of the world turn their backs on us. We might want – need – to march to express our feelings about torture executed in our name, as much as to express our horror at cartoonists we never heard of being the target of automatic weapons.
There are major armed conflicts going on in 6 different Arab countries, and ‘we’ play a part in all of them. We get up in the morning and prepare to march against violence in our own streets, but we should perhaps – also – protest the violence committed in our name on other people’s streets just as much. We may feel innocent as we’re marching, but that’s simply because we refuse to look at ourselves in the mirror. And we must be able to do better than that. Both to be the best we can be (which is still a valid goal), and to prevent future attacks.
Truthful media = free speech
The media are the public messaging system (to borrow an expression from Greg Wood) and they need to allow everyone to use the talking stick. At the moment the mass media in the West are part of a corporate political system that, in order to pursue a Hobbesian agenda (to borrow an expression from Francis Boyle (see his book on Libya) blacks out all information about the Western role in starting illegal wars and trumpets a steady stream of propaganda to justify these by blackening the other side.
BBC flags false flag in Charlie Hebdo tragedy
BBC supports my exposure of Charlie Hebdo false-flag
THIS BBC LINK SENT BY KEVIN BARETT HAS ALSO BEEN PULLED DOWN.
"Greetings,
Did somebody slip truth serum in the BBC water cooler?
For the first time in history, a leading Western mainstream news outfit is reporting accurately on evidence exposing a huge false flag operation. Read and watch this before it gets taken down!
Doubts raised over authenticity of Charlie Hebdo footage
A video clip broadcast by news agencies across the world in relation to the recent events in Paris is now under scrutiny.
http://bbc-news.co.uk/doubts-raised-over-authenticity-of-charlie-hebdo-footage/ 1
I'm honored that they chose to include me in this historic event. My articles exposing and ridiculing the incredibly lame and obvious Charlie Hebdo false flag have gotten hundreds of thousands of reads, and been attacked by right-wing media and the ADL. Check them out, in chronological order:
Paris "Charlie Hebdo" attack": another Zionist false flag?
http://truthjihad.blogspot.com/2015/01/paris-charlie-hebdo-attack-another.html
Charlie Hebdo False Flag Story Goes Viral http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/01/08/charlie-hebdo-viral/
Planted ID card exposes Paris false flag
http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2015/01/10/392426/Planted-ID-card-exposes-Paris-false-flag
Intelligence gaps cited in Paris attacks (satire) http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/01/10/intel-gaps/
Now BBC is stealing my stuff.
Should I sue them? Congratulate them? Or what?
And if this somehow snowballs and the Gladio B network behind this event - as well as 9/11, Bali, Madrid, 7/7, Mumbai, Boston and so much more - gets taken down, and the mainstream media start doing their job…making my alternative journalism redundant…I'm ready to accept a chair in False Flag Studies at the University of Wisconsin, home of "fearless sifting and winnowing." https://kb.wisc.edu/ls/page.php?id=21911
>Best
Kevin Barrett
Website: a href="http://www.TruthJihad.com
Editor, Veterans Today: http://www.veteranstoday.com/author/barrett/
Press TV: http://www.presstv.ir/Contributors/247897.html
Radio Journalist, NoLiesRadio.org:
http://TruthJihadRadio.blogspot.com
PS Please support my writing and radio shows by joining or donating at http://TruthJihad.com , in case that False Flag Studies position doesn't open up right away."
Footnote[s]
Global terror not just in Europe and the West
The problem is not confined to the West, and Europe. The cultural and political divide of Islam are also felt deeply in Africa. As media coverage focused on the Paris terror attacks last week, more than 2000 Nigerians were reported to have been killed by Islamist militants.
Girls become suicide bombers. Northeastern Nigeria is drowning in blood and few seem to care. Reports came through of an estimated 2,000 casualties after an attack by Boko Haram militants on the town of Baga in the north-eastern state of Borno. It may be the 21st century, but African lives are still deemed less newsworthy – and, by implication, less valuable – than western lives? Or probably we in Australia compare ourselves more with France, a western developed and secular country.
Last week, Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, expressed his condolences for the victims of France but stayed silent on the Boko Haram attacks on Baga. District head Baba Abba Hassan said most victims are children, women and elderly people who could not run fast enough when insurgents drove into Baga, firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles on town residents.
The motivation is unclear, but it appears aimed at intimidating Nigerians into not voting in the coming presidential election. The country is roughly split between Muslims and Christians. Ironically, Boko Haram's anti-democracy attacks could swing the election in favor of incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian.
Overpopulation is a huge problem for the peoples of Africa. Countries like Ethiopia and Nigeria are about to triple in population within the next fifty years.
If Africa remains on this course catastrophic consequences such as mass starvation and global war will occur.
Up to the early 1980s, Nigeria’s economy enjoyed the presence of both agricultural produce and the production of other consumers’ goods, however for almost three decades after; petroleum has been the country’s main source of revenue. The post-independent Nigeria (1960) is one faced with a lot of leadership induced poverty,corruption, religious charlatanism, war and restiveness, unstable political system, dictatorial governance, lack of adequate basic amenities.
The globalization of terror has been blamed on the West, and the US for their power and resource grabs, but it doesn't explain Islamic terror on other parts of the world. It's like a disease, an auto-immune system response that attacks our communities internally in the deadly quest for power and domination of anti-democratic ideologies.
Free speech
I concur with the point you make about what we don't know or are not told that is frightening Dennis. I was only talking to my sisters and brother-in-law on the same topic at Xmas. Whether it be the topic of immigration, overpopulation, climate change or the genocide that took place in this country in the 19th and 20th centuries. Whether it be the mainstream media, the government or the corporate elites, vital information is continually withheld from the public and the public cannot make the right decisions without this information.
One only has to look back at the past State election to the lies and deceit of the Coalition re East West Link. Our past is littered with such episodes - Tampa, East Timor, the intervention (apartheid) the desal plant and the north south pipeline, &c. The piece by RT in this blog reminds us of the number of little wars that have been started by colonialists and superpowers in a bid upset the status quo. And all too often the motivating factor is black gold and/or power. Whether it be Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria or Queensland it's happening right under our noses and like the French we march, but we say NOTHING!!
This is not to say that we don't have the right to say nothing. We do, but all too often we make the wrong decisions. Sometimes based on the above, however mostly it's a matter of not thinking clearly and seeing the mangy dog for what it is. We, of course, should be making these decisions at the ballot box. Nevertheless, corporate elites, governments and the mainstream media are experts at circumventing the ballot box leaving the electorate high and dry.
This where the public is left to protest a la East West Link, etc. Public protest is where our feelings are poured forth, sometimes restrained, sometimes not. The Great Australian Race Riots hosted by Peter FitzSimmons on SBS has been an eye opener for me. Not often has the course of Australian history been changed without a riot (according to the program). I'm not saying that I agree with all of these riotous changes, some have been atrocious, but there other times when rioting maybe the only way.
First, however, we must make the public aware of the real story behind the news and not just that of power and energy hungry governments driven by the corporate elites and mainstream media. We need more choices at the ballot box, the electorate needs to be more aware of what they are voting for and we need more humility and compassion shown by our elected representatives, not neoliberalism.
If you can't offend, you are not free
The freedom to say anything you like "so long as it does not offend" is the same freedom that people in Nazi Germany, The Soviet Union and North Korea today have. The right to speak without offending those who get to decide, in their opinion, what is offensive and what isn't. By this definition, even slaves are free as they can say what they like "As long as it doesn't offend" the slaveholder.
This article correctly observes we don't have a free press. The press decide what is said, and what is not said. As usual, it's what you DON'T hear and read from the media which is usually most important and most interesting. Real censorship happens with silence. Real censorship is not reported. The contentious issues are never brought up, at all. Such as Australias sustained high immigration rates. The media is able to write article after article on issues affected by this, without mentioning it, at all.
So one should always ask themselves, "What is NOT being said? What is in the darkened periphery where the media is shining the light?". It is there where real discussion begins, and where 'mainstream' public discourse ends.
The greatest irony is the cavalcade of marches in Europe. Here we have hundreds and thousands of people marching that they won't be silenced, marching for free speech, and what is the message? They don't even have one. They have nothing to say!
Some of the defenders of free speech...
https://storify.com/public/templates/slideshow/index.html?src=//storify....
Satire should be clever, not just insults
There is "free speech" and a license to offend and insult! Satire should be clever, and have a message that reaches the audience without offending the majority. It should be sensitive to the majority, and actually have some humour, not just insult beliefs and the people it depicts.
There should not be anything that's off-limits because some sectors of the community feel they must kill in the name of their beliefs. There's a difference between brutal insults, and clever satire that portrays some truth or exaggerates some point.
Good point, I only saw the video
That was my thought after seeing the video, but it was a hit. I don't think it means it was blanks. If you have the stomach for it, you can see other execution videos where there are "clean" shots and match this video. It's not always watermelons. While not a ballistics experts myself, there seems to be enough information to suggest that the lack of blood, or violent ejection, could be due to use of smaller calibre weapons. Full metal jacket ammunution can pass quite cleanly. There are other videos which show similar deaths.
This doesnt prove, or disprove a false flag, and I won't make any claim that it is or isn't, yet.
But I personally will wait for more evidence before I model my view of the events and their meaning on it being a flase flag.
I dont think this event is that improbable.
Free speech in Europe
"Free Speech" as exercised by many, seems to be little more than being rude. The point of free speech isn't to just be obscene, it's to disseminate ideas freely, without fear of retribution of repression.
The reason free speech is important isn't the right to just vent, or swear, it is that a free prosperous society requires the ability to challenge the status quo, the question societies assumptions, to challenge belief systems. Free speech stops tyrants by calling them out on their rubbish.
Consider...
1: Everyone in Europe and the UK agrees that "hate speech" is not "free speech" and that offending people is hate. Oddly, when the media was targetted, the media suddenly defends offensive speech. We have our own laws which would have hauled them into court.
I wonder how many of the people at vigils support our own restrictive laws?
Note that people have been accepting of retribution against offensive speech for some time.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1023969/Brigitte-Bardot-fin...
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/9595417/is_britain_the_worlds_f...
This gives an interesting examples of a FOURTEEN year old girl being taken by police, because of seating preferences during lunch.
More here.
http://www.legal-project.org/issues/european-hate-speech-laws
Note, I'm not defending what these people were saying, only pointing out that we have accepted that it is OK to use force (arrest) against people we find offensive.
Muslims take seriously depictions of Mohammed. It IS offensive, very offensive to them to depict Mohammed like this. I personally don't care about it, but they do, and who am I to say what they should, or should not be offended by?
It seems we are saying to Muslims "We can use force against people who offend OUR ideals, but not those who offend yours". "We find it OK to lash out against people who challenge our beliefs and morals, but you must just accept it."
Europeans don't have free speech, they have merely gone from enforcing one religion to another, and today is no different. Western nations still burn books.
But what I see, isn't people defending Islam, but people defending themselves and their belief systems.
How can Europe, which has had such liberal immigration policies, reconcile this event, in context of what is happening worldwide, with their own worldview? How can they maintain their belief that the future of Europe is a pluralistic society, when events like this occur? How can they maintain their argument that their vision is correct against the 'reactionaries', when events like this seem to give ammunition to the reactionaries?
I don't see this ending well, and holding pens, "Solidarity" and such completely misses the point. Europeans will continue to repress any serious discussion of the effects of immigration, and these problems will continue until there is a flashpoint and it becomes violent.
Thats what they seem to be begging for.
functions and guises of terrorism
I think they are designed to justify continued invasion and waging of war in the Middle East. Upsetting the local population may be a secondary effect. Mr Cole has a bit of a reputation for upholding the US destruction of Libya.
Charlie Hebdo and its role in neoliberalism
Juan Cole gives a related perspective on this:
http://www.juancole.com/2015/01/sharpening-contradictions-satirists.html
He claims the attacks are an attempt to create divisions in society - i.e turning non-muslim French against mostly non-violent and in-offensive muslim-French, for ulterior motives:
"This tactic is similar to the one used by Stalinists in the early 20th century. Decades ago I read an account by the philosopher Karl Popper of how he flirted with Marxism for about 6 months in 1919 when he was auditing classes at the University of Vienna. He left the group in disgust when he discovered that they were attempting to use false flag operations to provoke militant confrontations. In one of them police killed 8 socialist youth at Hörlgasse on 15 June 1919. For the unscrupulous among Bolsheviks–who would later be Stalinists– the fact that most students and workers don’t want to overthrow the business class is inconvenient, and so it seemed desirable to some of them to “sharpen the contradictions” between labor and capital.
""Sharpening the contradictions” is the strategy of sociopaths and totalitarians, aimed at unmooring people from their ordinary insouciance and preying on them, mobilizing their energies and wealth for the perverted purposes of a self-styled great leader.
The only effective response to this manipulative strategy (as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani tried to tell the Iraqi Shiites a decade ago) is to resist the impulse to blame an entire group for the actions of a few and to refuse to carry out identity-politics reprisals. "
Even more interesting is that this whole attempt may well backfire, with marches organised to resist this idea:
https://secure.avaaz.org/en/march_with_paris_loc/?bxNXFhb&v=51065
With banners "Not Afraid".
Gold Coast businesses question their housing "boom" model
The secretary of the Gold Coast North Chamber of Commerce, Gary Mays, said it was vital to create more jobs in a variety of industries so people could live and work locally.
At least there are some voices out there, not actually criticising population growth, but our business model based on housing and construction growth, and youth unemployment.
There's no economic or social precedent for our high rates of immigration, and the population growth crush we are experiencing. Housing does not produce enough jobs, and adds to our unemployment rate.
Demographer Bernard Salt predicts the combined population of the Gold Coast and Tweed will double to 1.2 million in the next 35 years!
Unemployment rose over that period, from 5.2 per cent to the 6.4 per cent reported by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on Thursday. The mantra is that "growth means jobs" - but what growth? Obviously population growth stimulates GDP growth, but there's no indication that this leads to economic growth, and jobs!
The housing "boom" is warping our economy, and leaving a damaging legacy of debt, social and environmental challenges, for future generations.
Gold Coast urged to diversify economy
Population growth is being used to mask a weak economy, and artificially prop up our GDP figures and consumption rates.
Gary Mays says that "the other thing is we've got to start utilising these graduates that we're turning out at a rapid rate from the universities with nowhere to go." Unemployed graduates is an indication of skills overshoot, and a stagnant economy, which flies in the face of our skilled immigration rate.
See also:
Queensland's Gold Coast losing its lustre – the Australian, 11 Jun 11 and Construction of the Gold Coast light rail system and major roadworks are causing big delays for frustrated motorists 14 Jul 13 and Roadworks cause major traffic gridlock on Gold Coast 21 Jul 13 – Courier Mail. - Ed