Australia

Back in the 1990s, the divorce industry had a roaring trade. And one of their stock arguments was "the best interests of the child". It was then claimed, contrary to evidence, that children always did better with their mother than with their father. Decent men were swindled out of contact with their children, even when the mother was proven violent, or a drug addict, and despite the fact that statistically, a female child is ten times safer from sexual violence with her natural father than with any other stand-in father figure. That didn't mean, of course, that there were no safe step-fathers or no unsafe natural fathers; it is just relative probability over large numbers.

But, as many of today's young adults can attest, such facts were ignored on a spurious 'best interest..." argument and they grew up without their fathers; today's young men, having seen the treatment meted out to their own fathers, typically are much less likely to even see any point in marriage.

But I remember thinking some years ago (not quite sure exactly when) I wondered "What happened to the huge rows about family court bias towards mothers? I haven't heard that 'best interests of the child' line for a very long time!"

It faded away. All the usual man-bashing media quietly dropped it. Why?

Well now we know.

This site is dedicated to a moral principle, which I call the Principle of Goodness, and as such I have largely refrained from direct political comments. But world conditions have so worsened since this site was first created that I think this policy must change. One of the things I warned of back in 2010 was the danger of descent of our entire civilisation into a new dark age. Now, many commentators are coming to the same conclusion. I warned of how leftism, political correctness, neo-marxism, call it what you will, is actually a religion, and a false one at that. And I specifically added that the global warming cult is not science, it is just one more branch of bad religion. Once more, many others have added their voice to the same opinion.

So, it is certainly time that I directly applied the Principle of Goodness to these situations, not only to illustrate the Principle, but also in the hope of changing the bad situation. And solar thermal is one of the very worst.

Start of open letter to Jay Weatherill:

I write to you today in your capacity as Premier of South Australia, and in light of your announcement to build a massive solar thermal power plant in your state. Now I do not know whether you are a "typical politician", whose only interest is to count "for" and "against" voters, or whether you genuinely care and will change your views depending on evidence and ethics. If the former, count me as "against", but note that I live in Queensland and, therefore, stop reading. But I assume you are the latter, and so I write on.

I do not know whether you are aware that these plants are bird-killers. Not only that, but they are bird-torturers. Any bird that flies into the path of the beam (which is huge) is instantly blinded, then its feathers catch fire and its skin is burned off. It is likely that it then falls out of the path of the beam onto the ground, in writhing agony but still alive, to slowly die in excruciating pain over several hours.

Vale Bill Leak. Honest. Courageous. Caring.

Reading the excellent The Australian, in particular a viewpoint regarding "LGBTIQ" (written by a G), I came across a remarkable comment, also from a G. Not entirely fair to a certain other culture, but completely on point regarding our own. Here is some of it:

I have put in a submission to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights. My argument: 18C (and D) of The Racial Discrimination Act are unconstitutional.

From the document:

The general background to this paper will be known to most Australian readers: the Racial Discrimination Act contains a section, 18C, making unlawful any public act “reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people” when “the act is done because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the other person or of some or all of the people in the group.” Recently some cases have come into prominence highlighting severe problems with this formulation; we shall investigate some of these below.

I intend to present four main arguments:

• one, that 18C does not achieve its objective of prohibiting all racist speech.
• two reasons why 18C is unconstitutional:
  • the limitations of its scope in 18D grant discriminatory rights based on intelligence, education, and power;
  • it effectively bans, or makes too expensive to risk, any speech at all (good, bad, or indifferent) that relates to race and is not covered by an exemption in 18D. Due to the discriminatory nature of 18D, this amounts to an effective total ban (from a combination of actual law and fear of state retribution) on speech about race by certain classes of person.
• and, since neither of the two arguments against 18C depends upon whether one’s behaviour might “offend”, “insult”, “humiliate” or “intimidate” (or, indeed, any other “bad effect” verb that might be suggested to replace any of these), it follows that removing or altering some of these words will not fix either of the two problems I have identified.

Before I get to these arguments, there are some general issues that need to be discussed. These include:

• A preliminary discussion of the concept of “race”; this will be referred to in the arguments that follow.
• A short discussion about the sections of the Act preceding the troublesome 18C: what is right, and what is wrong, with these sections. This is necessary in order to see why, in the main arguments, the superficially similar wording of 18C to the preceding sections has such different consequences.

I have presented it in the form of a white paper. Here is the link to the document (pdf, 282K).

During the writing of the paper, I made an (to me at least) amazing discovery:

I was struck by a comparison of this week's flooding, South Australia's power failure, and the talk not even a year ago (15 Dec 2015) on "their" ABC: [update: link added]

Is drought the new normal for the once lush south-east of SA?

Yet here we are today with much of south east Australia in flood. It's a great pity they listened to climate "scientists", when the facts have been known almost from the beginning. Or, at least, since 1911 (from Dorothea Mackellar's My Country):

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die -
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.

But regardless, on the ABC drones:

Climate change: droughts more severe and frequent

Hmmm.. I wonder. Here's what the Bureau of Meteorology has to say about it:

From The Australian - article "Most ADF soldiers ‘believe Islam promotes violence and terrorism’" (subscriber-only link, sadly), reporting Dr Charles Miller, a lecturer in Strategic and Defence Studies at the Australian National Univer­sity"

“The best estimate … for the proportion of soldiers who have received cultural sensitivity training and who believe that the Muslim religion promotes violence and terrorism is 91 per cent.

“The corresponding figure for those who have not had cultural sensitivity training is 17 per cent.”

Oh dear!

Have you ever noticed how the "sensitive elite" talk lots about "sensitivity training", "deradicalisation", and so on, whilst obviously having little clue about the core belief system that these "programs" and concerned with? Not talking about Dr Miller, but about the mindless promoters of these "fix it all" programs. In this case the "fix" made the problem over 500% worse!

Disclosure here: I believe Muhammad was a prophet, but I am not a Muslim. Likewise I believe in Jesus, but I am not a Christian; repeat for Buddha, Moses, Krishna, and others.

The relevance: Having read the Quran at least three times from cover to cover, both in the normal order and in order of revelation (as well as a lot more stuff), I know vastly more about what Muhammad taught than the administrators and politicians who think that throwing money at a problem, without understanding it, might fix it.

Have you ever tried to explain something to a politician, something that you are expert in? Here's how it usually goes: the politician smiles understandingly, but one or two sentences in, their eyes glaze over. Another few sentences and it's "Yes, well, we'll look into that... ho, hum, hah, must go."

That is why politicians are generally useless with the hardest issues. Unless you are willing to "get inside" an issue, you will never be able to make useful contributions to fixing the problems. By being generally unwilling to listen, by trying to fit everything into their political narrative instead of seeking the truth, our political masters perpetually remain nothing more than useless decorations on the national stage.

I am going now, with the above disclosure on record, to give you my personal view on whether Islam is a religion of peace.

We voted (clearly!) against a carbon tax when we elected Tony Abbott as our PM is 2013. But now our plain-speaking, introvert, somewhat politically clumsy, but honest, devoted to the welfare of his country, courageous protector is now an ex-PM. In his place we have a populist waffler who knows how to say all the right things (meaning the things that will get him fine sound-bites on the ABC) and who says nothing of importance until he works out the "popular" thing to say - and who, under no circumstances, ever takes a decision on principle.

Apparently "The Turnbull government will “probably” allow emission reduction permits to be bought from overseas, giving Australia flexibility to increase the targets it pledged at the Paris climate conference..."

The more I see of this man, the more I am convinced he is a willing member of the kleptocracy that seems to be in universal rule throughout the western "democracies". Let me explain why an ETS is infinitely worse than a merely impoverishing carbon tax...

"Our", "Your", whatever, ABC has just shown another beatup interview to attack the Abbott government, this time with the President of Kiribati, Anote Tong. The trigger was a joke told by Immigration minister Peter Dutton: "Time doesn't mean anything when you're about to have water lapping at your door."

Now before we get to point of this post, let's just think about that for a microsecond or two: Does anyone really think - really, really think - that if a labor/green politician had said it, it would even be reported, let alone blown up into a national issue when we are involved in a war to stop one of the world's most evil movements ever from beheading people, crucifying them or enslaving and raping them? Seriously? Then get your head examined.

But what does "Our" ABC do? This: