I have absolutely no idea what is going on here.  But according to the BBC it’s about liberating Lithuanian blonde girls from the prejudices of others.

A Lithuanian company plans to set up a holiday island in the Maldives run entirely by blondes - the latest project in a growing blonde movement in the Baltics. But how legitimate is this latest sign of Baltic blonde ambition?

What do you call a blonde who runs a business? A dab hand at marketing, if she comes from Lithuania.

Blondes in the Baltics have had enough of the jokes about being dumb. Now they want to show they are smarter than the gags make out, with a growing blonde business empire.

But they succeeded only in making me more “prejudiced” than ever.

The following promotional film, made by British director Richard Curtis for the global warming activist group 10:10, has caused quite a furore.  It takes 1min 10sec to see why:

10:10 has withdrawn the film from circulation and striven mightily but unsuccessfully to prevent sceptics uploading it again to YouTube.  They also apologised for “missing the mark” with it.  The sceptics, of course, are delighted, having been handed a perfect propaganda piece.  Certainly, the film says everything about the vicious and hysterical destructiveness of the eco-left and nothing about climate scepticism.  But what interests me - exerts a fascination, really - is where this destructiveness comes from.  For we must assume that the kind of people who involve themselves in such extremism are the same kind that populate anti-racism, and the same kind of people who have availed themselves historically of opportunities for violence against dissent.  They were the servants of the late Inquisition and the witchburners in Puritan dress.  Violent zealotry is always with us.

The question is, are violent zealots born or made?  And if they are born, why?

by John Ray

A few days ago I went in to a private hospital to get my hearing tested and a hearing-aid prescribed. I’ve already got one plastic eye lens so a computerized ear comes next. That’s ageing for you.

Greenslopes private hospital, impressive though it is, does however have one of those murderous automated car-parks. You have to deal with a machine to get in and out. And it is not easy. I got so frazzled trying to get the machine to let me out that I left all the documentation from the audiologist on top of it when I could finally drive away - a fact I did not realise until I arrived home.

So what to do? One thing I was NOT going to do was negotiate that accursed machine again. So I just thought to myself that some kind person would find my documentation and take it to the audiologists - who would return it to me. And that is exactly what happened. I received it in the mail today.

Now isn’t that nice to live in a largish city and still get treated with village courtesy? But it is no coincidence. I trust my fellow Anglo/European-Australians to be like that: generally, good kind people. And that’s because the Australian population is still overwhelmingly white. You would have to go to Eastern Europe to find a whiter country.

Of course, it sounds racially-bigoted when it’s said just like that. But for several years now, to attribute Australia’s friendly civility to race has been mainstream sociology, albeit somewhat inconveniently so for the almost universally Left-leaning sociologists themselves. In Ottawa in December 2001, Robert Putnam, a left-leaning American political scientist at Harvard known for his research into racial homogeneity, launched a new set of findings on racial diversity and trust. They ran contrary to his own expectation, and to the two theories prevalent in this field, namely Contact Theory, whereby groups gain trust through inter-mixing, and Conflict Theory, whereby the groups do not gain trust of each other but turn inward to themselves as sources of trust. However, even though they did not suit him ideologically, and he certainly hesitated about making them public, Putnam was man enough to publish his findings.

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a sonnet by Alexander Baron

Tear down a forest, pulp its wood to print,
And spend your paper money while you may,
Dig up the Earth, and smelt its ores to mint,
Then stash your precious Krugerrands away.
Drain marsh and swamp: rich reservoirs of life,
Build your apartments where trees used to stand,
Give the lynx to the taxidermist’s knife,
And turn meadow and glade to dust and sand.
Let profit be your aim, and your excuse
Be progress, write that on your balance sheet,
Convince yourself such treasures are no use,
And, when the desolation is complete,
Sit back contentedly to count the cost
Of worthless booty for what’s ever lost.

by Alexander Baron

There was much controversy last week over comments at the Liberal Democrat Conference in Liverpool by UK Business Secretary Vince Cable.  They included an attack on City spivs and gamblers, on the wealthy, and on capitalism and its strangling of competition:

In uncompromising mood, he told the delegates:

“Capitalism takes no prisoners and kills competition when it can.

The right-wing press reacted predictably. But, as is often the case in politics, the controversy is unwarranted. Cable earned a PhD in Economics, so it is to be hoped he is not entirely ignorant of his subject matter, but reading a little (unorthodox) history might help to shed light on what he really means.

In his magnum opus “Tragedy And Hope”, which was first published in 1968, Professor Carroll Quigley makes essentially the same observations; page 452:

Business hates competition. Such competition might appear in various forms ... [making] planning difficult, and [jeopardising] profits. Businessmen prefer to get together with competitors so that they can cooperate to exploit consumers to the benefit of profits instead of competing with each other to the injury of profits.

But it is not only business that hates competition, earlier, on pages 380-1, the good Professor points out that:

... the picture which Marx had drawn of more and more numerous workers reduced to lower and lower standards of living by fewer and fewer exploitative capitalists proved to be completely erroneous in the more advanced industrial countries in the twentieth century. Instead, what occurred could be pictured as a cooperative effort by unionized workers and monopolized industry to exploit unorganized consumers by raising prices higher and higher to provide both higher wages and higher profits

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by I. Bismuth

September 24: We spent this evening side by side on the sofa doing what we are underpaid to do. While I was busy marking the work of my undergraduates, Rose was tapping away at a re-telling for pre-school tolerance workshops of the traditional African tale of the entire Yoruban kingdom that yearns to be re-located to a nice part of Oxfordshire.

She had reached the point in the narrative just after the Brits-to-be have finalized their plan to apply for a grant to open a Yorubas-This-Is-Your-Lucky-Day Dating Agency, the first ever in rural England, only to receive the devastating news that there will be a delay of a fortnight in issuing their new passports. She was uncertain about the most appropriate characterization of this chilling hitch. Was a delay of two weeks best described as fascist, racist, or Nazi?

With my wide experience of the struggle against evil I was able to offer her an authoritative guide to correct usage. Fascist would be a delay of three weeks. Racist would be a delay of four weeks. And Nazi would be a request to consider the consequences of the re-location of an entire Yoruban kingdom to a nice part of Oxfordshire on the inhabitants of that nice part of Oxfordshire. Le mot juste for a delay of two weeks in issuing the passports is extremist.

She nodded and agreed that this captured the exact nuance of hate involved, and I reapplied myself to the essays of the next generation of the professionally sensitive.

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by sirrealpolitik

This story in the Daily Mail - reputedly the paper of choice for middle-brow British bigots - is a fascinating object lesson in what we are up against at MR.  It is evident both in the visuals and in the not-so-subtle propagandistic spin of the “journalist” David Gardner (who appears to be a creature of the zeitgeist rather then a Jew - Ed).

A picture of the apparent racial mixing in San Antonio is given the caption:

The Texan city blurs the [racial] lines better than most.

Ah, that word “better”.  It turns this article into an instrument of social engineering, intended to assign a positive value to this supposed goal of “blurring.”

Gardner continues in this vein:

Another Texan city, Houston, also shows a richer diversity of races spreading out from the centre.

I wonder if Gardner has ever been to Texas.  If he had, he would know that once you get into the rural areas blacks become a rarity.

In Gardner’s mind, the racial separation in cities like Detroit and New York is evidence of white racism (of course!), where Euro-bigots form “rich white enclaves”.

Yet it must be noted that the author’s “blame whitey” mentality gets struck down in the comments section by the reader who has by far the most public support, with a 1545 rating at last count. “karl the Yank”, from upstate New York, says:

Rather than a symptom of “racial divisions” or social problems I think it is very telling that most humans prefer to live with their own. People who share their same history and culture. I dont see anything wrong with that. It is just human nature. Why some people see this fact as an awful thing that needs to be “corrected” is beyond me?

And there’s the question: why do educated whites interpret behaviour understood as normal in other races as “xenophobia” and “racism” in whites?

“My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms. But for you, perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there will follow a better age. This sleep of forgetfulness will not last for ever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance.”

Petrarch, from Africa, written in 1343.

The European mind is, in my view, better viewed from the very Anglo-American standpoint of its natural endowment than as a culturally and historically revealed phenomenon, though it is certainly our habit to favour the latter.  I confess that I don’t like the light that culture and history throw on the mind.  I instinctively want to withdraw out of that light, and withhold my agreement to the descriptions and images that appear in it.  What, after all, should we say about the European mind now, in the light of its debilitations in our postmodern age?  Perhaps no more than Petrarch said at the close of his epic poem about the great Roman general Scipio Africanus.

I don’t expect anyone else reading this to be burdened by this argument with temporality.  I don’t expect anyone else to seek a revelation of mind in its consistencies at all times rather than its saliencies in some - its great cathedrals, its epic poetry, its symphonies, its devotion to freedom and charity, and so forth.  I quite expect that my search for consistency went unsuspected by anyone who read this question, addressed to Notus Wind on his latest Ontology of Mind thread:

Notus,

A serious if perhaps leading ontological question, well, three ontological questions, really:

If our own faith had never been replaced by Christianity ...

1) Would an Enlightenment have been necessary and ...

2) if necessary, would it have come, and ...

3) if it would have come, how would it have differed from what we got?

This was an attempt to turn the historical narrative inside out in a few words, and find the mind humming away smoothly inside.  Here is Notus’s reply which I thought too good to be left to gather dust on a mature thread that perhaps not everyone will trouble to keep up with.

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