Wednesday, July 28, 2010

The hollowing out of Labour/Labor

From todays Australian Newspaper
Ring any bells
"The Labor apparatus is a superb, slick, clever machine for delivering jobs and patronage to its supporters.
Certain unions exercise disproportionate influence over its deliberations and safe seats are now rotten boroughs doled out to reward faithful apparatchiks.
The branches are moribund and no longer have a genuine say in policy or candidate selection.
No wonder young, energetic idealists and activists of the Left are flooding into the Greens and GetUp!"

Monday, June 21, 2010

Thanks to the sanest man in Australian Journalism Andrew Bolt

US historian Shelby Steele on the slow death of the West:


One reason for this is that the entire Western world has suffered from a deficit of moral authority for decades now.

Today we in the West are reluctant to use our full military might in war lest we seem imperialistic; we hesitate to enforce our borders lest we seem racist; we are reluctant to ask for assimilation from new immigrants lest we seem xenophobic; and we are pained to give Western Civilization primacy in our educational curricula lest we seem supremacist.

Today the West lives on the defensive, the very legitimacy of our modern societies requiring constant dissociation from the sins of the Western past—racism, economic exploitation, imperialism and so on."


Just do not have the bottle to defend the enlightenment

Wonder if they know what living in an unlightened society is like.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

The ideological world versus the real world

Those who construct their reality from an ideology, like the marxists, or from a religion like say the Greens must occasionally look at the parts of the modern world which they have wrought and wonder at the current tragic consequences of the actions drawn from their unreal ideas.
Why have had such monsterous and evil consequences followed the lofty ideals of the left..

The ideology that sprang form the 60's from the "New" Left and the environmental movement, their projected a reality, has come to pass.

They hold the seats of power in governments, universities and the media.
These institutions have marched in lockstep with their brilliant ideas for a better and more enlightened future for us all. From saving Africa, ending poverty leveling out incomes, to changing the world's thermostat no project was too small for taxpayers money to be hurled in billions into the breach.

We have funded billions and billions of dollars from the public purse for their solutions to conjured threats.

The solutions they promulgated have been taken put in place at enourmous expense.

Why then if the implementation of their ideas has been to their wishes has a grusome reality arrived that is so different from their claimed nivarna.

What has actually come to pass is so different from that promised by the green doomsayers that you have to conclude that to continue to hold the views they do, so far removed from reality, is akin to madness.

In the end though thankfully reality mugs them.

They see a world of windmills, of centrally commanded social mores, of social justice and control by government.

What they cannot ignore is the reality if what is actually there.

The vast number of hard realities that governments can never control, for long anyway.

Two things are certain.

When the ideas of their rulers are so far removed from their reality of life every day people revolt.

That, or the economic system collapses when fixing the imaginary problems takes all the money and meantime the real problems are starved of attention and resources.

Take one example of a Green scare.

The world population explosion is a core left bogey man, a frightener of small children and ill informed politicians.


The worlds population will peak at 2050. It will decline thereafter if present trends are continued.

This is the reality.

It is here already. Take the reality of what the deluded greens perceive of is an "overpopulated" Japan.


"According to a U.S. annual report, Japan’s population peaked in 2005 and will plunge from its current 127 million to 89 million in 2050. That’s a decline of 30%. The median age in Japan today is 43 years old, the highest in the world.

The average age in Japan in 2050 is projected to be 61.

An increasing number of Japanese leaders are looking for an easy way out of the dilemma of rapid societal aging — as evidenced by recommendations by the Japanese Association of Acute Medicine to allow euthanasia for the terminally ill.

On last year’s Children’s Day, the government noted that the number of children in Japan had declined for the 26th consecutive year. Over the past decade, more than 2,000 junior and senior high schools closed due to lack of students to teach. As I recently viewed a report on Japanese television stating that more than 60,000 teachers are unemployed, I couldn’t help but wonder if that teacher I met at the one-student school still had a job. That same program reported that nearly 100 children’s theme parks have closed in recent years and that more and more pediatricians are switching specialties to become geriatricians.

Since the 1920s, when Margaret Sanger traveled to Japan to promote contraception and sterilization, the Japanese have embraced the modern notion of “family planning.”

One recent poll revealed that 70% of young Japanese single women have no intention of getting married because babies are simply “too much trouble.”

http://www.ncregister.com/site/print_article/22739/

So for the reason that babies are too much trouble for these polished young ladies of priveliege the race, culture, social and enttity called Japan will cease to exist in the forseable future.

That is how the world ends, not with a whimper or a bang, not by fire nor by ice, not even with the babble of a small child.

It ends because girls whose Grandmothers and mothers made the deepest and hardest personal sacrifice two generations before to bring them their spoiled life of luxery, and whose Grandfathers and fathers, raised their Nation from paddy field poverty and serfdom by sacrifice, hard work and enterprise to be the second wealthiest in the world, find shopping and holidays so much more fun that the keeping of a messy husband and the tending of a bothersome child.

The George Monbiot's of this world ponder how to get "rid" of four or five billion people, people like you and me, to avert impending catastrophe. Their ideology misleads them and hides the real reality.

They rest easy, safe.

They live the life of the priveleiged elite.

They have constructed a world from words and ideas.

And it suits them well.

Well 42 years have passed since the genesis of this thinking.

The time of the test has come.

Does the real world match their construct.

Being unable to discern the difference between a world of fantasy and a world of reality is a symtom of madness.

Read that piece about Japan above, that is reality not the phantoms of '1968"

As my hero Deng Jioping said.

We may agree or disagree about ideology, but we must proceed from reality.

Taxpayers should refuse to spend their money on the green madness.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

In light of business I thought i would post some comments i wrote in my ezine some 13 years ago.

The knowledge society

The knowledge society has arrived and few societies are prepared for it. The last great transition was when the cottage industries and crafts that supplied the humble wants of the rural based population were thrown into the cataclysm of the Industrial Revolution.

In that era if you had two arms could stand upright and had a modest grasp of numeracy and literacy you could get a job, raise a family and pay a mortgage. So numerous were such people that Karl Marx forecast they would rule the world!

We now move into a world where knowledge is currency Agriculture occupies under 5% of the population and manufacturing is falling below 30%. The Internet is a harbinger to the on line revolution and an indication that the transition has begun in earnest. To some the cottage lamps are beckoning again.

But three groups suffer.
Group 1: The ignorant and illiterate school leavers Victims of the sad cult of whole context learning and self construction literacy training. This lunacy has harmed the median learners, not bothered the brightest but left those whose houses are not interested in books with less literacy than their grandparents

Group 2: A large number of young people are well educated but unskilled.. In a knowledge society the most precious commodity is knowledge of the job. Previous experience.

Group Three: the older worker whose knowledge has been superseded and is redundant or who were the easiest to get rid of since they had more resources.

The focus in gaining full employment has been to get these groups onto the bottom rung of the ladder All the schemes which might have worked in the depression of the 1930's have been tried repeatedly and failed.

Why try and cram more unlearned or pseudo skilled entrants onto a crowded bottom rung. of the ladder

Better to move those on the next rungs one step up. Make junior book keepers into accountants, ticket writers into graphic artists. The emphasis should be on giving those in the lower middle ranks a more skilled repertoire.

The unemployable can then train for the first steps on the ladder knowing that there is a place there. While the first steps might be Mc Donald's or data input but the second and third are open for progress.

There are opportunities for a number of players
Universities
instead of sitting in beleaguered backwaters of education bleating about lowered income or touring the foreign student pools could to go to local enterprises and contract for online training in areas in real demand.

Private training consultants instead of offering short term courses could provide substantial qualifications online
Prospective students could judiciously mix both options. . Education Al la carte. A skilled worker is both a capital asset and a public benefit.

Enterprises could offer real educational and qualification packages as part of their enticement package to the advancing cohorts of the future skilled.

The State would invest in upskilling the currently skilled to make room for those unskilled to begin the process. A far better investment than the training of a personal social worker for every unemployed and lifetime dole and social security payments..

Real Philanthropists could endow Internet establishments offering such options as a tangible public benefit.

The option is not only to design online MBA courses for the upper ranks but management courses for receptionists and stock broking for pay clerks.

If the receptionist leaves the chair 3pm to online in a conference room would it break the bank to have a part time trainee from Group 2. For the day that she is a real earner.

Group three have opportunities in the training and organisation of such systems, going on line themselves to become contract educators.

Group 1, well its back to square one to achieve what was done in tin shed in small schools houses in the thirties. By rote learning through the screens teach them to read and write

The wider challenge is to remove the notion that education is an activity conducted at specific geographical location to a specific age group at a specific time.