As James Reed was struggling with the hundreds of pages of his book review, he tossed to me, Cameron Murray and Paul Frijters, Game of Mates: How Favours Bleed the Nation,( 2017).

     This book is timely given that the issue of Chinese influence on our politicians through donations, is not often out of the news. Thus in today’s paper we have “ALP Branch Bows to Chinese Donations Ban,” The Australian, July 21, 2017, p. 5, which tells us that the NSW ALP, under pressure from Bill Shorten, will stop taking donations from two Chinese-born businessmen, with close links to the Beijing government.  ASIO had previously warned about these Chinese businessmen:
http://www.smh.com.au/national/investigations/asio-warns-parties-that-taking-china-cash-could-compromise-australia-20170602-gwjc8t.html. This is a good development.

Australian Conservative, Senator Cory Bernardi, in his “Weekly Dose of Common Sense” shows the real agenda behind Free Trade Agreements and how the UN has morphed into a type of World Government.

He wrote, in part ………………

“As I told the crowd of over 450 people in Brisbane last night, it doesn’t mean any one of us has all the answers. Individually, we bring our unique gifts and skills and talents into the battle of ideas. But together, those gifts complement each other and strengthen our capabilities. Through working together, our individual differences become a source of strength rather than isolation.
That’s what being a community is all about. It’s that sense of belonging and contributing to something bigger than oneself that strengthens families, clubs, cities and nations. It strengthens political parties too.
However, all communities need ties that bind. They need the thread of continuity that runs through all so that we may be drawn together.
At the most basic level that thread is familial. In a political party it is idea, vision and values. As a nation, it is culture.
Culture is our language, our traditions, our laws and our expectations of each other. It emerges over successive generations, each one building upon the previous, bringing us ever closer.
Except that’s not what’s happening now. There is a new force at work within our culture. It isn’t of us and it isn’t working for us. Many refer to it as globalisation but it can take on many monikers.
Despite the reckoning of many pundits, globalisation isn’t about free trade or international markets. Those forces can and do work to our advantage. They provide local businesses with export opportunities and local consumers with a broader range of more competitively-priced goods.
Rather, globalisation is a direct attack on our national sovereignty and self-determination.
It sees unelected bureaucrats in supra-national bodies influencing our domestic agenda through groupthink, peer pressure and intimidation.
The best example is the United Nations. Formed in 1945 for the purpose of preventing another world war through dialogue, it now sees itself as a quasi-world government.
It dictates refugee policy, spruiks the great global warming scam, redefines marriage, smoking policy and so many other virtue-signalling and identity-politics agendas that it has simply become a vehicle for the globalists to push their view.
The UN’s stacked resolutions and dodgy reports are used by political outfits like the Greens to undermine our domestic policy agenda in favour of someone else’s.
These people truly believe they are the enlightened powers that should be running a world of open borders and wealth redistribution in order to save us all. Perhaps that should be ‘enslave’ us all.
It’s time for that to change. We need to reassert our self-determination. That means we need to revisit the treaties, agreements and pacts of decades past to make sure they are working in our interest.
Let’s review them to see if they are achieving what we thought they would. We could start with the UNHCR refugee treaty. It was written in 1951 and the driving forces and key players have changed since then.
Just as every prudent person would insist that every contract has a termination or review date, so too should we insist on reviewing our government’s international agreements at regular intervals.
It will help ensure a check is kept on the agenda that is intent on diminishing, rather than strengthening Australia.”…

I wonder of the Australian Conservatives have a firm position to introduce Citizens Initiative and Referenda as a "core" (non-redactable) policy-ed

    I have been making this claim, with some controversy here over the years, that Pope Francis hates the West, is a commo Pope, and wants to see the West go down.  A discussion of just these points has appeared now in the mainstream press: Tess Livingstone, “Pro-Migrant Pope ‘Aspires to Destroy Christianity’”, The Australian, July 19, 2017, p. 12; http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/promigrant-pope-francis-aspires-to-destroy-christianity/news-story/76be2aee290dacbaa9417aa8af5abb63.

     The remarks primarily are concerned with retired Pope Benedict XVI, who recently compared the church under Pope Francis to a ship that “has taken on so much water as to be on the verge of capsizing.”  As far as criticisms go, that one is strong.
Pope Francis has called on the European nations to abandon their borders, and adopt a federal structure. He is a proponent of open borders immigration for the West, but is silent about immigration to non-white countries, because, well, he is a New World Order kinda guy.

     Migrants in Australia, we are told, have delivered an almost four-fold increase in employment growth between 2011 and 2016: The Australian, July 21, 2017, p. 7.  It though is a Ponzi scheme, with the growth being caused by migrants anyway, who tend to be put into what jobs are available. The claim is made that the only jobs lost are those of the unskilled, but this is manifestly untrue, because local skilled also miss out, such as some university graduates.

     For example, the new class elites want to see international students working in the state even before they finish their studies: The Australian July 19, 2017, p. 27.  These jobs will be lost to locals, and it is just magical thinking to suppose that the flow of money spent by international students will create new jobs. There is considerable flexibility in the economy to absorb workers, and to not require more for increased output. More efficiency is simply squeezed out of existing workers. Thus, increased student loads is met by making young PHDers work harder, not by increasing the number of jobs. The money just goes as profit:
http://www.eurocanadian.ca/2017/07/the-economic-argument-against-mass-immigration.html;
https://cis.org/Immigrants-Replace-LowSkill-Natives-Workforce; 
https://cis.org/Immigration-and-Wages;
https://cis.org/Cost-Welfare-Use-Immigrant-and-Native-Households.

     Well on the way of making heterosexual contact illegal, feminists are moving onto the next horizon in Amsterdam: http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2017/02/labour-seeks-to-make-sexual-harassment-on-the-streets-as-crime/.
     The Dutch Labour party has a bill to make sexual harassment on the streets a crime, with up to three months jail. For women, this initially sounds like a good idea.  And, ideally should help against migrant sexual assaults. But, on reflection, we should understand that it will do nothing of the sort, since sexual offences by non-Whites against women are not treated with the same degree of concern as sexual offences by Whites:
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/10/06/europes-rape-epidemic-western-women-will-be-sacrificed-at-the-alter-of-mass-migration/
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2016/01/07/muslim-male-refugees-are-raping-women-in-europe-n2100918
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/oct/19/dutch-battle-surge-of-desperate-violent-muslim-ref/
     The proposed measures are likely to be just more politically correct window dressing.

     Here is my brief take on the book sent to me by the noble editor to review, Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, (Vintage books, New York, 2013).  I was genuinely hoping to find some answers here, but was disappointed for my vast investment of time spent ploughing through 449 pages. Was I told the inner secrets of psychology, or how human nature ticked?

     Well, early in the book I was introduced to moral problems. How best to enlighten a Christian audience when the profane is involved? Just push ahead and offer an apology, because this is not my fault.  But, Professor Haidt really likes his example of a moral problem, and I quote: “A man goes to the supermarket and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.” (p. 4) I did not expect to be hit by such a shocking example so early in a popular, yet still scholarly book. Worse, it is not clear why this is a moral problem, rather than one needing to be deal with by mental health workers. It may well be that there is nothing morally wrong here from a secular humanist framework, unless masturbation is wrong (which from a Christian framework, it arguably is), but that does not mean that the activity does not exhibit psycho-pathological sexual disorders. It is the wrong example to illustrate a moral/ethical problem, and I found myself questioning many of Haidt’s claims in the book: but where is the argument for that?

to THE AGE
     As James Paterson notes (‘Radical approach to Indigenous recognition will fail’, 25/7), the Referendum Council’s recommendations have 'far-reaching implications for all of us.’ He does not, however, seem to have grasped the problems associated with the proposal for a ‘declaration of recognition.’  From one point of view, why do we need an official statement of the obvious? On the other hand, is it so obvious? Government should be wary of making historical assertions about controversial matters. That’s the stuff of totalitarianism. There is some doubt as to whether our Aboriginals really were the ‘first people’ on this continent or whether they displaced an earlier group. Then again, no present-day Aboriginals existed in time before other present-day Australians.
     And who knows what radical implications future High Court judicial adventurers might claim to read into even the declaration’s seemingly innocuous statement about ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’?
NJ, Belgrave, Vic

     At a closed door meeting of eastern European leaders in Budapest, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has launched an attack on the European Union, saying the EU would wither and die if it did not change its policy towards Israel:    
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/19/eu-will-wither-and-die-if-it-does-not-change-policy-on-israel-netanyahu.

     Contrary to what is pushed in the immigration-mad media in the West, Netanyahu wisely urged Europe to close their doors to refugees from Africa and the Middle East.

     The entire world is now in debt by $ 217 trillion, which is the number 217 followed by twelve zeroes: $ 217,000,000,000,000. This is 327 percent of the world’s annual economic output (GPD), according to the Institute of International Finance.
     Even China, the so-called miracle economy, is running on debt, which has increased its borrowings by $ 2 trillion, and the IMP is concerned about China’s rising debt levels. Already, China’s debt levels are unsustainable, in conventional economic terms, being 260 percent of its GDP: https://www.rt.com/business/394557-global-debt-surge-gdp/.

     The elephant in the room here is: just precisely whom does every nation owe such unsustainable debt to? The answer is: the international financial system, run by the masters of the New World Order. Governments long ago gave the Masters of the Universe, the power to control credit, and now they rule the world. Having a One World Government may be what many want, but the more sophisticated Demons see this as too much work. What does it really matter who is elected when they can be ruled effectively by the power of money?

     Forget fences, in this day and age of mass immigration invasions: nations need walls, thick, long and strong: http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/07/22/orban-europe-must-regain-sovereignty-soros-empire-build-border-wall-stop-muslimized-europe/.

     How’s this for a headline: “Orban: ‘Europe Must Regain Sovereignty From The Soros Empire’, Build Border Wall to Stop ‘Muslimized Europe’”.  The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has made a passionate defence of  European values and identity at the Bálványos Summer University camp in Romania. He called on European nations to end their association with billionaire open-borders, mass immigration  financier George Soros, who Orban saw, has his vast wealth to fund pro-mass migration organisations to create a “new, mixed, Muslimized Europe. ” Orban said that the EU was in an “alliance against the people’s will” with the financier.
Orban said:

     The hawks who are pining for the US to go to war against Russia, something temporarily stopped by the election of President Trump, should pause and think hard about China’s recent military exercises with Russia, China’s first involvement in European inland waters, in the Baltic Sea.

     In September, the exercises shift to the Sea of Japan, another area of possible confrontation. China’s newspapers made clear that all of this was to strengthen the Chinese-Russian strategic partnership. The Global Times of China said that China’s navy “will surely get stronger and stronger and march further and further, which the West should get used to.”

to THE AUSTRALIAN
     Tom Drake-Brockman is right to call for a major reorientation of Christian tradition (‘We need to reignite the self belief and values that Jesus held so dear’, 17/7), but his suggested ‘new creed of spiritual humanism’ is not the answer. The essence of Jesus’s teaching was not faithfulness, but an invitation to seek ‘the kingdom of heaven’, a search that requires a ‘new birth’ in the sense of a new understanding of human nature itself. At the heart of the gospels is a recipe for initiation within a metaphysical framework.
     Some scriptural passages, such as a few in in chapters 3, 5, 6 and 11 of John’s gospel, can, however, be adduced in support of the erroneous ‘faith-based theology’ which Luther forged into ‘an iron-clad dogma’; for the four canonical gospels are inconsistent and can be read in different ways; but their major thrust is the promotion of a salvation or gnosis that only a few can fully attain in this life, but which can bring partial light and comfort to all the pious faithful.
NJ, Belgrave, Vic

to THE AUSTRALIAN
     The Coalition will be both sensible and ethical to continue its call for a plebiscite rather than a free parliamentary vote to determine whether Australia should significantly change its legal definition of marriage. Here are some answers to Peter van Onselen’s advocacy (‘Opposing gay marriage vote will hurt conservatives’, 15-16/7).
     There have been plebiscites in our history before and the seriousness of this present controversy demands another, if not a referendum. Moreover, the ALP wants a plebiscite on a republic. Now, while the plebiscite result might not be binding, if it proves favourable to change, it would undoubtedly be honoured by the parliament and opponents of change would not feel betrayed, which would be good for national unity.
     Opinion polls results are not always reflected in actual voting; nor do we want to live under government by such polls.
     That other Anglophone nations have gone one way does not mean we must follow; they might have made a mistake, for it is simply not true that their decisions have been happily accepted by supporters of the traditional definition of marriage. On the contrary, there is great concern at certain subsequent developments and other mooted possibilities.
     Finally, a free parliamentary vote, no matter what its result, would not be a truly representative way to proceed.
NJ, Belgrave, Vic

     There is a bit of counter-evidence for the migration faith:
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10676/germany-migrants-infectious;
http://www.rki.de/DE/Content/Infekt/Jahrbuch/Jahrbuecher/2016.html?nn=2374622.

     A report by the German federal government’s Robert Koch Institute, which monitors diseases has stated that there has been an across-the-board rise in infectious diseases since 2015 when Germany undertook its essentially open borders refugee migration program.
     Many professionals believe that this institution is still underrating the disease rates, with these diseases now being major problems in Germany:
adenoviral conjunctivitis,
botulism,
chicken pox,
cholera,
cryptosporidiosis,
dengue fever,
echinococcosis,
enterohemorrhagic
E. coli,
giardiasis,
haemophilus influenza,
Hantavirus,
hepatitis,
hemorrhagic fever,
HIV/AIDS,
leprosy,
louse-borne
relapsing fever,
malaria,
measles,
meningococcal disease,
meningoencephalitis,
mumps,
paratyphoid,
rubella,
shigellosis,
syphilis,
toxoplasmosis,
trichinellosis,
tuberculosis,
tularemia,
typhus
and whooping cough.

     This article goes back to a little snip that I took from The Australian, way back on May 5, 2012, p. 69, about blonde-hair found among the dark-skinned people of the Solomon Islands. I returned to find the article, which I put aside, when one of my students from the Solomon Islands, a really nice lad, said that there were a lot of people with dark skin and blonde hair. He said that while some  of them claimed to have European ancestors, he dismissed this and put the blondness down to diet. It seems that most of the lighter haired people often acted in a superior way, which deeply annoyed my student. More probing revealed that his girlfriend had gone off with one of these blonde types and he did not like them.

     Researching this I found the scientific article, E. Kenny (et al.), “Melanesian Blond Hair is Caused by an Amino Acid change in TYRp1,” Science, vol. 336, p. 554.  It seems, to cut the complexities, that the blonde hair is the product of a genetic mutation in gene TYRP1, and that’s that.  But since then, I have run into a biologist from the Solomon’s who had blonde hair and dark skin, and said that as a child he sang songs about his European ancestors. Even though he was a biologist, who knew much more science than me, he reacted aggressively to the mutation claim, and said that this line of thought was undermining his heritage. Now there is a pretty pickle for you!
     Who says that the exploration of racial differences is not fascinating, revealing the complexity and genuine diversity of the human species, with all the politics thrown in for good measure.

     Dr Paul McHugh, who is a distinguished Service Professor at John Hopkins University and  former psychiatrist-in-chief for John Hopkins Hospital, has treated transgendered people for 40 years: http://www.cnsnews.com/blog/michael-w-chapman/johns-hopkins-psychiatrist-transgendered-men-dont-become-women-they-become. He has made news headlines in the US for arguing that in his professional opinion, “transgendered men do not become women, nor do transgendered women become men.” He has formulated his argument in a piece published at http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/06/15145/, and the title of the paper is: “Transgenderism: A Pathogenic meme,” which does not pull any punches.

     McHugh says: “first, though, let us address the basic assumption of the contemporary parade: the idea that exchange of one’s sex is possible. It, like the storied Emperor, is stark nakedly false. Transgendered men do not become women, nor do transgendered women become men. All (including Bruce Jenner) become feminized men or masculinized women, counterfeits or impersonators of the sex with which they “identify.”  In that lies their problematic future.

     A US bride has called off her US $30,000 wedding, for reasons that she is keeping to herself. She had pre-booked a swanky reception, and was left with the dilemma of what to do with the food. So, good soul that she is, she invited in homeless people: The Australian, July 17, 2017, p. 9.
    Now, as you would know, if you knew me, homeless people like me, are not the best at personal hygiene and we tend to roll in the mud and grime a bit. However, local businesses donated suits and dresses, and somewhere my US brothers and sister got in a shower. And, then it was, dive in, to boubon-glaxed meat balls, whatever that is, but it sounds meaty, goat cheese, roasted garlic bruschetta, chicken breasts with artichokes, Chardonnay cream sauce, and a great slab of wedding cake. After that, it was back to starving, so I hope the lads and lasses of the mean streets tanked up.

     The kind lady says that she does not know what to do with the wedding dress, but I am sure the homeless would know what to do. Uncle Len is not too proud, or gender challenged, to wear such an outfit while dumpster diving, or collecting hard rubbish, or bottles and cans for sale. After six months of bin action, I am sure that the ghosts of the wedding-not-to-be would be purged by the grey ooze of survival on the streets

     Elon Musk, has joined with Stephen Hawking and claimed that AI is an existential threat to human beings, capable of eliminating all jobs, and sparking a war: The Australian, July 17, 2017, p. 22.   I did not find any more details about the war, but it could be a Luddite revolt of the people versus the machines, as popularised in the Big Arnie Terminator movies. It is possible, if people get hungry enough that they could actually do this, but I tend to view that they might just as easily meekly starve to death in some isolated corner. Time will tell.

     The Musk solution is regulation for the safe development of AI. That could prevent the Terminator scenario, but I am not sure. Once computers reach self-awareness, and infinitely expanding intelligence, which is what our “let’s do it” Dr. Frankenstein scientists are all on about, regulations will not count for much.

     While surfing the net in my woollen underwear and wet suit, I by accident came across this great quote about the decentralised world:

"This is what we humans call Planet Earth. A big, blue-green mass of globular rotation with a surface of around 510 million km².
Now, as you will observe, it is shown without borders or boundaries. Not because we National-Anarchists believe in the abolition of borders and boundaries, of course, the more the merrier, but due to the fact that we do not recognise the existing territories governed by the various nation-states or imperialist empires. We have turned our backs on their territorial designs and believe that fresh micronations must come into being; i.e. those formed by ordinary tribes, families and individuals.

     A Women’s March in the US against the National Rifle Association  and gun rights, no doubt because these are well-known phallic symbols that require symbolic castration, fell to paradox: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/07/16/womens-march-surrounded-armed-guards-protest-nra-gun-rights/.
The women were surrounded by armed guards, men, gasp, men! with those horrible phallic symbols, guns!  One of the protest themes was, “Real Men Don’t Need Guns.” OK, so the feminists are not real men, did anyone ever say that they were? Just “unreal” men, or womyn or whatever.  And, the power elite, working to take away the guns of ordinary people, while being heavily protected by their men with guns, is nothing new. This would not be a good conspiracy if there was consistent values and standards employed. Of course, the elites are not going to openly say yet that the agenda is to disarm the ordinary people while they remain protected, and able to oppress the ordinary people by having access to weapons. Maybe, just maybe, the plebs might get a wee bit angry about that, but probably not. In a little while it will all be too late for these sleepy folk, and then the cats can be let out of the bag. Pretty cruel though, to keep cats, even metaphorical ones, in bags, but, there you go.

     Moving right along, French president Macron has said anti-Zionism is a reinvented Form of anti-Semitism, speaking at a ceremony commemorating the victims of the mass roundup of Jews in Paris in WWII: https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/1.801574. Such a critique would indeed raise problems for those of the Left arguing as follows:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/05/israel-accused-war-crimes-gaza--amnesty-international;
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2015/07/justice-victims-war-crimes-gaza-conflict/;
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2017/country-chapters/israel/palestine.