Christianity told to bow to Woke

There’s an old definition of news that goes like this: ‘If a dog bites a man, that’s not news. But if a man bites a dog, that’s news!’

I was reminded of this when, flicking through The Age newspaper on Friday, I saw an article headlined, Catholic school refuses to show student’s same-sex movie.

Dog bites man, I thought.

That a Catholic school refuses to promote things that undermine its Catholic values is hardly surprising. The Age might as well have reported that Lefties like cancelling people, or that Joe Biden is a walking house plant.

Dog bites man.

But the media is now so appalled by Christian values and so ignorant about Christianity that it is news to them when a Catholic school stands by its doctrine.

The Age reported that a parent was upset his daughter’s film project, which features a lesbian kiss, would not be posted on her Catholic school’s website or showcased at her school’s visual arts exhibition.

Mount Lilydale Mercy College principal Philip Morison told The Age: ‘Some scenes are not in keeping with our values as a Catholic school.’

If you’re unclear, that would be the girl-on-girl action.

The budding LGBTQ+ filmmaker had been told she was welcome to submit her project as part of her VCE assessment, nevertheless ‘a queer film’ would not be promoted by the school at their exhibition.

The student complained to The Age: ‘I thought they would be okay with it. I thought we had gotten past that, but obviously not.’

One can only imagine the Year 12 student’s surprise to learn that the 2000-year-old Catholic church had not gotten past its Catholicism.

The ‘distraught’ student continued: ‘I believe it’s an act of discrimination. All I want them to do is change their minds, so I can be included with my classmates.’

Of course it’s an act of discrimination. Discriminating between Catholic values and non-Catholic values is what keeps Catholics Catholic, just as discriminating between conservative values and Woke progressive values is what keeps the Liberal Party … er, maybe that’s not such a great example.

But I digress.

All the Year 12 student wants is for her school to change their minds about the teachings of Jesus, Saint Paul, and Moses. All the school wanted her to do was to save the lesbian kissing for after-school hours.

Jesus had better change his tune.

As for being included with her classmates, she is. She is enrolled in the school, she is included in classes, and her project was included in VCE assessment. She, however, excluded herself from the Catholic film exhibition when, despite warnings, she went ahead and made an LGBTQ+ film.

Animal Justice Party MP Andy Meddick has taken the girl’s case to state Parliament where he accused the school of failing to reflect ‘community values’.

He told The Age: ‘I personally believe that if you’re a school, regardless of your religious beliefs, if you’re receiving public funding, then you have a responsibility to reflect the values of the community, not of your particular faith.’

Well Mr Meddick, two can play that game.

I personally believe that if you’re an Animal Justice Party MP, regardless of your political beliefs, if you’re receiving public funding, then you have a responsibility to reflect the values of the community, not of your particular Party.

Incidentally, 20 per cent of Victorians are Catholic while just 2.71 percent of Victorians voted for the Animal Justice Party when Mr Meddick was elected to the Upper House in 2018.

Tell me again who is more reflective of ‘community values’?

Macquarie School of Education Professor Tiffany Jones cast doubt on whether Catholic beliefs are really Catholic beliefs since some Catholics seem not to practice them.

She said: ‘The teaching of the church is arguable … because you will get Catholics who support LGBTIQ+ people, you will get Catholics who are LGBTIQ+ people.’

I think what Ms Jones meant to say was that while Catholic teaching on marriage and sexuality has been crystal clear for 2,000 years, the commitment of some Catholics is arguable.

Imagine if Catholics changed their doctrine whenever they came across Catholics who did the opposite of Catholic doctrine so as to ensure Catholic doctrine was fully inclusive of those people who disagreed with Catholic doctrine…

In what way would that still be Catholic doctrine?

But LGBTQ+ activists have no time for such logic. They are not committed to fairness or choice. Gay rights activist Rodney Croome, condemning the Mount Lilydale Mercy College for not allowing the student to show her gay film, said:

‘This kind of discrimination is illegal in Tasmania and now Victorian law. It should also be illegal in federal law. Before the election the new Government promised to act. The time is now.’

It should not be lost on anyone that while the Left love to accuse Christians of wanting to impose themselves on the public, it is the Left who literally make laws by which they will be able to impose themselves upon Christians.

The Left preach tolerance for all beliefs whilst being completely intolerant of Christian beliefs.

And the Left demand inclusivity while seeking to exclude Christian schools from government funding; this despite the fact that Christian parents pay taxes and the state system would collapse if Christian schools suddenly closed for lack of funding.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/08/christianity-told-to-bow-to-woke/

****************************************************

Covid skepticism on the rise

James Allan

The tide has turned. Finally. Recently that organ of pro-lockdown orthodoxy, the New York Times, ran an editorial to the effect that during the Covid pandemic no schools should ever have been closed. And that it would take decades to recover from this public policy fiasco. Sure, the NYT buried this editorial in a Saturday edition. But it’s a start. Especially for those of us who doubted the imposition of lockdowns from day one, publicly and in print, and were faced with a barrage of unhinged abuse about being ‘grandmother killers’ or ‘denying the science’ or having some talking head suffering from a toxic overdose of his own supposed virtue ramble on about ‘not on my watch’ as regards adopting the Swedish approach.

Last week the front page of the London Telegraph (far more sane through the pandemic, by the way, than the Australian) published a front page piece with a headline ‘lockdown effects feared to be killing more people than Covid’. In fact, the article by the paper’s science editor Sarah Knapton cites excess deaths data from Britain’s Office for National Statistics that make it plain this will happen. Knapton says that ‘over the past two months, the number of excess deaths not from Covid dwarfs the number linked to the virus’. Even some doctors’ organisations, who were all too willing to try to suppress and cancel lockdown dissenters for over two years, are doing about faces – not least the British Heart Foundation. Others, like the man who goes by the moniker ‘The Naked Emperor’ (for obvious reasons) on Substack, have taken this data and drilled down further. For instance, for the week ending 5 August there were 1,350 excess deaths in England and Wales.

Guess what? That is 14.4 per cent higher than the 5-year average. And you’re seeing those noticeably higher excess deaths in Australia too. But the Naked Emperor makes a point the science editor of the London Telegraph still shies away from, a point related to wide-open, honest debate: ‘There is no doubt that lockdowns are one of the major causes [of these really high excess deaths numbers] but it would be stupid to not even consider vaccines. Investigate whether they have contributed to these excess deaths in any way, present the evidence and then say no they haven’t. But don’t just dogmatically say they are safe and not look into it.’

That sums up the view of this twice-vaccinated, no-boosters, writer. I have so little trust in the expert class (including the medicos) after the last two years I am taking nada, nothing, zero on trust from these people. Many of them spent the last two-plus years stifling dissent; or keeping their heads down and being too cowardly to voice honestly held doubts; or revelling in a heavy-handed ‘we are the incarnation of science and we’re not prepared to brook any dissent’ form of modern-day aristocracy. And this in the context of Anders Tegnell’s Swedish approach (the same as the one recommended by the Great Barrington Declaration) looking better and better with each passing day – on every axis of concern and on every criterion. Not just as regards kids’ schooling outcomes. Not just all the economic outcomes from debt to small business closures to ruined CBDs to incredible asset inflation. Not just the invidious massive transfers of wealth from the young to the old and from the poor to the rich that lockdowns (and the money printing and massive spending needed to support those lockdowns, triggering the above-mentioned asset inflation, now price inflation and a hammered private sector) brought about. No, even on straight-up ‘which policy choice will have the fewest excess deaths’ criterion, lockdowns were a mistake. The right choice, the one that was WHO and British policy in October of 2019 based on a century of data, was to protect the vulnerable and leave everyone else alone to make their own calls while definitely not locking down, not closing schools, not weaponising the police as the enforcement arm of two-bit public health bureaucrats. It was right even if the only axis you cared about, the only one, was how many deaths your response to Covid would lead to.

So to be blunt, Australia’s response to Covid was nothing to be proud of. As time goes by it is looking worse and worse. Scott Morrison and John Howard may say that Australia’s response was top of the class. But I strongly disagree. I don’t know what data they’re looking at but what I’m seeing indicates bad choice piled on bad choice – all while shutting down dissenting views; centralising decision-making within an incredibly narrow band of people; and maybe worst of all ‘engineering a situation whereby those with decision-making power had no skin in the game’. They paid virtually none of the costs they imposed on others.

When I made this critique a year ago and more, most people said I was wrong on the facts. These days more and more agree with me on the substance. They concede we should not have gone down the road we did. But they offer this secondary defence of our (and to be fair most of the democratic world’s) political and public health castes. They say something along the lines of: ‘Look, there was great uncertainty. No one knew for sure how potent this virus was. It was better to be safe than sorry, to opt for the least risk option. Maybe we were too slow to reverse course. But in the swirl of uncertainty we can forgive the initial lockdowns, school closures, massive spending, etcetera, etcetera.’

Again, count me a strong dissenter to that plea in mitigation. In the face of uncertainty that is exactly the time when you should be guided by your core principles and values. If your initial response is to copy China and more or less weld people in their homes that seems, to me, to be a despotic and wrong-headed response. It is certainly not a recognisably liberal response. It amounts to invoking the precautionary principle on steroids, all while doing only ‘benefit’ analysis, not ‘cost-benefit’ analysis – because many people right at the start pointed out all the many likely medium-term costs to this sort of authoritarian, thuggish lockdown response.

Yet throw in some wildly wrong modelling by Neil Ferguson out of Imperial College. Stir in a bit of Pravda-like fear porn press coverage. Add a lot of cancelling those with dissenting opinions, especially by Big Tech. And here we are today. But uncertainty in no way justifies what our politicians did. Heck, if we’re giving the full picture there was much less uncertainty than this attempted defence suggests. Right from the start they had the data from the cruise ship Diamond Princess. Not a single young person on that boat who caught the disease died or went into ICU. And the death rate even amongst the many elderly cruise ship passengers never came close to that of the Spanish Flu, forget the Black Death.

Anyway, I want politicians who fall back on liberal values in the face of uncertainty, when it counts. I don’t want those who, faced with uncertainty, resort to what you’d see from the Chinese Politburo.

Vote them all out. They richly deserve it.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/never-forget-their-thuggery/

***************************************************

‘Fuel emissions standards’ just a costly leg-up for EVs

Judith Sloan

You have to hand it to the passenger motor vehicle industry – they are past masters at securing favours from governments. They have been doing it for decades – arguably it’s their core skill set.

When the US car companies got into trouble during the global financial crisis, the executives flew off to Washington in their private jets to plead with the Obama administration to be bailed out. Their request was granted.

Notwithstanding the fact that Volkswagen was involved in one of the largest corporate scandals ever – in relation to falsifying the emissions standards of their vehicles – the company remains a favourite of the German government as well as other governments around the world.

The reasons that the car industry holds sway with politicians are obvious. Most of us drive cars and car factories stand out and employ lots of people who are relatively well paid. There are both patriotic and masculinity aspects to cars – they need to be defended.

Car manufacturing in Australia lasted several decades in the context of extremely high rates of protection. Over time, the number of manufacturers shrank but at the end, the overseas-owned companies could not convince the federal government to continue to prop them up.

Australian consumers had paid dearly with high prices and a limited range of cars on offer. Some people might have loved their locally produced Holdens or Fords. But by dint of high tariffs and other measures (government-imposed quotas were favoured at one point), Australian drivers came off badly.

Just because we no longer produce cars here doesn’t mean that the multinational car companies have given up seeking to influence government policy to their benefit. And this is precisely what is happening with fuel emissions standards. Don’t think for a minute they are motivated by saving the planet; it’s all about ensuring that what is decided yields their company the best commercial result.

It’s why there is actually an all-mighty spat going on between the premium European car companies which are represented by the Electric Vehicle Council and the companies that supply the bulk of cars for income-constrained customers – Toyota and Mazda, in particular – which are represented by the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries.

The European car companies are led by VW – there’s an irony there. Their aim is to kill off the push to hybrid vehicles, preferring instead for government policy to leapfrog the hybrid phase and head straight to fully electric vehicles, something which they specialise in. (Mind you, given that VW is essentially paid by the German government to produce fully electric vehicles, it’s hardly surprising that the company made the switch away from internal combustion engine vehicles.)

FCAI, by contrast, sees hybrids as being a popular and convenient stepping-stone to accommodate lower net emissions arising from car transport. (It accounts for around 10 per cent of our total emissions.) According to its modelling, fully electric vehicles will make up less than 20 per cent of new car sales in 2030, with a further quarter internal combustion and the remaining hybrids.

The preferred government modelling and one also favoured by the EVC is that over 90 per cent of new cars sales will be fully EV by 2030. (In their dreams, by the way.) The EVC is lobbying to make sure that only plug-in hybrids are counted in this percentage, thereby serving the interests of its members. (Most hybrids at this stage are not plug-in.)

Where do fuel emissions standards come into this argument? Before answering this question, it needs to be pointed out that Labor rejected changing these standards as part of its election manifesto. That’s right – any changes were explicitly ruled out. But this has not stopped Climate Change Minister, Chris Bowen, from effectively reneging on this pledge and opening the issue up for discussion. In other words, expect changes to fuel standards very soon. (Didn’t I warn you about Bowen (and Burke)?)

The push is on from the EVC to insist that Australia comply with European emissions standards – referred to as Euro 6 – which, incidentally will provide a massive commercial boost to its members. The shift is opposed by the FCAI. This standard puts a maximum of 95 grams of CO2 per kilometre driven by passenger motor vehicles. Most of Australia’s most popular current vehicles have emissions in excess of 200 grams per kilometre.

But here’s the important feature to note – the way these new emissions standards will work is that each manufacturer must comply with a Corporate Average Fuel Emissions figure. In this way, the manufacturers cross-subsidise the sales of their EVS while jacking up the price of popular cars on the Australian roads. This suits the premium European car manufacturers to a tee, but will hurt the average driver who requires an affordable vehicle combined with convenience.

When Bowen summarily rejected the idea that these new fuel emissions standards are the equivalent of a sector carbon tax, he was dead wrong. That’s what it is, that’s what its intention is.

There is another major complication to the insistence on Euro 6 in Australia and that is that our two remaining refineries are not in a position to comply at this point of time. There has been considerable progress with the sulphur issue and a solution is now likely by 2024. But the problem of aromatics has not been solved. Additions of ethanol would help but would also significantly add to the price of petrol, which wouldn’t be politically popular.

You might imagine the resulting closure of the refineries would weigh on Bowen’s thinking – on national security grounds, at the very least – but there is little doubt that some of his advisers and the bureaucrats will be telling him not to worry too much. Just think of the contribution to the reduction in our national emissions that their closure would involve!

So where do consumer preferences fit into this policy about-face? The reality is that very many Australians, particularly those living in outer metropolitan and regional areas, are quite rightly attached to their powerful ICE cars and spending five minutes max to fill them up. The last thing they want is to pay top dollar for an EV and wait hours to charge it up, having driven around to find an available charger.

But consumer preferences won’t count for much when Bowen thinks he is saving the planet but is actually being conned by lobbyists. More sighing.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/fuel-emissions-standards-just-a-costly-leg-up-for-evs

**************************************************************

The need for moderation in politics

My two-year-old daughter has had a shocking cold with a chesty cough for a few days now and it just won’t shift.

The other night, her mum had applied a healthy dose of Vicks Baby Balsam to her chest and back and then left her alone in her room for a few minutes.

When I walked into the room a little while later, our toddler had managed to open the Vicks and was in the process of smearing the entire tub all over her face and upper body.

It’s lucky she didn’t get it in her eyes.

There was a lesson in what my little girl had done that’s worth sharing.

Our little girl had seen a potential solution to her problem but instead of a measured response, she emptied the whole tub on herself, almost to her detriment.

We do the same thing as she did. And by ‘we’, I mean society and our governments.

We see a problem like Covid and instead of a measured reaction we apply lockdowns, curfews, bans on protests and gatherings, mask mandates and vaccine mandates, and then we top it off with societal division and segregation.

Unlike my little girl, we went so hard in scooping everything out of the jar and smearing ourselves with it (for the sake of a virus with 0.27 per cent infection fatality rate) that our eyes are still stinging and will be some time.

And despite all of those authoritarian measures being proven, by real-world experience, to be completely and utterly useless in dealing with the ‘pandemic’ or Covid, there are still people calling for their return.

Our governments then reacted to the economic hardship that was about to unfold, principally because of the ‘pandemic’ measures that they enacted.

The answer should have been to provide targeted assistance while also getting as many industries back to work as soon as we realised Covid wasn’t the plague.

Instead, we emptied the jar (and then some!) with a Covid stimulus cash splash.

Australians got $750 a week to stay at home and watch Netflix while small businesses struggled to find anyone willing to work for them.

And once again our eyes are going to be stinging for some time as the resultant inflation – from spending too much money – continues to spiral out of control.

Away from the ‘pandemic’, we see even societal issues like racism being dealt with similarly.

Of course, the structural racism of Australia’s past may have hindered some Aboriginal people from getting ahead.

But instead of a measured response of seriously targeting areas of disadvantage, we smear ourselves with virtue signalling and Wokery.

The other day, a friend told me about his young child who asked him why white people stole the Aboriginal peoples’ land.

His son was actually told that at preschool!

Why punish kids with such guilt trips for sins of the past, especially when that same sin of conquest has happened in just about every nation, in just about every culture, and in just about every age of humanity?

Why does Australia need to insert a racist clause into its Constitution (as the government plans to do) that sets up a new de facto chamber of Parliament which has the colour of your skin as its membership and voting criteria?

We over-egg it with sexuality too.

I certainly recall my school years and the wholly inappropriate homophobic bullying that went on against certain kids.

But instead of dealing with such bullying, schools today run programs where girls who are a bit boyish are taught to bind their chests, where boys who are a bit effeminate are taught to tuck their groins, and where both of them are taught to go on puberty blockers and get hormonal and surgical treatment without parental consent.

The tub is empty, folks, and our eyes are well and truly stinging!

Away from cultural matters, we also know have a big problem with our global economic system.

True capitalism – the free enterprise system – is supposed to be based on the natural economy where people use their initiative, talents, and hard work to generate not only rewards for themselves but rewards for others as well.

The natural economy creates a connected community where the fruits of our skills and labour are given to others who can’t do what we do and, in return, we enjoy the fruits of the skills and labour of others who can do what we can’t.

But the corporate behemoths that control the global marketplace and the politicians who have had their palms greased by those behemoths have corrupted capitalism.

They now call it crony capitalism.

And it has resulted in some huge disparities in wealth and ownership.

The World Inequality Lab has worked out that the ‘wealth of richest individuals on earth has grown at 6-9 per cent per year since 1995’ and that, in those past 27 years, the share of global wealth owned by billionaires has tripled, with 2020 marking ‘the steepest increase in global billionaires’ share of wealth on record’.

So there is a problem. A big problem.

But instead of dealing with the corruption of capitalism by multinational corporations and interfering governments, Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum (WEF) propose a Great Reset.

This will be where those corporations and governments get even closer, so much so that both are somehow going to be responsible for managing societal issues.

Together they will Build Back Better or so the Great Reset slogan goes.

Let’s get this straight.

The problems of the global economy have been caused by corporations and governments being too close … and the WEF proposes to fix the system by making corporations and governments even closer?

To come up with that one, Klaus and the Davos ‘elite’ are certainly smearing something all over the place, but it sure ain’t Vicks.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/bingeing-on-safety-is-dangerous/

************************************

Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

***************************************