JEREMY LEE 'S LATEST DVD: THE PROOF OF THE UNSEEN

by Betty Luks
I have just watched Jeremy Lee’s latest DVD. There are two presentations on it:
• “Retell the Story” - a 1999 presentation on world events, up to that time, by Jeremy to a group of young people in Brisbane,Queensland and -
• “A + B: Mending a Mortgaged World” a paper written by Jeremy and – because Jeremy managed to break a hip beforehand – first read by his sister Nancy at the 2009 Inverell Forum and now made into a film. . As Jeremy insists… how can the world possibly get out of financial debt by issuing more financial debt?

I want to acknowledge Nancy and Jeremy Lee’s commitment to, and years of defence of, their Christian faith and the fundamental importance of the individual’s freedom (balanced by accountability and responsibility). A freedom that flows from that faith in the grace of God in our lives.
Those who personally know me will not be in the least surprised that I hark back to Tolkien’s masterpiece “The Lord of the Rings” for just the right word-scene to express what I believe about these two people. Tolkien’s story is a modern parable written for just such a time in which we live.

Those who are familiar with the story will remember that after all their adventures involving the destruction of the Ring of Power, Samwise Gamgee (Sam) is to return home to The Shire and his family. His friend Frodo, who is leaving this world of mortal men, comforts Sam with these words:
“… Do not be too sad, Sam. You cannot always be torn in two. You will have to be one and whole, for many years. You have so much to enjoy and to be, and to do.”
What do those words mean – or should mean – to those of the Christian faith?

In his 1882 sermon “Faith, the Proof of the Unseen” Scotsman George MacDonald had this to say:

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

“We have been talking about faith ever since the Lord came. It is not exhausted yet; and God forbid that I should know yet what faith is; although I know a little what it is. I think the meaning of the phrase is this:
Faith is the foundation, the root, the underlying substance of hope. If you have any hope, it comes from some faith in you. Hope, you may say, is a bud upon the plant of faith, a bud from the root of faith; the flower is joy and peace.
Now the evidence of things not seen… the true meaning is the most profound fact in human history; it is the trial or the proving of things not seen...
Now upon that turns the life of every man, especially, perhaps, in the present day. This thing of faith means the whole recognized fellowship of man to God and His fellows; it is the right position of the human soul which is made to understand the truth - the right position of that soul towards the truth; that is faith, partly…
Much, much foolish talk has been uttered about faith…. but if I could stir up a single soul, instead of talking about the meaning even of the greatest things, to go and do the smallest duty, I should say that is the kind of duty for which Christ spent Himself.
Read His life wisely:
If you read His life wisely you will see that His constant effort is to turn a man's thought back to himself, and make him do a thing, and not talk about it… Faith is intended to put to the test the unseen world of truth, love, law, hope, redemption…”
Get the picture dear reader?
In their own lives, along with many, many other folk, both Nancy and Jeremy have demonstrated that in spite of all the forces arrayed against them, in spite of all the smears and attacks by public figures, and personal difficulties - and there have been many - they have been doing and being. The latest DVD is a witness to that fact.

Get your copies direct from them – and we urge you to plan to present copies to your friends and families – why not as Christmas presents? It is their future that is at stake.
Copies of the DVD - $25 posted - from: J and N Lee, P.O. Box 1234, Toowoomba Queensland 4350.

MONEY MATTERS THE PARAOHS AND HIGH PRIESTS

Thought this item was worth including in this week’s journal: Please note the author does caution the reader he may not have the proportions of taxes strictly accurate, but the overall picture does present a picture of where the western world is headed.
The website (dealing with matters of finance and investment etc.), is titled “Australian market news that matters, in 90 seconds or less,” and the article is “Pharaohs and High Priests” by Kris Sayce, Friday, 18 September 2009:

"The pharaoh collected a large amount of taxes that he used for large government projects such as building pyramids and temples. These taxes also supported the wages of skilled workers, scribes, artisans, and military personnel, as well as financing large projects done by peasants during times of flood.”

"The ancient Egyptians were quite fond of a bit of slavery too. You know slavery, it's where you work and work and work for someone else but you don't get to enjoy the fruits of your labour. Well, if Pharaohs Kevin Rudd and Ken Henry have their way with the upcoming tax stitch-up, chances are you'll be pushed even further into servitude.

Already, the average Australian worker (that's right, the average) has more than 20% of his or her salary confiscated by the government before it even hits their bank account. That's just the beginning. Think about it this way though. If you work a five-day week, every Monday, the work you do is to pay off the Federal government's income tax demand. Come Tuesday and you have to work half the day to pay off your superannuation guarantee. That's money which is guaranteed to be taken from you, but without any guarantee you'll get it back.

The rest of Tuesday and into Wednesday is taken up with paying off the GST and other levies and surcharges you find yourself paying for every day. By the time you get to the close of business on Wednesday you should have paid off a raft of other taxes, such as rates, vehicle registration, medicare levy, medicare surcharge (or private healthcare), payroll tax, and don't forget all the company taxes you ultimately pay for through higher prices for products and services.

So, as you roll into work on Thursday morning, it looks as though you're about to earn some cash for yourself... Not so fast bucko. If you've got a mortgage, chances are that's another 20-30% of your income going straight to banks, just to keep a roof over your head. Now, all that by my calculations brings us up to - about right now on a Friday morning.

That means you've got the rest of the day to work for yourself. But as if it couldn't get much worse there's one more hurdle for you - inflation.

By the time you finish work this week and get paid next week (if you're lucky) or next month, the dollars that you worked 40 hours for will actually be worth less to you than the dollars you worked for last month. Your average salary of $62,000 at the start of the year, adjusted for inflation will only be worth about $60,000 by the end of the year.

You need a 3% pay rise just to get back to breakeven. Talk about running just to stand still. So, at about the time of the two o'clock smoko this afternoon, the money you earn for the rest of the day is yours to earn and spend as you please. But don't worry, if that doesn't sound like much, because you've always got the credit card to fall back on. Out of interest, the total purchases on credit cards in July by Australians was $19.1 billion.
Look, play around with those numbers as much as you like. Chances are I'm not far off the mark.

And what does the mainstream press have to say about any of this? Nothing of course. The best they can come up with is rubbish like, "Rudd helped you hang onto your job." No! No he didn't. It was your money. You helped yourself hold on to your job. That was the money you worked for which was confiscated by the government and then divvied out to its favourite chums, are handed back as a bribe.

Rudd didn't help anyone. Remember, if you were lucky enough to get the $900 bribe, it actually cost you around $4,200 from your taxes to fund the Fairy Ruddfather's spending. Only, you haven't really paid for it yet, but you will. Because the government has just borrowed the money* and will demand that you pay it back. Even though you've gotten nothing for it, and didn't even ask to go into debt.

But in reality, the Fairy Ruddfather is just one of the Pharaohs. His co-conspirator is the real danger man. That's Treasury Secretary, Ken Henry. Without exaggeration, this man is one of the biggest threats to the individual rights and freedoms of all Australians.

The man is a menace. Maybe you think that's a bit harsh. After all, he is a public servant. And people aren't supposed to criticize public servants. Doubtless he would tell everyone he could be earning much more in the private sector but he's forsaken that to "do his bit" for society.

Let me explain what I mean when I label this man as the biggest threat to individual rights and freedom... Reading the story in yesterday's Australian Financial Review (AFR), your editor was stunned by two things. The reporting of the story, and the content.

To quote from the article:
"Dr Henry has invited about 20 representatives of key business and tax groups to attend a meeting in Sydney on October 15 to give feedback on reform directions to him and panel colleagues Heather Ridout and Greg Smith."

The article goes on to quote from the letter of invitation:
"This consultation session provides an opportunity for you to provide feedback on the reform directions that the review panel is considering. The views of stakeholders are important to the review panel in ensuring that the possible reforms take business circumstances into account and are sustainable." He's also planning on meeting with other accounting lobby groups.

Anything ridiculous strike you about consulting accountants about tax proposals? It's like asking a butcher if we should all become vegetarians. Tax groups are hardly likely to recommend abolishing taxes, or even making the tax code simpler. It's in their interest for it to be as complicated as possible.

But more than that, where's our invitation? Where's your invitation? I mean it's you that contributes every dollar to tax revenue whether it's direct or indirect. Of course, you'll be told, "this is much too complicated to trouble you with. You just get along and concentrate on working, that's a good citizen!"

It got us thinking. Have you ever watched someone talk to someone who's disabled in a wheelchair? In many cases they'll either talk to them slowly like a six year-old, as though loss of leg usage has someone affected their brain power, or they'll completely ignore them and talk to the carer instead.

Well, reading that story in the AFR yesterday it seems like the pollies view the humble taxpayer as nothing more than a cripple in a wheelchair... Just go to the Treasury website and take a look at the submissions. There's thousands of them. Special interest groups as far as the eye can see. Each backed by research and PhDs and tax experts by the dozen. Granted, there are also many submissions from individuals. Self funded retirees scared out of their wits at the prospect of Pharaoh Rudd and Henry swiping their life savings outright or by stealth...

Submissions from interested groups:
Thankfully the Tax Review panel received submissions like the 55 pages from the likes of the Australian Bankers Association.
Or the Australian Social Inclusion Board which laments, "Varied treatment of income, as well as exemptions, deductions and concessions available in the existing system provide opportunities for people to pay less than their share of tax."
That would involve the government deciding what the "share of tax" would be we assume. Or maybe the Australian Social Inclusion Board could quantify what the "share" should be.

Then there's the fund managers of course, AXA have chimed in with the unsurprising declaration that, "AXA believes that in order to achieve Australia's desired objectives in relation to self funded retirement, an increase in the Superannuation Guarantee is required."
And we shouldn't forget the trade unions who will do all they can to ensure you don't get to keep your hard earned wages: "This Review is ideally placed to consider a series of taxation measures to ensure that the top income earners in our community, who benefited from neo liberalism over the last three decades (while their share of total income doubled) are those in the forefront of new progressive taxation policies."

You've got to give the unions some credit. They may as well have quoted Wolfie Smith, "come the glorious revolution they'll be the first against the wall!" For 'progressive taxation' read, "give us what you've earned." It's nothing more than theft of your property (income).
Can we really believe that Pharaoh Henry will turn his back on the 'progressive' taxationists and declare taxation to be immoral? Of course not.
Pharaoh Henry has carte blanche to re-form (that's right re-form, not reform) the tax system. It will be a re-forming that ensures individual tax burdens are increased while special interest groups and lobby groups are thrown a few bones to keep them quiet.

Individuals will find a greater tax burden either directly or indirectly, and a destruction of their retirement savings. Increased public spending and borrowing by the government in your name with the demand that you pay for is nothing short of coercive rule by a bunch of megalomaniacal bunch of bureaucrats. We'll wait to see what Pharaoh Henry has to say when his report is published, but we can guarantee you're not going to like it.”

* Question: How can governments ‘borrow’ money from banks who are in reality bankrupt? Can you not see the absurdity of such a financial/banking ponzi scheme?...ed.

MURDERING MUM

by Ian Wilson LL.B.
1st September 2009 was a sad day for me. I started the day early at 6.30am with a read of the papers. I noted the headline “Mum Murder: Domestic Killings Hit Alarming Level” in the Adelaide Advertiser. Eight mothers have died in the past eight months and this is prompting a call for a state review into domestic violence killings. The stories often involved people over thirty and seem to be male on female violence.

I do not wish to minimise this problem but I believe that there is also unreported female to male domestic abuse, which is ignored. In the article one of the survivors of domestic abuse says: “It’s time people realised what domestic violence actually is – it’s not just a punch, it’s a punch to the heart and soul and very core of you that you cannot put into words”. That is also true for men.

I am helping a friend with his divorce. His ex-wife abused their five children but they live with her. The authorities did not believe his allegations of child abuse. He became disturbed recently about how his ex-wife would leave the kids unattended – the eldest would ring him. He put a private detective on her.
The surveillance CD sits next to me. She meets a middle eastern man who gives her drugs. She allows him to perform a sex act on her that was once illegal (all done in his van). She then drives home to smoke her dope. My friend was devastated. He was angry enough to perhaps do something silly but will stay at his mate’s place until he has gotten his emotions under control.
That is but a small slice of the dark, sordid, decadent, degenerate world out there.

Yes, sadly, mums are murdered, but so are dads, perhaps not physically but also through stabs to the heart and soul.

BLACK ARM-BAND HISTORY

by James Reed
Irish Australian and political correctness supremo, Tom Keneally, has been praised in the media as producing something of a masterpiece with his new history of Australia, "Australians" (Allen and Unwin, 2009). Actually the book is the story of Australian personalities and this makes the book marginally more interesting than Manning Clark’s inaccurate history – Keneally is definitely a capable writer and a skilled story-teller, so his work is far superior to Manning Clark. But his politics is the same: a sophisticated version of Paul Keating, oozing with anti-British sentiment and republicanism. And this is just the first volume: wait until we get up to multicultural Australia and Asianisation!

Kevin Rudd launched the Irish Australian’s book, Rudd towering over him in photographs (The Australian, 28/8/09, p.7). Rudd however did not tower over Tom in prose. In Rudd’s speech we find treasures such as “the love of history is, I believe, the handmaiden of country”. All meaningless garbage. What is he talking about? And the PM has called for a truce in the history wars, going beyond “the arid intellectual debates”. So, what does he want? The sort of politically correct history produced by the elites like Keneally?

Greg Melleuish (“Leave History Alone”, The Australian, 1/9/09, p.12) demolishes Rudd’s methodology and I think that of Keneally. It is not the role of history as a theoretical enterprise to tell of good and bad, to be prophets and give moral assessments. Historians rather should seek to understand the past. Storytelling can be left for novelists like Keneally and would-be “intellectuals” like Rudd.

THE END OF CIVILISATION?

by Brian Simpson
In his piece “An alien would say our planet isn’t worth invading” (The Weekend Australian Financial Review, 8-9/8/09, p.64) Peter Ruehl says: “In the US, whites will be a minority of the population by 2042, according to the Census Bureau. In Australia, when classes at the University of NSW end for the day, you’d have a hard time spotting any Caucasians because this seems to be where the entire youth population of South-East Asia is getting educated”.
What, a journalist concerned about the dispossession of the white race? Well, don’t jump to conclusions, for “we insist on continuing to be screwed up about race.” But what’s wrong with that? If race is “something so elementary and therefore senseless to argue about” then what’s wrong with white people being upset by paragraph one?

Ruehl goes on to talk about the Aboriginal question after this provocative introduction and leaves these questions hanging, as journalists always do. But I for one am disturbed about the planned destruction of my race by the forces of immigration, multiculturalism and globalisation.
Worse than the fall of Rome, this time it might ring in the end of human civilisation. We seem almost powerless to stop it because our elites welcome demise.
I hope that they outsmart themselves; that some unanticipated event occurs which they have not planned for. I hope for the awakening of our people. No Mr. Ruehl, our planet has already been overshot, over-exploited and invaded.

OH, FOR A LIFE LIKE THAT!

by James Reed
The city, at night. A restless sleep of a beehive that has a thrillion secrets. Wives cheating on husbands, husbands on wives. But not everywhere. There are pockets of resistance to the disease of modernity. Just 90 minutes drive from decadent Amsterdam, soon to be an Islamic capital through mass Third World immigration, is the town of Staphorts, an outpost of Calvinism.

Swearing is banned, women dress as women should and men act as men rather than apes (“Strict Religious Group Tolerates ‘Ungodly’ World”, The Advertiser, 29/8/09, p.68). The orthodox media, of course, sneers at such folk, but I for one have pangs of pain in my heart as if some existential thorn has been plunged through me. It could be different, it doesn’t have to end this way.

RUDD, CHINA AND THE ART OF SURRENDER

by James Reed
Oh mighty China, full of economically magical god-like beings, how best to win your economic love? What can Australia do to be “top of the pops”? Should we crawl over broken glass to win your love? Indeed, can we crawl enough?

Greg Rudd, the PM’s older brother, believes that dealing with China is best done through “whimsical humour and Aussie banter”, whereas his brother Kev 09 “makes his points about China in measured and often Chinese language”.
My goodness, how many times have we been told that Kev 09 can speak a bit of Chinese – enough to get him a blow drier, say, in Mandarin? The way the media rattles on about this, one would think that he was a Chinese scholar who wrote essays and books. But Rudd PM is not, his tortured prose being in long-suffering English. Even then, no one understands him.

Greg Rudd wants the “throw another prawn on the Barbie” approach. Seeing what his brother does, I would say that Big Kev’s approach is “throw another Aussie on the Barbie”.
According, though, to Greg Rudd, the best chance we have of saving the planet is “humour” (“Goodwill Offers a Rich Yield”, The Australian 15/8/09, p.10).

The joke is that Greg Rudd speaks of China’s 5000 years of civilisation as eclipsing our puny 221 years. Yet China has moved to cover up evidence of Nordic princely mummies discovered there, indicating a Nordic foundation to Chinese civilisation. Now that is a laugh.

THE HAPPY RABBI

by Peter Ewer
An orthodox synagogue in Bondi, “struggling financially” wanted to “dump” Rabbi Moshe Gutnick because “some members believed he was failing to meet their pastoral needs and the synagogue was struggling” (The Australian, 26/8/09, p.1).
The Rabbi though, succeeded in arguing a “life tenure” case before London’s Jewish Court. The Rabbi won a $1 million payout from the congregation. No comment is necessary.

MEANWHILE IN PORT AUGUSTA '

by James Reed
The cry of “racism” has gone out as various parties have said that police are turning a blind eye on the basis of race. Aboriginal gangs are bashing people. The police, when rung, ask “are they black?” Apparently the police are leaving warring tribes to fight it out, so some residents believe (“A City Under Siege”, The Advertiser, 5/9/09, p.15). Put this one on multiculturalisms “dark side”.

INDIA AND THE UNIVERSITIES

by James Reed
“We’re selling education not visas”, Julia Gillard has told India (The Australian, 3/9/08, p.5). With the latest wave of Asianisation, one would not be irrational to think otherwise. Indians now flood the streets of Australian cities, as waves of other Asians have done.
But wait, maybe there is hope that one or two university places might remain for Anglo Saxons. India is allowing Australian universities to open up on Indian soil (The Australian, 1/9/09, p.3).

This means that the universities can “sell out” over in India, without bringing Indian students here, to be exploited. If only the evil Australian universities could be rolled up and put on some huge ship, to sail away from us forever.

HO HUM MICHAEL MOORE NOW 'RIPS INTO CAPITALISM '

The UK Guardian thought fit to write on film producer Michael Moore's latest ‘flick’ with the headlines: 'Capitalism' Flick Rips into Crimes of Wall Street’ (9/9/09).
Source: https://www.alternet.org/story/142496/

We are told the documentary drew tumultuous applause at the Venice film festival after dragging “the viewer through a thicket of insurance scams, sub-prime bubbles and derivative trading so wilfully obfuscatory that even the experts can't explain how it works.”

“The big villain,” we are told “of course, is capitalism itself, which the film paints as a wily old philanderer intent on lining the pockets of the few at the expense of the many. America, enthuses a leaked Citibank report, is now a modern-day "plutonomy" where the top 1% of the population control 95% of the wealth.
Does Barack Obama's election spell an end to all this? The director has his doubts, pointing out that Goldman Sachs – depicted here as the principal agent of wickedness – was the largest private contributor to the Obama campaign.”

Ho hum… Michael is safe to produce another documentary another day. He seems to have done a good job in “ferreting out the human stories behind the headlines.”
All good dramatic stuff targeted to produce strong emotional responses from the audience. But, what about their understanding? What about the deeper truths?

Ah… Michael. Methinks more such 'ferreting out' would take you too close to the bloated, corrupted and evil seat of Sauronic-power for your own well-being and future ambitions.