Letter From Australia (About Economic Refugees)

Gullibility Without End

There are two kinds of refugees in the world: those fleeing from tyrants and murderers and those looking for a better socio-economic life.  The latter are called “economic refugees”.  Whilst their aspirations and ambitions are understandable they give the former kind of refugee a bad name.

Economic refugees all too often attempt to game the system by masquerading as genuine refugees.  Australia, for the last five years, has deliberately refused to distinguish between genuine refugees and economic refugees.  As a consequence it is now regarded as a soft-destination for economic refugees.  The boats keep coming.  Paul Sheeha, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald exposes the defalcation of the Australian government on this matter. Any government which loses control of its borders has ceded sovereignty. Worse, it has meant the government is complicit in self-deceit and in lying to the people. Paul Sheehan believes it is a key reason the Gillard Government is despised by the electorate.

Easy Dupes, Our Bad

Breaking Silence, Part Deux

Macsyna King has been in the news again.  This time the context has altered somewhat.  The coroner investigating the death of her premature twins has placed the blame firmly upon her then derelict “husband”, Chris Kahui. It was impossible for Macsyna King to murder the children, the coroner concluded. By process of elimination, Kahui was the only one left to blame.  This must have come as a shock to a more than a few people.

Here was a woman who was vilified throughout the country as the indisputable murderess, a child killer, a swine, a monster, the lowest of the low, etc.  In fact, when Chris Kahui was charged it took the jury only a minute to declare him not guilty.

Lines of Antithesis

Rebekah’s Womb

The lines of antithesis are not like chalk lines left on the sidewalk after a child’s game, to use Van Til’s illustration. Those lines can be washed away by the next rain. The lines of the antithesis are two lines of generation, two lines of seed — the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent (Gen. 3:15). These two races occupy the same human history, and all is not well between them.

The history of the world is Rebekah’s womb, and she picked up on the fundamental problem early on. “But the children struggled together within her; and she said, “If all is well, why am I like this?”(Gen. 25:22, NKJV). The elder humanity is Esau, but the older will serve the younger — Jacob — and the meek will inherit the earth. 
Douglas Wilson.

Institutional Blinkers

Purblind Central Bankers

The causes of the Global Financial Crisis are complex and multi-valent–as expected.  One individual who shares a good deal of the blame, however, is Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve.  Greenspan deliberately kept interest rates low in the US (and thereby in much of the world) during the critical period of 2000 to 2004.  It was during this period that house prices began to inflate rapidly.

In May 2000 the US federal funds rate (set by the Federal Reserve) was 6.5 percent.  Then the dot-com crash happened.  Internet and IT companies had been a hot item on the stock market, trading well above their intrinsic value.  Suddenly, as is often the case, the mood of the market changed:

Letter From America (About Men)

Heroism in Aurora 

Manliness has been devalued for a half century, but courage isn’t dead.
By Mona Charen
July 27, 2012 12:00 A.M.
National Review Online

If just one man had given his life by throwing himself atop his girlfriend to shield her from bullets in that Aurora theater, it would have been cause for amazement. That three apparently did so is deeply affecting. People earn the Medal of Honor for such courage and self-sacrifice in the military. There is no equivalent in ordinary life — or what should be ordinary life.

Jon Blunk, Matt McQuinn, and Alex Teves all reacted instantaneously when the horror began to unfold at the theater.

Homosexual "Marriage"

A Caricature from Mordor

The New Zealand Parliament will consider a bill legalising homosexual “marriage”.  A private member’s bill has been drawn in the ballot.  Parliament will now consider the bill and vote it either up or down.  What should be our position and response?

From the foundations of the Christian faith and its Head, Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son, our Lord the matter is straightforward.  The institution of marriage is a divine one and binds all human beings.  Marriage  constitutes a man and a woman leaving their respective parents, and cleaving to one another for life, until death parts the couple.  Nothing else is marriage.  Everything else is an aping of marriage, not the real thing.  These things are the teachings of holy Scripture and, therefore, of the Church of our Lord.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

How the Marble Always Rolls 

Political Dualism – Americanitas
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, 26 July 2012

Years ago, when I was in college, the prof in some class or other had us watch a documentary film recording somebody’s suicide. They didn’t show that part on camera, but the whole thing was a “situation ethics” kind of thing, where the person had been diagnosed with a terminal (and painful) disease that he didn’t want to endure, and so he decided to check out. The film included the farewell party, bunch of friends over, that sort of thing. The premise of everything was “avoidance of pain,” with justification of the suicide built on that assumption.

In the class discussion afterward, I raised the question of presuppositions

The Second Global Financial Crisis, Part III

Nursing our Malice

When the Global Financial Crisis hit many pundits argued that Western capitalism had failed.  They had a point.  Half a point.  Capitalism is essentially the private ( as opposed to government) manufacture and trading of goods and services.  But such a non-government, free trade system cannot survive unless it is built upon a foundation of integrity, honesty, and the prevention and punishment of theft. Capitalism only prospers and benefits the majority if it cares deeply about the sovereignty of other people’s property, believing that what God has given, let not man take away.

Society Afraid Of Its Own Shadow

Scorning the Propaganda of Fear 
A review of Pascal Bruckner’s  The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse

Emma-Kate Symons
20 Jul 2012 00:03:00
Australian Financial Review

When a celebrated French philosopher from the centre left assails the “despotic” politics of environmental fear he should expect a dressing down from his climate change-conscious comrades.  But Pascal Bruckner has incited such fury with a diatribe against green prophesiers of imminent planetary ruin, the reaction has surprised even this veteran of the trans-Atlantic culture wars.

“The planet is sick. Man is guilty of having destroyed it. He must pay,” is how Bruckner caustically portrays the received wisdom on environmental “sin” and damnation in his latest book Le fanatisme de l’Apocalypse (The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse).  “Consider . . . the famous carbon footprint that we all leave behind us,” he writes in his introduction. “What is it, after all, if not the gaseous equivalent of original sin, of the stain that we inflict on our Mother Gaia by the simple fact of being present and breathing?”

The Second Global Financial Crisis, Part II

Meeting Obligations, Or Not

In a previous post we argued that little of any significance has been accomplished effectively to regulate investment banking.  There is no doubt whatsoever that global investment banking, which had been dominated by US companies, had been responsible for the Global Financial Crisis.  As a result of government actions, risk is now concentrated in that sector more than ever before.  If institutions then were too big to fail, there are bigger now investment banks.  Moreover there are less of them.  Risk is therefore exacerbated and arguably more acute than 2008.

Why do size and number of investment banks matter?

The Second Global Financial Crisis, Part I

Defalcation on a Unimaginable Scale 

We are nearly four years on from the Global Financial Crisis.  It has achieved the status of its own acronym (GFC)–a sure sign in modern parlance that it “means something”.  Its effects are still with us and some assert they will ripple out for a further decade. Has the problem been solved?  Far from it.

In short the regulatory changes made, particularly in the United States, have been both inadequate and even those passed, ineffectually policed.  The causes of the original crisis were manifold; the solutions, however, appear straightforward.  They have largely been ignored.

Conflicts of Interest

Big Brother Shareholder

Mighty River Power will be a dirty float.  The Prime Minister, John Key has confirmed it.  The dirt in this float usefully illustrates how governments “do” commerce badly.

Firstly, let’s paint the more general picture, before addressing the dirt.  For governments, politics matter: their real constituency is not the owners of a business, but the voters whom they must either impress or placate.  Governments always stand ready and willing to trade off the rights of property owners, making them the fall-guys for the “greater good” which just happens to be the good of the current governing political party.

Some Wars Should Not be Fought

Do-Good Wowsers on the Wane?

A growing number of folk are facing up to the unintended consequences of prohibition.  The consequences include the reckless destruction of lives and subsidizing vast criminal enterprises.   The evils are now much greater than those which attend the drug taking in the first place.  Rich Lowry, writing in the National Review has been looking at the tea leaves and discerns a change in the portents. 

Cannibalism Alive and Well Amongst the Left

Succeeding to Self-Destruction

A few commentators have called attention to the bare-knuckle contest underway in Australia.  Sections of the Labour Party have decided that their coalition partner, the Greens are the enemy.

Labour has gone into a governing coalition with the Greens.  In order to maintain the coalition, Labour has had to cede policy leadership to the Greens.  Extremist policies have been pushed through that are out of kilter with the wider, broader electorate.  Upshot: Labour has plummeted in the polls.  As things stand it is facing electoral decimation next year.

There is a reflexive kinship between Labour and Green political parties.  We see the same thing working in New Zealand.  Both Greens and Labour belong to the same ideological world-view.  The Greens just happen to be more consistent.

Letter From the UK (About Syria)

Syrian Tragedy

It does seem as if the days of the Assad Alawite regime in Syria are numbered.  The tide seems to have turned in favour of the rebels.  What the longer term will bring is impossible to predict.  We need to keep in mind that this is a conflict between Islamic sects: Alawite (a Shi’ite sub-sect), Sunni, and Shi’ite itself.

The Guardian explains how the tea-leaves are indicating the end of the Assad regime.

A Man Has to Know His Limitations

Round and Round the Garden Went the Teddy Bear

You just have to love Ludwig Wittgenstein–not that he was a very lovable character.  If Hume was the enfant terrible, the dismantler of the Enlightenment’s claim to objective, evidence based, rationalistic “truth”, Wittgenstein was his twentieth century step-child.  He was the gladiatorial, scathing, sarcastic progenitor of post-modernism.

Wittgenstein pointed out that in all reasoning and arguments there are sets of pre-interpretative grids at play which lead one to certain inferences and conclusions about the facts and data being discussed.  All knowledge is circular.  All reasoning is circular.  To Enlightenment rationalists and their twentieth century descendants, this is hateful stuff.

Fools and Horses

Self-Inflicted Damage

The climate change gig is a rigged game where the casino always wins.  The casino is government: the casino wins when more and more control is asserted and exerted over the lives and activities of subjects.

Manufacturing a bogus-crisis is an ideal way for the casino to proceed.  If the existence of the human race is supposedly at stake, governments need to go to an emergency, war-time footing which requires government command-and-control over everything necessary to ensure survival.  That is why climate change has been seized upon with alacrity by western governments.

Desperately Seeking Mana

The Preserve of Fools and Horses

Every society has its idiosyncrasies and fools.  The existence of tomfoolery is unavoidable in a fallen world.  How to deal with it?  Mockery and laughter are sometimes effective tools.

It’s a shame in many ways that Maori–many of whom seek mana above all else–end up the butt of jokes over their particular foolishnesses.  One could argue that the defensive, incessant quest for mana is a cruel idol.  The more mana is adulated and sought after, the more it betrays the seeker as having anything but.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Cooking and Counting 

Goo-Mongers – Postmodernism
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, 13 July 2012

One of the charges that is laid at my feet with some regularity is that I am an autodidact, unaccountable to no one, and that this unfortunate fact makes me pop off from time to time, and to do so in ways that are clean contrary to what is taught by the certified experts and gatekeepers.

There is a lot going on here, not the least of which is the confusion of certification with education. But that part of it is another topic for another day. For the present, I would like to present a brief explanation and defense for what I would describe as the biblical approach to being contrarian.

“I have more understanding than all my teachers: for thy testimonies are my meditation. I understand more than the ancients, because I keep thy precepts” (Ps. 119:99-100).

This approach eliminates the cocksure sophomore as well as the argumentative crank.

"Harmful Misinformation" Bites the Dust

Students vote FOR Free Speech

Students at Auckland University yesterday rejected a motion to disaffiliate a student organization advocating against abortion.  Sanity prevails. 

We are glad about the outcome.  However, it is a reminder that free speech rights are coming under increasing attack from the Left which is working more and more to proscribe speech it deems “harmful” or “offensive”–that is, views and actions with which it disagrees.  In this case, the forces of censorship and proscription were defeated. 

This from the NZ Herald:

A move to ban an anti-abortion club from the Auckland University Students’ Association has been defeated overwhelmingly after an emotional debate about free speech.  A special general meeting attended by a large and noisy crowd in the university quad voted 227-125 yesterday against a motion to disaffiliate the ProLife Auckland club “for propagating harmful misinformation”.