OUR QUEEN 'S SADNESS AT BUSHFIRE DISASTER

The Queen of Australia, Queen Elizabeth II, has expressed shock at the devastating bushfires that have torn through southern Australia and offered her condolences to the families of those who have been killed.

"I was shocked and saddened to learn of the terrible toll being exacted by the fires this weekend," the Queen said in a statement released last Sunday.
"I send my heartfelt condolences to the families of all those who have died and my deep sympathy to the many that have lost their homes in this disaster. On so dreadful an occasion as this for Australia, the fire-fighters and other emergency services have been making extraordinary efforts to contain the situation and tend to those who have been injured. Please also convey to them my renewed admiration for all that they are doing."

Buckingham Palace has announced Her Majesty will make a private donation to the bushfire fund-raising appeal.
More than 1800 homes have been destroyed and 7,000 people have been left homeless. The fires have burned 1,100 square miles of land, according to the Victoria Country Fire Authority and the final death toll is expected to exceed 200 as rescuers continue to search burnt-out settlements.

ROYAL COMMISSION TO BE CALLED

from David Flint 's Opinion Column
The Premier of Victoria, Mr. John Brumby, has announced a Royal Commission will be held into the bushfires which have so devastated the State. He told the ABC 'We want to put in place whatever arrangements are necessary to ensure nothing like this ever happens again in our state.''

A Royal Commissioner has considerable powers, but must act within the "Terms of Reference" of the Commission. The Commission will be established by the Governor on the advice of the Victorian Government. They are considered to be non-political and independent, and this is reinforced by their appointment by the Crown acting on advice. It sometimes occurs that the findings of a Royal Commission do not reflect well on the government which decided to appoint it.

Royal Commissions are called to look into matters of great importance. They are usually chaired by a judge or former judge. Some Chief Justices take the view that since a Royal Commission is an administrative body, judges should not take part. They adopt a strict interpretation of the separation of powers doctrine.

The Premier also said "There is clear evidence now that the climate is becoming more extreme. Those people that doubted it... we have had temperatures of 48 degrees.'' He had earlier said that Victoria may need to review its bushfire policy of "stay and defend or leave early" in light of the appalling death toll.

The head of CSIRO's bushfires research unit, Phil Cheney, told The Australian on 10 February the Royal Commission should look at fuel reduction policies. He said that while temperatures rising several degrees might increase the fire danger by one or 2 per cent, doubling the fuel load doubled the threat.

"It's very difficult to protect a home and life in tall forest," Mr Cheney said. "If fuel reduction was carried out around homes and in adjacent forests there was an excellent chance of people staying and protecting themselves and their homes."
He said fuel reduction practices had changed dramatically in the past 20 to 30 years.

ANOTHER 'ASH WEDNESDAY - ONLY WORSE

by Betty Luks
Because of the wonders of technology, I was able to quickly refer to Eric Butler 's comments on the horrendous 1983 bush fires. Those fires caused such destruction and loss of life in both South Australia and Victoria.
At the time, he wrote of the 'combination of long drought, searing winds, the stupidity and the acts of either sick or subversive arsonists that 'resulted in one of the greatest natural disasters in Australian history. '
Eric and Elma Butler and their families became very involved in the 'helping, healing and restoration of their own rural community around Panton Hill in Victoria. What Eric had to say about the volunteer spirit of the Australian people has stayed with me and I was reminded of him when I heard a CFA chap on radio - encouraging victims of the recent fires to 'bond together and help one another to regain their lives once more.

Realism required for natural disaster:
Eric continued: 'If the fire disaster has done nothing else, it has provided encouraging evidence that the great majority of those Anglo-Saxon-Celtic people whom the Grassby's have smeared, are basically decent, prepared to make every effort to help their fellows in a disaster.

Young men, many of them married with families, who lost their lives as volunteers in the unique Australian fire fighting services have demonstrated that type of service to their fellows, which should put most politicians to shame. Television has at least shown all Australians that those who have fought, suffered and in many cases, lost all their material possessions, are capable of great courage and quiet dignity. '

You were right Eric. They are in fact a special breed a British-European breed!

Eric wrote of another important matter:
'The stupendous financial figures give some indication of the vast destruction of national wealth - houses, furniture, personal belongings including clothing, pastures and stock. But such is the enormous credit of Australia, its productive capacity, that a realistic financial policy by the Federal Government would enable much of the destruction to be overcome in relatively short time.

'We applaud the views expressed by spokesmen for the Senate Integrity teams, who challenge both Mr. Fraser and Mr. Hawke to treat Australian refugees from the bush fires as generously as Vietnamese coming into the country are treated. There is growing resentment as Australians see Vietnamese driving around in late model cars, well dressed, and obtaining homes on terms denied to Australians.

'Integrity spokesmen are calling for a complete moratorium on all rural debt until the drought breaks and fire losses are overcome. They point out that while the Federal Government is donating $600,000, the same government has made hundreds of thousands of dollars available in the form of foreign aid to Communist and pro-Communist governments.

"What we need is some of this foreign aid right here in Australia for our own desperate people. A mere $10 million would enable all fire victims to be reasonably re-housed," they are stressing. Some $4 to $6 million has been since promised by Mr. Fraser, but this is to go to State Governments. Will you write to local papers, businessmen, your political representative NOW and insist the real credit of Australia must be used to help the victims of the latest tragedy get back on their feet?

It is time the national credit of this nation was used by and for the people of this nation, not just for a private financial system.

How true Eric when you continued:
'While it is right and proper that individual Australians should have the opportunity to demonstrate their deep compassion for their fellows with a flood of every kind of assistance, a financial policy by the government would make the task of adequate reconstruction quickly possible.
If the drought and fires do direct attention to some realities, then out of destruction may come a much quicker regeneration process for Australia. '

ECONOMIC OUTLOOK ISN 'T ALL THAT BAD

Martin Hattersley, Canada:
After listening to economists, executives and politicians wail about the global economy, we need a dose of realism to dispel the myths that make today's situation so discouraging. So here goes:

- The economy is not collapsing. We are just as able to grow food, build houses and automobiles, as we were a year ago. What is collapsing is the system of payments by which that production is made available to people who want to enjoy it.

- There is nothing mysterious about the way our money system behaves. Money obeys all the normal rules of arithmetic. Our Gross National Product is directly connected to the quantity of dollars in circulation at any time. If the quantity is reduced, say by a shortage of credit, then the amount of production will also shrink and bankruptcies and unnecessary poverty result.

- Government deficits are not a bad thing. They are sometimes needed to give citizens a decent standard of living.

- It's wrong to assume that Canada's banks are stable and sound. The reserves of legal money held by banks to cover their obligations to customers are a minute fraction of the amounts they owe. Banking is a confidence game that can break down at any time. It only takes a few bad debts for the whole card house to start tumbling down. That's what is going on at the moment.

- Everyone doesn't have to be working to get an income. The really rich get most of their incomes not from the jobs they do, but from the property and investments they own. Society's unearned income -- who gets it and why -- is as important to a sound and prosperous economy as what comes in a pay packet.

- Creating money does not necessarily involve creating debt. Coins come into existence simply by stamping an image on pieces of metal. When you think how much of your taxes are going to pay interest on borrowed money that the government could have printed, one wonders why there isn't a taxpayers' revolt.

- Governments printing money does not guarantee inflation. Money is like the transmission fluid in a car -- it doesn't create any energy itself, but it transmits the energy of the motor to the wheels, which makes movement possible. If there's too little fluid, the vehicle will go in stops and starts just like our present economy. Too much fluid, and its power is diluted. Dollars are dollars no matter where they come from, and as long as there is proper control of the overall amount in circulation, inflation and deflation need not be problems.

- The present situation will not work itself out soon. History shows that the one effective way of getting out of a depression is by the incredibly unpleasant, dangerous and wasteful route of re-armament and war, when normal rules of "prudent finance" are suspended. Do we want that? When we find ourselves in a hole, as we are today, the first thing to do is to stop digging. The next, is to find a way out.

- Economic systems have been created by man, and they should serve public welfare, rather than private greed.

Today's "competitive, free-enterprise system," so favoured by organizations such as Steven Harper's National Citizens' Coalition, is nothing but a blueprint to establish the Kingdom of Hell on Earth. We can do better.
So let's take off the blinkers and see the situation as it really is -- not nearly as bad as the financial experts would have you believe.

As William Aberhart used to say in the Great Depression, "If you haven't suffered enough, it's your God-given right to suffer some more."

Signed: Martin Hattersley, former leader, Social Credit Party of Alberta, Edmonton, The Edmonton Journal, Canada: 8/2/2009.

THE CURRENT SO-CALLED BANKING 'CRISIS '

by Wallace Klinck, Canada
C.H. Douglas described history as "crystallized policy. The credit system is an instrument of confiscation, centralisation and control of human activity. We can only use and develop our resources for production and consumption by permission of the banking system which has appropriated to itself, through a monopoly of credit issue and cancellation, the power to dictate both production and consumption, while all the time acquiring increasing economic and political control - leading to eventual amalgamation into a de-facto world state.

This conjures up the frightful spectre of a world dictatorship. Yet many people are lured by the prospect of solving problems by making them bigger. Many public spirited and informed individuals have sensed the malignant nature of these world-encompassing powers.

The following is a brief mini-essay that I forwarded to all Canadian Members of Parliament:
The so-called financial "crisis" derives from a faulty financial price-system which generates consumer prices more rapidly than it distributes incomes - forcing consumers to rely increasingly on creation of new money issued as repayable debt in the form of bank loans. When liquidity becomes eroded to the point where borrowing can no longer be sustained the whole financial edifice collapses like a deck of cards. Mass foreclosure which ensues reveals the confiscatory nature of the financial system, manifesting a tragedy of human effort.

In a free society and rational economic system, producers should get their money from consumers. Subsidizing producers so that they can create more goods for which consumers lack income to purchase is lunacy. What is needed is enhancement of consumer income to balance aggregate purchasing power, with aggregate prices, in each cycle of production. This would place consumers in a position to determine the viability of producers. The physical cost of production is fully met as production progresses. There should be no aggregate need for consumer debt whatsoever.

If society had followed the Social Credit policy of C. H. Douglas, who advocated Consumer Dividends and Compensated Retail Prices instead of the Fabian Socialist Social Debt policy of the late economist John Maynard Keynes, none of the current madness would have occurred. We would be enjoying increasing prosperity with falling prices and increasing leisure, as should be the case in any modern and civilized society.

A financial system which issues money only as interest-bearing debt in combination with a concentrated and controlled public media (the two are concentric) are the main instruments employed to effect this ominous policy of centralised control of society. The credit system is doing essentially what it has always done - except that we are now dealing with a greater magnitude of circumstances.
By making society dependent upon bank credit and ensuring that an expanding economy generates a growing disparity between financial costs created and incomes liberated to meet those financial costs, society must fall deeper and deeper into debt.

Unliquidated costs increasingly inflationary:
It could not continue were it not for the fact that unsustainable private debts are transmuted into funded permanent state debt. Of course an accumulation of unliquidated costs is increasingly inflationary. The balanced budget is a mathematical impossibility in the context of the present financial system. When governments more recently attempted to contain state debt, the private sector had to meet the impossible task of bearing this load. Eventually, liquidity became so diluted that the private sector could no longer sustain the debt-load - and we see the results.

Policy of the Higher Powers:
The higher powers must have known full well what they were doing and that the "crisis" will be used to implement more far-reaching measures of controlling people and nations. Our Federal (Canadian) "Conservative" Government has just instituted a "temporary" five-year deficit. Of course the banks and those around them will be the source of the "bailout" credits.

So, are we attempting to solve a problem of excessive debt by applying more of the same from the original source of the problem, assumed in this case by the state? This is pure Keynesism in action and, as intended, will end in increasing the power of the state over the citizen. How long the current foreclosure of the assets of the nations will continue is not certain and depends upon how long it takes for this confiscatory process to sufficiently liquidate the accumulated debt - in accordance with the policy of the financial powers.

Comment:
Australians will recognise the Fabian Socialist pedigree of the policies PM Rudd is pursuing in this country. The further tragedy is neither the Opposition nor the Independents have any knowledge or understanding of an alternate system.

Isn 't it time you informed them? Encourage them to download the Social Dynamics videos from the League website. Even if they secretly watch the videos better they watch them than not!

Important little essay for this time in history: 'The Just Tax by Geoffrey Dobbs.
In a 1994 postscript Geoffrey Dobbs explained how he, a forest botanist, was invited in 1952 to write for a leading theological journal 'Theology ', usually written and read by professional clergy. It seems the theological world was ransacked for someone who had any ideas on the subject but no one could be found.

Then, as now, while there was any amount of passionate discussion in the churches about the distribution of the taxation levied, whereas, the moral nature of taxation itself, or of the money of which it consists, was scarcely even then considered in the light of Christian theology. With the recent 'financial crisis it could be the Church leaders are also having 'a reality check '.

Copies of the updated version of 'The Just Tax are available for $4.00 plus postage.

BISHOP RICHARD WILLIAMSON 'S OWN 'FIRE-STORM '

Who would have thought such a storm would rage because this Bishop was reinstated into the Roman Catholic Church?

Spiegel Interview with Bishop Richard Williamson: 'I Will Not Travel to Auschwitz'
Bishop Richard Williamson's denial of the Holocaust has done serious damage to the Catholic Church. In an e-mail and fax exchange with SPIEGEL, the ultra-conservative bishop says that he is willing to "review the historical evidence." (RePortersNoteBook@yahoogroups.comemail).

SPIEGEL: The Vatican is demanding that you retract your denial of the Holocaust, and it is threatening to not allow you to resume your activities as a bishop. How will you react?
Williamson: Throughout my life, I have always sought the truth. That is why I converted to Catholicism and became a priest. And now I can only say something, the truth of which I am convinced. Because I realize that there are many honest and intelligent people who think differently, I must now review the historical evidence once again.
I said the same thing in my interview with Swedish television: Historical evidence is at issue, not emotions. And if I find this evidence, I will correct myself. But that will take time.

SPIEGEL: How can an educated Catholic deny the Holocaust?
Williamson: I addressed the subject in the 1980s. I had read various writings at the time. I cited the Leuchter report (Der Spiegel eds. note: a debunked theory produced in the 1980s claiming erroneously that the Nazi gas chambers were technically impractical) in the interview, and it seemed plausible to me. Now I am told that it has been scientifically refuted. I plan now to look into it.

SPIEGEL: You could travel to Auschwitz yourself.
Williamson: No, I will not travel to Auschwitz. I've ordered the book by Jean-Claude Pressac. It's called "Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers." A printout is now being sent to me, and I will read it and study it.

SPIEGEL: The Society of Saint Pius X has set an ultimatum for the end of February. Are you not risking a break with the Brotherhood?
Williamson: In the Old Testament, the Prophet Jonah tells the sailors when their ship is in distress: "Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the sea be calm unto you: for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you." The Society has a religious mission that is suffering because of me. I will now examine the historic evidence. If I do not find it convincing, I will do everything in my power to avoid inflicting any further harm on the Church and the Society.

SPIEGEL: What does the repeal of the excommunication by Pope Benedict XVI mean to you?
Williamson: We just want to be Catholic, nothing else. We have not developed our own teachings, but are merely preserving the things that the Church has always taught and practiced. And in the sixties and seventies, when everything was changed in the name of this Council (eds. note: the Second Vatican Council), it was suddenly a scandal. As a result, we were forced to the margins of the church, and now that empty churches and an aging clergy make it clear that these changes were a failure, we are returning to the centre. That's the way it is for us conservatives: we are proved right, as long as we wait long enough.

SPIEGEL: People at the Vatican claimed that they didn't know you. Is that true?
Williamson: Most contacts pass through Bishop Fellay and the General Council, of which I am not a member. But three of us four bishops attended a private dinner with Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos in 2000. It was more about getting to know each other, but we certainly talked about theological issues and even a bit of philosophy. The cardinal was very friendly.

SPIEGEL: The Second Vatican Council counts as one of the great achievements of the Catholic Church. Why do you not fully recognize it?
Williamson: It is absolutely unclear what we are supposed to recognize. An important document is called "Gaudium et spes," or Joy and Hope. In it, the writers rhapsodize about the ability of mass tourism to bring people together.
But one can hardly expect a conservative society to embrace package tours. It discusses fears and hardships. And then a nuclear war between the superpowers is mentioned. You see, much of this is already outdated. These Council documents are always ambiguous.
Because no one knew what exactly this was supposed to mean, everyone started doing as he wished shortly after the Council. This has resulted in this theological chaos we have today. What are we supposed to recognize, the ambiguity or the chaos?

SPIEGEL: Are you actually aware that you are dividing the Church with your extreme views?
Williamson: Only violation of the dogmas, that is, the infallible principles, destroys faith. The Second Vatican Council declared that it would proclaim no new dogmas. Today the liberal bishops act as though it were some sort of all-encompassing super-dogma, and they use it as justification for a dictatorship of relativism. This contradicts the texts of the Council.

SPIEGEL: Your position on Judaism is consistently anti-Semitic.
Williamson: St. Paul put it this way: The Jews are beloved for the sake of Our Father, but our enemies for the sake of the Gospel.

SPIEGEL: Do you seriously intend to use Catholic tradition and the Bible to justify your anti-Semitism?
Williamson: Anti-Semitism means many things today, for instance, when one criticises the Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip. The Church has always understood the definition of anti-Semitism to be the rejection of Jews because of their Jewish roots. This is condemned by the Church. Incidentally, this is self-evident in a religion whose founders and all-important individuals in its early history were Jews. But it was also clear, because of the large number of Jewish Christians in early Christianity, that all men need Christ for their salvation -- all men, including the Jews.

SPIEGEL: The Pope will travel to Israel soon, where he plans to visit the Holocaust Memorial. Are you also opposed to this?
Williamson: Making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land is a great joy for Christians. I wish the Holy Father all the best on his journey. What troubles me about Yad Vashem is that Pope Pius XII is attacked there, even though no one saved more Jews during the Nazi period than he did to protect them against arrest. These facts have been distorted to mean exactly the opposite.
Otherwise, I hope that the Pope will also have an eye and a heart for the women and children who were injured in the Gaza Strip, and that he will speak out in support of the Christian population in Bethlehem, which is now walled in.

SPIEGEL: Your statements have caused great injury and outrage in the Jewish world. Why don't you apologize?
Williamson: If I realize that I have made an error, I will apologise. I ask every human being to believe me when I say that I did not deliberately say anything untrue. I was convinced that my comments were accurate, based on my research in the 1980s. Now I must review everything again and look at the evidence.

SPIEGEL: Do you at least recognise universal human rights?
Williamson: When human rights were declared in France, hundreds of thousands were killed throughout France. Where human rights are considered an objective order for the state to implement, there are constantly anti-Christian policies.
When it comes to preserving the individual's freedom of conscience against the democratic state, then human rights perform an important function.
The individual needs these rights against a country that behaves like a Leviathan. But the Christian concept of the state is a different one, so that the Christian theories of human rights emphasize that freedom is not an end in itself. The point is not freedom from something, but freedom for something. For good.

SPIEGEL: Your statements and the lifting of your excommunication have triggered protests worldwide. Can you understand this?
Williamson: A single interview on Swedish television has dominated the news for weeks in Germany. Yes, it does surprise me. Is this the case with all violations of the law in Germany? Hardly. No, I am only the tool here, so that action can be taken against the SSPX and the Pope. Apparently Germany's leftist Catholicism has not yet forgiven Ratzinger for becoming Pope.

Interview conducted by Peter Wensierski and Steffen Winter. Interview conducted in German and translated into English by Christopher Sultan.
Original source: https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,606164,00.html