Category Archive: METAPHYSICS
Voicing Doubts
As October 14, Referendum Day, beckons, Australians are asked whether to say “Yes” or “No” to the insertion of a new Chapter (IX) with a single section, s.129, into the Commonwealth Constitution. The key Chapters in the existing Constitution set out the main sources of power, and how that power is balanced, between the Federal Parliament (Chapter I), the Executive Government (Chapter II), the Judicature (Chapter III) and the States that complete our federal system (Chapter V). In Australia’s Federal system, the States have exclusive legislative power over their territories, but the Federal Government can override this by having the…
Continue Reading →Prison Journal
(Volume I: The Cardinal Makes His Appeal) (by George Cardinal Pell) (2020) The story is notorious, and you don’t require the gift of faith or have to hold a brief for the real victim to find it shocking. Pell was the leading Catholic figure in Australia, of a conservative bent, and detested by many Australians, who considered him a monster. The reasons for this seem to be that he was the leading Catholic figure in Australia, and of a conservative bent. His conviction for historical sex crimes saw a ‘pile-on’ of a magnitude only comparable with the demonisation of Lindy…
Continue Reading →The Madness of Crowds
Douglas Murray in 2019. Photo by Andy Ngo
(The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity by Douglas Murray) (2019) Murray’s enjoyable book is a start. A comprehensive book on the madness of crowds would comprise a 100-volume set, and require Edmund Burke as co-author. Why, this book doesn’t even analyse the French Revolution! Instead, the author takes to task those modern curios, identity and ‘intersectionality’, explains how the current thinking is to ‘unlock these oppressions’ after which something will happen (but what that is, no one is sure – modern Marxists being like the dog who chases the stick – once gathered, what next?) The work is…
Continue Reading →Tranquillity, Too: A Revelation
(An Allegory) Behold, he cometh with clouds He had a second rate mind, and his name had been Register Seven. At two o’clock in the morning, after night fill, the infomer-cial for a “fat-free infuser” caused him to get into his zombie-mobile and drive to a window to collect his succulent “Stak-A-Krap.” He could eat that for breakfast, lunch, or dinner; the taste portable, running all over, smelling like a wet dog on a sunny day. So he ended up working there, managing what management called “the dining area.” His diseased yearnings had gotten him into difficulties with earlier jobs….
Continue Reading →H. L. Mencken and Götterdämmerung
Wotan's ravens (by Arthur Rackham)
H.L.Mencken, 12 September, 1880 Mencken buried lots of idols, icons, and foolish ideas. He also buried a swathe of gods: “Huitzilopochtli…was born of an apparently innocent flirtation that [his mother, a virtuous widow] carried on with the sun…But to-day Huitzilopochtli is as Marie Corelli. Once the peer of Allah, Buddha and Wotan, he is now the peer of Father Rasputin, J.B. Planché, Sadi Carnot, General Boulanger, Lottie Collins, and Little Tich.”* Mencken goes on to list some 114 gods and comments: “They were gods of the highest standing and dignity – gods of civilized peoples – worshipped and believed in by…
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