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Australia has this big problem with their livestock exports to Indonesia.  Apparently they are often killed in an unacceptable manner.

So will someone explain to me why we don’t send, with each shipment, a team of Australian Killers? Complete with power generator vans and stun guns?

One needs an abattoir to deal with meat once the animal is killed.  And abattoirs have a finite capacity. Which is why attempting to send all the animals to the few acceptable abattoirs may not be a practical solution.

But all the animals could be farmed out to abattoirs as usual and each abattoir could receive, along with the animals, a team of Australian Killers and associated equipment.

Quietly. Politely. With some apologies. And pending discussions – amicable, adult, intelligent discussions between Australian and Indonesian officials.

Who pays for these teams could be worked out later.

Let it be done, rather than kill a whole industry and cause incredible damage within Australia.

Which is quite apart from the laughing stock we make of ourselves when we are prepared to cripple a whole industry over inhumane animal deaths but turn a blind eye and are complicit in refugee mistreatment up to and including possible deaths.

Why’s that, then?

We all know what sort of nation we think we are: hard workers, lovers of freedom, brave, strong, healthy, committed to honesty, courage and a ‘fair go’.  Right? Something like that, right?

But what do you think we look like to the rest of the world?

How about this to the fugitives, the refugees, the oppressed, the desperate:  picture a poster, with a tall sun-bronzed Aussie standing in the foreground, smiling broadly and saying ‘Come to us, all you in need, all you oppressed and persecuted, come to us!’ and in the background a typical prison wall with guard towers and razor wire and guards with guns and perhaps a chute sticking out of the side of the wall drawn in that cartoon way, showing people being shovelled down the chute into the waiting arms (?) of the guards and persecutors of known human rights abusing countries such as Malaya and perhaps another chute on the other side sending people pell mell right back to where they came from.

How about that? Can you picture that?  That’d be just about how we are currently seen.  If it is not then it definitely IS the picture we are currently trying to project. Without doubt.

And my question is: why don’t we just have it drawn and publish it? Why screw about? Just get a good cartoonist and get it drawn and publish it all around the world.

The fugitives, the oppressed, the desperate and needy of the world would soon get the idea.

Next: how about those people up to their knees in blood and guts and shells and bullets and crippled kids and mums and dads, broken families and destroyed homes – the ‘freedom fighters’, the people, of Libya.

We sanctimoniously say we’re on the side of the citizens and against Gaddafi but what do we actually do? Nothing.

What should we do?

We should do as Peter Coleman says in the Spectator (21 May) – we should recognise the Transitional National Council in Benghazi as the legitimate interim government of Libya.  That’s what we should do.  As France and Italy have done. And Qatar and Gambia.

And once we’ve recognised a government then we could respond to that Government’s calls for help. We could send soldiers.

And that’s probably why we don’t do it. Because we don’t want to be asked for soldiers. Because we don’t want to send them. Because we don’t want Australia boys dying in Libya.

Well, that sounds fine. Except Australian soldiers would probably far rather fight on the side of the citizens in Libya than on the side of the foreigner in Afghanistan.

And, at bottom, it is simply a case of doing the right thing.

Which this country seems to be in a great hurry to forget.

Here’s a go:  There is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University who is investigating Happiness. He has a website called “Track Your Happiness” where you can get involved yourself if you wish.

There is an article about him and his work in the ‘New Scientist’ of 16th April 2011 called ‘In Pursuit of Happiness’.

In that article they describe a list of things that cause happiness or don’t and they say that the list is pretty much what you’d expect it to be, after all their investigation (which is ongoing, and which you can be part of) – but they find one surprising thing: Children. It turns out having children causes a “… small but reliably negative impact on happiness.”

This means you can rely on it. You can safely predict it. Children will diminish your happiness.

How do you like them apples?

Climate change is the hobbyhorse of the age. Of the decade, anyway. But there’s a laughable studious refusal to take a scientific look at it.

Even by the scientists, especially by the scientists.

The whole thing is about the Earth’s climate changing in a way that will adversely effect human beings, right?

Well, when was the last time you saw any kind of rundown on just what changes you might find in your area and what effect they might have on you?

When was the last time you heard anything about provisions for the coming changes?

When was the last time you heard politicians developing policies to cope with the coming changes?

When was the last time you listened to or saw or read scientists in earnest propounding of the deleterious (to you and I) changes that we need to make provision for and may hope to mitigate?

When did you ever see anything listed never mind quantified?

If there’s a danger we first need to identify the nature of it and then we go into harm minimisation mode, combating the danger, making provision for the danger, etc…

In this instance we’ve had an immense furore over whether or not to implement a ‘carbon tax’ and over whether or not human beings are really responsible for climate change. And that’s all we’ve had and that’s all we’ve got.

But it seems fairly obvious that a carbon tax is going to do  nothing whatever to mitigate or obviate the unwelcome effects of global warming – whether we implement it or not, whether humans have contributed to global warming or not.

Read what Phil of the University of Adelaide has to say.

And read what he has to say about the  major identifiable ‘adverse effect’ of global warming. Which is: rising sea levels. Which are predicted (he says) to rise by up to 4 feet by the end of the century.

But he’s not the only one. The US government says that global warming is inevitable. They claim that if ALL greenhouse gas emissions were to cease immediately we would still get appreciable warming (and sea level rise).

And here’s some Yahoo answers that conclude the same thing and give us some interesting new stuff, too.

So if it is inevitable then first and foremost, front and centre, should be facts and figures and discussions and provisions and policies for dealing with it.

But all we get is this same old crap about carbon taxes to – what? – end it? Global warming? End it? Prevent it? Nonsense. Not possible.

So it is all about a nonsense while the real problem gets closer and closer.

So why is it carrying on? Why persevere with this nonsense?

Well my guess is sheer conceit. My guess is that it is all motivated by sheer conceit.

On the part of politicians who want to ‘go down in history’.

As simple as that.

And scientists of the same ilk.

We should remember that scientists are sworn to stupidity. Sorry to have to say it so bluntly but it is a simple fact.

A scientist cannot believe anything until it has been subjected to ‘scientific analysis, investigation, testing’ – ‘proven’ scientifically.

We are all familiar, surely, with the numerous times, the numberless times, we’ve heard of scientific studies that earnestly investigate something so obvious it strikes us as completely without an need for study.

But that IS science. That IS the ‘scientific method’ – to investigate the seemingly obvious to check whether or not it is really true.

And science proceeds like that. Painfully. One step at a time.

And this progress, this method, needs people with good maths, for instance, for analysing data, and excellent placid, patient, plodding minds that can gather data meticulously for years sometimes without ever any earth shaking or even locally significant results.

The vast mass of science is performed in this tedious manner.

They know what they know about their field and they know it in particular by the results from their investigations….

And they know almost nothing else… they are no more knowledgeable about other things than you or I, quite possibly less because it is easy for them to think of themselves (it seems, nowadays, anyway) as somehow superior and automatically more correct, simply because they are scientists.

So I think many of them support the climate change debate in a wrong headed and confused fashion just like the pollies.

To be other than wrong headed and confused they would constantly strive to point out that the change is apparently inevitable and we should be preparing.

Okay.

That’s the climate change thing.

But there’s more earth change than climate change. Why isn’t it being looked at?

There’s environmental change from many points of view.

Take resources – mineral resources – they are being mined out of existence… soon we’ll be scrabbling for the last few remnants of many things and we’ll have great difficulty continuing our present lifestyle across the planet without these things.

Take water…

Take living space for indigenous peoples…

Take timber, the forests, the biodiversity…

And no doubt many more aspects that I haven’t thought of.

For the problem isn’t Climate Change – the problem is Earth Change – the Earth is being changed in a way that seriously compromises the future of earthlings.

That’s what it really is about, should be about.

🙂

Education is booming, isn’t it? All over the world.  The illiterate masses are being educated, are becoming literate and the literate masses are being urged to become ‘more literate’, to get into ‘Higher Education’ , ‘Tertiary Education’ – go to College, go to University.

There’s apparently a wish by the government of Australia that 40% of school leavers will attend University.

But our Universities are unfunded, demoralised, devalued, lost, adrift….

No matter. The recent ‘bandwagon’ is Education and everyone is on it. Not Education as something we need to consider deeply and seriously and thoughtfully – something we need to decide upon the nature of and the content of in the interests of the nature and content of our whole reality, our whole society, our whole nation – no.  No. Not Education like that.

But Education as a bandwagon. Education as a sausage machine. Education as a handy catchphrase. Education as a handy job maker and  unemployed person soaker-upper.

As people become more and more devalued in our society this is attended by a commensurate need for people to obtain more and more ‘qualifications’, masquerading as ‘education’, in order to obtain work.  And you need work in order to obtain money. And, of course, you need money in order to pay your life-long ‘rent’ for living space on our planet.

And in fact what as happening is that people are becoming less and less educated as ‘Education’ becomes more and more a necessary part of their lives.

They become more and more like indoctrinated, programmed, brainwashed sheep following orders and doing this, that and the other in order to pay their dues and continue their existence.

So where’s the upside of this horror story?

On the web.

All across the world the people now have access to instant information and an enquiring mind can enquire at the speed of light.

All over the world people without formal access to education are busy educating themselves.

They follow their whim, they follow their fancy, they pursue little trodden trails, they ask and have answered difficult and unpopular questions….  they discover things of all kinds…  they develop their own ‘education’ which doesn’t have a name as a formal ‘subject’ or ‘area of expertise’.

Not that they couldnt do that if they wished and doubtless some of them do.

But the vast majority are ill disciplined (‘externally’ disciplined) in their studies and simply pursue where fancy takes them.

After sufficient time they are, shall we say ‘qualified’, they have ‘passed’ their own personal ‘course of study’ and are worthy of a ‘degree’ or ‘diploma’ or whatever formal recognition of what they’ve achieved.

Which they’ll never get, of course.

But what have they achieved?  What was this ‘course of study’ they followed?

It was development of the self, development of the enquiring mind of an individual. It was self expression, self development. It was manifestation and nurture of the ‘self’.

In the round. Intellectually ‘in the round’ – unconstrained by artificial barriers of artificially defined ‘course content’ and ‘prerequisites’.

These people have responded to the information age and the 21st Century and its tools, its toys, its problems, its preoccupations, its dangers, its realities by collecting the information they saw as necessary for them to play their own part in all of this, for them to respond, to fit in all of this.

It is the people making the people into people.

It is not the privileged, the witch doctors, the self-styled ‘gurus’, the powerful vested interests, the fools, the charlatans directing the course of study of dumb sheep wishing only to have it all done with, finished, so’s they might ‘get out’ and begin earning money and enjoy status as ‘professional people’ or ‘qualified people’ or whatever….

It is not that. It is almost directly anti-that.

It is the creation of a new kind of person.

For the first time in the history of the world the unprivileged, the poorest, can enjoy more access to information and calculating power than was enjoyed by the genius of old.

The genius of old always followed their own line. It is they who manifested what education properly is: self study. You learn only by having a desire to learn.

Today’s mass learning, mass ‘education’, is force feeding pap into the mouths of dumb masses with no desire to know anything. It is not learning. It is not education. It is indoctrination or propaganda.

But the self-teaching individuals all over the world now are a return to the practices of the original geniuses here and there that brought about all the great advances, leaps of knowledge, understanding, methodology of the human race.

Where once there was a mere handful of hungry, capable enquiring minds able to find access to information and means with which to study and experiment – and thousands, maybe millions more who ‘withered’ on the vine from lack of opportunity – now there’s millions, millions who can find the opportunity via this wonderful tool, the personal computer and the web, which makes it all one vast computer.

And so the human race is leavening itself and bread is leavened from within by the presence of the burgeoning yeast cells so the human race is leavened from within by these burgeoning human cells growing themselves, feeding themselves, teaching themselves, penetrating without effort obscurantism, cant, hypocrisy, deceit, trickery, lies….  finding the truths and expounding the truths…..

Happening with blinding speed.  So quickly. The World Wide Web, which stitched the world together had its humble first beginnings in 1990.  From beginnings to the current situation in only 21 years.

21 years. Traditional (in the West) coming-of-age.  Perhaps coincidentally this marks the time when the human race ‘comes of age’ and begins to be a coherent rational thinking organism for the first time, instead of a massive dumb organism variously exploited by parasitic organisms….

From this time on we can expect scientific insights – all kinds of insights – to come as it were spontaneously from out of the ‘mob’, from out of the WWW, from those self-taught and endlessly learning individuals and groups of individuals that have and are and will be self teaching and self realising and fully enjoying the miraculous possibilities of the web.

Truth will  begin to appear. Truth.

Here’s an understandable take on the Economic Realities of our crazy Western World – and perhaps it is the total Truth of it all:

Leigh Harkness

Here’s a thought – why don’t we get the names and all available details of every person in every one of these refugee boats published as soon as they’re apprehended?

Let the whole nation see who’s come here and where from and why, etc…Then perhaps we’d know what we are talking about when we sling generalisations around about these boats and the people on them.

Being kept in ignorance is one of the fundamental evils we all fight against – why do we voluntarily allow it in this case? Because we still haven’t woken up to ourselves and started demanding the information and the ability to govern ourselves.

Acting like dumb, ignorant, passive sheep we shouldn’t be surprised we get treated like such.

🙂

Heard with interest, this morning, about Julia Gillard’s recent speech.

I think it beautifully demonstrates the way the Labour Party has lost its way. ‘Dignified and purposeful’ she said, right?

Mate, the only purpose is to get enough money to live, to work, to live, to work…

My wife works for $20/hr in freezing cold – stood down for hours on end without pay at the whim of the employer, conditions eroded by ‘workplace agreements’ the workforce (mainly 457 visa holders) are frightened to object to.

We work to pay off a house so worthless that the South Australian Housing Trust demolishes them by turning them into matchwood rather than use them or recover any value from them. i.e. we pay for the land – evidence of our total lack of ‘right to live’ in our society – in distinction to the aboriginal hereditary right to live, but that’s another question, isn’t it?

The Greens Julia mocks offer purpose beyond this slavery. And having purpose gives dignity. Gillard is unaware of this and unaware of the lack of dignity in my wife’s slavery.

No matter how far fetched, how perhaps irrational, the Green’s basic attitude is a declaration of purpose – to build a better world.

We need work, says Gillard. That’s her dignity and purpose – a place on the rowing bench for the galley slaves.Tony Abbott echoes the sentiment, saying that unemployed must be forced to accept these jobs.

The highest vision for the future either party can offer is coercion and slavery. No high ideals. No visions of a better future.

No carrots to chase after, no ‘vision splendid’, just authoritarian edicts and a future of endless toil while the gap between rich and poor widens inexorably…

Push the people. Tell the people what to do. Spell it out for them. Make ‘jobs’ for them.It is not just the labour party has lost its way. It is both major parties. And it is the nation as a whole.

And it is the Western World as a whole. We are blinded to our own predicament. Rolling round the world causing death, injury, poverty, destruction everywhere we go, we ourselves deeply in debt and without clear understanding or control of our own systems, we blindly toil away like demented grubs in a white ants nest, building we know not what for no reason other than to survive.

Yep. She said a mouthful did Julia, right there, and Abbott endorsed it. Enough said. That’s enough. Bring back Waltzing Matilda and let’s jump in the billabong rather than be caught by this any longer.

🙂