December 2022 Volume Volume LXVI, Number 11, No. 592
Russia, China and Iran: An Uneasy Alliance of Rogues
Up from Despair
Les Murray and Marian Poetry
The Inalienable Freedoms in a National Bill of Rights
The Eternal Business of Coronations
The Voice and the Problem of Extractive Elites
Contents
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The West's delusion, not least that of the US, was that it could do business with Tehran. Instead, while the Obama and Biden administration lavished access to billions of dollars on Iran, opportunism drew Moscow and the mullahs together. The latter hopes Putin will aid their nuclear quest, the former warily appreciative of the drones unleashed against Ukraine -- and, in the last 24 hours, against IsraelApril 14, 2024
21 mins
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There is much that is worthwhile about My Last Drink: 32 Stories of Recovering Alcoholics, not least the significant difference between Alcoholics Anonymous and government programs. AA customers, by and large, understand that, from a life-management point of view, they are nobody's victims but their own and the solution to their own problemsMarch 8, 2023
9 mins
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All of Murray’s poems, we remember, are dedicated 'To the glory of God'. The keynote of 'May', for instance, is the reference to Mary, as 'the beginning'. This introduces the celebration of God’s gift of the natural world and of the conflation of divine and human life within it, of which the mystery of the incarnation, the Word made flesh, is the eternal focusMarch 4, 2023
16 mins
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There are current moves towards a national bill of rights in Australia, but any such bill which fails to include and entrench all of the various traditional and antecedent rights and freedoms will be of no use. That is to say, our rights and freedoms are not limited to the trendy 'rights' as framed by ardent lobbyistsFebruary 21, 2023
8 mins
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King Charles no doubt hopes his investiture proceeds more smoothly that of Victoria, who we can assume was not amused when the elderly and appropriately named Lord Rolle lost his footing and rolled down stairs before her. Meanwhile, thirsty royals were slipping into the Chapel of St Edward, where the altar hosted a lavish spread of sandwiches and wineFebruary 19, 2023
12 mins
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It is exceptionally difficult to avoid concluding that the Voice will represent a grave threat to equality under law, an indescribably lucrative payday for the professionally aggrieved, a symbolic gesture that does nothing to improve the living conditions of indigenous Australians, or some combination thereofJanuary 6, 2023
6 mins
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Everyone has the ability to do good, to care for virtue, to leave the world, however small a part of it, in a better state than the one in which it was found. In many ways that is what keeps the world going: the minor acts and modest deeds history most often neglects to recordJanuary 1, 2023
13 mins
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As political institutions become increasingly progressive, the law becomes an instrument for imposing whatever political action is desired. This creates a risk-averse population with little sense of what human being and human nature are, or what human freedom and human necessity involveDecember 31, 2022
24 mins
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Journalistic critics of SFIRA have been marginalised into silence by SFIRA smear tactics and legal threats from SFIRA lawyers. Very few Irish journalists will now take on the SFIRA: the personal price is too high, not least because the Sinn Fein arm of the SFIRA alliance is the wealthiest 'political' party in IrelandDecember 30, 2022
21 mins
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Abolitionists, suffragists, prohibitionists, indigenous rights advocates, LGBTQIA+ advocates and climate catastrophists alike have viewed and continue to view their moral agendas as being above mere human law and act accordingly, imposing their will on the majority. This is dangerous, and it is up to all who recognise the peril to hasten the demise of this tyranny of the minorityDecember 28, 2022
18 mins
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If people from all over Australia were marching through the countryside in favour of the Voice there’d be saturation coverage on the ABC. If they were out in force to extol the pride and pretensions of 'rainbow people' there’d be police and premiers marching at their head. None of those honours came the way of the more than 600 Christians who walked from Ballarat to Bendigo in the annual Christus Rex pilgrimageDecember 26, 2022
7 mins
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Media Watch host Paul Barry, poor chap, dedicated an entire segment of his expensive little vanity program to the Twitter buyout and he wasn't happy. Elon Musk, he whined, is 'the billionaire bully who’s taken over the town square'. Apparently he believes that once a media organ, institution or anything else has been conquered and colonised by leftoids it must stay that way foreverDecember 24, 2022
8 mins
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'It is clear that in the century between the Spanish flu and Covid, something radically changed in our collective outlook. Two things in particular. One is that we now expect more of the state, and are less inclined to accept that there are limits to what it can or should do. The other is that we are no longer willing to accept risks that have always been inherent in life itself'December 23, 2022
20 mins
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The energy issue is a case study in how a political elite, infused with abstract norms and transnational idealism about the end of history, created the perfect conditions for the revenge of political realism. Whilst Europe eschewed the hard truths of geopolitics, geopolitics happened on its doorstepDecember 22, 2022
8 mins
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The desire of the custodians of the UK’s heritage to rid themselves of the inconvenient artefacts of British history, especially from the age of empire, has been accompanied by a more sinister campaign to dictate how the British people should think about their past. This is being done in a number of underhand waysDecember 20, 2022
24 mins
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Like teenagers rejecting their parents’ talk of the past, those at ABC Classic and ABC Jazz know for a moral certainty that prejudice in the performing arts was rife in the grim olden days, meaning today's cultural and music scenes are stained by legacies of racism and exclusion. Somehow, according to the twisted logic of woke, that means no Hiawatha Sonatas, even though the composer was a black manDecember 19, 2022
11 mins
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In The Idea of Australia, Griffith University's Julianne Schultz stains 400-plus pages with spleen and slipshod scholarship underwritten in large part by misquotations and partisan misrepresentations. Her notion is to present the nation as a sorry polity with a sorrier history. What emerges, however, is an author with not the slightest grasp of Australia and its soulDecember 15, 2022
15 mins
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As inflation soared production plummeted, unemployment shot up, the poor grew poorer and price controls aggravated those inflationary distortions. Conspiracy theories and resentments multiplied. In our time, when societal fragmentation is on the rise, the consequences of a splintering of public opinion in the Weimar period are worth our attention. Fractious societies failDecember 13, 2022
8 mins
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The Sermon on the Mount enjoins us not to judge, and from this commandment stems the untruth, to cite but one example, that addiction to heroin has no moral aspect whatever and is straightforwardly a disease like any other. This is untrue and obviously untrue, but so anxious are we not to be censorious that for a variety of reasons we abandon judgment altogetherDecember 11, 2022
8 mins
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As with the Frankenstein, Mummy and Dracula tales, the 1951 sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still and other films of the period have been subjected to some very sorry retellings indeed. Sometimes the original version is the best -- a simple truth this latest and lacklustre remake of The Midwich Cuckoos establishes beyond doubtDecember 10, 2022
13 mins
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After the poet's death in May 1886 at the age of 55, sister Lavinia discovered a locked box containing many poems written on loose papers, envelope flaps and the like. That cache, constituting much of the roughly 1800 poems and containing what are considered some of the greatest poems in the Western canon, have kept legions of Dickinson scholars busy ever sinceDecember 8, 2022
13 mins
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Question America's chaotic, state-supervised federal elections and you’re an 'election denier', therefore an enemy of democracy and most likely a Trumpist conspiracy peddler. As President Biden’s press spokesman has said of those long delays in tallying votes -- inexplicable to citizens of efficient democracies -- that’s how the system is intended to work. Well, yes, exactly as intendedDecember 6, 2022
9 mins
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A fourteenth-century court document in which a young woman certified that Chaucer had not raped her, first uncovered in 1873, was milked by feminist scholars for the next 149 years. Now that we know the full story, the poet can be granted a conditional acquittal -- but no more than conditional, mind youDecember 2, 2022
8 mins
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Lingering Questions Sir: Frank Mount’s article “How Xi Misreads the […]November 30, 2022
7 mins
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Fantasia Lamps In the light persistent rain, the heads of […]
November 30, 2022
1 mins
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Contemplating a Statue of the Reclining Pan, Nimbin, 2012 Far […]
November 30, 2022
1 mins
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Love at Sea The pillows between us, adrift on a […]
November 30, 2022
1 mins
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The Day the Law Decreed They Wear the Star How […]
November 30, 2022
1 mins
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Camels Camels wear Astrakhan coats bleached to light brown. Their […]
November 30, 2022
2 mins
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South Head, Venus Bay See this rugged headland path, this […]
November 30, 2022
2 mins
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Expiation We are not supposed to speak ill, of the […]
November 30, 2022
1 mins
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My Vegetative Love Amaranthus mignonette cyclamen The raised worn elbow […]
November 30, 2022
2 mins
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Ancient Genes Sometimes I think I see in dreams Your […]
November 30, 2022
1 mins
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His Oracle’s Advice You’ve arrived late, an outline traipsing the […]
November 30, 2022
2 mins
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Ghost Train Fire, 9 June 1979 For John Godson, Damien […]
November 30, 2022
2 mins
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Time to cross out their names They won’t mind, the […]
November 30, 2022
1 mins
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Nu Descendant un Escalier This is how I feel— As […]
November 30, 2022
1 mins
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The Perfume Counter, Mother’s Day Hypnotic Obsession, Beauty Intense, Euphoria, […]
November 30, 2022
1 mins
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From Du Bellay Heureux qui, comme Ulysse Fortunate, like Ulysses, […]
November 30, 2022
1 mins
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Looking for Shark Lake (Haj Sjö) Alvhem Sweden November 2020 […]
November 30, 2022
1 mins
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Magnolia Figo my plausible belief your name derives from the […]
November 30, 2022
1 mins
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On Married Love The purpose of erotic intercourse In marriage […]
November 30, 2022
3 mins
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Lord Northcliffe, the brash young newspaper baron, was perhaps the […]
November 30, 2022
5 mins
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What If?! What if everything we thought we knew about […]
November 30, 2022
37 mins
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Much ink has been spilled in recent decades in arguments […]
November 29, 2022
8 mins
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Integration works. Just ask the vast majority of Aborigines who […]
November 29, 2022
8 mins
