Nauru NOT necessary.
Aboriginal Nation
Heard more about aboriginal representation in the constitution this morning.
You know what it all sounds like to me?
Like an ambit claim.
Certain power brokers adept and well versed in our way of doing things see an opportunity to create a whole second nation for themselves within Australia.
A nation that would hold immense power = having a say in any decisions whatever that this current nation made.
Without any responsibility whatever.
A nation that they would be the leaders of. Drawing life time benefits from, position, power, wealth.
Without any right to it.
A nation that would have its own bureaucracy, of course, eventually reaching levels of thousands, all lolling around in sinecured well remunerated jobs – all paid for by us.
Without any need for it.
Sinecured jobs the whole aim of which would be to complicate, irritate, obfuscate, block, harass and annoy the workings of our state.
Much the same as a cross between what ATSIC did in its day and what agitators do now.
So in the name of traditional aboriginality we’d have:
A second ‘nation’ of ‘aboriginals’, none of whom are aboriginals in any proper sense of the term but all of whom are part breeds and english speaking urban dwellers.
A second ‘nation’ in the name of aboriginality which exists solely in a western european style, following european habits and fashions in all respects from housing, health, education business and so on.
In the name of aboriginality we’d have something that never, ever existed in aboriginal times:
a nation using money,
a nation using english,
a nation using property,
a nation using wheels,
a nation using machines,
a nation using medicine,
a nation using schools,
a nation using clothing…
and so on.
All paid for by us.
And we’d have to consult them and ask their permission to do anything at all.
When in fact all the aboriginals are dead. All that’s left are mixed bloods without ceremony, without initiation, without understanding, knowledge or desire to live in the old ways.
Nothing wrong with that. It’s the way of the world. It is natural. But there’s this great big fuss going on all the time as though the aboriginals were still with us and they want to live in their old way and we’re preventing it somehow.
No. There’s no one wants to live in the ‘old way’. Why would they? Stone age. No one wants to go back to the stone age.
There’s thousands and thousands of hectares put aside for aboriginal people to continue living in their old way. And it is empty and unused. Unless it is used for the ‘new way’ – cattle stations perhaps.
And in fact it would be illegal to bring your children up that way nowadays. Seen as a cruelty to them.
It’d be illegal to keep your workers in those conditions, contravening health and safety rules.
It’d be illegal to live in such ‘dwellings’ with such sanitation.
And so on.
It is a nonsense.
So there’s literally no question of rebuilding something that once was.
There’s absolutely no question of putting back something that has been destroyed.
There is not something missing that once was.
Quite the contrary, there’s something relatively wonderful and magnificent exists now that never did.
But there’s this constant whinge, this whining and threatening demand for something.
For what? If it is not for what once was what is it for?
It is for something that never existed before.
It is for a duplicate State within this State.
A copy of this ‘Western’ or ‘European’ or ‘Developed World’ or whatever you want to call it social system, social structure. In every respect. Eventually. At fulfillment.
But right now, as the thin edge of the wedge, at the beginning for a duplicate bureaucratic system, a duplicate political entity. The creation of a fictional ‘State’ that is the ‘Aboriginal State’ with its own flag, own laws, own land, own everything – AND a hook into the existing system – called ‘representation’ that gives them a totally disproportionate say – in perpetuity – in anything that is done.
It is breathtaking as an ambit claim.
This is not the aboriginal people. As I say they’re gone. But it is not their descendants, either, they’re living their lives as best they can caught in this bewildering time warp, concept warp of neither aboriginal as was nor australian as is.
No. This is a few clever, manipulative, self seeking, far seeing and crafty individuals who mostly enjoy positions of power, prestige and good remuneration within the current system and understand it well.
Thoroughly ‘westernised’ modern people making a power play for the reins of this nation.
Meanwhile what happens to the descendants of those aboriginal people?
Not allowed to be descendants in the same way as the rest of the Australians from other ethnic and national groups – the Italian, the Greek, the Spanish, the Ukrainian, etc., etc… their traditional culture, heritage, ethnicity absorbed into the mainstream of Australian life and culture they are constantly sidelined, marginalised, set aside for special consideration in many aspects, split off from the mainstream.
Ostensibly all these activities in their interest. But in reality? Their interests not furthered one bit.
Clearly seen in watching the case of any one child from birth to early adulthood.
You’ll see them begin with a total happy acceptance of all the world around them and slowly be transmuted into a grudge carrying partial citizen in a confused state of being, not being wholly here and not being wholly there, anywhere.
Told by the activists that they must cling to their culture.
But what is their ‘culture’?
It was a stone age culture.
Nobody is going to sit around making stone axes, bark canoes, sleeping on the ground etc… so what are they to do to preserve their culture?
Agitate for more money, agitate for special consideration for law, health, housing, education and political representation as a seperate nation.
That’s what’s put before them.
A nonsense. Clearly nothing to do with their traditional culture. Nothing to do with their stone age culture that preserved them for tens of thousands of years.
I maintain they’re being robbed. They had things in that culture that could be considered and preserved and utilised today but those things are totally ignored, buried, lost, devalued, unwanted and unconsidered by their urgers, manipulators.
What are those things?
Consensus.
For instance. They lived by consensus. We currently live by dictate of the majority. We call it democracy. We vote. The majority carries the day. Then we all do what that majority says we should do.
So that typically nowadays as we all flounder around not knowing what direction to take and the political parties grow more and more alike we get the population evenly divided over trivial issues. So that eventually we are governed by only just over half the population.
The voting population.
It comes down to government by the active minority. The vested interest minority. The powerful, influential minority. The pressure groups, etc.
We are dominated by minority interests and it manifest everywhere. Makes us all docile slaves. We are accustomed to it. We expect there to be a dominant minority and we are more than ready to bow to their wishes.
Traditional aborigines were not like that. They considered every man to be equal and nothing was done without a consensus: i.e. all agreed. Everyone had to agree on everything, anything.
This makes a tremendous difference to the nature of a person. His perception of reality, his own reality the nature of existence. It makes the difference between a free man and a slave man.
This is a valuable notion, valuable concept, valuable idea in the context of creating finer human beings.
Should be known, preserved, taught to the children.
And a sudden aside: the mixed heritage should be taught. Recognised, accepted, embraced, taught, came to terms with.
The ‘aboriginal’ children of mixed heritage. They have a considerable measure of European blood. They have both aboriginal and European blood. They have two heritages if you like. Their heritage is twinfold.
This should be accepted. Be known and accepted. Made much of in fact because it is a valuable thing, a good thing, a strengthening thing. They are in a position to reach back far into mankind’s natural past and to embrace mankind’s future. They are the stronger, the better for it.
And they’re not unique, lonely, forlorn, different because of this, of course. There’s many peoples in the world of mixed heritage. They should know this. The biggest thing about this whole aboriginal thing is the marginalising of them, setting them apart, telling them that they don’t fix, don’t belong, are somehow ‘other’. Bludgers making money out of exploiting this.
Well the embracing of mixed heritage shouldn’t lead in any way to any of that. The mixed heritage is in fact the norm for the human race. It would do them well to understand that.
Very topical nowadays with DNA analysis uncovering movements of tribes and people’s across the face of the earth throughout millenia.
Absorbing such information as young aboriginal children in today’s context would in fact give them a head start on the other children around them – because they’d become relatively au fait with this aspect of the human race.
So that was an aside.
Back to the main thread where I was saying their social organisation was built on consensus rather than minority rule:
Another aspect of stone age peoples is their lack of money. This means more than just being without money, what that means to us. It suggests a completely different mindset.
Consider: our whole mindset is that ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ relate to money. Or turn it the other way: our whole idea of rich or poor relates to how much money we have.
We can kill ourselves, suicide, because of perceived loss of riches or failure to attain them.
We can – and often do – spend our whole lives trying to achieve ‘riches’ in the shape of money.
It is the perpetual endless obsession with the majority of us: how much money do we have? Have we got enough to meet necessities? Do we have enough to afford some desirables? Do we have enough to give to our children? Do we have enough to consider ourselves if not ‘successful’ then at least ‘normal’ ? Are we ‘losers’ or are we ‘doing alright’?
Can we have self respect?
We will kill for money and many do. We cheat, lie for money. Spend years in tasks we hate, for money.
On and on it goes. There’s no end to the ramifications of having money as part of our society, our social organisation. You can hardly think of anything, anywhere, it doesn’t have an effect.
Yet the traditional aboriginal society: No Money.
What a difference is this! To measure your worth without using money. To measure the worth of your neighbours, your friends, your enemies, your world, without money! To have plans, dreams, hopes, aspirations all without the concept of money!
To not have to eat your heart out all the time worrying can you get a job, can you keep a job, are you doing alright in the job – for money.
To do things for yourself, for your family, for your friends, with no thought, no possible thought, of money.
This needs much exploration. Much consideration. What is human society like when the money imperative is removed?
It must be, by definition, more closely the purely ‘human’. And therefore ‘worthy’ if only for that. To identify and understand the more purely ‘human’ is very worthwhile quite obviously. Know your starting point. Know the material you are working with. We are losing, have lost for a long, all connection with who we really are. This is an excellent starting place to find it again.
Next: This money thing leads naturally into the next big difference:
Property. They had no property. No concept of property. Ownership of hoards, collections, stockpiles,
Notes for future expansion of this thread:
Right To Exist: always got a home in/on the land.
Vision: scientifically recognised much sharper more detailed.
Manufacture: making parts, joining together, planning for function..
Science/Logic: maths, theorising, experimentation, data collection
Politics/Nations/War:
And so on… more later.
Children Protest Climate Inaction
Radio National reports children protesting about ‘climate inaction’. I posted on their facebook page:
It’s a bit ridiculous and reprehensible the way you report about these agitated children protesting about ‘inaction on climate change’ isn’t it?
One of them complaining about bushfires and droughts and ‘sick of inaction’.
What, exactly do these uneducated children think anyone might do to stop these bushfires and droughts?
Does anyone anywhere really think there’s anything related to climate change that Australia can do to slow, stop or reverse the change?
If they do they’re deluded.
There’s in fact nothing the whole world can do. Nothing. Change will continue much at its present rate no matter what anyone does.
That change will inexorably bring certain particular effects – temp change to a certain level, sea level raises to at least a certain level and so on.
Certain effects are coming without a doubt.
And there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
To stop it.
BUT: mitigate the consequences. YES. Prepare. YES. Much could be done in that direction.
Much. If they protested that nothing was being done to prepare then they’d have a reasonable stance.
But at the moment they’re misguided, delusion and useless. Being used by media such as yourselves simply to agitate the public against things like mines and such in the interests of fomenting news worthy upsets, arguments, quarrels, disputes, even physical confrontations.
All of which is totally deplorable. Totally. Totally. Absolutely deplorable and shabby.
The nation – any nation – needs to get busy preparing for inevitable changes and stop this delusional obsession with putting out your backyard fire and expecting to see the planet suddenly cool.
What Don’t The Ultra Rich Tell Us?
This was a Quora question :
https://www.quora.com/What-dont-people-tell-you-about-being-ultra-wealthy
I was moved to provide an answer for it. There were already many good answers. Mine wasn’t needed and is possibly tripe. But here it is:
I don’t know any of them and I’m not one of them. So perhaps I’m 100% wrong but here’s my guess:
They don’t know any more about how to get rich than you or I do.
That’d be why, as some of these answers state, they’re frightened of losing their money.
And it’d often be because, as some of these answers state, they inherited their money.
And that’d be why they, as some of these answers state, sometimes slowly lose all their wealth until they’re worse off than you or I.
And that’d be why they often try to hide the fact that they’re wealthy.
And that’d be why they often live beneath their means and even sometimes quite mean little lives.
And that’d be why they’re not known for enlightening us all, showing the way, telling us how to do it, why there’s not a shelf full of books – ‘how I did it’, ‘do it my way’.
That’d be why all the books, tapes, seminars, etc. that we do see about how to get rich are so obviously their idea of their best chance of getting rich off of us.
That’d be why with chambers full of usually fairly wealthy and often really wealthy politicians ‘leading’ their nations the populace remains largely insolvent and bound to economic slavery.
Because the truth is they don’t have a clue any more than anyone else does.
What they don’t tell you is that.
And history shows it was always either luck or theft and oft times a mixture of the two.
Even those times when wealth can be shown to have been acquired by diligence, intelligence, application, sheer hard work then opportunity and good fortune can be shown to have played a senior role simply from observation of the many times greater number of examples where diligence, intelligence, application, sheer hard work unto even death failed to meet with success.
Any hard working successful person has the sense to give thanks to their god for the good fortune they enjoyed during their careers – regardless of how little it was, for they are well aware it could easily have been less as for many others it was.
It is the conceit of many a ‘successful’ entrepreneurs that only they know what hard work is when in fact they’d probably know the least.
And theft and war. They don’t tell you what they know of how fortunes that persist for generations were acquired by theft in war and in peace.
How to get rich. It is the great question isn’t it? Has occupied philosophers and economists since the dawn.
No one knows. Various theories. No certainties.
How to lift the millions of humans out of abject poverty? How to lift our own selves out of perhaps the relative poverty of unemployment in a modern state?
We don’t know. We’re trying to find out.
And the rich don’t know the answer any more than we do.
Just like us the find the obvious staring them in the face when they look at the facts, the history:
You get rich by either inheriting it or stealing it or just blind luck.
And there’s only one of the three we’ve normally got any control over.
I’ll Become A Liberal
Just listening to this Shadow Treasurer. I think I’m convinced.
I’m going to join the Liberals.
Disarray or not. I don’t care. They’re in disarray because they’re all thinking. They’re arguing amongst themselves.
They’re in disarray the way America is in disarray. Because everyone is taking an interest and thinking hard.
And the same as the USA they’ll come good and be the leaders, the first to do it, the first to handle such an event, such a challenge.
You know what convinced me?
“We’ll pay for it.” Something like that he said. “We’ll pay for it.”
Mate. They’ll pay for nothing. They’re not even pretending to ‘pay’ for anything they say outright they’re going to raise taxes.
We pay. WE PAY. ‘They’ just think they are something, someone else. ‘They’ think they are not ‘US’.
They are not us. ‘They’ will ‘pay’ for things by raising taxes on US. And then they’ll say ‘they’ve’ ‘paid’ for things.
A joke. A crime. The hub of all the problems in the world. Overlords and ‘leaders’ and pundits and know-alls and power brokers who are not us. Who don’t want to be us. Who see themselves as not us, as separate from us, as different; as better, greater, smarter, in a position to ‘lead’ us and instruct us, with a god-given mandate to tell us what to do, to extract money from our pockets, to waste it and then come back for me.
You could just give a little and understand perhaps where they are coming from if they find the money within the existing tax scheme, with the funds they have. But they don’t even pretend to do that. They clearly say they will raise taxes. Fran Kelly put it to him. It is a fact.
What he means and is totally incapable of saying is that like it or not WE WILL PAY for their plans.
And he totally overlooks, ignores, derides the fact that this government has and is paying for things and saying money too! Has put the budget in surplus. THAT’s ‘Paying for things’. That’s what that is.
This government is paying for things. As near as governments ever do.
I won’t be conned and especially by people as far off the planet as that. He really and truly and honestly believes the ‘they’ are paying for things. Not us, them.
And with that party the closer it gets to its core the more it is ‘them’ and not us, because they toe the line of an ideology, don’t they? Enough said. I’ll go with the battlers that are working on things and are currently doing alright.
Noel Pearson And Helping Aborigines
Just heard that Noel Pearson – again – venting his anger.
What a thoroughly unpleasant man. At least on that performance.
Reminds me of the man who went into Parliament with is hat on.
Frankly I’m a bit sick of it all.
Overall I believe the problem is that aboriginal people are being used by whole scads of people to further their own ends.
To build lucrative careers for themselves. Give themselves cushy jobs, sinecures.
All on the basis of building something that has never ever existed: an aboriginal nation as we understand ‘nation’ – with all the trappings of such, bureaucracy etc.
If it were ever built we’d simply have two nations in Australia and conflict would be the inevitable result.
But mainly it is obviously a totally artificial construct, nothing whatever to do with aboriginal ‘heritage’, aboriginal culture.
Meanwhile the true heritage, the true culture of theirs is ignored. The basic human culture that had and represent.
And the other plank is that they are disadvantaged. This is nonsense. They are in fact advantaged. They are provided for to a greater extent than any other Australian.
They create disadvantage by insisting upon seperation on the one hand and failing entirely to help each other on the other.
Which isn’t to say that there aren’t hundreds, maybe thousands, of aboriginal people trying hard to help other aborigines. But there’s an overall push to maintain and create bad situations so’s the agenda can be furthered.
The people who are trying are not helped by the ‘leaders’ of the ‘aboriginal nation’ and that’s because ‘leaders’ of ‘aboriginal nation’ are both artificially created fictions.
You want to help them get off their backs, make their ‘leaders’ help them, tell the truth about what their cultural heritage could be, stop marginalising them, splitting them off from the populace and let the be part of our world.
It does them no good in the first place to tell them they’re different.
It does them no good to feed them a diet of grudges and encourage them to embrace them.
It does them no good to tell them they’re disadvantaged – and it’s someone else’s fault.
It does them no good to have bad mannered nasty people representing them.
It does them no good to have ‘leaders’ that don’t lead or help them.
It does them no good to have their own ‘tribal lands’ and live in isolated ethnic communities out there trying to mimic contemporary civilisation without any contemporary civilisation reason for being there.
It does them no good to duplicate all essential services with an ‘aboriginal’ version.
It does them no good to throw millions of dollars at them via their ‘representatives’ and ‘leaders’ for the money never gets to them.
It does them no good for them to be seen and be defined as ‘a problem’.
I’ve lived and worked with them, amongst them, in their bush communities and I have nothing but the best wishes for them. I’d do all I could to help them go well.
I’ve seen quite clearly that all of the above does them no good.
And I’ve seen quite clearly that the essential first mistake is to segregate them off. In all respects, physically in where they live and notionally as requiring all kinds of different and special administrations in everything from health to employment via legal services etc.
A small abo child is a wonderfully happy being perfectly joyous and all embracing willing to share and accept and it is somewhat saddening to see the remorseless inexorable differentiating and separating that is brought to bear on them.
And a pox on the houses of all those that encourage it.
And the first fix? Shatter the invisible wall around them by allowing them full freehold of their land – or at least a hefty chunk of it.
So’s they can begin to build communities after our model by buying and selling properties from each other and from and to anyone else and can begin working on building everything from houses to roads and bridges in those communities.
This is how our world was built.
This is the method. This is the road.
They are supposedly on this road but not allowed to move down it. Frozen into enforced inaction.
Yep. The first step is quite clear to me. Give them freehold.
Then they’ll begin to grow up.
And disenfranchise all these ‘leaders’ with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
Always Something Broken
I get superstitious. I get paranoid. I get frustrated and hassled and unhappy and even desperate.
Because there’s always something more breaking.
Things break quicker than I can fix things. So the list gets longer. All the time.
And I feel it is because of this place we’ve moved to. That’s the superstition.
Like just a couple of days ago the electronic piano broke. makes a continuous horrible white noise sound and nothing else.
And there were disturbing things happening with one of our computers.
Then this morning my child complains about his smartphone. The screen switches off in a second if you take your finger off it.
And it reports there’s no space where there’s gigabytes of SD card unused.
And I can find nowhere in it to do anything about it.
Nor can I find any help on the web. That’s a kinda ‘broken’, too – like the web is broken, when it doesn’t help.
Then I investigate the doubtful computer and do a disk check. It fails. I put Seatools onto it – it is a Seagate drive – and it fails and tells me to use Seatools for DOS. Means downloading an ISO and burning it.
Means finding a burner… see? Things multiplying in order to service the breakdowns….
When I find a burner it probably won’t work…..
That’s this week, so far…….
Indonesia Should Shut Up
Indonesia should shut up about our possible move to Jerusalem.
I think.
But then again: why? They just spoke their mind.
Probably not honestly but cleverly. Making an ambit claim, testing the water, seeing just how much effect they can have on Australia.
Just how frightened of them are we?
Just how snivelling greedy and easy to push around are we?
This tiny little country of 25millions – one tenth their size?
It doesn’t really matter to them, does it?
But it matters to us. What sort of posture we adopt, how we behave, who we are, what we do. It matters to our self perception. It matters to what we become.
And I think we’ll turn soft and yellow and rotten.
Let’s see…
All The Time In The World…
I just realised today that when you practice music you’ve got all the time in the world, haven’t you?
You must have. Because you can’t hurry it.
It must be practiced at the right speed. So you can’t be in a hurry. You have to calm down to that speed. You have to be ‘in’ or ‘at’ that speed.
That’s how you’ve got to be going. That’s how you’ve got to be thinking about things, about your current state, about the time available….
Sort of a first step into escaping into your world of music is simply that: escaping into the time of your music.
So there’s no such thing as a ‘quick practice’. I’ve only got a few minutes, I’ll just have a quick practice, race through a couple of numbers…
I mean, even if you did ‘race through’ a couple of numbers that’s simply setting the time faster and you still have to adhere to it.
You wouldn’t think of yourself as short of time when playing a number that required great speed, would you?
Similarly you’re not short of time when playing a number at a speed greater than its normal speed.
Or to put it the other way round: hurried practice is not practice. It is some kind of an abortion, an aborted, crippled practice.