Most of us are aware that Senator Cory Bernardi has an on-line petition, "Free Speech Petition" at http://www.corybernardi.com/18c_petition.

The petition seeks for parliament to remove the most troubling words from section 18 C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, the words being "offend" and "insult". This would still leave the words "humiliate" and "intimidate" in the section, which would operate as before.

Is this a step forward, or this this managed dissent?
The answer is: both. It is a step forward, as eliminating these words would knock down almost all of the problematic cases from the Bolt case to the University student ones. It is thus worth supporting for that reason.

However, there is weighty opinion that has been made repeatedly in The Australian by legal commentators, that the entire section needs to go. A good book arguing for more comprehensive reforms, especially to defences, is No Offence Intended: Why Section 18 C is Wrong (2016).

I think the presently "offended" ethnics will only now claim that they are "humiliated." There is only a thin line between being offended and being humiliated, and today, all those offended will say that they are also humiliated, and naturally intimidated, because the bar is very low in the politically correct landscape.

Democracy Needs Divine Intervention
In 1887 the Scottish history Professor Alexander Tytler, at Edinburgh University, speaking about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2000 years earlier, (was attributed to have said-ed) the average age of the world's greatest civilisations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years.

"During those 200 years these nations always progressed through the following sequence:
from bondage to spiritual faith,
from spiritual faith to great courage,
from Courage to Liberty,
from liberty to abundance,
from abundance to complacency,
from complacency to apathy,
from apathy to dependence,
from dependence back into bondage".

The essence of free speech is the ability of a person to be able to publicly express an opinion, informed or otherwise, true or false, on matters of local, national and international importance, without hindrance. Defenders of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, such as Meredith Doig, President of the Rationalist Society of Australia Inc. (‘Dealing with the contentious matter of 18C’, Sydney Morning Herald, 25/8) decline to uphold this ideal and produce specious arguments to justify their position.

There is no obligation on government whatever to ‘balance’ liberty against ‘equality’. The latter is an arithmetical term foolishly invoked to mask the agendas of interested parties. Equity is the appropriate term to use; and it does not collide with the defence of intellectual freedom.

The Federal government spending on Indigenous affairs is an astonishing $5.9 billion a year, but most of this money is failing to help Aborigines, according to a report published by the Centre for Independent Studies. (The Australian, August 23, 2016, p.1) The study found that less than 10 percent of 1082 programmes had been subjected to proper evaluation to determine their effectiveness.

The 1082 programmes are “just the tip of the iceberg.” And the figure will increase once non-indigenous NG0 spending in the indigenous sector, and university spending is added, which would add billions.

A recent delightful story of childhood resourcefulness and intelligence was published in The Australian (August 22, 2016, p. 15), “Saved by Dr Google.” A 13-year-old contracted a serious illness that devastated her, putting her in a hospital bed. Doctors did numerous tests, and concluded that she had a severe cause of chronic fatigue syndrome. However, she spent her time researching on the internet and eventually discovered a research paper describing a girl with the same condition as her: pandysautonomia.

While this is all incredible, if one goes to Google and researches pandysautonomia one will find that it is a rare auto-immune autonomic neuropathy, and has occurred in cases of girls receiving the HPV (cervical cancer) vaccine. Although the probability of this effect may be low, this little girl could not have anticipated that her body would have responded in this way. Hence, given the probability of such catastrophic health effects, even if low in probability, people should have the right of choice regarding vaccines, and not be beaten by the Centrelink whip.

Jennifer Oriel (“Get Up and Be More Transparent, Mr Soros.” The Australian, August 22, 2016, p. 12) comments on the hacking of George Soros’ files. The socialist billionaire has been shown in these files to have actively used his transnational network to put pressure on governments for mass migration and open borders and to target individuals criticising Islam. He acted, through his Open Society Foundation, to undermine politicians from the Right.

In general: “Soros-affiliated organisations follow a well-worn political and rhetorical strategy updated for the digital age. Like the socialists and communists of old, they attack liberal democracy by delegitimising the classically liberal values of individualism, free speech, logical argumentation and public reason. They attack democratic states by advocating a porous border policy, reframing illegal immigrants as refugees and degrading critics of totalitarian tendencies such as Islamism in orchestrated campaigns of pc censorship.”

Here’s the question: Did large Chinese companies, in league with their government, deliberately intend to harm the New Zealand and Australian economies by stockpiling products, in order to then purchase devalued land and commodities at a cut rate?

For several years, there have been whispers in New Zealand that farmers are becoming “tenants in their own land.” As Chinese companies move in more and more, carving out and buying for themselves swathes of New Zealand farmland (and Australian, too), those concerns are growing louder.
We New Zealanders are few in number but have slogged it out over the past century and a half to become the largest dairy exporter on Earth—sending out 95 percent of our product. Our dairy industry is critical to our economy. The livelihood of our country depends, to a great deal, on how well our farms do. Judging by what has been happening of late, that’s not so well at all.

Everyone knows that I am the bad-tempered and pessimistic one at this site. But is that necessarily a bad thing? Could this entire self-help cult of positive thinking actually be wrong?
An article by Zaria Gorvett, “Why it pays to be Grumpy and Bad-Tempered” August 10, 2016, puts the case against the self-help ideology. Cynics actually have more stable marriages, higher earnings and live longer. Cranks turn out to often be superior at negotiating.

Good moods and optimism comes at a cost. It can make one gullible and blind to problems that the pessimist, one who is sceptical about human goodness, will pick up on in a flash. The fact is, our emotions, including the so-called negative ones, evolved with mankind, and have survival value. Anger, even hatred, can in various circumstances, save one’s life. Psychological experiments testing the ability of anger versus sadness in creativity have found that anger wins hands down as it “prepares the body to mobilise resources.”

I will let you in on a little secret, since there is just you and me and no-one else listening in – I have a morbid interest in the so-called grand conspiracy theory that the super-elites are planning to wipe out most of the human race. I, of course, don’t believe this, but the case has been put by excited folk on the internet. Usually they take out of context the words of high-flyers such as Bill Gates, about the need to reduce human population numbers, and say that he is advocating some plan of high tech genocide, probably using vaccines: https://archive.org/details/WipeOutHumans-BillGates-VaccinesArebestWayToDepopulatePlanet.

I grant, as my mother has documented in article after article at this site, that vaccines have negative consequences. But I seriously doubt whether anyone attempting to genocide the world would choose such a slow method, where genetically engineered diseases, such as a new strain of super-small pox, would take out 95 percent of humanity overnight.
So, I’m sorry; I dislike Bill Gates as much as the next man and his dog, but I just don’t follow my fellow conspiracy theorists in seeing him pursuing that agenda.

It is disappointing that both sides (sic) of politics support Getup and the Soros initiatives. Our Nation does not belong to us (the people), thanks to the two party political system. It has been handed over to the elite internationalist with our politicians playing the public as fools for the highest bidder.

Jennifer Oriel, The Australian, 22/8/2016.
In perhaps the biggest political scandal since WikiLeaks, a group of hackers has dumped hundreds of files exposing the influence of socialist billionaire George Soros on Western politics.
The files show Soros has established a transnational network that pressures governments to adopt high immigration targets and porous border policies that could pose a challenge to legitimate state sovereignty. His Open Society Foundations target individuals who criticise ­Islamism and seek to influence the outcome of national elections by undermining Right-leaning politicians. The Australian arm of the Soros network is GetUp!.
GetUp! was established by ­activists Jeremy Heimans and David Madden with funding from Soros. The Labor-affiliated Construction Forestry Mining Energy Union donated $1.1 million to the group. Bill Shorten and John Hewson are former board members. A major funder listed on its 2014-15 Australian Electoral Commission expenditure return is Avaaz, the US GetUp! ­affiliate that has received copious amounts of funding from Soros networks.
Like most NGOs, GetUp! claims to be independent from political parties. Like many NGOs, however, it has close ties to the Left. As Sharri Markson ­revealed in this paper, GetUp! chairwoman Sarah Maddison urged people to vote for the Greens in the past federal election.
In the wake of the election, GetUp!’s Paul Oosting revealed its campaign strategy was to target conservative MPs to reduce their influence. Immigration Minister Peter Dutton was a primary GetUp! target. In Tasmania, the organisation spent up to $500,000 to unseat Andrew Nikolic and forked out $140,000 on campaign advertising alone.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald 23 August 2016, Senator Pauline Hanson had just two words to say when she arrived at Parliament House: "I'm back."
 
Senator Hanson joined her new colleagues on Tuesday for what is known as 'Senate school' - a guide to the procedures and practices that govern the upper house.

In an article that most of us would have trouble understanding, we may find some interesting material about the possible ill-effects of vaccines: S. Colafrancesco (et al.), “Human Papilloma Virus Vaccine and Primary Ovarian Failure: Another Facet of the Autoimmune/Inflammatory Syndrome Induced by Adjuvants,” American Journal of Reproductive Immunology, vol. 70, 2013, pp. 309-316.

The paper examined cases of women suffering from post-vaccination autoimmune phenomena, often caused by an immune-based inflammatory syndrome produced by adjuvants (chemicals which allegedly make the body produce a stronger immune response, such as aluminum or aluminum salts). This has occurred after the administration of the HPV vaccine.

Source: On Line Opinion,  19 August 2016
Louis O'Neill, who is studying writing at Macquarie University defended his right to freedom of speech: 

“Frequently I find myself holding what one might consider a politically incorrect opinion, such as having scorn for Islam, disagreeing with myths peddled by the third wave feminist movement or finding no legitimacy in the claims of the black lives matter movement.
 
As a result my adversaries are more than ready to deviate from the laws of discourse, veering off into ad hominem, red herring or appeal to emotion fallacies. The legitimacy of my political viewpoint is often times devalued, as I occupy the “privileged” end of the spectrum, being a heterosexual white male, and so I'm told that I mustn't speak on issues which aren't specifically related to my own demographic.
 
Sometimes the sanctimony of my ideological combatants is so abundant that they feel they need not even engage further in conversation once I've pushed their buttons enough.
 
Well to them I say, if your idea cannot withstand the corrosive qualities of informed conversation, then your idea is not one worth having. We must herald logic as the great sieve through which we may push idiocy and illogicality, and allow the juices of truth to percolate from it…”
 
Read further here … http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=18460

Of course the Liberal Party’s ‘Beliefs’ are changing from their 1949 ‘Beliefs’, but they still insist (according to their website) on their belief in:
 
We Believe:

“In those most basic freedoms of parliamentary democracy - the freedom of thought, worship, speech and association.”
Found here,  https://www.liberal.org.au/our-beliefs

The Coalition’s second most senior figure in the Senate insists the government won’t be supporting a move by one of its backbenchers to change race hate speech laws.
Liberal senator Cory Bernardi has thrown down the gauntlet to his colleagues, vowing to use the first week of the new parliament to introduce a private bill that seeks to remove the words ‘offend’ and ‘insult’ from section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.
The government’s position was very clear, Finance Minister Mathias Cormann told ABC radio on Thursday 18 August 2016: ‘We will not initiate or support any changes … it’s a debate we had two years ago.’
 
In a communication to one of our politicians, Wallace Klinck of Canada had this to say:
 

The Rand Corporation has released a report about the nature of a possible war between China and the United States, saying that such a war would be “intense, destructive, and protracted,” as China is fast closing the technological gap. Indeed, with globalisation many crucial spare parts and goods the US would need are now “made in China.”

My guess is that the US under Hillary Clinton, who will continue the globalisation programme, will lose. They will run out of steam, assuming nukes are not fired. That is, if they even work.

The chattering class in Australia have had to consider the “unthinkable,” having a glazed-eye cargo cult mentality towards China. If China owns Australia’s basic infrastructure, perhaps in a war China may decide to shut down Australia. Really? It took some time for our Asianised experts to get an infinitesimal of common sense reality.

The more difficult question though is what happens in an all-out China war, if Australia does not join with China against the US: how will Chinese people in Australia be dealt with? Will they be placed in camps, as many Germans and Japanese were in WWII?

The ruling elites are worried about anti-immigration sentiment, as has come to be symbolically, and now parliamentary represented in the form of one, Pauline Hanson. Thus, The Weekend Australian, August 6-7, 2016, p. 4, trots out the same tired old line that it has been pushing since that red Australian mast head was put on their newspaper, “Immigration ‘A Key to Our Prosperity.’” Scott Morrison is quoted, obviously enough, also pushing this line.

And then there is the human interest support story that always goes with this sort of propaganda. Here we will have a migrant who is either: (1) a super-achiever, and/or (2) would be afraid/feel “alien” if he/she went home.

In this story we are treated to a combination of both; the finance broker who “would feel alien if I went home.” Now that’s interesting, and says much about how migration itself changes cultures. And why, given the immigration ideology shouldn’t even migrants continue to migrate in a never ending chain of migrations? And with this “musical chairs” of migration, what meaning at all does “home” have anymore?

The headlines back in June 2016, loudly proclaimed:
“New DNA Technology Confirms Aboriginal People as First Australians.” (ABC News, June 7, 2016)

With all the talk about recognition and “first people,” perhaps many were surprised to learn that the “New DNA Technology” reference is to a research paper allegedly refuting an earlier paper of 2001, that had argued that the oldest known Australian human remains, near Lake Mungo, New South Wales (“Mungo Man”), were alleged to not be Aboriginal at all, but from an extinct human linage. This would mean that the Aborigines, in pre-history “displaced” this race of people. This could have been by interbreeding, but more likely involved warfare. Things were tough and different from today.

This would directly challenge the “first person” ideology, but we did not hear much about it.
(continue reading)

Topher takes an irreverent look back at the unpopular people of history and finds that sometimes it's the 'crackpots' who are right... meaning that there's a real benefit to ensuring everyone has a right to free speech, even if they're a crackpot!