The left loathes the concept of IQ -- especially the claim that it helps to determine socio-economic status, rather than vice versa -- because of a near-religious attachment to the idea that man is a piece of clay that can be moulded into any shape by society
Where would we be without the smart alecks of the press stretching and embroidering the words of a PM they detest in order to convict him of things he didn't say and doesn't mean? As demonstrated by the latest eruption of misrepresentation and confected outrage, a lot better off
Perhaps you read some of the many recent reports asserting that young homosexuals in the bush are killing themselves in numbers many times higher than that of their straight neighbours. Shocking stuff if true. Fortunately it isn't, not even remotely so
Much of the intelligentsia has turned against the West's high-cultural tradition that has sought the true, the beautiful and the good. Rather, it has set to assailing our customs, traditions and institutions, with issues -- refugees are the latest -- taken up as cudgels to assault the civic order
He supports partial-birth abortion, cozies up to the Clintons and frames the issues in a perspective that, with a couple of notable exceptions, tag him as more Democrat than Republican. Yet the candidate beneath that preposterous pompadour continues to lead the GOP field and dominate the headlines
If you are bent on re-making society, first change or undermine long-held norms and values. Under a transforming officialdom, and with the police enlisted to serve as The Guardian's paramilitary auxiliaries, the very concept of respectability is decried as "middle-class privilege", a stigma in and of itself
An ill-conceived press release brought feral hordes onto the streets of Melbourne, where they stayed to block traffic and pose for media footage long after officialdom had refuted the allegation of random, "racist" visa checks. With the operation cancelled, faux outrage chalked up another victory
The Continent's leaders, most of them, apparently believe that more money must be provided to "refugees" countries of origin, thus lessening the incentive to leave. Surely, with a full-blown invasion well underway, only the simple-minded would deem this approach any kind of solution
A nation worthy of the name can have but one authentic day to celebrate and affirm its unity. Here's a heartening impression drawn from the last time I marched: Asian families whose little kids, with colourful crayons and sheets of white card, were printing messages. 'Thank you' was what they said.
They Marched in March -- the usual suspects in all their serried shades of anger and incoherence -- because, well, it would have made even less sense to bemoan the fact that Tony Abbott and the Coalition won an election last September by April-ing in April. Zeg is fearful of such antics' impact on the easily impressed.
At the University of Wollongong there is so much diversity to honour, especially when Christians are demanding all the attention with their mangers and tinsel, that staff have been sent a chirpy reminder that Christmas is about much more than the Messiah
Climate change is torching Australia, according to the likes of Tim Flannery and his fellow warmists at the Bureau of Meteorology. If only the money now spent on computer projections and big-ticket fire fighting gear could go toward fuel reduction
A New Zealand court has rejected the argument that one can claim asylum from the alleged ravages of climate change. For the plaintiff, it is back to teeming Kiribati, where the real problem is a booming population
A cash-strapped America no longer has the resources to continue as the world’s policeman, as its craven capitulation to Tehran makes clear. For Australia the message is chilling
Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of angry young men in Budapest demand they be allowed to proceed to Germany, where Angel Merkel thinks she has room for some 800,000 this year alone. Lousy poster children for the invasion of Europe, the BBC opts instead to focus on the fetching Ms Nour
The Samuel Griffith Society's conferences are a delight and this a year's gathering was no exception, not least because, as power continues to be directed by imaginative judicial edict toward Canberra, it was a genuine pleasure to share the company of those who eschew centralist legal sophistries
Unlike the dog that didn't bite, the mystery facing Baker Street's most irregular detective concerned those yelping warmists who howl doom at the slightest provocation, even the contradictory variety. More ice around an allegedly melting ice cap? Clearly, Watson, they are a rum lot
Was the national broadcaster asking the Communist Party to organise telegenic protests against the Vietnam War? Documents suggest the security agency suspected as much, but the only thing of which we can today be certain is that the accusation was far from an improbable
Speaking personally, I have no particular objection to the idea of same sex-marriage and would almost certainly vote in its favour. What I do find objectionable is the way in which this issue has been used, -- just another trendily ‘progressive’ cause -- to corrupt the standard of public debate
When Peter Minter banned Quadrant's poets from his magazine's pages on the grounds that they had published in what he likened to a Nazi journal, the curious might have wondered just what sort of verse he actually favours. Here's a hint
Readers can form their own judgement as to whether this first-person account would count in Andrew Bolt’s challenge to Robert Manne to “name ten” Aborigines stolen purely for racial reasons
PM Stephen Harper has three election victories under his belt and, from a conservative point of view, not much to show for them. Being nice to political enemies is all very well and good, but it leaves your supporters less than impressed
If "Indigenous culture" is to be recognised in Australia's Constitution it is vital to understand what the term means. Rap songs and break dancing, perhaps?
If a slick video and the IPCC's latest inaccurate and untruthful arguments are the best it can do to demonstrate a dangerous warming problem, its advice should be ignored and funding withdrawn
The ability to hold two conflicting ideas and simultaneously believe each to be true is a very handy knack indeed. Cheating husbands picture themselves as entirely committed to spouses and families. The portly assure themselves that one more sticky bun is a mouthful of no accord. And if you work for or edit a dying, addled, disgrace of a newspaper -- and here The Age springs immediately to mind -- it is entirely possible to place two contradictory assertions on the home page, one right below the other.
The illustration above, taken from this morning's Age homepage, makes the point.
Story #1 asserts that PM Abbott is dragging his heels in not immediately providing Syrian refugees the succour, visas and Centrelink appointments they deserve.
And right underneath? Why, another story explaining that country shoppers from Bangadesh, Pakistan and other points of origin lacking cradle-to-grave welfare systems are passing themselves off as Syrians in order to reach the West's government-funded dental chairs.
Ah, the Age! Believed by fools, produced by hypocrites.
To get a glimpse of the destruction a once-sane newspaper is inflicting on itself, click the link below.
Brendan O'Neill in the latest Spectator:
We all know about the problem of sexual pornography on the internet. Now we need to talk about the problem of moral pornography. And nothing better illustrates it than the photo of Aylan, a three-year-old Syrian who drowned alongside his five-year-old brother Galip, his mother and others fleeing the hell of Syria.
The global spreading of this snapshot — which appears on the front page of the Independent today and inside the Guardian, and is even callously being turned into a meme by sections of the weeping Twitterati — is justified as a way of raising awareness about the migrant crisis. Please. It’s more like a snuff photo for progressives, dead-child porn, designed not to start a serious debate about migration in the 21st century but to elicit a self-satisfied feeling of sadness among Western observers.
His column can be read in full via the link below
What might be called the Rule of the Tool is always worth bearing in mind: If all you have is a hammer and nothing else, the obvious solution to every problem, even those that require a screwdriver, will be to administer a good whacking. In the warmist press over recent days, President Obama has demonstrated the wisdom of that insight with his widely reported lament that the blessing of electrical power from every socket, not to mention the freedom conferred by the private use of automobiles, is inflicting a catastrophic melting on the world's glaciers. To make his point, the world's most prominent community organiser was shipped briefly to Alaska, where he posed for the cameras before the retreating Exit glacier. "This is as good a signpost of what we’re dealing with when it comes to climate change as just about anything,” he recited.
Now there are two ways of finding a little sunshine in this latest episode of presidential posturing. The first is to recognise that Obama's jaunt was actually a perverse blessing, as all that posing and preaching kept him too busy to cut any further deals, like his recent nuclear accord with Iran. There are a number of other nations whose sinister goals might have gained from the sort of compliant indifference extended to Tehran's mullahs, so that's a definite plus if those lesser outlaw states must wait a little longer for Washington's permission to pursue their mischief. Small consolation, true, but with this president any action not immediately counterproductive must be regarded as a definite plus.
The second is that, once again, a warmist mouthpiece has indirectly demonstrated the essential shabbiness and shallowness of his message. Yes, the Exit glacier has retreated quite some distance in the past century, which is the factor that telegenically positioned Obama and his TelePrompter amongst those ice-free boulders. Had his handlers directed Air Force One to another Alaskan destination, however, the opportunities for sound-byte alarmism would have been grievously curtailed. That would be the Hubbard glacier, which no less an authority than NASA reports as growing at a prodigious rate, even as the Exit glacier shrinks and others with it. Click here to view an expanded version of the picture atop this item to see just how much it has grown.
This difference -- one glacier booming, the other withering -- might have been the grist for an informed discussion on the lack of certainty in the disciple that calls itself "climate science", but the only instruments available to lead such a examination would have been the current president and his talent for overlooking the inconveniently obvious. With the Paris climate confab coming up, this policy of inspired omission will be well worth keeping in mind.
More than that, after what is now very nearly two decades of the climate refusing to cooperate with the alarmists' hot-house prophecies, pounding the time-worn cliches is pretty much all the green-eyed opponents of growth and prosperity have left. Hammers are dumb, blind instruments. How blessed the warmists must feel to have a spokesman who fits that description to a tee.
The NASA report on the Hubbard glacier can be read in full via the link below.
Modern educational theory some years ago embraced the notion that the problem with little boys is that they are not little girls.
Roughhousing in the playground? Evidence, surely, of incipient testosterone poisoning. Rambunctious in the classroom, which can make a teacher's job somewhat more difficult? Quick, off to the school nurse for the daily dose of calm-'em-down pills. A near-instinctive urge to turn pencils, fingers, even bite-sculpted sandwiches into imaginary guns? Clearly yet one more example of the male urge to dominate and destroy.
Fortunately, thanks to the feminist sensibility that shapes Big Chalk's approach and agenda, strong women are on hand to make sure the boys behave themselves. Other threats to peace and tranquility are, as Zeg notes, somewhat more problematic.
From Elliot Abrams' review of former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren's new book on his time in Washington:
When Oren speculates about why some American Jews ... are so critical of Israel, his answer is not politics and ideology but insecurity. “I could not help questioning whether American Jews really felt as secure as they claimed,” he writes. “Perhaps persistent fears of anti-Semitism impelled them to distance themselves from Israel and its so often controversial policies.”
But nothing in the book substantiates this opinion, while a great deal that Oren writes about Obama and his entourage—from Jeremiah Wright to Rashid Khalidi in the past, to those who have manned his White House staff in the present—points to a very simple answer: Around the world, the Left has turned against Israel. Are American Jews on the Left really afraid of pogroms, or are they afraid instead of disloyalty to the Democratic Party and accusations that they are “moving Right”?
The review, in Commentary, and can be read in full via the link below.
Writing at The American Thinker, Scott Powell compiles a potted history of the Left's infiltration and ascent:
...Fast forward to 2008, and we find the long march through the institutions resulting in the New Left being embedded in constituencies that provided a base of support and policy positions for the Obama presidential campaign. And while Barack Obama had a very unconventional background of lengthy associations with Marxists and anti-American radicals throughout his formative years and early adulthood, a nearly twenty-year membership in Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s “hate America” church, and an extreme left-wing voting record, the major media–now enveloped with the blinders of political correctness–made little effort to report on his background or examine his substantive qualifications. Barack Obama was both the culturally cool and articulate black candidate who provided a means for national redemption for a racist past, while also being the one candidate who provided a blank slate upon which people could project their own desires for hope and change.
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