Two excellent talks that will give you good feelings and even hope! From the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce
The truth about financial incentives:
How our human super power can save the planet:
You’re welcome
Okay, it can’t be avoided.
Sir Roger wrote this in a fit a few weeks ago and he was in a variety of minds as to whether he ought to publish it. Was it intemperate? Of course. It was Sir Roger. Anything else? Was it wrong? Sir Roger, on reviewing it, has determined that he does not resile from its sentiments and so directs its publication. Here then is his response to the
Someone at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office made what appears to be a joke memo about what the Pope could do when he visits Britain and before he gets arrested.
The FCO is wishing it had a hole to jump into. The Government doesn’t know where to look. The poor author of the memo has been “assigned to other duties”. And the “Vatican” is effecting to be deeply mortified by the “insult”.
Really?
The true obscenity is that while many of the suggestions are, in an enlightened world, actually rational and reasonable, they are characterised by the FCO as “far-fetched”. Commentators are calling them “astonishing”, “foolish”, “clearly ill-judged, naive and disrespectful”. A Catholic Bishop says, “This is appalling”, “outlandish” and “outrageous”.
So what were the abominations that the poor little 20-something Oxbridge Foreign Office boy proposed?
[ Be careful. You may go to hell just for reading this list.]
It includes:
• Launch ‘Benedict’ condoms
• Review vatican attitude to condom use
• Bless a civil partnership
• Reverse policy on women bishops
• Ordain a woman
• Open an abortion ward
• Training course for all bishops on child abuse allegations
• Announce sacking of dodgy bishops
• Vatican sponsorship of AIDS clinics
• Launch helpline for abused children
So all of these things are done by other religions and/or secular groups in advanced 21st Century society around the world. Done by grown-ups, by rational, thoughtful people, by mature, socially-concerned human beings dealing with actual problems in the real world.
Nevertheless, the “Vatican” (whatever that is a metaphor for) is not part of 21st Century society. nor is it any of those other things. It is anchored in 6000 year-old anxieties of desert tribal culture, was hijacked into a militaristic system by a mad emperor in the 4th Century who appropriated it to his imperial service and decided its beliefs, and for millennia has been so wrapped in archaic, cannibalistic, irrelevant ritual that it has lost even the vaguest connection to the “true” orgins of the cult.
If Christ were to return today it is the Catholic Church which would most vehemently be clamouring for his murder – because he would threaten to collapse their cosy, now entirely temporal, globally-tentacled, fear-mongering, parasitic apparatus, emasculate their power structure and reduce the fraudulent façade of their unctuous piety to rubble.
What the “Vatican” is doing now, must do and always does do is to desperately try to prop up the flimsy cardboard and canvas of the awful illusion they call their “authority”; patch it, stitch it, retouch it. And scream obscenities at – and, as they have so frequently done, kill – those who too clearly see their fakery and their flagrant lies and refuse to pretend it is real.
The more the church screams injustice and victimhood the more you know they are lying and afraid and protecting their livelihood whatever the cost to the real people in the world.
Because that is the problem; the catholic church through its pope is literally – and I mean literally – responsible for the deaths of millions in Africa, millions who are dying right now.
The catholic church is harming lives around the world. It is causing endless misery on a daily and hourly basis with its so-called “beliefs”. The pope’s “beliefs” are not merely irrational, illogical, deeply stupid and pathologically detached from reality; they are caustic, toxic, savage and inhumane. They are putrid, repugnant and rotten. They are fundamentally anti-life.
The catholic church for at least 1700 years has been, in its deepest nature, dishonest and utterly debauched. The establishment — which supposedly honours a simple, plain man who blessed the poor and the downtrodden — smells like a brothel and is painted up like a cheap, toothless harlot. (Metaphorically.) It remains debauched, like a syphilis-ridden hag, because those who have attached themselves like crabs into its stinking knickers don’t understand that they cannot continue to get away with what their predecessors have done for so very, very long.
Here endeth the lesson.
Today, Sir Roger celebrates his 1,000th post in 1277 days – or exactly 3½ years – since the inaugural, ungainly, embarrassing post – Minister von Rock Opens Australian Refujesus Exhibition – on 15 October 2006. Since then he has improved marginally, been mentioned in the Press and on numerous websites, and been included in the top 40 blog posts for 2007 at On Line Opinion.
He’s been #1 on Google for over three years and, better than that, he’s consistently beaten out the #2, his arch enemy immi.gov.
He won the Australian election, unseating the sitting Prime Minister in the process, and caused a landslide in the US Presidential elections. Perhaps more importantly he got rid of Mick Keelty.
He’s been congratulated by some of the people he most respects including Richard Neville, Stephen Poole and Club Troppo collectively.
He’s been threatened with the big government stick of the Crimes Act by silly old Immigration Dept clown, Bob Correll, and survived. In fact possibly Sir Roger’s proudest moment was his reply to Bob and the response that received, especially from Ken Parish who Sir Roger likes to think still had his marbles when he called it “quite possibly the best piece of passionate, angry polemic I’ve ever read, certainly on a blog. ‘Roger Migently’ is roused to extraordinary heights of eloquence.”
Ah, the olden, golden days …
Sir Roger has attracted 127,838 spam comments, some of which he has celebrated. (Sorry, 127,839 127,840 127,841 127,842 . . . . )
And it all happened because Howard and Beazley were in a race to the bottom to hijack Australian values from the people who really own them.
Us.
And the giant Sir Roger was roused to fight.
So Sir Roger has waited a few days since Post #999, hoping for inspiration befitting the global significance of this occasion, wishing once again to elevate himself to the heights of grandiloquence of which he was once capable.
And then, you know, he realised that self-aggrandisement was out of place.
Instead, his deeply-felt gratitude, especially to his readers, yearns for expression.
It is simple, open, soul-bearing transparency that is called for.
And so he has chosen to mark this special moment in an understated way with a simple yet gloriously compelling message which quietly expresses his beliefs. This is the sauce of Sir Roger’s strength, his balm and succor:
Produced by TheThinkingAtheist.com
May the Sauce be with you and may His Noodly Appendage be upon you and guide you safely through pirate-infested waters.
RAmen!
After all the hard work of so many people Australian politics is looking like Howard Lite, iSuck 2.0 déjà vu all over again. Boat people – “Aaaaarrrggghh! Foreigners! Tough on Queue-jumpers [but not on the causes of queue-jumpers]”.
“Let’s pretend to be doing something about climate change. We have to do something. We have to do something. I know! Let’s play tiddlywinks! That’s “something”. Hey, youse guys, the world is going to burn to a cinder unless we do something about it! So what we’re doing is, we’re playing tiddlywinks. If you don’t play tiddlywinks too, the world is going to burn to a cinder.”
“Okay, well, um … wait on … we don’t believe in tiddlywinks but we’ll play if Johnno and Wayne don’t have to play but you promise they will win.”
“But if Johnno and Wayne don’t play the world will burn to a crisp! No-one will win!”
“Okay, well…well…well get fuckin’ stuffed then! Let the world burn for all we fuckin’ care! … Fuckin’ lower class upstarts! Fuckin’ fairy eggheads!”
Palestine.
Israel.
Obama (what a fucking disappointment).
Russia.
Burma.
Sri Lanka.
China,
Tibet.
Fucking arrogant, corrupt and criminally-incompetent Indonesian politicians, bureaucrats, police and judges.
Walls everywhere.
Hatred.
Religious madmen in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia.
And the United States, which is terminally fucked in the collective head.
Democracy movements being crushed everywhere.
Freedoms, rights and privacy being shredded even – especially – by the good old Brits, eh, what?
Stupid global refusal to listen, based on creaking, long-ago-discredited, Industrial-Revolution-era social-political-religious theories that date back – even in their most recent versions – more than 200 years in the West, and on 4000-year-old, crazy, murderous, hate-filled, tribalist, racist, desert-engendered cruel religious fantasies in the rest of the world.
The hopes of “peace and love” from the last five decades crumbling like the naïve hallucinations they so pitiably were.
Young people who will “look after” things in a few years unable to think or care about anything but how some fake and shallow, talentless celebrity flashed her cunt, and what eyeshadow to wear …
And the people who actually care. the people with answers, who could possibly do something about it all, are sneered at and ridiculed.
It’s enough to make you want to just give up and forget it all and look at some funny cat video.
Magna Carta 15 June 1215
We know where we stand on a Bill of Rights and we could argue for it but we don’t think we need to any more. John Howard has argued against it and that’s just about enough for us. The little shit has been so wrong about almost everything he has touched as he blundered cynically and sycophantically through his political career that anything he is against is almost certain to be the right thing to do.
…“ Mr Howard said MPs should not hand their decision-making powers to “unelected judges accountable to no-one”.
Just put this beside, say, Howard’s support for Guantánamo and the US military commissions – both legal black holes accountable to no-one but the “unitary Executive”.
Or put it beside the terrorism laws his government introduced, the rolling back of eight centuries of habeas corpus, the fact that the security forces and selected judges and magistrates were/are accountable for their actions not to Parliament and indeed to no-one but the Cabinet ministers, in secret.
The people have no right to know what they are up to. In fact knowing what they are up to, reporting what they are up to or probably even asking what they are up to could land you in gaol. This situation borders on (if it is not already) oligarchy. It is the sort of thing that the French Revolution was fought over, and that the Enlightenment was all about. And it is okay with John Howard.
Actually … where do “the people” fit in, for John Howard?
The idea that a Bill of Rights tears apart the fabric of civil society is a monstrous, cynical joke. Our entire legal and political system is based on bills of rights of one kind or another, in one way or another.
Magna Carta was a Bill of Rights; the English Parliament passed the Petition of Right in May 1628 which referred to rights secured in the reign of Edward III three centuries earlier:
IV. And in the eight-and-twentieth year of the reign of King Edward III, it was declared and enacted by authority of parliament, that no man, of what estate or condition that he be, should be put out of his land or tenements, nor taken, nor imprisoned, nor disinherited nor put to death without being brought to answer by due process of law.
V. Nevertheless, against the tenor of the said statutes, and other the good laws and statutes of your realm to that end provided, divers of your subjects have of late been imprisoned without any cause showed; and when for their deliverance they were brought before your justices by your Majesty’s writs of habeas corpus, there to undergo and receive as the court should order, and their keepers commanded to certify the causes of their detainer, no cause was certified, but that they were detained by your Majesty’s special command, signified by the lords of your Privy Council, and yet were returned back to several prisons, without being charged with anything to which they might make answer according to the law.
[ … ]
VII. And whereas also by authority of parliament, in the five-and-twentieth year of the reign of King Edward III, it is declared and enacted, that no man shall be forejudged of life or limb against the form of the Great Charter and the law of the land; and by the said Great Charter and other the laws and statutes of this your realm, no man ought to be adjudged to death but by the laws established in this your realm, either by the customs of the same realm, or by acts of parliament: and whereas no offender of what kind soever is exempted from the proceedings to be used, and punishments to be inflicted by the laws and statutes of this your realm; nevertheless of late time divers commissions under your Majesty’s great seal have issued forth, by which certain persons have been assigned and appointed commissioners with power and authority to proceed within the land, according to the justice of martial law, against such soldiers or mariners, or other dissolute persons joining with them, as should commit any murder, robbery, felony, mutiny, or other outrage or misdemeanor whatsoever, and by such summary course and order as is agreeable to martial law, and is used in armies in time of war, to proceed to the trial and condemnation of such offenders, and them to cause to be executed and put to death according to the law martial.
The Howard/Ruddock terrorism laws amount to this description of martial law (and in fact to terrorism themselves). Howard bulldozed all of these hard-fought rights and liberties, the history and traditions of law. And why? Because he believes in his heart that the people can’t be trusted with their own lives? Can’t be trusted with power? That power should remain in the hands of those special few who “understand” it? That rights ought not be defined but should be secret privileges that are in the gift of the few, to be dispensed as the favours of a benevolent ruling elite?
Well, as long as we do have our constitution they are not privileges and they are not in his gift to dispense to the deserving and the compliant and the mates. They are ours and we want them written down and enshrined so that people such as Howard — like the pigs in Animal Farm — can’t take them away.
Amnesty’s human rights act campaign coordinator Jenny Leong says …
“We need to remember that it was under the Howard government that so many of the human rights of this country and our reputation internationally for respecting human rights were eroded,”
she told ABC News Online.
The French declared the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789.
The first four Articles are:
1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.
2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.
3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.
4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.
In 1791 Thomas Paine wrote in Rights of Man:
“ The fact, therefore, must be that the individuals, themselves, each, in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.
It is essential to our freedom as individuals and as communities that this sentiment is remembered and written in stone. The agreement by all the people together to form a government and that this government belongs entirely to the people, that political parties are the servants of the people’s government and are not its owners, is the core of our democracy and freedom from tyranny.
So this time it’s the turn of Matthew Johns, poster boy for Rugby League – the second official poster boy for Rugby League to be shamed within weeks – and regular on the cross-dressing Footy Show.
When I was eleven years old my best friend was a catholic boy called Barry. Every Saturday afternoon we would go to the matinee at the old Capitol Theatre (1/9d up stairs front circle, or “up front” as we’d say). Value for money back then. On the way home Barry would pop into St Mary’s to do his confession and out he would bounce, all freshly forgiven and ready to sin again with impunity. I, incredulous, asked him about this and his opinion was that he could sin as much as he liked, knowing he would be forgiven next Saturday.
I thought of this yesterday as I watched Matthew Johns writhing uncomfortably with the week’s revelations of his ‘sex romp’ in New Zealand some years ago.
It seemed there was a pattern amongst many people, particularly footballers, who do whatever they like, knowing that all they need to do is effect a display of contrition and remorse and everyone will forgive you or at least get over it soon enough.
“ It caused all parties enormous pain and embarrassment,” [said Andrew Johns]. “For me personally, it’s put my family through enormous anguish and embarrassment, and has once again, and for that I can’t say ‘sorry’ enough. But the police did investigate the situation at the time, the allegation, and there were no charges laid. But there has been a lot of pain and embarrassment to a lot of people.”¹
So forget the girl. We should feel sorry for Andrew. He’s upset.
Note the carefully spin-doctored “form of words”. First, he hasn’t actually apologised. He hasn’t even said “sorry”. He has said he can’t say it enough. The question remains, can he say it at all? Does he express regret? Perhaps, but only to his family. He hasn’t expressed regret for the act itself, for his behaviour, for his attitude to the girl or his apparently misogynistic attitude to women generally.
This type of non-apology “apology” is supposed to “do”, is supposed to satisfy the criticism. It addresses nothing at all. Doesn’t have to, of course. As Matthew Johns says, it was only an “allegation” which he hasn’t denied, there were no complaints, no charges laid, no case to answer. He owes nothing to anyone.
And just wait…if the Four Corners story makes things a little more uncomfortable for him, expect to see him popping up on Australian Story in full PR-managed mode to tell “his side of the story”.
Imagine him struggling to hold back the tears as he tells of the stresses of growing up under the aura of a far-more-famous-and-better-footballer-brother, Joey; trying to grow up to be your own man when your brother is so much bigger and stronger and better than you; coping with the stresses of dealing with Joey’s own emotional and drug problems.
I’m already sorry for him, so sympathetic and forgiving…and I haven’t even seen the [non-existent but potential] program yet.
As far as we know, there’s been no serious impact on Matthew Johns personally. He hasn’t lost any money, or his job, over his multiply-gismic escapade. There is, in fact, probably some grudging, if unacknowledged, envy, amongst a large number of men.
¹ UPDATES:
1. We find other sources have quoted Johns as saying, “I am very sorry for all the trauma and embarrassment this has caused for everyone, but particularly for my family…
2. He did lose his job on Channel 9.
What is generally lost in the coverage of these regularly revealed scandals is the question,
“What is Rugby League REALLY?”
What is it about? Really? What are kids learning about our culture in this “family game”? The conclusion an objective observer might reach, simply on the evidence of the behaviour of those who play it professionally, is that it is mostly about exaggeratedly blokey masculinity, violence and more or less violent sex – sex that is, clearly, at the very least hostile and aggressive to women and I think probably has the same attitude and intent as rape in war.
It does seem, from the number of times we hear about these episodes, that a team of Rugby League players having a group-fuck is not unusual, not even a ritual or a rite of passage. It seems to be just what you do when you’re away from home together.
Pizza and a gang-bang.
The question I’d like to ask Matthew Johns and anyone else who enjoys these sex romps is,
“How young do you think your own daughter will be when she has her first group fuck with a rugby league football team? 16? 18? Will you watch? Will you join in?”
Or to put it another way,
“If you saw your 18 year old daughter being taken up to a hotel room by 15 Rugby League players, what would you think and what would you do? Would you ask if you could watch, or would you join in?”
What you might also wonder is, is it possible that the only way these blokey “teammates” – or team members who mate – can contrive to have sex with each other in a marginally acceptable way is to mingle their semen together in a vessel who provides a façade of heterosexuality to the inherent homosexuality of the activity.
For myself, I can’t imagine the attraction of sticking my dick in amongst the combined gism of any number of other men, footballers or not, not even Matthew Johns’s cum. I think I would probably throw up.
But perhaps that would get a good belly laugh from Matthew Johns.
