Sunday Roast

Sunday Roast

Godly Thoughts for Sunday

“ 

And now, today, we grieve for four young men [US Marines murdered in El Salvador] taken from us too soon. And we receive them in death as they were on the last night of their lives, together and following a radiant light — following it toward heaven, toward home. And if we reach — or when we reach — heaven’s scenes, we truly will find it guarded by…

…wait for it…

…we truly will find it guarded by United States marines.
– [President Ronald Reagan, June 22, 1985]

So that’s something to look forward to.

“ I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do.

When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”
– [Stephen Roberts]

 

“ I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian God may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more often likely to be foolish than sensible.”

– [Bertrand Russell]

 

“ We have just enough religion to make us hate but not enough religion to make us love one another”
– [Jonathan Swift]

 

“ When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.”

– [Oscar Wilde]

Drugs are Bad

Drugs are Bad

 M’Kay?

 I mean, some drugs are bad. Just bad. 
Some drugs are good, like medicine.

Some drugs, well, they’re legal even if they kill you, like cigarettes, or, like alcohol, kill other people you run into. But drugs drugs are just B-A-D. Inherently. In and of themselves. Drugs are morally bad. M’Kay?

After all, drugs cause crime. Drugs cause illness. Drugs cause violence and even death – by overdoses and suicides. Drugs cause the breakup of families and relationships.

Drugs cost the economy billions of dollars a year and strain the health care and welfare systems to breaking point.
Actually, to be more precise, illegal drugs cost the economy billions of dollars a year and strain the health care and welfare systems to breaking point.

So how come drugs like heroin and cocaine cause so much crime and devastation? Do drugs really make good people evil?
Consider that the real cause of all of the crime, illness, destroyed relationships and death is the fact that the drugs are illegal.
The reason drug addicts steal and burglarise is that the drugs cost so much that to buy them they have to obtain the money for them illegally.

The reason for the illness is that the drug addicts are spending all of their money on drugs and not on nutritious food or health care.

The reason for the destroyed relationships is that financial worries, illness and preoccupation with obtaining the drugs compound to make proper relationships virtually impossible.

The reason that people die from overdoses is that because there is so much money in the drugs, dealers can make even more by “cutting” them. They can be cut several times between the original importer and the end user, with a variety of substances. Sometimes the drugs are cut with caustic chemicals. In any case, addicts can’t know how pure the drug is that they are using. When they take their normal dose of a sample that they are unaware is unusually pure, it can kill them.

Why do addicts commit suicide? At least one of the reasons must be that they feel hopelessly trapped in the squalor of a desperate downward spiral from which they can see no possible escape.

Does all this make sense? Well, we know of at least one person who was (is?) a heroin addict. When we heard about her she had a high-flying corporate job at boardroom level. Together, she and her husband were very well off indeed. She had two daughters at an exclusive private school. She was on the school council. And she took her heroin hit every morning before leaving for work. No-one was ever the wiser and it never interfered with her performance at work.

Why didn’t she, too, descend into the hell that other junkies do? The answer is, she could afford the drug. On her income the cost was no big deal at all. She could afford to make sure that the drugs she bought were of consistent quality.

And, anecdotally, she is only one of thousands of similarly effective, perfectly functional heroin addicts in Australia, many of whom are said to be Canberra public servants.

So why are the drugs so expensive? First: because they are illegal; second because there is a strong demand. (To some extent their illegality drives demand; the thrill of the naughtiness, at least in the early experimental stage, can have appeal for rebellious young people.)

The illegality drives up the price. Law enforcement measures make the production and transport of the drugs more and more difficult. Concealment becomes more and more expensive, and the inducements for the producers and couriers need to be big enough for them to be willing to take the risks of death or imprisonment. This pushes up the street price which pushes up the crime statistics. The better the cartels become at hiding their trade, the more the enforcement agencies have to lift their abilities to detect and intercept it. The better the agencies get, the higher the risk and so the higher the price. The better the agencies get, the more limited the supply and so the higher the price.

All of this because “Drugs are bad, M’Kay?” Morally bad. As an article of faith.

Illegal drugs constitute an industry which depends entirely on their illegality. It is in the interests of the drug criminals that drugs are illegal because that is how and why they make such enormous amounts of money.

But it is not a one-sided industry. It is equally in the interests of the enforcement agencies that the drugs be illegal. Their operations have exploded in size in recent decades. Vast empires, both governmental and private, have been built which employ enormous numbers of people all over the world and infuse huge amounts of money into both large and small countries. This money is used to bribe and control tinpot dictatorships and timorous democracies. The war on drugs is used, particularly by the US government, to leverage compliant trade deals throughout the world.

You will not find a drug baron calling for the relaxation of drug laws. In fact they are more likely to be clandestinely buying influence in the corridors of power to tighten the laws. Nor are you going to find their adversaries, the anti-drug czars, expressing an interest in loosening their own powers or reducing the size of their empires.

And of course the amount of money involved leads to breathtaking levels of corruption of both private and government officials, which naturally compromises the quality of governance where it matters most.

For players on both sides it is “a nice little earner”… at the expense of poor people all over the world; stupid poor people in the West, desperate poor people in the third world.

But there is a very nasty side to the illegal drug trade.

In Colombia the cocaine trade funds the FARC guerilla movement’s terror and kidnapping operations. The best way to cripple the FARC would in fact be to decriminalise cocaine worldwide.

In Afghanistan the worldwide illegality of heroin, with its huge market, is what is fuelling and funding the Taliban, resistance to democracy and ultimately world-wide Islamist terrorism. The value of the illicit poppy crops makes it worth the warlords’ resisting the ISAF in Afghanistan. It is in part what leads to the killing of Australian and other nations’ soldiers.

Decriminalising heroin would starve the trade of oxygen.

We are not holding our breath. But any trade depends on supply and demand.

What about demand? This is the truly hard question, the really confronting question.
No trade can survive without demand. The illicit drug trade could never survive if the drugs were merely expensive. People have to want them and want them bad.

So what is it about our society and our culture that so many people so desperately want whatever they get from these drugs?
Don’t know. It probably has something to do with alienation, dehumanisation of our societies and our economic systems.
Perhaps Erich Fromm¹ has a clue:

Could it be that the middle-class life of prosperity, while satisfying our material needs leaves us with a feeling of intense boredom, and that suicide and alcoholism are pathological ways to escape from this boredom. Could it be that…[this is] a drastic illustration for the truth of the statement that “man lives not by bread alone,” and that…modern civilization fails to satisfy profound needs in man?
[ … ]
It is the conflict between two principles of value: that between the world of things, and their amassment, and the world of life and its productivity.
[ … ]
Science, business, politics, have lost all foundations and proportions which make sense humanly. We live in figures and abstractions; since nothing is concrete, nothing is real…Man has been thrown out from any definite place whence he can overlook and manage his life and the life of society. He is driven faster and faster by the forces which originally were created by him. In this wild whirl he thinks, figures, busy with abstractions, more and more remote from concrete life.
[ … ]
… automatons, who follow without force, who are guided without leaders, who make machines which act like men and produce men who act like machines; men, whose reason deteriorates while their intelligence rises, thus creating the dangerous situation of equipping man with the greatest material power without the wisdom to use it.

Whatever, it is not a question that will ever be addressed politically. It is not a question we as a society want to ask, let alone answer, because it would require such adjustment, such effort, such an acceptance of responsibility, such reassessment of who we are that there is no political or social will to address it. Especially when we have our eyes firmly fixed on “the plasma”, or whatever must-keep-up status bauble comes next. And so we will have more of the same and worse.

And we will continue to slump back into the comfort of our self-serving myths.

And we will continue to blame and punish and contemn the poor, stupid, desperate victims, even though in our refusal to abandon our righteousness, in our refusal to see things as they are, and in our refusal to tackle the real questions, we make ourselves the true and self-inflicted victims. 

M’Kay?

¹Erich Fromm, The Sane Society

The Ancient Marinara

The Ancient Marinara

 

He’s a Legend, and our friend

 

We wish he wouldn’t describe himself as “ancient”. That tends to put us at the edge of a category we fiercely resist.

Richard Neville, one of the founders of homepagedaily.com, was the infamous, notorious publisher and editor of Oz Magazine.and author of Hippie Hippie ShakePlay Power, amongst many others. Unrehabilitated 60s icon, iconoclast and futurist. And our friend, or at least our supporter and adviser, in the earlier and more threatened days of the Ministry of Mateship and Fair Dinkum Values, aka ‘ValuesAustralia’.

Here he is with chilling news on the grim future for the globally-heated rich:

Happy Saturnalia

Happy Saturnalia

 

Absolute relaxation and unrestrained merriment 

 

 This time of year is a traditional celebration of the birth of an extraordinary man – a long-haired mystic who revealed the secrets of the universe and forever changed the way we see the world. He is one of the most universally revered historical figures of all time.

Yes, 25 December (in the “Old Style“) is the birthday of Sir Isaac Newton.

His birthday was retrospectively celebrated in antiquity by the Romans in the festival of Saturnus, or the Saturnalia

Or perhaps the birthday of Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun. Other cultures also celebrated the winter solstice as Yule, or the birthdays of various gods.

The Romans attributed to the god Saturnus the introduction of agriculture and the arts of civilized life. Falling towards the end of December, at the season when the agricultural labours of the year were fully completed, it was celebrated in ancient times by the rustic population as a sort of joyous harvest-home, and in every age was viewed by all classes of the community as a period of absolute relaxation and unrestrained merriment.

 

During its continuance no public business could be transacted, the law courts were closed, the schools kept holiday, to commence a war was impious, to punish a malefactor involved pollution. Special indulgences were granted to the slaves of each domestic establishment; they were relieved from all ordinary toils, were permitted to wear the pileus, the badge of freedom, were granted full freedom of speech, partook of a banquet attired in the clothes of their masters, and were waited upon by them at table.

 

All ranks devoted themselves to feasting and mirth, presents were exchanged among friends, cerei or wax tapers being the common offering of the more humble to their superiors, and crowds thronged the streets.

Seems oddly familiar…

It was Newton who formalised the importance of gravity in the motion of the planets and his laws remain largely the basis on which today we are able to compute the trajectories and forces to send spacecraft to explore our solar system. (with a little help from Einstein)

One of these craft, Cassini, has been exploring Saturn and its moons and sending back amazing images. Last year it sent back this extraordinary [mosaic] image:

You will be able to notice this:

Interior to the G ring and above the brighter main rings is the pale dot of Earth. Cassini views its point of origin from over a billion kilometers (and close to a billion miles) away in the icy depths of the outer solar system.

 

This image of Saturn is eerily reminiscent of a monument to Newton that was never built.

 

Étienne-Louis Boullée was a visionary French neoclassical architect whose work greatly influenced contemporary architects and is still influential today… His style was most notably exemplified in his proposal for a cenotaph for the English scientist Isaac Newton, which would have taken the form of a sphere 150 m (500 ft) high embedded in a circular base topped with cypress trees. Though the structure was never built, its design was engraved and circulated widely in professional circles.

So Happy Saturnalia to one and all!

And as our special seasonal gift to you, here are two videos to put a smile on the face of you, your friends and family:

 

Germany vs Greece: The Millennial Match

 

 

Women: Know Your Limits

  

 

Hi …

Hi …

Hi!

 

 

Hi Hi!

 

 (gulp)

Hi hi ho!

(gulp)

Hip! Hip! Hooray!

The national result, the result in Bennelong and the role the Greens played in getting Labor over the line are a clear enough repudiation of Howard’s political ideology.

Thanks to Possum, to the Pollbludger, to Ozpolitics, to Mumble and to Simon Jackman.

But especially thanks to Possum (whose site now sports the baseball bat) for helping to keep us sane through the scary last days.

So we’d just like to say to our old mate and penpal, Bob Correll:

We’re sorry, Bob that you’ll have to deal with the fact that it was largely your own hard work, in DEWR and as Deputy Secretary in DIC, that was responsible for so much of the swing against the government.

I’m sure you’ll be more than aware of just what effective and efficient services are provided to people in search of employment – as we expect you shortly to be – by CentreLink and the Job Network Members you helped to set up. (Perhaps you could show your mate Mick Keelty how to get there.)

So vale, Bob, old mate.

Such Is Life

Such Is Life

“Unemployed at last!”

 

 We think this is the best Australian novel ever written. Yes, we know there are many contenders and perhaps The Tree of Man comes a close second.

But to us, at least, Such Is Life by “Tom Collins” (Joseph Furphy), published in 1903, is the best literary expression of enduring Australian values and character.

The colour and variety of the characters; Furphy’s obvious affection for the people who sparsely, but so vibrantly, populate the bush; the good-humoured, fatalistic, attitude to the daily struggle; the disrespect for authority (now on the brink of extinction); the sense of the Australian bush which is not so much read as absorbed from the pages; the hilariously laconic humour; and the story-telling genius of the author; all of this would be enough.

But most of all we like Furphy’s own description of the book:

‘temper, democratic;
bias, offensively Australian’.

In fact this is so perfect that we want it for our own motto. Indeed, why not for Australia’s motto?

 

 

The 1956 dustjacket says:

” Such Is Life cannot be described: it has to be read. And when it has been read it will be read again for the pleasure that its human greatness and its subtle craftsmanship give.

 

“First published in 1903, this book is an Australian classic whose stature has grown with the years, whose intricacies and strength have been the subject of endless discussions and literary essays. ‘Tom Collins’ (who was Joseph Furphy) is widely held to be the greatest and most individual of Australian writers – partly, perhaps, because his ideals are those which all true democrats most resolutely cherish.

 

… in stressing its Australian core we must not forget that it is also unique in English literature. The author’s genius soars above accepted rules and forms, creating in rare and beautiful language a work that is all of life as he knew it.

 

“No less great as a man than as a writer, Tom Collins wrote with the complete sincerity of one whose independence of mind and essential honesty made him discard all forms of sham. Wit, shrewd observation and delicious humour are blended in this richly entertaining book to give an illuminating picture of humanity and of Australia.”

What makes this novel so relevant today? In the light of Tony Abbott’s “excellent” advice about WorkChoices’ protections, it’s the first line of Such Is Life:

Unemployed at last!