Back from Wordpress.com

Dears Readers--

Since Friday the 13th, Wordpress.com has been behaving erratically regarding my account and Aetheric Journals there - suspending them arbitarily, fixing them when I complain, and then suspending them later on. As I find this rather annoying, I shall be laboriously attempting to transfer by hand the posts I have made at wordpress.com to my old Blogger address.

If they keep on stuffing me around I shall bid Wordpress.com good-day and return to Blogger.

Yours Sincerely,
Mild Colonial Boy.

A Bertie Wooster Musical Interlude

Bertie Wooster (Hugh Laurie) -- Minnie the Moocher



Bertie Wooster (Hugh Laurie) -- Sunny Disposish




Bertie Wooster (Hugh Laurie) -- Nagasaki

"A Parcel of Rogues" Musical Interlude

From We Can Do Better:

Orderly immigration or Organised invasion?

Would someone please fill us in about this claim that Australians have agreed to what seems to many to be an organised invasion of legal immigrants for the profit of the housing, finance and infrastructure moguls?

Sheridan writes,

"Paul Kelly argues in his The March of Patriots that there is a bargain between the Australian people and their governments. The Australian people accept a big, diverse and in many respects generous immigration program, so long as it is orderly and well controlled by the government." (Population growth lobbyist, Greg Sheridan, The Australian about his 'esteemed colleague' and fellow population-growth barracker, Paul Kelly of the Australian.)

I don't know anyone who was actually asked and the subject wasn't on the menu during the elections (which were mostly conducted by the mainstream press as usual).

The Corries -- Such a Parcel Of Rogues in the Nation



The Corries sing a poem of Robert Burns written in 1791 to protest the Acts of Union 1707. Some Scots, such as Robert Burns, saw it as an act of betrayal by a traitorous Political Elite handing over Scotland to alien masters.

Some Readers may see parallels to the Australia of today with it's Political Elites' handing Australia over to the whims of foreigners through the bipartisan policies of high Immigration and Multiculturalism at the expense of traditional Australia.

Such a Parcel Of Rogues in the Nation
by Robert Burns


Fareweel to a’ our Scottish fame,
Fareweel our ancient glory!
Fareweel ev’n to the Scottish name.
Sae famed in martial story!
Now Sark rins over Salway sands,
An’ Tweed rins to the ocean,
To mark where England’s province stands —
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

What force or guile could not subdue
Thro’ many warlike ages
Is wrought now by a coward few
For hireling traitor’s wages.
The English steel we could disdain,
Secure in valour’s station;
But English gold has been our bane —
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

O, would, or I had seen the day
That Treason thus could sell us,
My auld grey head had lien in clay
Wi’ Bruce and loyal Wallace!
But pith and power, till my last hour
I’ll mak this declaration :-
‘We’re bought and sold for English gold’—
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

Advertisment for Marital Harmony

(via Vintage Ads)

She knew that Drano would stop his accusing eyes.

William Lind on Political Correctness: Or why the Fifties were better

From William Lind's What is Political Correctness:

Most Americans look back on the 1950s as a good time. Our homes were safe, to the point where many people did not bother to lock their doors. Public schools were generally excellent, and their problems were things like talking in class and running in the halls. Most men treated women like ladies, and most ladies devoted their time and effort to making good homes, rearing their children well and helping their communities through volunteer work. Children grew up in two–parent households, and the mother was there to meet the child when he came home from school. Entertainment was something the whole family could enjoy.

What happened?

If a man from America of the 1950s were suddenly introduced into America in the 2000s, he would hardly recognize it as the same country. He would be in immediate danger of getting mugged, carjacked or worse, because he would not have learned to live in constant fear. He would not know that he shouldn’t go into certain parts of the city, that his car must not only be locked but equipped with an alarm, that he dare not go to sleep at night without locking the windows and bolting the doors – and setting the electronic security system.

If he brought his family with him, he and his wife would probably cheerfully pack their children off to the nearest public school. When the children came home in the afternoon and told them they had to go through a metal detector to get in the building, had been given some funny white powder by another kid and learned that homosexuality is normal and good, the parents would be uncomprehending.

In the office, the man might light up a cigarette, drop a reference to the “little lady,” and say he was happy to see the firm employing some Negroes in important positions. Any of those acts would earn a swift reprimand, and together they might get him fired.

When she went into the city to shop, the wife would put on a nice suit, hat, and possibly gloves. She would not understand why people stared, and mocked.

And when the whole family sat down after dinner and turned on the television, they would not understand how pornography from some sleazy, blank-fronted “Adults Only” kiosk had gotten on their set.

Were they able, our 1950s family would head back to the 1950s as fast as they could, with a gripping horror story to tell. Their story would be of a nation that had decayed and degenerated at a fantastic pace, moving in less than a half a century from the greatest country on earth to a Third World nation, overrun by crime, noise, drugs and dirt. The fall of Rome was graceful by comparison.

(Inspired by Heritage American's "Was Life better before the Revolution")

Another Refreshing (& Nourishing) Beverage Advertisement

Hmm B-V - just like Liquid Meat. How delightful.

(HT Vintage Ads)

A Refreshing Beverage Advertisment

(from Vintage Ads)

Legacy of the Left

Phillip Blond in the New Statesman article, Labour's betrayal of society (HT to Burke's Corner):

But the dominant legacy of the left is not this commonwealth of shared interests and hierarchical association: it is what is most destructive of society, state authoritarianism and private libertarianism. It is a condition and a philosophy most elegantly and perfectly attained by New Labour and all its acolytes and advocates.

How can this be? Why and how is the political philosophy that is most evidently social, and claims all righteousness and power as a result in fact so asocial and unilateral? The answer is that, for the most part, socialism is founded on liberalism and liberalism is founded on a hatred of society. Modern liberalism begins with Rousseau and Rousseau begins with the idea that our emergence into society constitutes our original imprisonment: "Man is born free but he is everywhere in chains." Society so conceived is fundamentally sinister because it compels man to inauthenticity. As such, the task of an individual in a society is to construe a settlement that protects individual will and insulates its subjective desires from the corrupting influence of others. Society for a liberal is valid only if it is composed of others exactly like himself. Rousseau invents the "general will" through which the individual, in obeying others, is obeying only himself because all have become the same.

But this autonomy can be protected only if others do not violate its bounds; and this is a role that can be played by the state only. The state then becomes the great policer and equaliser of humanity, and through the general will it must reconcile each individual with every other. As such, the state must strip society and people of all differential ties, beliefs and values in order to ensure equality and fairness; naked and denuded we now stand equal and alone before the state as the ultimate guarantor of our freedom.

Thus does modern liberalism underwrite all the great totalitarianisms of our age, from the terror of revolutionary France to the Cultural Revolution of Mao in China.

A rampant individualism demands a community exactly like itself. This repressive lineage passes directly into the left through Marx, and after Marx the left became both statist and individualist - a disastrous dialectic that has progressively and aggressively erased culture, custom, difference and ultimately society itself. "Socialism" so conceived is indeed the enemy of society; it despises the world as it is and seeks instead to eradicate differential values and tradition, in the mistaken belief that we must all be the same if we are to be free.