Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost

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All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

— John Tolkien (1892 – 1973), The Riddle of Strider,
The Lord of the Rings, 1954.


Every time I change wives, I should burn the last one.
That way I’d be rid of them.
They wouldn’t be around to complicate my existence.
(Maybe that would bring back my youth, too.)
You kill the woman and you wipe out the past she represents.

— Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973)


[For] young ladies will look forward to being married, and will jostle each other in the race to the altar, and will avail themselves of all opportunities of displaying their own attractions to the best advantage, down to the very end of time as they have done from its beginning.

— Charles Dickens (1812 – 70), Nicholas Nickleby, 1839.

(Jim Endersby, Women in Science Fiction, 2021)

Dear Miss Ford,

Women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen, as the work is performed entirely by young men.
For this reason girls are not considered for the training school.

The only work open to women consists of tracing the characters on clear celluloid sheets with India ink and filling in the tracings on the reverse side with paint according to directions.

(Walt Disney Productions, 7 June 1958)


Charles Darwin (1809 – 82):
[Among women] the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man. …
[These] faculties are characteristic of the lower races and therefore of a past and lower state of civilisation.
(The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1871)

Andrew Tate vs Greta Thunberg
The Origin of COVID

No Sparrow Falls

The Batavi

Digital Diva

The Search For Dark Matter

Hugh Morgan: Master of Denial

The Reptilian Elite

The Latrobe Valley

Ninja and Blankie Spiders

SEEK II (Secure Electronic Enrollment Kit)

SEEK II [combines] forensic-quality fingerprint capture, rapid dual iris scan capability and innovative facial capture technology.
SEEK II is a comprehensive biometric identity management solution.

The Descent of Man

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Charles Darwin (1809 – 82):
The [marked] variability of all the characteristic differences between the races [of man] indicates that these differences cannot be of much importance …
[For,] had they been important, they would long ago have been either:

• fixed and preserved, or
• eliminated.

In this respect man resembles those forms, called by naturalists protean or polymorphic, which have remained extremely variable, owing … to their variations being of an indifferent nature, and consequently to their having escaped the action of natural selection.
(On the Races of Man, The Descent of Man, 1871)


David Wilson (1949) [Evolutionary Biologist]:
Jewish history is not as simple as a displaced people struggling to survive amidst hostile neighbors.
Jewish groups survived and even prospered through specific activities and relationships with different elements of their host nations. …

A common pattern was for Jews to form an alliance with one gentile segment of the host nation, usually the ruling elite, to exploit another gentile segment, such as the peasantry.
Far from being anti-Semitic, the ruling elite would attempt to protect the Jews from the rest of the resentful host population. …

The non-Jew had no fear that the Jew would take a partisan stand in the struggle between the rulers and the ruled, who bore the economic yoke of the political privileges enjoyed by the rulers.
(J Katz, Tradition and crisis: Jewish society at the end of the middle ages, 1961)

The Jew’s outsider status was an advantage as far as the rulers were concerned.
(Darwin's Cathedral, 2002)

Steven Grosby

Professor of Religion, Clemson University

During the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, there were those who thought that the divisions of humanity were ‘given’ in the sense that they were an unavoidable consequence of racial differences.
For example, the French diplomat Arthur de Gobineau (1816 – 82) argued:

• that humanity was divided into different races; and …
• that these races determined the distinctiveness of the culture of one civilization from that of another.

[It] was Gobineau who developed … the view that the decline of a civilization was the inevitable result of the mixing of one race with another.
This view was subsequently extended by the anti-Semitic Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855 – 1927), who believed in the existence of a pure Aryan race.
The most hideous historical expression of these racialist views was the anti-Semitism of German Fascism, which asserted that the ‘blood’ of the Jews defiled the supposedly pure and superior Aryan race.
Such racialist views about the ‘natural’ divisions of humanity into permanent physical types have been shown to have no scientific basis whatsoever, as genetic variability may be greater within a race, than between races.
These views have, deservedly, been rejected today by all serious analysts.

(Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2005, p 99)


The Descent of Man

Radial Bleach

Goliath vs David

The Wolf of Woy Woy

From Reagan To Trump

The Pit of Despair

Gas Superprofits

Faith Based Medicine

RoboTheft: Ripping off the Poor

David Pocock

The Upward Surge of Mankind

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The point is … that greed, for lack of a better word, is good.
Greed is right, greed works.
Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, [for] knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind.

— Oliver Stone (1946), Wall Street, 1987.

One Small Step

(Secrets of the Universe)

Jimmy Carter (1924):
We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization. …
We cast this message into the cosmos. …
This is a present from a small distant world …
We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. …
We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations.
This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.
(The Golden Record, Voyager Spacecraft, 1977)

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857 – 1935):
Earth is the cradle of humanity.
But one cannot live in the cradle forever.
(1903)

Herbert Wells (1866 – 1946):
A day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars.
(The Discovery of the Future, Nature, 65:326, 1902)

Georges Lemaître (1894 – 1966):
Standing on a cooled cinder, we see that slow fading of the suns, and we try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds.

Ralph Emerson (1803 – 82):
If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!
(Nature, Chapter 1, 1836)


Mark Alfano [Associate Professor of Philosophy, Macquarie University]:
[We] find that people who are open-minded, who score

• low on intellectual arrogance, and
• high on a disposition to criticize their own in-groups,

are simultaneously better at:

• rejecting unwarranted conspiracy theories, [eg about COVID, and]
• accepting true, or warranted, conspiracy theories, like that Osama Bin Laden plotted 9/11.

(Trust and scepticism in a post-truth world, ABC The Philosopher's Zone, 30 September 2022)

The Taiwan War

Measuring What Matters

Goofy was a communist

Capitalism vs Democracy

Innoculation

Grassroots Democracy

Theory of mind in birds

Surviving the police

Dress Code Violation

Ghost in the Machine

The Price of Civilization

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Greed is Good

Milton Friedman (1912 – 2006):
I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.
(Jordan Ellenberg, Less Like Sweden, How Not To Be Wrong, Part 1, Chapter 1, Penguin, 2014)


Foundation for Young Australians:
Over the past 15 years:

• incomes of the top 10% have grown [25% faster] than the bottom 90%.
• Incomes of the top 1% have grown [twice as fast as the bottom 90%, and]
• incomes of the top 0.1% have grown 2.8 times faster than the bottom 90%.]

(The New Work Order, 4 September 2015, pp 8 & 26)


Nicolas Herault & Francisco Azpitarte [Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research]:
[The] direct effect of tax-transfer policy reforms [in Australia] accounts for half of the observed increase in income inequality between 1999 and 2008 …
(Understanding changes in the distribution and redistribution of income: A unifying decomposition framework, Review of Income and Wealth, 12 December 2014)


George Megalogenis (1964):
This is the part of the Great Recession we did not avoid.
We had imported the AMERICAN DISEASE of budget-busting TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH.
(p 39)

Both sides of politics have fallen for the line that in order to maintain our record run of prosperity you have to squeeze:

• the employee,
• the student,
• the single parent,
• the consumer

— anyone, really who

• does not run a business, or
• own an investment property.

(p 27)

Business has convinced itself that globalisation means it owes no obligation to society other to generate profit.
(p 26)

[Indeed, business has, if anything,] become more presumptuous since [the 2008 global financial crisis:]

• Give us a cut in the company tax rate.
• Fund it with an increase in the GST.

There is NO economic logic here …
(Balancing Act: Australia Between Recession and Renewal, Quarterly Essay, Issue 61, February 2016, p 27)


Josh Frydenberg (1971):
I was thinking yesterday, as [Jim Chalmers (1978)] was coming into the chamber — fresh from his ashram deep in the Himalayas, barefoot, robes flowing, incense burning, beads in one hand, wellbeing budget in the other — what would the yoga position be that the member for Rankin would assume?
(Hansard, 27 February 2020)

Labor and @JEChalmers want to replace responsible economic management with a yoga mat, beads and a “wellbeing budget”.
(26 February 2020)

[A "well-being" budget is] laughable …
Labor hasn't delivered a surplus since 1989 so it should surprise no one they're going to look around for some other way to measure economic output.
('Laughable': Josh Frydenberg rules out adopting Jacinda Ardern-inspired 'wellbeing budget', SBS News, 20 February 2020)


Peter Martin (1958):
In an important way, Chalmers first "wellbeing budget" will have more rigour than any of the budgets prepared by Frydenberg or any of his predecessors. …
Introducing measurables wouldn't be about supplanting GDP, but about including it along with other measures of prosperity as outcomes against which the budget could be assessed, along with measures of health, the environment, gender, children's welfare, and the welfare of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
It would let us see whether we are making progress or going backwards on the environment … living standards, inequality, health and other things, and what the budget is doing about it.
(Why Labor's first 'wellbeing' budget will have more rigour than any before it, The Conversation, 19 July 2022)

Things To Be Afraid Of

Hell on Earth

How Not To Be Human

The Working Homeless

Well-being budget

Inflation Panic

Alan Kohler (1952):
Some people might … have to sell the house because they can't afford to make the repayments.
And god help them if they have to go and rent, because there's just no rental properties available and rents have gone up far more than interest rates have gone up.
Rents in Adelaide and Brisbane are up 13% to 14% in 12 months … that's if you can get a place.
(ABC News Daily, 5 October 2022)

Tax cuts funded by welfare cuts

Conservatives love tax cuts

Blowing the budget on $9,000 bonuses for the rich

Broken Promises

No Taxes, No Services

How civlized you want to be?

Richard Denniss:
[Out] of the 38 OECD nations, [Australia has] got the 10th lowest tax in the developed world [— $115 billion dollars per year less than the OECD average.]
[Tax] is the price [you] pay for a civilized society …

(Jeffrey Smart (1921 – 2013), Labyrinth, 2011)