I want to approach this with the utmost care. On the old blog.,you used to share that you had experienced difficult and painful events in our early life, and at times it seemed to deeply affect you emotionally. Given the personal impact this must have had on you, I was wondering how you managed to stay emotionally detached when working on cases related to this area of criminal behavior. I ask only out of curiosity about how such experiences shape one’s ability to navigate similar situations professionally. I also ask because I’m somewhat sceptical anyone could not let these experiences color their view.

Retired border chief ordered to not report border crossers with ties to terrorism

‘We have no idea who and what entered our country’

‘Retired San Diego Border Patrol Chief Patrol Agent Aaron Heitke said he was instructed by the Biden administration to not publicize arrests of illegal border crossers identified as “Significant Interest Aliens” with ties to terrorism.

Heitke testified before a U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security hearing on Wednesday about how Biden-Harris “open border policies have undermined our safety and security.”

“We had an exponential increase in Significant Interest Aliens … with significant ties to terrorism,” illegally entering in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection San Diego Sector, he said.

Prior to the Biden-Harris administration, the sector averaged 10 to 15 SIAs per year. “Once word was out that the border was far easier to cross, San Diego went to over 100 SIAs in 2022, way over 100 SIAs in 2023 and more than that this year,” he said.’

The Centre Square

I wonder if border security was on the agenda of Albanese’s 90 minute meeting with Biden today?

Knuckle Dragger
 September 21, 2024 9:08 pm

The Furniture Shop is missing one of its mascots.

You don’t speak for me!
…
Or do you?

Knuckle Dragger
 September 21, 2024 9:30 pm

You don’t speak for me!

…

Or do you?

Check your email.

Bwah ha ha ha.
Good times.
Went off like a Lebanese pager.

Who is this Leigh Lowe?

Silly me thought a realtively innoccuous comment at the Paywallian might get though…..
There was an article by Chris Kenny abou how awful people were to disparage those unhappy about Welcome To Country and such like. My comment was:

As I understand it the Welcome to Country was invented by Ernie Dingo and Richard Whalley in the 1970’s to assist with a ceremony for some foreign dignitary.
Then the smoking ceremony: also invented, there seems to be no record of this being a legitimate activity by aboriginal people. Mind you they did generate plenty of smoke with the burning of the bush that was practiced to flush out some food.

Ditto the ‘dot paintings’. No paintings anything like dot paintings found among the rock art and cave ‘paintings’ of aboriginal people.
All are fabrications and totally made up.
When you have to lie and make things up about your past, then either you did not have one worth much or are embarrassed about it.
Without honesty there is not much.

Apart from Covid-19, there is another virus circulating at the moment.

It is just as dangerous as the Covid Pandemic, but it originated in the USA, not China. It has seeped across the Pacific like leaking fluids from an overstocked fridge, carried on the bonkers blogs and nutjob social media accounts of some in the land of the shooting spree. Recent events close to home at Wieambilla provide an instructive example. The consequences are real, as can be observed by the chaotic state of US politics.

I’m referring, of course, to the epidemic of distrust of institutions and government across the Pacific since the Tea Party movement emerged towards the first ten years of the new millennium. That movement grew out of a sense of grievance and entitlement precipitated by globalism, automation, and the GFC.

Political movements generated by national grievance rarely end well. Examples include Brexit, which is wreaking havoc on daily life in the UK right now, and the Tea Party itself, which has changed some Republicans from a credible conservative movement to a baying mob, despite the fact that it largely disappeared from the scene in its original form. National grievance was one of the major factors driving the rise of the NAZI movement in Germany in the thirties, and remains a large component of Chinese nationalism, used extremely effectively by the CCP under Xi Jinping.

Another component assisting the rise of grievance politics is the role of US corporate media, exemplified by Fox news, and these days, Newsmax. Gone are the days when the corporate media reported the public mood. These days they make a profit by exploiting that mood, monetising it, and then selling it back to the consumers of that same media. 

These same consumers are always prepared to pay for what they want to hear. They become opinion junkies, and this phenomenon leeches into social media. Recently, social media platforms have belatedly started to arrest the tide of misinformation and disinformation that feeds this sense of grievance. Facebook and Twitter (now X) have begun to do this, although with reluctance, as it messes with their business model. It took an insurrection for Twitter to give Trump the shove. And the twit from South Africa reinstated him.

None of this would bother me very much, except that it is beginning to have an effect locally. One example of this is the imported outrage from the US about vaccine mandates and lockdowns. Despite the fact that the Australian death rate from the virus per head of population is about 1/25 of what is it across the Pacific (67 per million here vs 2297 per million in the US) there are Australian nitwits jumping on the culture wars bandwagon, and bleating, post-event about mandates and restrictions.

 The most recent example of this trans Pacific virus is the push for legislation designed to require voters to present ID at the ballot box. It is designed to solve a problem which does not exist in this country, and has already been resolved in Queensland, where people on the electoral roll are posted an ID card to their address, to present when they vote. I’m accumulating a collection.

A far greater problem than electoral fraud in this country is the rate of participation in state and federal elections – (91.9% at the last federal election). Despite the Electoral Commission seeing this as an achievement, we’d be doing better as a democracy if everybody got to vote. Full participation is essential to democracy. How about the legislature take measures to ensure this disenfranchised 8.1% of the Australian electorate votes, rather than chasing the less than the 0.001% of the electorate who allegedly voted more than once at the last federal poll?

I won’t hold my breath for an answer.

Thanx TOM ..
Week-in-pictures has outdun itself today .. an excellent selection ..
Week In Pictures.

Piers Akerman sinking the boots in. Deservedly so:

Anthony Albanese’s legacy is simple – beyond a scintilla of a doubt he has foisted the worst government on Australia in living memory.

Forget “Silly” Billy McMahon or discredited Gough Whitlam, both of whom deserve all the contempt of those who knew them and experienced their trashing of the country.

But their egotistical antics pale to dim shades of grey, almost off-white, compared with the catastrophic failures of the incumbent.

The most recent polls reflect the loss of confidence in this leftist government as do the constant comparisons with the last real Labor leaders, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating (before he started sliding into irrelevance).

Though his first term isn’t due to end for 12 months, it would seem that Albanese is a one-trick pony and he has failed to bring that trick off.

His stunt, the core of his triumphal election night address, was his promise to deliver the Voice to parliament with all its principal clauses intact.

He placed all his political capital on this – and we know how it went 11 months ago.

His inability to read the room and his innate vanity blinded him to the flawed campaign he thought would be the crowning legacy of his first term in office

Now it is looking increasingly as if the public will say No to the man who not only pledged to bring home Yes but who then had the hide to deny any involvement at all in the disastrously divisive campaign.

Mad, bad and dangerous doesn’t do justice to this farce of an administration.

The Indigenous portfolio has been so wretchedly mismanaged that the number of Aboriginal children in care has reached record numbers.

Domestic violence is at hellish levels, far worse than it has been since pre-settlement times.

Some states have set up Truth and Justice commissions to criticise Western culture and the European occupation. But if there was any truth to be aired, we would be hearing about the brutish existence of pre-settlement Aboriginals.

But it’s not just at home that this government has served its citizens so appallingly.

Its performance away has earned Australia the contempt of its oldest and greatest allies, those who came to our rescue in our hour of need, as well as those who have helped us thwart terrorist attacks here recently.

The Albanese government couldn’t help our allies when the Houthis blocked shipping in the Red Sea.

It has cowed before implicit Chinese threats to our ships and aircraft in international waters and air space.

It has reduced support to Israel, though that nation supplied our intelligence service with critical information.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong has stated she wished Australia could have done more to assist the UN with a resolution that threatened Israel’s existence and rewarded the barbaric terrorist activities of Hamas and its Gazan supporters almost 12 months ago.

By trying to isolate Israel, we are losing access to the technologies which enabled the recent targeted strikes against terrorist organisation Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria.

Rather than putting national security foremost, the Albanese government rushed visas to people from Gaza so they could enter Australia without security checks.

Now the government is running a scandalous baseless fear campaign against nuclear energy.

Under Labor, defence force morale has reached rock bottom.

Bill Shorten may have jumped ship too soon. Australia is rapidly becoming a failed nation under the Albanese government.

From ther Hun.
Clementine Ford threatened with legal action by Kingston Council candidate Jane Agirtan over social media spatA social media spat that kicked off over a designer handbag could end up costing Clementine Ford more than $150,000, after an aspiring councillor claimed she’d been defamed.

Number of asylum seekers in Australia reaches six-year high 

I note the Gazans here on “tourist visas” are now demanding work and study rights and Medicare cards.

I think they intend to settle down.

This is where she really outperforms.
The art of vacuity

This is interesting because the rush to net zero will kill AI just the same as everything else. Perhaps when the lights go out such nuclear reactors can be repurposed for more immediate needs.
Microsoft inks deal to restart Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to fuel its voracious AI ambitions

Electric cars are up to twice as expensive as petrol or diesel vehicles to run, new figures have suggested.

Looks like they didn’t factor in insurance and depreciation.

Or average repair costs over a vehicle’s lifetime.

Which would make the EV figures much, much worse.

And governments are just biding their time until they can make those chargers a revenue source.

I foresee a day not far hence when EV owners will cry for subsidies.

Death toll from Israeli strike on Hezbollah military leaders risesStephen Kalin
11 hours ago

Dow Jones
154 comments

Israel’s airstrike on a building in southern Beirut didn’t just kill a top Hezbollah commander – it took out an entire class of senior leaders of the militant group’s most elite fighting force, as the two foes lurch closer to all-out war.
Hezbollah on Saturday raised the death toll among its fighters from Friday’s airstrike to 16, including top military commander Ibrahim Aqil and many of the senior commanders of the elite Radwan force. The strike on top leadership followed a pair of broad attacks on the group’s rank and file, when thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies that had been rigged with explosives blew up roughly simultaneously across the country.
According to the group’s own death announcements, the week’s attacks accounted for about 10% of the 500 Hezbollah fighters to have been killed since the group started firing rockets across the border shortly after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel that sparked the war in the Gaza Strip.

Smashing the Western Illusion of Democracy

Finn Andreen, Mises Wire, 13 September 2024

In these politically turbulent times, the “illusion of democracy is fading worldwide” as one pundit wrote recently. There is a growing sense in the West that “democracy” is not working well, but there is not yet a full and clear recognition of that fact. Michel Maffesoli, honorary professor at the Sorbonne in Paris, has been saying already for several years, that “the end of the democratic ideal is manifesting itself.” Signs of this can be seen in the problematic elections that have taken place in his native France and other Western countries. 

The “ideal” or “illusion” of democracy comes from widespread misconceptions about this political system, despite clear misgivings from the most illustrious political thinkers of the past. The most important misconceptions about democracy are that elected representatives are generally loyal and disinterested, and that the electorate is generally informed and rational with regard to politics.

David Hume wrote in his famous Essays (1777) that democracy cannot be “representative” because all societies are “governed by the few.” Sociologist Robert Michels then defined, in his ground-breaking work on political parties (1911), what he called the “iron law of oligarchy,” methodically showing that all mature organizations, without exception, become oligarchic (i.e., ruled by minorities). 

For the early democratic movements of the 19th century, representative democracy was generally not perceived as truly democratic; the Athenian model was the ideal. As Robert Michels noted, it was only when the practical impossibilities of direct democracy on a large scale became evident, that the concept of political representation gained legitimacy. Over time, this concept became synonymous with “democracy.”

Montesquieu considered in The Spirit of the Laws (1739) that the main justification for the representative system is not only that the average person does not have the time or the interest to engage in political life, but that he is incompetent to do so. Tocqueville warned in Democracy in America (1835) that one of the potential threats to democracy is that people can become so absorbed by the pursuit of economic opportunities that they lose interest in politics. 

Indeed, the majority has neither the interest nor the motivation to get deeply involved in politics. Voters implicitly understand that their vote is just a small drop in an ocean of ballots and will, by itself, make no difference in the election outcome. It has also been argued by some that not only do voters lack the interest and motivation, they also lack the time and the capability of thinking rationally about politics, as political theorist James Burnham summarized in his essential work, The Machiavellians (1943):

“The inability of the masses to function scientifically in politics rests primarily on the following factors: the huge size of the mass group, which makes it too unwieldy for the use of scientific techniques; the ignorance, on the part of the masses, of the methods of administration and rule; the necessity, for the masses, of spending most of their energies on the bare making of a living, which leaves little energy or time for gaining more knowledge about politics or carrying out practical political tasks; the lack, in most people, of a sufficient degree of those psychological qualities—ambition, ruthlessness, and so on—that are prerequisites for active political life.”

Though these insights about political representation have long been known, they have been suppressed in order to maintain the illusion of majority rule. “Democracy” has such a positive connotation in the Western value system that it is understandably difficult for most people to accept that they do not “rule” in any meaningful sense. This reality is all the more difficult to grasp since some policies from the ruling minority do, and even must, consider majority public opinion to some extent. If pressed, most people would nevertheless admit that though they have elected “representatives,” they actually have no real say over several areas (e.g., foreign, monetary, and trade policy), even though these areas impact their lives greatly. 

The Inherent Instability of All Political Systems

Though the illusion of democracy is slowly fading in the West, it is not so much because of a realization of the truths presented above. Rather, it is because representative democracy, like all political systems, is inherently unstable. It has long been known that conditions constantly change, to paraphrase Heraclitus, but it is not widely understood that political systems are ill-suited for this basic reality. Though democracy might sometimes seem to work well, the never-ending economic, social, demographic, and technical changes to society make such impressions short-lived. 

Regardless of the political system, the power balance at any given time between state and society, and between the ruling minority and the ruled majority, is constantly disrupted by such changing conditions. The seemingly inexorable increase in state interventionism has a negative impact on wealth-creation and private property, forcing socialization, and leading to a rise in political tensions. When the state becomes more bureaucratic, it fails to keep up with a changing society, and thereby destabilizes the power balance. Further, political tensions also arise if the ruling minority pushes a political agenda that disregards or even antagonizes the majority. 

Democracy, in particular, is subject to constant swings of political tensions due to its inherent lack of fairness: the losing side of an election (more than half in plurality systems) is not represented. As Gustave de Molinari wrote, democracy “insist[s] that the decisions of the majority must become law, and that the minority is obliged to submit to it, even if it is contrary to its most deeply rooted convictions and injures its most precious interests.” Voting phenomena like Duverger’s Law and Arrow’s paradox tend to soften Molinari’s stark description but, by distorting election results, they hardly make them more representative or more fair.

When the state’s size and power is limited (i.e., statist interventionism in society is weak), the state’s record as defender of property rights would naturally be considered more important than whether or not the majority is democratically represented. Conversely, when the state’s power is extensive (i.e., the state is strongly interventionist), whether at a national or supranational level, the majority surely has high expectations from democracy since the direction of society hangs, grotesquely, on the decisions of its executive and legislative branches. 

A Necessary Reduction of State Power

It is possible then to conclude that a limitation of state power is necessary in order to reduce political tensions in society and to introduce much-needed stability, regardless of whether or not the political system is considered “democratic.” This requires a decentralization of decision-making and a reduction of the role of the state, by strengthening the free market and individual rights. The result would be a freer society, able to adapt more naturally and harmoniously to the changing conditions. Thus, what is needed is “more freedom” rather than “more democracy.”

Unfortunately, the illusion of democracy has led the majorities in the West to conflate democracy with freedom. This is a significant mistake because democracy is no guarantee for freedom, even if majority rule were possible. On the contrary, when concessions to the majority have been made, such as welfare spending through fiscal redistribution, these have had deleterious effects on society and reduced economic freedom. As Tocqueville said, “I dearly love liberty and respect for rights, but not democracy.”

Considering the misconceptions about political representation that have been presented here, it is high time to fully smash the illusion of democracy in the West and substitute freedom for democracy as the highest political goal to attain and to protect.

Finn Andreen is a Swedish libertarian living in France.

Excellent day yesterday. Had lunch with the great Bushie, Farmer Gez, Matrix, John and Mater. Along with wives of Mater and Matrix.
Fantastic to just sit and listen to these people and their experiences.

Numbers, the right/left thing politically is very simple. The Left wants more government – rules, regulations, hoops to jump through etc. The Right wants fewer of these.

Regarding Starship Flight 5 and the FAA:
https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/essays-and-commentaries/spacex-and-elon-musk-blast-the-faas-red-tape-again/

RTWT. The FAA are a pack of utter bastards who must be taking lessons from CASA which is yet another criminal organisation.
I’m told by a former insider that the only two things discussed at lunch at CASA are “how’s my super going” and ” Who in the industry I managed to screw over this morning”.