WHEN WE DON’T KNOW WHAT WE DON’T KNOW

 

If one thing is certain in terms of the voice, most Australians do not really understand what it means, how it will work and how it will be set up. You could be forgiven for thinking that neither do those promoting a Yes vote. The reason for that is because the Government which is pushing the voice has not explained in clear and coherent detail such critical factors.

When has trust me, I’m from the Government ever worked? Who would buy anything on the basis of, don’t you worry about how it’s going to work?

Neither is the Government presenting Yes and No positions as it is required to do under regulations pertaining to a Referendum.

Section 11 of the Act requires the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) to distribute a pamphlet with a written argument for and against the passage of the referendum. This pamphlet should be received by each household with an enrolled elector not later than 14 days before polling day. These written arguments (no more than 2,000 words each) are to be authorised by a majority of parliamentary members who voted for or against the Referendum Bill, respectively.

Now, clearly the Government still has time to create and distribute said pamphlet, after battering Australians with the guilt-waddy for months, and playing the emotional card which was used, along with a lot of lies,  now called myths, to win the 1967 Referendum.  Advertisements promoting a Yes vote are now being used by the Federal Government. Then again, the Act is hardly what it once was, where previously, “it allowed the Commonwealth to only spend money in relation to preparing and distributing the pamphlets and prohibits any Government-funded referendum education campaign or advertising. However, in 1999 the Government legislated to allow additional expenditure, such as for advertising, in relation to that specific referendum, and the recent history of public funding of referendum campaigns has been relatively ad hoc.”

So, the public is presented with a pro-Yes campaign from the Federal Government in the months leading up to the Referendum, which hardly seems right, let alone fair. And that leads most people to rely on what the media offers. Unfortunately, in the realm of mainstream media, with some noble exceptions, there is more promoting a Yes vote than making a case for a No vote.

And given the lack of clarity on the voice and its structure, function and powers, there is little basis for the average Australian to gain perspective. From what is presented we have a suggested position that the voice is going to resolve the problems in aboriginal communities, which it seems dozens if not hundreds of groups and consultations, billions of dollars and decades of time and attention have failed to do.

How many live in such communities? A small minority.

Based on projections for 2022, among Indigenous Australians: 38% (344,800) live in Major cities. 44% (395,900) live in Inner and outer regional areas. 17% (155,600) live in Remote and very remote areas combined (Figure 2, ABS 2019b).

So, a small minority live in the troubled communities and the guess of how many are fully Aboriginal in ancestry is around 1%. The data is hard to find because one presumes in this age it is a no-no to enquire into such ancestry percentages, given the prevailing view that Aboriginality is something spiritual and there is no relevance between 100% of such spiritual ancestry or less than 1%.

But, the most common presenting position suggests that Australians owe those with Aboriginal ancestry special treatment because, they have been here a very long time, 40,000 years, pick a figure onwards and upwards. Or rather, they believe they can trace back their ancestry furthest and that makes them unique and deserving of special treatment and what amounts to a louder and extra voice and in essence, their own chamber in Parliament and an additional vote.

How is any of that fair, constitutional, democratic or not racist? The basic premise with longevity ancestry is that the further back someone can trace some of their ancestry, the superior they are as a citizen, i.e. they deserve special rights. This means that someone with 100% Aboriginal ancestry is top of the ranking, although we don’t actually know if any of those here in 1788 were descended from the first Homo Sapiens to arrive on this land, and someone who became a citizen last week is bottom. None of that is democratic and all of it is an insult to Australians in general and migrants in particular.

We also have the insanity that someone like Senator Jacinta Price, if the voice gets up, is a superior citizen along with her mother and her sons, and her father and husband are inferior citizens, despite the fact they all live the same sorts of lives.  Would a Yes vote mean that in divorce situations the parent with some Aboriginal ancestry gets greater rights over any children? It could, because nothing has been spelled out. And it is an important question because most Australians with aboriginal ancestry are in mixed marriages. In fact, we have more than two centuries of intermarriage which is why most Australians with Aboriginal ancestry are more Anglo-European than anything else. This fact alone is a testament to the lack of racism in Australia.

Analysis of the 2006 census reveals that 52% of Aboriginal men and 55% of Aboriginal women were married to non-Aboriginal Australians. In Australia's larger east coast cities, the intermarriage rate was well above 70%; in Sydney, as many as nine out of 10 university-educated Aborigines had a non-indigenous partner.

But, with the shocking dysfunction and violence in Aboriginal communities, that position also raises the question, since the entire group is deemed to be in need of this voice, of whether or not any amount of Aboriginal ancestry predisposes to serious dysfunction or inferior function at best. We know that is not the case because the majority of Australians with aboriginal ancestry, now numbering around 900,000 because we allow people to register as ‘native’ even with truly trivial amounts of Aboriginal ancestry, are doing fine. They have the same sorts of lives and outcomes as other Australians, experience no Gap and are as successful as the average and often more so. We see it in the fact that with the inflated numbers for Aboriginality, those with such ancestry make up around 3% of the population and yet are represented in State and Federal Parliaments at nearly 5%. These are the minimals who are fully assimilated into the modern world and broader community and who have been for generations in most cases.

They have absolutely nothing in common with those struggling in tribal/clan communities for the simple and tragic fact, they are the least assimilated into the modern world, and instead remain trapped in backward and violent aboriginal tribal clan systems. This group of urban elites do not speak as one because they are descended from different tribal/clan groups. In fact their only capacity to speak as one is in English as Australians. Neither do they speak as one in communities, riven as they are by familial and tribal/clan divisions. As far as many in tribal communities are concerned, these Aborigine Lites are whitefellas. Anyone who thinks that Linda Burnie, Marcia Langton, Ken Wyatt, Lidia Thorpe or Noel Pearson live the same sorts of lives as those in Aboriginal communities needs to think again.

So, we do not have one voice among those who have been elected to Parliament despite them all having some Aboriginal ancestry. We do not have one voice in each Aboriginal community and we certainly do not have one voice from all communities, let alone from every single Australian who has registered themselves as native. And yet we are being asked to change our constitution, betray our democracy and introduce racism into our society by voting for a voice which does not exist and which will never exist. 

How could it? In 1788 there were between 350-500 different groups, most not even big enough to be tribes, but instead, family clans, without a common language and generally at war with each other. They were descended from waves of migration across 40,000 years with the most recent thought to be the arrival of colonists from southern India, who brought their native dog with them which became the Dingo. Did those stone-age peoples eradicate anyone they found in their path, apart perhaps from a few useful females? Probably, for that was the way of it in the times. In a modern democracy 40,000 or 4,000 years are no more important than 40 years or 4 weeks, for that is the nature of the system.

In Aboriginal communities the clans are still at war with each other and as Noel Pearson recently demonstrated with his attack on Mick Gooda, there is infighting even with the elites. If the urban Aborigine Lites are at war with each other what hope is there of a voice even from this mob?

And there are many notable Australians with Aboriginal ancestry like Senator Jacinta Price, Anthony Dillon and Warren Mundine who are firmly in the No camp. There is no unity even among those who are well educated and highly successful in Australian society. And yet we are being told that Australians with aboriginal ancestry, codename indigenous, need to speak with one voice and this needs to be written into our Constitution, a document which is meant to represent each of us equally. It would not even represent Australians with aboriginal ancestry equally because there is no unity and there is no one voice. Never was, never will be.

Meanwhile, with nothing clarified or spelled out in terms of this voice,  Australians can only sift through the propaganda and snippets of information, apply common sense and try to avoid making a serious error of judgement which our children and grandchildren will inherit to their terrible cost.

On something as important as our Constitution and our democracy, ‘she’ll be right mate, ’just doesn’t cut it. When you don’t know then vote NO.

 

The quality of being

 Being is so hard to find,

because it hides in dim

places, where time and

mind muddle to make 

real, to create that sense

which holds us in sure

ground; guides, protects

and binds us to self.

Being does not know 

itself unless we draw

a shape, smooth the 

edges, tidy the frayed

parts of soul, and call

upon our inner spirit

to know the truth of 

who and what it is.

Being cannot be led

or directed, but only 

enticed once we can

recognise that it exists,

beyond the ghostly 

dregs and dross of who

and what we are, for 

in those shaded realms

we are drawn into the 

lap of endless being. 

Poetics: Quality Poems | dVerse (dversepoets.com)

PALESTINE ACHES

 

 

 

The dead have silent teeth and empty throats,
they have no voice with which to speak, to cry
of all the horrors they have seen and been and
known; to call for justice, freedom from the

power of those who kill to claim what is not
theirs, the land of others, who suffocate children
in waves of dust and shredded metal moments,
where blood and tears and destiny are driven

deep into the waiting earth; dressing broken
fragments of their lives, their souls, their
hearts, that costuming of evil which war does
primp and posture into place, for those who

are the victims, for those who cannot speak,
and for whom the only hope can be for others,
that their throats are not empty, their teeth
are not silent, their words are not crushed

beneath the boot of evil and injustice and
military might, and that in the darkened
quietness of this awful, suppurating wound,
their only hope is that the voices of the living

will be speaking out for those who lie strewn,
fleshed like scattered crops, in that harvest
which bleeds and grieves and slowly seeds
the fields of future justice in aching Palestine.

Why doctors can no longer be trusted

 

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that younger generations of doctors are poorly trained and that an intelligent individual researching for themselves, is often better informed than the GP that they see.

 

I read somewhere that the only thing medical students are taught about vaccines are schedules and that few if any would take the time to find out, how they are made, what they contain and what they are designed to do. The word vaccine is in allopathic medicine today, the equivalent of the Holy Wafer, something to be accepted without question as a matter of blind faith.

 

This blind obsession with vaccines rides on the back of materialist reductionist mechanistic science and the deluded belief that health resides in some magic pill, potion or needle and Death and Disease can be thwarted through chemical means and the manipulations of mere mortals.

Doctors today work under the Rumsfeld doctrine - they don't know what they don't know and they don't know that they don't know. On the subject of vaccines they are brainwashed and the vaccine industry is a cult.

 

Reading the histories of infectious diseases and the massive changes made by improved living conditions provides perspective no longer taught in medical schools.

In 1977, Boston University epidemiologists John and Sonja McKinlay published a seminal work on the role vaccines (and other medical interventions) played in the massive decline in mortality seen in the twentieth century.

 

The McKinlay’s study was titled, “The Questionable Contribution of Medical Measures to the Decline of Mortality in the United States in the Twentieth Century.” Their data showed:

 

<b>“that the introduction of specific medical measures and/or the expansion of medical services are generally not responsible for most of the modern decline in mortality.”</b>

 

In 1970, Dr Edward H. Kass, of Harvard, gave a speech to the annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, of which he was then President. He warned his colleagues that drawing false conclusions about why mortality rates had declined so much could cause them to focus on the wrong things.

 

He said:

“…we had accepted some half truths and had stopped searching for the whole truths.

 

The principal half truths were that medical research had stamped out the great killers of the past —tuberculosis, diphtheria, pneumonia, puerperal sepsis, etc. —and that medical research and our superior system of medical care were major factors extending life expectancy, thus providing the American people with the highest level of health available in the world.

 

That these are half truths is known but is perhaps not as well known as it should be.”

<b>

Macfarlane Burnet, Nobel Prize laureate for immunology, suggested over half a century ago that genetics, nutrition, psychological and environmental factors (ecological medicine) may play a more important role in resistance to disease than the assumed benefits of artificial immunity induced by vaccination procedures (Burnet 1952 p106). </b>

 

He suggested that in years to come society may have to reassess the belief scientists were placing in vaccination.

 

He considered that genetic deterioration of the population may be a consequence of universal mass vaccination campaigns and he postulated that ‘some of our modern successes in preventative and curative medicine may on the longest view be against the best interests of the state’ (Burnet 1952 p107). Burnet (1952) believed that genetic constitution was the most important hidden variable in disease statistics.

 

<i>Early in the last century, measles killed millions of people a year. Then, bit by bit in countries of the developed world, the death rate dropped, by the 1960s by 98% or more. In the U.K., it dropped by an astounding 99.96%. And then, the measles vaccine entered the market.</i>

 

 

https://financialpost.com/opinion/lawrence-solomon-the-untold-story-of-measles

ACT OF LOVE

The fruit falls swiftly from the tree,

the bulls stand silent in the lake,

the figure crucified is seen

upon the framework of the dream.

With arms spread wide and silent eyes

they lift her high upon the boughs

and turn her face towards the south

where white-flanked cows raise shining knives

above the meek and pious brows.

With sure and steady strokes they strip

pink flesh from each initiate,

to bathe in sacred waters then

the raw-bled truth of god and men.

The wise man watches, monkey-faced

and clasps each paw in full embrace

around the pierced and bleeding feet

of Woman, raised … her Self to meet.

Then gathered in small, blackened arms

the corpse is carried to the edge

of water, sanctified and deep

wherein the Goddess counsel keeps.

To lie beneath the water’s chill

and watch through full and empty eyes

the blood-washed sacrifice above

has been her greatest act of love. 

PULL

Pull yourself together,

they said.

As if I were yarn,

loose-stretched, ragged

at the edges;

a shapeless form

on life's hard block.

But the tears had knitted

in my soul, with needles

piercing deep;

a shimmering sheet

of memories

to shawl my troubled sleep.

Pull yourself together,

they said.

As if I could take

the strands, taut-tattered,

tired and torn,

and thread them through

again, on life's hard block -

so I did.

83 (c)

Madness rules when there are no boundaries

 

A society without boundaries is madness

Roslyn Ross

Getty Images

Roslyn Ross

13 November 2022

5:08 PM

Until we know the shape of something, we cannot begin to understand what it might be or what it might mean. It is in the boundaries, the borders, and the identity of something that we find meaning, purpose, and structure. When the mind has no such boundaries the result is madness. The same applies to societies.

We know that children, particularly teenagers – despite huge resistance – require boundaries in order to feel safe enough to explore the process of their becoming. Societies, systems, and nations are the same because without the basis of order nothing is certain and in the madness of all things being possible, things become impossible.

This is not to say that boundaries (which are our beliefs, traditions, practices) should not change or be redrawn, but that removing them quickly is disorienting and dangerous. Where do we fall when there is nothing to fall against? What stops us from tumbling into some abyss when there is no defined border?

The famous poem by Yeats touches upon the need for the centre to hold. Yeats reminds us why it is important that some things hold fast in order to retain a semblance of order, without which there is chaos. The poem reflects our age where we are tearing down the structures of the past at a sickening pace, leaving individuals and society vulnerable, like some crab that has discarded its shell and now creeps, soft, weak, piteously defenceless until a new carapace can be grown; until a defined, protective border is in place.

---

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

The Second Coming – William Butler Yeats

---

We may not value many things which we have inherited from the past, but we should recognise that the fact they have been handed down means they are important in ways we do not understand.

In every act of destruction of the past, whether statues, gender roles, political systems, traditions, we are removing the borders which have helped keep our world in place. Defined beliefs like armour which preserve and protect, and which can be removed slowly, in small steps. But, where if too much is discarded too quickly, we risk everything.

And when we tinker with things we do not understand we unleash demons beyond imagining and believe that anything can and should be possible, or acceptable then we open ourselves and our world to much we may not have imagined. As the maxim has it – be careful what you wish for.

‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’ are the words from ancient Hindu scripture, which Robert Oppenheimer quoted when he realised what had been created. There are more ways to create an atomic bomb than the literal.

The pace of change in the Western world, in particular over the past century, has been faster than ever before. We humans have evolved over many thousands of years with certain beliefs that have underpinned our societies. While there can and should be variations on those themes, there are basics that form the glue holding society together. One of which is that there are males and females and they come together in committed unions and create life so humanity may endure. Another is that there is more to this world than the merely material and that we have spiritual needs which demand attention. The Ten Commandments, not surprisingly, reflect the basic rules which have enabled humans to not just survive but to thrive.

A healthy society respects and preserves at least half of these rules for life – honour your father and mother; do not kill but protect life; honour the sacrament of marriage; do not steal; do not lie and do not envy others and covet what they have.

The first four rules pertain to religion and in the past century, at least in the Western world, religion has declined and been demonised and mocked, by the new Mammon which is Science. We no longer believe in honouring our parents and certainly do not honour the sacrament of marriage between a man and a woman. Even telling lies is not condemned in this age, but at times, applauded. As to coveting what others have- all too often that is deemed to be a requirement and not a failing.

So, out of the ten rules for life, or commandments as they have been called, we really only still hold to two – do not kill and do not steal. Although even here, the bed in which they lie is rotting because we do kill with abortion and euthanasia, and even stealing can be justified it seems. The Greens recently defended an article that argued it was justifiable for people on low incomes to steal from supermarkets like Woolworths and Coles. No more of this transported to the colonies for stealing a sandwich stuff.

This means the protective shell of such traditions which have held for millennia is pretty much in tatters. Which also means that ‘anything goes’ and that means absolutely anything. We already have people talking publicly in support of adults having sexual relationships with children; of men becoming women and vice-versa; of children being chemically and surgically altered; of sperm, egg, and womb being purchased so two men or two women can have a child – anything is possible, everything is accepted, and there are no rules to hold society together.

Not only does the centre not hold but nothing is held in place, in shape, in form and we barely conceive of the monster we have created, so well described by Yeats:

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it 

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. 

The darkness drops again; but now I know 

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, 

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, 

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/11/a-society-without-boundaries-is-madness/