MidSummer

Merry Midsummer everyone.

Especially those on the cold, dark lower half of the planet.

(I am) A strange thing

I am a strange thing.

I was raised Atheist by lapsed (walked away fast) Catholics.

In my mid teens I encountered Discordianism, through the Illuminati Trilogy, and it spoke to me. I also encountered Wicca, but in a hide bound bookish form that celebrated Midsummer in the depths of the Southern Winter.

A few years later I was firmly Discordian, and while ignoring a great many gods, found myself looking to Eris as the Feminine and Pan as the Masculine aspects of the Numinous. At that time my (now ex-)wife and I encountered a slightly more open form of Wicca that had just begun to celebrate seasons we experienced, not those marked on a Glastonbury souvenir calendar. The coven was also in transition to circling with the sun, not with the directions in books.

So I find myself Wiccan, henotheistically Erisian and seeing the Masculine energy in the figure or thought form of Pan in his aspect as practical joking god of shepherds and ordinary men. I try very hard to see the Gods are mental tools to assist in making the Numinous accessible on a human scale, however they refuse to be so constrained and overflow, at times inconveniently, into my life.

Nerd Love

I am a Nerd. At school, from the 4th grade on I crushed on girls who were unobtainable, or, more often less likely to be interested in me than enthused about getting a filling at the dentist. To be fair, that was pretty much any girl, it wasn't like I was focused on the most beautiful girl in my class. Was I annoying, yes, creepy, sometimes, of course I was, that was my dictated role in society. Between 9 and 18 years of age, awkward, outcast and unloved.

I did not commit rape, did not entertain the idea of rape. After all, as a civilised human being, sex was something intimately tied to the idea of being liked and accepted. Was I hurt by the continuous rejection, yes. Did girls sometimes tease me, abuse my desperate loneliness, even set me up to be physically assaulted by loveable Bad Boys to demonstrate their power to manipulate, hell yes. Did I hate women, no, did I become murderous, no. I despaired.

In the 9th grade a definitive moment was standing in a phone booth, well, one of those half shell things with a pay phone in it, in the strip mall across the road from the school. A girl I vaguely knew wrapped her arms around me from the side as I rang off, and said "Give me a hug…" I froze, confused and absolutely convinced any action on my part would be a mistake. After several seconds of cajoling, I put my arms around her, loosely mirroring the limpet like full body grip she held me in. Her gaggle of friends began laughing uncontrollably and calling out something. The girl stepped away, and her boyfriend stepped through the encircling girls, grabbed me, flung me against the wall and punched and kicked me until I was on the ground. Then a half dozen of his friends and some of the girls joined in kicking me. I was only rescued by a construction worker from the site next-door, who after driving off my attackers, helped me to my feet and told me he'd seen the whole thing and that a girl had done something similar to him when he was a kid. Did I plot murder, no.

A year or so later I was in the school counsellors office, in trouble because I had a crush on a girl and that this had become known was an embarrassment to her. "What," the counsellor sneered "Do you think you love her?" I replied:

"I am a 15 year old boy, who nobody likes, how could I possibly know anything about love. I have a crush on her which is at least as uncomfortable for me as it is for her."

A year or so after that, a different girl I had a crush on said what was probably the nicest thing a girl said to me at high school. "It isn't that I hate you, it's just that I am utterly repulsed by you."

Somehow I managed to survive those and many more experiences without dialling the crazy up to random murderous rampage against women. My life since has had ups and downs. I have known love, and I have known loss. I endure.

Nothing Else Matters - Medieval Style

Nothing Else Matters - Medieval Style

Religious Humanism

Religious Humanism

25 Sep 2015

Please do not make the mistake of assuming Abrahamic Religion encompasses all possible kinds of Religion. Although one could argue that you can find almost every variety of religious expression somewhere in the almost infinite number of sects the God of Abraham in his various incarnations both figuratively and purportedly literally has inspired. The modern Society of Friends are very much a Humanist religion for example.

Outside the Abrahamic faiths, you have Unitarian Universalism, many sects of Buddhism, a variety of animist religions (including those rare souls who genuinely follow the Jedi path), and many forms of Neopaganism that are more or less humanist in their beliefs and practises.

Equinox - There's this wheel

It is a Neopagan thing, created sometime in the last century.

It has 8 festivals spread around the year roughly (give or take a week or so) evenly spread.

Each of those 8 festivals (or at least 6 or 7 of them) were celebrated at or about that time of year by people variously described as Celts, or Saxons, or Danes or, well, lots of different people associated with England, and the bits of France that were at various times England, and lets not forget Wales nor Ireland. (We can largely ignore the Scots, as the English did for centuries.)

We have various bits of textual and archaeological evidence for most of these 8 festivals, at various times and places over a couple of thousand years, and at various places and times they have been celebrated on dates calculated by various calendars.

The easy ones are the Solar festivals, the Equinoxes and Solstices, or they would be easy if the Earth's orbit were completely stable. They drift, by a day or two each year from their mean point, and over time they drift around the Zodiac too. So whatever method we use to decide this (points vaguely at late September) is the (Southern) Spring Equinox, there will be perfectly good documentary evidence that this choice is wrong, in someone's opinion. The Solstices (Summer and Winter) are the longest and shortest day and night, and vice versa each year. You'll notice there's one in December that is disturbingly close to the major festival of a Roman era cult or three.

Calendars often simply declare these orbital mileposts to be the 21st or 22nd or 23rd of  March, June, September and December. Ephemerides and other observation and mathematical predictions give us an hour or ever minute based on some agreed definition. That's the bottom line, agreed definition.

Is the Equinox the moment of passage of the sun through some arbitrary point on the Ecliptic - entry to some particular house of the Zodiac (or achieving the midpoint of it's time in  that house). Is it that day which is equal to the night either side of it where you live, or at some other place? Is it a day chosen by a calendar publisher? By the calculations of a religious authority, or even Friday, Saturday or Sunday closest to the nearest full or new moon? We'll avoid the question of moon phases for now, they have similar complexities.

At every turn we find different authorities for placing these days over a spread of a few days and valid reasons in the minds of some to celebrate them perhaps a week or two either side.

Earth's orbit is not circular, we mark off slightly different arcs of the sky each day, each month, and this means the four Solar mileposts are not quite evenly spaced, and due to the Moon and the various planets, their wobble is not synchronous, so the span between them increases and decreases a day or two year by year. Add to that the complexity of Leap Years and you can see where this leads.

If we lived in the Neolithic (New Stone Age, when farming appeared and we became slaves to our crops), this is all pretty simple. We'd have a fair idea, as farmers, that the Solar year was 365 days give or take, and we'd be able to observe the length of day and night, and the progress of sunrise and sunset across our horizon with the seasons. Counting days, coupled with observing which day the sun rose past a certain notch on the cliffs or even a large rock stood on the ridgeline, and we could reset the count easily enough. Local climatic knowledge would tell us things like don't plant until after the Equinox, or plant no more than 78 days after the Winter Solstice depending on where we lived.

We'd celebrate harvests and plantings, but we'd do those things according to lifetimes of accumulated wisdom on local seasons, when it rains, when it snows, when it frosts. We'd do so according to Sun and Moon (because tides influence the air as well as the sea) and sometimes, we'd get it wrong or there'd be unseasonal rain or frost and we'd starve. We'd live by feast and famine, as is the way of the subsistence farmer of the Neolithic.

We'd almost certainly celebrate a special day for the dead, variously (remember I'm talking Europe in the Northern Hemisphere) in early November halfway between the Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice, or like the Romans, 6 months later (or earlier, remember the year is like a wheel) in early May. We'd celebrate one or two harvests depending on where we lived and what crops we grew. We'd celebrate somewhere in the depths of winter when we used up stores that would not make it through to spring.

Lets look at the Day of the Dead. Samhain it is styled by the celtic revivalists who "borrowed" it, mostly from the Irish. As Halloween, it is locked into the (Roman) Gregorian Calendar as October the 31st, which, if you count the days betwixt Northern Autumnal Equinox and Midwinter, is about a week early. We know from astronomic alignments in stone aged northern European burial sites that there was some significance to a date in early November going back at least a couple of thousand years. Unfortunately we know next to nothing about what anyone in northern Europe did to celebrate or mark such annual observances until only the last 1,000 to 2,000 years, and that often only from what was condemned or copied by Romans and Christians and folk revivalists.

We live in the Century of the Fruit Bat, er, Twenty-first Century. So we have several thousand years of progress in calendrical and astronometric calculations to draw on. We also have several thousand years of assorted and disparate traditions. By the Early to mid Twentieth Century several groups had come out of the woodwork with more or less well thought out and/or historical revivals of "Pre-Christian" European beliefs. These groups fueled an explosion of interest in the Occult, Witchcraft, Paganism, and along the way revived, exposed, composed, created, synthesized and faked a new folkway, which included the now almost universal "Wheel of the Year". Sure, at least one of the festivals was pretty much made up to complete the symmetry, and a lot of stuff picked and polished from 10,000 years and a continent and a half of "Celtic" archeology and a couple of centuries of theorizing and romanticizing cobbled together to make the others. The urban roots of a lot of this revival meant a lot of mistakes were made that could have been corrected by looking out the window, Latitude and local climate can make a huge difference to the perceived "season" at any given day even in places only a few hundred kilometres apart. Adding "late September" events from southern France and from Highland Scotland lead to hybridization of Early Spring and Early Summer imagery. Traditions drawing on one or the other saw the other as wrong. Books more assembled than authored muddied the waters. New traditions made up to fill markets with poor scholarship and even poorer editorship (Ancient Celtic Potato Goddess chips anyone) left ever more genericized and blended authorities for the ill informed to bring to the debate.

Banananananana

Commercial bananas are not usually bred from seed. They are taken as cuttings. Mutant sprouts are cut off and planted to see what kind of fruit they produce.

If your banana is seedless, it is most likely a free growing tumour...

Aging

As teenagers we were never invincible, as you age¹ you just become less suicidally stupid... I just hope I grow out of suicidally stupid before it kills me.

¹ the 29th is my 55th Birthday. As kid I was told I wouldn't live past 40.

Medieval music interlude

Medieval cover of Radiohead's Creep

Creep

More at Nerdist article...

As Menzies so glowingly said...

HATS OFF TO HITLER

Menzies' Opinion

MELBOURNE, Friday.

Mr. Neville Chamberlain (British Prime Minister) had established a new departure in diplomacy and as a result the elements that made for peace were increasing every day, said Mr. R. G. Menzies (Federal Attorney-General), when addressing the Australian Women's National League today.

He had displayed more imagination in handling the European crisis than any other Prime Minister for a century, added Mr. Menzies. The French Revolution was a minor incident "If you were Germans," added Mr. Menzies, "you would take off your hats to Herr Hitler, who does really rule Germany and is not a figurehead. He has produced results. He has been able to bluff and the other nations have not been able to call his bluff."

Mr. Menzies expressed an opinion that the principal cause of war was ignorance.

The Recorder Port Pirie, SA, 29 October, 1939

Seculaism

Secularism is founded on the idea that your right to impose your religious laws and to protect your god from offence ends the moment you enter public space, which is to say at the door of your temple or your home

Being a Sorcerer is sometimes odd.

Being a Sorcerer is sometimes odd.

You skim over incantations in popular fiction because millions of nerds believe just a little bit and that gives them power.

But when you need a quick healing spell, because millions of nerds believe, just a little, every single day, you incant:

"Cure Moderate Wounds"

and feel the power surge through you.

No acceptance!

You do not have to accept how you are, 
you can always get worse...

Rio Tinto vandalism

A few weeks ago Rio Tinto destroyed a 46,000 year old rock art gallery. With government permission.

They then apologised, not for their Crime Against Humanity, but for how upset it made people. Other companies have permits for similar vandalism over coming months.

Rio Tinto are a transnational, the Chairman is British, the CEO is French, the CFO is Danish. Only the victims are Australian.

Other mining companies are similar. Multinational pirate crews destroying everything in pursuit of profit.

Gender is not biological.

Gender is purely a social construct, biology is about sex, which is complex too.

How can some palid milksop in a suit in London's Square Mile and a Tuareg Warrior riding across the desert both be "Manly". A male sharemarket clerk almost certainly can't put on eyeshadow with any flair at all.

Left propaganda

Can't trust lefties like FoxNews...

The Entertainment channel for National Socialists.

Nerd Dancing

I've been binging on Anime lately to counter a desire to go into hibernation.

Nerds do not dance badly, it is just that nerd dancing sequences are badly animated. Consider the nerd dancing by Rikka interspersed in the first 20 seconds of this: Love, Chunibyo and Other Delusions! Ending Theme

Or, quintessentially Angel - "I don't dance..."

Satire? Real?

Unfortunately, in The Age of Doltron, you can never be more than 80% certain something is satire, and likewise that it is real...

Discordianism

As statistics show us most who dabble in Discordianism last less that 5 years, I shall cease to be Discordian any day now.

I have been Discordian since 1981, any...

day...

now...

I know my Goddess is Imaginary,

She tells me so Herself.

[Hail Eris. All Hail Discordia.]

Ducking Heck!

I have been contemplating the word duck. Ducks are the funniest creature in English. "Duck!" is the essence of slapstick. Maybe that's why Pratchett created that most intriguing of minor characters, The Duck Man. Being childish one can tell someone to "Get ducked <sic>". On that note #$@@% you all

I am a useless cripple

I'm a useless cripple.

But...

I have contributed.

I've influenced policies of many political parties. I've stood up for my rights and won, and sometimes lost. I've stood up for the rights of others. I've raised issues and championed causes.

I've taught people life skills, from coping with stress to cooking to solving problems.

I've tried to help people through teenaged angst, through homelessness, through family breakdowns, and I held hands through crises big and small.

But...

I've made mistakes. I'm not perfect, and I have not always been successful in every way I've tried to help every time.

Recording Police

Arizona may criminalise recording cops in public.¹

"If they have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear..."

They have lots to hide

We have everything to fear.

¹ Arizona may criminalize recording cops

TheAlternative Truth is out there

Usually offered by RWNJs in a flood of links to youtube videos from channels like YouKnowsItsFlat and UkraniansForTrump

Arguing with the "Right"

Have you noticed how certain people demand we do in-depth research and justify every statement with citations, but their own pronouncements tend to be without visible means of support?

Universal ethics/beliefs...

Universal ethics/beliefs...

--------------------

• Don't kill anyone unless someone important tells you to.
• Don't steal stuff off anyone bigger than you unless you have armed backup (this is known as The Underlying Principle of Taxation).
• Don't provoke gangs bigger than yours (the Government is the biggest gang of all)

(Prescriptive ethics/beliefs are a different game entirely.)

c.2010 AWL

Wicca? Well,yes.

I'm Wiccan, yes, which means I believe a number of things...

Responsibility for my own actions.

(There is no forgiveness vending machine in the sky).

That the Numinous is omnipresent and immediate.

(Divinity is within and without).

That my way is right for me.

(Other people may find different Stairways to Heaven suit them better).

That the Masculine/Feminine duality is at the core of being human. 

(And that we each express aspects of both).

Finally I believe that I should minimize harm while perfecting my Self.

(Eight words the Wiccan Rede fulfill, An it harm none do what ye will.).

(Southern) Imbolc on Wicca

Many things in Wicca have changed. The changes are well documented.

There are several traditions, not just that of GBG. Even GBG's religion evolved with the addition and expansion of his original work by the likes of Dorien Valient. Gardner started out condemning homosexuality, eventually he accepted it.

Here in the Southern Hemisphere even most Trad Wiccans now circle sunwards not clockwise, and celebrate Midsummer in December. They are a few still hidebound by the calendars written in England a half century ago, but they are increasingly rare.

Wicca itself was an eclectic conglomeration of Cabalistic/Abrahamic imagery and now largely discredited early 20th century anthropology and folklore studies.

Wiccans share 

- the Rede, at least the short form

- a belief in a masculine/feminine duality in our relationship with the numinous

- a relationship with the natural cycles through a solar/lunar ritual calendar.

You do not need to be initiated in a lineaged tradition to be Wiccan, you need that to be a lineaged member of that tradition. Wicca is a mystery religion, one path to the mysteries is through the rituals of GBG and his original coven. Another valid path is to seek those mysteries for oneself. That won't qualify you as a 17th Degree Priestess of the Isle of Ducks Tradition, but it will make you Wiccan if you share certain basic beliefs. Except that beliefs aren't necessary, because what is shared is rituals - actions.

Get out of being Evangelized Free Card

Also works against "Jesus loves you!"

I'm a huge Nukees fan, and have to thank Gav for pointing out this Get Out of Being Evangelized Free card. Some of my friends have questioned if it is fair dinkum, so:

Mar 3:29 

But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin.”

Nukees - Wednesday, May 2, 2007

http://nukees.com/d/20070502.html

So, remember, I believe "The Holy Spirit is a Prick", and thus will never be forgiven. There is thusly no point in trying to save me, please find a less hopeless way to spend your time. Yay me.

Frontier money

In many places larger companies would mint tokens or notes to make up the shortage of circulating official coin. The better ones were sometimes better than government money in their primary circulating area. Similar coins and notes were printed for Company Stores, usable only to buy at inflated prices from your (effective) owner. Some of those Company Store peonage operations were frightening.

Others allowed the notes to be circulated, with a promise to purchase them back (effectively making them cheques) but there were many scams. Often the notes were printed on paper that was fragile using soluble inks. Get them wet, handle them, do anything much and they became useless scrap.

Some bosses baked the notes brown and crumbly so they wouldn't last long enough to be spent.

Here in southern Queensland they were known as Calabashes, nobody seems certain why. More generally in Australia they were called shin plasters (possibly derived from chin plasters after the use of scraps of paper to stem bleeding shaving cuts).

On Marriage

Way back when the Established Church (ie only legal one) recorded Marriages in their ledgers. If any question arose as to the status of the relationship between Mary and John, it could be answered by digging through dusty books.

Then people started moving long distances to cities where the book of their home parish was inaccessible. Around the same time religious diversity started to become an issue.

Inheritance; moral hygiene laws; contracts; huge areas of the law considered marital status as significant. Something had to be done, so the State stepped in to hold a central record of marriages and other significant life events.

Somewhere along the way a certain degree of protection of the vulnerable and various crank concepts like racial purity slithered in and so it went from a registration of a legally significant fact to the State regulating the institution of marriage.

In some places and times the regulation was minimal, not already married, old enough and of sound enough mind to understand what they were doing, not entering into a fake marriage to claim some benefit or privilege. In others it was intrusive.

I'd like to see the word "Marriage" given by the state to the churches, let the babies have their bottles. Hold back the registration of domestic partnerships and the protection of the vulnerable to the state.

Of course under such a reform I look forward to making popcorn and watching the fun when a Gay friendly church starts Marrying (Oh Noes!!!) same sex couples...

Conspiracy Theory²

I have a theory...

Actually several.

1/ There really are conspiracies. Some of them are large and nasty. Some are Government sponsored.

2/ These real conspiracies sometimes interact, getting in each others' way, forming alliances, sometimes sharing key personnel. The world doesn't make sense and sometimes that is because somewhere there are madmen playing god.

Which brings us to

3/ Many Americans are blind to the nature of the American Capitalist System, which is effectively a bucket of conspiracies. 

4/ There are a lot of crazy people who spew their madness into the world. Disturbingly sometimes they are right.

5/ Some crazy conspiracies are promoted to discredit conspiracy theorists and classes of theory.

6/ Many Conspiracy Theories are displacement of other fears.

Finally Occam's Razor is your friend.

Banksterity

Banksterity - Making the 1% carry their share.

The Banks profit from their own mistakes, reach into the public purse, then insist the poor and the middle class pay. Austerity measures see the lives of billions across the world disrupted to preserve the wealth and profits of the very richest.

• Trading in all bank and financial services corporation shares suspended immediately.
• A 5% levy for 10 years on all income over 13 times the average wage in each country, no deductions.
• If a bank took more than 1% of its total deposits in government subsidies, or an absolute amount more than 1,000 times the national average price of a home in 2004, administrators are to be appointed for 5 years to ensure that the public receives every cent back with average credit card interest. All interest on residential owner-occupier loans to be suspended for 5 years.
• “Performance” bonuses paid to senior executives after subsidy payments to be reversed.
• Foreclosures on homes to be allowed only if the bank holds no (an insignificant number) vacant properties.
• Banks to be charged vacant possession fees equivalent to 24 hour commercial security patrols to repay the public purse for the fire and police services used to protect their vacant property. 
• Any foreclosed property vacant for more than 6 months and in poor repair to be seized by the government, repaired at the bank’s expense and used to the public benefit by sale or lease with no return to the bank. Any foreclosed property vacant for 1 year to be sold at no-reserve auction with the proceeds after administrative fees returned to the bank.
• A public enquiry into the finance sector in each country with the highest level of power to investigate and to compel witnesses.

Love is Asymmetrical

I love, you are loved.

We are *in* love, but that doesn’t mean your experience is anything like mine.

Anyone who had a crush in high school should recognise the asymmetric nature of love. As might anyone who was the object of an unwelcome crush, if they have a modicum of self awareness and sympathy for their fellow primate.

To love is to place someone else’s happiness above one’s own. To ignore their imperfections and exult their finer qualities. To be willing to endure hardships to defend their peaceful existence. Unfortunately we do these things with many of our cynical higher intellectual functions swamped by biology, so we suffer tunnel vision that often prevents us noticing that our level of devotion is not reciprocated.

Taxation is Theft (and other delusions)

Taxation is Theft!

It’s a Lie!

Taxation is insurance against disaster, criminality and revolution. What is theft is misuse of taxation income.

Taxation at its most basic form is the act of the State acquiring a reserve of food (and seed) against a bad harvest or loss of stored crops. Which in the hands of a compassionate Prince rapidly extends to a basic Grain Dole for the poor.

A clear step up from [insert biblical references to gleaning and orchard harvesting]. In the Roman Empire in 58BCE it took the next logical step, and became a universal Grain Dole. Providing the poor with the basis of life, enough to keep Body and Soul together a day longer. Give us this day our daily bread was not a plea for a poverty stricken Roman Citizen, but part of their contract with the State. Of course it was rapidly reduced to only the poorest 50% or so even Caesar decried Middle Class Welfare.

Theft of Tax Revenue can be many things. Military White Elephants are theft if they are not projects of innovation, funding research and development of technologies with civilian  spinoff potential. Military adventurism is likewise theft, not just of Tax revenue, but also of the taxpayers’ very lives. Adventurism should be contrasted with actual defense and the rare but unfortunately necessary Just War. Which as an aside brings us to Military Conscription, which is theft, of liberty and labour and at times life itself.

Tax, redistributed as an income support payment of some kind, discourages the very poor from robbing, or or even killing and eating the very rich. Restrict such bribery too far, and you create the incentive to engage in freelance socialism, or even barbeque the Patricians. Most civilised people are only a couple of days of empty bellies off rioting on the streets.

23 skidoo - Sri Syadasti

Sri Syadasti Syadavaktavya Syadasti Syannasti Syadasti Cavaktavyasca Syadasti Syannasti Syadavatavyasca Syadasti Syannasti Syadavaktavyasca

Which is Sanskrit, and means: "All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense."

It is the name of a Discordian Saint.

Brightfart news

Breitbart, a site that aspires to the credibility of the National Enquirer and the journalistic excellence of such stories as:
2,000 Year Old Chinese Mummy Gets Job As Noodle Cook...

if I'm a dickhead...

At high school a girl called me a dickhead in class, and in a creepy AF voice I said "If I'm a dickhead, can I rub my forehead against your crotch." I looked around, the teacher, a friend, was tight lipped trying not to react, breathing slowly to not loose it, and...

The [little bitch] yells "Miss! Miss! [nickname] just said" and quoted me. the teacher fell forward onto her desk screaming with laughter unable to contain herself. After about ten minutes she calmed down and the girl was bouncing at her and would not shut up. Finally the teacher said [little bitch] "Oh do shut up, he got you, just... Shut up..."

Represented by the "Liberal" Party

Not the Party! (Blue)

The Liberal Party is not the Party of Small Business, they are the Party of Multinational Corporations and Offshore Bank Accounts.

They don't represent Pensioners, "battlers", Australian Values, they represent Brown Paper Bags Full Of Cash. Which they do by giving us their very best effort to be sitting in the right chair when the bell rings, most of the time.

While they are busy doing that, they steal, sorry mistakenly abuse, allowances from the tax payers worth millions of dollars, and unlike some kid on the dole who gets his Centrelink form wrong, they don't go to Gaol, they just pay it back if they are caught.

They are not the Party of Menzies, the man who threw away the cumbersome "insurance" format of the Aged Pension and replaced it with a commitment to pay the Pensioners a reasonable stipend to live on in return for a lifetime of being available to contribute to the economy.

They are not the Party of Fraser, who brought us Multiculturalism and Ethnic Diversity as priorities from the Commonwealth Government. He gave us our first comprehensive refugee policy, of open arms, in response to Vietnamese Boat  People. He opposite Apartheid in South Africa and racism both there and here. He brought in the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act of 1976.

They are the party of faceless Billionaires and Religious Fanatics who flirt daily with Fascism while they sneer at Australian Values like a Fair Go. They squeeze the Pensioners, they push young people to homelessness and despair, they help the rich steal from the poor while trying to run the most fundamental services of the State as sources of profit. They defy the wishes of up to 70% of Australians on Marriage Equality and other issues at the command of Theofascists like the Australian Christian Lobby. To be fair, also the shadowy medieval fringe of the  administration of the Catholic Church, the same secret power structure of financiers and Princes Ecclesiastical that has been exposed as harbouring hundreds of Kiddie Fiddlers who molested thousands of victims, because to throw them on the mercy of the Courts could cost Mother Church billions in compensation.

They assist known members of international crime syndicates to get an easy route to residency, but genuine refugees languish in Concentration Camps which are acknowledged as intended to inflict misery to discourage refugees. They are, in short, unAustralian.

Notes on Ming the Merciless

Menzies sold us out to the Mine Owners and English Agribusiness Investors. He killed our Space Program, computing, materials science and built environment research expertise, and artificially forced down STEM salaries. At the behest of the English and Americans he abandoned moving into high tech manufacturing by applying luxury tax to high technology, indeed almost any manufactured goods,  rather than tariffs, preventing local manufacture building a strong base. He (and his mates) attempted to impose Fascism on Australia but were forced to repaint it as Economic Liberalism after Hitler and Tojo moved against The Empire.

If we had taken up the manufacture of goods the way the US helped Japan do after the War, our natural resources would have made us world leaders, instead, we grew wheat, baled up wool and dug ores out of the ground all sold at rock bottom prices to the English and as they turned toward Europe, other markets.

He held our Universities back, as did his useless successors until the Whitlam revolution, ensuring that only those with the money to study in England got advanced degrees of any value, plus a few clowns on scholarships chosen to be our future middle management and backbenchers.

My Vast Mind

I have had No Life for decades, my vast mind¹ is crammed with data, small portions of which have been assembled into knowledge and some little wisdom distilled from those gleanings.

Now, have I had lunch yet?

¹ it is purple, made of a putty like material