Infidels

*

Where middle age desires predictability and old age craves security, youth, above all else, is hungry for freedom. This is the reason that youth are the backbone of the movement inaugurated by Congressman Ron Paul, which started as a quiet presidential campaign, mushroomed into an Internet and media phenomenon, and is now fueling a movement to elect other statesmen like Ron Paul to state and national office. College students in droves organized rallies of staggering proportions to receive Dr. Paul, while countless other innovators, many (though not all) of them young, peppered the Internet with imaginative and stirring Ron Paul video promotionals, clever slogans and logos, and even songs. Dr. Paul himself has been promoting freedom for decades; all of a sudden, America’s youth are listening.

But the same energies that prompt youth to become freedom-seekers are, unfortunately, easily misdirected. Sensing that all was not right with the domestic political turmoil and with a debilitating war being fought on the other side of the world, the youth of the ’60s, the first wave of the Baby Boomer generation, rebelled in the name of freedom–and ended up wreaking havoc. In retrospect, all the youth-driven ferment of the ’60s and ’70s accomplished little more than legitimizing revolution of the wrong sort, degrading the cause of liberty into a sordid pageant of libertinism and, in the longer run, strengthening the very institutions of corrupt, outsized government that they had resisted.

The turmoil of the ’60s and ’70s left footprints that are still very visible today. The abandonment of sexual restraint and the degradation of modes of entertainment are still very much in evidence, as are the drug culture and the repudiation of parental authority. Moreover, the self-absorption of the Baby Boomer counterculture found expression in a welter of new federal programs designed to give Baby Boomers cradle-to-grave security at the expense of American taxpayers. As humorist (and Boomer) Dave Barry put it, “I care about our young people, and I wish them great success, because they are our Hope for the Future, and some day, when my generation retires, they will have to pay us trillions of dollars in Social Security.”

In the last 10 years or so, however, something of a counter-revolution has begun to take hold, of which the Ron Paul phenomenon is but the latest manifestation. What is happening is not hard to diagnose: the children of the ’60s and ’70s rebels are growing up, and many of them do not like the Brave New World their parents’ generation has foisted on them. Many of them correctly perceive the web of so-called entitlements, like Social Security, Medicare, and sundry other “safety nets,” to be a vast pyramid scheme designed to enrich the old at the expense of the young. Many youth expect Social Security to be insolvent or drastically reduced by the time they reach retirement age, and resent being taxed heavily to support programs from which they are unlikely to benefit.

The once-vaunted “sexual revolution” is also getting a second look, as today’s younger generation watch their parents, who never learned in their youth the restraint and commitment necessary to sustain long-term relationships, fail to hold marriages and families together. A pandemic of new venereal diseases like AIDS has also cast “the new morality” in a different light.

All of these things youth are seeing and discussing among themselves in their blogs, chat rooms, and websites. But although many are trying not to repeat their parents’ mistakes, many more continue to succumb to the cultural riptide of drugs, promiscuity, and aimlessness.

What is needed, if the energies of youth are to be properly directed, is education. The Founding Fathers had their preceptors, like George Wythe, who instilled in them the doctrines of liberty, and subsequent generations were the beneficiaries of a small-town, one-room-schoolhouse, family-centered culture that both furnished a proper education and instilled values that perpetuated and strengthened our civilization. Today’s youth will be no less susceptible to refinement and enlightenment if they are given proper educations in their formative years.

Fortunately, a revolution in education is already underway, and it has nothing to do (fortunately?) with outcome-based education, federal grants, or the PTA. The home-schooling phenomenon, still accounting for the education of only a small minority of America’s youth, has already wrought tremendous changes on the cultural landscape. An entire generation of home-schooled children is being educated free of the socialist and secularist bias that taints the public-school curricula. Most home-schoolers are learning at their parents’ feet about limited government, our Western cultural heritage, and politically incorrect American history–topics that are forbidden, for the most part, in government schools. What victims of public education, like yours truly, had to learn painstakingly, as self-taught adults, home-schooled youth can learn when their minds are in the full flower of youth. Many of them go on to become productive, well-educated citizens with a proper perspective on freedom complementing high moral standards and firm religious convictions.

For those who were not home-schooled, the Internet is brimming with websites and organizations promoting liberty, decency, and character. Besides the aforementioned Ron Paul movement, organizations like the John Birch Society and the Von Mises Institute use the web to educate and inform, while myriads of churches use the Internet for outreach and inspiration.

In a word, the Internet has shattered the controls the so-called “gatekeepers” used to exert on the dissemination of information, while legal reforms have broken the government-school education monopoly. The surprising success of the Ron Paul campaign and the rise of home schooling are only the beginning. The future, in this author’s opinion, will continue to see more and more movement away from subversive, collectivized public education. The religious awakening that has been underway since at least the ’80s will continue to gain momentum, posing an ever-stronger challenge to the militant secularism that, a generation ago, bid fair to tear our civilization apart.

A challenge is building to the bloated Beltway behemoth that, for far too long, has sought to overthrow limited government and reconfigure American culture into the bargain. As Congressman Ron Paul himself recently observed, “There’s something going on in this country, and it’s big.”

Publication: The New American
Publication Date: 14-APR-08
Author: Scaliger, Charles
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/

Caught on open ground, fleeing between ramshackle buildings, was only part of the story. He had been so driven; and then so much in want. He wanted to create a land of significance, a life of urgency, but nothing seemed of any importance any more. The veil of reality had been stripped aside, and he could find nothing beneath. He was duly shattered. He woke up crying; but there was no answer. All that energy had been wasted. Entertainment had taken a different course. Nobody read any more. Not even himself. Exhausted after work, he would slump on the couch and watch the flickering screen, the best the world had to offer, all delivered directly to him.

When Joyce and he were in the cinema together, sometimes the only customers, he would say as some kind of feeble joke: it's nice of them to have made this movie just for us. The streets were more and more crowded. Out west the mosque spilled over; as they attended Friday prayers. A bright red brand new Ferrari was parked just outside, casually, a dinky toy, and later he watched the handsome, overly handsome Lebanese man who owned it drive away, already talking on his mobile as he burbled away from the mosque, ostentatious, a finger in the air to all the lesser mortals. Nothing but Arabic was spoken in the street. This once rather boring, insular anglo suburb had been completely transformed.

Up the road the more radical mosque continued about its business. You are not welcome here, the giant invisible signs read. They are preaching jihad, even some of their own claimed against others. It's great, all the jumble of cultures, but sometimes.... Sometimes it breaks down, he finished the sentence. Half of them don't work. They mop up vast amounts of welfare. They have astonishing numbers of children, and we're all paying taxes to support them. How is that fair? How is that right? And they hate us, absolutely hate us. We are nothing but infidels to them. They will never fit in, they don't want to fit in, they want to bring the caliphate here, the Muslim world order.

This was Sydney these days, a cauldron of seething resentments. Someone was getting more than you. Our taxes were being wasted. Ethnic groups disputed with each other. Nobody was happy. The crime gangs went about their merry way. How much tax did the Ferrari driver pay? Could he get you killed with a single phone call? It certainly looked like it; but perhaps these were just prejudices, racial stereotypes, the greatest sin of the modern age. You could never question it, although the Mafia connections of one its major early proponents in Australia, Al Grassby, are now well acknowledged. Does it lead us around in circles, all this tolerance, does it lead us to hatred of another kind?

And so they cruised the suburbs that had been utterly transformed. They made way for dangers that had never been foreseen. They felt like strangers in a strange land - their own city - but since when was it yours? They were captured. They were groaning with pleasure. They were bewildered by increasing ethnic divisions. This is not what we signed up for. They are like a horde of flies buzzing on the ceiling, one talk back caller said. And they breed and they breed. He knocked on the door in the only wealthy section of Macquarie Fields and the man said the same: they breed and they breed and they breed, they breed like rabbits, there are so many of them, and what chance do any of those kids have but a life of welfare, a life the rest of us have to pay for?

They had had a child virtually every year for the last decade and the photographs of the family showed an astonishing step-down scale of identikit children. Then one of them went missing. And the gaps closed over. Old news stories were everywhere. None of it mattered. He was, in conclusion, bearing all for nothing. This city has gone to the dogs, he declared, and they laughed for no reason. It was simply true. The parasite Labor government, beyond incompetent, meant no one had any faith or pride in the state, no confidence in their masters. It was at the core of the city's discontent, the knowledge that your taxes were being wasted, that you were being led by a Mafia like caste of complete incompetents, and so the pride of place that should have been here vanished; and all that was left was a surly, disengaged population, fighting for survival while drug dealers flashed around in brand new Ferraris and a spoilt, indulged, motivationless under class mopped up billions of dollars in welfare, watched television, argued with each other. It was all such a terrible mess, a terrible waste of energy, curdled good will.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25219309-421,00.html

Work Choices finally buried - Julia Gillard

By Patricia Karvelas

The Australian

March 21, 2009 03:00am

KEVIN Rudd has fulfilled his election pledge to scrap Work Choices and establish a new industrial relations order, after a Senate deal with Family First's Steve Fielding yesterday ended a deadlock that threatened to stall the Government's workplace agenda.
After a day of tense negotiations, Julia Gillard persuaded Senator Fielding to allow her to keep her promise to define a small business, for purposes of unfair dismissal concessions, as having fewer than 15 workers, The Australian reports.

In return, the Deputy Prime Minister and Workplace Relations Minister agreed to impose an 18-month phase-in period, during which a tougher, 15 full-time-equivalent-worker definition will apply.
Under the deal, a small business will be defined by a simple head count of less than 15 workers - which was always Labor's policy - from January 1, 2011. All workers will regain the right to claim unfair dismissal that existed before the Howard government's Work Choices laws.

But small businesses with fewer than 15 staff will be exempt from claims from new employees for 12 months. The probation period for other employers will be six months.
Related Coverage

Ms Gillard hugged Senator Fielding after he agreed to support the legislative centrepiece of the Government's 2007 election platform.

The new laws will increase union workplace entry rights and provide for a centralised umpire, Fair Work Australia, to set minimum wages, settle industrial disputes and hear unfair dismissal claims.

An emotional Ms Gillard, who was in the Senate chamber with former ACTU secretary Greg Combet when the Bill passed, said Work Choices was "finally buried".

Ms Gillard said the Rudd Government had fulfilled its promise to get rid of the Howard government's industrial relation laws almost three years after they were introduced.

"Every step of the way we've had to fight against Liberal Party opposition. Even today, in the last hour in the Senate, the Liberal Party was twisting and turning and fighting to keep Work Choices," Ms Gillard said.

"Today, despite their opposition, we have buried Work Choices."

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,25218288-24636,00.html

FIVE days of political bickering over the Rudd Government's workplace legislation in the federal parliament this week focused almost entirely on the definition of a small business so some employers could get an extra six months' reprieve from unfair dismissal claims.

Almost lost among the war of words in this esoteric debate was the broader sweep of Julia Gillard's achievement as she succeeded yesterday in finally killing off the Howard government's Work Choices laws.

Just hours after the Deputy Prime Minister and Workplace Relations Minister won almost everything Labor wanted by gaining passage of the Fair Work Bill, business leaders protested that Family First senator Steve Fielding had been sidetracked.

"While the definition of a small business is important, it assumed a level of attention that has done an injustice to many key issues," Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Peter Anderson said.

The impression that was publicly conveyed as Malcolm Turnbull's Coalition team and senators Steve Fielding and Nick Xenophon wrestled over whether the definition of a small business should be less than 15, 20 or 25 workers, was that they were battling to win a significant exemption for the employers from claims of unfair dismissal.

But under Labor's revamp of Work Choices, even after a concession extracted by Senator Fielding in negotiations with Ms Gillard yesterday, the right to claim unfair dismissal is still to be fully restored to all workers.

When John Howard introduced the Work Choices laws in 2006, he removed unfair dismissal rights from most workers by exempting firms with fewer than 100 employees from claims.

The exemption meant up to 90per cent of the workforce was suddenly excluded from the unfair dismissal rules that Paul Keating introduced in 1993, prompting an outcry at the time.

Ms Gillard yesterday restored the Keating unfair dismissal model. Her only concession to small business was to extend the probation period for new workers in small businesses with fewer than 15 employees to 12 months. For businesses with more than 15 employees, the period before new workers can lodge dismissal claims will be six months.

Senator Fielding succeeded in persuading Ms Gillard that the 12-month threshold should be defined as "15 full-time employees" so that part-time workers are not included.

But Senator Fielding's minor victory will be short-lived. From January 2011, his deal allows that the 15-employee threshold will revert to Labor's policy of covering all staff at a worksite.

After three years of campaigning to overturn the Coalition's Work Choices regime, the union movement's leadership yesterday praised Labor's news laws as a major step forward for the nation.

http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/3558/218/

Press Banned from VP Al Gore's Keynote at CTIA
Written by Contributor Wireless and Mobile News
Friday, 20 March 2009

CTIA has banned the press from covering Al Gore's speech at 9:30 a.m. on April 3 a CTIA Wireless in Las Vegas.

The ban is at Gore's request. It appears Gore usually bans press from his talks.

The press ban seems impossible to carry out because so many tech-savvy attendees could be Twittering and SMS messaging the whole talk.

Here's what the description on the CTIA website says:

"Photography, recording, webcasting and any other reproduction of Vice President Al Gore's speaking appearance is strictly prohibited. VP Gore's keynote address is closed to the press."

Al Gore is an American environmental activist, author, business person, former politician, and former journalist. He served as the 45th Vice President of the United States.

Gore was involved in American politics for over three decades, serving first in the U.S. House of Representatives (1977-85) and later in the U.S. Senate (1985-93) (representing Tennessee) before becoming Vice President.

Since retiring from politics, Al Gore has been a tireless advocate for raising awareness on the dangers of global warming. He was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (together with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) in 2007. His documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, won an Academy Award in 2007.