Days Volume Two

* And unfortunately most people do not have sufficient powers of discrimination to distinguish the artificial world of the media from the real world of everyday experience. The two worlds merge in their minds, and they can't tell them apart. What people see on the television screen is not just entertainment; it is a collection of artificial experiences which merges with their collection of real experiences and gives them a new and largely artificial basis for evaluating things and making decisions. Dr William Pierce. All that was coordinated, all that was lost, young bones striding along valley floors, laughter, the dazzling sunlight. Oh how much hope there was. We had celebrated everything, the mornings, the evenings, the nights, we had celebrated being alive and we had celebrated being of a different time. We wanted to tear down the ramparts. Now the country is run by stale old socialists who have subsumed and inverted the messages of the past, exploited social justice dogma for

* Most people have a very limited range of real life experiences. Television and films and glossy magazine advertisements provide an enormous expansion of experience for the average person, by substituting artificial experiences for real experiences. On the television screen viewers experience artificial conflicts, artificial life. In advertisements they are given artificial ideals of beauty and fashion, artificial life-styles to which they can aspire. And in their newspapers and news magazines they are given a carefully filtered, a carefully slanted, view of what is happening in the world. Dr William Pierce. America's Dissident Voices. He had been unhappy for so long that when the opportunity came to change all that he didn't know what to do, how to recognise himself. All was changing. The profession which had once seemed so noble echoed in the corridors; flat, meaningless, the snakes in power. In the alcove opposite was the dero who's name no one had ever deciphered. One

* A LITTLE POEM: We drank for happiness and became unhappy. We drank for joy and became miserable. We drank to be outgoing and became self-centered. We drank for sociability and became argumentative. We drank for sophistication and became crude and obnoxious. We drank for friendship and made enemies. We drank for sleep and awakened without rest. We drank for strength and felt weak. We drank for sex drive and lost our potency. We drank for relaxation and got the shakes. We drank for confidence and became uncertain. We drank for courage and became afraid. We drank for warmth and lost our cool. We drank for coolness and lost our warmth. We drank for freedom and became slaves. We drank for power and became powerless. We drank to soften sorrow and wallowed in self-pity. We drank to stimulate thought and blacked out. We drank medicinally and acquired health problems. We drank because the job called for it and lost the job. We drank to make conversation and became slurred in speech. We drank

* In the ancient cult of the earth goddess Cybele Mater Magna, young male devotees would fall into a frenzy, grab a sword and, in a dramatic public gesture, emasculate themselves. Some versions have the freshly made castrati run through the streets, choosing the family whose honour it will be to support them by tossing their severed gonads onto the doorstep. But what is generally agreed, from Ovid to Lucretius to Catullus to Pausanius, is that the now genderless youths, known as galli (or, in Greek, galloi) lived and dressed thereafter as women, becoming Cybele's priestesses, presiding at her worship and at ritual orgies in her honour. This story might have nothing more than shock value, were it not for the obvious and unexplained feminisation of contemporary men. As Mal Meninga noted with disgust after a recent bloke-survey, "the nation's iconic hard Aussie blokes are a dying breed. We've become a nation of pansies... Behaviour, too, emulates the female. Wherever you

* Apocalyptic beliefs have always been part of the Christian tradition. They express the yearning for heaven on earth, when evil is destroyed and the good are saved. In their classical religious form, such beliefs rely on signs and omens, like earthquakes and sunspots, which can be interpreted, by reference to biblical passages, as portending a great cataclysm and cleansing. Thus, apocalyptic moments are products of a sense of crisis: they can be triggered by wars and natural disasters. Classical apocalyptic thinking is certainly alive and well, especially in America, where it feeds on Protestant fundamentalism, and is mass marketed with all the resources of modern media. Circles close to the Bush administration, it is rumoured, take current distempers like terrorism as confirmation of biblical prophecies. In secularised, pseudo-scientific form, apocalyptic thinking has also been at the core of revolutionary politics. In his latest book, Black Mass, the philosopher John Gray discusses

* What Friedrich Hayek called the "fatal conceit" -- the idea that government can know the future's possibilities and can and should control the future's unfolding -- is the left's agenda. The left exists to enlarge the state's supervision of life, narrowing individual choices in the name of collective goods. Hence the left's hostility to markets. And to automobiles -- people going wherever they want whenever they want. Today's "green left" is the old "red left" revised. Marx, a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist, prophesied deepening class conflict but thought that history's violent dialectic would culminate in a revolution that would usher in material abundance and such spontaneous cooperation that the state would wither away. The green left preaches pessimism: Ineluctable scarcities (of energy, food, animal habitat, humans' living space) will require a perpetual regime of comprehensive rationing. The green left

* When they reached the mountain's summit, even Clancy took a pull, It well might make the boldest hold their breath, The wild hop scrub grew thickly, and the hidden ground was full Of wombat holes, and any slip was death. But the man from Snowy River let the pony have his head, And he swung his stockwhip round and gave a cheer, And he raced him down the mountain like a torrent down its bed, While the others stood and watched in very fear. He sent the flint stones flying, but the pony kept his feet, He cleared the fallen timber in his stride, And the man from Snowy River never shifted in his seat- It was grand to see that mountain horseman ride. Through the stringy barks and saplings, on the rough and broken ground, Down the hillside at a racing pace he went; And he never drew the bridle till he landed safe and sound, At the bottom of that terrible descent. He was right among the horses as they climbed the further hill, And the watchers on the mountain standing mute, Saw him ply th

* March of the Polar Bears By George F. Will Thursday, May 22, 2008 A preventive war worked out so well in Iraq that Washington last week launched another. The new preventive war -- the government responding forcefully against a postulated future threat -- has been declared on behalf of polar bears, the first species whose supposed jeopardy has been ascribed to global warming. The Interior Department, bound by the Endangered Species Act, has declared polar bears a "threatened" species because they might be endangered "in the foreseeable future," meaning 45 years. (Note: 45 years ago, the now-long-forgotten global cooling menace of 35 years ago was not yet foreseen.) The bears will be threatened if the current episode of warming, if there really is one, is, unlike all the previous episodes, irreversible, and if it intensifies, and if it continues to melt sea ice vital to the bears, and if the bears, unlike in many previous warming episodes, cannot adapt. Because of