[the three political stances] left, right and them

Brussels

There is an issue looming over this way and that is between the left wing and centre-right bloggers [the majority of the political bloggers in the blogosphere].

By and large, if you skip round the political blogs, the centre-right gets stuck into the left and puts difficult questions [because these are easier to find] and scorns when the left avoids them and calls for everyone to be nice to one another instead.

The centre-right interprets this to mean that the left has no answers for their curly questions because their philosophy doesn’t stand the light of day and the left “know” in their hearts that they are correct in their ideals. So they say nothing and think their ideals are slowly being realized, if only they keep up the struggle.

Two left wingers recently suggested that one should be careful flinging around epithets – presumably they meant the epithet of socialist. The problem with epithets was alluded to in the post on the Crusades which was more a political than a religious post, i.e. that groups and individuals adopt a label to project an image and align themselves with a certain desirable [in most people’s minds] stance, when in fact their true stance is anything but benign.

The Democratic Republic of Germany was the example I used.

There are three major thrusts in political life but most people see only two and that’s why the terms left wing/right wing are so convenient and comfortable to use.

Almost no one identifies the third discrete political thrust, which I label Them, for want of a better term. Them includes what is generally accepted as communists, extreme nationalists [in terms of their methods], global socialists, anarchists, Gore-nutters, monopolists [aligned anyway with the State – see the Morgan Fed], higher degree Masons and a rag tag of other extreme views which wish to see the complete transformation of society resembling 1984.

The greatest problem for those who can only see left wing/right wing is that Them cut across all political spectra. The [alleged] worst capital monopolists, e.g. Goldman Sachs, are in the same trough as the Trotskyites and Maoists. Skargill and Mandelson are of the same ilk, all attached to a world view which is anything but benign.

They suck in the left through its do-gooder, nicy-nicy idealism where everyone loves everyone else and everything’s in the great melting pot and they cynically play on that. The result is the way all socialist movements which have ever gained a foothold have gone – it always ends up the same way:

# inflation, followed by great unemployment;

# massive and crushing debt, such as Maggie inherited from the Wilson era and passed on to Blair who made it many times worse again;

# vast bureaucracy, most administering the administrators or chasing people up for things which it was entirely unnecessary for the State to involve itself in in the first place;

# nannyism – the view that people cannot make do or get on in life unguided or without social engineering;

# social engineering, multiculturalism, relativism, moral equivalence, the denial of moral absolutes, political correctness and its stablemate – revisionism, the proliferation of human degradation – drugs, child sex etc., breakdown of the family unit;

# the move to the police state, ID cards, data bases, CCTV, Health and Safety procrusteanism, the hemming in of people into their own homes and the need for passes to go anywhere or find work, all in the name of making us happier and safer;

# procrusteanism, forcing all into impossible equality and yet demanding of each according to his/her expertise for no difference in remuneration;

# the elimination of incentive to try, to set up a new business, to try a new idea and the slow blanketing of the nation, the snuffing out of life and joy, in a malaise of weariness and resignation to the inevitable.

When Them work on the ambitious, the young capitalist trying to make good in a “free market”, we get the Billionnaire Boys Club, the Nick Leesons, the Royal Scottish, the greed, the belief that one is above the riff-raff stuck in their employee status. These people are the movers and shakers, so Them lead them to believe, playing on vanity, indifferent to others’ suffering, narrowly selfish and adoring, nay, fixated on that comfort that only riches can bring, free of any inevitable social consequences [or so they believe].

Common Purpose is semi-governmental and yet it plays on this Elite motif, the feeling that one is above the common herd who are expendable via warfare or even swine flu. The Elite don’t travel on public transport by and large, they don’t mix with the common herd, they become immune from humanitarian considerations although they believe they are the true humanitarians, re-ordering society for the better – the yahoos ruled by the wise, the adepts, of which they are part.

So when Cherie says that Gordon Brown is right wing, she doesn’t see what is really happening. Them work on the left and right equally. Brown is one of Them, a believer in The Great Work of Ages, the grand plan, the re-ordering of society in line with global considerations. Cherie is correct in this respect - he is not of the movement she thought they were all part of - idealistically desiring to raise the living standards of the poor, wanting to reorder society so that everyone is equal and has a fair chance – the impossible dream.

The cynical Them know it is a dream for two reasons:

# they’d never allow it to come about – they never have allowed it throughout history, with the stakes so high;

# it is the way they can get their hooks into the agenda, through the portal of leftish people’s essential niceness and failure to understand the politcal process in all its nastiness.

Any attack on Them can be easily deflected by appealing to the do-gooder leftist’s natural disinclination for the cold-hearted, aggressive approach and by appealing to the conservative's rationalist view on most issues.

The reason society is in such trouble is the simple fact that it cannot recognize the presence, the existence of Them, its true enemy though the stateless, non-party political Sutherlands and Mandelsons are right before their eyes, the simple fact that people instantly label any attempt to expose Them as conspiracy theory without ever delving into the matter, the simple fact that Them keep a super-low profile and operate within Round Tables and Inner Circles, far away from the milling hordes, making it triply impossible to get people to see what is happening.

Here is The Club in operation:



All very chummy, great entertainment but precious little to do with undoing the damage done to the nation.

Them laugh when a leftist suggests that capitalism caused the current woes or when the free enterprise advocate blames socialism for Britain’s current ills. Though the latter is undoubtedly true and the greed of the monopolist capitalists knows no bounds, both left and right miss the point that it is the machinations of Them which is behind all major social upheavals – these monopolist capitalists are part of Them. They are not the average free-marketeer.

For those who doubt the presence and the conniving of Them, I ask the doubter to explain Colonel House. It's a good starting point. Read not only the bowdlerized and sanitized potted biography but the documentation of the time, including congressional papers and there you see Them in all their arrogant ignominy.

The hope for this part of the world is that these people are so dog-eat-dog that should Irish Lisbon 2 be passed and Cameron gets in, he will be forced by pressure into a position of holding an EU Referendum and the EU will be severely damaged. With the other bloodsucking states in the EU feeding off Germany, France and Britain, with Britain essentially gone over to the U.S., Germany and France will be at each other’s throats and the whole Sauronesque Mordor might just tumble to the ground.

It’s a small hope, a tiny flicker and not yet forlorn.

Here's a little video on some of the ways Them operates:


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[preferential voting] consider it, britain

This blog did run a post, in passing, on the last Australian election result, admittedly not hugely interesting to most readers and as I spoke yesterday, in conversation, of the system of Preferential Voting used downunder, it became apparent that Brits don't really understand how it operates.

The Brits know about First Past the Post and they are aware of Proportional Representation but this Preferential Voting seems a mystery.

The main problem with First Past the Post is that it encourages minority governments and makes small parties unimportant in the political landscape. So though the BNP, LPUK and UKIP may poll well, they are not going to take the seat, except in rare circumstances and therefore their only value is as a pressure group.

Preferential works as follows.

I've invented a card for a mythical constituency called Griddlesham and let's say that our voter doesn't like the major parties, voted them down the list and also placed the Monster Loonies last because they're too frivolous for our voter's tastes. I've left out the British smaller parties for the sake of the exercise _ I'm not the BBC, remember. Let's also not quibble over the names of the parties, whether they'd be on the card in reality or whether the names would be done that way or not.

So our man filled in his slip this way:

Right, so after the first round of votes have been counted, according to 1st preferences, the results are as follows:

Airley, W.M. ................8, 432
Barnes, G.S. .............. 18, 422
Farrier, N.L. ................2, 003
Long, G.K. .......................878
Roland, B.R. ........................2
Tennant, L.B. ..............3, 401
Vincent, T.L. ............. 19, 456
Informal ..........................682

TOTAL........................53, 276

Labour leads and now the lowest scoring candidate is dropped off the list and the papers of the 2 people who voted for the Loonies are now looked at for their 2nd preferences, which turned out to be for the Pensioners and the Free Parking, so the actual voting slips are placed on the piles of those parties' candidates, as if they were a 1st preference ... and the 2nd round begins.

After this, Free Parking is eliminated and all votes in the Free Parking candidate's pile are scrutinized for 2nd preferences and so it goes through the 3rd and subsequent rounds until, let's say, there are 3 candidates left:

Airley, W.M. ................8, 432
Barnes, G.S. ............... 21, 912
Vincent, T.L. ............. 22, 250
Informal ..........................682

Labour leads but now the LibDem will be eliminated and his preferences distributed. This is where it gets interesting. If the Lib Dems have a strong tradition of directing their preferences, then it will go the way the party wants but not all parties can control their supporters that much. Pundits in this hypothetical say that the Lib Dems will probably 65% direct preferences the Tories' way and 35% to Labour.

It happens that way and the final result is:

Barnes, G.S. ...............27, 393
Vincent, T.L. ............. 25, 201
Informal ..........................682

This was how the PM, John Howard lost his seat in the last Australian Federal Election. He was leading the vote but was pipped on preferences.

The good thing about Preferential is that the wishes of the smaller parties count for far more than in First Past the Post in that they have a direct bearing on the result and therefore need to be seriously considered in the run up to the election.

Not as fair as in Proportional Representation but fair to a goodish extent plus the results are usually known the same night plus it still returns one member per constituency, maintaining more directly representative government, as far as the electoral system goes at least.

The downside is its apparent complexity but it is not as complex in practice as it sounds and the result is usually known in each constituency within 4 to 12 hours. Some point to the unfairness - that if Howard had the most votes, he should have won. Against that, he did not have a majority - 50% plus 1 vote, whereas, under Preferential, those who did not vote for him on the first preference have their other preferences considered, once their candidate is eliminated.

So when the victor ends up with 50% plus 1, it is a majority of people who want him [or her].
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[sadness] music from the other side

Reading people's comments on these youtubes, ranging from "relaxing" to "mysterious" - in order to understand the music and the use of their version of the Gregorian chant, one needs to know that Era stemmed from Enigma [one track which will be posted in a few days] and Sadeness Pt 1 makes it clear it's about despair, desolation, lost souls, people turning their backs on the Voice [a motif running through their music], walking about alone inside and condemned to fill the void with sex and whatever else comes to hand.

That comes out more clearly in Sadeness than in this track, which is quite nice in its own way and shows that there can be a stark beauty to melancholy.

Music from the other side.
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[artificial islands] how would you design them

Crooked Brains has an interesting post on artificial islands. He mentions The Pearl-Qatar in Doha, The Palm Islands off Dubai and Durrat Al Bahrain, among others.

Given that you could raise the money and putting certain criteria in place in that it is owned by you but under the auspices of some national government which decrees that it is not to be used for commercial purposes, that the island must accommodate twenty families and that there is natural fresh water from a spring, trees, some soil, it is a warm temperate climate and there are no immediate hazards, either natural or man-related, then I have some questions.

If you could choose between five such islands on offer form the government, all different in aspect but at the same price:

1. What would you look for as natural features of the island?
2. How would you build the infrastructure and in which order?
3. How would you stock it?
4. What defence provisions would you make?
5. What would be the social structure and how would you ensure that?
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[quite good] this one

[contrasting styles] u.s. and russian air forces

There are posts outside my 'remit' and this is one of them, so I come to learn, not to lecture. If I'm in error, please just set me straight. I have to admit I was in error over the f22 post but the result was a nice learning curve and certain things came out as a result.

Basically, I confused the British situation where the government has consistently underfunded and underequipped the armed forces with the American situation, where the issue is defense contracts and less than 100% technical quality, e.g. the dragon skins.

Anyway, Bob B pointed me in the direction of this youtube below, which compared the F22 with the Russian SU47. The first thing which worried me were the words "a scientific analysis" becasue people who usually trot that expression out are either amateurs or people with a barrow to push who think the word "scientific" is an automatic trump card, which of course is rubbish.

However, the main arguments were that the F22 had four main things going for it - stealth, service altitude, internal weapons capability and supercruise, whereas the SU47 had speed, manoeuvrability [forward pointing wings], range and wing loading.

The arguments then started in the comments section and once we got past the gung-ho stupidity such as, "We Americans will kick your a--e every time, Russkie," and the retort that, "You're talking through your a--e - a good Russian will beat a good American every time for these reasons ... yada, yada" - once we were past that, we got down to the real comparison.

The F22 would not be detected and could fire from 25 miles away, negating any need for manoeuvrability, air to air dogfighting or pilot skill. The sophisiticated technology, as long as it worked and wasn't disabled, can detect and disable ahead of time. That's the F22 line.



The Russian line and one my mate here put forward was that where the Americans favour the all-in-one fighter that can do everything you could think up, the Russians tend to the design of single purpose craft and would not go into this theatre alone - there'd be some Ilyushins sitting back out of the firing line and they'd be doing all the radar and stealth work required. They'd advise the SU47 when to fire and where and the Russian "hive mentality" would come into play. That's the SU47 line.

I'd imagine the same argument would apply to the F15 and Mig 29 or whatever number is a better comparison. There was also a good argument made that the SU47 is not in production anyway and this is in line with the "Concorde" sitting, rusting outside Kazan, Russia and a young man once telling me - our plane is technically superior to the Concorde. True, it doesn't fly but it is technically superior.

My mate says the question is not how the top pilots would fare but how the average pilot would fare. Russians tend to "seat of the pants" flying, with everything manual and therefore non-controlled turning circles etc., whereas the American average pilot is supported by technology and therefore should prevail. An interesting head-to-head.

This tendency of the west and Russia can be seen in cameras, where the west tends to fully automatic, with everything which opens and shuts, whereas the Russian is still using manual aperture and shutter by preference. I'm not Russian but my blog runs this way - the template is a case in point. Still in classic, I do my own html and produce the effect I want, rather than take it off the shelf as a widget.

[crusades] wolves in doves’ clothing

There are a few lines in that much-misinterpreted, misused [by devotees] and maligned [by detractors] document, that chronicle of tales of yesteryear gathered together in two volumes and called the Bible, which concerns whom one can trust.

In the 7th chapter of Matthew, in the course of a lecture given [as far as any historical source can determine] on a hill on the north end of the Sea of Galilee, near Capernaum, a fine place to address a gathering I should have thought – in the course of that lecture, the following words were uttered by the Nazarene carpenter’s son:

16: Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
17: Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.
18: A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.
19: Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
20: Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

What often escapes both the maniacally abusive fanatic and the most blindly sceptical atheist is that there is a lot of good common sense in there, as witnessed in what we’ve just read.

It’s a good rule of thumb which one does not need to be religious to accept and it does explain an awful lot of what’s happened in the world in the millennia preceding that lecture and subsequently.

In the best [or worst] Cromwellian manner, let me beseech thee, “Think it possible you may be mistaken,” those who attribute the Crusades and the Inquisitions to any form of Christianity. For a summary of the precepts of that faith, see Matthew chapters 5-7.

Now compare those to the actions against “wrong thinking people” and dissidents taken in the name of the faith but which actions more closely resemble those of, say, a Walsingham or an Ayatolla. In simple English, this faith does not allow of such actions and it is a slur on all the good people who have read those words and done what they could to keep their nose clean and their powder dry [seeing as we’re mixing metaphors this morning] to attribute subsequent actions of the warring states to Christianity.

Clearly, a number of things went wrong along the way, not least being human nature, which is, in the first place, all that the scripture of this faith tried to address and the reason, if one accepts the presence of the Logos on earth at that time [not necessary in order to support this argument] why this loose collection of precepts for living were delivered to a fractious and malcontented people.

Those precepts, if followed to their logical conclusion by voluntary acceptance and not imposition, can only lead to a natural regulation of society, something which, if you cast your eye over the western world in 2009, is just not happening.

The Crusades

There is much literature [a lot of it on the web too] which supports the contention that it was in no way a “Christian” crusade which saw troops slaughter all. A monk named Fulcher, who was supposedly on the First Crusade, described it thus:

Fulcher claimed that once the Crusaders had managed to get over the walls of Jerusalem, the Muslim defenders there ran away. Fulcher claimed that the Crusaders cut down anybody they could and that the streets of Jerusalem were ankle deep in blood. The rest of the Crusaders got into the city when the gates were opened.

The slaughter continued and the Crusaders killed whomever they wished. Those Muslims who had their lives spared, had to go round and collect the bodies before dumping them outside of the city because they stank so much. The Muslims claimed afterwards that 70,000 people were killed and that the Crusaders took whatever treasure they could from the Dome of the Rock.

Those antipathetic to the Christian faith point to this as one of the crowning arguments against it but anyone who is a Christian in the sense of having committed and received, as promised [a very few in terms of total numbers] know full well that the Crusades were anything but Christian, for the reasons given in the sermon on the mount.

Any student of history knows what happened when Constantine adopted the faith as a useful tool for his plans at that time [that link just now is anything but Christian and yet it holds water] and the Romanization of Christendom then led to other “Christian States”, an oxymoron if ever there was one and inevitably to bloodshed and oppression, not least of women [yes, even that].

Once again, to return to the original document, there is no exhortation in those lines to follow the direction "Christendom" did follow, reaching its lowest point perhaps around the time of Chaucer and in the time of the Borgias although their were many other questionable times along the way as well.

Whether intentional or unintentional, Byron’s view, from Don Juan [1819-24] that:

Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded
That all the apostles would have done as they did

… contains both a fallacy and a truth. The fallacy is that “Christians” did the burning. No Christian, in the sense of an accepter of the Logos, would ever burn another. The gospels don’t allow it and the gospels are the central tenets of the faith. We’ll come to who did do the burning later.

Thomas Paine, in The Age of Reason, Pt 1 [1794], wrote:

Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child cannot be a true system.

By and large he’s right though a child may be shocked by many things, real or imaginary. The point is though, that the precepts of this faith do not allow of such a thing – for example the “turn the other cheek” and the admonition not to seek revenge because “revenge is mine, saith the Lord”.

Now if you stop for one minute and think that last one through, imagine that we no longer seek revenge because we can control the impulse. The person who uttered those words was well aware of the over-riding spell which grips a person once revenge is on his/her mind. A modern allegory is the revenge of Anakin Skywalker when he slaughtered a whole village and thus weakened, he went on to much worse things, having progressively fallen under the influence of the Emperor.

If you give way to your base instincts, then you tend to the bestial and eventually become worse, as we have destructive instincts the other members of the animal world don’t.

So that little system, the Christian precepts, are a damn good platform on which to base a society.

Back to the Crusades

Who then did all the slaughter, the inquisitions, the inhumanity, man on man? Daniel Defoe wrote, in The True Born Englishman [1701]:

Wherever G-d erects a house of prayer,
The Devil always builds a chapel there;
And ’twill be found, upon examination,
The latter has the larger congregation.

The twisted version of the faith relied on one thing in particular – no one getting to see the original script and that was achieved by having the Bible chained to the pulpit and written in Latin, the learning of which was denied to the poor and downtrodden in mediaeval and earlier times.

Hence a golden opportunity for the worst excesses, in the name of Christianity.

I ask you to pause once more and be honest. A lie on this scale is no less believable than the giant lie of the Enlightenment, which scholars now know to have been a recipe for the breakdown of society – this point has been made by commenters on at this blog a few times.

It is no less believable than the lie of the Ayatollahs and Mullahs that interprets jihad as a call to slaughter. Let’s not get into that whole religion at this point.

Look – if I put on chainmail in 1097, sharpen my sword to a razor edge and with a gleam in my eye march off to the Holy Land to slaughter infidels, on the strength of the Bishops and Barons [the Christian Druids] telling me I’m doing it for Christ, a fact unable to be attested, due to lack of access to the scripture which supposedly exhorted that, if I work myself up into a fervour, a holy hysteria at their beconing, then what else am I to think and while I stand ankle deep in blood and look down on the deed I’ve just done, if some sort of remorse and feeling that not all is ship shape and Bristol fashion here [love mixing those metaphors] grips me, I sure as hell am not going to complain about it as I’ll be the one lying in the street slaughtered or something even worse in the hands of the fiends at the top.

So, does putting a white robe with a red cross over my chainmail, as I grasp the soon-to-be-bloodied sword convert me to a Christian?

As a Christian, if I get into dark clothing, with balaclava, kidnap an ageing aid worker in Iraq, read him a few lines of the Koran on film, cut his throat and say, “G-d is Great,” does this make me a Muslim terrorist?

Is Voltaire, philosopher in the age of reason, whose influence has been well claimed to have had immense effect on the doings of the Jacobins, on his repution as an Enlightened man - is he actually an enlightened advocate for the peace and happiness of mankind or is he something altogether different?

Just because you dress up in the garb of the enemy and sprout your rhetoric in a semi-biblical manner, does that make you a godly man?

Just because you can fool your party members that you are actually right-wing in your policies, party members believing this because true Labour people would never have wrecked the society as Brown has, does that make you right wing or are you, in reality, a Mandelson type international socialist?

Just because you have convinced the west that the bankers [who have always colluded by the way, Tiberius – read Jackson] who have brought society to its knees, are a prime example of the evils of capitalism when, in fact, there is no free market [the true sign of capitalism in its best form] in operation anywhere in the west [read Tim Worstall and others], then does that make you, Mr. Federal Reserve, capitalists or are you, in fact, globalists of the worst ilk, globalism and its desire for a one world state being socialism in its most extreme form?

Was the Democratic Republic of Germany democratic?

Can people see that the labels claimed by people who perpetrate atoricities and human misery are so vague and inappropriately assumed that entirely different labels might be more fitting?
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[logo time] more governmental squandering

They did it with the 2012 dog's breakfast of a logo for the games, they did it all over the governmental world. Now they're doing it in Australia:

Melbourne, the brand, has been given a $240,000 facelift and the result is a big M. Lord Mayor Robert Doyle has unveiled a new logo for the city, which will replace the previous M and leaf symbol introduced in the early 1990s.

$240 000 for what? On that rubbish? It looks appalling, has government squandering written all over it and does nothing for the city. Plee-ease - outsource it to a primary school next time.
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[wordless wednesday] captions please

[#silly week] july 27th - now official

Right, it's now official!

Man in a Shed's #Silly Week is from:

July 27th to ... er ... the end of the week probably

Bloggers all, support this worthy cause and I'll ask Bloghounds too if they would get behind the scheme.

Details here.