To THE AUSTRALIAN          There could hardly be a more brilliant and succinct summary of our national political culture than that provided by F. X. Geraghty (16/2). So how can we induce a return to the practice of principle rather than self-indulgence? How can we halt the ‘inroads of the Nanny State’ by reforming the wishy-washy Liberal Party and frustrating the hidden authoritarianism of the left?

     Only by religion, and that means a major rethinking of our Christian sacred tradition, the basis of our culture and civilization. The voices of the universalists (like Alvin Kuhn and Tom Harpur) and perennialists (like Aldous Huxley and Rene Guenon) need to be listened to. An ‘orthodox’ theology based upon the misinterpretation long ago of ancient initiatory documents needs to be superannuated. It’s a tough call for many devoted Christians, but it’s the only way.
  NJ, Belgrave, Vic

To THE AGE          Some of us see the government’s response to the Uluru Statement from the Heart very differently to the way in which Waleed Aly views it (‘Such a sorry way to behave’, 16/2). We are sceptical that the advisory body that issued it (which was formed by invitation only) was really adequately representative. Secondly, we believe that the ‘formal apology a decade ago’ was also unrepresentative and in fact a piece of gesture politics having no mandate from the Australian people as a whole.

     Thirdly, it is disappointing to learn that the prime minister has announced a new inquiry into constitutional recognition. Public discussion in the last two decades has more than adequately established that any such recognition is against the interests of national unity and fundamentally inequitable. That is why no referendum proposal favouring it will succeed. Finally, ‘Indigenous perspectives’ are already being widely heard and acted upon at all levels of government anyway.
  NJ, Belgrave, Vic

     It all happens in the Socialist Republic of California:

  http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/02/13/gavin-newsom-jeff-sessions-outright-racist-praising-anglo-american-legal-traditions/ 
  http://www.breitbart.com/video/2018/02/13/popovich-live-racist-country/ 

     California Lieutenant Governor and gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom has called Attorney General Jeff Sessions an “outright racist”  for saying that sheriffs are a “critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement.” “Reminder that our Attorney General is an outright racist who wants us all to acknowledge ‘Anglo-American heritage,’” tweeted Newsom. This is a god example of the mania of anti-white racism, which now has become so crazed, so deranged, that any positive comments about traditional culture and people is hit with the magic “racist” ray gun. How can this not lead to a sticky end?

     The issue of unemployment arising from the rise of the machines has concerned us at this site, but it is not the only matter of worry. Advances in AI threaten to make humans as a species redundant:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-12/self-driving-cars-will-cause-riots-street-meet-americas-first-anti-automation 
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/02/13/a-i-expert-artificial-intelligence-will-be-billions-of-times-smarter-than-humans/

“Ian Pearson, a futurist and A.I. expert, recently stated that artificial intelligence will be “billion of times” smarter than humans and people may need to somehow merge with computers to survive. CNBC reports that speaking on a panel organized by CNBC at the World Government Summit in Dubai, Ian Pearson of Futurizon commented on the issues that may arise around artificial intelligence. “The fact is that AI can go further than humans, it could be billions of times smarter than humans at this point,” said Pearson. “So we really do need to make sure that we have some means of keeping up.” Pearson continued, “The way to protect against that is to link that AI to your brain so you have the same IQ… as the computer. I don’t actually think it’s safe, just like Elon Musk… to develop these superhuman computers until we have a direct link to the human brain… and then don’t get way ahead.”

     Surfing through Natural news.com, I followed a common thread of articles about our dystopic future, many hard to believe. To begin, https://www.naturalnews.com/2018-02-13-eco-friendly-company-ingenious-way-to-dispose-of-the-entire-population.html

     A Canadian company which sought to have an “eco-friendly” approach to disposal of human remains, used the process of alkaline hydrolysis to dissolve bodies. The only problem was that the remains ended up in the sewage system, going out to sea. Human bodies today are rather toxic, with lots of heavy metals, so this was not fair on the fish. Bodies that are not liquefied may end up being part of a growing global market for such parts:

     I thought that this one was false news, but apparently not.
  http://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2018/02/13/iran-accuses-west-using-reptiles-lizards-nuclear-spies/ 

“Western spies use lizards and assorted small reptiles to “attract atomic waves” and spy on Iran’s nuclear program, the former chief-of-staff of Iran’s armed forces has claimed. Hassan Firuzabadi, senior military adviser to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, made the revelation as he responded to questions from local media on the recent arrest of environmentalists, Ouest France reports. It is the latest in a long line of claims made in the troubled Middle East that include allegations western forces have also used an eagle, a dolphin, a vulture, and Mossad-inspired shark attacks on various Islamic foes – with varying degrees of success.”

     Sweden claims to have a “feminist” government:
  http://www.government.se/government-policy/a-feminist-government/ going into inclusion overload, but still truly concerning things are happening in that country, and much of Europe, which are a foretaste of social collapse:, with the rule of law going out the window:

“Alicia’s Iraqi parents took her to Sweden when she was four. When she was 13, they took her back to their homeland to marry her 23-year-old cousin. Returning alone to Sweden, Alicia, a Swedish citizen, gave birth to twin boys, who at birth automatically became Swedish citizens. After she cared for them for a period of time, her children were taken away, against her will, to be raised in Iraq by her husband. Last year, he petitioned the Stockholm municipal court for sole custody. On January 9, 2018, the Stockholm Municipal Court ruled in his favor, on the grounds that the twins had lived longer with him than with Alicia, who is now 24.

     The new marvel Black Panther movie, with a largely all-Back cast, has been given a 100 percent rating by critics (now dropping to 99 percent), making it the greatest movie ever produced in human cimematic history – according to the politically correct:
  https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/black_panther_2018/

     After all, if critics of the movie can be depicted as “racist,’” well, how can one lose:
  https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Alt-Right-Trolls-Try-to-Tank-Black-Panther-Score-on-Rotten-Tomatoes-20180202-0003.html 

     Conservative websites are celebrating Trump’s food boxes:

““The Trump administration is proposing to save billions in the coming years by giving low-income families a box of government-picked, nonperishable foods every month instead of food stamps. White House OMB Director Mick Mulvaney on Monday hailed the idea as one that kept up with the modern era, calling it a “Blue Apron-type program” — a nod to the high-end meal kit delivery company that had one of the worst stock debuts in 2017 and has struggled to hold onto customers. Mulvaney said the administration’s plan would not only save the government money, but also provide people with more nutritious food than they have now. …”
http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2018/02/13/trumps-food-boxes/

     I am not one to apply to the state of Israel a higher standard for the evaluation of actions that I would to any other nation. Further, I believe that Israel has a right to exist, and I reject the trendy Leftist notion that the Palestinian are guilt-free victims; Middle East politics is complicated and cannot be reduced to the simplistic game played by the Left in our universities. With a new term almost here, posters went up at my old university, where I make use of the library, about the Palestinian girl, Ahed Tamimi, who has been arrested, after an early hour raid at her home, for slapping an Israeli soldier after her 15 year old cousin was shot in the head:
  https://tribune.com.pk/story/1588751/3-brave-palestinian-teenager-ahed-tamimi-known-confronting-israeli-soldiers-arrested/
  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/ahed-tamimi-palestinian-girl-charged-assault-punching-slapping-israel-soldier-video-a8137096.html 

     But, this video shows Tamimi hitting and kicking Israel soldiers on another occasion, with the men not responding even after having their faces slapped:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxvG4t4SwoI 
  https://legalinsurrection.com/2017/12/ahed-tamimi-case-is-about-child-exploitation-by-anti-israel-activists/

To THE AGE          Campaigns against ‘the far right’ need to be undertaken with caution (‘White pride blurs thin blue line’, 12/2). The term itself assumes wrongly that all political positions espoused by activists can be accurately plotted on a straight line. In reality, it is not as simple as that. The regimes of Hitler, Stalin and Mao had several very unpleasant features in common.

     The wielding of an armoury of pejorative terms (‘white supremacists’, ‘neo-Nazi’, ‘racist extremists’ and so on) is too often used unfairly against decent and honourable conservatives of Caucasian ancestry legitimately seeking to protect their peoples, religion, history and cultures in unsympathetic or hostile environments.  There is something, too, of the turncoat in people like Christian Picciolini which smells a bit.
NJ, Belgrave, Vic

To THE AUSTRALIAN          On the matter of Shakespeare’s Hamlet it seems from Barry Gillard’s review of Rhodri Lewis’s Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (‘The madness of knowing thyself’, 10-11/2) that Lewis, far from having broken free of the ‘many confines, wards and dungeons’ of the ‘solely scholarly or academic’, has become trapped there. A few simple corrections are in order. It is untrue that in Elsinore ‘no distinct framework for genuine virtue is apparent.’ We have the integrity of Hamlet himself, shown repeatedly in his behaviour, though spoiled by his psychological illness (which he labels as being ‘passion’s slave’). We also have the sterling fidelity of Horatio, the loyalty of the common soldiers and the memory of the excellent kingship of Hamlet’s father.

     Secondly, we cannot ‘cease to view the play as a tragedy based around a young man’s inability to make decisions’ without ignoring central segments of the drama. Shakespeare emphasized the delay by contrasting Hamlet’s soliloquy in Act Two with his later one in Act Four. Ernest Jones has provided the best and most comprehensive case study of the character, though his ‘solution’ of Freud’s dubious ‘Oedipus complex’ need not be accepted. Shakespeare was not ‘intolerant of late 16th century humanist conventions’; in his work as a whole he honours both kinds of knowledge of oneself mentioned by Gillard. In Hamlet he wrote with admirable understanding and compassion of a young man’s nervous breakdown, clearly precipitated by his mother’s infidelity. That, of course, is the ‘tragic flaw’ of this particular play.
  NJ, Belgrave, Vic

     It is not too difficult to come up with a list of the many rights which past Australians enjoyed, but which have been taken away from us by the political class to serve their New World Order masters. Everyone has their personal  list, but at the top must be the destruction of the Federal system by the High Court of Australia, and the centralisation of power in Canberra. This drive for centralism began immediately with the High Court’s opening, and has continued to the present day, making the states completely dependent upon Canberra. Thus, Feds were easily able to force all states into the 1996 gun grab by using the financial threat. However, the Founding Fathers never intended for the states to be politically gutted in this way. As one of the leading law papers has said about this:

“Our contention in this paper will be that Australia’s High Court, in deciding federal distribution of powers cases over the last century, culminating in the recent Work Choices case, has created an end product that looks not unlike one of Herbert’s misleading cases, although of course the High Court’s intentions have been something other than simply the reader’s amusement. Such a contention, we readily acknowledge, will come as no surprise to those familiar with the constitutional jurisprudence of the superior courts of other countries. The Australian High Court has been by no means unique in its ability, over time, to interpret the Constitution in a manner widely at variance with the intentions and expectations of its founders.

     When Trump is good, he is very, very good, but when he is bad, he is wicked. However, on the question of vaccination freedom, he has been a leader, standing up against the power of Big Pharma:
  http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/president-trump-fighting-the-morlocks-one-battle-at-a-time_02122018

“The Conscience and Religious Freedom Division has been established to restore federal enforcement of our nation’s laws that protect the fundamental and unalienable rights of conscience and religious freedom. OCR is the law enforcement agency within HHS that enforces federal laws protecting civil rights and conscience in health and human services, and the security and privacy of people’s health information. The creation of the new division will provide HHS with the focus it needs to more vigorously and effectively enforce existing laws protecting the rights of conscience and religious freedom, the first freedom protected in the Bill of Rights.”
https://www.hhs.gov/conscience

     Perhaps readers, who like me, are critics of “our” decadent, decaying universities, may find this item amusing: a US teacher, in a US college, was sacked over a dispute with a student about whether Australia is a country:
  https://www.rt.com/news/418447-university-lecturer-australia-not-country/

“Southern New Hampshire University has fired a lecturer who insisted that Australia was a continent – but not a country – and took some time to conduct “independent research” into the issue before reviewing a student’s paper. Ashley Arnold, 27, who is studying toward an online sociology degree at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), was “shocked” to learn she had failed an assignment, part of which required students to compare social norms between the United States and any other country – in her case Australia. Arnold was downgraded because her professor believed “Australia is a continent; not a country.”

To THE AGE          Bill Shorten’s announcement (‘Labor supports Indigenous “Voice to Parliament”’, 13/2) that, if elected to power, the ALP will legislate to create such an entity ‘as a first step’, involves an irresponsible and dangerous campaign for the constitutional division of our nation. We should remember the 2002 warning of former minister for Aboriginal affairs, Peter Howson, that such a separatist agenda is ‘counterproductive to achieving genuine reconciliation and ‘has produced much misery among remote Aboriginal communities.’

     He also pointed out that ‘the reconciliation some presently pursue has become a weapon to wield against the traditional concept of Australia.’ Shorten’s proposal is not in our national interests and appears to be a sneaky way of getting around public resistance which he defames as ‘scare campaigns’. History shows (France in 1789, Russia in 1917) that foolish idealism leads to disaster.
  NJ, Belgrave, Vic

     So, the majority of Millennials do not know how to boil a light bulb or change an egg…wait, senile me, I got that wrong, change a light bulb and boil an egg:
  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4338132/Milennials-don-t-know-change-light-bulb.html

     The British survey showed that most, quite capable in the use of IT equipment, failed at practical domestic tasks. The survey did not venture outside of the comfortable domestic sphere, but if one considered basic survival skills previous surveys indicate that Millennials lack these skills too:
  http://www.foxnews.com/great-outdoors/2017/01/16/poll-millennials-lack-basic-survival-skills.html 

     I do not know how authoritative this is because I could not find any other source reference, but Melania Trump allegedly refused to enter the White House until it had been purified:

“I’m not going to go into that White House unless it has been completely exorcised,” she is said to told Pastor Begley. “They cleansed the White House. They had people in there anointing it with oil and praying everywhere, because apparently during the eight years when Obama was there, and maybe even some of the presidents before him, there were all kinds of idol gods and images and all kinds of artifacts in there that were demonic, even some of the stuff from the Clinton era.”
https://alt-right-news.blogspot.com.au/2018/02/melania-demanded-white-house-be.html 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51ic9dnC1_I 

     Here, for the scientifically minded is the abstract to a study that showed evidence of the protective effects of spices on DNA:

“Spices are rich sources of antioxidants due to the presence of phenols and flavonoids. In this study, the DNA protecting activity and inhibition of nicotine-induced cancer cell migration of 9 spices were analysed. Murine fibroblasts (3T3-L1) and human breast cancer (MCF-7) cells were pre-treated with spice extracts and then exposed to H2O2 and nicotine. The comet assay was used to analyse the DNA damage. Among the 9 spices, ginger, at 50 μg/ml protected against 68% of DNA damage in 3T3-L1 cells. Caraway, cumin and fennel showed statistically significant (p < 0.05) DNA protecting activity. Treatment of MCF-7 cells with nicotine induced cell migration, whereas pre-treatment with spices reduced this migration. Pepper, long pepper and ginger exhibited a high rate of inhibition of cell migration. The results of this study prove that spices protect DNA and inhibit cancer cell migration.”

To THE AUSTRALIAN          Ian Buruma treads warily (‘Censorship risks moralistic kitsch’, 12/2) through the minefield of discussion of when, if ever, and how the community should censor works of art perceived as being tainted by immorality. His best observation is that ‘to judge the moral component of artistic expression, we must look not at the person who made it but at the work itself.’ Even then, however, it can be helpful to know something of the artist’s character and history.

     Balthus painted some of the finest paintings of last century, but not all will agree that ‘there is nothing that suggests moral depravity or abuse’ in some of his paintings of very young girls. By contrast, there is nothing unclean in Andrew Wyeth’s portraits of Siri Erickson; and we know how honourably he engaged in going about that work. Where Buruma slips badly is in his contrasting of the propaganda films of Eisenstein and Riefenstahl. Both have considerable artistic quality, but he succumbs to political correctness in allowing this only to the communist.
  NJ, Belgrave, Vic