Peak political hypocrisy.
It appears that some think Philippians 4:19 reads: “My government will supply all my needs according to its riches and glory.”
What it actually says is: “My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.”
There’s a big difference.
Daddy government does not equal Father God.
The New South Wales Premier, Dominic Perrottet would no doubt agree with this observation.
In a 14-minute interview with SkyNews host Alan Jones, the Premier declared,
“As a [classical] Liberal, the less government intervention the better.”
Posed as a question, Jones reminded the Premier of support he’d given over a decade ago for Winston Churchill’s position opposing
‘The socialist model [as] the equal distribution of poverty not wealth. [As well as opposing] plans for more social engineering more welfare handouts and the continual obsession with our rights at the expense of our responsibilities.’
The new Premier acknowledged how “most people don’t want to live off the state,” and how “they want freedom to succeed. Freedom to prosper.”
“These are fundamental values that I believe in,” he said.
Perrottet then qualified this by signalling how Government intervention in times of crisis, such as COVID-19, are the exception.
He asserted,
“There will always be a role for the state to support those who are vulnerable, so that no one slips through the gaps, and that’s where the state intervention should be.”
Perrottet repeatedly said he advocates opening up New South Wales “as quickly, and as safely as possible.”
The Premier also congratulated the State for getting “vaccinated”. He failed to acknowledge how his government’s dogged totalitarian obsession with “no jab, no job” mandates met “vaccination” quotas.
He alluded to who was behind the latter, stating his government did “what the health teams asked [them] to do, and followed that advice.”
The current roadmap, Perrottet said, was designed by ex-Deputy Premier, (and Berejiklian chief CCP-19 head-kicker) John Barilaro on the advice of government health officials.
In other words, a greater easing of restrictions in NSW will come when forced “vaccinations” push the current stat up over the 80% quota set by unelected health bureaucrats.
Nodding at a strong commitment to opening the State, Perrottet noted 20 months’ worth of “sacrifices” made by the people of NSW; reasserting, “as I’ve said before, people born in this nation are born free.”
While there’s a lot to like about the new Premier, the people of New South Wales would be well justified in showing extreme caution.
For example, this week he presided over New South Wales becoming the first state in Australia to enforce segregation, demand employers fire staff on medical grounds, and discriminate against those they provide services to.
On a personal note.
My daughter was given three working days to get vaccinated or face unemployment.
Another family member faces being forced into unemployment and denied the right to her qualification after years of hard work trying to attain it.
In addition, another close relative was told this morning that his regular meeting with a mental health professional would have to be suspended until the 1st of December. The date some of the “public health” mandates are alleged to expire.
(He may also face setbacks in his battle with mental health problems. All in the name of “public health orders.”)
Another faces the “convert or die” dilemma before being fired for non-compliance.
Why? Because, contrary to the data showing that the age group they belong to is more likely to be hit by lightning than it is of being hospitalised or dying of COVID-19, they land in the “unvaccinated” class.
Regardless of what the propaganda slogans preach, none of these people have a choice.
“Get the vax or face the axe” decrees are the equivalent of being told to do the slave master’s bidding, or face the slave master’s whip.
Where there is no freedom to say “no,” choice does not exist.
To be fair, Dominic Perrottet inherited a regime governed by policies dominated by unelected health bureaucrats, not the voice of the people.
The new Premier is undoubtedly stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Perrottet inherited a government obsessed with appeasing anti-freedom, and pro-lockdown worm tongues, both from the Left and within their “COVID crisis” media hungry, health bureaucrat team.
The big Perrottet plus, is, that by all appearances he’s a far-sight better than Victoria’s Dictator of Doom, Daniel Andrews.
Reasserting governance of, by and for, the people, Perrottet made the right move in sideling government health advisor Dr. Kerry Chant.
Outside this, for now, his words only exist as nice, empty gestures.
Nice words and reassuring platitudes are welcome, but the NSW Premier needs to act on them.
Only a fool would think the words temporary government program are not an oxymoron.
For instance, while the NSW State of Emergency expires on 25th March 2022, contrary to the December 1st “freedom for everyone” party-line, current public health orders do not have an official expiry date.
Parnell McGuinness in the SMH explained,
‘Legally, this never has to end. As long as the state and territory chief health officers who compose the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee deem COVID-19 an “unacceptable risk to public health” the emergency powers under which Australia is living can go on indefinitely.’
In sum, PHO legislation was changed last year. Meaning that PHOs have no provisional boundaries, checks or balances. This hands unelected bureaucrats, like Chief Health Officer’s the absolute power to enforce PHO’s indefinitely. (See section 2.16, p.25 Subsection 2B)
Perrottet has the chance to be a Ron DeSantis. To follow or borrow his example, leading, not only NSW, but also Australia away from its COVID communist trajectory.
In order to do this Perrottet must end both vaccine mandates and vaccine passports.
Perrottet should ditch the mad, then follow the few, on behalf of the brave.
#recalaimtheline #FREEAUSTRALIA
WATCH:
First published on Caldron Pool, 19th October 2021.
Artwork: Ben Davis.
© Rod Lampard, 2021.
Last week, one of the The Ezekiel Declaration’s three co-authors, Pastor Matthew Littlefield, spoke with Bill Muehlenberg explaining the purpose, alongside answering some high-profile criticisms of the declaration.
Littlefield told CultureWatch Radio,
“Few were speaking up, and so we felt we needed to say something…Australia, for a long time now, has considered itself to be the kind of country which doesn’t coerce people’s consent. we’ve actually dropped the ball on this at different points in history.”
He explained,
“People will remember, we put Germans, Italians and Japanese people into internment camps, and that is something, when people find out about, they’re shocked and quite ashamed of; the stolen generations, [for example] other times when our society has dropped the ball.”
Littlefield added,
“Almost one-hundred percent of the time when that happens, we look back on it with national shame, and we don’t always live up to ideals of giving people freedom to make their choices in this country.”
“I really feel like this [issue] is one of those situations, where in the midst of a crisis, in the midst of a very difficult time, and people are going way too far.”
This is because people are afraid, being pressured, threatened or just desperate in “wanting to get back to normal.”
Looking for a reply to Tim Costello’s criticisms, published by Eternity News where he accused the declaration of “sowing the seeds of vaccine hesitancy,” CultureWatch Radio co-host, Andrew Smith, asked, “aside from [Tim Costello’s] unthinking use a euphemism for people not buying into the panic, what is he missing here?”
Littlefield answered,
“To say we’re sowing the seeds of vaccine hesitancy when we (including the media and government) clearly know” that the “vaccines” are questionable is “quite hilarious.”
“What we are doing is speaking up and saying, we’re not going to stand by and allow the Church to say to people you cannot come in without a vaccine – and we’re also speaking up for businesses and other people out there, who don’t want to see that happen.”
“We cannot allow,” Littlefield said, “a two-tier society to happen, especially not without saying something” against it.
On the issue of vaccination, he replied:
“We’re not trying to tell anyone either way. What we are saying is there are people with genuine concerns and we need to speak up for them, and we need to give them a voice, to make sure that people know there are others defending their freedom to not be coerced” into taking the COVID “vaccines.”
In his conclusion, Littlefield discussed the importance of the separation of powers as promoted by John Locke, and who they were instituted by authorities in Australia, before, during and after Federation in 1901.
He rightly argued that the separation of powers kept Australians free, and well-governed by holding governments accountable to the people.
“To see this being abridged in this time of crisis” Littlefield lamented, “is really concerning.”
Bill Muehlenberg commented at the start of the podcast that the pastors were “brave,” and said he was “thrilled” there has been an open move against government overreach from clergy, when so many seem so silent.
As I wrote last week, mandatory vaccinations are contra Imago Dei.
The Ezekiel Declaration is the Church wielding the Gospel, reminding the State wielding the Sword, that it must radically reverse any and all policies that serve to enslave and harm, rather than liberate and heal.
To quote Just Thinking’s Darrell B. Harrison and Virgil Walker,
“Socialism says: “No, it’s going to be decided by the collective, by the government entity, by the state.”
Vaccine passports and “no jab, no job” are the cold, dark, bony-fingered hands of socialism proper reaching for the throats of Australians.
Sowing the seeds of full-blown – poverty inducing – socialism in Australia, should be of greater concern for the church in general, than the tone, nuance and fear of dissidents “sowing seeds of vaccine hesitancy.”
There’s already talk of food shortages come Christmas.
Australians applauding and welcoming socialist fanaticism, shouldn’t be surprised if they get what comes with socialist fanaticism.
The Ezekiel Declaration is an open letter to Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison from three Australian pastors opposing vaccine passports, and the other constitutionally questionable policies related to it, such as mandatory COVID “vaccinations”.
Since publication the declaration has been signed by 3,019 Church leaders and 23,463 members and attendees.
First published on Caldron Pool, 14th September 2021.
© Rod Lampard, 2021.
I apologise for my tardiness in keeping the blog up to date. In between posts you can still catch my weekly article for Dads 4 Kids here, and my almost daily articles for Caldron Pool here.
Financial support for this blog, and my work in general, can be made through PayPal here.
The recent mandates in Australia have made life somewhat intense since August, my aim is to post new content this week sometime, as time permits.
In the meantime, check out the Bill Muehlenberg Culture Watch podcast I recently joined, together with my CP colleague Evelyn Rae, discussing all things Caldron Pool.
Medical conscription is a product of chattel slavery, it turns people into the property of the state.
It’s for this reason that the forced medical conscription of civilians is banned by constitutions and human rights codes.
Pro-mandatory vaccinators and those who launched a recent attack on The Ezekiel Declaration overlook this fact.
They also miss how forced medical procedures are contra to Imago Dei.
The Imago Dei mandates that the State, corporations, individuals and institutions have no right of claim to ownership of another person or their body.
Biblical injunctions against chattel slavery, and rules concerning indentured service emphasise the importance of this mandate.
Man and woman are made in the image of God. Not in the image of the State, superstitions, imaginations, idols, ideas or ideologies that seek to shape and control them.
Ergo, domestic vaccine passports (which really only are a euphemism for mandatory vaccinations) are a vile, inhumane, ironic negation of humanity.
“No jab, no job” is another way of saying “convert, or starve”.
A “choice” between the slave master swinging the whip, or doing the slave master’s bidding.
Forced medical procedures are the weapons of tyrants.
The problem isn’t just an arbitrary division between the unvaxxed and “vaxxed”, it’s the divide widened between those deemed “essential” and those “unessential.”
In blunt term: life worthy of life vs. ‘life unworthy of life.”
The cruelty this will spawn has no limits.
The door that allows Government to get away with mandating medical procedures under threat of losing your livelihood, gives them the power to mandate the theft of your land, your house, your savings, your kids, and your property.
Such is the dehumanising embrace of an arbitrary Us vs. Them -oppressor vs. oppressed – false dichotomy.
Look at the self-righteous “tone” in the opposition to Caldron Pool’s efforts to speak truth in love; to promote the Gospel’s liberating power to uphold life, light and liberty.
It’s shameful that some church leaders seem professionally threatened by other Christians, and not the outlaw governments telling them that they’re not essential.
It’s just as equally shameful that mandatory vaccination “Christians” are backing Government policies that will hurt families, under the guise of “loving your neighbour.”
Who are the selfish ones?
The ones pushing for the protection of civil liberties, or those happy to undermine them on a narrative that demands we all “fall in, line up, goosestep in unison, and salute, or else!?
I can tell you, it’s not the individual being bullied into leaping before they look.
Neither is it the family being told they’re selfish and ungodly if they “don’t follow the fear and give-in to the government without question.”
Christians are called to lead by example in separating truth from falsehood.
It’s not “selfish” to question manipulative propaganda.
It’s not “selfish” to communicate strong concerns, when medical science is being censored in favour of an approved political narrative.
This was illustrated by Premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, who has claimed that COVID-19 will become a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
This is despite the science showing that the vaccinated still carry and transmit COVID. That COVID is at its worst in those over 70, and those with comorbidities.
This is despite scientists stating that we should only vaccinate the vulnerable because mass vaccinations will create worse mutations.
Niceness and nuance are not an effective answer to manipulative propaganda.
Any Pastor who manipulates others into playing Russian roulette with a questionable “vaccine” is a disgrace to their office.
Anyone who argues that it’s “selfish” to pray, wait on the Lord, or practice the gift of discernment (aka informed consent), is preaching a doctrine of demons.
Anyone claiming that opposition to medical conscription is opposition to medicine is manipulating you.
As are those who scream “get the vaxx.” Don’t think. Don’t wait. Just do.
This isn’t faith. Nor is it loving.
Faith is a work of Christ. It is prayerfully minded action, worked out in us vis a vis the light of God’s wisdom (see 1 Timothy 3:16-17).
Anyone who doesn’t encourage you to wait, to pray and then act, are preaching a false gospel. (See King David’s list in Psalm 37, Psalm 91, and Psalm 27).
Faith seeks understanding. We’re to operate alongside, on and in the wisdom of God, not the wisdom of the World.
This means informed choice, not forced compliance.
This means prayerfully seeking out the absolute best medical options provided by providence through the vocation of proper medical professionals.
The alternative to never ending booster shots, and totalitarian “health” measures must be sought out.
As Dr. Robert Malone and Peter Navarro argued in a recent article entitled ‘Sorry Facebook, forced universal vaccinations are not the answer.’
Vaccines are likely to produce stronger mutations, making the vaccine-mutation-vaccine cycle the stuff of Sisyphus.
In sum, covaxes are becoming as ridiculous as excessive lockdowns.
They’ve been tried, they’re not stopping the virus.
Surely securing a treatment and preventative, alongside better vaccines, is the better option?
For The Ezekeial Declaration’s critics, their energy would be better spent fighting against the virus, instead of fighting against those trying to stop corrupt leaders turning their citizens into the virus.
While some Christian leaders – who’ve long since sold out to Leftism – applaud the tiring oppressive nonsense of increasingly bad governance, there are others who see the precipice of this Abyss and are taking a stand against bad leaders dragged us all into it.
Daring to sigh with the wounded is an outworking of sacrificial love.
Risking livelihoods by rejecting medical conscription/chattel slavery is an outworking of sacrificial love.
Rejecting a theology of glory – which places Government on the same level as God – and choosing instead to live out the theology of the cross, is far from misrepresenting the Gospel.
The Ezekiel Declaration’s rejection of medical conscription is a definitive “yes” to Imago Dei, and by extension a stern “Nein” to chattel slavery.
This is the Church wielding the Gospel, reminding the State wielding the Sword, that it must radically reverse any and all policies that serve to enslave and harm, rather than liberate and heal.
Hated by both sides of the political divide for not surrendering truth to falsehood, martyred Latin American Priest, Oscar Romero wrote,
“What kind of Gospel does not disturb? What kind of Word of God does not rankle, a Word of God that does not touch the concrete sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed? What kind of church does not disturb people’s consciences and provoke a crisis, but instead issues nice, pious considerations that bother nobody? – what kind of Gospel is that?” (paraphrased)
It’s on the grounds expressed above that The Ezekiel Declaration has my full support.
People are not property.
As the 20th century shows: it’s best to draw a line in the sand, then bury our heads in it.
References:
Romero, O. 2018. ‘The Scandal of Redemption: When God Liberates the Poor, Saves sinners, and Heals Nations’, Plough Publishing (p.55)
First published on Caldron Pool, 7th September 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Spurgeon described holy fear as an act that extends itself to happiness.
Holy fear, the Victorian preacher wrote, is the fear of God – ‘a quite grace which leads a man along a choice road, of which it is written, “No lion shall be there, neither shall any ravenous beast go up thereon.”
The fear of God is the beginning of ALL wisdom. Not worldly wisdom, which lends itself to vanity, but God’s wisdom which lends itself to the preservation of life, light and liberty.
Faith operates, not on a debilitating insecurity of the unknown, but on the certainty of the Word of God, grounded in God’s self-revealing.
God’s wisdom vs. Worldly wisdom.
The latter finds its home in tyranny, the former in the hearts of those who reject it.
Holy fear vs. Worldly fear is the choice between true wisdom and vanity.
God’s wisdom is the gift of true liberation. If, at the end of Holy Fear, man finds happiness, it’s because he’s granted freedom.
Holy fear isn’t a crushing fear. It’s a liberating essential that sets us free from a world demanding that we dumb ourselves down in order to fit in – that we package everything into a safe space, then fear everything, this includes fearing the fear of God.
We are faced with a clear choice between the fear of God, and the fear of man. We either embrace His ‘quiet grace’ and be led by it, or we embrace a self-righteous theology of glory and suffer the consequences for ditching wisdom in favour of vanity. Virtue signalling and self-promotion have no home in Holy Fear.
The old preacher when penning his own reflection on this referred to Proverbs, ‘Blessed is the one who fears the Lord always, but whoever hardens his heart will fall into calamity.’ (Proverbs 28:14)
The prior verse states, ‘Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.’
Followed by verse 15, which reads, ‘Like a roaring lion or a charging bear is a wicked ruler over a poor people.’
The wicked ruler demands to be feared, is stubborn, hardened, controlled by appetite and arrogance.
Proverbs states that though the wicked ruler stamps up and down, true wisdom will win the day. For from it springs true freedom.
It’s the wicked ruler who uses crushing fear, not God. It’s the wicked ruler, not God, who is stuck in his ways, and its the wicked ruler, not God, who crushes freedom.
We’re often given the image of God being a long bearded, grey, grumpy old man with a big stick at the ready, keen to slap people down.
Reconsider the stereotype.
Holy fear liberates. Worldly fear incarcerates. Wisdom governs the former. Vanity the latter.
©Rod Lampard, 2021
What the past 18 months has revealed to the world is this:
In the post-modern era there’s an extremely thin line between an “expert” and an activist.
I’m in agreement with Peter Hitchens, “these past 18 months have been a major turn back towards what looks like superstition.”
Discussing mask mandates, and “mantras,” Hitchens told TalkRadio’s Mike Graham, “I wish more people would pay attention to the evidence.”
“The way in which people wear masks [for example], flapping around their chin, gaps in either side, putting masks in pockets, and taking them back out again…Anybody who knows anything about hospital mask wearing knows, you mustn’t touch them. As soon as you take them off the mask has to be replaced.”
For masks to be affective, “they have to be tightly fitted to the face, quite uncomfortably,” Hitchens explained.
“It’s a simple point: even people who understand this must know these tokens people are wearing can’t do much good.”
Despite claims, “we know that there’s no proof masks protect from infection. If an infection can get in through a mask, why shouldn’t it be able to get out?”
Hitchen’s, paraphrasing Graham Brady, concludes, “masks are much more of a political symbol than an actual protection; people wear them as a sign of compliance with the new regime.”
Asked for his thoughts on the lifting of all COVID restrictions in Britain, on what was styled as “Freedom Day,” Hitchens replied, “it doesn’t feel all that different.”
Hinting at the lax attitude towards reason, in favour of a narrative, Hitchens stated,
“Nobody examines COVID statistics in a particularly rational of forensic fashion, because there’s this huge desire, both from the COVID Zero lobby, the people who want us permanently under control, and parts of the public living in fear.”
This fear, Hitchens asserts, “has gone in so deep; but fear is irrational, it’s completely immune to reason.”
For instance, offer any reasoned opposition, and “very rapidly the response turns to anger because the mob is safer in their certainty and fear than they would be in a reasoning world.”
Hitchens adds, “That’s what we’ve come to. Damage has been done to reason in politics, public life, broadcasting, universities, and elsewhere – which were already quite badly damaged.”
This is why, he argued, July 19 (aka ‘Freedom Day’) will attract attention from a lot of “COVID Zero people and the rest of the militants who want to permanently control [us] for “health reasons.” They’re waiting for their opportunity to say opening up on the 19th was wrong.”
They’ll “use figures obtained from tests looking for COVID numbers, that don’t necessarily indicate any actual illness. Then they’ll point to hospital admissions.”
Hospitalisation numbers are problematic.
Hitchens explained: “The last time I tried to look up the numbers of admissions, it showed people connected with COVID, had tested positive, but you couldn’t state that’s simply why they were in hospital, when they had been in hospital with something completely different.”
Addressing the controversy over Dominic Cummings breaking his own lockdown rules, Hitchen quipped, “The people who devised these policies don’t believe their own propaganda. They don’t behave the way they tell us to behave!”
In June, Cummings, who is the former aid to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, alleged the Ministry of Health’s bureaucratic ineptitude had hindered Britain’s early COVID response.
Cummings also laid blame on Boris Johnson’s reluctance to buy into COVID hysteria. Accusing the Prime Minister of not acting early enough to lockdown Britain.
Hitchens recognises the importance of “really strong precautions.”
Precautions should be weighed and measured by sober-minded experts, not pathos driven activists posing as professionals.
Left in the hands of the latter Western society will be set further adrift. Even if capable, it will not be able to reconnect with its moorings.
Such as Thomas Sowell illustrated in his 2004 Empirical study of Affirmative Action,
‘Any “temporary” policy whose duration is defined by the goal of achieving something that has never been achieved before, anywhere in the world, could be more fittingly characterised as eternal.’
WATCH:
First published on Caldron Pool, 7th September 2021
©Rod Lampard, 2021
Vaccine passports serve a purpose for international travel. There’s little use or need for them on a domestic level.
Certification between countries where tried, time-tested, scientifically indisputable safe and effective vaccines are necessary for pragmatic tourism.
Abstracted from this context those passports are arguably problematic.
A “papers please” police state is built on a culture of suspicion. There is no due process. No mercy. No habeas corpus.
Domestic papers which grant permission for movement and privilege are also the substance of caste systems.
When discussing India’s Affirmative Action programs, Thomas Sowell explains that although India is the ‘world’s largest multi-ethnic society, it’s the most socially fragmented.’
There’s a hierarchy. The lowest are the “backward classes”. Such as ‘tribal groups outside the mainstream, and the “untouchables” (Dalits).’
India’s Dalits ‘constitute about 16% of the country’s total population, and members of the backward tribes another 8%.”
Sowell adds, ‘these two very poor and historically outcast groups are greatly outnumbered by members of the “other backward classes, who constitute 52% of all Indians.’
He continues, the “untouchables” have been outcastes in the literal sense of not being one of the four broad categories of castes recognised by the Hindu religion.’
Consequently, ‘they could not draw water from the same well used by caste Hindus – and, in some places, still could not in practice, decades after they had the legal right to do so.’
Dalits face restrictions and ostracization.
For instance, in the 1930s,
‘…discrimination against harijans (untouchables) extended to restrictions on entry into cafes and “eating houses,” access to village amenities like wells and cemeteries, and on the clothes they wore – their right to wear shoes was a frequent point of contention.’
Social stigma encourages social fragmentation.
Violence against outcastes, Sowell states, has been widespread.
Citing an article from 2001, in India’s The Hindu, ‘attacks on Dalits (most often orchestrated by collectives representing upper caste interests) and even massacres of men, women and children are indeed a regular feature in most parts of the country.’
Though these ‘horrors are in retreat’; affirmative action programs such as a quota system benefiting the “backward classes” has ‘eliminated what goodwill the upper castes had for the lower castes.’
‘Partly,’ Sowell writes, ‘because of an overestimation of the effectiveness of preferential policies’, which only end up benefited a very small amount of those they’re designed to help.
Sowell’s conclusion: preferential policies create ‘poisonous intergroup relations and [are] real dangers to the fabric of society.’
When it comes to advocates of the COVax domestic passport, two points of relevance exist.
First, the non-COVax are already being treated like they’re part of a “backward class.” Dismissed as “anti-vaxx”; “anti-science” troglodytes.
Why would anyone jump onto the same boat as a bully, who’s also happy for you to be oppressed, until you do as they do?
Secondly, pro-COVax privileges are preferential policies. This is affirmative action. In the words of believers: ‘positive discrimination.’
Why would any sane person support as system that divides the people, and feeds bad government?
Many in Australia’s media are vying for the very things that in any other context, that same media would be crying out against.
A caste system isn’t going to end COVID or the widespread COVID madness attached to it.
Such as India’s Hindu scheduled class structure. Where Dalits and the “backward classes” face (and have faced) restrictions and ostracization.
Is it religion or science that justifies this?
An apartheid between the COVaxxed and un-COVaxxed will carve a caste system in the fabric of Australian life.
This isn’t something to celebrate or welcome. It’s something to resist because precedent matters.
Informed consent should be respected. Any erosion of civil liberties, rejected. This isn’t hard to add up.
It’s one thing to encourage the COVax. It’s another to demonise others, and beg the Government to take away rights because other people have chosen to show more discernment in their decision making.
The media in Australia are choosing militant medical tyranny, over a duty of care to make sure “democracy doesn’t die in darkness.”
India has the longest running affirmative action programs in the world. These programs had a use-by date, and yet they’ve been extended and expanded time and time again.
Remember, when discussing the issue of mandatory COVax and certification, we’re talking domestic “papers please” police state oppression, not pragmatic tourism.
The former we have no choice over. The latter we do.
Give the government an inch on this, and they’ll run a mile.
If that happens, Democracy’s death certificate will read: cause of death, a complicit and compliant media re: COVID-19.
First published on Caldron Pool, 3rd August 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Threats of medical segregation via vaccine passports have exposed a critical societal weakness.
Medical segregation is a consequence of a greater segregation between those conscious of their rights, and those ambivalent towards, or unaware of those rights.
There is a divide between those who know what and where their rights come from, and those who’ve never been taught the basics.
This illiteracy separates civic minded citizens from those who either choose to ignore, or are taught to ignore civics and theology.
In this context, medical segregation is a lot less concerning than the divide between those who know their rights and those who don’t.
The greatest tool to subdue a once politically savvy, theologically literate population is to encourage a culture that prides itself on leaving politics to the politicians, and throwing theology into the dustbin of history.
Australians learn very little about the history and contemporary application of civics and theology.
From accounts about Australia’s newly proposed curriculum, we’re set to learn even less.
Corrupt bureaucrats benefit from this ignorance.
A poor understanding about civics and theology, or no interest at all in them, makes for a bloated bureaucracy.
It fills the ranks with educated elitists controlling a docile public, while you pay them well for the privilege.
A people ambivalent towards politics and religion are a people easy to hide corruption from.
A public ignorant of their roots, nation, and the richness of their heritage are easily abused.
A people unaware of their rights, and where those rights come from, are easier to control.
They’re also easier to influence, and easier to govern.
It’s no surprise then, that brothels, liquor stores and fast-food restaurants remain open despite lockdowns.
An intoxicated, overweight polis is no threat to the sword, should the State choose to wield it against its own people.
A people uninterested in politics and religion will be governed outside their interests.
Consequently, a people left uneducated by an over-educated elite, are fodder for whatever sinister desires fat cat career politicians want to impose on an otherwise free people.
A corrupted bureaucracy benefits from a people who avoid talking about politics and religion as if doing so was a civic duty; even obedience to God.
There’s no need for me to run-on about how many times Romans 13 has been employed to justify ungodly compliant subservience, instead of Godly servanthood leadership.
With what’s currently unfolding in Afghanistan largely thanks to Joe Biden’s horrifying example of bad leadership teaches:
Governments will not govern in our interests if we don’t take an interest in how they govern.
Governments will not govern well, if we don’t care who, or why they are governing.
Governments will govern outside the law, if we don’t know or care about what freedoms exist that allow those being governed the right to hold bad governments accountable.
They serve the people; the people do not serve them.
Society, liberty and individual responsibility cannot thrive on a “we only know what’s best for you” – and we in the bureaucracy get to determine this – basis.
One consequence of a people either uninterested, or uneducated enough (if at all) in their rights and responsibilities, has been the quick formation of a COVID “vaccinated” class and their separation from the “vaccine” hesitant.
No sane, loving person chooses to embrace segregation.
No sane, loving person chooses to embrace oppression.
No sane, loving person welcomes their neighbour’s executioner.
Yet there seems to be those in society who want to do all three.
On this side sits life-destroying lockdown advocates.
On one other side, those who understand lockdowns, but choose to stand for life, light and liberty.
There is a divide in society.
This divide isn’t between the haves and have nots, it’s between those who know their rights, and those who don’t.
It may sound cliché, but the answer is education.
Regardless of melanin, minority or material wealth, Australians should be raising the next generation of ANZACs: mindful of civics and theology; God, Queen and country.
Mum’s and dads educating their kids as far as they possibly can, wherever, and whenever it is in their power and ability to do so.
This should happen long before parents march their kids off to an industrial education complex, where they are less exposed to education, and more, and more exposed to Ceasar’s vacuous, mind-killing indoctrination.
We should be raising ANZACs who run towards self-sufficiency for themselves and their families, and away from the cold, bony fingers of Government.
We should be raising ANZACs who are prepared, if necessary, to run towards the fight for life, light, and liberty, not away from it.
We should be raising ANZACs who are well informed enough to turn away from ungodly, unchristian, and anti-Western governance.
We should be raising ANZACs who will see through falsehoods, and walk towards truth without regard to how dampened their spirit is, or despondent, and demoralised they are.
The greatest tools used to subjugate a people are fear and ignorance.
Civics and theological illiteracy, is a pox on the West.
This plague separates a free people from those who’d rather the false promises of government dependency.
For them it’s easier to bury their head in the sand than draw a line in it.
They do this because they’ve either never been taught why, where, when or how to draw it; or because they’ve been conditioned to show no interest in doing so.
This is a detriment to our society, its future and the children who will inherit it.
First published on Caldron Pool, 19th August, 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Any sane, fed-up, liberty loving citizen will benefit from John MacArthur’s June 13 sermon, ‘When Government Rewards Evil and Punishes Good,’
Time constraints meant I couldn’t get to it after a friend dropped me the link mid last week.
The recent rash, health hazard lockdown in New South Wales seemed to provide an opportune time to tune in.
I call these excessive lockdowns a health hazard because in all frankness that’s exactly what they are.
They’re an illogical way to fight COVID-19.
It makes no sense for public health experts to issue public health orders that hurt healthy people.
The same goes for public health orders that hinder unhealthy people who need to get healthy.
Pinning them to their couch, fast food and Netflix – among other mind-numbing, life sucking drugs and devices we’ve allowed into our lives – isn’t a logical, holistic health strategy.
The excessive use of lockdowns will kill.
I’ve already argued how CCP-19 medical tyrants are harming cancer research.
We also published a piece in February pointing to the World Health Organisation’s regional director for Europe who warned that,
‘Coronavirus measures will have a ‘catastrophic’ impact on hundreds of thousands of cancer patients who’ve had appointments cancelled and screenings delayed during the pandemic.’
Additionally, information provided by Caldron Pool on Monday strongly backs the conclusion that public health orders are creating a public health crisis.
Christian’s ought to be on the frontline fighting this on behalf of the poor, the wounded and the vulnerable.
While some are. Many aren’t.
Instead, they post selfies of themselves getting “vaccinated.” Usually accompanied by a manipulative comment like “man up”, “be a big boy,” or “do your duty and help us get out of this mess.”
Some lurk on social media smugly calling those who choose to practice more discernment, “anti-vaxxers.”
Rather than stand with the vulnerable and encourage the gift of discernment, they call the “vaccine hesitant” and those who are more civic-aware “selfish.”
Any Christian who would rather self-promote, than sigh with the wounded stands on extremely thin ice.
It’s this trend that MacArthur’s sermon smacks up the side of the head.
“The true church,” MacArthur asserted, “follows Christ, not the government.”
The power of government is not its own. God gives it, and God can take it away.
Though people in power can become lawless, there is no such thing as a Lordless power.
Their power is on loan to them through the office of vocation, under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
Consequently, God will hold government accountable for how that power is used.
Speaking from Romans 13, MacArthur explains,
“The role of the government is to restrain evil; and when it functions to restrain evil, it is fulfilling its God-ordained purpose…It is designed as a necessary restraint in a world of sinners.”
He adds,
“This is God’s design for government. The problem is, when government ceases to function by God’s design, it yields up its authority.”
“When government turns the divine design on its head and protects those who do evil and makes those who do good afraid, it forfeits its divine purpose.”
MacArthur then lists how today “In our world rulers are designing a culture that protects the immoral.”
First, “it desires to protect criminals, and makes those who do good afraid.”
Second, “criminals are unrestrained because they don’t fear the consequences, but the police are restrained because they fear the consequences of stopping criminals.”
Third, by propagating lies, protecting liars and persecuting those who speak the truth, “it praises the evil and persecutes the good.”
The conclusion being that “God’s design for government has been entirely corrupted.”
A corrupted government turns everything upside down, “like putting [Canadian] Pastor James Coates in prison for preaching but letting rioters go free.”
For him,
“The greatest threat to truth and virtue in this country is the government because they have totally prostituted their God-ordained design. All through history, government is the ultimate persecutor of people. Satan has to get ahold of government; and that’s where he operates—always work through government…Satan always works through evil rulers to persecute the people of God.”
COVID era government attacks on civil rights aren’t new.
For example,
“Look, in Acts chapter 4, the Jewish leaders said to the apostles, “Stop preaching!” In Daniel 3, Nebuchadnezzar said, “Stop worshiping!” Again, in Daniel 6—we didn’t read it—the rulers said, “Stop praying, or we’re going to throw you into”—what?—“the lions’ den.”
MacArthur continues,
‘So we are beginning to see persecution from government. This is the most formidable persecution: COVID, LGBTQ, transgender, social justice—all these new ideologies are now going to become the only acceptable moral standards. And if you don’t accept them, you’re going to be the enemy of the government. Truth, the Bible, Scripture is going to be cancelled. The government’s taking control; they want to take control of absolutely everything. The church has become the main enemy of the government—nothing new.”
He closes with prayer, but not without first reminding us that Romans 13, when removed from the context of Christ’s Lordship, has been used to justify “horrendous abuses of individual human rights”:
“Hitler’s Holocaust, racism in the apartheid of South Africa, both the Jews in Germany and blacks in South Africa were viewed as a threat to public health and national security… “‘Trust us,’ said government…‘we truly have your best interests at heart. All we want to do is help . . . keep you safe.’”
Preaching from Romans and Revelation, MacArthur acknowledges the battle lines between the World (Kosmos), Satan and Parousia (physical return of Christus Rex – Jesus Christ, King of Kings and Lord of Lords).
The Lamb wins. The Lamb has already won. The Lamb will overcome.
We can vent at government abuse, and vent we should.
Be Ephesians 4:26 angry. Fervent in prayer as James the brother of Jesus instructs (James 5:16).
Likewise, James in 4:7, restrained righteous anger stops the triumph of evil.
This reflects where I think MacArthur’s main points land.
As I wrote last week, Government as God is a government gone wrong.
The full transcript of MacArthur’s sermon can be accessed here.
WATCH:
First published on Caldron Pool, 18th August 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
The world is worse off for not having leaders like Reagan, Churchill, etc. who understood that they were accountable to a power far greater than the office on loan to them.
I miss them.
Kyrie Eleison.
Beware the totalitarian, welfare state.
Government should play a subsidiary role, not a substitutionary role in our lives.
A government which substitutes itself for God, is a government gone wrong.
“We do not need,” Joseph Ratzinger once said, “a State which regulates and controls everything.”
We need instead, “a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need.”
Subsidiary comes from the Latin subsidium, which means ‘help, assistance.’
This is the essence of Rev. Dr. Edmund Aku’s work, ‘Solidarity, Subsidiarity and Common Good.’
Social cohesion is forged by solidarity and subsidiarity. The burdens of community are voluntarily shared.
Good government is never above that community, but part of it.
Compatibility, says Aku, isn’t a prerequisite.
Solidarity will draw the incompatible together through empathy and sympathy.
It’s a theme I tried to explore in 2019 when writing, ‘The solidarity of suffering: From racism to empathy.’
Intersectional oppressor/oppressed cognitive distortions are not reconcilable with subsidiarity and solidarity.
If your melanin, social, medical, or material wealth status doesn’t tick all the politically correct intersectional boxes, then person, pain and story are rejected.
For example, the social construct of Critical Race Theory tells me that my lighter shade of melanin automatically negates any need for justice over oppression in my life.
CRT disqualifies my personhood because of my skin tone.
“Lived experience” be damned.
According to the ideology, I am no longer a person, I am an oppressor.
Regardless of how painful, poor, abused, beaten, abandoned, welfare dependent – oppressed I am or was – “white privilege” praxis states that none of the suffering I’ve gone through in life matters.
“White privilege” determines that I have no rights to sympathy and empathy, chiefly because it falsely assumes that my shade of melanin makes me incapable of giving sympathy and empathy.
So declares the collectivists drunk on the groupthink of woketivism: “All white people are racist.” “All heterosexuals are heteronormative homophobes.” (etc.)
Ergo, I have no right to belong to the community.
This segregation is social distancing. It is violent. It destroys solidarity and subsidiarity by substituting itself for God.
Therefore, Intersectionality can only ever be a form of bad government.
In Augustine’s words, a people governed by falsehoods are a people governed by the delusion of demons.
‘Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals…’ – (City of God, IV:5)
The strong are not allowed to protect the weak. The weak are not allowed to be protected by the strong.
This denial of communal care ruptures relationship.
Dr. Edmund Aku argues,
“The moral responsibility prompted by the spirit of solidarity calls for empathy with the other, so that oneness is seen beyond literal sameness. In this way a sort of equilibrium is lived out where the weak find protection in the strong, and the strong gain fulfillment in this service to the weak.”
For CRT purists, forgiveness, reconciliation and sacrifice are the antithesis of Marx’s self-serving never-ending revolution.
This means that the Lordship of Jesus Christ will be an affront to a world governed by would-be overlords; a world governed by the delusion of demons.
The government who plays a substitutionary role are anti-christ – alternative messiahs – incapable of solidarity and subsidiarity.
Consequently, a people who give governments the role of God, are a people no longer governed by sympathy and empathy.
This is proven by the blood spilt during China’s Communist Cultural Revolution, the Soviet Gulags, socialist killing fields in Cambodia, and the gas chambers of National Socialism.
Governments substituting for God will “want you broke, isolated, jobless, depressed, childless, medicated, and entirely dependent on them for your entire existence.”
The popularity of lockdowns, mask mandates, mass censorship of professionals, and ease at which governments are bypassing constitutional guarantees, in favour of rule by bureaucratic decree, are symptoms of a greater problem.
When government dethrones God, it disqualifies its right to govern.
Such a government will only have a surface interest in your health, and the health of the community.
It should never be forgotten that “the Nazi group in charge of the actual killing in the gas chambers were called the General Welfare Foundation for Institutional Care…’ [i]
Augustine said,
‘Let them acknowledge the facts, even if it goes against the grain; and let them stop destroying themselves by crazy insults against God, and refrain from deceiving the ignorant.’ – City of God 5:24
Once a good government slides from solidarity and subsidiarity into a substitutionary role, that government inevitably goes bad.
As Evelyn Rae notes,
“Stop being a simp for the government. They do not love you. They do not know your name or your circumstances and they certainly will not remember you. They make for a terrible parent and an even worse god – have them as neither.”
References:
[i] Dean Stroud, 2013 ‘Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance’ Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing pp.132 & 136
First published on Caldron Pool, 14th August 2021
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
I’ve had some weird encounters with hostile people over the years.
I’m not just talking about the arrogant online troll, who comments on every social media post correcting gramma, or misconstruing every word to argue a point the post was never actually making.
Sure, they exist.
The online world is packed with people whose mental health issues are enabled by anonymity, non-face-to-face interaction, and the ability harass without any real-world consequences.
Like the person who repeatedly calls me an “anti-vaxxer” for articles written supporting censored medical professionals, savvy politicians, discernment, and informed consent on COVID-19 related medical procedures.
Then there’s the odd fellow who likes to tear down others in order to make a name for himself.
This gentleman persistently harasses me with slurs, and accusations.
Rarely does he argue the point, instead of arguing the man.
Very rarely does he have a kind word to say, or an actual argument that isn’t tainted by ad hominem or confirmation bias.
On the best of days, I have little patience for intellectual pissing contests, or those described by Roger Scruton as ‘intellectual masturbaters.”
Yesterday, he picked the wrong day to peacock his self-righteous hubris on my Facebook page.
Apparently, encouraging people to look after their health because of unhealthy public health orders makes me an extremist.
In this man’s view, I’m no better than the Taliban.
There’s a thin line between just criticism and abusive dishonesty.
The confronting reality for Australians is that he’s probably not alone in this view.
There are plenty of Christians and Christian leaders encouraging unchristian policies that harm people in the name of “helping” them.
They’re so driven to deny Christ over culture that they’re happy to submit Christ to the culture.
COVID culture has given rise to mentally unwell neighbours, who are plugged into the propaganda matrix.
They have become the government’s eyes, ears and subsequent accuser.
It’s so twisted that “loving God and loving their neighbour” has come to mean throwing their neighbour under the bus.
That’s a long-winded way of saying, I get it.
On Friday, I visited my mother to drop off food cooked by two of my daughters.
All the advised precautions were adhered too.
I social distanced, wore a mask the entire time and stayed outside for the duration of my brief visit.
This didn’t stop my mother’s unmasked, late 50s, neighbour from the house next door bursting out of her front door to interrogate my mother and me.
The neighbour was a complete stranger. This didn’t stop her from pouncing on us as I was getting ready to leave.
Defending my mother forced me to stay longer than I’d intended.
From her small veranda this person demanded to know whether or not I had permission to visit, and if I lived in the area.
I asked her why.
She replied, “I’m protecting myself.”
I politely told her to mind her own business.
The interrogation continued, so I pointed out to her how what she was doing was what’s wrong with Australia today.
As politely – and as best I could manage through a cloth mask – I reminded her that the ANZACs didn’t die for what she was doing.
They didn’t die for a culture where people lived in constant fear, and where neighbour saw it as their civic duty to denounce neighbour.
She was smug, smiling and not swayed.
The viciousness obviously brought her some kind of twisted sense of euphoric hold on power.
Fed up, I told her: call the authorities, or go back inside, close the door and hide under the bed.
Guaranteed protection.
She then went inside got her phone and “began recording me” (quote unquote), goading me to keep on talking.
My mother’s neighbour then persisted on lecturing me about how what I was doing was illegal.
I argued that there was nothing illegal or wrong about loving my neighbour.
Not deterred, this woman continued to maintain that I was breaking public health orders.
I said those orders are creating a public health crisis.
Then I asked her, if she agreed that looking after my mother’s emotional and psychological well-being was an important part of healthcare?
To which she said, “still breaking the law.”
Frustrated, I told her to stop being a communist; a covid Nazi and reminded her of the “zero covid” status in our regional area. (a correct statement at the time).
My mother is in her late 60s. She has had major anxiety issues and has wrestled with depression off and on in life.
Lockdowns are not a healthy prescription for her.
Care packages are a small relief. Especially from her grandkids.
Not one bit of my reasoning swayed this next-door neighbour.
I then said to her that she was buying the ABC’s propaganda.
To which she laughed and said “oh, ah, I get it now. You’re one of those religious conspiracy theorists.”
She pointed her finger at me and repeated the words, “Religious conspiracy theorist. Religious conspiracy theorist.”
To her, I was a criminal. Like my internet hater, I am no better than the Taliban.
In other words, loving on my mum – caring about her overall well-being – made me the equivalent of a “domestic terrorist.”
My adherence to COVID-safe protocols didn’t matter, even when I pointed this compliance out.
The whole nasty and unnecessary conflict ended with me pushing back on her straw man accusations, telling her that the name calling proved she knew I was in the right.
With her still recording, I got in my car and left.
Some may rightly say that this neighbour was acting out because she’s been driven to live in fear.
I would agree, if it wasn’t for how premeditated her attack on me seemed to be.
It was clear to me that government sanctioned suspicion and hatred for neighbour empowered her smug false sense of self-importance.
Just as my internet hater peacocked his false sense of superiority later that same day, this neighbour tried to bully and intimidate my mother into submission.
I’m not writing in order to ridicule this poor deluded woman.
I’m writing in order to point out how situations like it are the consequence of reckless policy making by an out of control and dangerous bureaucratic elite.
The “we’re all in this together” crowd appear unconcerned with how their requests for neighbour to police neighbour cause paranoia, division and hatred.
Giving the public a blank cheque to denounce each other was always going to be a problem.
What’s mindboggling about it all, is how few politicians there are willing to acknowledge just how debilitating and problematic; how deleterious this power and permission is.
These kinds of permission are ripe for abuse.
They were always going to end up as a weapon in the hands of abusive people, more than they were a tool for genuinely concerned citizens.
To borrow from former atheist and victim of Communism, Richard Wurmbrand,
‘I will never forget my first encounter with a Russian prisoner, an engineer. I asked him if he believed in God. He lifted his eyes toward me and said, “I have no such military order to believe. If I have an order I will believe.”
Wurmbrand added,
‘He was a brainwashed tool in the hands of the Communists, ready to believe or not on an order. He could not think anymore on his own. This was a typical Russian after all these years of Communist domination!’ (Tortured For Christ, 1967. pp.26-27)
Ronald Reagan once said, ‘let our friends and those who may wish us ill take note, [we have an obligation to each and the world] never to let those who would destroy freedom dictate the future course of life on this planet.”
May it be so.
#JesusisVictor!
First published on Caldron Pool, 22nd August, 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Rand Paul just served up one of the best, liberty loving, pro-individual responsibility speeches of 2021.
In an open letter to Americans, elected an unelected bureaucrat, the Republican senator for Kentucky, stated,
“It’s time for us to resist. They can’t arrest all of us. They can’t keep all of your kids home from school. They can’t keep every government building closed. Although I’ve got a long list of ones that we outa keep closed.”
Paul adds,
“We don’t have to accept the mandates; the lockdowns and the harmful policies of the petty tyrants and bureaucrats. We can simply say “no, not again.”
He then moved his words towards Nancy Pelosi telling the long over-due for retirement double-standard Democrat:
“We will make out own health choices.”
“You will not arrest, or stop me or anyone of my staff for doing our jobs. We have either had COVID, had the vaccine, or been offered the vaccine.”
This was preceded by Paul rejecting vaccine passports,
“We will not show you a passport. We will not wear a mask. We will not be forced into random screenings and testings so you can continue your drunk with power reign” over Washington D.C.
The trained doctor, turned senator, also rejected Biden’s mandates, stating,
“President Biden, we will not accept your agencies mandates, or your reported moves towards a lockdown. No one should follow the CDC’s anti-science mask mandates.”
Anticipating greater “bureaucratic power grabs” under the cover of COVID, Paul said that if Biden were to shut down government agencies again – some of whom aren’t even back to work yet – he’ll “stop every bill coming to the senate with an amendment to cut their funding if they don’t come back to work in person.”
Speaking defiantly in defence of children, Paul who is the father of three boys, warned union bosses and local bureaucrats that he’ll push to defund any who pledge allegiance to corrupt COVID politics, stating,
“We will not allow you to do more harm to our children again this year. Children are not at any more risk of COVID than they are from the seasonal flu. Every adult who works in schools has either had the vaccine or had their chance to get vaccinated.”
There is “no reason,” Paul states, “for mask mandates, part time schools, or any lockdown measures. Children are falling behind and are being harmed physically and psychologically” by government sanctioned COVID “tactics”.
‘If it sounds like I’m fed up, it’s because I am,” Paul added; “I’m not a career politician. I practiced medicine for 33 years. I’ve worked in emergency rooms. I’ve studied immunology and virology, and ultimately chose to become an ophthalmologist.”
Following on from this, Paul says, “I’ve been telling everyone for a year now, that Doctor Fauci, and other public health bureaucrats were NOT following the science; and I’ve been proven right time and time again.”
He concludes,
‘We are at a moment of truth at a crossroads. Will we allow these people to use fear and propaganda to do further harm to our society, economy and children? Or will we stand together and say, “absolutely not. Not this time. I choose freedom.”
Rand Paul was elected to office in 2010. He’s been married for 24 years and follows Christ.
As far as senators go, Rand Paul – who is COVaxxed – is one of the few who’ve sought to keep Anthony Fauci accountable to the American people.
Consequently, Paul’s been one of the few elected representatives to publicly oppose Faucism, the COVID cultists, and subsequent bureaucratic COVIDiocy.
At the risk of repeating myself, Barack Obama’s birthday bash backs Rand Paul’s revolt.
His bold proclamation for freedom over Faucism isn’t fringe lunacy.
With lockdowns, and proposals for unconstitutional medical conscription, being the favourite go to of Australia’s bureaucrats and big media, the relevance of Paul’s words reach beyond the borders of the United States.
Our elected representatives need to put an end the tyranny of one-eyed solutions, and the totalitarianism of COVID mad bureaucrats.
https://twitter.com/RandPaul/status/1424399282447298563
First published on Caldron Pool, 10th August 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
“You’re just like your father.” This was the fictional narrative of my formative years.
Instead of using my name when things got heated between us, my family would refer to me as my father.
Regardless of how well-intentioned, the shame was as real as the control it induced.
There was nothing I hated more. There was nothing I feared more than the idea that I might become him, or be like him.
Once I was legally able to, I added my step-father’s surname.
The rationale was as simple as it was naive. A name change would mean the end to the name calling. A different name, meant a different person.
I had manufactured a way to navigate the whip statements. A way around being shamed into submission. A way to neutralise psychological abuse.
A way to honour both my mother and my estranged father.
My late father had his moments. He was complex. A proud man who struggled with his past. He was a man who had opportunities to move beyond the abuse in his own childhood. Unfortunately, he chose a life of victimhood instead.
His failures were chilling and the effects of his flaws wide-reaching. His dysfunctional life had impacted mine.
Parental abuse had conditioned me to fail as a father.
I remember my first days as a new dad. They were days full of uncertainty and questions. A concoction of fear, self-doubt, joy, insecurity, and love.
Would my father’s failures become mine? How would I deal with the inevitable mistakes I was going to make? How can I not make the same mistakes that he’d made? What if I fail too?
Like the trauma from a Nazgul blade tormenting the Hobbit Frodo Baggins. If permitted, the past can hinder the present.
21 years later, self-hatred and self-doubt still creep in.
They’re after the leftovers. The scars from dysfunction.
Neil T. Anderson wrote in ‘The Bondage Breaker’,
‘Two favourite moves of the devil are temptation and accusation. He uses them to pin us down and defeat us…those who give in to his accusations end up being robbed of the freedom that God intends His people to enjoy.’
There’s a reason John’s Revelation refers to Satan as ‘the accuser…’ (Rev. 12:10).
Paul’s letter to the Church in Rome, chapter 8 begins with these words, ‘There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.’
Skip to verse 15, Paul states, ‘For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”
We are well equipped to succeed where others have failed.
By this standard we walk upright, as sons whose inherited darkness has been replaced with the mantle, children of light.
The truth, Jesus said, sets us free.
John 14:6 identifies truth as this Jesus – the objective Word of God made flesh.
In his autobiography, ‘Transformed‘, Remi Adeleke outlines the Navy Seal’s four pillars of tough-mindedness.
- Positive self-talk.
- Visualisation.
- Goal setting.
- Self-control.
Adeleke is a former Seal. He overcame the odds. He received no special treatment. He simply did the best with what he was given.
The Seal’s list is adaptable to fatherhood.
Speak life. Preach truth. Aim accordingly. Don’t quit.
Put your trust in God, your best foot forward, and let Him take care of the rest.
Remind yourself that what was, does not have to determine what will be.
The past does not have to define the future.
I no longer have the hyphenated name I adopted out of fear.
I am my father’s son; I am not my father’s sin.
The cycle of abuse stops with me.
I first published this on Dads 4 Kids. It’s republished here with permission.
I’ve been writing a weekly column for Dads 4 Kids for over a month now, and thought I’d make a formal announcement about it.
Like Caldron Pool, D4K is a good fit for where I’ve come from, to what I’m doing now.
I’m still writing for CP, and remain 100% committed to producing the kind of quality work the team provides the political and theological arena.
To put it simply, my work at D4K will help support my contributions to Caldron Pool.
Thank you all for your ongoing support, prayer, and encouragement.
LINKS:
CP: https://caldronpool.com/author/rodlampard/
D4K: https://dads4kids.org.au/author/rod-lampard/
YouTube have censored the American based PDL podcast I was a guest on last week. Their reasoning is false. No medical advice was given, or prescribed.
Joe Prim and I talked about Big Tech censorship, the inconsistency and double standards of leaders, lockdowns; as well as a range of other related topics.
Access the censored podcast here:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0HD3lrfZheMbwryFq9oDdh?si=Pq_2GSh-RcSzipeY8nB33Q&dl_branch=1
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-brave-new-world-w-rod-lampard/id1533603164?i=1000528563586
Spreaker: https://www.spreaker.com/show/prepare-defend-lead
https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/0HD3lrfZheMbwryFq9oDdh?theme=0
Heavy handed COVID restrictions, in conjunction with a reassignment of medical resources, has stalled Australia’s cancer research, which, according to Medical Republic, runs the risk of sending cancer research backwards.
Paul Mirabelle, chairman of the grants committee at Tour de Cure, told M.R that ‘cancer researchers around the country were struggling.’
The causes were the direct results of a lockdown fuelled funding freefall.
Mirabelle said, the potentially fatal halt in momentum was due in part to The Australian Government’s counter-lockdown COVID welfare program, JobKeeper, not being extended to include ‘university employees.’
This is despite, the Australian Government’s Cancer Australia grants programs, and extensive taxpayer supported funding, including a recent commitment by the LNP, allocating ‘$100.4 million for improvements to cervical and breast cancer screening programs which will help detect these life-threatening cancers earlier, improving survival rates.’
Along with ‘$6.6 million for Breast Cancer Network Australia to operate its helpline, rural and regional information forums and extending its consumer representative training program.’
Other contributing factors cited by Mirabelle, were the ‘drop in income from the loss of international students,’ and COVID restrictions affecting fundraising events.
Door to door, morning teas, researchers and patient trials have been scaled back in the interest of practitioner/patient safety.
The pandemic’s negative, and I believe, wide ranging, long term, impacts on Cancer research aren’t isolated to Australian scientists.
Research organisations in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States also report a significant drop in personnel, and funding.
An article from May last year appearing in The Toronto Star, claimed that ‘up to 15,000 medical research staff faced layoffs as the fell through the cracks of aid programs’ offered by the Canadian government.
The only researchers who qualified for aid were those working with, on, and because of COVID-19.
The Star pointed out: ‘Clinical and research trials that were unrelated to the coronavirus were suspended or cancelled by order of the [Canadian] federal government as the country went into lockdown in mid-March, including more than 600 cancer research trials.’
In the U.K., University of Oxford professor of cancer medicine, oncologist David Kerr called the pause in clinical cancer research, a ‘knee-jerk reaction,’ made worse by the uncertain nature of COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic, and the transfer of ‘nurses and doctors from the research frontline to the clinical frontline.’
Kerr told online medico news site, Medscape, that Cancer Research UK, one of the biggest cancer charities in the world, ‘has projected an annual loss of income of roughly 200 million pounds, down from 450 million. For the Canadian Cancer society, a drop of $100 million, and in America, a drop of $200 million.’
All of it, said Kerr, is because of lockdowns. The impact of which, ‘will be enormous and will echo forward for many years.’
The National Breast Cancer Foundation of Australia’s report card, while crediting the global partnerships of researchers singularly focused on battling the COVID-19 virus, also attributed the halt in cancer research to ‘working restrictions and lockdowns.’
NBCF’s snapshot asserted that ‘9 out of 10 respondents anticipate their research program will take over 12 months to recover from the impact of COVID-19.’
NBCF’s launches it’s annual ‘GOPINK’ campaign in June to back its goal for “Zero deaths from breast cancer in 2030.”
The silver lining, if there is one, is that the collaborative precedent set by the urgency of restraining COVID-19 sets the standard for a similar, singular focus on better treating, diagnosing, and eliminating the cancer pandemic that kills more people each year than COVID-19 ever has.
The down-side to this silver lining is this: if cancer research can be halted, and risk being sent backwards, for a virus that’s become more about politics than healthcare, it can be halted for other political reasons.
This should concern all stakeholders.
Organisations are being increasingly pressured to become “WOKE” compliant, and that means surrendering to the far-Left’s ever darkening rejection of binary facts and biological science.
Based on current trends, it’s not long until the LGBTQAAI+ “WOKE” lobby boycotts breast cancer research, appealing to their belief that using the colour “Pink” and the terms women and men, are “heteronormative oppression” that foster a “hateful and negative space” for those who identify as LGBT.
Ridiculously claiming, as perhaps they no doubt one day will, that organisations like the National Breast Cancer Foundation are reinforcing “harmful” gender stereotypes.
Not kowtowing to the new cultural norms, and using gender neutral language, or gender-neutral colours, imposed and approved by the radical left, the NBCF will face accusations from its fanatical adherents that they want “LGBT people to die.”
All of this will resemble the overzealous bureaucrats wielding the lockdown sword, who suffocated essential services like cancer treatment, patient care, and research, without giving much thought to the long-term consequences.
In this sense, the diagnosis doesn’t look good.
Unless there’s a stop to the funding freefall, and lockdowns that are negatively impacting cancer research, it could be that the numbers of deaths from, and with covid will be outnumbered in the long run by treatable non-Covid related diseases.
Largely because these essential services were ignored by politicians whose reckless decisions were backed by big tech censorship, healthcare providers with time on their hands to choreograph dances for TikTok, and a lust for the political capital that COVID cult fanaticism keeps on delivering.
In sum, lockdowns, through killing livelihoods, may very well end up killing more people than a deadly virus, that governments said justified such terrible totalitarian measures.
First published on Caldron Pool, 24th May 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Here’s five bizarre COVID vaccine sales pitches that suggest COVID Vaccine passports are nothing more than COVID compliance cards.
- FREE admission to “Dracula’s” castle.
The Romanian castle long associated with the 14th Century tyrant, Vlad the Impaler, and Vampirism, is once again a top spot for bureaucrats looking to impale their citizens, albeit more humanely.
Throughout May anyone can turn up without an appointment and receive free admission to Bran Castle, as well view ‘it’s exhibit of 52 medieval torture instruments.’
The catch? Visitors have to get a COVID vaccination upon arrival.
The “two-for-one” deal was an initiative supported by the Romanian Government. The idea, said Reuters, is to help boost tourism, and spark interest amongst the majority of Romanians, who’ve shown little appetite for a COVID vaccine.
2. Burgers and FREE Fries!
New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio appeared in a clumsy video using fast food to sell the vaccine.
The Democrat leader held up a burger and fries, mumbling as he ate, “is it too early in the morning to eat a burger? This could be breakfast.”
Adding, “Mmmm … vaccination. I’m getting a very good feeling about vaccination right at this moment.”
The cringe burger bribe was part of a wider incentive program to push the benefits of getting vaccinated. According to New York Daily News, the program included a ‘Shack Shack gift card, with promises of free fries for anyone who gets vaccinated, and free passes to music festivals.’
Apparently, Democrats think there’s no contradiction in using fast food to promote health initiatives.
3.Would you like some free Serbian Roast Ox with that shot?
Serbian Restaurateur Stavro Raskovic is offering a ‘plate of spit-roast ox or wild game goulash for free’ for the COVID vaccinated.
Raskovic said to Reuters, that the catering industry has been hit hard by lockdowns, and if ‘this (vaccination) is the way out, then we wanted to contribute.’
Serbian health authorities set up at the location, and gave people the choice between ‘Pfizer/BioNtech (PFE.N), and China’s Sinopharm (1099.HK).’
Only one-third of Serbia’s 7 million people have received the shot, with 694,476 infected, and 6,456 having died, with, from, or of, COVID.
4. Forbes’ FREE stuff a COVID compliant card can get you!
Celebrating COVID mania, Forbes published a tribute to Krispy Kreme, and its free donut for vaccine subscribers.
The offer only applies to those who’ve been vaccinated, on the proviso that the COVID free donut lover, can ‘provide proof that they’ve gotten the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine or at least one dose of the Moderna or Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine.’
Excited by the enticements, Forbes adds, that COVID compliant card holders can also get up to 50% off at some restaurants, and even ‘marijuana stores are joining in on the fun’, offering the drug in its edible form free.
Of importance, Forbes also points out that the ‘vaccine isn’t perfect,’ and advocates the vaccinated still wear a mask, and still social distance.
5. Joe Biden’s “get the vaccine” or wear a mask until you do Tweet.
Biden’s dictatorial fiat on masks was on the same trajectory as proposals being entertained by Australian politicians, whereby only those carrying Communist COVID compliance cards have the right to freedom of movement.
Biden’s tweet: “The rule is simple: get vaccinated or wear a mask until you do. The choice is yours,” was a reassertion of his more presidential Rose Garden speech.
In it, the 2020 Deus Ex Machina President reassuringly told Americans, in essence, that under his administration, those who don’t get the shot, won’t be shot.
Included in his get America vaccinated efforts, Biden also talked up the failing U.S economy, the success of his government in job creation – as unemployment figures proved otherwise -, and repeated the Democrat self-serving lullaby, “we’re all in this together.”
What all this “free stuff”, and the promise of freedoms being returned attest to is that “We’re all in this together” is only valid for those who can prove they’re COVID compliant.
Notably the four hours extra pay being offered by American Aldi, and Trader Joes, for employees who take the COVID compliance jab.
A closer look at most of the current run of “freebies” for the vaccinated, are from companies hardest hit by government lockdowns, and whose fast foods rank low on the “recommended by your Doctor” scale.
Is the vaccine really about healthcare?
While free stuff is a better option than mandatory vaccinations, it shouldn’t be an either/or option.
Especially when it’s camera loving overzealous bureaucrats, Government lockdowns, and not the virus that’s delivered the pandemic impact of the Spanish Flu, and equivalent.
COVID compliant cards open a pandora’s box exposing society to a caste system that segregates the haves from the have-nots; those who’ve been vaccinated, and those who haven’t; the clean from the unclean; the righteous, from those deemed less than.
In other words, the eligible and the ineligible. Those who are allowed back their freedoms, and those who aren’t.
It’s a lunacy that threatens the lucid. Emotion trumping reason. A downgrade of life, light and liberty, that’s set to intensify demands that do not liberate, but rather subjugate, under the premise of protecting people.
CP editor-in-chief, Ben Davis, was right to state:
‘Every single person I’ve spoken to who’s said they’re going to get the vaccine has told me it’s because they want to travel again. It’s not about their health concerns. It’s not about protection against the virus. It’s not about saving grandma. It’s about “returning to normalcy.” To many, the vaccine is just a necessary hoop we have to jump through to appease our rulers for the promised carrot. Is this about protection or subjection?’
Covid-19 is now as much an ideological worldview, and commodity, as it is a deadly virus.
COVID compliance cards are an addition to COVID compliance wardens, who share the same political designation as Soviet and Maoist political officers inserted into a community to scare, intimidate, and ensure total ideological conformity.
Bribes may work to pull in business. Threats to take or restore civil liberties may work to sell the vaccine, but they bolster a blame and shame game that confuses the virus with people, turns people into pawns, and allows governments who’ve abused their power to get away with it scott-free.
First published on Caldron Pool, 20th May 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Legacy media headlines should really read:
“Hamas’ assault on Israel enters its 7th day.”
They won’t because just like the false “Jan. 6th insurrection at the Capitol” narrative, there’s a dishonest agenda at work, which is proven to exist by the attacks on honest people who call it out.
To back this up, carefully pay attention to how legacy media – post Biden’s coronation as leftist lord and saviour – have dropped the word “insurrection” for “riot.”
Look at Eternity News’ two hit pieces falsely claiming that the rhetoric from Caldron Pool and others, incited violence. (That piece was later retracted).
Not willing to leave it there, Eternity News’ second hit piece, targeted a piece I’d written weighing up election interference claims, as Eternity News squeezed Caldron Pool in with “Trumpism,” “Christian nationalism,” and “outrage media.”
There was no apology for misrepresenting Caldron Pool, just what appeared to be a justification for the defamatory article they had to retract.
In an age of deceit, honest people are viewed as dangerous.
In an age of blurred distinctions and corrupted definitions, well-meaning people are easily misled.
Eternity News was right about reckless rhetoric, but spectacularly wrong in who they accused of being guilty of using it.
The same legacy media who used the buzz-word “insurrection,” later replacing it with the less dramatic, but far more accurate term “riot,” are the same people demonising Israel’s restrained self-defence as horribly evil.
Examine the vast majority of hate expressed towards a person who brings a reasoned perspective to the Hamas attacks on Israel.
Perspective is usually lost in the fury of race-baiters using “us vs. them” distortions, with Israel marked as the oppressor class, and the Palestinian people, the oppressed.
The choice isn’t Israel or Palestine, it’s coexistence or no existence.
Palestinian leaders have rejected the former for decades, to the determent of their own people. Blaming Israel for the failures of Palestinian leadership, only perpetuates the victimisation of the Palestinian people.
The Washington Post seems to disagree, and have thrown their “mates’ rates” power over the Whitehouse into overdrive.
Taking aim at the U.S. funded Iron Dome interception system, it’s not Hamas’ anti-Israel rocket diplomacy, but Israel’s successful defence against Hamas rockets that is ‘helping to perpetuate the Gaza-Israel conflict.’
According to them the Iron Dome defence shield, allows Israel not to care about civilian life, and ‘gives Israel less incentive to find a political solution to its conflict with Gaza.’
What’s telling here is the language.
WaPo or their readers shouldn’t need to be reminded that a defensive shield is for the defence of civilians against a hostile and aggressive force.
The WaPo piece frames the argument in such a way as to demonise Israel, while pulling the proverbial wool over their readers eyes. Ironic for a newspaper with the mantra: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
It is traitorous hypocrisy, but it sells newspapers, and for politicians, earns them camera time.
Australian Greens Senator, Mehreen Faruqi exemplifies this kind of opportunism.
The majority of Australians couldn’t have ANZAC Day, many can’t sing in, or attend Church, “because of COVID-19.”
Pastors are being arrested in Canada for holding Church services, because pastoral care, although an essential service, isn’t considered under COVID Communist fiats, to be one.
People can’t do Church. They can join a mass protest to hate on Israel, because it’s part of the approved narrative – COVID rules need not apply. “We’re all in this together” and “diversity is our strength” become the twisted meaningless equivalents of “war is peace.”
Faruqi, and many protesting that Israel is the belligerent in this new escalation of the Arab-Israeli conflict, do not hold vigils, protest, nor celebrate protests, on behalf of the countless number of Christians being slaughtered by Islamists on the African continent; West Papuans suffering under the occupation of the largely Muslim Indonesian government; and the persecution of Christians in Egypt, and ASIA.
On balance, Faruqi has been an outspoken critic of the severity of the COVID lockdowns, backing mass Black Lives Matter [Inc.] protests, while criticising sports events, and with good cause for concern about how lockdowns inhibit civil liberties.
Also, blatantly absent from her criticisms is support for remembrance services on ANZAC Day, and support for Christians practicing their faith without recriminations from overzealous COVID bureaucrats.
Both are the heart of Australian national identity. It’s a curious thing that Faruqi, an Australian senator, who benefits from the ideals founded under that national identity, can raise up a protest for some, but deny that same support to others.
This suggests that Faruqi, and The Greens are only fans of lockdowns if there’s political capital to be mined from them.
Such as, a misguided mob protesting for the annihilation of Israel, under the seemingly harmless slogan “Free Palestine;” a slogan the Greens senator, joining many on the Left, along with some white nationalists, are applauding without a care for Israel, or the genocide that it infers.
Before I’m ad hominem dismissed as a Zionist by white nationalists, or racist, by “Woke” Leftists, on some notion that I’m “worshipping the Jews”, or trying to tie Faruqi’s worth as an Australian with her loyalty to ANZAC Day, it’s neither racist towards Muslims, hatred towards Palestinians, or xenophobic towards non-Jews to critique an apparent biased agenda, and its pattern of double-standards.
The absence of protest is as revealing as the narrative changes, and, the language used by legacy media to herd, and indoctrinate, rather than inform and educate.
It’s not a hard sum.
Israel may have to revisit its imperfect border policies, but the only ones denying the right for Palestinian existence are Palestinian leaders, and their sycophants seeking to annihilate the existence of Israelis.
Hamas has entered its 7th day of attacks on Israel.
To argue the reverse, is to entertain a zero-sum game, built on an either/or fallacy, padded by reckless rhetoric, and propagated by big media’s love affair with disaster porn, and the abuse of language.
Beware the auctioneers.
First published on Caldron Pool, 17th May 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
For all the good Australia’s Budget 2021 promises, it’s ultimately an “if you don’t vote for this, you’re a misogynist” manifesto.
Before dismissing this as an overreaction, digest these words from The Australian’s Glenda Korporaal,
‘After months of heated discussion about the Morrison government’s attitude towards women, the 2021 budget will go down in history as the first time that women have been so heavily identified in such a key economic statement in Australia.’
Korporaal added, ‘it’s not just the 81-page Women’s Budget Statement that puts a ‘gender lens’ on everything, it’s the explicit identification of women’s role in the economy.’
This is a sign, noted Korporaal, that the Morrison led Liberal National Coalition, are ‘taking responsibility for women’s economic and personal security.’
The budget rhetoric, wrote Korporaal, ‘expands the areas of perceived government responsibility into women’s safety.’
For the cynic, she said, it looks like the LNP are ‘trying to repair their image on women’s issues.’
I’m one of those cynics.
What the LNP are communicating is partiality.
So much for government neutrality, and with it, gender equality.
My cynicism isn’t unwarranted.
The party aggressively portrayed by its Leftist opponents, and fencing sitting opportunistic enemies, as being a party against women, are now the party for women.
If justifying my cynicism with the witch’s brew context the budget was boiled in, isn’t enough, note that I’m not the only one.
Author and veteran, ABC journalist, Quintan Dempster quoted ABC Insiders in a Tweet on the 9th of May, writing, ‘according to The Guardian Australia, the Prime Minister’s approval rating with Australian women has taken a “massive hit.”
Dempster then asked, ‘Will Tuesday’s budget will be a counter misogyny masterpiece then?’
Regardless of what you think of me or my fact-based opinions, Korporaal, and Dempster aren’t lightweights.
Read together, The Australian and the ABC agree.
This is a virtue signalling budget that will reap an ill wind for the LNP, because no matter how “woke” the LNP try to be, it’ll never be enough for the patriarchy hating Leftist vandals, who a large portion of this budget appears to appease.
In essence the 2021 LNP budget is payment for applause from the LNP haters who gaslighted them into splashing dollars they don’t have, on a rush to satiate the anti-woman propaganda, pinned on the LNP by radical adherents of, as Morrison said last week, the ‘moral corrosiveness of identity politics and cancel culture.’
Fair criticism of the Canberra bubble’s poor history in its treatment of women aside, is the national budget the appropriate place to go to war on behalf of its victims?
Sending the country broke for the sake of appearing “woke” is a dodgy gamble with other people’s money.
The only authentically clap-able decision in the budget’s women’s only cash splash, is the $1.1 billion dollars directed towards Domestic Violence services, some of which will go towards helping Indigenous Australian women.
That’s a positive. As are some of the budget’s more sober applications, such as funding opportunities through new apprenticeships, expanding manufacturing, bigger focus on defence, infrastructure, and healthcare.
The instant political win for Morrison is that budget did what it appears to have been designed to do: send the LNP’s political opponents into an unrecoverable flat-spin.
For example, Labor’s anti-women narrative is disarmed, and even the Radical Left Greens Party are struggling with how to respond.
The Greens seem stuck between celebrating the LNP’s new found partiality towards radical feminism, and the LNP not paying enough towards Ponzi schemes that support the Green’s mythos of “climate justice,” or their Ponzi operators whose ‘apocalyptic climate change’ scaremongering is shoved like a rushed vaccine down the throats of children, and the elderly, “for our greater good.”
The budget deficit isn’t a win for the Australian people.
Lower taxation looks great on the surface, but even that’s weighed down by an increase in superannuation from 9.5% to 10% after July 2021, increasing to 12% in 2025.
What this means is that those in Government, along with millionaires like Kevin Rudd, and Paul Keating, who bleat on about raising that compulsory contribution amount to 12%; railing, as they have, against proposals to allow workers access superannuation for use on a first home, benefit from the dollars they, and the unions they serve, can skim off the top.
It comes down to this: more of your hard-earned money for them, and the unions, less of it for you.
The Morrison budget was about government empowerment, not the self-empowerment of women.
It means more social workers, and more money to man-haters in women’s refuges, meddling in the lives of families, who don’t need the help, instead of putting social workers where the help is needed most.
This one-sided nonsense doesn’t help balance the family court system, which often pushes men into a corner through its own vicious partiality.
Why not add new funding to support Dads in Distress, and men’s shed projects as well?
Either the 2021 budget shows that Scott Morrison’s prowess in outplaying leftists is pure genius; or he’s a sell-out, playing quiet Australians for all their worth.
I bounce between the two, but lean towards the latter. Simply because getting in debt to satiate identity politics is plain stupid.
It’s not a good look. The same PM who rejected identity politics last week, has embraced it this week.
What’s more, as a Christian, identity – brokenness – sin – all the trash, whether self-inflicted or inflicted on us by others, is to be grounded and held accountable in Jesus Christ.
‘God’s grace in the flesh’ is where society, if both man and woman are to thrive and survive together, has to find its core identity.
There is no greater common denominator, or battlefield neutraliser than Jesus Christ.
That Biblical instruction which separates humans from machines at the mercy of bean counters, which, long before Darwin’s and Marx’s twisted religions came on the scene, asserted that men and women are not economic units to be solely identified with the almighty dollar, but are Divinely created beings made in the image of almighty God.
Such is the importance between living vs. earning a living preached by Solomon in Proverbs 27, where lives are put before livelihoods.
Solomon’s advice, in sum? Don’t be so caught up earning a living, that you forget how to live.
Plenty of people still adhere to this, it’s just the ones who see Government as god, and seek to use government as a god, who spell hell for the rest of us.
Without the same ‘Deus ex-Machina’ spike that magically coronated Joe Biden as President of the United States, Morrison’s “wokeness” gamble is a reckless one.
Inserting identity politics into the budget sets a precedent for entitlement through a “woke” woman over man, standard, that will divide Australia, not unite it.
First published on Caldron Pool, 14th May 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Queensland March for Life’s annual walk in Brisbane on the weekend showed a strong sense solidarity for the right to life.
The Cherish Life Queensland sponsored event, drew a 4,000+ strong crowd, was accompanied by Queensland police and ended with brief speeches from Senators Matt Canavan, Amanda Stoker, and George Christensen, at Speaker’s Corner outside Queensland’s Parliament House.
In what the Courier Mail snidely called an “anti-abortion protest” attracting a ‘swarm of self-proclaimed “champions of life,” right to life supporters rallied for:
- An end to ‘Queensland’s 2018 abortion-to-birth laws, which have resulted in a 58% increase in abortions.’
- ‘The Federal Government to allow a vote on the Children born Alive Protection Human Rights bill in 2021.’
- ‘An increase in state funding for palliative care, against legalising euthanasia’ (“assisted suicide”) in Queensland.
- An end to ‘sex-selective abortions taking place in the state.’
A minute silence in memory of the 26,583 baby’s lives taken in 2019, was also observed.
Queensland’s celebrated new radical abortion laws allow ‘the “right” to terminate a baby’s life for any reason, even up to birth.’
Reporting on the event, the Brisbane Times’ Felicity Caldwell fell in line with the “abortion is healthcare” legacy media backed false doctrine, making a point of reminding readers that Amanda Stoker is ‘Scott Morrison’s Assistant Minister for Women.’
Caldwell’s not-so-subtle “you’re-anti-women” jab at Stoker was to insinuate some “insidious” conflict of interest, implying that Stoker’s position on terminating a life was incongruent with her position as Assistant Minister for Women.
That pettiness was added to with Caldwell’s smug reference to Stoker ‘losing her fight against James McGrath for the coveted first place on the LNP Senate ticket.’
While Queensland’s abortion laws are now some of the most radical in the world, the State faces another round of debates over euthanasia, which, as Caldwell noted could see Queensland follow Victoria, Western Australia, and South Australia in the legalising “assisted suicide” under the same banner of “healthcare” as abortion.
Quoting, David Muir, chair of Clem Jones Trust, the Brisbane Times said that the push for euthanasia was about “choice”; arguing that “the only people who have a choice are those opposed to voluntary assisted dying” (Muir’s sugar-coated euphemism for “assisted suicide”).
He said, “it’s also about compassion and humanity. This is not a choice between life and death. Terminal illness is already a prescribed death. Euthanasia means the person chooses when they die.”
Using a survey carried out by Clem Jones Trust, Muir claimed his views had the majority of support from Queenslanders; saying that supporters also believed in palliative care, and that palliative care needed more funding, but it’s not a one-size fits all answer.
There’s nothing creepy or anti-women about opposing government overreach through activists demanding lethal legislation.
What is creepy, is reducing conceiving a child to the equivalent of contracting an STD, and treating a human life as though it were a virus; a life unworthy of life.
Murder isn’t healthcare.
Each year, Right to life advocates are essentially marching in time to the Australian Prime Minister’s speech last week, where he called out cancel culture for its moral corrosiveness, saying that humanity’s “inherent dignity” must be preserved.
In essence the Prime Minister told his Jewish audience that they would know well how important it is to remember that as image bearers of God, we recall that life, no matter how small, or how faded, is a gift to be cherished, not cancelled.
On this firm basis, good government should push to emphasise curing disease, not killing people.
Good government should seek to ease their suffering, not erase their humanity, nor the humanity of genuine healthcare providers.
Good government would follow anti-Nazi theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s assertion that ‘even in suffering, we should aim to affirm life,’ not surrender breath, and a heartbeat to a clinical, inhuman, and indifferent, culture of death masquerading as “healthcare” or a culture of “choice.”
To donate to towards March For Life, please click here
First published on Caldron Pool, 10th May 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Anyone who’s lived it will tell you that growing up in a housing commission neighbourhood isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s where I cut my teeth as a kid, and where I warred against my dysfunctional home as a teenager.
The stereotype of public housing mightn’t suit the bureaucrats who prefer softer tones, accompanied as they are by candy-coated success stories, but the stereotype isn’t that far removed from reality.
Our housing commission estate wasn’t a ghetto.
Even so, while opportunity promoted some tenants to greater things, there were many others who remained chained to the cycle of government dependency, and with it, welfare despondency – complete with stale cigarette-stained walls, drawn curtains darkened by brokenness, and the smell of cheap beer fermenting in the carpet.
This was the stigma that sometimes reflected the truth behind welfare dependency. It’s why those higher up on the socio-economic ladder found reasons to keep “people like me” at arm’s length.
I was in the too hard, too much baggage, basket.
“People like me” included those who lived next to me.
From the time my family moved in, until I moved out, our next-door neighbours were Indigenous Australians. I remember them, and they remember me.
The closest our families ever came to a joust, it was more sporting, than hostile.
My late father, an army reservist, had installed a make-shift flagpole on the far end of the veranda. One Australia Day, he raised the Australian flag, and our neighbours responded by putting the Aboriginal flag on their roof. There was no hostility. Just a warm exchange of support; a smile, a wave; understanding and respect.
It was no utopia, but never a bad word was spoken.
The shade of our melanin didn’t matter.
I recognise that my context could be discounted as an anomaly, but my observations of the broader public housing community’s shared difficulties would question that conclusion.
On the whole, it wasn’t the shade of our melanin that defined us, it was similar circumstances and the government programs we lived under.
“People like me” translated, meant that both black and white shared common ground.
This isn’t to say that racism didn’t exist. The point here is to put my experiences up against Critical Race Theory’s assumptions that say I’m racist, because I exist.
For instance, I once asked an American academic, who subscribes to CRT, what my broken home life, the abuse, neglect, fatherlessness, pain, public housing welfare dependent, and dysfunctional upbringing meant for her claims about “white privilege.”
She answered that regardless of how broken my heart was, or how badly my life was affected by powerful external abuse, which I had no control over, I was still considered privileged because I had white skin.
Apparently, my pain, and problems didn’t matter. My lighter shade of melanin meant that my “white privilege” cancelled the legitimacy of my pain, and problems.
I had not right to call myself oppressed, or a victim of oppression. No justification for complaint, grief, nor any ability to empathise with those who didn’t share my shade of melanin, even if they share a similar lived abusive context.
In the world of Critical Race Theory, “people like me” now means racists. I’m measured, not by the content of my character, nor my response to overwhelmingly broken circumstances, but by the colour of my skin.
“People like me” is now defined by the “sin of whiteness,” by way of what Janet Albrechtsen called ‘collective shaming.’
Where, said Albrechtsen, ‘white skin and male chromosomes’ are ‘prima facie signs of wickedness.’
For example, in April, ‘a female youth worker from the Kingston Council conducted a session with Year 11 students at Parkdale Secondary College to discuss privilege, pronouns, and intersectionality.’
The youth worker, ‘asked the teenage boys present to stand up if they were white, male and Christian.’ Then told them that ‘they were responsible for being privileged and oppressors.’
This wasn’t a one off. Brauer College in Warrnambool, allegedly made male students ‘stand up at an assembly and told them to apologise to their female classmates for offensive behaviour on behalf of their sex.’
Albrechtsen noted that the first public tar and feathering by Critical Race Theory fanatics was ‘under investigation’, and the second had ‘been apologised for.’ (Not without a huge outcry from parents).
This, she rightly added, was a ‘new form of racism and discrimination.’
Jump over to the Daily Telegraph’s recently published a piece called ‘Terror Hit Probable’.
In it, Finn McHugh wrote that while ASIO’s (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation), ‘biggest concern about terrorism remained Sunni extremist groups, particularly Islamic State, the threat from nationalist and racist groups was escalating rapidly.’
ASIO secretary is quoted as saying, ‘young Australians are being snared in racist supremacist and misogynistic ideologies in a way that is deeply concerning.’
He called this, ‘Right Wing extremism’, saying that ‘it now accounted for 40% of ASIO’s onshore counter-terrorism workload.’
Nothing was said about Left Wing Extremism, under the banner of Antifa, or even Critical Race Theory fanaticism.
If ASIO is correct, and not just vomiting Leftist agitprop, or working with “woke” groups as the CIA, and FBI do, and did against President Donald Trump, marginalising young white men, in the name of anti-racism is no antidote.
Communal shaming is like adding gasoline to a smouldering fire. There is (to quote Albrechtsen) ‘no justice in shaming innocent white boys.’
David Horowitz observed in 1999 (Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes) that:
“Ideological hatred of whites is now an expanding industry.”
He cites as examples,
‘Noel Ignatiev’s “Whiteness Studies,” an academic field promoting the idea that “whiteness” is a “social construct” that it is oppressive and must be “abolished.”
And, The magazine Race Traitor, who Horowitz names as
‘the theoretical organ of this academic cult, emblazoned with the motto: “Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity.”
I know from my public housing welfare despondent upbringing that we felt the impact of ‘you are what we say you are.’
Some were able to broke free of it, others didn’t.
A sure-fire way to create white supremacists is to embarrass, and humiliate, young, white impressionable men by telling them that their skin colour makes them white supremacists.
Many on the Left are that so far up their own version of racial purity, and “moral superiority”, that they can’t grasp the fact that they are creating the very thing their anti-white racism fears the most.
Then again, perhaps that’s the plan? Manufacture an enemy, and exaggerate the threat, in order to maintain political power, and social relevance?
Either way, if you support the current racist political manoeuvring by from the Left, you’re complicit in the consequences, and are as big of an idiot, as they are.
The answer to the alleged resurgence of racist Right-Wing Extremism might simply be restraining the equally vicious, domestic violence inflicted on society by “Hate Whitey” racist Left-Wing radicalism.
First published on Caldron Pool, 7th May 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Australian businessman, Clive Palmer has signed Israel Folau to the Gold Coast’s Southport Tigers through his company Minerology.
Palmer played for the club in the 1970s, and is a key sponsor.
In a press conference breaking the news, the many faceted, adventure driven billionaire said he’s been a supporter for over 50 years.
Palmer told journalists that the Bronco’s (Folau’s last team) has cleared the decision.
When asked if he agreed with Israel’s “views” around homosexuality, Palmer offered this sharp response,
“Look, I don’t know what his views are to be honest. All I know is he’s placed on the Twitter or something a quote from the Bible. And I know that the Bible’s used every day; quoted in Churches across Australia for millions of Australians.”
He then added,
“I know when we go to Parliament, many parliamentarians refer to texts of the Bible, and they pray every day. I know that when you go to court and you swore in for evidence you put the hand on the Bible. So, to me it’s nothing extraordinary that someone makes a quote from the Bible.”
Palmer then took the media to task for blowing Folau’s 2019 social media post out of proportion stating, “I’d just say from the media it’s grown out of all proportions. It certainly shouldn’t affect a person’s livelihood, how he can support his children, or what he can do.”
The Southport Tigers alumni made it clear that he wants the club to lead in being open to religious diversity, saying, he didn’t want to bring a persecution of people for their religious beliefs into sport.
Answering questions about the legality of signing Israel, Palmer said there is no legal prohibition on his participation in the sport, adding, ‘religious freedom in this country is a fundamental right.’
Asked whether Queensland Rugby League will be putting legal restrictions on him, Folau said he’d have to talk with Palmer, who was quick to address it, saying there is no legal prohibition on what Folau can and can’t say.
With this came the reminder that the Rugby Australia paid Israel for damages for doing exactly that, which Palmer said was an admittance by the RA of wrongdoing on their part.
His comments preceded a warning to Folau’s haters looking to cause new drama through litigation, ‘I’ve got some resources, and if it got down to a legal battle, I’m sure anyone opposing someone on the basis of religious persecution would go down very seriously, and they’d have to pay a lot of damages.’
Critics are already laughing off the “partnership,” in true compliance with the false narratives built up around both Australian celebrities by the largely leftist legacy media, who’ve painted Palmer as a mad, loose cannon, and conditioned people in the false belief that Folau as an anachronistic, homophobic “happy clapping gay basher.”
The Herald Sun, citing a February 2021 black flip from St George Illawarra Dragons on signing Israel, supported LGBTQAAI+ lobbyist and widespread legacy media accusations of “gay hate,” stating in its report that NRL has no jurisdiction over the QRL, and that the QRL will have to decide whether or not to let the “controversial anti-gay former Wallabies star” play.
ESPN didn’t follow the Herald’s lead. The sports magazine highlighted Folau’s talent, respectfully handled the controversy, and pointed out the Australia Christian Lobby’s ‘recent online petition, which garnered 12,000 signatures demanding Folau be allowed to play in the NRL.’
Super charging the Southport Tigers, Folau will be joining two of his brothers on the field in a first for the A-grade Queensland Rugby League team.
Folau said it’s a step in the right direction, and credited ‘his Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’ for the opportunity.
First published on Caldron Pool, 21st May 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
For the second time in six months, Communist Chinese propaganda bullhorn, the Global Times, has published false accusations about Australia’s military involvement in Afghanistan.
The Maoist-state-affiliated organisation published a poster alongside a defamatory editorial, claiming Australian soldiers committed ‘sanctioned massacres’, were part of ‘cover-ups’, had ‘a kill list’, and photoshopped enemy activity to mask” ADF evils.
In the same month, the Marxist mouthpiece used selective comments from Australia’s Home Affairs Secretary Michael Pezzullo, who the CCP rag accused of “sabre-rattling,” for warning against belligerency in his 2021, ANZAC Day speech,
“Today, as free nations again hear the beating drums and watch worryingly the militarisation of issues that we had, until recent years, thought unlikely to be catalysts for war, let us continue to search unceasingly for the chance for peace while bracing again, yet again, for the curse of war.”
Pezzullo doesn’t mention China, but The Global Times (along with the Australian Labor Party) responded to his speech as an attack on Communist China’s position on Taiwan.
CCP propagandists then falsely used Pezzullo as an example of Australian politicians exhibiting a ‘high zeal for war.’
The CCP’s manipulation of facts are its primary ingredient in their ramped-up belligerency against Australia.
There’s a clear, discernible pattern.
Take for instance, the bannable by Twitter standards, actions of Chinese Communist Party official, Zhao Lijian, who, in a Twitter post in November last year depicted photoshopped images of Australian soldiers beheading Afghan children. (The post inciting violence against Australians was reported, but Twitter neither blocked Lijian, or booted his account).
This follows The Global Times’ Beijing Bettys penning articles telling Australia to ditch the United States and embrace the CCP’s debt slave, ‘Belt and Road Initiative’, or else!
This includes the CCP’s incursion into Australian society, via money hungry Australian Universities, abuse of trade relations, and the bullying of Australian citizens, such as Australian swimmer Horton Mack.
Let’s not forget the unscheduled visit in June 2019 of three Chinese Warships who entered Sydney harbour unannounced, with sailors dressed in full combat gear.
This list doesn’t include cyber-attacks, the potential biological warfare origins of the Communist COVID virus, or the tariff war triggered by China’s Communist leaders, who view Australia as a puppet of the United States in need of some good ole’ Red Guard, gulag Marxist “liberatin’ lovin.”
Examine The Global Times’ latest song and dance routine.
Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of The Global Times, said Beijing should bomb Australia, if the Oceanic island continent decided to back a U.S lead defence of Tawain.
Affirming China’s ‘love for peace’, Xijin stated that ‘retaliatory punishment should include long-range strikes on the military facilities and relevant key facilities on Australian soil.’
Before reading Xijin’s military strategy, I said to my wife last week that I wouldn’t be surprised if the Communist Chinese Party did something like nuke a part of Australia in order to coerce submission through a show of force.
Although the CCP claim to adhere to a “no-first-use of nuclear weapons policy,” they’d appeal to Hiroshima and Nagasaki as examples; making out that our new “benevolent” and “glorious” Marxist rulers wanted to avoid bloodshed, or direct military confrontation.
America’s new Commander in Chief is weak. So is the jihadist leftist narcissistic party he serves.
Like the blind bats most of them in that category are, many on the Left would surrender and celebrate.
Biden would ramble out a few sentences through his mandatory mask, something like “that’s not nice, don’t do it again,” while the CCP laughs in his face, then maybe sinks a carrier battle group or two; as BLM, and PRIDE parades break out across America in celebration of the Communist destruction of the “racist and homophobic” West.
Think about it. There’s plenty of desert the CCP could use to scare the hell out of (paralysed by political correctness) fence sitting Aussies.
This kind of approach would also allow the CCP to encourage their Leftist sycophants in Australia to blame “warmongering right-wing extremists,” “racism” etc.; gaslighting Australians by saying: “you brought this on yourself; because of your “whiteness” warmongering. You only have yourselves to blame.”
Would it mean war? Not necessarily.
Australia would simply capitulate, ditching ANZUS, as quickly as Australia is ditched by the Pro-CCP Whitehouse Democrats. The surrender would be unconditional, with Australia’s leftist legacy media leading the charge – especially the ABC, and perhaps Eternity News – doing everything in their power to make that happen.
Led, as they would be, by former “glorious” leader Kim Il-Kevin07, or another power hungry wanna-be from the Left at the helm.
The U.N would applaud the smashing of “Sinophobia, the patriarchy, racism, and homophobia.”
Anyone who still stood in their way would be punished under puppet state rules established by the Communist Chinese Party.
I’ll stop there. You get the point.
If you think this is a stretch.
Precedence would beg to differ.
Founding member of the anti-Vietnam war movement in the United States, David Horowitz, now an ex-Marxist, stated in a 1985 piece marking the 10th anniversary of the fall of Saigon:
‘Let this be perfectly clear. Those of us who inspired and then led the antiwar movement did not want to just stop the killing, as so many [antiwar protesters from back then] now claim. We wanted the Communists to win.’
Horowitz adds, we operated from a double standard, holding America to account, while ignoring the crimes of those America was fighting against.
Some of us, says Horowitz, ‘like Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, provided a protective propaganda shield for Hanoi’s Communist regime while it tortured American war-prisoners; others engaged in violent sabotage against the war effort.’ (“My Vietnam Lessons”)
He concludes, ‘my experience has convinced me that historical ignorance and moral blindness are endemic to the American [and Australian] left.’
Horowitz couldn’t have described the response from the Leftist elite in Australia to the increasing belligerence of the Communists in China, more accurately.
In April, Australian Labor’s foreign affairs spokeswoman, Penny Wong aligned with the CCP in openly criticising Pezzullo’s ANZAC address.
Wong, according to the Sydney Morning Herald rebutted Pezzello by accusing him of not using ‘sober and cautious language.’
Labor responded in kind to Australia’s Defence Minister, Peter Dutton’s well publicised concerns for the Taiwanese people, and Australian sovereignty.
Fast forward to this week.
Australian Labor’s Shadow Trade Minister, Madeleine King, demanded LNP member George Christensen be ‘sacked.’
As Wong did with Pezzullo, King took Christensen’s’ words out of context, then accused him of being an ‘unhinged’ warmongerer, for pointing out Communist Chinese warmongering.
Christensen is right.
Contra to King, honest observers would acknowledge that it’s China, not Australia, who’s militarising the South China Sea, and its maritime navigation lanes.
Likewise, as much as the majority of Australians don’t like how it enslaves the Chinese people, Australia isn’t infiltrating Moa’s dystopian society by way of the wolf diplomacy, intimidation, or belligerency.
Australia isn’t invading Taiwanese airspace, or practising chest-beating invasion drills. Neither is Australia seeking militant global dominance.
More to the point, unlike China, Australia isn’t a nuclear power, with unelected bureaucrats encouraging its bureaucratic caste to bomb another country!
Despite the CCP’s claims to the contrary, – including criticisms from self-hating, clueless Leftists who have a distaste for ANZUS, The QUAD, Five-Eyes, and America’s close relationship with Australia – accusations from China’s Communist propaganda arm best fit the ‘sabre rattling’ of the Chinese Communist Party, not Australia.
With help from blind bats in the Australian Labor Party, Beijing Betty from the CCP’s cut and piece propaganda department is projecting.
No Australian wants a war with the Communist Chinese Party or its indoctrinated Marxist minions, but it’s treasonous to advocate we walk around ignorant of the drums of war.
Far better to draw a line in the sand, than bury our heads in it.
As I argued in May last year:
Appeasement of the Chinese Communist Party is treason.
Tweet
First published on Caldron Pool, 12th May 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Christians in Finland are experiencing set-backs to their civil right to exercise their civil liberties.
Family Research Council reported on Monday that ‘Finland’s former Interior Minister and leader of the Christian Democrats, has been criminally charged for posting a picture of the Bible, opened to Romans 1:24-27.’
The Twitter post was a criticism of the ‘(ELFC) Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland joining an LGBTQAAI+ Pride parade.’
It triggered a two-year investigation, and could land the former Finish member of parliament in prison for up to two years, unless she recants.
Prosecutors are arguing that the post citing the Apostle Paul’s words verbatim, ‘violated the equality and dignity of homosexuals.’
One report from Finland added that ‘the charges were filed on three separate issues’, pertaining to Räsänen’s staunch Christian conservative views on marriage, that she’s expressed publicly in writings, and on social media.
Another report cited Räsänen’s 2004 booklet, ‘“Male and Female He Created Them: Homosexual relationships challenge the Christian concept of humanity” as the real centre of the charges.
In it, Räsänen respectfully argues that homosexuality is a ‘sexual anomaly;’ asserts the prudence of the age-old, man for woman, woman for man union; critiques cultural acceptance of “born that way” self-justifications for Same-Sex marriage, and outlines the danger posed by passing oppressive pro-LGBT laws based upon arbitrary propositions.
Such as, said Räsänen, ‘the Swedish act of 2003 concerning the right to teach the portions of Scripture dealing with homosexuality. Those who disseminate statements alleging homosexuality to be a sin can be sentenced up to two years in prison for incitement against a group of people. If the offence were considered minor or if suspects agreed to withdraw their statements, they might get by with only fines or parole.’
In addition, Räsänen writes of the hypocrisy from Same-Sex marriage advocates, stating,
“When the registered same-sex relationships were equated with marriage, a development was started which was difficult to halt. During the processing of this Act, it was affirmed to the Church, and to Christians concerned about the consequences, that the Church could retain its own values and views on homosexuality. Shortly after the Act was passed, a warning was issued to the Church about discriminating against its employees who intended to form homosexual partnerships. This was based on their fundamental rights against discrimination.”
In other words, the promise from Same-Sex marriage advocates that civil rights and civil liberties would be protected for all, not just some, was a blatant lie.
Instead of protecting civil liberties, Same-sex marriage laws created an untouchable, protected political class.
As a result, according to FRC’s Tony Perkins, former M.P. Päivi Räsänen has been charged for “hate speech.”
Räsänen has rejected the charge, telling prosecutors, “I do not see how I would have in any way defamed homosexuals whose human dignity and human rights I have constantly said to respect and defend.”
FRC recounted that Räsänen was determined to see that freedom of speech and religion, ‘both of which are guaranteed in international agreements and in [Finland’s] constitution, are respected.’
With the characteristic PRIDE flair for the melodramatic, Finnish Bishop Elect, Rev. Dr. Juhana Pohjola, has also been charged.
Prosecutors allege that Pohjola, editor-in-chief of Luther Foundation Finland’s publications, is guilty of incitement against a group of people, due to his continuing to support of traditional marriage, and Räsänen’s publication.
Lutheran International said that the 2019 investigation follows, ‘an Helsinki Police investigation which concluded no laws had been broken.’
Finland made Same-Sex marriage legal in 2017, whilst the book was published in 2004.
The Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland (ELMDF) was created as a move away from the State Church – Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland -, due to the ELCF’s distancing of itself from the Bible and the Lutheran Confession.
Rev. Juhana Pohjola was defrocked in 2014 by the ELCF for helping found the ELMDF, which seeks to maintain its Biblical roots due to concerns that about the continuing theological decline of the ELCF.
As a founding member of the ELMDF, Rev. Juhana Pohjola’s conviction, and potential prison time would bolster his opponents in the ELCF. It’s not a stretch to see how they could benefit politically from such a conviction of one of Finland’s high profile Christian leaders.
All of this is eerily similar to 1930s Germany.
The ELMDF appear to be the equivalent of the Confessing Church, which was founded on similar grounds. The Confessing Church was an ecclesiastical protest against nominalist German Christians surrendering Christian theology into the hands, and service of National Socialist ideology.
In its response to the charges against, Räsänen and Pohjola, the International Lutheran Council said,
‘“The implications of the decision to charge Juhana Pohjola and Päivi Räsänen are clear: if the authorities are willing to do this to a respected pastor, reverend doctor, and Bishop Elect, as well as a Member of Parliament and former Minister of the Interior, then that sends a message of fear and intimidation to everyone in Finland who follows the Scripture’s teaching on human sexuality.”
The ILC called on “Christians to demonstrate solidarity with their suffering Finnish Lutheran brothers and sisters.”
In the same response the ILC asserted that Christians,
“We must not be silent but express righteous indignation at the actions of the Finnish authorities and demand an end to the persecution of those who adhere to historic Christian teaching on sexuality. I encourage Christians around the world to pray for Juhana and Päivi, and to follow the example and command of Jesus: ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you’ (Matthew 5:44).”
What can be drawn from all this is that Same-Sex marriage advocates acted deceptively.
Rather than reaffirm the legitimacy of their arguments, I’m more convinced than ever that “love is love”, was, and still is a lie. Their goal was domination, not “equality.”
Where civil rights are exalted over civil liberties, hell on earth is sure to follow.
Tweet
First published on Caldron Pool, 7th May 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Hatred, or more generously put, disdain for Christian homeschoolers rears its pernicious, snarky head every year in one way, or another.
The main combatants are from the Left. They fire vitriolic salvos over the walls of their sheltered cloisters of higher learning into an area of education they view to be harmful.
They view it as harmful because the general curriculum used by most Christian homeschoolers is classically based, which is generally speaking, loathed by the Leftist hegemony.
The essential Christian Homeschooler’s curriculum would include a holistic embrace of subjects across a spectrum of genres that have built, informed, and sustained Western civilisation throughout the good and the bad.
If done right, Christian homeschooling gives students the best of Biblical Theology, antiquity, Shakespearean, Victorian, literary, and Philosophical classics, as well as age-appropriate exposure to multi-ethnic biography, art, community, logic, civics, General science, Math, grammar, English, language, and History.
Of course, not all Christian homeschoolers aim high. Neither do some schools.
This flaw doesn’t warrant vilification, such as Yale University Professor, Phillip Gorski’s claim on Twitter that ‘Christian homeschooling was -and is – often – if not always – a major vector of White Christian Nationalism.’
Gorski, according to a Campus Reform article, accused Christian homeschoolers of advocating a ‘fusion of Christianity with American civic life,’ which he says, ‘carries assumptions about nativism, white supremacy, authoritarianism, patriarchy, and militarism.’
What Gorski means by ‘fusion’ is the belief in American exceptionalism, or ‘manifest destiny.’
His concern is that homeschooled students are being taught that America is a Christian nation, founded by white Europeans, which for better and worse, is one of the greatest Constitutionally Democratic nations to ever have existed.
In other words, they’re being taught the truth, not a revised history ordained by the Critical Theorist Marxists of the New Left.
While Gorski’s concern about ‘manifest destiny’ is to be recognised, it’s not evident that this, errant natural theology doctrine, is the be all and end all of Christian home-schooling curriculum.
I’ve never seen it present in the American Curriculum our family uses, and has used in 11 years of home-schooling.
To be fair, Gorski does admit that ‘not all Christians homeschool, and not all Christian homeschoolers learn Christian nationalism,’ but it’s banal for Gorski to make claims insinuating that ‘manifest destiny’ is the benchmark of Christian home education, when his definition of Christian nationalism is skewed to begin with.
As part of the Leftist academic apparatus, Gorski’s operating from his own assumptions, and learned bias.
To state it simply, for Leftists, Western Civilisation is white supremacism.
This is a fundamental belief among Leftists, evidenced by the irrational MAGA hat hatred in the United States, and here in Australia by loud, Leftist opposition to the Ramsey Centre For Western Civilisation.
Academics are protesting the presence of the Ramsey Centre on University campuses through agitprop op-eds, and a dedicated website, by which they accuse the philanthropic organisation of being narrow, Anglo-centric, Sinophobic, racist and patriarchal.
Never mind that they’re tenured positions of privilege only exist because Western Civ. grounded on Biblical Christian evangelical ethics, makes such positions and privilege achievable.
Simply teaching about Western Civilisation and its achievements is, to the majority on the Left, teaching racism, white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, xenophobia, and the long list of thought cancelling nouns goes on and on.
This includes the assumption that students not being taught from Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Black Lives Matter, or LGBT programs, within or over-against the ABCs, and 1,2,3, are being taught wrong.
By wrong: Children are being taught at home, not force fed from the Unionised conveyor belts of the predominately Leftist education indoctrination complexes.
Though the Left does influence home education indirectly through the tragic history of the radical Left bludgeoning its way through the 20th Century, they have no control over what those children are taught, which translates into having no control over the adults those children become.
As is displayed by the way the Left farms racism and fear of catastrophic man-made climate change for political profit. Leftists, and some liberals, don’t want citizens, they want subjects.
I’m not advocating that “cancelling” CRT or QT, I’m saying – as I already do – like Islamism, Nazism, and Communism, teach about them, just don’t teach from them.
Teach from the Bible in one hand, the newspaper in the other (Karl Barth).
In the end the contempt for Christian homeschoolers isn’t about people, it’s about politics, sex, and power.
The Left’s blind contempt for Western Civilisation merges with a learned prejudice against Christian homeschoolers.
The hate for Church and State informs the radical Left’s willingness to pervert, then vilify Christian home education on malicious grounds.
This fits in well with recent comments from Gene Veith, who wrote that “President” Joe Biden’s “American Families Plan,” was reminiscent of ‘Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which Government also breeds, reproduces (via in vitro hatcheries), and indoctrinates children in massive “nurseries.”
‘State Conditioning Centres’ took over the mum and dad role of raising children, and the curriculum, said Veith, taught “woke” ‘Elementary Class Consciousness.’
Brave New World analogies may seem overused, but we’d be fools to discount the loudness of its message here because, as Veith states, it ‘sounds disturbingly non-fictional.’
A.W. Tozer once said that ‘the complacency of Christians is the scandal of Christianity.’
If we allow the Leftist hegemony to dictate curriculum, on the sole basis of their own self-serving, misconstrued and false notions of Western Civilisation, we’re not just guilty of contributing to that scandal, (which in Biblical terms is scandalon; sin), we’re, as Tozer also said, ‘lacking in a moral wisdom that future historians will record as an Achilles heel, because though we had the intelligence to create a great civilisation, we lacked the moral wisdom preserve it.’
First published on Caldron Pool, 5th May 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Seconded.
Critical Race Theory is racism.
—-> https://caldronpool.com/hate-whitey-is-racism/
—-> https://caldronpool.com/critical-race-theory-is-culturally-accepted-racism/
Mum challenges a school who wants to infuse Critical Race Theory’s false doctrines into the curriculum.
She’s right. Black Lives Matter Inc. and the whole CRT, “hate whitey”, money making industry has more in common with the Nation of Islam, and Malcom X, than it does Martin Luther King Jnr.
CRT is a rejection of the early civil rights movement. It does what David Horowitz has accused “Black Power” thugs of doing: keeping African-Americans chained to poverty through as politics of grievance, and bitter sense of entitlement.
Criticisms from former Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, aimed at Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison’s Christian faith, are asinine, petty, and hypocritical.
In response to Scott Morrison’s speech at an Australian Christian Churches conference in April, Rudd told the ABC’s 7:30 Report,
“The idea that anyone leading a political party could believe that it is ‘God on our side,’ is just the stuff of real danger in my view.”
Rudd’s problem with Morrison is largely manufactured outrage.
Morrison never said or alluded to the absolutizing of the Church through the State by way of hyper-nationalism.
In ripping apart Morrison’s testimony concerning answered prayer, Rudd twisted what Prime Minister said, and skewed the message to serve his own ends.
No where in the speech – which was transcribed by Crikey – does Scott Morrison say about the 2019 election that “God was on our side,” nor did Morrison suggest that Australia should become a theocracy.
The Prime Minister spoke of being the image bearers of God. A key part of healthy Biblical theology, and a major part of the fabric from which Western Civilisation was formed.
Contrary to Rudd’s self-centred accusations, Morrison asked those gathered to be what they are called to be: a landmark; a beacon of hope under the 24/7/365 Lordship of Jesus Christ.
In essence, Morrison was calling the Church to be image bearers of the self-revealing God in a sea of poisoned politics, societal division, ideological extremism, and the subsequent surge of political turbulence.
There’s nothing Morrison said that justifies Kevin Rudd’s venomous anti-Church and State tantrum.
Granted, his concerns about the excesses of Pentecostalism weren’t all that off the mark. I’ve seen some dumb stuff done in the name of the Holy Spirit.
While criticism of certain aspects of the Christian denomination are necessary, the more appropriate platform for such criticism is theological analysis, not trial by media.
Certainly not trial by ex-Prime Minister, who from his political pulpit, appears to be saying that the Christian faith should be constrained to four walls on a Sunday, and read through the lens of Das Kapital.
Rudd’s bourgeois leftist social justice Christianity, is as concerning as cultural Christians who keep Jesus in his Sunday box, bringing Him out for a cameo at Christmas, and Easter. Only apply if necessary. Particularly if there’s an election on, and the mood feels right.
By using Morrison’s Christian faith, to shove his own bigoted bourgeois leftist, Marxist Jesus of “Social Justice,” down the throats of Australians, Rudd appears to be completely unaware that his self-righteous chest-beating negates proclamations about his own Christian faith.
For example, Rudd, in his article for the Guardian placed his own “garden-variety theology” (whatever that is) against what he alleges is Morrison’s “radical political theology.”
His juvenile outbidding of Morrison should be read as it appears to have been written: “Morrison isn’t a real Christian. I know, because I’ve always been one.”
It’s not the first time.
In a quarterly essay discussing faith and politics, Chris Uhlmann explained how Rudd “compared his faith, with that of John Howard, and [did so] to find his opponent wanting.”
Could Rudd’s hypocrisy be any more blatant?
He condemns Scott Morrison for bringing “religion” into politics, but was not averse to using God in his 2006-2007 election campaign.
In a 2006 essay for the Monthly, Rudd appealed to the strength of German Evangelical (Lutheran) theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Rudd appears to have used Bonhoeffer’s Christian opposition against the Nazi state, to inadvertently portray the Liberal National Party as Nazis, and the Australian Labor Party as anti-Nazis, for the goal of winning the 2007 election.
Spot the irony. Kevin Rudd, a “Christian Socialist” employed an ecclesiastically Conservative Christian theologian, who stood up against National Socialism, to promote Christian Socialism.
Bonhoeffer wasn’t a fan of the all-consuming, and never satisfied, economic leviathan, stating, (and I’m quoting him verbatim): ‘a lack of obedience to Scripture is characteristic for the teaching of the social gospel.’ (DBW 12, Memorandum, p.242)
Around the time of the 2007 election, when it came to roles played in society by both the Church and State, Kevin Rudd was all for it, writing,
‘The function of the church in all these areas of social, economic and security policy is to speak directly to the state: to give power to the powerless, voice to those who have none, and to point to the great silences in our national discourse where otherwise there are no natural advocates.’
Adding to this, he then asks secular politicians not to reject the Christian perspective:
‘A Christian perspective, informed by a social gospel or Christian socialist tradition, should not be rejected contemptuously by secular politicians as if these views are an unwelcome intrusion into the political sphere. If the churches are barred from participating in the great debates about the values that ultimately underpin our society, our economy and our polity, then we have reached a very strange place indeed.’
It’s telling. Kevin Rudd is okay with the Christian perspective in politics, as long as it’s the Leftist authorised version.
A deceptive, flowery version informed for the most part, by false doctrines that submit the Lordship of Jesus Christ to the tyrannical lordship of Karl Marx.
It’s not Morrison’s faith in politics that needs a health check-up, it’s Kevin Rudd’s.
‘Socialism’s real error’, said Christian, ex-Marxist and French scholar, Jacques Ellul, is ‘the one that lies behind all the rest, is that it ended up formulating a new religion, setting up gods: history, proletariat, socialism, revolution.’ (Jesus & Marx, 1988. p.139)
As Simone Weil asserted: ‘Marxism is a badly constructed religion.’
Rudd’s hypocrisy and its utterly self-important nonsense beg the question, why is #kevin07 still being taken seriously?
The former populist P. M has discredited himself by letting his lust for media attention assuage his narcissistic opportunism.
Watching Kevin Rudd’s responses to Leigh Sales on the 7:30 report was like watching a sketch from the Comedy Company.
The election of Kevin Rudd ignited over a decade of destabilisation in Australian politics. Him calling the Prime Minister “wacky” is genuinely laughable.
To be in Christ, is to be in the Church.
Crucially, and perhaps most importantly, is that Rudd’s criticism of Morrison, not only misconstrues the role of church and state, it neglects vocation.
Vocation is God’s sovereign grace working through human hands, where, says, Lutheran scholar, Gene Veith, ‘His Word extends into the world.’
Through vocation the spirituality of the cross is lived out in ‘parenting, farming, labouring, soldiers, doctors, judges or retailers.’
It’s impossible for a genuine Christian to be separated from Jesus Christ.
The distinction between church and state is not to be understood as a separation between the secular and sacred.
A Christian defined by their church attendance record, melanin, ethnicity, or loyalty to a political ideology – is not a Christian.
Jesus is bigger than Sundays.
First published on Caldron Pool, 3rd May 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Happy Thursday readers! For those interested, I’ve uploaded a new t-shirt design to my Redbubble “store.”
Link below.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison has rejected identity politics and cancel culture in a speech delivered to the United Israel Appeal Dinner, in Randwick, NSW.
Morrison’s April 29th address wasn’t a thunderous “no,” but it was an encouraging reiteration of comments he’d originally made during an informal speech at the Australian Christian Churches conference held on the Gold Coast the previous weekend.
One that inadvertently triggered a meltdown amongst the radical leftist vanguard because a) he seemingly didn’t ask their permission, b) didn’t officially schedule it on his Prime Ministerial calendar, and c) a Christian Prime Minister giving a speech at a Christian conference, was a bridge too far for the “Australia is supposed to be a secular country” blusteringly bigoted, anti-Christian belligerents.
The essence of his speech reinforces a commitment from the 3rd highest office in the land, after God and Governor-General, that Australia won’t be led by extremists on the left, who are demanding total conformity to their divisive ideological agenda.
This all sounds promising, but there is a caveat. Morrison’s words are dimmed by the Liberal National Party appearing to follow the direction of Australian Labor’s virtue signalling vote grab, by implementing gender quotas.
With this in tow, we’d be fools to not ask whether the Prime Minister was fully committed to his convictions?
If the Prime Minister’s commitment to tackling the toxins of identity politics and cancel culture is an authentic “hell no – full stop!”, we are seeing a watershed moment in Australian politics.
Morrison’s boldness wasn’t a Menzies sonic boom, heard when the Liberal founder, and Prime Minister, stood in the gap for all Australians with ‘The Forgotten People,’ and his perceptive, if not over-the-top-at-times, consistent defence of Australia’s [Classical] Liberal Democracy, against the totalitarianism of Communism at the height of its insidious power.
This said, Morrison’s address was, in many ways, a Menzies moment.
Scott Morrison, drove home the message of community, and individual responsibility; of offering grace towards our neighbours through the Biblical Christian emphasis on an ‘inherent dignity’ handed to humanity by way of the being made in the image of God (Imago Dei).
Liberty, the Prime Minister said, ‘is not borne of the state but rests with the individual, for whom morality must be a personal responsibility.’
He adds,
‘This is not about state power. This is not about market power. This is about morality and personal responsibility…That is the moral responsibility and covenant, I would argue, of citizenship. Not to think we can leave it to someone else. ‘
‘Community begins with the individual, not the state, not the marketplace…to realise true community we must first appreciate each individual human being matters.
Then Morrison qualifies his meaning stating that,
‘In this context, we must protect against the social and moral corrosion caused by the misuse of social media, & tendency to commodify human beings through identity politics.’
‘We must never surrender the truth that the experience and value of every human being is unique and personal. You are more, we are more, individually, more than the things others try to identify us by, you by, in this age of identity politics.’
‘You are more than your gender, you are more than your race, you are more than your sexuality, you are more than your ethnicity, you are more than your religion, your language group, your age.’
Finally, and with justification, Morrison solemnly nails the fascist nature of identity politics, cancel culture, and by extension Critical Race Theory/Queer theory, asserting:
‘Throughout history, we’ve seen what happens when people are defined solely by the group they belong to, or an attribute they have, or an identity they possess. The Jewish community understands that better than any in the world.’
Cancel culture and identity politics are birthed from same DNA found in Communism, Nazism, and Islamism. They are totalitarianism proper.
That Australians have a Prime Minister publicly moving against this new authoritarianism, is, to lean on the sentiment expressed by CDP leader, Lyle Shelton, a gift.
This, Shelton said, ‘has been Morrison’s finest hour as PM. For a politician who is known more for his pragmatism, this is a welcome and necessary shift.’
I’m a little more cautious. At the moment Morrison’s words are just that, words.
They come from the same Prime Minister whose Communist Chinese inspired anti-COVID counter measures hurt civil liberties, and came without any promise of preserving those liberties, hand-in-hand with his Government’s fight against the Communist COVID virus.
They also come from a P.M. who entertains the hysterical dogma of apocalyptic climate change catastrophisers.
Hopefully, Morrison’s new speech suggests a new direction.
Scott Morrison, the Prime Minister that no one seems to be able to box in, pin down, or label, no matter how hard they try, has gone into bat, shouldering his fair share of the burden for the sake of our civil liberties.
As such, Morrison has delivered one of the best speeches of his time in office, and is to be commended for it.
First published on Caldron Pool, 5th May 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Australian Senator, Amanda Stoker, has, according to reports from The Australian, directly criticised a plan to infuse an antiracism campaign by The Australian Human Rights Commission, with Critical Race Theory.
Linking the two, The Australian said that AHRC has now held back from a committing $140,000 tender to align Critical Race Theory with the “Racism: its stops with me” (RISWM) campaign.
The intention of the “addition” was to move the ‘focus of the campaign beyond the level of interpersonal racism towards a critical look at forms of structural/systemic and institutional racism, as well as unconscious bias.’
The $140,000 ideological alignment tender’s purpose was to ‘increase understanding about these concepts,’ along with ‘mobilise supporters and potential supporters into action to address them.’
Amanda Stoker is quoted as saying that after learning of the project, she ‘immediately called AHRC president to express concern that it was fostering racial division.’ Racism, Stoker said, ‘is completely unacceptable in modern Australia, but ideas like Critical Race Theory, only lead to greater racial division.’
AHRC president, Rosalind Croucher, said that the call with Amanda took place, but denied that Stoker’s criticism had any influence on the decision to put the project on the back-burner.
Defending the $140,000 tender, Croucher said, crucially, it was an idea that sought to include CRT, ‘not replace the current focus on individual behaviour and building social cohesion.’
The Australian said that Croucher rebuked Stoker, telling her that ‘while open communication is valuable, it is not for an assistant attorney to give direction to an independent agency head.’
IPA director, Bella d’Abrera backed Amanda Stoker, ‘accusing the AHRC of using radical race theory to divide Australians, while notorious Twitter race baiter, Greens Senator, Mehreen Faruqi backed the AHRC infusing CRT into its RISWM campaign.
The debate over CRT as a basis for education is raging in the United States. Donald Trump restrained CRT because of its far-left wing toxicity, but Joe Biden backs it.
Some States, however, are following the Trump lead, and seeking to limit the radical Left-wing ideology’s reach, by banning the teaching of CRT in schools.
In other words, these states are seeking to restrain maddening radical left-wing dogmas such as: ‘systemic racism, white privilege, “whiteness”, and gender bias issues.’
Stoker’s concerns are valid.
The minute the Australian Human Rights Commission starts preaching from the “woke gospel” of Critical Race Theory, and it’s sibling, Queer theory, it’s no longer an organisation advocating human rights, but reinforcing the protection of an emerging oppressive political class, and its false doctrines.
Ex-hard-line Communist, and veteran of the New Left, David Horowitz, in ‘Hating Whitey & Other Progressive Causes’ described what we now know to be Critical Race Theory, as an academic movement of ‘radical left anti-white hatred’, calling it ‘a by-product of anti-Americanism.’
Horowitz, once an avid supporter of the Black Panthers, noted,
“Ideological hatred of whites is now an expanding industry. [See] Noel Ignatiev’s “Whiteness Studies,” an academic field promoting the idea that “whiteness” is a “social construct” that is oppressive and must be “abolished.” [Also] The magazine Race Traitor, the theoretical organ of this academic cult, emblazoned with the motto: “Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity.”
He wrote this in 1999.
His comments pre-date – and perhaps predict – the rise of Black Lives Matter, popularity of CRT, Democrat race baiting, and the “all white people are racist” stereotyping.
Horowitz, an agnostic, is hated by the Left.
It’s easy to see why Amanda Stocker is now on their ridiculous “religious right-wing” watch – them because we hate them – list.
Thankfully, Amanda isn’t alone.
Recall what Kemi Badenoch, a Conservative MP from the U.K., said in October last year:
CRT as an “an ideology that sees blackness as victimhood and whiteness as oppression. We do not want to see teachers teaching their white pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt…What we are against is the teaching of contested political ideas as if they are accepted facts.”
If the AHRC is as passionate about antiracism as they claim, surely the AHRC’s hierarchy will recognise this, and look to a broader range of voices, than those identified by Horowitz.
Critical Theory praxis is designed to discredit. CRT and Queer theory are its weapons. Manipulative thought cancelling platforms used to censure a person based on the lightness of their melanin, convictions about biology, faith, and the man for woman, woman for man, union.
Critical Theory, and its offshoots, Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory, are not what they appear to be.
In the end, Rosalind Croucher, the AHRC president, is to be commended for halting the $140,000 tender, for the simple fact that ultimately, ‘Critical Race Theory is culturally accepted racism.’ – Virgil Walker
First published on Caldron Pool, 30th April 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Silicon Valley is yet again proving that they’re an anti-democratic monopoly, willing to ban, block, boot, and blunt the voice of Democratically elected representatives.
Craig Kelly is their latest victim.
Facebook has banned the Australian Member of Parliament for breaching their COVID rules.
One of those posts in question was Kelly’s proposed bill to ‘Ban Domestic Passports’ within Australia.
ACL director Martyn Iles called the targeted ban, “big tech censorship”, noting that one of his “The Truth of It” videos have been censored, and that when it comes to Facebook “he, himself, is on borrowed time.”
Iles has good reason for thinking this way. Radical Leftist Jihadists spurred on by the collaborative cancellation of President Donald Trump, appear to love a book burning.
For instance, as Iles noted, Amazon’s ‘recent ban on one of the most carefully written scholarly books on transgenderism, by Dr Ryan T Anderson.’
In addition, Tik Tok ‘(without explanation) permanently banned PragerU’s Amala Ekpunobi, a young, African American, conservative woman whose content tends to be nothing short of excellent.’
The ACL director declared: they censor because they’re scared of ‘truth. Truth is exposed by analysis. Truth has the power to persuade people. It is hard to fight fair against truth.’
He then pointed out that ‘the woke worldview is built on a foundation of lies, which must be protected at all costs – especially the most fragile ones. Censorship is the only tool they have to fight truth. They dare not let it free, or argue with it.’
I’m going to add that the kings and queens of the information age seem determined to exert political power, where political power hasn’t been granted to them.
The technocratic Tower of Babel bubble, that is Facebook, and Twitter (et.al) are how people do business.
There is no opt-out clause. Ours is now truly a technological society.
Technocrats don’t seem to just want the world, they want to run it, and they’re on their way to owning you.
Many businesses use their platforms to communicate with employees, passing on vital information that affects the livelihoods of everyday people, living everyday lives.
The technocracy in California thrives on this co-dependent relationship. They are rulers of the governed, without the consent of the governed.
It’s an abusive relationship, trademarked by Big Tech’s collaborative effort to interfere in the 2020 United States election, when they punished customers on their platforms for objecting to conscription into Silicon Valley’s predominantly Leftist groupthink paradigm.
The way they wield power through their sheltered, centralised hub betrays an arrogance not dissimilar to what Democrat Senator, J. William Fulbright, in 1966 called, ‘power confusing itself with virtue.’
Fulbright was lamenting his vote supporting the Democrat led push to increase America’s involvement in Vietnam. He saw the ‘organised slaughter’ as an outworking of the ‘arrogance of power.’
The relevance is simple. For Fulbright, this was ‘welfare imperialism’; a big nation dictating their terms of existence onto a smaller nation.
In today’s geopolitical vernacular, it’s Communist China vs. the Free People of Hong Kong. Likewise, Communist China vs. the Republic of China (Taiwan).
By banning criticism, Big Tech follows the road of ‘exaggerated power’, where it ‘can admit no wrong-doing,’ because it’s too invested in an agreed upon consensus, that demands ‘unquestioning support.’ (ibid)
Their COVID-19 wall of silence that bans alternative opinions from “unapproved” professionals, and its vetting system that ensures loyalty to the agreed upon narrative is an expression of this ‘arrogance of power.’
This overthrow of elected representatives raises some important questions about where do we go from here.
One possible way that Big Tech can work around their concerns about “fake news” content is by extending grace to the official accounts of our elected representatives.
Could something akin to parliamentary privilege be extended to elected representatives using social media?
I’m convinced it could. If Big Tech is serious about civil liberties, primarily freedom of expression and speech, such an extension is not only an appropriate application of grace towards elected representatives, but its fast becoming a necessity.
The voice of the people, for the people should be protected.
Parliamentary privilege empowers this; it ‘refers to an immunity from the ordinary law, which is recognised by the law as a right of the houses and their members.’
As such, ‘parliamentary privilege exists for the purpose of enabling the houses of the Parliament to carry out effectively their functions.’
For example: ‘the primary functions of the (upper-senate; lower-representatives) houses are to inquire, to debate and to legislate.’
The sad reality is that, for all the bluster about being platforms for freedom of speech, Big Tech aren’t all that interested in being platforms for freedom of speech.
There can be, said Fulbright, ‘no solution to a problem until it is first acknowledged that there is a problem.’
It’s doubtful that the technocratic kings and queens of this new aristocracy are aware that the fault, as well as the remedy for it, lies with them.
References:
J.W Fulbright, 1966. The Arrogance of Power Random House Publishing Group.
First published on Caldron Pool, 28th April, 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
The chilling image from Western Australia of a lone elderly man defying authoritarian COVID-19 lockdowns, is an anathema on the reactionary political decisions of soft leaders, who’ve sold out to the political capital Communist China’s COVID-19 grants them.
The apparent veteran was seen wearing medals, and marching with metal walking aids down an empty street in Perth, during what would have been Perth’s ANZAC Day commemoration service on the weekend.
Parts of the city were thrown into a three-day lockdown by Western Australia’s Labor government after two people tested positive to the controversial virus. One, a 54-year-old man, ‘had completed quarantine on April 17th, after arriving from China.’ (SBS)
According to the Daily Mail (which was one of the only established media outlets to report on the event), ‘under the strict lockdown rules, residents are only allowed out for essential reasons, and the current lockdown may be extended.’
Western Australia’s flash lockdown was on par with Victoria’s ludicrous limitations in Melbourne, and its fenced off perimeter around the ANZAC memorial, which was met with a justifiable amount of criticism online.
Similar criticism was being directed towards the Western Australian Labor government.
Noteworthy among them was Herald Sun, and Sky News presenter Rita Panahi, who applied her almost flawless characteristic sharp wit, saying,
‘What a powerful image. Strength, principle and character. What a contrast from WA’s bedwetting premier who cancelled Anzac Day commemorations. ‘Complexity of feelings’…that’s one way to describe scaremongering & hysterically disproportionate response.’
In parts of Canada and Victoria (Australia), he’d have been tackled or tasered.
The media would have called him a “grandma killer,” claiming he wanted people to die, and “Zooming” celebrities with masks on would be slamming him for his rebellious stand for civil liberties.
All this would be happening while doctors and nurses with too much time on their hands performed well-rehearsed dances on Tik Tok, as bureaucrats took to hourly press conferences informing nations that this veteran’s actions mean lockdowns have been extended for months, because only they know what’s best for us.
It’s a travesty that we’re allowing governments to turn its attacks on the virus, into an attack on the people.
#AnzacDay is not a spectator sport. It’s an open-air Church service where ALL in attendance participate to remember the fallen; mark the tragedy of war, and respond to a summons to vigilance, and the obligation we are handed to preserve light, life and liberty.
Don’t believe me? Look up the history.
The architect of Anzac Day was Christian chaplain, Canon David John Garland. He was active in helping soldiers during WW1, and ‘served from 1918-19 in the Middle East.’
He was also a staunch fighter for civil liberties. According to the ‘Australian Dictionary of Biography’ (Mansfield, Vol. 8, 1981), in 1937 he protested the ABC’s ban on politicians from broadcasting for three months before the Federal election, calling the decision ‘dictatorship of opinion.’
Deemed the ‘heart and soul of ANZAC Day Commemoration Committee,’ Garland set up Anzac Day ‘ceremonies and rituals; initiated the Anzac Day march, the returned soldiers’ luncheon, the two minutes silence, the wreath-laying ceremonies at memorials and the special church services. He also began a trust to use money raised from Anzac Day badges for the care of soldiers’ graves at home and abroad.’
The politicisation of COVID-19 is the further promotion of COVID control-by-fear narratives, it’s an echoing of Communist totalitarianism; the elevation of hubris through bureaucratic nonsense, over-against common sense.
By applying excessive political force to the COVID-19 crisis, catastrophising bureaucrats have happily used fear-porn, to jump from press conference to press conference to convince us they’re excessive lockdowns are needed.
Through their unelected narrow health bureaucratic advisors, they’ve rejected the scalpel, and applied the hammer and cycle.
Computer modelling were stepping stones to totalitarianism.
Just as they’ve politicised COVID-19 for the cameras, they’re politicising ANZAC Day, but it’s likely to backfire. Many will see their hijacking of ANZAC services to satiate their lust for power for what it is, a mockery of the dead, and the enslavement of the living.
If you, once said Chuck Colson, ‘get the notion in your head that there’s a political solution to everything, and you don’t have to do anything except let Government take care of everything for you, you will eventually be controlled by those people.’ [i]
Chaplain Garland would agree, the ‘dictatorship of opinion’ from which a narrow band of unelected health bureaucrats determine what is essential and what is not, isn’t what those who we remember on ANZAC Day fought, and died to preserve.
ANZAC Day exists because pastoral care is an essential service.
Being baby-sat by bureaucrats isn’t.
References:
[i] Colson, C. 2015. I’m Happy, Not Happy, My Final Word, Zondervan, (p.123)
First published on Caldron Pool, 26th April, 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Dr. Kevin Donnelly’s Wilkinson Publishing new release, ‘Cancel Culture & The Left’s Long March,’ is an Australian first.
Aussie academics have teamed up to produce a long overdue scholarly rebuttal of the influential Radical Left’s Maoist inspired Culture War (p.62).
Connelly’s authors aren’t numb to the stresses of everyday life, or ignorant of the chasm between the non-fiction of real life, and fiction over facts life of social media netizens. Its content isn’t long-winded, verbose, nor does it come from a group of high-minded ivory tower theorists.
His compilation of essays comes from a broad spectrum of professionals who’ve directly felt the impact of Cancel Culture in their respective fields.
Some of whom have lived some of their professional life staring down the barrel of Cancel Culture’s fully locked, and loaded “fall in, line up, goosestep in unison, or else!” gun.
With contributions from the more well-known personalities such as Geologist Ian Plimer, Former Prime Ministe Tony Abbott, Sky News host Peta Credlin, and Independent scholar Dr. Stephen Chavura, the book introduces other ‘culture war warriors’ Kevin Donnelly, Gary Marks, Jennifer Oriel, John Steenhof, Anthony Dillon, Patrick Byrne, Dr. Fiona Mueller, and Kristian Jenkins.
For all that ‘Cancel Culture & The Left’s Long March’ teaches, it is a well-informed push-back, as much as it is a group of concerned academics drawing a powerful line in the sand.
The book has left me somewhere between anger at Western apathy, disappointment with society’s quick surrender, and being buoyed by its impassioned intellectual plea to step up the fight in a war no one wanted, but were forced onto fighting because the Radical Left will not tolerate an opposing viewpoint, or any viewpoint that doesn’t enhance, deify, or support their own.
What this means is actuating a firm “no” to the totalitarian Left’s imposition of new cultural law; laws that are designed to cancel out civil liberties, the family unit, science, and Biblically Christian based constitutional democracy.
As such, my overall response to ‘Cancel Culture & The Left’s Long March’ is this: every discerning voter needs to read this book as soon as they can.
At the centre of Cancel Culture’s black heart is a manufactured reset of society, that’s part of a broader new paradigm which measures good and evil by the yardstick of ‘safe versus dangerous, instead of true versus false.”
It’s why ‘those who value Western Civilisation must be vigorously opposed to the never sleeping militant left’s totalitarian agenda’ (p.30).
One of the significant features of Donnelly’s work is the depth of knowledge its authors have about their subject matter.
Gary Marks, for instance gives a strong overview of the New Left’s, Marxist Frankfurt School, its origin, mandate, and founders.
Donnelly runs through the tactics of infiltration used not for the purpose of educating children in Australia, but re-educating them.
For example, he says, ‘instead of being an impartial and balanced pursuit of knowledge, wisdom and truth’, education curriculums emphasise ‘politically correct language, ideology and group think.’
He grimly adds, ‘where English once involved teaching clear thinking and the importance of logic and reason when evaluating arguments and differing points of view as a result of [Marxist/New Left] critical theory and post-modernism, students now judge arguments according to how they feel’ (p.35).
Similarly, ‘beauty’, writes Jennifer Oriel, ‘is replaced by a simulation that is culturally impotent.’ University ‘leaders have so diminished freedoms that the miseducated are taking the uneducated into a realm of darkness’ (p.51).
Her examples include the cancelling of non-leftist speakers on campuses, to booting academics for expressing leftist wrong-think with whip statement terms like the ‘thought-terminating cliché Islamophobia’; manufactured for the ‘purpose of beating down critics’ (p.59).
As Oriel writes, the New Left’s ‘neo-Marxist colonisation of the university’ replaced ‘the pursuit of objective truth and classical liberal education with revolutionary education that taught students what to think’ (p.57).
Dr. Fiona Mueller concurred calling the new cultural-left’s triumph over our education institutions, and the ‘ideological intimidation epitomised by cancel culture’ (p.75), the ‘closing of the Australian mind’ (p.67).
‘Cancel Culture & The Left’s Long March’ indicates a significant cultural shift; it’s a watershed proclaiming the counter-culture, though forced underground by radical leftist jihadism and its Cancel Culture crusaders, is a thriving community, determined in their resistance to stop a resurgence of bloodthirsty 20th Century authoritarianism.
As Daintree said, while noting that this takeover of the masses was a consequence of post-modernism’s rejection of objectivity, there are ‘signs things will improve.’
The emergence of ‘small liberal arts institutions like Sydney’s Campion college’, for instance, as well as ‘the Ramsey foundation’, and intellectuals in the same calibre as Sir Roger Scruton, and Jordan Peterson, encourage us to ‘reverse the darkening influence’ of those who fixate on identity, gender, and sexual preference (pp.93 & 94)
Speaking of the COVID-19 response, Tony Abbott adds ‘it’s vandalism to demolish anything when there’s nothing better to replace it with’; society has ‘gone beyond accommodating people’s fears to the point of playing on them’ (pp.102 & 104).
It’s this well-ordered, plainly stated insight that allows ‘Cancel Culture & The Left’s Long March’ to take its author’s much needed objective message beyond the corridors of the academy into the colossal subjective Thunderdome of post-modern society.
Cancel Culture is the culture of death equivalent of “life unworthy of life.” The same issuing of demands for ideological conformity under both Nazism and Communism, which forged a legal wall of silence around Stalin’s Gulags, and purges; and euthanized contemporary criticism of Auschwitz, Dachau, Ravensbruck and Buchenwald (among others).
As John Steenhof points out ‘Australian laws are being weaponised to silence religious voices, and to cancel religious Australians who express ideas that are discordant with the atheistically secular ideological fashions’ (p.109).
Israel Folau being the primary example of how weaponised ‘vilification laws are abused.’ Dr. Jereth Kok a Victorian G.P. is another.
Jereth was ‘suspended from practicing medicine after an anonymous complaint from an activist triggered the Medical Board to suspend his licence, alleging that his conservative Christian political views made him a menace to his patients. Despite his patients ‘never complaining about his professionalism’ (pp.114 & 115).
This should send a chill up and down the proverbial spine of Western society. The same callous hands which gripped Europe in the 20th Century, are wrapping its cold, dead, bony fingers round the necks of Western society.
Perhaps the greatest outworking of this cultural-leftist toxin is the Left’s vile misuse of Aboriginal Australia, where ‘fuzzy sounding and emotive words or phrases – like “first nations people”, “connecting with country”, “institutional racism” – that have no precise meaning, are used to bolster an argument to make an opponent look sinister, or make the one using the rhetoric sound intelligent and morally superior.” (p.126)
Anthony Dillon writes, ‘such [CRT] rhetoric is a smokescreen’ used by “whinger ninjas” [sic.]. They turn attention away from the ‘fact that very often the worst offenders in treating Aboriginal people badly are other Aboriginal people’ (p.129).
Critical Race Theory [CRT] and Queer theory share the same genetic origins in New Left Critical Theory, formed by the reduction of society into an oppressor and oppressed class, with related post-modern, historical revisionism to justify it.
Queer theory, says Patrick Byrne, opposes the ‘biological worldview.’ It cancels criticism on the false moral relativist view that biology is a social construct.
Byrne compares gender dysphoria to anorexia, where the ‘anorexic female’s perception of her body as obese is in conflict with the reality.’ If we’re forced to affirm gender dysphoria, because not to do so is labelled “transphobic”, will they also ‘insist on supporting a person with anorexia nervosa’ to ignore their biological fact for subjective fiction? (p.143).
Ian Plimer and Stephen Chavura conclude the book.
Plimer impressively argues it’s the ‘sun that drives the surface temperature of the planet’, not carbon dioxide. Writing, ‘it has never been shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming’ (p.162)
He also explains how the ‘Climate cult’ has manufactured the “Climate Crisis;” Stating that ‘science is tribal, is politicised, and because science is government funded, has a tendency to follow the party-line.’
Adding, this ‘Climate change cult is part of the ‘cancel culture community masquerading as science.’ We know this because basic questions such as “how do we know what we know?’ is considered a seditious and offensive question (p.164).
Cancel Culture’s biggest tool says, Chavura, is Social media. It’s ‘virtual mobs’ are unlike anything seen in history; and the ‘only speech they tolerate is that which conforms to the leftist social agenda.’
He writes, ‘at the end of the day cancel culture thrives on timidity, and codes of free speech,’ as opposed to Cancel Culture’s obsession with arbitrary, and ambiguous “hate speech” rubrics, that often are used to silence speech the Left hates.
The power of Cancel culture’s effectiveness is limited by the attention we feed it.
‘Cancel Culture & The Left’s Long March’ a book of criticisms, and observations.
I’m confident in saying that it is one of the most important books I’ve read in a while.
Donnelly’s well put together compilation isn’t a manifesto, it’s a response to, and exposition of demonic false doctrines, deceptively emerging from the hegemonic leftist swamp as a liberating, benevolent force.
May we see more academics follow these courageous few.
First published on Caldron Pool, 24th April, 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Australian academic, author and public speaker, Dr. Stephen Chavura has given his strongest message to date on the dangers of apathy in the face of virulent cancel culture.
In his essay from Kevin Donnelly’s ‘Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March’, abridged by The Australian, Chavura argued for what he calls, ‘courage culture’ to meet and ‘remedy cancel culture.’
Central to cancel culture, writes Chavura, ‘is an emerging therapeutic totalitarianism, which seeks to outlaw speech and practices deemed “unsafe” or “harmful.”
This is evidenced by the emerging police state in the West, which from behind a wall of fearmongering narratives, ambiguous legislation, and EULA’s headlined as regulating “hate speech,” the Left arbitrarily polices thought and speech that it hates.
By extension, we also see the cancelling of livelihoods, personalities, places, and conservative platforms the Left hates, which are now becoming too numerous to mention.
For instance, cancel culture’s ‘woketivists’ have seen to the ‘termination of careers and punishment of free speech of ordinary Australians working in education, health, the public service, and private corporations. In Australia the Human Rights Law Alliance represents dozens whose religious views – particularly regarding sexuality and gender – have resulted in them losing their jobs or being disciplined in their workplaces.’
The upside to this, says Chavura is that there are a growing number of people, corporations, and institutions who recognise that Cancel culture is fascism proper. That it’s a direct domestic threat to civil liberties, and constitutional democracies.
In thanking them for their courage, Chavura acknowledges the limitations these groups face in the struggle to be heard within the Leftist echo chamber that violently opposes opposing viewpoints, with often manipulative lawfare, and intimidation through false claims on the moral high ground, and a consensus from the majority.
These groups see Cancel Culture’s inherent negation of life, its hypocrisy, and absolute hatred of anything its “feelings first” yardstick renders as life unworthy of life.
What’s needed, said Chavaru, are ‘more organisations defending freedom of speech and other liberal rights [to] emerge to fight back against cancel culture.’
If so, then ‘more brave individuals will stand tall when the cancel mob comes for them.’
Along with this community uprising will come support for those holding the line against the fire on the horizon, stoked as it is by the darkness of another world-shattering gathering storm.
He writes, ‘Cancel culture is itself a test of how committed citizens in comfortable and prosperous liberal democracies are to their freedoms of speech, religion, and, conscience.’
This storm can be stopped, ‘but only by courage culture.’
If, he adds, ‘our freedoms are cancelled because of our apathy and fear, then we’ll only have proven that we forfeited our right to those hard-won freedoms long ago.’
Closer to home, Chavura has long held the view that the Church in the West faces a Kairos moment; built for a time such as this, a time for choosing, of risking, of meeting the task handed to it as Christ’s hands, and feet on earth.
This is a time for defending society where freedom is governed by objective morality, against a phantasmagorian utopia governed by nothing other than what has been prescribed for us by mob rule, an unelected bureaucratic elite, and the nihilistic abandonment of individual responsibility, God and the obligation of reciprocity His grace commands of us.
Those who deny the existence of Cancel Culture are usually part of the “resistance” pushing Cancel Culture.
These groups are all too ready to throw other Christians under the bus for personal gain.
Buying permission to speak into politics, they purchase privilege with the blood of saints they’ve slain on the altar of their own self-righteousness.
It’s a political play for influence, power and an audience. It has nothing to do with building up the body of Christ; and everything to do with maintaining the Left’s hold on the body of Christ. Man’s lordship over against Christ-as-Lord.
Its therefore not hard to see why these goats are quick to attack others for calling a spade a spade.
Cancel Culture represses free speech, demands heart allegiance, and imposes new cultural laws in order to pursue the erasure of civil liberties.
The goal is to replace Classical Liberal societies, and their Biblical foundations, with Marxist Promethean wokeness (my definition for Cultural Marxism.)
Chuck Colson called barbarism, ‘inhumanity done in the name of humanity; the killing of people for their own good.’
Cancel culture is fascism proper. It’s barbaric, and this barbarianism is punching its way through the gates.
Flawed, anti-Nazi theologian, Karl Barth, saw this first hand. His faith in Jesus Christ led him to reject the deification of the state, and its sycophants in the German Church. As a result, he was booted out of Germany by Hitler.
His resistance is summed up with one sentence:
‘Christianity is the protest against all the high places which human beings build for themselves’ (C.D IV/II p.524).
It’s why the Barmen Declaration that he helped forge was a founding document of the Confessing Church.
It sought to stop opportunistic clergy, and their congregations, from subsuming Christian theology into the service of Nazism, boldly proclaiming:
‘We reject the false doctrine, as though there were areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ, but to other lords–areas in which we would not need justification and sanctification through him.’ (Barth, 8.15 second thesis, Barmen Declaration 1934).
Heed Chavura’s call, because he’s right: ‘Courage is the only way forward.’
In the spirit of the movement supporting cancelled Star Wars actress, Gina Carano, of The Mandalorian, ‘Welcome to the Rebellion!’
First published on Caldron Pool, 9th April 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Christian Democrats founder, and the party’s only member of parliament, Reverend the Honourable Fred Nile has announced his retirement, and at the same time his replacement.
Nile’s time in politics spans 40 years, and like many Christians in the public eye, it’s been met with a mixture of hate, vilification, misrepresentation, and admiration.
He left school at 15. Worked as a booky, converted to Christianity, served in the military, worked a day job and an event co-ordinator. He is the Parliament of NSW’s longest serving member.
Rev. Dr. Ross Clifford wrote of Nile’s legacy, ‘He’s never sought to disrupt the elected Government but rather amend bills where appropriate, oppose bad and immoral legislation and ensure legislation based on Christian principles is considered and debated.’
Though not without mistakes, like his myopic opposition to Christian 80s metal band Stryper, Nile is the personification of John Stott’s axiomatic ‘Christianity belongs in the marketplace, not the museum.’
Fred Nile’s greatest examples are consistency, and teachability. His greatest achievement is providing a reliable voice for Christians, at the round table of democratic power, so often sold out to the dehumanising gods of the secular humanist religion; and it’s “me, myself, and I”, neo-Pagan age.
Shelton faces the same challenges.
Tom Rabe, The Sydney Morning Herald’s transport reporter, quoted “independent” MP Alex Greenwich mocking the baton exchange calling Shelton “an irrelevant political blow-in,” stating that he’d ‘feel “completely out of place” [in the] NSW Parliament, because it valued and celebrated the LGBTI community.’
Greenwich’s criticism isn’t surprising. He was the architect of the poorly debated, ambush legislation that now allows for abortion up to birth in New South Wales.
Long absent from the media, Greenwich appears to be out for some quick political relevance himself, riding themes imbedded in click-bait articles from pro-totalitarian woke websites unhappy at the news, falsely claiming that Lyle’s replacement with Nile is ‘One homophobe replacing another homophobe.’
Lyle’s acceptance of the position, which is yet to be confirmed by the party’s State council, comes amid tax payer funded LGBTQAAI+ activists taking the former ACL director to Queensland’s human rights tribunal, demanding Lyle be pay them compensation, and be permanently gagged (aka cancelled), because of list of alleged “grievances,” among those is “hate speech.”
Shelton expressed reverence for Rev. Fred Nile’s years of dedication to Church and State, and publicly voiced gratitude for the opportunity in a brief social media link to Nile’s press release:
“A privilege & honour to be asked to succeed the Rev Hon Fred Nile MLC. He has been a courageous & often lone voice for Christ’s values in Australian politics over 40 years. Never before has the Christian voice been more needed in public life.”
He graciously told Eternity News (even after they published an ACL hit piece just hours before current director, Martyn Isles was to be a guest panellist on the Australian Public Broadcasters show Q & A) that, “Nile pioneered Christian political activism in this country and history will judge him to have been right on so many issues.”
In response to what appears to have been “social justice” questions from the Leftist social club for “woke” “Christians”, Shelton said he’ll be advocating ‘first and foremost for vulnerable people. The poor and disadvantaged, human rights for the unborn and support for their mothers.’
As well as taking a stand against radical transgenderism, and standing up for “freedom of speech and freedom of religion.”
With Nile handing the CDP baton to Lyle, along with John Anderson returning to the fold, a new and interesting era in Australian politics has begun.
Include here the steadfast Claire Chandler, George Christensen, straight-shooting Mark Latham, Pauline Hanson, and no-nonsense Craig Kelly, all of whom are holding their own; paralleled with Andrew Hastie, Peter Dutton, and Amanda Stoker gaining what should be considered providential ministerial positions, the frontline in the Marxist culture war nobody but leftists wanted, has never looked so promising.
If we add to this the meteoric rise of non-leftist Indigenous Australians, such as Jacinta Price, Anthony Dillon, Warren Mundine and brave new arrival, Cheron Long, it’s no stretch to say that this diverse youthful brigade of new faces means the leftist dominated toxic swamp, colloquially known as the “Canberra Bubble” or “inner city elites”, has its days numbered.
Make Australia Great Again.
First published on Caldron Pool, 12th April 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Rebel News has reported that police in Canada have gathered en mass to stop Christians from gathering at Grace Life Church, led by Pastor James Coates, who was arrested earlier in the year and spent 35 days in a maximum-security prison for opposing bureaucrats bullying citizens with COVID for political gain, by abusing power through the use of unmitigated fear.
The authorities also barricaded the church with fences, closing of the private property so that no one could use it.
There’s also been unconfirmed reports posted to social media, noting that the same police state crack down isn’t being applied to Mosques, with one Twitter user saying “Dont forget, this isn’t happening at the mosques in Calgary.”: https://youtu.be/XBKKNQI3Pr0
Rebel News’ Ezra Levant explained that ‘These are heavily-armed lockdown police in Edmonton, Canada. They operate out of a garrison they built at a church they seized because it wouldn’t close. FACT: These cops have set up latrines on the front steps of the church.’
Levant commented on the Church’s tenacity writing on Twitter, ‘Canada wouldn’t obey politicians and lock its doors. So they jailed the pastor for 35 days. The church still wouldn’t close. So police raided it, turned it into an armed garrison & occupied it. And still the Christians come.’
Blaze Journalist at large, Elijah Schaffer said “You cannot lock down Christianity.”
The crackdown brings to life the relevance of anti-Nazi theologian, Karl Barth’s resistance to Government assuming the role of God:
‘We confuse men’s consciences if we don’t reject the view that God’s laws and the so-called ‘ten commandments’ of socialist morality have the same humanist ends in view.’ (Karl Barth, Ten Articles on the Freedom and Service of the Church)
File under: Covid communism.
CALDRON POOL’s rolling coverage:
WATCH: Pastor James Coates Gives His First Interview After His Release From Jail
Pastor James Coates Freed After Five Weeks In Prison
Pastor James Coates’ Release Delayed
Pastor James Coates To Be Released From Prison After Crown Withdraws Charges
Police Raid Canadian Church, Install Fences Around Building
VIDEO: https://twitter.com/RealCanuck…/status/1381335392541151233
Despite Big Tech’s efforts to present themselves as platforms for freedom of speech, they seem bullheadedly determined to build an iron curtain of silence around critics not aligned with their preferred ideological paradigm, or political party.
Following on from Silicon Valley’s ongoing wall-to-wall de-platforming of President Donald Trump, including pulling the kill-switch on competing social media platforms such as Parler, and Gab, the monolithic golden gods of the information age are engaging in Soviet-Maoist tactics in the way they gag dissent, and cancel unapproved opposition.
Big Tech’s reassuring words which attempt to calm increasing concerns over their new collaborative monopoly that decides what news gets shared, and who gets to share it, when matched against their praxis, suggest that these reassurances are nothing more than the soothing platitudes of empty rhetoric.
Put simply, they aren’t delivering on what they promise.
Actions speak louder than words.
For example, Rebel News reported yesterday that YouTube has suspended them for a video talking (ironically) about Big Tech censorship and cancel culture.
This means that Rebel News cannot upload, or post any of its news content on YouTube for one week.
The suspension, according Editor-in-Chief Ezra Levant, also came with a warning from YouTube stating that the next breach of the “rules” will be met with a longer suspension, followed by the deletion of the Rebel News account.
RN pointed out that the double-standard by reminding people that while Big Tech bans, blocks or boots those not aligned with Leftism or the current political narrative of Globalists etc, ‘accounts for Nicolas Maduro, the Communist dictator of Venezuela, or Ayatollah Khamenei, the theocratic ruler of Iran, or numerous Chinese Communist regime propagandists are permitted to remain.’
YT’s suspension of RN, was trailed by Twitter locking out Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe for what Ben Shapiro said was a violation of Twitter’s rules regarding “spam.”
The most probable reason for their censoring of O’Keefe is connected to him reporting the truth about CNN’s anti-Trump electioneering propaganda, where he revealed CNN’s vicious, utter contempt for their viewers.
Shapiro agreed, writing in response, ‘I’m sure this has nothing to do with O’Keefe’s latest investigation, in which he utterly humiliated CNN by exposing its rank bias. The timing is probably just a coincidence!’
He’s right. The timing is too convenient.
Shapiro was also right to state that ‘this should concern everyone – left, right, and center. It is becoming easier and easier for Big Tech to silence people they view as “problematic.” This problem is going to get worse before it gets better.’
As ex-New Left foot soldier, David Horowitz has noted in his somewhat informal confession ‘The Black Book of the American Left (2013)’, anyone aligned, or appearing to be aligned with the leftist ideological hegemony is beyond reproach, those deemed unworthy of life, however, are easy prey, targeted with ‘defamation and then quarantine.’
Progressives, he said, ‘disconnect from reality in the service of a destructive illusion, and are blind to the human consequences of their ideas and actions.’
Thus, with one hand Silicon Valley can say they stand for civil liberties, while with other they denounce, then guillotine anyone considered to be a threat to their increasingly centralised power base.
This is, as Horowitz explained, ‘the common tack’ of the Leftist regime. Revisionism, and an ‘inability to face up to the past, a penchant for rewriting it, resistance to historical truth, and the deliberate suppression of facts or inversion of facts in the service of a political cause.’
Big tech’s behaviour personifies the culture war. That battle, as this new iron curtain proves, isn’t left vs. right, black vs. right, it’s truth vs. falsehood.
Those would benefit from hiding the truth, profit from lies. Which is why there’s no room for self-reflection in a room full of self-righteous romantic revolutionaries.
Beware the auctioneers.
First published on Caldron Pool, 16th April 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
One thing we’re big on in theology is literary criticism. The scientific process of taking a statement back to its original source through questions, context, analysis, research, and faith-filled dialogue about our reasoned conclusions.
It’s a sure guard against deception, misrepresentation, and ignorance.
A good reason for our focus on this is highlighted by Eric Voegelin in his 1968 book, ‘Science, Politics & Gnosticism’:
‘The deception of the reader occurs when a text or citation is separated from its context and is used in isolation from its original intended meaning.’ [i] (paraphrased)
Context matters.
Voegelin had just gotten through explaining how Karl Marx in his doctoral dissertation of 1840–41 misrepresented the statement, “In a word, I hate all the gods”, from Prometheus in Aeschylus’ ‘Prometheus Bound.’
For Voegelin, “anyone who doesn’t know Prometheus Bound must conclude that Prometheus’ “confession” sums up the meaning of the tragedy.”
Marxism’s revolt against, and hatred of God, is a product of Marx’s misunderstanding of ‘the Hellenic [Promethean] symbol.’ [ii]
Voegelin states that Prometheus is reinterpreted by Marx, ‘The revolutionary reversal of the symbol—the dethronement of the gods, the victory of Prometheus—lies beyond classical culture; it is the work of gnosticism.’
This is where, said Voegelin, the ‘young Marx presents his own attitude; under the symbol of Prometheus’ Marx wages war against God, and because they’re inseparably linked, also, man.
It could be said that Marxism uses a god, to dispose God, in order to exalt themselves as god; leaving in the wake of Promethean “wokeness,” a sea of mass graves, in exchange for the Divine seat of power.
Marx either got Prometheus horribly wrong, or deliberately manipulated the Greek myth to build a school of thought, and oppressive ideology around it.
Prometheus wasn’t a Marxist, but Marxists have forged Prometheus in their own image.
Bonhoeffer, in his lectures on Genesis, recorded in DBW3: ‘Creation and Fall,’ substantiates good reasons for discernment, and suspicion of this Marxist Promethean self-justification, better penned as Promethean wokeness.
According to Bonhoeffer, in the Garden of Eden, God’s Word was used as a weapon against God. The result was a catastrophic fallout between the creature and its benevolent Creator.
The power to decree that which is right and wrong, good and evil, is now considered to have been taken up into the hands of humanity.
Rather than a new day dawning [enlightenment], darkness descends [truth is hijacked] and humanity descends with it.
The source that determines what good and evil is relocated; reassigned by, and lowered down to a Creatorless humanity.
Humanity in its abstraction from God devours itself.
Instead of being liberated, God’s creature becomes burdened. The Promethean Marxist’s hatred of God, is powered by human lust for dominion and power. This is why I am convinced that Socialists, for all their protests to the contrary, care only about power, not people.
Marx’s Promethean wokeness seeks to overthrow God – demanding God’s kingdom, be ruled by man, without God in it [iii].
Thus, human beings, wrote Bonhoeffer, ‘renounce the word of God that approaches them again and again out of the inviolable center and boundary of life; they renounce the life that comes from this word and grab it for themselves.’
Man positions himself in God’s place; Good is called evil, and evil is called good, for ‘humanity stands in the center; disobedience in the semblance of obedience, the desire to rule in the semblance of service […]’ [iv]
We’re told in the Biblical accounts, such usurpation is the nonsense of Nothingness, it turns humans into the playthings of demons, and is ultimately destined to catastrophic failure.
The Governed become pawns, Government becomes God.
The overbearing weight of being governed by a government which has confused the Creator with the creature, is inevitably unjust, corrupt, and self-destructive.
Who, and what governs those who govern us? No one. There is no limit to Marx’s Promethean Wokeness.
Despite appearances, the Promethean self-justification, its pride filled proclamation about the “death of God,” and subsequent coronation of man as a god, doesn’t happen without a decisive response from God.
God isn’t wounded outside His own choosing [e.g.: as He does for our sakes in Jesus Christ].
Neither is He killed off.
Instead of liberation, in humanity’s exaltation of itself over against God, humans mortally wound themselves.
Despite this, God shows compassion.
In spite of the Promethean self-justification where ‘the ultimate possible rebellion, portrays the truth as a lie. [Where] the Abyss that underlies the lie lives because it poses as the truth and condemns the truth as a lie,’ [v] God doesn’t abandon His self-centred, rebellious creation.
He graciously intervenes, judge’s humanity, and in doing so saves it from itself. He then covers His creatures’ nakedness, and blesses it with posterity.
God remains God for us, even when He disagrees and takes a stand against us.
Even though His creature is so infused with, and consumed by the maddening effects of Marx’s misguided Promethean hate, God chooses to reconcile, liberate, and save the creature He loves.
God chooses not to jettison His creature, as it has jettisoned Him.
Promethean wokeness doesn’t allow any connection with this God.
It in fact, denies it. Reduces humanity to systems, and calls all questions that challenge it, “enemies,” “traitors,” and “bugs.”
Karl Marx’s big mistake was to read into the Promethean myth his own lust for power.
Promethean wokeness is a Marxist monstrosity.
What’s left behind is the butchered, and disfigured creation of an idea that prides itself as man’s true liberator, but conceals behind its mask the deep black void of the Abyss.
Sources:
[i] Voegelin, E. 1968, Science, Politics & Gnosticism: Two Essays, (paraphrased). Kindle (Loc.492)
[ii] ibid, 1968
[iii] Johnny Cash, U2 ‘The Wanderer’
[iv] Bonhoeffer, D 1937, Creation & Fall, Fortress Press (pp.109-116)
[v] ibid, 1937
First published on Caldron Pool, 8th April 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Dr. Suess Enterprises appear to have threatened to take legal action against the online home of Christian satirists, The Babylon Bee.
The alleged offending article entitled ‘In New Dr. Seuss Book, Cat In The Hat Gives Kids Puberty Blockers While Their Mother Isn’t Homewent’ went live on March 5th.
In it, the double “B” took a satirical look at Cancel Culture’s recent cancellation of six classic Dr. Suess books. Books such as ‘And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street’; ‘If I Ran the Zoo’; ‘McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!’; ‘Scrambled Eggs Super!’; and ‘The Cat’s Quizzer.’
The Left’s “woke” revolutionary vanguard have seen to it that each title is ejected from Dr. Seuss printing runs because, according to them, the content is ‘hurtful and wrong’, as it has images ‘containing racist stereotypes of Black people, Asians and Arabs’; woketivist speak for “I say it’s politically incorrect, therefore it is, so burn it!”
The Bablyon Bee was drawing attention to the double standards by which humourless Cancel Culture operates; illustrating the dissonance between moral relativist “politically correct” Leftist revolutionaries, who demonise everything they don’t like as “harmful, wrong, and politically incorrect”, but then in absolutist terms promote adult “entertainment” as wholesome, and helpful for children, such as transgenderism, and out-of-place LGBTQAAI+ Drag Queen Storytime in public libraries.
The Bee wrote:
“I have some new drugs,”
said the cat in the hat.
“A lot of good drugs!
I’ll inject them in you.
Your mother will not mind at all if I do.”
Adding, ‘the children learn a lesson in intolerance, too, as their goldfish ignorantly tries to stop them from taking the drugs, warning them of permanent side effects. The goldfish is then killed and flushed down a toilet.’
The only real crime here is that the Bee’s piece doesn’t rhyme the way Dr. Seuss books actually chime.
Nevertheless, Seuss Enterprises have responded to the piece, sending a sloppy email to the double “B’s” CEO, Seth Dillon, (who shared it on Twitter):
“Your article, satire or not, is a copyright infringement and breaking multiple defamation laws. Remove this or we will proceed accordingly.”
Dillon asked people to respond in rhyme, then reshared the piece, commenting,
‘Unfortunately for them, this piece was a work of satire, which is fair use. We will not be taking it down the way they took down several of their own, perfectly harmless titles to score worthless virtue points with insatiable leftists.’
Among the best rhyme responses were:
‘I would not could not cease and desist. I could not would not when you say resist. I do not like your litigious suits I do not like them Dr. Suess’ – @RoyceMcCutchoen
‘We will not comply with your outlandish request. Spend all you want of your benefactor’s bequest. We shall win the day and win by a lot! You’ll rue the day. Satire or not.’ – @kchessor
Due to the shoddy nature of its grammar some have questioned the authenticity of email. With one Twitter user quipping: “Reason: Complain” Apparently Seuss Enterprises is located in the same area as the deposed Prince of Nigeria.’
Until it’s authenticated, we can safely assume it’s legit. Suess Enterprises have joined the joyless “woke” revolutionary vanguard, and murdered original classics to appease the humourless, Leftist mob.
Filed under: Cancel Culture is fascism proper.
First published on Caldron Pool, 19th April 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Great Barrier Reef Marine Scientist Dr. Peter Ridd has halted donations to his GoFundMe page, after it reached the necessary financial target, allowing him to seek an end to a long running court battle over freedom of speech.
The scientist was sacked from James Cook University after the University claimed he’d breached “codes of conduct” by criticising other scientists for being too ‘emotional and not objective’ enough.
Ridd challenged the decision, and originally won his case of unfair dismissal, but that ruling was overturned by the Federal court, and is now being challenged in the High Court of Australia.
The cancelled (alleged) “climate denier’s” crime was challenging groupthink assumptions about Climate Change which hinders the scientific method, and taints research.
Since then, offended activists, whose apocalyptic climate change beliefs were challenged by Dr. Ridd, have been falling over themselves to reduce damage done to apocalyptic predications (read: narrative) which they say justifies cancelling Dr. Ridd.
Ridd’s opposition to the standard hegemonic Climate Change party-line is summed up in an article for The Australian in 2020, where Dr. Ridd criticised a report from The International Union for Conservation of Nature which he said, ‘blames climate change, agricultural pollution, coastal development, industry, mining, shipping, overfishing, disease, problematic native species, coal dust — you name it, [for allegedly] killing the reef.’
The report didn’t take important factors about the life of the reef into account, such as that,
‘The reef occasionally conspires to give the impression it is dying. All these events are entirely natural and are part of life on the reef. Sixty years ago, when these cycles of death and destruction were first being discovered by scientists, it was legitimate to be concerned about whether they were unnatural. But there is now abundant evidence, almost totally ignored by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, that the reef is fine. The coral always recovers vigorously after major mortality events.’
The Marine Scientist damned the report as a ‘rehash of old, mostly wrong or misleading information produced by generally untrustworthy scientific institutions with an activist agenda and no commitment to quality assurance.’
The Leftist cancel Ridd campaign hasn’t subsided.
Witnessed by responses to his criticisms, chief among them being his assertions in The Australian, that ‘the amount of coral, while fluctuating dramatically from year to year, is about the same today as when records began in the 1980s.’
An AAP Factcheck, funded by the NGO, Australian Conservation Foundation and published by The Courier, claimed Ridd’s statement was “partly true,” but emphasised that ‘annual surveys of the reef show significant fluctuations in coral cover, and for this reason it may be difficult to assess the reef’s future health based on the readings alone.’
Consequently, the Factcheck accused Ridd of making “baseless” generalised statements, because he only ‘provided figures which combined the three regions in the annual surveys to show the coral cover on the reef as a whole.’
Thus, Ridd’s claim was written off as “mostly false” based on what they asserted was a consensus among “experts and officials” whose counter-claim is that while ‘average coral readings for the past decade have been well below both long-term averages and those from the 1980s. In sum, the condition of the reef [suggests] its health had deteriorated and continued to decline.’
In addition, the AAP Factcheck seemed to imply that Ridd’s professional assessment was reckless because it took the spotlight (the cynic in me reads this as potential funding) away from those who claim that ‘climate change was predicted to negatively affect the growth and recovery of the reef. Its likely impacts included more frequent storms and bleaching events.’
In his defence Dr. Ridd pointed out the problems of statistical data: it can be loosely applied to forge an image that misrepresents the reality.
In response, the AAP Factcheck tu quoque’d Dr. Ridd, suggesting that he has ‘made similar comparisons in his column when he argued that there had been essentially no change in reef cover since the 1980s.’
The AAP Factcheck’s conclusions appear, in the end, to be based on confirmation bias regarding apocalyptic climate change predications, and only loosely on the historical data Dr. Ridd was referencing.
Historical data that Jim Steele’s expositional piece ‘Coral Bleaching Debate’, published on Judith Curry’s ‘Climate Etc.’ in 2016 appears to back up.
Peter Ridd faces the same ready-made Leftist gallows as cancelled Climate Scientist, Judith Curry, and Australian Geologist Ian Plimer, who’s against-the-stream facts, and straight talk threaten the gargantuan amounts of dollars being plunged into NGOs, from people who’ve been conditioned by the Climate Change Apocalypse narrative, to fear the worst, and “follow the science.”
Fear easily separates a fool from his or her money, and the well-oiled (no pun intended) marketing machine that is today’s fashionable “climate emergency,” is big business.
It’s no wonder “follow the science” activists are so eager to cancel Scientists for doing that very thing.
As Dr. Ridd explained, I was ‘fired for saying that, because of systemic problems with quality assurance, work from JCU coral reef centre, which also publishes extensively on climate change, was untrustworthy. I believe what I said was true and have given plenty of published evidence to support that statement.’
He added, ‘the case has already demonstrated a major problem with Academic Freedom of Speech at a university. This may be the most important long-term implication of the case.’
Peter Ridd’s case is set to be heard by the High Court of Australia at 10:00am on Wednesday, 23 June 2021 in Court No. 1, Parkes Place, Canberra, with the final judgement being handed down sometime after.
First published on Caldron Pool, 16th April 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Instead of wasting time making childish digs at Australian opposition leader, Anthony Albanese’s misspoken gaff, last week’s criticisms of the alternative Prime Minister and his party, should have been deeper, and a lot more sober minded.
Albanese’s gaff, telling reporters that we can all charge our Labor ordained, tax-free shiny “non-luxury” electric cars at night with solar power, was an honest mistake.
It was clear enough he meant that those Labor subsidised electric cars can charge overnight on Labor subsidised “renewable energy”, with workers (tax-payers) paying an arm, and a leg for the privilege.
Humour about the gaff aside, pointing out the gaff was pointless.
The white noise “sound bite” distracted the Australian public from the Labor Party conference, where they announced a range of far-left election proposals; ironically, suppressed debate on the Communist Chinese Party thanks to Penny Wong; and scuttled in-party opposition to legitimising the current Islamist antisemitic leaders of the Palestinians, by recognising the Palestinian territories as a Palestinian State (another Penny Wong move).
The Australian reported, ‘former federal MP Michael Danby, was prevented from speaking on the proposed resolution.’ In addition, Labor senator Kimberley Kitching was barred from binding Labor to equating the CCP’s treatment of the Uighur’s with genocide.’ (Wednesday, 31st March 2021)
Labor is buoyed by a recent win in Western Australia, which has essentially brought the state under one-party rule, and they’re on the Culture War war path to see if Australians will do the same for them on a Federal level.
This utopian hubris, however euphoric it may make the belligerent far-left feel, may be short lived.
The real gaff Australia’s alternative Prime Minister has made is his decision to lead the Labor Party to an election on a platform very similar to that of far-left British Socialist, and former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
Morrison vs. Albanese is looking like Johnson vs. Corbyn. With the opposition leader revealing that he has no real plan, other than to accuse the LNP of having no real plan, stating that Morrison has no “post-pandemic plan for women, jobs, climate change, and First Nations people.”
The 2022 election (which could be sooner if legacy media speculation has any insider merit) is looking like a rehash of Britain’s Boris Johnson underdog race against the more hegemonically fortified radical leftist, Jeremy Corbyn.
This was hinted at from within the Labor Party when Michael Danby criticised members for “adopting Corbyn’s plan for “unconditional recognition of a Palestinian state, but also his Stalinist methods by suppressing debate on the foreign policy motions.” (ibid)
Earlier in the month, Australian/Israel and Jewish Affairs council’s Dr Colin Rubenstein, called it “problematic” because ‘it denies negotiation with Israel as part of the two-state solution.’
Ergo, the Labor Party is effectively affirming the Palestinian rejection of negotiation with Israel, and, in a nutshell rewarding antisemitic sentiment, in exchange for quick political capital squeezed from the post-modern vine of virtue signalling.
Labor’s platform shows it’s unconcerned with doing real work to combat immediate threats to the Australian people; that its only concern is with appealing to policies that seek to answer threats manufactured by the people they share an ideology with.
Labor are navel gazing about electric cars, fantasizing about apocalyptic climate change, preaching about what white people are not doing for black people, what men are not doing for women, and lining up the ABC’s to be replaced in schools by the LGBTQAAI+, BLM and CRT.
Meanwhile, the Morrison government, for all it’s obvious flaws, such as their COVID-19 downgrade of civil liberties, flirting with quality killing identity politics quotas, and pushing policies based on the Climate Change religion is, however fostering a return to pre-COVID normal, economic recovery, improvements in defence capabilities, real action on caring for the environment, countering a racist, belligerent, and anti-Christian, Chinese Communist Party, as well as building the QUAD, a partnership with four key nations who share Australia’s national security concerns.
More electric cars, aren’t going to save Australians from a militarised South Pacific, with Communist Chinese Party beachheads, and forward staging bases, all pointing in our direction, designed to intimidate and coerce, should we not agree tow the Leninist-Maoist Party line.
Tax-payer funded renewables, and gender fairies in schools aren’t going to save jobs, help bring back manufacturing, reduce mental health issues, or prepare Australians for a future that appears more and more troubled by society’s surrender to ideologies at war with healthy Western traditions, and it’s surrender to anti-christs, bent on taking power, for power’s sake.
Which party has its head in the clouds, and which party is in-tune with the corrosive state of the world?
Which party is taking its role as a Government for the people, in that world seriously, and which party is too busy powdering its face for the cameras to notice?
At the moment, when it comes down to a choice between the two, the LNP is the undisputed winner.
Vote accordingly.
First published on Caldron Pool, 7th April 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
One of Australia’s rising political stars, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price lead a small contingent of young, concerned Indigenous Australian women to Canberra last week, to raise awareness about high rates of Domestic Violence in Indigenous Australian communities.
Nampijinpa Price arrived in Canberra with Cheron Long, the cousin of 15-year-old Layla Leering, who died in 2017 after being sexually abused.
The initial police investigation recorded the cause of death as suicide, but was disputed.
An inquest in 2020 found grounds for further investigation since police were ‘unable to confidently determine the circumstances’ of Layla’s death, and that of two other young girls.
Thanks to pressure from Layla’s family, the inquiry into her death, has been reopened as a murder investigation, with Layla’s family (according to Advance Australia) ‘proving that the police and government had ignored several warnings about Layla’s wellbeing, bringing rise to the opening of a long-overdue review into police and child protection agencies.’
While Nampijinpa Price hit the Canberra bubble with the goal of shining a light on D.V issues, she ended up exposing the infamous double-standard-shuffle found among Australia’s leftist elite, whose favourite target is usually white, heterosexual, Caucasian Christian men.
This is the elitist class who went from being on the “all men are dogs” offensive, to being on the “don’t marginalise gay men” defensive, after facts about men recording themselves committing sex acts in the workplace, and ‘defiling’ an employer’s desk in Parliament house, turned out to involve male staffers who identify as Homosexual. [i]
It’s the same elitist class, who praised the recent women’s ‘March 4 Justice’, flaunting it as a liberating voice for the ‘sisterhood’, preaching loud, and proud, about the evils of the “patriarchy”, sexism, and so-called ‘toxic masculinity’, but stopped short (presumably for fears of appearing racist by “marginalising Indigenous Australian men”) in giving a voice to Australia’s Indigenous women suffering much higher rates of D.V. within their own communities.
All good reasons that justify Vikki Campion’s (Barnaby Joyce’s partner and former staffer’s also somewhat defensive) scathing remarks in the Saturday Telegraph:
‘We are so powerfully sucked into salacious stories of sex that the desk involved in the act got more than 1200 media mentions at the time of writing; the rape and death of 15-year-old, Layla, got only 10, three being in her local paper.’
Campion added,
‘Instead of hearing Layla’s story, the media reported more clumsy advances, such as Annastacia Palaszczuk’s encounter with someone who shook her hand too hard.’
Including, notes Campion, hype over the LNP entertaining the introduction of a quota, where women will be put before men for candidacy.
On which Campion spoke of identity politics hysterics, and concluded,
‘Instead of bringing in quotas, support the perfectly capable women like Nicolle Flint, who did turn up and listen to Layla’s cause, who is leaving parliament for good because of how she was treated at the so-called top of the political tree.’
Her criticism is backed by the actions of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, who cut away from Nicolle Flint’s speech in the house while Flint was pointing out Jacinta and Cheron’s concerns about a Domestic Violence, and rape culture within Indigenous Australian Communities.
This prompted Cheron Long’s Facebook response,
‘I’m fighting back tears writing this; today I have lost all trust and respect for the ABC. I am in shock, that the ABC has shut down and censored Nicole Flint MP, when she was giving a direct quote from a speech that I delivered earlier.’
These victims, Long said,
‘Have no voice, they have no support. The ABC have no heart for the silent victims of abuse in the bush; they rather champion the Left, then listen to real stories, and when a real story comes along, the ABC CENSOR IT!!’
In her own criticisms Jacinta expressed dismay at the selective hearing amongst the “elitist” class, stating,
‘It’s trauma enough that as an Aboriginal woman under threat of violence for speaking out against ‘Aboriginal rape culture’ Cheron travelled all the way to Canberra to publicly share the tragic story of her murdered cousin in order to get justice, but then the trauma is exacerbated by being deliberately ignored by the ABC.’
Ignoring Credlin, Campion, Flint, Cheron and Nampijinpa Price’s concerns further encourages a politically correct paralysis that perpetuates a culture of silence, stifles freedom of speech, and enables abuse.
Instead of addressing an alleged ‘Aboriginal rape culture’, or the downgrade of professionalism in Parliament House, by way of Post-Modern, “love is love” anything goes nihilism, legacy media and politicians are playing political football with its victims.
We know the Left has a voice. Their boisterous, persistent, divisive, “Invasion Day”, and “genocide”, anti-Australian rhetoric, gets shouted from the streets every January.
If it seems that this matters more than Layla Leering’s death, it’s because the anti-Australia virtue signalling is a quick injection of political capital.
It’s a comfortable protest; armchair activism powering a paper-thin narrative based on manufactured grievances, dressed up to look like the real thing.
Platitudes of justice for (alleged and factual) “historical wrongs” cost less, than loving those in the here, and now, by helping them help themselves through the messy task of healing wounds, tending scars, changing culture, untangling battered communities, and defending the defenceless.
Layla Leering’s legacy was a chance for the Left to put their heart where they say it is.
Instead, what the Left has shown, is how uninterested they are in helping real people, with real problems.
If their real stories don’t pad the fake Woke (and racist) Critical Race Theory party-hotline, it’s the proverbial, “don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
This isn’t an example of Right vs. Left, or Black vs. White, it’s an example of truth vs. falsehood.
Substance will always, always trump appearances.
Cheron and Jacinta stand in a similar place to Trugernanner (Truganini; 1812–1876). I think she’d be proud of what they’re achieving, and as dismayed as they are at the rot among elites, and the cycle of abuse that their selective silence still perpetuates.
References:
[i] Credlin, P. ‘I stand by every decision I made to clean the place up’ The Sunday Telegraph March 27, 2021
[ii] Campion, V. ‘Rape, murder ignored in favour of salacious pollie sex stories’ The Saturday Telegraph March 26, 2021
First published on Caldron Pool, 29th March 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Chuck Colson saw in advance the contradictions of a society guided purely by the sexual revolution.
In the late 1960s feminist sexual liberation was celebrated as a utopian moment; the elevating of an oppressed “class” through the seizing of power from both men and women, to achieve biological equality.
The great feminist cry against misogyny, through “equality with men” become a misandrist war against men. Its high point was the sexual revolution, and its war-cry ever since has been “choice.”
Respect for women was never the goal. The movement’s primary motivation was the impossible goal of irradicating natural inequalities, through the equality of biological choice.
Raising woman in the eyes of man, for him to see woman as being of equal value, was, at best, a bonus. Not necessarily desired, but welcomed as a consolation prize, should the great feminist war be lost.
Respect for women wasn’t a core virtue. Feminists tended/tend to disrespect other women, and show contempt towards them for not making pro-feminist choices.
Illustrated by author, political scientist, and early feminist, Jean Bethke Elshtain, who, after choosing to join a feminist group with a friend in the 70s, found that being married, and having children appeared to exclude them from being allowed to express an opinion.
Elshtain said, ‘my friend and I left, for we could not treat our children as abstractions, as nuisances to be overcome, or as evidence of our “sad capitulation” to the terms of patriarchy.’
The group’s facilitator had ‘abruptly and publicly’ cut off their discussion declaring, “We will have not diaper talk here. We’re here to talk about women’s liberation.”
Feminists won battles, not just with their ambivalence towards respect, or ignorance of their own hypocrisy, but with their dismissal of restraint, and revelation.
Restraint was considered repressive, and God’s revelation, which included the objective moral law, was demonised as archaic, oppressive, and patriarchal.
According to the thought leaders of the day, such as Simone de Beauvoir, restraint and revelation didn’t liberate women from being a ‘parasite’ on man. They protected, and were used to propagate the parasitical condition of woman, by equally oppressed man. [i]
The feminist bible peached that the human condition wasn’t oppressed by sin. It was oppressed by objective morality, and the shackles of Christendom’s institutionalisation of marriage. Marriage was no longer a vocation, or Godly union where man exists for woman, woman for man, both free before God, but as matrimony –marriage reduced to a woman becoming a mother. [ii]
While feminists got the latter partly right, they got the former spectacularly wrong.
The condition of the human heart is ‘deceitful above all things, desperately sick, outside understanding.’ (Jeremiah 17:9) Without God’s revelation empowering restraint there is no genuine liberation.
Which is why Colson’s brief analysis finds relevance with concerns about reactionary feminist protests today, and the over-reactions to them by Governments.
In observations he’d made about the ‘self-refuting nature of the post-modernism social model,’ Colson wrote: ‘the irony of removing all restraints of shame and modesty is that women led the charge. The feminists thought this was great: women could be “equal” to men, sexually speaking.’ [iii]
It was, he said, ‘the great liberation movement that would lead us to nirvana, freedom, equality.’
Colson added, ‘feminists [haven’t yet] realized [that] they’ve sold their constituency down the river, because the only people who profit from “no restrictions, no limits” philosophy are men’, who are encouraged by this way of thinking to look at women ‘as objects of gratification, and pleasure.’
The ejection of restraint and revelation has ‘reverted culture back to the ancient Greeks, who viewed women as property – as chattel.’
For Colson, the rejection of ‘radical Christian doctrine that considers all human beings to be created in the image of God, with innate dignity’, has created the ‘ultimate post-modern impasse.’
Society wants ‘total freedom [from objective morality] (nihilism), but then, all of a sudden, when it begins to hurt and be untenable, people scream.’
They then turn to big government to solve the problem.
In other words, feminists are running to government, after running away from God, to bring in moral restraints on sexuality, that they’re advocacy for nihilistic, no-restraints, free-sex pandemonium has birthed.
This is the great feminist contradiction, born from legitimate feminist criticisms, that were taken too far by people high on the myth of man created by De Beauvoir, Daly and Greer.
Feminism hasn’t delivered a utopia for women, it’s in fact bought them a ticket on the Titanic. A gargantuan enterprise in the pitfalls of good ideas, corrupted by human arrogance.
It is, as Karl Barth wrote, ‘the myth of man, built up without respect to man and woman’s relationship to the Divine command, which, ends in the negation of real man.’ (paraphrased)
Freedom cannot be maintained where virtue isn’t flourishing, asserted Colson; and he’s right: ‘Moral chaos will lead us to lose our freedoms. The inevitable consequence of the modern project of complete liberation from all restraints is slavery.’
Women’s liberation cannot be achieved through humiliating man, in order to exalt woman, humiliated by man.
The crux of liberation is God on the Cross, who, in, through and, with Jesus Christ becomes our only way to freedom from sin.
It’s the choice between a House of Freedom, and a House of slavery.
It’s the essence of the Easter message, reminding us that it’s not man’s humiliation of man that saves, and exalts, but the humiliation of God, and His exaltation of humanity. [iv]
‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.’ – John 3:16, NIV
God is true to His Word. Restraint and revelation will never lose its relevance, because the liberating, living God, commands it, and still speaks through it.
References:
[i] Beauvoir, Simone de. 1949. The Second Sex Vintage Books
[ii] I’ve merged Kierkegaard’s critique in ‘The Instant’ with Barth, K. Man and Woman, Church Dogmatics: Doctrine of Creation KD 3:4, (p.127)
[iii] Colson, C. 2015, My Final Word: Hook Up Culture, Zondervan (pp.89-90)
[iv] See Westminster Shorter Catechism (Q. 27), Dietrich Bonhoeffer DBW 12 (p.343) & Karl Barth, Respect for Life, KD 3:4 (p.397)
First published on Caldron Pool, 31st March 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Independent Australian MP, Craig Kelly has added his voice to a growing list of politicians calling for a Royal Commission into Veteran suicides.
Kelly wrote on Twitter,
‘I will be voting to have a Royal Commission on Veteran Suicides NOW. My electorate of Hughes includes the Holsworthy army barracks, and veterans have told me they want a Royal Commission now. Let’s have a starting date ASAP!!#istandwithveterans’
In a more detailed video posted to the straight-talking politician’s Facebook page, Kelly’s support for an enquiry into veteran suicides was made even clearer.
The member for Hughes explained his disappointment at the Government’s handling of the Brereton report, stating that LNP didn’t just throw Special Forces Veterans under the bus, they threw them under a tank.
At the time of the report, the LNP appeared to be appealing to an opportunist wave of hate towards the military coming from within Leftist dominated Legacy Media. The pile-on burnt the 99% for sins of a few. Among non-media opportunists targeting our military were Melbourne’s Socialist Alliance.
I noted through Caldron Pool at the time, reform in any institution is a necessary part of good management.
This should involve improving how we as a society look after, show appreciation for, and serve our military, and its veterans. This process shouldn’t involve hurting our veterans in order to help them.
The battlefield criminality of a few, doesn’t justify stripping meritorious recognition earned by the good deeds of the many.
Kelly’s firm advocacy for a Royal Commission, is a step in the right direction.
The Senate passed the motion, but the motion is set to be rejected by the Morrison Government when it comes up in the lower house (House of Representatives), because of a counter proposal which would create ‘a permanent independent commissioner to investigate the issue.’ (TND)
According to Craig Kelly just passing the motion in the Senate was ‘a victory for all our service men and women.’ He added, ‘we have an obligation when we sign someone up to put that uniform on, it should be a lifetime obligation that we look after them.’
Explaining his vote, Kelly said, ‘we’ve seen such a great number of tragic suicides after Defence Force personnel leave the service, and especially in recent months following the Government’s appalling response to the Brereton report, this was something that was urgently needed.’
Any Aussie raised on the Redgum anti-war anthem, ‘I was only 19’, has lived, and breathed John Schumann’s vocalisation illustrating the internal struggle of Australia’s Vietnam War vets.
More than Cold Chisel’s, ’78, ‘Khe Sanh’, Schumann’s 1983 lyrical bridge between Vet, and citizen created a sense of empathy, and appreciation for those who came back, and weren’t welcomed back, but bore the cost of defending our freedom.
I come from a family with a history of military service. Raising public awareness about the needs of Australia’s veterans, rides the rich Australian tradition of mates helping mates.
A Royal Commission’s thorough investigation into Veteran suicides, coupled with its inevitable findings, and recommendations, will open the door to a tactical blueprint for how we can fight for those, who fight for us.
First published on Caldron Pool, 26th March 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Head image credit: Royal Australian Army
Former ‘Dancing with the Stars’ host Daryl Somers was slammed on social media this week for calling out cancel culture.
The Australian entertainer, and comic, also famous for the successful, Aussie larrikin vaudeville Saturday night regular, ‘Hey, Hey, It’s Saturday,’ (1971-2010) lamented the new morality, its Iron Curtain hecklers, and Soviet-era thugs, telling the Daily Telegraph,
“You couldn’t get away with half the stuff you could on Hey Hey now, because of political correctness and cancel culture. It’s a shame because showbiz doesn’t get much of a chance.”
The 69-year-old added,
“’A lot of comics can’t work much because what would have been just tongue-in-cheek previously now can easily get them into trouble. I can’t say I am enamoured with it, but it is a changing world in which we live and you just have to work around things.”
Somers’ comments were met with a deluge of hate on Twitter, as Jack’s goons – behind their morbidly heavy chairs, lattes, and expensive Apple computers, with their “everything is racist” CRT crusade, hiding their dissatisfaction with their own achievements in life – in true Red fashion, gave Somers’ “the gong.”
Then, and not without irony, the perpetually angry, run-of-the-mill, unsatisfied radical leftist jihadist, fighting imaginary Nazis online – heaped insults, ridicule, and “hate speech” at a man they don’t personally know, at a show, they don’t understand, and have probably never seen (other than selective ‘Hey, Hey it’s Saturday’ clips designed to stir up anti-Israel Folau level animosity to fever pitch), because of humour that goes over their immature heads.
With one such Twitter loudmouth claiming the cast “bullied Kamahl” (an Australian legend in his own right), reviving Kamahl’s grievances aired on ‘A Current Affair’ in 2011, about ‘Hey, Hey’s’ ‘ethnic comedy,’ while overlooking Daryl Somers telling ACA that he was ‘very fond of Kamahl, had the greatest respect for him and always will.’ Adding, “I think this is all rather silly.”
To add, what Australia’s version of America’s race-baiting racists didn’t bother mentioning, is that Kamahl made regular appearances on the show.
Kamahl joined hundreds of other musicians, who benefited from the cast’s ability to draw a crowd.
Far from delegitimising him because of ethnicity the “Hey, Hey” platform legitimised Kamahl, and made him a respected, household Australian name; helping him sell albums, and increase his fan base. (Noted by the fact that I’m writing about him 11 years after the show was cancelled.)
That’s the real “Hey, Hey” legacy. Not racism. Not sexism. Not homophobia. [Insert the long list of apparent phobias those of us are not on the Left are continually being diagnosed with, by those on the Left.]
The poor decision to include a blackface “Jackson Jive Show” in Red Faces during a 2009 reunion show, shouldn’t be the “Hey, Hey’s” defining moment. Irrespective of the joyless, graceless, and cold bony finger of Karl Marx reaching through his humourless, Cultural Marxist disciples today.
It’s a well-established fact, that without Daryl Somers, Australian artists, and the Australian music industry would never have achieved what it did. It’s no coincidence that the Australian music industry’s life support was pulled around the time ‘Hey, Hey, It’s Saturday’ ended.
Somers is a dead-set Aussie legend.
It’s good to see him speaking out.
Examine the claims. The problem isn’t Somers. It’s the hate-anything-Australian leftists, beating up Somers, tearing-down-others in order to make themselves famous.
The problem isn’t an Australian entertainment icon, who had the balls to put his face to an always controversial, vaudeville variety show with an original Aussie larrikin flair.
They often mocked themselves along with everyone else.
It’s worth repeating the words of Karl Barth,
“Away with the yardsticks! Those who cannot sigh with others, and laugh about themselves are warmongers.” (Attributed)
Cancel culture is fascism proper.
(You can watch some of the Hey, Hey It’s Saturday episodes at their website here.)
First published on Caldron Pool, 24th March, 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Wednesday’s front page of the Australian has exposed government proposals that would lower the Warragamba dam level (Sydney’s water supply) to save homes from dam overflows.
Overflows, that well paid government advisors, like Tim Flannery, from as far back as 2007, said, we’ll never see again because the rain that did fall wouldn’t be enough to fill the dams – due to “apocalyptic climate change.”
When it comes to this latest overflow, (thanks to unexpected rainfall) it would seem that Australia’s bureaucratic caste would rather dump a precious resource, leaving an infamously dry continent with less drought resilience, rather than increase storage capacity, which would a) bring infrastructure up to speed with population expansion b) help drought proof the city.
Why would they even consider ditching water?
Because the “apocalyptic climate change” narrative buys them votes from citizens they’ve scared into submission, and floods their coffers with money; and maybe advance their tax-payer funded career with a cushy position on the UN Climate panel.
In all fairness, bureaucrats appear to be conflicted about whether to dump water, or raise Dam walls.
According to The Australian, the New South Wales LNP State government has ‘been pushing for years to raise the Warragamba Dam wall by up to 14m,’ which would ‘aid in flood mitigation.’ As well as add to Sydney’s water storage capability.
The problem with this is (predictably) ‘the plan is opposed by environmentalists and Indigenous groups who argue it would damage unique ecosystems, and [first Australians] heritage sites.’ [i]
Salvatore Babones, whose book on Trumpism, and the Left’s New Authoritarianism was the focal point of an article a few weeks back, penned a piece for the same Wednesday edition.
Babones describes an apathy within our bureaucratic system, that hinders the better management of water drawn from rainfall.
He argues, for example, that our knowledge of how much groundwater Australia has, such as the ‘Great Artesian Basin,’ is 60 years out of date. There’s a general assumption that rain provides ‘2% of all groundwater, and although the basin is in decline,’ above average ‘rainfall can recharge water naturally stored underground.’
How much groundwater is left, asks Babones?
No one seems to know, and the data from NGIS system for measuring it is suspect, because ‘there’s been no co-ordinated effort to drill new’ bore holes to investigate it. [ii]
To add, Water storage, and management is a national security issue.
It’s beyond the pale that Australia’s bureaucratic caste would major in chasing the apocalyptic climate change fairy, by entertaining apocalyptic climate change fever, rather than major in securing, cultivating and better managing our most important natural resource.
Humans ‘are not the enemy’ said Chuck Colson, expressing his views on the clash between eco-totalitarians and Christians.
‘Our job is to cultivate, and till; making the fullest use of the resources God has given us, to enhance life, God’s supreme creation, which is the human being. But we must do it in a way that is productive of the earth’s resources, free from despoiling it.’ [iii]
This, he said, ‘is where we part from the “green” movement, which puts the earth first,’ and views humanity as a virus.
Concern about a loss of tribal heritage, or the environmental impact caused by raising the Warragamba Dam wall, does not overrule arguments, and the practicality of doing so.
Storing more water, means more water can be used to protect, sustain, and cultivate the environment, as well as be a life affirming resource for the decedents of Gundangara people, and their neighbours. It’s a win-win.
In addition, the Gundangara ancestral legacy is also affirmed, noted by how the Gundangara people recognised Warragamba’s significance, and the impact rivers attached had in sustaining life on one of the driest continents on earth.
Increasing a dam wall cannot, and does not erase that legacy.
The other aspect to all of this is that the “Apocalyptic climate change” bandwagon is a lucrative cash cow, and eco-fascist evangelists know it.
Which is why Bjorn Lomborg said in a piece cross-posted by The Australian,
‘the easiest way to get societies to authorise the spending of tens of trillions we don’t have is to scare us. The academic and activist faction that sets the threatening tone in the climate conversation wants dissent eliminated, leaving themselves the only ones authorised to tell you how scared you should be.’ [iv]
As Chris Smith inferred on Sky News, the idiocy of some in our current bureaucracy is only outdone by the self-interest of bureaucrats profiteering from fear.
References:
[i] Rice, S. ‘Cabinet eye proposal to Reduce Dam Level’, sourced from The Australian, 24th March, 2021.
[ii] Babones, S. ‘Let this sink in: we need to stop wasting our groundwater’ sourced from The Australian, 24th March, 2021.
[iii] Colson, C. 2015. My Final Word; ‘Dominion & the Environment’ Zondervan
[iv] Lomborg, B. ‘When Climate Alarmism meets cancel culture’ sourced from The Australian, 24th March, 2021
First published on Caldron Pool, 25th March 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
In a controversial move, Australian Liberal Nationals Senator, Amanda Stoker is asking for concerned citizens to support her petition aimed at preserving ‘objective truth,’ ‘basic biology’, parental rights, and ‘common sense,’ against proposed, weaponised legislation packed inside the LGBTQAAI+ trojan horse transgenderism.
Stoker argues that ‘when you get to the heart of the transgender debate, you realise that you and I are being expected to abandon objective truth.’
Adding, ‘for too long now, the Left has told you what you can and cannot say, the time for action is now.’
She’s right. Biology isn’t a social construct. Everything about the “LOVE IS LOVE” mantra pivots on forcing people to believe a lie, and forcing them to deceive others.
Telling a child, for example, that they don’t have a father or a mother, only a parent, and or, birth parent. (And other examples can be added to this one).
There’s a distinctive line between tolerance, and intolerable tyranny.
Acknowledging this, the Queensland senator wrote,
‘Australians are polite people. If a grown man chooses to wear women’s clothing and change their name, we are generally content to live and let live. No one wants to make anyone feel ‘less than’.
Most people agree that adults are free to live their life the way they want.
But that doesn’t mean we abandon truth. It doesn’t mean we abandon common sense or our understanding of basic biology.
The transgender agenda’s list of demands is completely unreasonable and it’s time you and I stood up for common sense.’
Stoker joins Tasmanian, LNP senator, Claire Chandler, whose pro-women opposition to queer theory’s invasion of women’s sport, is a popular target for Cancel Culture’s hungry Radical Leftist Jihadists.
Despite the Left’s manipulation of anti-discrimination law, issuing their usual threats, and intimidation, Chandler has, with significant credit to her, remained unmoved.
If not more determined, posting to Facebook on International Women’s Day,
‘remember that ‘woman’ is not a feeling, a political movement, an identity, a fashion or a trend. A woman is a female. The more people who acknowledge that fact, the more chance we have of making the world a better place for women.’
Chandler and Stoker’s pro-woman platform deserves our support.
We have a right, as Amanda worded it,
‘to know what your child is being taught about gender and sexuality in school. You do have a right to keep women’s sport for women. You do have a right to protect children from hormone treatment and surgical procedures. You do have a right to teach your children they are born as either a boy or a girl and that gender isn’t something we can choose.’
This isn’t “slippery slope” anti-marriage equality, homophobic, transphobic, right-wing supremacist, “you’re all Nazi’s and Trumpists”, hate speech.
This is genuine representation on a political level; an invitation for stakeholders, which include the unconcerned, and concerned voter, to stop the new Barbarianism before it removes the right to life, light and liberty, replacing it with servitude, and subjugation.
Chandler and Stoker’s have, and are, voicing concerns about the totalitarian weaponization of legislation by the LGBTQAAI+ lobby, and the movement’s perpetually angry, jackboot wearing foot soldiers.
Something that might already too late for some Western nations, such as Canada, but not yet here in Australia.
Demonstrated in Ben Davis’ latest article, where, in essence, a Canadian father has been charged with “family violence” and then imprisoned, for refusing to bow to the LGBTQAAI+ religion because he chose to affirm his daughter’s biological sex, instead of lie to her, and participate in her LGBT conversion indoctrination.
Another example is Twitter’s lockout of Binary’s, Kirralie Smith, for asserting the male and female scientific, binary distinction, alleged by Twitter to be “hateful conduct.”
I’ve followed Kirralie on Twitter for a few years. She’s never posted anything close to the kind of hate I see vomited up, and out by the propaganda wing of Radical Leftist Jihadists.
Proving one thing: Twitter may protest against accusations of bias and partiality, but it’s clear by their behaviour that they are NOT a politically neutral organisation.
We can be thankful that the Senate passed a ‘motion banning’ the use of radical queer theory language, such as “Chest feeding” and “Lactating Parent”, but the march towards affirming it, is still moving forward.
As the imperfect, anti-Nazi theologian, Karl Barth wrote,
‘The incontestable truth that male and female as such are together man [humanity] becomes a lie when it is not significantly counterbalanced by the recognition that man as such is male or female and not a third term.’ [i]
So goes objective truth, so goes humanity, and with it, civilisation.
Where civil rights are exalted over civil liberties, hell on earth is sure to follow.
You can support Amanda’s pro-science, pro-common sense, pro-truth, pro-man and pro-woman, petition here.
References:
[i] Barth, K 1951. CD.3:4 Man & Woman p.159
First published on Caldron Pool, 22nd March 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
Fearmongering shadows the so-called “apocalyptic climate change emergency“.
I realise that in saying this, I’m breaking the kind of taboo that’ll get a scientist fired, the average citizen harassed, and any celebrity with a mind of their own, cancelled.
Defining terms, and questioning narratives don’t appear to be the highest priority for those sucked into the emotional vortex of double C hysterics.
Which is why the debate is smashed to pieces; disallowed by quick appeals to oxymorons like “believe the science” or “the science is settled.”
Global climate patterns are complex, and fluid; rain and temperature fluctuate, it’s much more powerful than humanity, and it’s in constant movement. We could say it’s perpetually adjusting and readjusting. It’s what makes life possible.
‘Climate Change’ seems to be a misleading term that ignores the micro-level plural, “climates”, in favour the macro singular, “climate.”
When in conversation with a CC fanatic, it’s worth asking then, which of the five climates are in crisis?
1. Subtropical/Temperate
2. Alpine/Continental
3. Desert/Dry
4. Rainforest/Tropical
5. Ice-cap/Polar
Why has the language moved from theoretical anthropogenic Global Warming negatively impacting an alleged [Global] Climate, to the fanatical alarmism of “climate crisis”, “climate emergency” to “climate justice”?
Which of the five climates that make up the global climate need “climate justice”?
One climate naturally changing, doesn’t equal an emergency.
Furthermore, what is “climate justice”?
What do activists really mean when they say “climate change is war”?
You won’t get a definitive answer.
The popular response will be polar. They’ll quote Al Gore’s cash cow propaganda films, something about sea levels, Ice Caps melting (which they tend to do naturally anyway), and polar bears dying (which they also tend to do naturally).
Then they’ll fog up, and drift into some vague warnings about how asking these kinds of questions makes one a “climate change denier.”
The real answer is they don’t really know. They just say so because it’s catchy, popular, and feels right to do so.
Evidenced by the quagmire of emotional responses, filled with panic, hatred of opposing viewpoints, asinine “follow the science” religious assertions, and ambiguous catch-phrases built on conjecture.
All of this suggests that “Apocalyptic climate change” isn’t about the environment, Global climate, nor the climates.
It’s about money, politics, and power. It’s about changing patterns of behaviour to stimulate automatic responses, not changing weather patterns.
Not science. Not people, not the climates, and most certainly not about preserving the environment from deliberate, and accidental pollution.
Swaying public opinion to profit from fear is easy. Fear is more of a motivator than freedom.
Activists – those among the fray who are more akin to eco-fascists than genuine environmentalists – know this, and that’s why they milk every dollar, and vote they can from it.
Australian Geologist, Ian Plimer agrees. ‘It’s a game of power. There is no climate emergency. Climate always changes.’
In his ground-breaking book, ‘How to Get expelled from School’ he adds, ‘human induced global warming has nothing to do with climate or the environment. It’s a method to take money out of your pockets.’ [i]
“Climate Change” is about who holds power, and how much power they can harvest from it, not what powers our electricity.
Danish author, and sceptic, Bjorn Lomborg came to the same conclusion. Not once, but twice.
In January 2020, Lomborg accused activists of ‘exploiting the tragic Australian bush fires’ by using the word “unprecedented” in order to falsely claim that the bush fires were ‘near-proof of a climate emergency.’
Lomborg’s well referenced source material showed that burnt areas from 1997-2020 was in decline.
Hence Lomborg’s refutation of CC hysterics: “[this graph] suggests two things. First, that the area burnt in Australia is not increasing and likely decreasing. This result is similar to what we see across the world — lower, not higher burnt area. Second, the current Australian fire season in terms of area burnt is not unprecedented compared to the recent past.”
Lomborg revisited the data this year; updating it with new information that refuted claims from activists and vindicated his original scepticism. The conclusion: the 2019-2020 Australian bushfires were not unprecedented.
‘The biggest Australian fire is the 1974-75 fire, mostly documented by satellite.
It burned 117 million hectares in Central Australia, or 15.2% of Australia in one year
Almost 4x the area burned in 2019-20.’
Reflecting on a reading of Global Fire Data analysis Lomborg said,
“Fires burned 10% of Australia’s land surface on average every year in 20th century. In this century, it burned 6% (2001-19)
We now have the data for 2019-20, the year with “Australia ablaze”: 4% (3.95%) Yes, tragedies: Much more fire close to where people live (NSW and Victoria).
But we were told “Australia burns” and “this is what a climate crisis looks like.” No. Australia had one of its lowest areas burned in last 120 years.
[The area of] Australia burned in 2019-20 [is] inconsistent with climate change. The total burn should have been *larger* — when in fact it was *much smaller*…’
Lomborg also highlighted the climate crazy propaganda, writing that the ‘fires [were] inconsistent with climate impact.’ The data doesn’t back ‘bad media coverage, and misleading graphics [that] pushed the idea that the Australian continent was ablaze.”
Exhibit (A):
Exhibit (B):
Lomborg’s proof that we’re being manipulated by activists, within, and outside, both government, and Legacy Media, is staggeringly blatant.
These organisations are complicit in orchestrating a shared narrative that conditions the reflexes of gullible citizens to cry “wolf”, hate on their neighbour, and dehumanise those with an opposing viewpoint, when so commanded.
The “apocalyptic climate change” political narrative is built on an organised myth.
Social engineers clued into behavioural science, know that people will choose order over chaos, even if the cost of order is the absolute surrender of their personal freedom, and individual responsibilities; i.e.: civil liberties, and civil rights.
Weather patterns are as dynamic, as the climates they support. How the climates interreact, and change, is a natural phenomenon.
Using the 80/20 rule, in general, speculative science, the science of approximation, only gets weather predictions right up to 80% of the time, it’s an easy to conclude that they could be wrong about “Apocalyptic Climate Change.”
To quote Caldron Pool writer, Matthew Littlefield,
‘Just a reminder for all you east coasters here in Australia, that climate experts predicted drier warmer weather. As we enjoy this cooler wetter weather let’s remember that climate experts have about the same batting average with their predictions as doomsday prophets from bad churches:
Taking in the advice of Plimer and Lomborg, by all appearances “Apocalyptic climate change” is a tool, and idea, preached with the aim of wresting control of constitutional democracies away from the people.
When our politicians start sounding like beauty pageant contestants, citing “fight climate change” in the same way as “world peace,” you know they’re signalling towards virtue, not science.
Building legislation on this, in order to score easy political points is reprehensibly irresponsible.
Hell isn’t a climate change apocalypse, hell is an activist induced inferno triggered by reckless, and reactionary legislation, written on the run, in the ink of hyperreactive climate change hysterics.
References: [i] Plimer, I. 2011, How to Get Expelled From School: A guide to Climate Change for pupils, parents & punters, Connor Court Publishing (p.18)
UPDATE: Since posting this, Eastern Australia has had record rainfall. With many dams overflowing, and major floods. The opposite of predictions posted by News.com.au on 9th, December 2020. (see headline screenshot above).
First published on Caldron Pool, 20th March, 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
