“DE-CODING MAMMON: MONEY IN NEED OF REDEMPTION”

Canon Peter Dominy of the Church of England (rtd.) writes:
“This thesis is an attempt to understand the suspicion of money implied in Jesus' statement that it is impossible to serve both God and Mammon. I argue on the basis of Scripture, reason and tradition that problems associated with money do not arise simply from the way it is used, but from the nature of money itself.

This is argued in three sections.
• First I consider the history of money and in particular of the commodity theory of money.
• Second I consider the issues of debt and interest, of central concern in the Christian Scriptures.
• Finally I consider money through four different lenses: justice, value, desire and power. The argument as a whole leads up to the last of these. (emphasis added…ed)

As was already suggested by Jacques Ellul fifty years ago, I argue that money must be understood as a cosmic power to which we are all subject and which is in need of redemption. In the second and third sections I make suggestions as to what the redemption of money might look like. I summarise the argument in a final section, 'De-Coding Mammon'.”

The 250 page document “De-Coding Mammon: Money in Need of Redemption” is available online from the University of Exeter:  

THE HUMAN RIGHTS DELUSION

by Ian Wilson LL.B.
In general, academic law journals seldom carry articles critical of core paradigm assumptions of the Establishment. Human Rights is one of the ruling ideologies in academic law today. Thus it is pleasing to see published Peter Quinlan SC, “The Human Rights Delusion: A Defence of the Narrative Tradition of the Common Law”, (University of Notre Dame ALR, Vol 12, 2010).

Previously in On Target (Vol47No23) in my note “The Human Rights Myth” I mentioned his paper “On Witches and Unicorns, Part I” which contained the basics of the larger paper.
Quinlan examines the philosophical basis of human rightism and finds it lacking, and a failure as a lingua franca of public debate about justice and social ethics. The question therefore explored is whether law/justice comes first and rights second, or rights come first and law/justice second.
In brief Quinlan argues for the priority of law against measuring law against the rights of individuals. Proposing, as human rightism does, that some person, such as an asylum seeker has a right, “does not, ultimately say whether the exercise of that right is a good thing or a bad thing; all it identifies is a freedom of action or choice on the part of that person”.

Further, human rightism is based upon viewing individuals as self contained liberal atoms and this ontology undermines a healthy civic culture: ”It leaves each member of the community... as an atomised unit, alone to determine what is 'good', 'fair' or 'just' with no bridge for arriving at shared values or agreed 'forms of life'”.

Human rightism then is a form of liberalism that ultimately undermines the shared values necessary for a fully functioning civic culture. The alternative philosophy and jurisprudence, derived from the common law tradition is based upon principles of “social and cultural standards”, or the narrative tradition.
Unlike the simplistic positing of “rights”, “these principles and standards, in our tradition, are developed by a close analysis of the ends of a particular relationship (be it economic, nurturing, healing, conflict resolution or some other end), the texture of that relationship (be it equality, mutuality, vulnerability, power, control, disadvantage or impartiality) and how that relationship intersects with other relationships”. The common law tradition thus supplies a superior jurisprudence to human rightism.

Indeed an article in The Advertiser (June 18, 2011, p.67), “Shock at Immigrant 'Abuse' of Rights Law” begins by saying: “Human rights law is demolishing every aspect of Britain's immigration controls”, according to UK government papers. Labour's Human Rights Act is used each year by thousands of foreign criminals and failed asylum seekers, to gain entry into Britain. Section 8 “the right to a private or family life” is used as the aliens quickly get a partner who then has a child.

In the first three months of 2010, 99 foreign prisoners used this clause to defeat deportation; “One Bolivian was allowed to remain to care for his pet cat”. This is a legal culture which has rolled out of control – thanks to the ideology of human rights.  

REFUGEE LEGAL FUNDING AND ASYLUM SEEKER MADNESS

by Ian Wilson LL.B. The League Immigration Special:
Here is food for thought (“Refugee Lawyers Relying on Federal Funds”, The Australian, May 5, 2011, p.5). The Melbourne Refugee and Immigration Legal Centre, the “legal centre behind last year's High Court decision clearing the way for more litigation by asylum-seekers”, gets 68% ($1.29 million) of its revenue from the Department of Immigration. The High Court ruling has generated a massive wave of new migration challenges, which will cost the bleeding tax-payer millions of dollars.

The article continues:
“Together, Victoria and the Commonwealth provide 83% of the revenue that was available to the legal centre last year – or $1.58 million out of total revenue of $1.9 million. And while the centre provided help to 4178 people, it also engaged in an ambitious lobbying and advocacy program aimed at liberalising asylum laws, criticising government policy, changing public perceptions about asylum-seekers and running test cases. A representative of the centre flew to Geneva for a retreat and consultations organised by the UN Commissioner for Refugees.”

Need anything more be said! Lobby for the elimination of all their government funding! If the legal profession wants to achieve the aims listed above, let them pay for it out of their own pocket.  

THE FALL OF AMERICA

by Brian Simpson
By 2040, non-whites will become the majority in the United States. The Hispanic population in particular is exploding, growing by 43% over the past decade to reach 51 million. New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin recently stirred up dust on this issue when he expressed the very un-politically correct thought (through “a friend”) that black and Hispanic students, most from single-mother homes, cannot make the grade in education despite billions of dollars spent on incentives.

He suggests vocational and commercial education for these students. However he does not go on to consider whether even that will work. What happens to a nation when its core population component faces such a problem? Clearly, America will go the way of South America and Mexico.

Part of this failure has been due to the dominance of environmentalism over geneticism. A recent book by Bryon Caplan, “Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids”, based on twin studies and adoption studies, has concluded that nature wins over nurture. Applied to the national demographic question we can already see that American decline is forthcoming.  

TAX VOLCANOES, NOT CARBON!

by James Reed
While volcanoes continue to spew forth carbon emissions and stop plane flights, Gillard continues to press ahead with her carbon tax. Economic modelling (where would we be without it) predicts that eight black coalmines will close, resulting in 4,100 job losses in regional NSW and Queensland: and that is only in the first three years.

Ross Garnaut's proposals, Gillard's climate policy guru, has been criticised by Gillard's own energy commission for being ineffectual and too bureaucratic. (The Australian, June 16, 2011, p.1) But that is the real point of the whole exercise: centralisation of power through making a bigger government, a bigger bureaucracy and more money extracted from the productive economy to be put into government hands, to be wasted on politically correct policy agendas.  

THE ANSWER MY FRIEND, IS NOT BLOWING IN THE WIND

by James Reed
Wind farms have become sacred sites for the modern urban greenie. The frantic concern for “feel good”, quick fix “solutions” to complex environmental problems has led them to ignore the ill-effects of wind farms on the health of humans and the environment. People living near wind farms often suffer from sleep deprivation. Then there are the effects of low-frequency noise, or infrasound.

Some medical experts believe that infrasound could in the future be found to be the cause of a number of fatal diseases. (The Australian, June 15, 2011, p.1) Wind turbines, ironically, could be the new asbestos, or cigarettes. All of that then would have been to make green urbanites feel good. Never mind the scores of politically correct native bird and insect life meeting their end of days at the end of rotor blades.  

THE BEAUTIES AND THE MACHETES

by Peter Ewer
Shapely African girls in Melbourne were strutting their stuff for Melbourne's Miss South Sudan. (“Far from the War, Beauty Pageant Sparks Violence”, The Weekend Australian, April 30 – May 1, 2011, p.13) But the men-folk had other ideas and two African groups decided to hack into each other with machetes, before turning on police and attacking two officers.

But don't be too concerned as it's just a cultural thing. Deputy Police Commissioner Ken Jones said, “The youngsters coming out of there have known little else [but fighting] and it does take them a long time to make the transition”. If so, why couldn't the process of adaption have taken place in Africa, first?

A Miss Africa contest in Adelaide last year saw over 100 Africans brawling in the City of Churches' main entertainment precinct. But again, don't be too concerned, it's all just a multicultural thing and in the end everything is just going to be peaches and cream.  

LET US STAY OR WE WILL BURN THE HOUSE DOWN!

by James Reed
Ah! - the Villawood riots – it's not all bad. What else is an asylum seeker to do after having an application for refugee status rejected twice? Surely not return “home” on a flight. Why, just burn down the “house” and throw roof tiles at firemen trying to extinguish the flames – after all they may have intended to “come up here on the roof and steal our blankets, our water and everything”. So what's good about this? Well the chattering class is now saying that it will take a political miracle to save Julia Gillard's government from defeat at the next election.

People are also openly questioning that holiest of holies, the 1951 Refugee Convention. And the refugee lobby is giving us funnies: like at Easter wanting to deliver Easter eggs to detainees at the Curtin detention centre, even though most of them are Muslims. Could chocolate eggs be the new symbol of multicultural peace?  

THE GREAT POLICE GUN SALE DEBATE

by John Steele
South Australian police formerly used as a sidearm Smith and Wesson .357 calibre revolvers. In 2009 the police changed to the Smith and Wesson M&P40 semi automatic pistol. The revolvers were sold to the American public via trade-ins to Smith and Wesson. Victorian police did the same. But various anti-gun groups had objected to the ethics of this, arguing that it is contrary to the spirit of Australia's strict gun laws. Rather, these guns should have been melted down, these groups argue.

On the contrary, it is a pity that these guns were not available to the Australian public. Statistics have shown that “more guns, less crime holds” true. And where are the police when you need them? A group of youths gathered by the side of a friend's place in the side-street, drinking and urinating on his property. The police did not show up until after the event.

Rather, it was his Alsatian dog in the backyard that scared them away. What if they decided to rape his wife and daughter? Fight them off with his fists? The gun-ban crowd never answer the pro-gun argument about how one is to be protected if police don't make it in time, due to lack of resources or whatever. Presumably one is to die. Defending oneself - which for women and older people requires an equalising firearm – seems beyond their worldview. Until, of course, it happens to them.  

CHINA AND THE SAGA OF THE RESTLESS MIGRANT

by Brian Simpson
While the West, under the influence of the voodoo philosophy of political correctness, holds migrants as sacred, China too is sacred to the chattering class of Australia. But what happens when an irresistible force of political correctness meets an immovable object of political correctness?

Riot police armed with teargas and shotguns have restored order after severe rioting in Southern China. The rioters are primarily migrant workers who are badly mistreated, many working at least 10 hours a day, seven days a week, sleeping and eating in their factories. That there is a challenge here to dominant Western ideologies about the goodness of immigrationism and the goodness of China, is lost completely on our chattering class. Contradictions, paradoxes and antinomies are like water off of a duck's back.

HARMONY, SCHARMONY: ‘BAD FAITH’ OF MULTICULTURE OF GUILT

by Brian Simpson
Lawyer Dan Ryan wrote a brilliant little article about harmony (“Living in Harmony a Mixed Blessing,” The Weekend Australian, 12-13 March, 2011, p.3) Reflecting on Australia's own “Harmony Day” he says that “One day we may, like China, end up celebrating Harmony Day all year round!” China also promotes the ideal of harmony, but beneath the hype is the hard-core realty of censorship and suppression of dissent.

The same holds true in the multicultural West: “From Ottaway (Mark Steyn), and Vienna (Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff) to Amsterdam (Geerts Wilders) and Melbourne (Andrew Bolt), prominent journalists and politicians are put on trial not because they have breached any traditional, narrowly defined limits on free speech (defamation, incitement to violence, breach of national security) but because they have criticised or drawn unwelcome attention to some important cultural, religious or ethnic problem that should rightfully be subject to debate.

Perhaps in response to these legal constraints there has been a tendency by media not only to refrain from hard criticism of cultural, religious or ethnic problems, but to avoid even properly describing them. If it is decided that we must restrict speech or avoid discussing certain subjects to keep the peace over an apparently combustible population, might now not be the time to ask whether this type of harmony is worth celebrating?” As I see it, the ideal of harmony, like that of political correctness, has been borrowed from the Chinese communists. In this case the idea's origin exposes its incorrectness.  

PUBLISH AND PERISH: THE UNIVERSITIES AND TRUTH

by James Reed
One explanation for the decline of the university and the abandonment of the quest for truth relates to the existing ethos of “publish or perish”. Publication in peer-reviewed journals – that is journals controlled by the elite of the institutions who act as gate keepers – is the be-all and end-all.
These journals are all now ranked and promotions are decided by publishing these papers. It is well known that even in medicine most of these papers are false and the experimental results incapable of replication.

With thousands upon thousands of manuscripts competing to get into only a few thousand “A” level journals and about 25,000 peer reviewed journals all up (The Australian, May 4, 2011, p.40), it is clear why so much garbage is produced as academics scramble for the troughs to eat the small pickings of food, jumping over each other to do so. They make the pigs on a friend's farm look mild and mannered.

THE AMAZING SHRINKING LAW GRADUATE SALARY

by Ian Wilson LL.B.

A good reason not to become a lawyer: I will be honest, as a student I just drifted into law because I found the Marxism in the social sciences and arts so sickening. If I had had more drive and ambition and studied physics and chemistry in Matriculation, I would have done medicine or engineering. Today law graduates earn less than the median starting salaries of other graduates - $48,400 with the median salary being $49,000.

Dental graduates start on $75,000. (The Australian, June 17, 2011, p.13) Worse, earning capacity after the start will always lag behind fields like dentistry, medicine and engineering unless one can scale to the top of a very greasy pole. All in all, this is an excellent reason for young people not to be lawyers. There are enough lawyers: do something useful with your life to benefit humanity and society.  

AUSTRALIA'S FIRST WOMAN PM: DON'T WORRY JULIA, TIM STILL LOVES YOU!

by James Reed
The media is making much of Julia Gillard's low satisfaction rating. No, not her ‘satisfaction’ but rating as a PM. Kev the Dudd scored -19 before being knifed in the back, but Gillard now has -25. That is the worst on record. (The Australian, June 16, 2011, p.6) Gillard is so bad that she only narrowly leads hairy man Tony Abbott, 41 to 38% and Abbott is so unpopular that, as the boy next door put it to me, even his pet rabbit won't vote for him.

But Julia has been given a sacred task by the Masters of the Universe. Howard was to get rid of Aussie guns and undertake a massive Asian immigration program. Gillard's is the carbon tax. ‘Get that in girl and it will be a job well done’, has been written into her script. Now just imagine this process continuing on and on, generation after generation. In the end what will remain of life? What remains of life now…?  

LETTER TO THE PRESS

The Editor of The Australian 29th June 2011:
The recent visit to Australia, in connection with the extradition case against Charles Zentai, of Efraim Zuroff, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, has highlighted the weakness of the arguments for extradition. Judging by a WA News report (20/6), we can see that Zuroff made two fatal omissions in his argument that Zentai should face trial in Hungary.
He neglected to mention that the 1947 war crimes trial which found Zentai guilty was conducted by a communist state in a period of post-war political hysteria and that its findings are thus highly suspect.
The other omission is of the inescapable fact of law that it is quite impossible to guarantee Zentai a fair trial at this stage. Zuroff 's explanation that he wants 'justice achieved' shows that he cannot accept that Zentai may be innocent. Australia, however, should respect t he principle of the presumption of innocence in this case. Our national honour is at stake. We should not send an 89 year-old citizen to what could only be a show trial overseas.

- - Nigel Jackson, Belgrave, Victoria