Overloading Australia Update for Politicians: Why New Prime Minister says No to ‘Big Australia’

27 June 2010
by Mark O'Connor, author Overloading Australia

The new PM Julia Gillard's views on population growth were not known till this morning (27 June) when she is reported as rejecting the notion of "Big Australia".

She promises a significant reduction in immigration, and has renamed the Minister for Population Tony Burke (whom Rudd appointed a few months ago in what was probably a piece of window dressing). In future he is to be called " the Minister for Sustainable Population".

Members of Sustainable Population Australia remain cautious, with comments on Australia's on-line population forum including "At last a Prime minister who can read opinion polls" and "She talks the talk. It won't be long until we see whether she can walk the walk..." and "Might be rhetoric, but good to see some change in the stance."

However it is already clear (see the Age article below) that Julia Gillard is aware of public resistance to population growth; and we will learn in time if she is genuinely sympathetic to the public mood.

In her ability to "read the polls" Julia seems ahead of some of the commentators, who continue to deny that Rudd's "big Australia" rhetoric was a reason the public turned against him so decisively. Robert Boni comments on population forum:

I cannot believe that the mass media analysis on Kevin Rudd's popularity free fall in the last couple of months, have all skipped population as a reason, and blamed his problems on an array of other issues. It's like some sort of conspiracy. It is unbelievable that his attitude on population had nothing to do with his popularity problems.

An ABC’s of Ecology Systems Approach to a Sui Generis Agriculture Mythology: When did we Become We?

Ubuntu Brief of Amicus Curiae: Bushido Dischordian Futilitarian In Support Of:

Radical Honesty Common Sense Population Policy Social Contract Interpretations of Promotion of National Unity & Reconciliation Act, 34 of 1995

Excerpts: Brincibia SumMary of a Bushido Dischhordian Futilitarian

New tribalists believe in the New Tribal Revolution outlined in the Ishmael series by Daniel Quinn, meaning that the tribe fulfills an important role in human life, and that the dissolution of tribalism with the spread of civilization has come to threaten the very survival of the species. New tribalists seek to mimic indigenous peoples by organizing their own "tribes" based on underlying principles gleaned from ethnology and anthropological fieldwork.

An important expression of this movement is the trend towards modern eco-villages. Ecoregional Democracy and peace movement advocates are also often new tribalists as well, as the groups share common ideals.

New Australian Political Party will campaign on Stopping Australia's Population Growth

How many is too many? Australia's people problem

William Burke, National Times
February 18, 2010

Our high population growth, so beloved of both major parties, is straining resources and has turned the great Australian dream into a nightmare of haves and have-nots, says William Bourke.

Our high population growth, so beloved of both major parties, is straining resources and has turned the great Australian dream into a nightmare of haves and have-nots, says William Bourke.

Australia is an open and tolerant country with a rich history in migration. But it is an illusion that Australia can absorb many more millions.

Even a basic assessment shows that Australia's more recent high population growth causes or exacerbates many of our major economic, environmental and social problems. Yet successive federal governments push it higher and higher.

There is no consulting the electorate. No real democracy. Most of our population growth is driven by a high level of immigration. This is something that the federal government directly controls.

We know that Kevin Rudd favours "a big Australia", with a population of 36 million by 2050. It was only a few years ago that the official 2050 projection was 23, then 28 million. The current growth rate would actually take us to about 45 million. What happens after 2050 on this slippery slope?

While You Were Sleeping… The Economy Collapsed

There are a number of half truths and financial fantasies floating around the U.S. today, which may explain why some have decided to throw caution to the wind, adopting a cult-like blind faith in the “unsinkable” American economy. I suspect that the consequences for this error in judgment will become quite clear to most by the end of next year, but until then, let’s examine our current situation, what the government has to say about it, and the reality they wish to gloss over.

It’s nice to maintain a rosy outlook on the economic situation we face. It makes us feel safe. The fact is, though, that we are far from safe, and denying the problem will not make it go away. The MSM’s main drive, at least for now, is to promote a sense of well being. Some of them do it because they believe the markets are driven by psychology and that by creating a positive atmosphere, we can somehow make our troubles disappear through shear force of will. Of course, this is an absurd notion.

Others ignore the facts and spin ideas of recovery deliberately and with malicious intent, because they know comfortable people are not alert, and those that are not alert are easy to surprise, and surprised people are easy to control.

“Operation Production” of Global Slum Dwellers; perhaps future Criminals & Terrorists?

Report reveals global slum crisis

BBC News | Friday, 16 June 2006, 11:47 GMT

Slums have existed in what is now the developed world since the Industrial Revolution. Currently, about 36% of Africa's population lives in urban areas but the continent is experiencing urbanisation rates twice as high as those seen during the West's industrial revolution. It is predicted that Africa will be an urban continent by 2030. The UK government's Commission for Africa concluding report warned: “These slums are filled with an increasingly youthful population, unemployed and disaffected. Africa's cities are becoming a powder keg of potential instability and discontent.” -- “Operation Production” of Global Slum Dwellers; perhaps future Criminals & Terrorists?

Slum-dwellers who make up a third of the world's urban population often live no better - if not worse - than rural people, a United Nations report says.

Anna Tibaijuka, head of the UN Habitat agency, urged governments and donors to take more seriously the problems of at least a billion people.

Worst hit is Sub-Saharan Africa where 72% of urban inhabitants live in slums rising to nearly 100% in some states.

If no action is taken, the world's slum population could rise to 1.4bn by 2020.

Habitat - the UN's human settlements programme - is hosting an Urban Forum in Vancouver next week on how to stem the crisis.

Its report is billed as a ground-breaking survey of urban growth, making a clear distinction between slum and non-slum development for the first time in UN history.

According to Dr Tibaijuka, speaking to reporters in London, slum-dwellers suffer a double disadvantage: they both live in misery and their plight often goes unreported given the traditional focus on the rural poor in the developing world.

[Erik Prince, Blackwater & XE] Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy...

[Erik Prince, Blackwater & XE] Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy

Vanity Fair, January 2010

By Adam Ciralsky

Erik Prince, founder of the Blackwater security firm (recently renamed Xe), at the company’s Virginia offices. Photograph by Nigel Parry.

Erik Prince, recently outed as a participant in a C.I.A. assassination program, has gained notoriety as head of the military-contracting juggernaut Blackwater, a company dogged by a grand-jury investigation, bribery accusations, and the voluntary-manslaughter trial of five ex-employees, set for next month. Lashing back at his critics, the wealthy former navy seal takes the author inside his operation in the U.S. and Afghanistan, revealing the role he’s been playing in America’s war on terror.

“I put myself and my company at the C.I.A.’s disposal for some very risky missions,” says Erik Prince as he surveys his heavily fortified, 7,000-acre compound in rural Moyock, North Carolina. “But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus.” Prince—the founder of Blackwater, the world’s most notorious private military contractor—is royally steamed. He wants to vent. And he wants you to hear him vent.

Erik Prince has an image problem—the kind that’s impervious to a Madison Avenue makeover. The 40-year-old heir to a Michigan auto-parts fortune, and a former navy seal, he has had the distinction of being vilified recently both in life and in art. In Washington, Prince has become a scapegoat for some of the Bush administration’s misadventures in Iraq—though Blackwater’s own deeds have also come in for withering criticism. Congressmen and lawyers, human-rights groups and pundits, have described Prince as a war profiteer, one who has assembled a rogue fighting force capable of toppling governments. His employees have been repeatedly accused of using excessive, even deadly force in Iraq; many Iraqis, in fact, have died during encounters with Blackwater. And in November, as a North Carolina grand jury was considering a raft of charges against the company, as a half-dozen civil suits were brewing in Virginia, and as five former Blackwater staffers were preparing for trial for their roles in the deaths of 17 Iraqis, The New York Times reported in a page-one story that Prince’s firm, in the aftermath of the tragedy, had sought to bribe Iraqi officials for their compliance, charges which Prince calls “lies … undocumented, unsubstantiated [and] anonymous.” (So infamous is the Blackwater brand that even the Taliban have floated far-fetched conspiracy theories, accusing the company of engaging in suicide bombings in Pakistan.)

Frank Ellis: BBC's Reporting on White Farm Murders in South Africa & Zimbabwe

BBC's Reporting on White Farm Murders in South Africa & Zimbabwe

Email from Dr. Ellis to BBC Radio 5

The following e-mail (excl. images) was sent by Dr Frank Ellis to Radio 5's Victoria Derbyshire in advance of her forthcoming visit to Zimbabwe and South Africa.

From: Frank Ellis
To: Victoria Derbyshire, BBC Radio 5
Date: 2nd December 2009
Re: Your visit to Zimbabwe and South Africa

I am contacting you in the hope that during your visits to Zimbabwe and South Africa you will confront head on with your black interlocutors (some of whom will be regime stooges) the racist and murderous behaviour of Mugabe’s regime and the tacit encouragement given by Zuma’s regime to black racist murderers in South Africa. There exists the very real danger – you work for the BBC after all – that you will refuse to tackle these questions since the organisation for which you work insists on presenting an anodyne, rainbow-coloured picture of South Africa to the rest of the world rather than the gruesome and savage reality that exists.

Some six years ago I met a farmer’s wife, Betty her name was, who had just been thrown out of Zimbabwe. Her crime consisted in the fact that her husband and she were successful, white farmers. Here is what happened. One day a gang of so-called “war veterans” (“war veterans” is the term used by Mugabe’s regime to describe the roving gangs who plunder white-owned farms and kill the owners) turned up at her farm. She was told that her husband and she would be thrown out of the country in one hour. Her husband died on the spot of a heart attack. Betty was only permitted to gather up enough personal effects sufficient to fill a small, hand-held suitcase. She was then taken to the airport and put on a plane. Betty and her husband had lived all their lives in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. Not long after Betty related this harrowing account to me she died, broken-hearted and alone.

The Infinite Monkeys and Godwins Law

The Infinite Monkeys & Godwins Law

by Mike Smith | SA Sucks

Debating on racial issues is largely a one-way debate in modern society. Just about all the academics, politicians and Main Stream Media (MSM) institutions are advocates of Cultural relativism and Racial Egalitarianism. They believe in a fallacy and modern day superstition that all races are equal just like people in the Dark ages believed the earth was flat.

They constantly profess, advocate and defend this absurdity and false dogma with a fanaticism bordering on religious hysteria despite many scientists and anthropologist who did extensive work on differences between races and who published hundreds of volumes on the subject.

Trying to find works such as “The Bell Curve”, “Race and Reason”, “IQ and the wealth of Nations” or De Gobineau’s “Inequality of the races” in a public or University library is a rarity these days. Even academics who try to discuss race in the most moderate of fashions are met with academic intolerance and physical intimidation by racial failure apologists and egalitarians. All research that proves their theories wrong are shunned as “Pseudo-science” without the proof of this research ever been studied or even read.

One sees these phenomena also on the internet on forums where racial issues are being discussed. Anyone who provides a counter argument to Cultural relativism or egalitarianism is immediately attacked with an argumentum ad hominem to his person, called a racist and ignorant bastard.

Small-business bankruptcies rise 81% in California...

With credit tight and consumers still pinching their pennies, many business owners find they can't go on.

The actual number of small businesses in trouble is probably higher, experts said, because many owners file for personal bankruptcy rather than seek protection for the business.

Dennis McGoldrick, a bankruptcy lawyer in Torrance, said his clients are all stuck in similar situations -- capital is hard to come by, customers are tough to attract and debt is piling up.

"In this economy, anything that isn't a necessity is a tough business to be in," March said. "And the majority of my clients have waited too long to file for bankruptcy and in the process made things worse on themselves financially as a result."

Sounding an Alarm on Oil: In Search of a Presidential Energy Policy...

Michael Ruppert (FTW) Sounding an Alarm on Oil

Wall Street Journal

By Anthony Kaufman
04 November 2009

Michael Ruppert, at home with his friend, Rags, by Clara Tomkins. Star of Collapse, Author of A Presidential Energy Policy, et al

Independent journalist Michael Ruppert predicted the global recession. Now he's foreseeing an imminent energy crisis

Michael Ruppert proudly claims that he predicted the global economic slump more than four years ago in his self-published "From the Wilderness," a monthly news publication and Web site. A narcotics investigator for the Los Angeles police department in the 1970s, Mr. Ruppert left the department and spent years trying to expose links between the CIA and drug smuggling; after 9/11, he wrote the 2004 bestseller "Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil," published by New Society Publishers and a favorite among conspiracy theorists.

Société Générale tells clients how to prepare for potential 'global collapse'

Société Générale tells clients how to prepare for potential 'global collapse'

Telegraph UK

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Published: 6:12PM GMT 18 Nov 2009

Explosion of debt: Japan's public debt could reach as much as 270pc of GDP in the next two years. A bullet train is pictured speeding past Mount Fuji in Fuji city, west of Tokyo Photo: Reuters

Société Générale has advised clients to be ready for a possible "global economic collapse" over the next two years, mapping a strategy of defensive investments to avoid wealth destruction.

In a report entitled "Worst-case debt scenario", the bank's asset team said state rescue packages over the last year have merely transferred private liabilities onto sagging sovereign shoulders, creating a fresh set of problems.

Overall debt is still far too high in almost all rich economies as a share of GDP (350pc in the US), whether public or private. It must be reduced by the hard slog of "deleveraging", for years.

"As yet, nobody can say with any certainty whether we have in fact escaped the prospect of a global economic collapse," said the 68-page report, headed by asset chief Daniel Fermon. It is an exploration of the dangers, not a forecast.

Under the French bank's "Bear Case" scenario (the gloomiest of three possible outcomes), the dollar would slide further and global equities would retest the March lows. Property prices would tumble again. Oil would fall back to $50 in 2010.

Dubai mega-tower `last hurrah' to age of excess

Dubai mega-tower `last hurrah' to age of excess

By Brian Murphy, Associated Press Writer
Wed Dec 2, 6:10 pm ET

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – When work began in 2004 to build the world's tallest tower, Dubai's confidence also was sky high with a host of mega-projects on the drawing board or rising from the sands.

That swagger seems positively old school these days. It's been tripped up by a debt crunch that has humbled Dubai's leaders and exposed the shaky foundations of the city-state's boom years — leaving the planned Jan. 4 opening of the iconic Burj Dubai with a double significance of hello and goodbye.

It will be both a debutante bash for a new architectural landmark and a farewell toast to Dubai's age of excess.

The Burj Dubai — a steel-and-glass needle rising more than a half-mile (800 meters) — may be the last completed work from Dubai's time of the giants. Most other of the unfinished super-projects announced in recent years, such as a second palm-shaped island or a tower to surpass the Burj Dubai, are either recession roadkill or being considered on a far smaller scale.

If they are still considered at all.

Dubai last week dropped what amounted to a financial bombshell — announcing its main government-backed development group, Dubai World, needed at least a six-month breather from creditors owed nearly $60 billion.

Peak Debt: A World Drowning in Debt

A world awash in debt

Globe and Mail

Kevin Carmichael
Ottawa — Globe and Mail Update
Published on Friday, Nov. 27, 2009 7:29PM EST


The financial crisis provoked a global front to stimulate economies through massive spending. But this was fuelled by a staggering amount of borrowing. Now governments are realizing that a new calamity looms - higher taxes and slashed social programs

or 220 years, through civil upheaval, global conflict and a depression, the United States largely kept its public debt under control.

But the world's largest economy may finally have met its match. In its bid to prevent the Great Recession from spiralling into a global depression, the U.S. government spent tens of billions rescuing financial institutions and automotive companies. In the process, the federal budget deficit swelled 220 per cent from 2008 to a record $1.6-trillion (U.S.).

The world's biggest economy has plenty of company: Seven of the members of the Group of 20 nations are on a trajectory that will leave them with debts bigger than 75 per cent of their economies by 2014, according to the International Monetary Fund.

It's hard to understate the fiscal cost of the financial crisis, which continues to send shock waves around the world. This week's move by Dubai World, a state-owned conglomerate that fuelled the United Arab Emirates' rapid growth, to withhold debt payments shows the financial crisis continues to put government finances at risk.

“Are you a racist?” asks the BBC

“Are you a racist?” asks the BBC

Dr. Frank Ellis vs Victoria Derbyshire on the Logic of Multiculturalism

by BNP: Standing Up For Great Britain
March 2006

BBC's Reporting on White Farm Murders in S. Africa & Zimbabwe

Multiculturalism under attack – again

Leeds University Lecturer Frank Ellis featured on last Wednesday’s (8/3/06) BBC radio Five Live phone-in chaired by Victoria Derbyshire, the theme of which was whether or not Dr Ellis should be fired for expressing views that challenge the prevailing liberal orthodoxy.

Dr Ellis had dared to question the logic of multiculturalism in an interview he gave to Leeds Student, the Leeds University student newspaper, and in an article that he submitted to the same publication [Time to Face the Truth about Multiculturalism, by Frank Ellis]. And for his pains he’s had loony-left students and amongst others the local LibDem MP for Leeds North West Greg Mulholland calling for his head.

George Monbiot: Credibility depleting faster than oil

George Monbiot: Credibility depleting faster than oil

Mail & Guardian, UK

Nov 17 2009 08:04

Declining respect for the instruments of collective government as they are used increasingly by the elites to preserve or increase their share of a declining resource base.Do you observe any of these symptoms in your "real world"? If you do, you should suspect that your society is in advanced stages of overshoot. 18July 2006 :: PeakOil_RSA Briefing Paper

I don't know when global oil supplies will start to decline. I do know that another resource has already peaked and gone into free fall: the credibility of the body that's meant to assess them. Last week two whistleblowers from the International Energy Agency alleged that it has deliberately upgraded its estimate of the world's oil supplies in order not to frighten the markets. Three days later, a paper published by researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden showed that the IEA's forecasts must be wrong, because it assumes a rate of extraction that appears to be impossible. The agency's assessment of the state of global oil supplies is beginning to look as reliable as Alan Greenspan's blandishments about the health of the financial markets.

Is gross mismanagement of the nation's energy policy an impeachable offense? 18 July 06 :: PeakOilRSA :: Briefing Paper

If the whistleblowers are right, we should be stockpiling ammunition. If we are taken by surprise, if we have failed to replace oil before the supply peaks then crashes, the global economy is stuffed. But nothing the whistle-blowers said has scared me as much as the conversation I had last week with a Pembrokeshire farmer.

CCR5 Delta32 Gene's Black Death & AIDS Mystery

CCR5 Delta32 Gene's Black Death & AIDS Mystery

PBS: Secrets of the Dead

Frequencies of the CCR5 allele

EPIDEMIOLOGICAL STUDIES OF PERSONS WITH THE CCR5 DELTA-32 MUTATION

The delta-32 mutation of the CCR5 receptor gene is present in up to 20% of the white population worldwide.8 Persons who have 2 copies of this mutant gene have been shown to be highly resistant to HIV infection; those with a single copy can be infected but experience an attenuated course of disease.9
-- The AIDS Reader

Plaque commemorating Black Plague

Political Correctness — The Revenge of Cultural Marxism

Political Correctness — The Revenge of Marxism



by Baron Bodissey

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report as a guest-post at Gates of Vienna.

FrontPage Magazine: You make the shrewd observation of how political correctness engenders evil because of “the violence that it does to people’s souls by forcing them to say or imply what they do not believe, but must not question.” Can you talk about this a bit?

Theodore Dalrymple: Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

I have heard people who have grown up in former Communist countries say that we in the West are at least as brainwashed by Multiculturalism and Political Correctness as they ever were with Communism, perhaps more so. Even in the heyday of the East Bloc, there were active dissident groups in these countries. The scary thing is, I sometimes believe they are right.

Peak Oil & Demand Destruction: Who Gets Destroyed? || Europe's Impending Social Meltdown

Demand Destruction: Who Gets Destroyed?

Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights

Economists who comment on the possible effects of world peak oil production love to ridicule those who make statements such as "demand at some point will exceed supply." Strictly speaking, those economists are right that supply and demand are always in balance. The variable that changes to make it so is price.

So an economist who accepts the possibility of an oil peak may still believe that the marketplace will allow us to make a relatively smooth transition to a new energy economy as the price encourages the development of alternatives to oil and as demand is destroyed. The latter phrase is often glossed over. But demand destruction is at the core of misconceptions by economists about the likely course of events leading up to and following an oil peak.

A smooth transition away from oil mediated entirely by market prices essentially assumes two things: 1) a very gradual decline in oil supplies after the peak and 2) a recognition in the market price that the peak is coming long before it arrives.