Academia never ceases to amaze me. If it is not producing absurd politically correct material, then it delights in producing debunkings of the “life world” of common sense reality. This applies to physics right through to biology and neuroscience. There, the research strategy has been to deny the existence and/or causal powers of the mind, and to reduce the mind to the brain, and eliminate the mind. The less than hidden agenda is to get rid of the soul, so this is all a long argument against Christianity. Readers almost certainly have not heard of the attack by neuroscience on the idea of human freewill, so here is a good summary of what they are up to:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will

“It is quite likely that a large range of cognitive operations are necessary to freely press a button. Research at least suggests that our conscious self does not initiate all behavior. Instead, the conscious self is somehow alerted to a given behavior that the rest of the brain and body are already planning and performing. These findings do not forbid conscious experience from playing some moderating role, although it is also possible that some form of unconscious process is what is causing modification in our behavioral response. Unconscious processes may play a larger role in behavior than previously thought.

     Here is one of the latest finds in human evolution:
  https://www.amren.com/news/2018/01/jawbone-fossil-found-israeli-cave-resets-clock-modern-human-evolution/  
  https://www.timesofisrael.com/jawbone-fossil-found-in-israeli-cave-resets-clock-for-modern-human-evolution/ 

“A jawbone found in a cave in Israel’s Mount Carmel region has reset the clock on human evolution. The fossil, the earliest known record of Homo sapiens outside of Africa, was discovered in 2002 during an excavation of the prehistoric Misliya Cave. After 15 years of intensive research by an international team of multidisciplinary scientists, the unique remains of an adult upper jawbone, complete with several teeth, has been dated to 170,000-200,000 years ago.”

     At the moment the US government is supposed “shut down,” as the Dumbocrats use their fiscal voting powers to create more problems for Donald Trump:
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/trump-launches-new-round-of-partisan-attacks-as-government-shutdown-hits-day-2/2018/01/21/0560aece-fe35-11e7-a46b-a3614530bd87_story.html?utm_term=.9893fbc7d060

     Fortunately, on this one, at least, Trump seems to be holding his ground, and working on an alternative strategy to get the money bills passed:
  http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/01/21/donald-trump-senate-republicans-kill-60-vote-rule-end-government-shutdown/

     We are discovering that diversity in societies is not a blessing or a strength, but a curse. This screams out to us from the daily headlines, but the fact was well known to the ancient thinkers, as this excellent article reminds us:
  https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/01/18/tyranny-and-diversity-in-the-ancient-world/ 

“In his Politics, Aristotle realistically observes that diversity resulting from immigration without assimilation was a frequent cause of civil war and breakdown of civic solidarity within the Greek city-states…The importation and enfranchisement of foreigners, whether by democrats or tyrants, was also a common method to subvert the political process, destroy the constitution, and subjugate the citizenry. The archetypal example of this was the powerful and diverse Sicilian city-state of Syracuse, which was long ruled by a string of tyrants, making for a useful contrast with the homogeneous and free city-state. 

Dear Sir:
     I have written before about the impact of the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution, robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, on the job market. This revolution will increasingly polarise labour as low skilled jobs are automated and the same spreading to middle class jobs, e.g. financial services, business process outsourcing, areas that some are considering as diversification objectives.

    This revolution could yield inequity, particularly in its ability to disrupt labour markets – restaurants are already toying with the robots to replace service staff. The rewards of the revolution will shift even more so to the highly skilled, followed by investors and capital. These technologies will displace many workers so much so that full employment will not be necessary to produce the goods and services required by the economy.

     It is well known that birth-rates of primarily Northern European people (Nordics/Nordish), in the West, are below replacement level. The same problem exists in Japan. Unlike the deracinated West, the Japanese resist the immigration mania of replacing their people by foreigners, and good for them. However, now it seems that one town in Japan has reversed the trend of racial/demographic decline, doubling its fertility rate:
  https://www.economist.com/news/asia/21734319-subsidising-parenthood-appears-work-wonders-small-town-japan-doubles-its-fertility-rate

“A PATCHWORK of nondescript houses nestled at the foot of a mountain, Nagicho looks like an ordinary Japanese town. On closer inspection, something extraordinary marks it out: babies. Yuki Fukuda is one of many local mothers with three children. The bump under her winter coat indicates that another is on the way, part of a baby bonanza that has seen the town’s fertility rate double since 2005.

To THE AGE          John Warhurst wants us to ignore ‘furphies’ (‘Ignore republic-debate myths’, 26/1), but he ignores some of the best arguments in favour of our monarchy. Firstly, it is embedded in sacred tradition and fundamentally works for good on the people as a whole by encouraging us to ‘lift up our hearts’ and raise our vision towards the higher worlds and the divine creator and sustainer of all. A republic, by contrast, is too mundane and earth-bound. It is not, incidentally, ‘the people and society’ rather than the monarchy that have given us our rightly prized constitutional stability: both have.

     Secondly, Warhurst ignores the profound way in which our monarchy is linked to our history, so that its very existence causes us to be mindful of the legacies we inherit from our ancestors, whose wisdom and industry need to be considered and honoured by each subsequent generation. Traditional cultures around the world warn of the danger of ‘the headless man’, the quasi-automaton cut off from divine guidance. Communist totalitarianism is an example and it grows out of republics.
  NJ, Belgrave, Vic

     Australia Day is coming up, and as usual the ever-angry politically correct are screaming for the day to be removed. Then they will work their way along their massive list and remove every aspect of old Anglo Saxon Australia, because that is just what a hostile elite do with their spare time. By way of update, here are some recent articles detailing what is being said about Australia Day, and by whom:
  http://www.news.com.au/finance/work/everything-you-need-to-know-about-australia-day/news-story/e9030014fbdeb9351a230f1a08fbde41   
  https://theconversation.com/why-australia-day-survives-despite-revealing-a-nations-rifts-and-wounds-89768

     I don’t think that I could sum up our perspective on this debate better than a recent letter written by our noble Deputy Director, Mr Louis Cook:

As a native-born Australian proud of my British ethnicity, I happily agree with Fred Chaney (‘They were first, and they survived – we should listen’, 17/1) that ‘the original inhabitants’ of this continent have ‘a special place within the nation’ which is ‘unique’; but this does not mean that their descendants have any right to be regarded as ‘first nations’ in today’s Australia.

     On the contrary, and despite Chaney’s claim otherwise, they are indeed ‘just another ethnic minority’, entitled to ‘equal citizenship’ but not to favouritism in regard to their constitutional position. Those ‘first nations’ (a dubious phrase coined in our own times for special pleading with questionable motives) have been extinguished by history and are no more.

To THE AUSTRALIAN          Once again Geoffrey Blainey contributes marvelously to public debate (‘Australia Day doubters misread our past’, 26/1) with his combination of extraordinarily detailed knowledge of Australian history and sound common sense. Yes, Governor Phillip did not intend an invasion; a negotiated treaty in 1788 was impossible for two such different peoples; the settling of Australia was part of an irresistible ten thousand years-long worldwide development; and the Aborigines by no means lived in a paradise before the British arrived.

     On the other hand, reactionary triumphalism should be avoided by us on the conservative side of politics, as Robert Martin reminds us (Letters, 26/1) in his perceptive analysis of the limitations of the nation that sent the First Fleet here: gross social inequality, harsh administration of law, lack of free speech and unpleasant religious dogmatism. On balance, the celebration of our nation’s legitimacy on Australia Day is justified, but not without a sober and humble acknowledgment of past flaws and wrongdoing.
  NJ, Belgrave, Vic

     The cultural wars start in the schools, and that is why many parents home school their children. But, does this harm children’s education, given that many parents are not professional teachers?
From America:

“In 1997, a study of 5,402 homeschool students from 1,657 families was released. It was entitled, “Strengths of Their Own: Home Schoolers Across America.” The study demonstrated that homeschoolers, on the average, out-performed their counterparts in the public schools by 30 to 37 percentile points in all subjects. A significant finding when analyzing the data for 8th graders was the evidence that homeschoolers who are homeschooled two or more years score substantially higher than students who have been homeschooled one year or less.

     The subtle pleasures of diversity: camel beauty contests!
  http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2018/01/23/twelve-camels-disqualified-from-saudi-beauty-competition-for-using-botox/

“A beauty contest in Saudi Arabia disqualified twelve camels after their owners were found to have used Botox to make them look more handsome, Reuters revealed.
The King Abdulaziz Camel Festival in Riyadh expelled the camels and their owners for violating the competition’s rules, updated last year.

     The Australian people are more passive and apathetic than they should be about immigration, given the social harms that it produces. All criticisms are washed away by the government by saying: “we have border control!” Well, we do not, when tens of thousands of legal migrants arrive in Australia, to compete with locals for jobs, and if they create any jobs, they take more than they make.

     In the US, people support overall lower legal immigration, and want the rate capped at 500,000 per year, instead of the current annual rate of 1.3 million:
  https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jan/22/shock-poll-us-wants-massive-cuts-legal-immigration/

     The march of secularism seem unstoppable, with religion falling into disarray. But, is it? Lee Ellis et al., believe that from a biological perspective, this trend is only short-term, and in the longer term, the rule of fertility, will, rule:
  https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-017-0090-z

“For over a century, social scientists have predicted declines in religious beliefs and their replacement with more scientific/naturalistic outlooks, a prediction known as the secularization hypothesis. However, skepticism surrounding this hypothesis has been expressed by some researchers in recent decades. After reviewing the pertinent evidence and arguments, we examined some aspects of the secularization hypothesis from what is termed a biologically informed perspective.

     Colonel Jeff cooper, the father of American pistolcraft, some say, was as manly as they come, and this John Wayne toughness was reflexed in his writings in Guns & Ammo magazine, “Cooper’s corner,” and in his numerous books, including his modern version of The Art of War, Principles of Personal Defense:
  https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Personal-Defense-Jeff-Cooper/dp/1581604955

     This book is recommended reading as society heads ever-closer to chaotic violence from multiple causes of degeneracy. One interesting Cooper article appeared in Special Weapons magazine, 1984, “The Fighting Rifle, Forgotten but Not Gone.” Cooper, who while in the marines trained soldiers, came to profoundly dislike the M16, with its .22 round, the 5.56 X 45 mm. He described this round as a “poodle shooter,” and inferior to past weapons:

     Germaine Greer was one of the founders of second wave feminism in Australia, during the radical 1960s era, where Left wing uni types thought that the revolution was right around the corner. It was, but was not what they thought. Greer has  been critical of some aspects of the contemporary gender agenda, saying that trans women are not women:
  http://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-34625512/germaine-greer-transgender-women-are-not-women

     Now, however, she has thrown a spanner in the works of the #MeToo campaign of sexual harassment, saying that women have left things “too late’:

     Throughout much of the Middle East, it is downright dangerous to openly profess belief and faith in Jesus Christ:
  http://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2018/01/16/report-middle-east-christians-on-the-eve-of-destruction/

“Egypt, Jordan, Syria and the Palestinian territories are amongst the most dangerous places on earth for Christians, according to a new report. Although Christians claim the area as their Biblical heartland alongside Israel, persecution and discrimination, especially in the past 15 years, means they now constitute no more than three to four per cent per cent of the region’s population, down from 20 per cent a century ago.

To THE AGE          Your scornful description of the decision of the British people to leave the European Union as ‘nativist populism’ (15/1) ignores the big issues behind it: the protection of the monarchy, the retention of national identity, the resumption of a great legal tradition and a return to greater liberty. It is shocking but not surprising that certain powerful individuals and groups are doing everything possible to annul the Brexit result. Other members of the EU had their votes to leave overruled by political chicanery. It is to be hoped that British character and integrity will prevail against it. Better to be poor and free than wealthy and corrupt.
  NJ, Belgrave, Vic

To THE AUSTRALIAN          Rebecca Weisser is right to say (‘Look, Mr Keating, they are fleeing their republics’, 15/1) that ‘republics are less stable than monarchies precisely because they are not bound by tradition.’ She could have added that tradition is based in reverence for the sacred and that, without that reverence, public morality wanes and ruthless unselfishness grows.

     Australia, as a nation, as a people, needs, more than anything else a renewed awareness of, and respect for, the holy. Not a return to antiquated dogmatism, but a profound reform of the spirit. Yes, this is mysterious, but it is also the truth. We must shed the post-Enlightenment prejudice that logical reason is humanity’s best guide to building fruitful community. It can neither explain why the universe exists nor inspire the human heart nor satisfy the longings of the human soul. A constitutional monarchy is the best guarantee of national wellbeing.
  NJ, Belgrave, Vic

To THE AUSTRALIAN          In opposition to Fred Chaney’s claim (‘They were first, and they survived - we should listen’, 17/1) that Aboriginals should be recognised as ‘first nations within the nation’, that is no longer true in present time or acceptable to the majority of Australians who will not tolerate any proposal that might lead to dismemberment of our constitutional unity as the nation of Australia.
Also questionable is his assertion that the ‘collective identities’ of these ‘first nations’ have survived here.

     The considerable intermarriage of Aboriginals with persons of other ethnicity, as well as the dubious definitions of ‘Aboriginality’ promoted since the first Whitlam government (allowing part-Aboriginals to be viewed as Aboriginals), suggest that there is a gradual merging taking place of different ethnicities, which is good for national harmony.