Want a long-range heads-up? The question we should be asking Abbott and Gillard and all of their various immigration spokespeople right now is this:

How do you feel about the inevitability that – possibly in your lifetime – a future Prime Minister of Australia will stand up in Parliament to make a heartfelt apology on behalf of the Australian people; an apology for you, for what you did, for who you were and for what you stood for?

Possibly in your lifetime. Certainly in the lifetimes of your children and grandchildren, your nieces and nephews and their children, so that they can share your shame and hate you for the shame you spill on them.

Many others, and their children and grandchildren, will share the stain of complicity, or of not speaking up against you and your hideous policies.

74 years ago another terrible, vile event occurred. A boat full of refugees left the country they grew up in, fleeing from the persecution and horrors of their homeland and seeking refuge in a safe and welcoming country. They were Jews – 937 of them – escaping from Germany. The ship was the MS St. Louis. The year was 1939.

They tried to land in Cuba, Canada and the United States. Each of these countries refused them entry by various means including creating retroactive laws, tightening existing ones, or bureaucratically reinterpreting existing ones, requiring unpayable financial bonds, or invalidating valid entry permits and denying the right to seek political asylum. All of this might have a familiar stench to you.

The United States Coast Guard, the ship’s non-Jewish German Captain Gustav Schröder said, forced him to turn the ship back when he tried to land in Florida. Perhaps this rings a bell for you.

Hypocrisy runs deep in all societies but no deeper than the United States in this case.

Inside the Statue of Liberty since 1903 there has been a bronze plaque, a poem written by Emma Lazarus in 1883.

“From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome” it says.

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Of course there was much breast-beating understanding and public displays of sympathy on the part of all the countries, who met to find a solution that could see the 937 refugees settled safely. Just not in the USA, Canada or Cuba thank you. But anywhere else.

Eventually the ship was forced to return to Europe. Many were accepted by the UK, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. As you know, Europe was at war and only the UK was not overrun and occupied by the Germans. It is estimated that 254 of the 937 were slain, mostly in Auschwitz and Sobibór and that of the 620 refugees who returned to the Continent only 365 survived the war.

So apart from the human legacy what is the political legacy of this “harsh, pragmatic, no advantage”, hypocritical, boat-discouraging immigration policy 74 years ago towards desperate people fleeing the horrors of their home countries?

After the war, Captain Gustav Schröder was awarded the Order of Merit by the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1993, Schröder was posthumously named as one of the Righteous among the Nations at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel.

A display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tells the story of the voyage of the MS St. Louis.

In 2009, a special exhibit at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, Nova Scotia explored the Canadian connection to the tragic voyage. The display is now a traveling exhibit in Canada.

In 2011, a memorial monument called the Wheel of Conscience, was unveiled at Pier 21, Canada’s national immigration museum in Halifax. It was designed by Daniel Libeskind. The memorial is of a polished stainless steel wheel. Symbolizing the policies that turned away more than 900 Jewish refugees, the wheel incorporates four inter-meshing gears each bearing a word: antisemitism, xenophobia, racism and hatred. The back of the memorial is inscribed with the names of the 937 passengers.

On 24 September last year US Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns made a speech.

We who did not live it can never understand the experience of those 937 Jews who boarded the M.S. Saint Louis in the spring of 1939. Behind them, shattered windows and lives, loved ones in danger, crimes already underway and those crimes to come. Ahead, the hope of a new life in this country.

We all know how this journey ends. The ship was turned away. Its passengers returned to a Europe that fell, country by country, to the cruelty they set sail to escape. Having made it so close to the safety of our shores, nearly one-third of the men, women and children of the M.S. Saint Louis perished, half a world away, in Auschwitz and other camps.

…

[T]he dangers were visible to those clear-eyed enough to see them. The warnings were already clear for those who cared to listen … And yet the United States did not welcome these tired, poor and huddled passengers as we had so many before and would so many since. Our government did not live up to its ideals. We were wrong. And so we made a commitment that the next time the world confronts us with another M.S. Saint Louis — whether the warning signs are refugees in flight or ancient hatreds resurfacing — we will have learned the lessons of the M.S. Saint Louis and be ready to rise to the occasion.
…
[A]nti-Semitism, genocide and mass displacement are – sadly – all-too-alive in 2012 … there are other M.S. Saint Louises setting sail right now … there is always more we can and must do.

Or in other words, “Sorry”.

So Sir Roger offers these notes for the future Prime Minister who will – inevitably – say “Sorry” to all those who have sought to come to Australia seeking asylum in boats – legally – as refugees and discovered that the story that we were a warm and welcoming people was a cruel hoax.

Many years ago our country was called upon to stand for the values we cherished as Australians.

When people who had lost everything, their homes, their livelihoods, their hopes and their futures came to us;

when people full of terror who had seen, and often experienced, unimaginable horrors, or torture, came to us;

when people who were so desperate that they risked death in leaky boats and violent seas came to asking for our help ..

we were called upon as never before to show that we were indeed, and in our deeds, truly the people our story told about us; a people of humanity, hospitality and generosity, an understanding and tolerant people immensely proud of our multicultural triumph.

We failed. We proved that the story was a lie.

Our leaders failed us. Our institutions failed us. Our hearts failed us.

Instead, when we saw fellow human beings who so sincerely and transparently needed our help, people who had fled for their lives from wars, religious and tribal violence, and brutal tyrannical regimes, we told ourselves that those people were in fact queue-jumping, disease-ridden, child murdering terrorists and criminals who wanted to rape our women and steal the mineral wealth beneath our feet and the coins from our purse.

So to all those refugees we heartlessly turned away, or who we inhumanely imprisoned to the point where many of you went mad – and to those who never reached our shores but perished in the attempt – we say:

Sorry.

What we did as a people was based on greed, fear, narrow-mindedness, xenophobia, racism, hatred and ignorance.

As a people we say:

Sorry.

What our leaders did was not based on any of these things. It was based on the desire for power, on the desire to defeat an internal opponent in our own country. You were merely the tool that they used. To achieve their narrow partisan goals they broke international laws and our own laws. They ignored international conventions and treaties.

What those leaders did, along with those in our bureaucracies and agencies who conspired with them and abetted them, was unforgivable, unconscionable and inhumane and it disgraced and dishonoured our country. Their punishment is that their names and their reputations will be stained forever in the history of our country.

As we allowed them the opportunity to do what they did we say:

Sorry.

As you know, today’s Australia is not that Australia. We have learnt from that dark time. Our laws now ensure that it will not happen again. Our country truly is today, and thanks to so many of you, a people of humanity, hospitality and generosity, an understanding and tolerant people immensely proud of our multicultural triumph. We are once again true to our story and our values.

Thank you again.

I am so proud to be the Prime Minister of such a country, especially in the knowledge that we will never see such malignant, repugnant people assume leadership again.

 

Sydney Sings Verdi Requiem

If you’re in Sydney next weekend (3pm Sunday 28 April) Sir Roger has a shameless plug for you.

Actually, Sir Roger has a PEAK MUSICAL AND SENSUAL EXPERIENCE FOR YOU (Sir Roger knows how much you like a sensual experience.)

This year marks Verdi’s 200th birthday and the truly excellent Sydney University Graduates Choir is performing what some (Sir Roger) consider his very greatest masterpiece.

A huge orchestra, a massive 300 voice choir and Soloists you would normally have to mortgage your house to hear. And all for only $40 for two hours of trembling dread and luscious bliss.

Sir Roger always says that operatic music and ballet, consummately performed – as this will be – are finer transport to another realm of experience, to altered states, than the finest, the purest, drugs.

Bookings at Seymour Centre or at the door if any seats remain.

We are not permitted to divulge the following information but there are rumours afloat that Sir Roger may indeed be present IN THE CHOIR doing his voluntary work for Giuseppe.

Come and listen to the Verdi Requiem. Do yourself a favour**

 

(* as Darryl would – and frequently did – say)

(** as Molly would  - and frequently did – say)

 

 

Sir Roger wishes to … actually Sir Roger wishes he didn’t have to … mark the 10th anniversary of the most murderous international crime of the last 60 years: the Shocking, awe-full invasion of Iraq.

Sir Roger is shocked and dismayed that not a single one of the war criminals – downing a celebratory cup or two of blood on this special day – who masterminded and conspired to carry out the military murders (not to mention the traumatic displacement and loss suffered by millions of Iraqis, not to mention the post traumatic stress – and suicides – suffered by combatants on both sides) not a single one has been brought to trial, or even to questioning with a soft feather. Celebrating the fact they have so far got away with mass murder are the following war criminals:

George W. Bush
Tony Blair
John Howard
Donald Rumsfeld
Dick Cheney
Condoleezza Rice
Karl Rove
Colin Powell
Ahmed Chalabi (the liar who spurred the killing)
Paul Wolfowitz
Richard Perle
Douglas Feith “the dumbest fucking guy on the planet”

… and others

and only one of these, Colin Powell, has ever apologised or admitted that they were wrong. (Karl Rove couldn’t even admit he was wrong about the recent Presidential election, even after Romney had clearly lost.)

 

If only there really were a hell.

 

It has come to Sir Roger’s attention that the world’s largest professional paedophile ring has appointed a new president.

Elsewhere in the news …

… Sir Roger was thinking about the new pope today, his jesuitical casuistry and his statement that “if we do not proclaim jesus christ something is wrong … we would end up a compassionate NGO.” This is apparently supposed to mean that the worldly is less important than the unworldly (you know, the promised “afterlife”).

And Sir Roger thought, “You know, a ‘compassionate NGO’ would be a thousand times better than the pernicious, kiddie-fiddling, hate-mongering, war-mongering machine that it has been for, what, 1700 years (you know, since Constantine subverted the church, bribed it with the temptation of power and turned it, all too willingly, into a political arm of government, a travesty of its asserted principles and, in action, the antithesis of its founder’s teachings).

Sir Roger thought about a fellow-student at high school who slid from fundamentalism (calvinism) to fundamentalism (Augustinianism) becoming eventually a catholic priest. This fellow, let’s call him Brian, was highly intelligent for sure. But Sir Roger imagined a dialogue with Brian. Sir Roger would ask, “If it is true that proclaiming christ in the world matters infinitely more than being do-gooders in the world – specifically, if for example proclaiming christ means denying condoms to reduce the incidence of AIDS, or maintaining neolithic attitudes towards women – how is the evidence stacking up for the efficacy your stance?” And Brian would reply, surely, that, “Worldly evidence (or lack of it) is utterly irrelevant.”

So Sir Roger would ask, “Are you saying, then, that the dogma are Everything? You are saying that causing worldly pain and even death (for which there is abundant evidence) are irrelevant beside the imperative odediently, blindly, mindlessly to follow culturally ancient writings (and more recent worldly interpretations) which without evidence can only claim to be inspired by your god? Are you saying, perhaps, that the ‘reward’, the ‘pay-off’, for blind obedience exists in a purported future realm and state for which there never has been any credible evidence? And you are comfortable for the evidence of the human disasters caused by your philosophical position and the failure of your stand to cause real, increasing good here and now (the only place and time we can be reasonably sure of on the evidence) – you are comfortable to place that beside your reliance on the total lack of evidence for some frothy outcome imagined and promoted by the shamans of warring sand-tribes two thousand and more years ago?”

And Brian would say, “Absolutely!” or “Amen!”

And that is why I would say that Brian’s religion has little to do with anything out here in the phenomenal world but rather everything to do with the inside of his skull in the needs of his own psychology. The tragedy and the awfulness of this is that someone like Brian would be willing for countless others to hurt and even die, actually and factually, in order to comfort the disquietude of Brian’s own eagerly rationalising mind.

Is this just a bit selfish, do you think? Is it, perhaps, somewhat infantile?

Post script:
Religions that promise an afterlife full of riches and virgins and harps and eternal happiness (and, as at least one believer expects, “A NOO CARRRR!!!!!”) are operating The Perfect Scam. They take your money – as much of it as they can hustle. (George Carlin: “[God] loves you … and he needs money.”)

In return they give you nothing except a 100% iron-clad guarantee of … wait for it … Eternal Life! (And in at least one religion, your own personal planet.) The beauty of this racket is that they never ever have to pay up on the guarantee! If they’re right and you actually do get eternal life then of course their guarantee holds good. If they are wrong and there is no eternal life then … you’re dead as a doornail so how can they pay you?

In the meantime, as they know, they have got all your lovely money to play with here and now, where and when it actually is useful.

As Stephen Fry says so much more succinctly and entertainingly in this un-broadcast excerpt from QI,

And Alan Davies says, “Why do they believe all this stuff, Stephen? … This stuff is responsible for some serious aggravation in the world! … “

 

 

 

So Arthur Sinodinos failed to remember six companies of which he was a director and failed to declare this in his Parliamentary Register of Interest.

Either he is stupid or incompetent. And if you were the Chairman of one of the companies Sinodinos “forgot” to declare, since he is obviously not at all engaged with your company and its business or mission, and since he attaches no front-of-mind importance to his responsibility, you might wonder if he was worth the Director’s salary that you pay him.

But Tony Abbott’s response was much more interesting if you want to know how the Liberals try to manipulate a lie to make it sound like the truth, courtesy of the sleazy Frank-Luntz-clone in their midst.

So let’s “unpack” his comment (as the educators say).

“There’s a world of difference between exploiting an official position for personal gain and inadvertently overlooking to declare a couple of not-for-profit directorships,” Mr Abbott said.

exploiting an official position for personal gain
Let’s minimise the appearance of wrongdoing by contrasting Sinodinos with the dickhead from the health union, Craig Thomson, who everyone but Thompson has already decided is guilty until proven innocent. “Sinodinos only wet his pants; Thompson shat in his.”
And by the way this phrase will come in handy as a nice contrast later on…

inadvertently overlooking
Oh, look, you know, anyone could have made this sort of simple error.
It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t mean it. He’s such a busy person. Give him a break.
(No. He fucked over this country with his Grima Wormtongue advice to the infamous war criminal and professional fool John Howard for over a decade. No he doesn’t deserve to be given a break.)
This is also an appeal to lack of agency, responsibility and accountability.
(He is by choice a high-flying, highly-paid, prominent public figure. He gets no leeway. If he let the office boy down the corridor do his paperwork for this, then he’s still accountable for the office boy’s errors.)

a couple
Minimise the scale of the error.
(No, Tony, it was not “a couple”. A couple is two. Count them. One, Two. John and Marsha are a couple. John/Marsha. One/Two. John, Marsha and Roger the Lodger are not a couple; they are threesome. Sinodinos failed to declare six directorships. Six is not a couple. It’s a gang-bang.

not-for-profit directorships
Make him look like a nice guy. What a nice, altruistic generous man giving his time for free to help those in need. Giving back to the community.
(No, Tony. It’s not Arthur who is “not for profit”, it’s the company. Arthur makes the profit by being paid a director’s fee for apparently doing nothing, or at least not enough to lay down any data in his memory banks. Arthur took the money.)

A second suggestion from this one phrase is that, after all, you know, not-for-profit companies aren’t important, aren’t proper companies because they don’t do what matters most which is to make shitloads of money (except for the Directors of course). All they do is save the government and taxpayers money by doing jobs no-one else wants to and the pittance employees are paid is a king’s ransom compared to the nothing that volunteers are paid. So, you know, it’s not like not-for-profit directorships really count.

Also, this is a good place to again compare and contrast Arthur’s deeply warm humanity and altruistic works with the evil, money-grubbing exploitation of official position for personal gain by pre-judged Labor connection Thomson.

Arthur now has resigned from those boards. He hopes that has put things right. If he were a magistrate and someone came up before him charged with stealing Blue Poles (say) from the National Gallery, and if the perp said,

“I didn’t mean to, it’s not like me, I wasn’t feeling meself at the time. It was innocent! I thought it was my painting – it looked like the one in my hallway. I only noticed me mistake when I seen it wouldn’t fit in the hall. And by the way I call the Bingo down the old people’s home of a Thursdy. I’ll tell you what mate, I’ll give the painting back, then. okay?”

if he said that, what would Magistrate Sinodinos (or Abbott) have to say about that? Would they really say, “Oh, of course. Easy mistake to make. Could have happened to anyone. Inadvertent oversight. No-one liked that painting much anyway, so, you know, just return it while we close our eyes and we’ll forget it ever happened. Case dismissed!”

Or would they have clapped him in irons, dragged him off to the dungeons, clanged the door shut and thrown away the key?

And by the way, if Sinodinos wants to give back to any community he should try giving back to the Iraqi community which he helped to destroy by urging Howard forward in his murderous crusade.

Part Four of Sir Roger Migently’s exposition of Australian values as revealed during his epiphany on The Mountain …

16.

Most people are fairly good natured.

Very few people wish you any harm.

Most of them want to help you.

Very few people want to hurt you.

Some do.

Some just want to use you.

17.

It turns out there actually are two kinds of people in the world.

TYPE 1: There are those whose default position is that any new person they encounter has friendly intentions. Until proven otherwise. These people are almost always right.

TYPE 2: And there are those whose default position is to assume that any new person they encounter has hostile intentions until proven otherwise. These people are almost always wrong.

People who are Type 1 either naturally, or through experience or environment, enjoy a far superior quality of life because their experience is that they are always surrounded by friendly, helpful people. Their own friendliness generates reciprocal friendliness in others. So they generate increased niceness in the world in general. Type 2 people do the reverse and live a life of fear, foreboding and loneliness.

Most people probably think (when they think at all) that the type they are is “just the way I am”. But it is a choice a person can make.

18.

Nobody knows what the fuck is “really” going on. Anyone who claims to know is either deluded, a liar, or a charlatan who is after your money or your body, or naked power. The people who are most likely to claim to know are priests (of whatever religion) and politicians.

19.

Most people don’t have their homes burgled.

Very few people are mugged.

Most people will be in at least a minor car smash of some kind at least once in their lives. Very few of them will have to go to hospital.

You would not think this if you relied on commercial television news or some newspapers, or political oppositions, in whose financial or political interest it is to terrify the masses.

20.

If you live long enough, you will experience joy, love, courage, triumph, fear, loss, sadness and a broken heart.

That is called Life.

Embrace it all with everything you’ve got because it’s all you’ve got.

Get as much of it as you can.

 

 

11.

Science is not a set of facts. Science is a process. The process is to

a) observe,

b) speculate,

c) propose an explanation (or “theory”),

d) devise an experiment which
i) can be repeated (“replicable”) and
ii) can prove the theory false (“falsifiable”)

e) run the experiment, and then

f) assess whether the results have falsified the proposition.

g) If the proposition (the theory) is not falsified it survives until it is falsified or modified.

Science is, therefore, that body of conjecture which has not yet been disproved.

No true scientist will claim that “a fact has been proved”. However, some propositions such as evolution, relativity, quantum theory and global warming are so robust and have survived so much rigorous and repetitive testing that the probability of them being “facts” is so high as to render them what in everyday discourse would be considered facts.

In a criminal trial the test is “beyond a reasonable doubt”. In a civil trial the burden of proof is the “balance of probabilities”. All of those scientific theories listed above pass both tests easily. Religion passes neither.

That is why they still refer to evolution as a theory, not because they’re a bit uncertain but because nothing in science is an absolute fact.

Religious “facts”, in contrast, are worse than theories and are far from scientific. The data are not replicable, nor are they falsifiable since non-falsifiability is specifically built into the theory. Religion is based on faith, which is in essence a desperate hope against hope.

Often people confuse science with technology. Science is the process described above. Technology is putting the findings to practical use – usually by building things (although it is true that sometimes technology comes first – gosh, first we build a bike (look, mum, no hands) and then we do the science about gyroscopic forces. And then we build more advanced things, like gyro compasses.

 

12.

Evolution is not a force.

It does not have any intention. It’s simply a description and explanation of what happens.

Evolution is a fact as much as anything is a fact (see above).

Evolution is not design and there is no designer. No living thing (except possibly humans) ever thought “I think I’ll grow me some wings – that would be an excellent adaptation!” Creatures do not choose to evolve to fit a niche. Environments change. All individual creatures are born with mutations, whether through DNA transcription errors, or genes being modified by chemicals, or gamma radiation, or whatever. Many of those mutations will debilitate the creature and it will die before procreating. Most will make no difference at all. Some will from time to time make the creature better suited to the changing environment. It will thrive (unless hit by a rock or killed by a serpent) and have offspring and the offspring will inherit the new genetic code.

Sir Roger differs from Darwin in this – the likelihood that a potentially advantageous mutation will survive in the right place at the right time is incredibly unlikely. So evolution is, in Sir Roger’s view, the Survival of the Luckiest.

So stop talking as if evolution is going anywhere, or has a plan, or, worst of all, an intellect. Once again, evolution is simply the description of what happens, and why.

 

13.

The universe does not have any agenda.

Specifically the universe does not have any agenda for you.

It does not have intentions about you or about anything, including itself.

The universe is utterly pointless. There is no reason for it to exist besides the fact that it does.

The universe is also unbelievably, incomprehensively improbable.

So are you.

What there is to do about this is to marvel at the amazingness, the practically infinite improbability that not only is the universe here but also you are here and able to observe it.

Anyone who really appreciated the extent of the astonishing extraordinariness of the utter improbability of these two things not only existing but being on the one hand so immensely huge and wondrous and complex and unfathomable, and on the other hand, well, here at all, the brain of anyone who really got this would explode (see Total Perspective Vortex).

 

14.

You can stop looking for “The Meaning of Life”.

There isn’t one, except for the meaning you choose to give your own life.

 

15.

Immunisation works. Your child is far more likely to die from not having an injection than to become ill from having one. The whole immunisation and autism thing, and the conspiracy theory that has built up around it, was a scam from the beginning, bad science, and wacko-the-diddle-o, frankly.

Also, if you do not immunise your children you are not just failing to protect them, you are endangering everyone else’s kids. As a result of this nonsense dangerous, debilitating diseases are on the rise, and not only among the children of those gullible, stupid people who have take up the anti-immunisation cause.

Global warming is real.

UFOs are not.

Men really did walk on the moon.

If you believe any of these things is a conspiracy remember to keep taking the medication and see your therapist regularly.

“The Secret” is complete Bullshit. *

So is “The Law of Attraction”. *

*Mistrust anyone who tells you their product is based on science.

Scientology is a scam and a dangerous one at that.

Mormonism is just ridiculous.

Both are clearly ludicrous and rely on the gullibility of the first responders and then on the familial influence of parents on their children (like all religions).

They are both only slightly more ludicrous than most other religions.

People, by the way are not “born a catholic” or “born a muslim”. That is disgusting language and child abuse. Children are simply born, wide-eyed and wondering. Then their parents tell them they have to believe X or they’ll go to hell. That’s when they discover fear and hang onto their parents’ religious beliefs to avoid eternal torture.

 

 

 

6.

When we swear to something, that is kind of a proper commitment. The word “swear” comes from an ancient word that means “to speak”. To say words.

In one the most savagely beautiful and exceptional works of fiction, the book of John begins, “In the beginning was the word…” Sir Roger prefers his own variation: “In the Word is the beginning.” Speaking your word, “swearing”, makes possible the real-isation of your intention or your desire.

When you “give your word”, do you mean it as a commitment, a guarantee? Or is your word just something you said? If you say you will be somewhere at 1 o’clock, can people know that you will be there at 1 o’clock? Or do they make allowances for you? Do they tell you lunch is at 12.30 because you’re always half an hour late? How does it make you feel to be a person that people make allowances for, that other people “manage”?

How do you relate to your word? When you make a promise is it just “aspirational”, or is your word who you are?

When what you say is guaranteed, when you are your word, when what you say becomes what you do, then you have enormous power, because what you say unquestionably comes to pass. People will want to hear what you speak, so that they know what is going to happen in the world and make their plans.

 

7.

I don’t believe in capital punishment and I am not a murderer, nor am I remotely murderously inclined*. But, like you, I know that if someone threatens or touches my child I am capable of killing them without compunction.

This might give you pause next time you bray (from a safe distance) for some poor bastard’s blood. One day they could be braying for yours. And in the circumstances you may suddenly not agree so enthusiastically that your own execution would be such a good thing, or that judicial murder in general is a good thing.

*(except in the supermarket when people with no peripheral vision obliviously block an entire aisle, with their trolley parked sideways against their bottom, crouching, scanning shelves for as long as it takes, as if there were no other human beings of consequence in a world miraculously built and managed solely for them, and if there were it wouldn’t matter.)

 

8.

Either you control your emotions or they control you.

You have your emotions or you’re at their mercy. It’s up to you.

This thought gives you a place to stand outside your emotions where you can consider them from some distance if you need to. It doesn’t mean you don’t have emotions (you always will), or that they’re bad (they’re good), or that you shouldn’t enjoy them (you should), it just gives you choice if you need it. And it puts you in charge of them when you need to be.)

 

9.

Either you run your life, or plenty of other people are happy to fill the gap and run it for you – to get what they want. At your expense. It’s your call.

 

10.

Thank the universe for hot showers.

 

 

We interrupt this pre-recorded segment to bring you an impromptu message from our sponsor.

Sir Roger has been touched by the loyalty of one of his longterm readers and a fellow-blogger to muse on the importance of friends.

What is a friend? A friend is someone who cares, fosters, encourages and shares, someone who is almost as excited as you are about your successes and supports you in your failures or sadnesses. Many people believe a friend is someone who overlooks your crap in return for you overlooking theirs. This is bullshit. A friend is someone who will always call you on your shit – in the most empathetic way, of course – and relies on you to do likewise about theirs, because only then can you make corrections and perhaps grow and achieve what you are capable of.

A real friend is a rare and precious thing. A real friend is someone you feel comfortable with, that you can talk to easily at any time, whose company you can enjoy in silence. Real friends are the embodiment of loyalty.

Real friendships last through time and separation. Sir Roger recently spent two weeks in a villa on the Continong with friends made over forty years earlier; and although they had led separate lives in different cities, towns and countries, concentrating on building careers and families, and flourishing in diverse areas, when they regathered their friendship was as fresh and real as it had been all those years ago. And the conversation picked up, as it were, just where it had left off as if the intervening years were transparent.

So friends and friendships need to be nourished and enjoyed and cherished.

And the only way to have real friends is to be one.

None of this is to be confused with mateship. As Sir Roger has written elsewhere:

What is mateship? Mateship is pretending to be friends with someone who doesn’t want your job. A mate is someone who won’t sleep with your wife/girlfiriend without asking you first.

A “great mate” is a rugby league footballer who enjoys a gang bang with the other members of his team.

A mate is what men have who are incapable of attracting actual friends (see Tony Abbott) or of forming any kind of vaguely intimate relationships. So mateship is how Australian men pretend to have friends.

Sir Roger is returned from the Mountain with the Migently Mountain Manifesto and here are Tablets One to Five:

1.

 
Do what is right.
 
 

2.

 
You are safe. Now, at this instant, you are safe.

You are safe, right here, right now.

This might allow you to calm down and get a grip to deal with stuff.

Nothing is promised for the next instant, however, but right now at this instant you are safe.
 
 

3.

 
Most people are about as honest and ethical as they can afford to be.

Yes, some people are less honest than they could be and some are frankly more honest than is necessary or comfortable.

The value of honesty is relative. People will steal a loaf of bread if they really have to. They may not want to but if that’s what they have to do to feed their children then they will do what they need to. Some things are more important and more pressing, in the moment in real life, than esoteric debates about morality.

It’s true that some people exhort you to be honest. Other people want you to be honest. They don’t want you to be honest for your benefit. They want you to be honest for their benefit, so that they can make informed decisions based on reliable reports. In reality, though, most people don’t make decisions based on facts anyway.

On the other hand, being honest places less stress on the memory. And it makes you feel better.

Telling the truth is a different matter. There is no such as THE Truth. There’s my truth and your truth, for a start. What most people mean by the truth is merely opinion and interpretation based on life experience, emotion, limited information, conjecture and vague probabilities.

There’s the whole truth – that’s impossible to tell because you would have to describe the velocity and position of every fundamental particle from the beginning of time. You can’t tell both the position and velocity in any case, and if you could even get the information in a whole lifetime you wouldn’t get past describing the first billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second of the universe. The best you can do is describe the best interpretation of the motley collection tiny scraps of perception you can grasp as they rush by.

Then there’s the Absolute Truth. There isn’t one. So stop killing people because you mistakenly think you have it.
 
 

4.

 
Your Job is something you do because you have to, to survive financially, pay the bills, feed the kids, pay the rent or the mortgage. A job is trading time for money.

Your Work is also something you do because you have to. But it’s something you “have” to do because it’s an expression of who you are. It’s your contribution to the world.

For example, a teacher has two jobs:

1) spend time in a room with people and

2) fill out paperwork.

Being in a classroom is how we know you are doing your job. The paperwork is how we know you did your job.

A teacher’s Work on the other hand is growing people, inspiring them, helping them learn to learn, to love learning, to appreciate life, to contribute to the world, to experience the most of the world that they can as richly as they can.

The “Dignity of Labour” is a myth born of a conspiracy cooked up by capital and colluded with by labour, probably beginning during the Industrial Revolution.

Capital needed – and still needs – workers as close to compliant slaves as possible. Long hours, dirty work, few rights and low wages stopped people getting notions too far above themselves, or amassing the savings to escape. It kept them needing the employer and the job.

Labour needed justification for its powerlessness, its dependency and its degradation, for selling its soul to make others rich.

The solution was to frame labour as bestowing “dignity”. And eventually it became a fact instead of a pretence. And it didn’t hurt to have the Church bestowing God’s blessing on the charade. As a result “early to bed and early to rise” assumed a moral character to the point where anyone who gets out of bed after 6am or goes to bed after 10pm is committing a “sin”.

This is all bullshit. Any job in which you give over your labour and your time and your life to make someone else rich is shameful, degrading and humiliating and not dignified at all. It would be a sin if there were such a thing.
 
 

5.

 
Great leaders (and managers) don’t manage people or boss people. They manage outcomes by facilitating people in doing what they know how to do (which, after all, is why they were employed) and in developing skills to do it better. They share a vision which inspires and engages. They provide meaningful goals and engage their colleagues in the value of the work they do.

People who work for coercive managers do the least they can in order to keep their jobs. They have low job satisfaction and low productivity because they don’t own the work they do.

People who work for inspiring managers do the most they can because they want to and they want to because they own their work and they know why it matters. That is why they have such great work satisfaction. And that is why they stay.

Most people want to do a good job. A good manager doesn’t have to force people to do their best. A good manager knows to get out of the way of people doing their best.

Almost everyone wants to do the best job they can.

 
 

The Migently Mountain Manifesto

 
Australian values have lately been enthusiastically asserted by some Australians and Sir Roger has been much impressed – in much the same way a washed-up prize fighter feels the repeated impressions of his opponents’ fists in his guts.
 
These assertions of “Australian values” tend to be energetically debated in Melbourne with French and Indian visitors to Australia on trains, buses and trams, in university college meetings in Sydney, in the halls, offices and party rooms of Parliament House in Canberra and particularly on commercial radio breakfast programs everywhere.
 
Sir Roger was reeling from the onslaught and disheartened by the proponents’ ignorance, illogic, idiocy and illiteracy; by their fear, spite, narrow-minded prejudice, stupidity and frankly pre-agricultural social views.
 

Someone had omitted to convey to them that for their brain to operate as advertised it is necessary to update the database regularly and to calibrate it with reality.
 
Someone had omitted to explain to them that the texts on which their ethics are based and with which they (selectively) justify much of their self-righteous bombast are not actually sacred but were all simple rulebooks written thousands of years ago to enable the social control of brutal sand tribes, to suit their primitive times and conditions, calm their existential terrors, alleviate their ontological horrors, excuse their ignorance and justify their brutality.
 
Someone had failed to explain to them that the foundation myths, the stories of Australia on which they hang their narrative of Australian culture, are just that. Myths. It never happened, Bruce. It’s just like when your girlfriend lied to you – you weren’t the first.
 
Dismayed by the galloping erosion of the humane, generous, fair and tolerant values of his Australia Sir Roger therefore repaired to the mountain top seeking counsel and wisdom.
 
Sir Roger has returned from the mountain top with enlightenment and wisdom.
 
Over the next few days and weeks he will share with his world those insights into the best human and Australian values.
 

 

Sir Roger believes Malcolm Turnbull could easily be the next Prime Minister of Australia.

What do you think?

Here’s why:

1) The coalition and the right wing media will bring too much pressure on Julia Gillard about the Slater and Gordon quagmire – either facts or compelling implications – so that either she can’t stay, or she becomes too much of a liability to the party’s electoral success, vacating the PM-ship by choice or force.

2) Rudd will decline to nominate for leadership of the party, so he will be drafted and oh so very reluctantly accept (as someone described T. E. Lawrence, “always backing into the limelight”).

3) With Rudd at the helm again, Abbott, who already is hugely disliked (and an immature fool), barely tolerated as “at least not Gillard”, will preside over disastrous poll results (because Rudd will easily usurp his role as “at least not Gillard”).

4) Abbott will be unceremoniously dumped and Turnbull, who is hugely liked, will replace him. Christopher (Politics Beats Values) Whine, by the way, will immediately explain that while he couldn’t say so he always hated Abbott, thought he was the wrong man for the job, and preferred Turnbull.

5) People are already angry at Labor which in most policies is indistinguishable from the coalition; indistinguishable even from those of the war criminal John Howard. People are looking for an alternative but they are a bit fond of action on global warming and humane treatment of refugees, both of which might just conceivably be revived under Rudd.

6) Nevertheless Turnbull is better liked than Rudd and, promising to pursue good, moral and humane policies and good real Australian values, will win the next federal election in a landslide.

7) The Greens and Independents will disappear from the Reps – mostly because people are so bloody … we’ll stop there.

Yeah?

 

How do you think Australia’s economy is going, compared to the rest of the world?

 
Sir Roger wonders because some rainbow-lovers say it’s magnificent and some shrill hurricane chasers say we’re going to hell in a handbasket and doom is upon us. Sir Roger had his servan staff do some forensic research. They discovered that only the following 11 countries (i.e. the top roughly 6%) have AAA ratings with stable or positive outlooks with all three “big” ratings agencies (Fitch, Moody’s, Standard and Poors):

Australia
Canada
Denmark
Finland
Norway
Singapore
Sweden
Switzerland
Germany
Luxembourg
Netherlands

This is nice…isn’t it? That’s an elite group! Even the UK and US aren’t in it. Shouldn’t we be grateful and count our blessings, even celebrate? So if we are doing so well, if the economy is so excellent and apparently we’ve really “never had it so good”, why are so many people (all right I mean Jolly Joe and Tony the Tool and all the Liberal Premiers) trying to convince us how badly the economy is being managed, how tough life is, how bad we feel, and how much we’re all struggling? Remember it’s been 5 years now and they can no longer lay the wreaths at Costello’s door. Maybe they hope no-one will actually look at the facts.

Or did Sir Roger miss something?

You’re aware that a AAA rating is only about the money and in a “two-tiered economy” that may not mean a lot to the people on the lower tier (not being Andrew, Gina or Clive). But there is another list called the UN Human Development Index. It rates countries for Life Expectancy/Health, Education and Standard of Living. Here are the top few countries (corrected for “inequality”):

Norway
Australia
Sweden
Netherlands
Iceland
Ireland
Germany
Denmark
Switzerland
Slovenia
Finland
Canada
New Zealand would be in the top ten (it is #5 in the uncorrected index)

So surely it can’t get much better than this? I mean, if we’re miserable and pessimistic and afraid of the future in this environment, when would we EVER be happy and appreciative and optimistic?

Sir Roger thinks it’s not the facts that are at play but the clash of perceptual “frames” being manufactured by each side, the optimists and pessimists, that is directing the narrative and the perception of how well we’re doing.

What do you think? Tell Sir Roger in the comments.

Sir Roger is generally a jovial fellow when not contemplating the tragic, terrifying farce that is politics both national and global. But he was bemused and then tickled with annoyance by a somewhat acquaintance who seems on the one hand to be a decent and committed man dedicated to and driven by service to others and on the other hand to be a self-congratulatory cock-a-doodle-do-gooder.

However, on closer inspection, and with the assistance of his slav servants “assistants” Sir Roger is willing to allow that Graham Giblin’s self-diminishment – an exceptional weightloss of 30kg – was an achievement through which others can learn and that Giblin has done a noble thing by sharing his weightloss secret in a book for others who may wish to benefit from it also.

But what of his blatant self-promotion as “Graham Giblin – Trainer“? Again, Sir Roger’s drudges point out that his website appears to authentically express humility, gratitude and a passion to make a difference. “He must,” say Sir Roger’s peons, “explain to those who might wish to use his skills why they would make a fine choice, else his skills would go unused and his potential students would go un-made-a-difference-to.” (Sir Roger’s vassals never were quite the masters of the language.)

Sir Roger requires me to express that he thinks this:

“Humility is fine. It is modesty I object to so hotly. Modesty is saying “I am not very good” while knowing that one is. That is, modesty is a filthy, spineless yellow lie. And not only that, it is a lie that steals one’s skills and contribution from the world. It is simpering, deceitful, foul theft.

Humility is saying “I am good at this, it is true. I believe I am better at this than others are. And yet this fact and these skills, by which I contribute to the world what I can, do not make me, as a human being, superior to any other human being. And I am grateful for these skills and for my life and for the opportunity to make my contribution.”

So, says Sir Roger, if this is who you are, go well Mr Giblin. Help people by all means to lose weight (I may be the first to purchase your tome); may they live longer and better lives. And train your training if it helps others to live the lives they dream of.

 
Mr Fish trains his laser guided sights on the big smell and blows the bullshit all over the walls of the temples of false gods around the world…