The Greens are nutters

So argues Paul Sheehan in today's SMH, in this article entitled 'Green by name, flaky by nature'.


He doesn't mention euthanasia (on which, for some reason, the Greens are not only supportive but activist), but does mention banks, same-sex marriage, immigration policy, X-rated pornography, Zionism and a range of other issues on which you would think that ecologically concerned people—who exist on both sides of politics—should be free to take differing views on.

Global warming farce

You can feel the tide turning on this, or the wall crashing down, or the 'what' entering the 'whatever' (whichever metaphor grabs your fancy).

It's not so much that Paul Sheehan has written a somewhat sceptical article, it's the fact that it appeared in the SMH, until quite recently an unashamed promoter of the ideology that not only is global warming happening, we must all pay lots of money to stop it.

Here are 10 anti-commandments, 10 selected facts about global warming which have been largely ignored amid the orthodoxies to which we are subjected every day. All these anti-commandments are either true or backed by scientific opinion. All can also be hotly contested.

Sheehan then goes on to provide a random grab-bag of things that are most likely true and most certainly underreported—the polar bear population is increasing, Barack Obama wants nuclear power stations to multiply, the scientific consensus on global warming is a myth, etc etc.

The two from Sheehan's article that, if true, ought to make Christian bandwagoners on global warming ashamed:

6. The politicisation of science leads to a heavy price being paid in poor countries.

After Western environmentalists succeeded in banning or suppressing the use of the pesticide DDT, the rate of death by malaria rose into the millions. Some scholars estimate the death toll at 20 million or more, most of them children.

7. The biofuels industry has exacerbated world hunger.

Diverting huge amounts of grain crops (as distinct from sugar cane) to biofuels has contributed to a rise in world food prices, felt acutely in the poorest nations.

Those who have used the global warming momentum to push Christians (and others) to take costly action now (though the exact actions are frequently vague in nature, imprecise in application and uncertain in effect) have by and large remained silent on the real, current impact of a Western world largely sold on the reality of the still uncertain phenomenon of anthropogenic global warming.

The greater and possibly less visible sin of Christian apologists for global warming is not about how money and effort has been mis-spent, however, but how it's worked to distract some from the true end-time scenario; that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead.

Disappearing wealth

Paul Sheehan in today's SMH

I was advised by a very wealthy friend to borrow the full $1 million and put it into super. The cost of servicing the debt, he said, would be covered by tax-free dividend payments, and the rising value of the super would be free money. He made it sound so simple, and inevitable, perhaps because he had done so well for so long by borrowing to the hilt.

That was 18 months ago. Since then his company has collapsed. He has sold his waterfront mansion. He has left the country, with no plans to return for the foreseeable future. I did not take his advice. I borrowed nothing. Rather than leverage up, I de-leveraged down. I have no debt, no mortgage, not even a car. What I wanted was the ultimate luxury good, something invisible but palpable - peace of mind.

From here.

Infidelity

On Monday just gone Paul Sheehan had an extremely silly article encouraging bored and frustrated middle-aged women to be unfaithful to their husbands.

Today in the Sydney Morning Herald Andrew Cameron, ethics lecturer at Moore College, has a response.

From Andrew's article:

In his clarion call for "middle-aged" women to leave their arid marriages, Paul Sheehan effects the posture of gallant ally to unhappy women in the struggle against "routine, obligation, fear, guilt and the dogma of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious tradition" ("In praise of desire and infidelity", February 18).

But sexual politics can blind us to the obvious. Put his rhetoric of liberation on hold and consider: what would we have thought if the cardigan-wearing cynic, and the fat slob with the remote, were women? What if men were urged not to pretend they are "middle-aged", and to go forth and renew their sensuality with nubile young things?

...

In an argument throughout the Gospels, Jesus attacks his contemporaries for their divorces of convenience to remarry young things, and "everyone who looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matthew chapter 5, verse 28). The point is not to amplify male guilt. He wants men to direct their sexual energy toward their wives, as in the ancient proverb "Take pleasure in the wife of your youth … be lost in her love forever."

and other good things!