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They’re talking on the radio about, here in Australia, Aboriginal unemployment, what a shame it is, how to deal with it, what to do.

There’s always some story about some Aboriginal problem or other, never fail.

Because there’s no doubt they’re a nation in crisis. If we can call them a ‘nation’.   And that’s what, more and more as the years go on, they do call them.

Well, it seems to me, IF they are a nation, then they are in a good position to fix any and all problems they may have.

They should simply start building.

Houses, villages, towns….

And then sell, rent, lease those houses, villages, towns…

You see it seems to me that the basis of the whole ‘aboriginal problem’ is that they’ve left their traditional way of life – hunter gatherer nomads – and yet haven’t adopted our way of life – workaholic machine slaves.

They have managed to hang onto some territory, vast reaches of it in fact but they don’t/can’t do anything with it. It just lies there for the most part.

Now if we had all that land we’d be rich,  pretty soon.

Our whole society, our whole civilization is built upon land ownership, trading, speculation, etc…

The first thing they did when they planted the flag on Australian soil was start dividing it up amongst themselves – the lords and ladies, the military, those ‘on top’, not the convicts of course.

And still today we’ve got rich families living in Australia who can trace their wealth right back to the original divvying up, the original granting of gratis wealth.

It was ever thus.

It works everywhere all the time. I don’t need to say this do I?

But I will. Just in case.

Your local council ‘releases’ land and ‘zones’ land.  Land speculators and developers buy those releases and either sit on them or ‘develop’ them.

So a residential zone release may be sold to a developer who splits it up into ever smaller blocks as the years go by, with ever smaller access roads as the years go by and ever fewer back lanes and short cut alleys.

And he sells them and makes a fortune.

The council is happy, they’ve got many thousands from him for the original release.

The people are happy, they got work developing the block and now they can buy the houses, tiny, jerry-built, ludicrous things for a nation like this though they are.

And it goes on.

The council now gets rates from each householder.  The more houses, the more rates, the richer the council. The council flourishes, the councillors enjoy playing with more money and enjoy being big fish in a pool slowly getting bigger.

The developer (possibly a councillor himself, or brother, or father or whatever…)  gets ready to do it again…

It goes on and on.

It is how our nation grows. It is the mainspring of our system. Land values, property values.

Now the aboriginal land holders are denied all of that, it seems.

Their land is held under aboriginal title only and it doesn’t allow for them to build.

I’m guessing. I don’t know.

It allows someone to build.  We pay thousands, millions each year for contracts to builders to go out to the aboriginal lands and build and renovate houses.

The same with the roads and water works, electricity sub stations, schools, hospitals, everything on these lands…..

It is all there but none of it is built by the aboriginals and the aboriginals do not build a society the same as we do that is built upon this system.

They do not get their heads together and plan a land release.

They do not take that release and draw up a subdivision plan.

They do not build houses on those subdivided blocks.

They don’t sell those houses.

They don’t rent those houses.

They don’t get richer.

Their nation doesn’t flourish in our way.

There’s no building work going on in their waxing villages and town..

There’s no private enterprise moving in to the burgeoning villages and towns….

There’s nothing happening.

For their land is held as land for hunter gatherers to go hunting and gathering on, I think, and that’s all.

Now we must remember that many, many aboriginals do not want any development on their land.

But we must remember that many aboriginals do want it.

We must remember that the land areas are vast.  They could build hundreds of villages throughout Australia and not effect their ability to wander around in the ways of their forefathers….

So what I’m saying is, they could just start doing it.

Start planning and subdividing and selling and leasing and renting and whatever.  They could start doing what Australia does.

And there’s more:  there’s a need. There’s a market. There’s thousands and thousands of Australians without homes.  Without not only material homes but without a spiritual home in our benighted society.

Many Australians are literally estranged, alienated from their own society, their own peers, their own culture. They find it alien, they find it strange, they find it uncultured.

A home in a village in aboriginal lands under the umbrella of an aboriginal world view may very well turn out to be the haven they’ve longed for all their lives…

Aborigines would probably find it hard to understand all this. What I’m talking about. The need that exists. The thing that could be done. The need for it. The market.

Because the aborigines, as aborigines everywhere, have a home from the minute they are born. They are born to the land and have a right to exist on the land. The land is their home, unalienable.

They never are brought up with the concept drummed into them that they are homeless and penniless and worthless until they’ve educated themselves to the nth degree and worked hard and saved hard (making an employer rich on the way, then making a banker rich)  and bought a home (making a builder and a banker rich).

And that as they get older their ability to service the cost of that home will diminish until finally they’ll need to be stuck into an expensive nursing home there to slowly die while their life savings and the proceeds from the sale of their home are frittered away…

They know nothing of the awful truth of our willingly accepted slavery.  They, I imagine, are incapable of conceiving of the idea that you are ‘homeless’.

Whereas we all embrace that idea and have it as the wellspring of our live’s work.  Driven by that idea we make more and more money to buy better and better, bigger and bigger, homes and save more and more for our latter years when the natural forces of western society self-destroying  greed will eat at our incomes, drastically diminished by unemployment.

The aborigine anywhere in the world is always at home on the land and in the bosom of his family.

They will wander thousands of miles – I’ve often seen it in Australia – sleeping on the ground, walking miles, hitchhiking, living on bush tucker, to visit a family member thousands of miles away.

They don’t do this in some fever of anxiety or miserable state of depression about how low they’ve fallen, how poverty stricken they are, how awful life is for them…

No… they do it happily, beaming to recount the details of the journey they’re on, where they’ve been, where they’re going, who they’re going to see, what they’re going to do…. etc…

Because they are ‘at home’ there on the land.  The soil, the grass, the ground is their bed as a NATURAL thing – not as a last, poor, frightening uncomfortable place at the end of the downward spiral of a failed life, failed career…

No.. just as a natural lovely home. They love (I’m guessing this) the very feel of the ground, the scents of the ground and the grasses etc..  I guess that built on my own experience of enjoying the ground and the bush, because we can all partake of this in some measure and many have done so.  Many, many.

So they wouldn’t naturally think – ‘we should build homes’.  Either for themselves or for anyone else.

But actually they should. For themselves and for others.

There’s not just the others in Australia, either.

The world is suffering  mightily and it is programmed to suffer more as population increases.  Even if percentages of  poverty stricken dispossessed decreases the absolute numbers will still increase, you can bet.

And these suffering millions are the aborigines spiritual brothers… because most of them are aborigines, too.

They would leap at a chance to come to Australia to live on aboriginal land under almost any circumstances whatever….

Live in a village in the middle of an aboriginal holding… hundreds of miles from anywhere… bore water only to drink… intermittent electricity… but in a burgeoning community grasping this new idea of developing land to build homes etc….

They’d leap at it.

How’s that grab you, darling?

We are useless by definition. It is what holds our society together. It is what keeps it all going. It is the hallmark of our slavery. Our uselessness. It is what keeps us divided one from another so’s we can’t join together.  Similarly it is what makes us work against each other…  and so on…..

It works like this:

In the beginning and for millennia the human and pro-human creature was always part of the tribe in every way at all times.

Whatever the tribe was doing everyone was there, the children were there.

The children were always in the workspace and learning the work of the tribe because tribal work was done by the whole tribe with children included.

Hence everyone in the tribe knew they were part of the tribe and part of the work and building and making and gaining and therefore never doubted their inclusion, their belonging, their membership and never felt estranged and never felt in doubt about having useful ability.

Contrast this with our ‘modern’ system.  Now we are NEVER part of the tribe.  The tribe is too big. The tribe has no common actions. The tribe has no common goals. Within the modern nation ‘tribe’ it works like this:

The child is reared in basic isolation in the home where it is useless. At all ages. Useless. Useless for two reasons:

1.  The home is not a workplace, the home is not making/building/gaining anything, going anywhere.  The home is essentially a retreat, a resting place, a feeding and sleeping place, the work, the ‘getting’ and ‘gaining’ and ‘tribal effort’ is elsewhere. Hence there’s nothing to be a useful part of.

To wholly engage in the activity of the home it is logically only necessary to engage wholeheartedly in rest/feeding/sleeping/idling.  Children who do this are told, though, that they are ‘useless’ !

2.  At virtually all ages the child is unable to contribute to the getting of the home – the only real ‘work’ attached to the home. The child has no money, no skills. Hence they cannot buy a home, cannot build a home, cannot pay the rent or mortgage – cannot contribute to making this shelter.

Useless at home.  By definition.

Then the child goes to school to be educated in the ways of the tribe.

Here the child is clearly ‘Useless’ again. The work of the school is teaching. The child knows nothing. The child cannot teach. Hence the child is useless.

Filtered through this lens is the view of the society as a whole. The society views the child as useless.

We all begin our lives as ‘useless’.

This is tacitly agreed throughout our society.  ‘Useless’ and ‘Dispossessed’.

We have  no utility to the  nation, we are, of ourselves, worthless, and we have no rights in the land, we own nothing, we have no right to a place to sleep.

We will spend our lives gaining these things: ‘usefulness’ and ‘a place’.

The most primitive natives in the world have more than this.

That uselessness will persist until ever we can gain paid employment.  You will be essentially useless in the eyes of your society and yourself until  you have finished school and have obtained various documents of education achieved and perhaps various documents of skills obtained AND gotten employed.

It is crystal clear throughout the education process at all levels that the objective is to create a child with the ability to get a ‘good’ job. Because until this goal is achieved the child is essentially ‘useless’.

In the eyes of society, the nation, and in the eyes of the educators and in the eyes of the parents and – inevitably – in the eyes of the child itself.

Useless at home from the very beginning and throughout.

Useless at school from the very beginning and throughout.

Perceived as useless by the nation until slotted into a job.

Contrast this with the traditional/natural way of development of human individuals.

What enormous difference must there be within the individual? How different the emotional basis, the psychology, the directions of the intellect?

To always be an integral part of, to join in, be useful, be included from the very beginning and throughout ones life as against never be part of, never be inherently useful, never be completely safely accepted.

Is it any wonder natural peoples – that fraction of the ‘indigenes’ of the world that still have contact with the old way or an instinctive leaning that way – and our peoples cannot see eye to eye?

It is the difference between a whole and healthy man, solidly grounded in membership of his peoples  and a neurotic slave scrabbling for a living in fear of being thrown overboard.

Everything we think we know seems to be wrong… or that’s how it looks sometimes…   everywhere I look I find evidence to the contrary of accepted opinion, so called ‘fact’.

Now it is fish oil with its ‘omega 3 acids’, supposedly so beneficial, especially to pregnant women and their children.

Now an Adelaide study shows no benefit whatsoever.

But the most interesting thing is perhaps the last four paras:

It follows the release of a US study, published this month, in which scientists unexpectedly found a negative effect of fish oil.

One fatty acid – docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) – was found to promote cancer growth in mice that were prone to bowel diseases.

“We hypothesised that feeding fish oil enriched with DHA to mice would decrease the cancer risk. We actually found the opposite,” said Dr Jenifer Fenton, from Michigan State University.

“Our findings support a growing body of literature implicating harmful effects of high doses of fish oil consumption in relation to certain diseases.”

I will repeat that:

“One fatty acid – docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) – was found to promote cancer growth in mice that were prone to bowel diseases.”

Again and again accepted scientific ‘wisdom’ turns out to be diametrically wrong.

And yet scientists – particularly those ‘climate scientists’ – constantly rail against us (the general public) for not immediately believing everything they say……

The mind boggles…..

Three police ( at least, going on the report in ‘Adelaide Now’ ) and one boy with a couple of kitchen knives – end result? One dead boy.

And the assistant police commissioner has said “They’ve ultimately had no choice”

Three police, heavily (and heavy is the word – have you seen the guns they carry? ) armed, heavily trained ( oh, best training in the world, we’re t0ld), in the ‘best’ police force in the world and they can’t think of any other way to subdue an irate teenager than kill him.

A rope would have tripped him up.  A pole would have tripped him up. A blanket would have smothered him.  A sheet would have blanketed the knives and blinded and smothered him.  A net would have brought him down.  A bright light would have blinded  him.  A loud enough noise would have stopped him, even, or it would stop me.  (Just a bit of rap or heavy metal would turn me around).

How many of these ‘sophisticated’ ploys and toys did the police have to hand, have training in, attempt to obtain and deploy?

The answer is obvious.

After all this money. After all these years of ‘training’.

What can you say?  You can only live in fear of your life….

They chase after you for a traffic offence they’re liable to kill you (or bystanders),  they try to arrest you in a shopping mall and…  that same.

It looks right there on the surface like this shouldn’t happen. Right there, right now, clearly obvious.  And by that – ‘the surface’ – I mean when we instinctively think about the situation and ourselves, ordinary people.

But what have we got here? Ordinary people? No. We’ve got ‘highly trained’ police.  We’ve got people specifically trained for this job. People whose ability is lauded to the heavens whenever..

Considering that makes us rethink it all.  Yes. They’ve been trained.

So are we to understand that the instruction in the police academy is that “… if three officers find themselves chasing a boy armed with knives they have no option but to kill him…”  ?

Is that it? That’s the culmination of their training?  That’s as far as they’ve got? That’s the best they can do?

That’s the training for that situation?

Remember:  And the assistant police commissioner has said “They’ve ultimately had no choice”

Well I could use a well paid job.  I can train them to do better than that…   as I’m sure thousands of us could…..

But meanwhile a boy lies dead and no one, from police commissioner to prime minister effectively gives a damn about it but instead simply mouth transparent untruths such as:

“They’ve ultimately had no choice”

Australia’s progressed a great deal since the days of convict colony, hasn’t it?  More modern, more powerful guns, and precisely the same attitude.

Just heard on the radio about the new higher traffic fines which are claimed to be quite clearly simply a revenue raising exercise.

“No”, says a police spokesman (I think). They’re not.  What he’d like, what the police would like, he says, is that we don’t pay any fines at all but ‘do the right thing’, ‘drive sensibly’ and so on.

This is arrant nonsense I would claim, in the current situation, with things the way they are now.  And how are they now? They do NOT encourage us to drive ‘safely’, nowhere, notime, nohow.

We are ‘encouraged’ to drive AT THE MAXIMUM SPEED.

And ‘encouraged’ is in quotes because generally there’s no talk whatever, there’s simply speed signs posted here and there (everywhere, especially places where you won’t see them) and draconian, exorbitant and useless fines for exceeding the speeds posted on those signs.

The ‘thrust’, the ‘encouragement’, the prevailing ethos, the ‘message’ from government and police and medicine and social services and parents and teachers and all guides of any kind should be to drive at A GIVEN SAFE SPEED.

And THAT speed should be sign posted everywhere.

The SAFE speed.

NOT the MAXIMUM speed.

The SAFE speed could always be perhaps 10km/hr beneath the MAXIMUM.

It should be relatively SAFE to exceed the SAFE speed – isn’t that obvious?? Else it is not a SAFE speed.

Why is a speed SAFE?  Because it has a SAFE margin of error.

IF there is any SAFE margin of error in our Posted Maximum Speeds that safety does NOT apply to the driver – who is NOT SAFE from the attacks of the revenue raising highwaymen masquerading as public-protecting ‘policemen’.

The principal UNSAFETY of the Maximum Speed, the posted speeds, is not that they are really dangerous or unsafe speeds to drive at, it is that YOU are in DANGER of BEING ROBBED.

If you exceed the speed by accident – blindly following the clown in front, letting the attention wander and the foot creep down,  failing to notice the downgrade that increases the speed, failing to see the little notice hidden behind that gravel truck prior to the roadworks, failing to see the uncalibrated speed radar taking a lying record of your speed – or any of the multitude of other things that could quite naturally cause your speed to wander above the posted maximum – you are liable and will be attacked by the ravenous tax police who will attack your purse and your right and freedom to use a motor car.  THAT’S the danger you are in.

You are NOT in danger of crashing your vehicle. (Be sensible – of course you would be in danger of crashing if you wildly exceeded the speed and so on…. but generally, within 10 or 20k/h, where the majority of speed fines are issued).

Maximum allowed speed is supposedly a ‘safe’ speed to travel at and you are required not to exceed that speed as a question of road safety.

BUT THERE IS NO QUESTION OF ROAD SAFETY 90% OF THE TIME!

Exceeding the speed does not compromise road safety.

Exceeding the speed compromises YOUR safety – you become a prey for the tax/freedom police.

Isn’t this obvious? Isn’t it a clear question in logic? Isn’t it very, very simple?  Do I make it a bit lurid? Carry on a bit? Shout a bit?  Well, alright, sorry.

So just think about it yourself, quietly, to yourself, in your own way.

How unsafe is it for you to exceed the posted speed limits, generally?

Now here’s another question. I don’t know the answer. You find it and you tell me.

Count all the traffic fines for excessive speed.  Count all the accidents that have excessive speed as a factor (regardless of whether it is the causing factor, we’ll not worry about trimming them out).

Now what percentage of the excessive speeds resulted in accident?

Interesting answer it would be, I think.

But back to the point.

IF they were fair dink. IF they really wanted to reduce speed WITHOUT raising revenue, without concern for revenue, with only concern for the good of the populace (here’s a laugh – I’ll bet you’ve never thought of it for years – the government and the police are there to protect YOU! To look after YOU. You and me. Us. The people.).

IF that’s what they wanted they would have a ubiquitous, a perennial campaign of information complete with replacement of all existing speed signs, which asked people, harangued people, indoctrinated people, informed people, that the speed signposted and the speed you SHOULD travel at was a SAFE SPEED.

And we would all cruise around at SAFE sign-posted speeds and if someone accidentally exceeded the speed for a while they’d soon bring themselves back into line – and we could feel free to honk at them, etc….

And if someone deliberately exceeded the speed, boring down the highway passing everyone, being a nuisance and a threat, we could feel free to honk and photograph and report that individual.

And we could all feel free of this intolerable tension of balancing the knife edge of ‘permissible speed’ ‘maximum speed’ ‘required speed’ all being the same.

And the police – who are supposed to be ‘policing’ the nation for us, looking for problems that HURT US and fixing them, could then perhaps revert back to doing exactly that.

Instead of what they’re currently doing, more and more with every passing year. Which is actually HURTING US.  They aren’t the cure. They’re the problem!  And this is not how it should be.

We might not need teachers, even.  We all know, if we think about it for a second, that we essentially teach ourselves.  When we make progress in learning it is because we do the work internally.

Teachers don’t teach us. They may appear to do so because they can answer questions, they can make stuff available and so on….  they can assist us to learn.

But if you don’t want to learn you won’t.  And that, lamentably, is what often happens to teachers – they get kids that simply don’t want to learn.

But they teach in an environment that thinks, that acts as though, teachers are what makes education happen.

Teachers and uniforms.

Increase the workload on the teachers, train the teachers better, reward the teachers adequately, dress all the children in identical uniforms: everything will be right.  That’s the paradigm.

Ludicrous in the extreme. A cretinous approach. Betraying a total lack of any kind of understanding and demonstrating that some people, some where, need to be expelled from their positions, be they politicians, bureaucrats, educators or whatever.

And who is going to do that?  Again, as always, it boils down to us, the people. We need to wake up and take up the reins that our rightfully ours to hold.

Here’s some interesting thoughts: Teacherless Education.

Interesting thing, isn’t it? Interesting notion. Interesting subject.

We, of course, are not corrupt. Our society is not corrupt. Our systems are not corrupt. Our people are not corrupt. Our officials are not corrupt.  There’s nothing corrupt here……

Or is there?

We like to think – and I always automatically think when the subject first comes to mind – that ‘corruption’ exists elsewhere, not here.

But it doesn’t  hold up when we think about it.  It doesn’t.

One of the most obvious images that we get to represent the lamentable ‘corruption’ in other countries is that of policemen being paid cash to turn a blind eye to this or that – traffic offences, maybe, licence infringements or such – the kind of thing that the tourist will perhaps see and be told about – minor officials taking bribes before you can get a permit, things like that.

We think this is terrible and proves the point: ‘they’ are corrupt, we are not. And what does ‘corrupt’ mean? It means ‘not pure’, doesn’t it?

It is from a Latin root meaning ‘to destroy’ and there’s a whole swag of definitions you can find but they all mean about the same thing, there’s no quibble about it, it is well understood, ‘corrupted’ means destroyed in some way, which I express as saying ‘having the purity diminished’.

And for an image I imagine things like a sheet of shiny iron with rust flecks on it, beginning to eat through it – I see rust as a ‘corruption’ of the metal.

So what is the purity that has been corrupted? That has been despoiled?

Quick answer: the Law. THE LAW in all its capitalistic majesty.  The last refuge of the scoundrel they said, was ‘patriotism’, but I think an equal argument could be made for ‘THE LAW’.

More evil is committed in the name of the Law by the filthiest and most unworthy who hide behind ‘The Law’ than has been committed in any other way.

Just think of the Inquisition.  And then think of totalitarian regimes anywhere, everywhere in the world. Think of Nazi Germany. Think of Stalin’s Russia.

Everywhere murderers stomping around killing and destroying – always in the name of ‘The Law’.

What I mean by this is that it is demonstrably virtually impossible to taint, to destroy the virtue, to compromise the purity of ‘The Law’ – for it historically has none.

‘The Law’ itself is a meaningless, virtue – less phrase.

The phrase is applied to any code of conduct or list or rules or regulations that any crazy despot and his hordes of eager murderous allies, henchmen, aides, care to apply it to.

They seek to sanctify their actions by saying they are ‘The Law’.

There is no such sanctity.

That should be, at a moment’s reflection, crystal clear.

If anyone cannot see that they should consider these words and this discussion, this thread, this argument, no longer.

Instead they should go back to the beginning and work over it again and again, asking themselves ‘where is the purity, the sanctity, the reason, the right, the truth and the good in the words ‘The Law’ when applied to rules, regulations, procedures, actions, policies, people that murder, torture, oppress, cripple, torment and inflict living hells upon our fellow people?

No. There’s no sanctity, no purity, ipso facto, in ‘The Law’, hence it is not ‘The Law’ that is corrupted.

So what are we looking at?  A corrupt individual? May be. It may well be.  Perhaps this individual is ‘corrupt’ and that is what we mean.  And ‘they’ are ‘corrupt’ and we are not.

But what is the individual’s corruption? Simply, they are not doing their job according to (what we think) the rules of how it should be done.

So he/she’s corrupt. Because they are not doing their job.

Yes. Well might be. But not, I think, how we usually view the word ‘corrupt’.  We don’t call bad workers ‘corrupt’.  We don’t call ourselves ‘corrupt’ when we fail to do the job entirely correctly.

By that standard a murderous villain in a brownshirt torturing and killing on the orders of the Nazi regime and acting entirely within those orders would not be ‘corrupt’.

So that’s wrong. Reprehensible as it may be to not do your job properly and corrupt as you may be as an individual, the word ‘corrupt’ is not used to describe you simply because you don’t do your job properly – ‘properly’ being used to mean, here: ‘as detailed’ or ‘as ordered’.  Which in fact is probably an improper use of the word…  but put that aside for a while.

So if the individual has not been  corrupted and it is not ‘The Law’ that has been corrupted then where is the corruption?

It is in the society. In our social organisation. In our ‘social contract’ with each other.

We have joined together in a society for the mutual good, for the good of us all collectively and for the good of us all individually.

Sometimes we’ve deliberately joined this society, other times we were simply born into it – but then we could say there comes a time, an age, when we choose to remain rather than leave.  So that ultimately we are all supposed to be here by choice and we’ve all made an agreement to live together amicably according to certain rules, regulations, restrictions, codes, practices in the interests of the benefit of us all, collectively and individually.

And it is this agreement, this structure, this edifice that has been corrupted. This is where the corruption lies. This is what is being destroyed. This is what is tarnished. This is what is rotting away.

Now, having established that, let’s get to the nitty gritty and not mince words: it is our love for each other that is being corrupted, tarnished, damaged, eroded.

This ‘social contract’ represents a care and attention directed to each and every one of us by the rest, by consensus, by the organisation the social structure as a whole – and that ‘care and attention’ can best, most easily, be summed up in the word ‘love’.

Which no one would ordinarily like to use. But I will. Why not.

‘Love ye one another as I have loved you’ is supposedly what JC said and we are nominally a Christain country.  We simply shrink from overt demonstrations or professions of mimsy-wimsy-rosy scented ‘love’.

But in fact that is what it is. Our care for each other.

Our society is constructed with care for each other as the essence, the centre of it, the whole mainspring, the whole reason for its existence.

Care for each other.  Love.

And what gets corrupted when a country or a social organisation is corrupted (or even a small group, small organisation – a family perhaps) – is love.  Care. Mutual respect. ‘Help ye one another’.

That is what gets corrupted.

So now consider the ‘corruption’ of those minor officials and traffic policemen in those ‘corrupt’ societies.

Consider your discussion with them regarding the mitigating circumstances, the precise reasons, the extenuating circumstances…..

Consider their position and remuneration in their society – frequently a position required to sort social problems of all kinds with sometimes most dramatic consequences – as is true of any minor official or policeman anyway – and generally poorly remunerated and yet held responsible for the maintenance of a large extended family – which is not the case in our society but is the case most nearly always in these other societies.

Go check it out.

And when you check it out you may well find that every case is considered on its merits and that charges (bribes, fixes) are adjusted to suit the individual in question and that the official does support his extended family in countries with no welfare, no pensions, no benefits whatever, and does not grow rich him/herself.

And you may find that much can be done by almost anyone and most can be done by those that have cultivated good responsible behaviour and have a history of helping people and are known for it.

People are considered as people and every incident is seen as an interaction between people in a people world, the functionary the citizen meets does not pretend to be anything other than a person.

A person who can be bribed, we would say. A rather crude way of putting it but okay. It is the very fact that they are presenting themselves as persons, people, fellow citizens, fellows in this social organisation that makes them approachable in this way, bribable, gives hope of perhaps reaching an accommodation with them.

Our thoughts on ‘corruption’ are all mixed up, I’d submit. We mix up paying off a Thai policeman for a traffic infringement with paying off a Nazi thug demanding monies to protect against persecution.

Very different things.

Generally these ‘corrupt’ people in these ‘other’ countries are as far removed from Nazi thugs as you can imagine.  They don’t come to you and arbitrarily demand and threaten in the same breath.  The populace at large is not afraid of them.

What they are doing, mainly, that we are calling ‘corruption’ is letting people go. Letting people off. Freeing people. As un-Nazi as you can get.

Everywhere in these ‘corrupt’ countries things can be done, freedoms and mitigations can be got via these ‘corrupt’ officials and their interpretations of their jobs, of the rules.

And in this way the love of each other in those countries is kept alive. Is manifest.  As it has to be.

I’m sure that’ll raise a laugh. At first. But reflection on the situation by those who’ve travelled to these places and watched and noted will subdue the laughter and give rise to a changed perception of what’s happening.

And now contemplate our own situation.

Consider the traffic cop.  Who says he’s just upholding the law. And imposes harsh penalties for whatever infringement or supposed infringement – and who you daren’t even speak to in a normal manner with your normal fluidity because he’s likely to take offence at any time and escalate everything.

A cowboy in tinted glasses carrying an enormous gun and riding the highways looking for trouble – bringing the trouble to you.

And how much justice? How much truth? How much reason? How much fairness?  The police and the Courts are Daily (!) perpetrating injustices upon the public.  Not some airy fairy ‘sense – of – fairness’ injustice but hard, solid, factual illegalities. Read about unjust radar gun fines.

Our whole road safety thing is insane.  Everyone encouraged to believe and to travel at the speed limit !! How good is that?  At the limit!!  Nowhere does it ever suggest that the limit is a limit, an end, the final bit, the top, the furthest.

It is just posted. A dumb number. There are no other warnings, nothing more is said.

And the game, the insane game, is that we travel AT THAT SPEED and if we go over it by 1 km/hr that’s an offence!

And traffic police will prosecute (so to speak, on spot fine) immediately and they are not approachable. It is an OFFENCE to approach them as human beings – i.e. in this ‘other country’ way, to try to plead your way out of it and offer money.

They hide immediately and wholly behind ‘The Law’, which, we’ve seen, is an ass.

Now I’m tired. I’ve been writing this for a long time. Not being very good at writing I don’t manage to say things pithily, quickly, succinctly, so I rave on for hours and hours and still don’t get it said – sometimes I even reach the end of what I’m saying only to realise I’ve forgotten what it was I wanted to say!

So I will say little more.

But consider:  Our traffic fines are, it seems, almost certainly totally invalid, illegal. Our speed cameras and radar guns are fallible and, it seems, often, often wrong.

Our drug laws mimic the USA where there’s been a ‘war on drugs’ that everyone now agrees has totally failed and has (though they don’t say this as loudly or as often, though it is still agreed) created a monster that has killed and crippled thousands upon thousands and has distorted the whole face of America for the worse.

And everything is policed and maintained by authorities and police who hide behind a faceless anonymity and an implacable machine-like implementation of penalties and robotic judgements…….

Unless you are really rich… and then you can have any freedom you wish.

Which society is corrupt? Where is the corruption?

I hate this habit of referring to certain people as ‘deniers’.
“Deniers” are units of measure for the linear mass density of fibers. See the Wikipedia entry

Every time I see it I think of nylon stocking, the wartime and Americans ‘overpaid, oversexed and over here’.  And I find myself pronouncing the word as ‘den-yer’, sort of, definitely not as ‘de-nigh-er’ which is what is wanted, I assume.

The word they are looking for is ‘denialist’.  Again, see the Wikipedia entry.

They’re on the radio this morning talking about Julia Gillard and Carbon Tax.  There’s a good article from Terry McCrann in the HeraldSun on 27th.

It is ludicrous. Our Prime Minister’s about-faces, the whole thing in the first place.

A carbon tax will above all suck money out of our pockets and put it in the pockets of those whose pockets are already full of ill gotten gains.

Every large lump of money does exactly this. Compulsory Insurance – the Pension Funds.  Fund managers and rich people with Fund shares all profit more and more, playing with those funds, in effect sharing out the wealth represented by them and the wealth created (interest on investment) by them.

And we just lose.  And when they make ill advised or greedy or plain stupid or criminal investments and lose the money – global financial meltdown – they lose nothing more than a cessation to the rich inflow of money to their own bank accounts – and sometimes they don’t even lose that – but we, the insured, lose everything. Our Pension funds disappear.

That’s the way it works in the world.

And a Carbon Tax will just do that again.

A Carbon Tax cannot do anything to significantly diminish the world’s Carbon Dioxide load.  Not in Australia. Because we represent less than 1% of that load in TOTAL.  And the tax does not even pretend to remove our Carbon Dioxide load entirely.

Two coal fired power stations coming online every week in China. See here. But that is a 2007 report. It is hard to get figures for what’s happening today.  But there is a good Wiki article (well documented) that you can look at for yourself.   Energy Policy In China

But all of that is quite probably – almost certainly – beside the point.  For the point is that it is not proven, far from it, that reducing CO2 emissions will reduce global warming!

So:

. It is impossible for little Australia to reduce world CO2 emissions.

. If world CO2 emissions were reduced there’ll probably be no effect anyway – or certainly not enough to stop or reverse global warming.

. We sell more than 30% of the world’s coal. We could just as well cut our sales and claim to have reduced carbon emissions.  ‘Not fair, not sound, not logical’ the objectors will cry – if Australia doesn’t sell the coal someone else will.  But that’s the point – someone else will produce the emissions we don’t – if we ever could/did reduce our emissions.

The electorate, the politicians keep saying, want something done about global warming.

Yes. That might be true. I certainly do. I’m always very doubtful about anything the politicians say about what ‘the people’ or ‘the electorate’ want – it is usually arrant  nonsense, but this time it well could be right. I want to believe it because I want it.

Yes. I want something done about global warming.

But I’m not stupid enough to think we can stop it, or change it.

I want us to prepare for it!

Like bushfires. Prepare.

That’s such a similar thing.  After all the bushfire tragedies I as a citizen of Australia am still just as ignorant as I ever was about how to conduct myself and attend to my and my family’s safety in the event of a bushfire if we were to be in the bush.

I wouldn’t know how to assess the safety of a home in the bush – or a bush town – a town – doesn’t look much like the bush – a town with streets and roads and pavement – but they got burned to the ground, didn’t they – I wouldn’t know how to assess if it were safe for us to rent or occupy this or that home.

i.e. after all the talk and all the attention and all the dollars still, from an individual family’s perspective, nothing has been done about the bushfire danger in this country.

And global warming is the same.

Spend millions, make these laws, take money out of our pockets, channel it into those of big business, fund managers, etc., etc., the whole coterie of professional bandits – and when bad effects of global warming arrive, as they certainly will, I and my family and all such as we will inevitably suffer…….

Inevitably.

That’s how it goes, eh?

Good little thing on ABC2 tv Wednesday night, 8.30, called ‘We are the people we’ve been waiting for’.

It was about education, schools, education in schools.

I didn’t see it all and I can’t find (yet) how to get another look at it, but I caught some of it and it seems to me what it was saying was very heartening – they seem to have the right idea.

It was from England. Or the UK at least.

Somewhere near the beginning they were saying that education as we know it was created in the 19th Century and its mission was to create workers for the Industrial Revolution.  And its mission has never been readdressed.

They were saying that the purpose is to inculcate a certain amount of knowledge – whether or not it is really needed – and not to create a better person at all.

They were talking about schools in which difficult pupils, often given up on, achieve great things, simply because they are given some control over what they learn and how they learn it.

I want to see it again and get the detail.

I’m fully in agreement with what I have seen so far.

And somewhere else, I think on the radio today, I heard someone boldly stating that education is aimed at producing university graduates in the mistaken belief that is always necessarily a good thing.

And further stating that we’ve long looked down our noses at ‘vocations’ – i.e. tradesmen, trade training, people who leave school early and start learning and practicing a trade.

Completely overlooking, they said, that Medicine itself (universally seen as a bit of an educational and career holy grail, with good cause considering what it does for humanity) is itself a ‘vocation’ – a ‘trade’ – ‘hands-on’ physical job.

Yes, I couldn’t agree more.

There’s numerous aspects open up from consideration of all this.

Two spring to my mind immediately (actually permanent ‘bees in my bonnet’):

1.  Education is sorely amiss, awry in its whole direction and attitude and

2.  Medicine IS truly a ‘tradesman like vocation’ and should be seen and taught and practiced as such.

Considering the second I don’t mean to detract from the worth of a doctor nor diminish respect for them and what they do at all.

But I have seen doctors working for more or less the common wage – still well above the poorest or the mean in their country – but far below the remuneration and benefits of doctors in our society.

I was quite shocked to see it at first. Because I had this lingering reverence, awe, for the profession.

But does it need that reverence, that awe, that almost sacred standing?

No, it doesn’t. It needs de-mystifying and spreading out in a tradesmanlike manner across the population.

We don’t need a sacred arcane priesthood of witchdoctors. We need the fundamentals of doctoring to be widely disseminated, understood, practiced.