Fighting the CONservatives on their own undemocratic turf is quite difficult. 

As explained before on this site, the CONservatives "never have any regrets” about being ultra-capitalists and their hierarchy is based on this principle. You work for their money. Often, you are in the way of them making more money on top of their money by your complaints about their investments that have dubious ethical values. A lot of “side issues”, including Brexit, are also used to distract the populace from the main game. Democracy suffers. We suffer.

In the West, most Labour organisations are rarely fully “socialistic” and often have to make some apologetic gymnastics not to fully reject capitalism from their credo. They add a few socialist capers onto the capitalistic ride — like rights to “free”  education, free healthcare, decent wages — items which pisses off the medical practitioners, the bosses and the private insurers living from the CONservative right’s policies. 

These are hard times for Labor/Labour/socialist parties. 

The God, Guns and Greed credo of the CONservatives is a hard one to beat — especially when the media, including those claiming to be on the “left”, are all on the right side of capitalistic politics.

Even the “lonely” socialist mag, Red Flag, tells us that "Unions in Australia finished the year with a shocking near-death experience: a vote in the Senate on the “ensuring integrity” bill was tied, meaning the bill was defeated. For now. If passed, it would have given any “person with sufficient interest” the right to apply to deregister a union, or for the Federal Court to appoint an administrator to “exercise any power” of a union. This is the sort of control over union affairs that was previously known only in dictatorships.”…

"The fact that the union movement is down to begging right wing shitbags like Pauline Hanson for survival tells us something about the state of our unions. It’s one more piece of evidence, if one was needed, of the deep crisis in Australia’s trade union movement. This crisis is the worst our unions have ever faced. Union membership peaked in the early 1980s at over 50 percent of the workforce. Today it’s 15 percent, and even lower in the private sector." 

“... and no indication that our union leaders have a way out – beyond praying for an electoral miracle.”


Please, don’t insult Madam Pauline. She saved you bacon so far. Leave the lampooning to the cartoonists… And I believe that the socialists "praying for a miracle" was said in jest — a desperate one as if god existed. 

So, are unions the best way to fight CONservatives? Aren't we all bourgeois in waiting of a fairy-floss? Or aren’t we surviving in the bogan spectrum? 

In France, it seems unions are the last resort. But Macron is clever — after having been lucky... Macron was very lucky his opponents on the left side of politics were divided and the socialist Mélanchon came third in the first round of presidential election, by a tiny margin. The populace were left with a wicked choice between Macron and Le Pen. Macron scraped in with the lefties having to vote for him — fully knowing that he would piss on them, eventually.

Rather than holding firm like a brick wall against the unions, Macron bends the knees with grandiose burley-words — and gives titbits of nothing much to the strikers, while reinforcing his position. It’s a deceptive trick that only delays the final blow. In Australia, our Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, uses the same tactics on “climate change”. His position is still entrenched, but he acts as if there were changes to his views by spending cash at the wrong end of the equation when disaster has happened, but nothing at the cause — which in his mind does not exist. Nothing changes. We know.

In Russia, Putin's "trust polls" have taken a hit — falling to their lowest level in 13 years — 33.4 percent (some Western media inflate the spin, down to 22.7 per cent). These figures do not pose a problem for Putin who won a landslide election victory, while his approval rating, which is different from the trust rating, is still high at over 60 percent. His approval rating fell a bit because of relative falling incomes, his moves to raise the retirement age and his rise in the "value added tax".

Putin's problems are similar to Macron's. Ageing population and retirement age. Many a western journalist makes a bad meal of understanding Putin’s work at protecting the Russian economy from the ravages of capitalistic opportunism — including his latest revamping of the system of government. The Western media are mostly on the side of the exiled oligarchs who are patiently waiting to rape Russia some more, despite having been able to get out with a considerable amount of loot. In Australia, we’ve done the retirement age shift gradually, with not a pipsqueak from the “left”… 

Like the Labor Australian government, Putin saved Russia from the ravage of the 2008 GFC. In Australia, the government gave cash to people and organised artificial ways to employ people. In Russia, President Vladimir Putin’s had earlier created reserve funds that protected the Russian economy. The Western media hate Putin for this and other unmentionable things he never did.

Says the ex-finance minister Kudrin: “I just want to say that [Putin] is the only one, ..., who supported the creation of the Stabilisation Fund, then the Reserve Fund, then the National Heritage Fund, which played a decisive role in the crisis of 2008-2009”. The creation of the funds saved the Russian economy and its financing social needs, leading to the stability of salaries during the GFC and a rise in pensions... 

So what do we want from our governments? Action and reward? Intelligence and scientific understanding? Godly hubris and deceitful rubbish? Less “economist” bullshit, more generosity instead of sticks? Looking after the less privileged?…

We are Homo sapiens, a species of life on this little planet. We’re desperately in need of a political reset that does not destroy the planet — which the CONservatives and their "God, Guns and Greed” credo inexorably do. How do we change perceptions, especially against the present populist wave of simplistic CONservatives and their god ruling the world, from Trump to Johnson and our own Morrison?


Here comes the Romans, as promised in the title of this piece…

The Fabian Society or such could be one inspirational defence against the CONservatives. The Cambridge University Labour Club could do as well… But, despite having a higher intellectual complex dimension, either of these outfits may also be clothed in the religious and profitable mantles, like the CONservatives. 
The Fellowship of the New Life was formed a year earlier than the Fabian Society and included Edward Carpenter, John Davidson, Havelock Ellis, and socialist Edward R. Pease as members. 
The aim of this Fellowship was to set examples of simple clean living for others to follow. Some members wanted to be politically involved to transform the class social system. They set up the Fabian Society. 

The spirit of the Fabian Society was represented by its "Coefficients club". This club reflected the entire gamut of political beliefs, including socialists and Imperialists…  The Fabian Society advocated renewal of Western European ideals and their promulgation throughout the world. One can see how a Rhodes and his acolytes could weave their magic deception towards WW1...

The Fabian Society had been named in honour of the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (nicknamed “Cunctator", the "Delayer"). His strategy sought victory against the far superior Carthaginian army under Hannibal — through persistence, harassment, and wearing the enemy down by attrition rather than pitched open battles. Fabius is recognise as the father of guerrilla warfare.


Author Jon Perdue explained "The logo of the Fabian Society, a tortoise, represented the group’s predilection for a slow, imperceptible transition to socialism, while its coat of arms, a 'wolf in sheep’s clothing', represented its preferred methodology for achieving its goal.”

The "wolf in sheep's clothing" symbolism was later abandoned. A sheep in wolf clothing would have been better if you see my drift...


The club became a forum for "serious discussions and to formulate or propose political policy” over dinners, but shortly after its founding the members "abandoned immediate political goals" though they continued to meet, eat and discuss issues.


We need more than dinners… We need a Fabius revival and a god shooting contest… Presently most (all) of the CONservative leaders have no contrition for their mistakes and rorts (Aussie word for “official” corruption). As mentioned at the top, "the CONservatives "never have any regrets” about being ultra-capitalists". "They do not make mistakes” (see Liberals).
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Trump himself has made no secret of fashioning a faith and a public language cleansed of contrition. In 2016, he famously told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he does not “like to have to ask for forgiveness. And I am good. I don't do a lot of things that are bad. I try to do nothing that is bad.” Similarly, Morrison’s frequent resort to the construction “How good is …” is perhaps not merely a marketing instinct so much as it is an echo and adaptation of an evolving Pentecostal liturgical form.

In recent weeks for different reasons, both Trump and Morrison have come under intense scrutiny over their “all-is-well” language and leadership. But the two leaders are arguably creatures of a milieu in which we are all culpable for letting contrition go. Perhaps in catastrophe lies the invitation to rediscover contrition — and in contrition, to seek mercy and hope for the sort of life that can emerge from the ashes.

Michael Thompson is Lecturer in History at the Australian Catholic University. He is the author of For God and Globe: Christian Internationalism in the United States between the Great War and the Cold War.
Read more
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/australian-fires-and-the-absence-of-cont...

Yep. Thompson lives in dreamland. Even if the CONservatives were showing some contrition, it would be so obviously hypocritical that the process would be worse than being blind.

Yes we need to do guerrilla warfare, against the god, the guns and the greed… starting now, from the top.

More to come (on the Roman genetics)...

"Speaker Pelosi Orchestrating ‘Church of Holy Hell’ Against Trump." Graham

 

The Senator’s words come ahead of US President Donald Trump’s looming removal trial in the Republican-controlled Senate on Tuesday, following the president's December 2019 impeachment by the House.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, chair of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, on Sunday slammed  Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s earlier assertion that she “always prays” for Trump, accusing her of orchestrating what he characterized as a “church of holy hell” against the president during his presidency.

“I like Nancy Pelosi, I’ve known her for years, and I think she is a very religious person, but when it comes to Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi may pray for him privately, but she’s orchestrated the church of holy hellfrom the time Trump has been sworn in to now has been one thing after another,” Graham said in a Sunday interview with Fox News.

Graham stated that Pelosi and the US House of Representatives took 48 days to impeach the president, and claimed that Trump was not permitted to “call any witnesses” or “have a lawyer present” during the high-profile House Intelligence Committee hearings.

“This has been a partisan railroad job. And you're asking for fairness in the Senate? You violated every norm of what we do,” declared the Senator, who has been sworn in as an impartial juror for Trump's Senate removal trial.

In December 2019, prior to Trump's impeachment in the US House of Representatives, Pelosi, responding to a journalist's yelled accusation that she 'hated" the president, stopped the proceedings to tell the reporter that she "prays for the president all the time”.

The Senate has formally initiated the trial process for the potential removal of Trump from office, after House officials read the charges to the upper chamber and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was sworn in to preside over the process.

On 18 December, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The impeachment inquiry was initiated by Pelosi, following a whistleblower allegation that the US president withheld military aid to Ukraine in exchange for Kiev launching a probe into Trump's political rival Joe Biden.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/202001201078080828-gop-senator-graham-accuses...

 

Meanwhile, history is being rewritten by people who weren't there...

 

Warsaw was liberated by Soviet forces 75 years ago today — and Polish officials have cloaked the pivotal event in myths ever since. Yet, newly-released historical documents help shed some light on the truth.

Official Warsaw had no plans to celebrate this date — but it is not the first time that Poland has ignored the liberation of its state capital. Since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in the early 1990s, politicians across Eastern European have pushed the notion that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were equally responsible for instigating World War II —  and the idea that Red Army soldiers led a brutal occupation, instead of liberating Poland, has firmly found its place in the nation’s history books.

That view continues to prevail in some other European states, too — but a trove of recently-declassified wartime documents, published by the Russian Defense Ministry, tells a different story.

Myth 1: ‘Only the Home Army were true heroes’

With Poland under Nazi occupation, the Home Army (Armia Krajowa/AK), which supported the country’s London-based government-in-exile, became a dominant resistance movement. Decades on, the AK are lionized by many in modern Poland as the true heroes and patriots of history, while Poles who helped Soviet forces are often demonized as traitors.

The AK are hailed in annual ceremonies around a white obelisk erected in the 90s in downtown Warsaw to honor their efforts. In 2019, President Andrzej Duda honored surviving AK members as role models and a “precious treasure of history.”

Yet, the uncovered Red Army dispatches reveal that the image enjoyed by the Home Army fighters is a whitewashed one. The declassified reports show in fact, that in many instances after the end of the war, AK units behaved less than admirably — roving as armed criminal gangs, kidnapping and killing Polish police officers — and “terrorizing” ordinary people who dared to help the Soviets.

In November 1945, AK agents attacked a police station in the town of Kepno, killing everyone inside — including the wife and two children of an officer. In the same month, they murdered a member of the pro-Soviet Polish Workers’ Party in his apartment in the town Pulawy in front of his wife and wounded his child. AK insurgents also began a campaign of intimidation against Poles who would cooperate with Soviet forces. One warning read: “Take your children and prepare to die.”

 

Remember the Polish pope and that Poland is a "Catholic" country...

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/478443-poland-warsaw-liberation-myths/

 

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Oxfam releases global inequality report amid ongoing controversy

As the world's rich meet for the World Economic Forum in Davos, their festivities are as usual heralded by the Oxfam report on global inequality — a highly controversial study that should be taken with a grain of salt. (21.01.2019)   

Davos: Wealth gap can be tackled by Fourth Social Revolution
At the World Economic Forum, a group of experts debated whether a reinvention of social systems is feasible alongside the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The panel discussion was aired on DW-TV on the weekend. (25.01.2019)   

US billionaires call for new 'wealth tax' to fight climate change
Twenty of the wealthiest people in the US have urged the next president to impose taxes on the rich to combat climate change and increase access to health care. They said the US has an "economic responsibility" to do so. (25.06.2019)   

Women must wait another 99 years for gender equality: Global Gender Gap Report
No one in the current generation will see gender equality in their lifetime, researchers have concluded. While health inequality has largely been addressed, progress in the labor market and politics has stalled. (17.12.2019)   

Nursing home abuse in Germany: 'I can't let my mother die of thirst’
When the elderly become helpless they need especially good care. Frank Schulz visits his mother's nursing home in Germany every day — because he is scared she is being neglected. (28.12.2018)   

Employment fails to protect against poverty, study shows
A comparison of the world's most developed countries has found that rising employment is masking an increased risk of living below the poverty line. In Germany, the contrast is particularly stark between generations. (05.12.2019)   

OECD education study reveals gender gap and strong disparity
More and more young people are getting university degrees. However, the OECD's "Education at a Glance" study reveals that when it comes to careers in the sciences, gender equality is still a long way away. (12.09.2017)  
Read more:
https://www.dw.com/en/women-work-for-free-while-billionaires-accumulate-...

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Julius Caesar came from a family of Greek/Roman gods. 

It had become fashionable during part of the Roman Republic to claim a divine origin if one came from a distinguished "gentes" Roman family. Lulus, the mythical ancestor of the "Julius race", was the same as Ascanius, the son of Aeneas, and founder of Alba Longa. Aeneas was, in turn, the son of Venus and Anchises. Other legends told that Lulus was the son of Aeneas and his Trojan wife, Creusa, while Ascanius was the son of Aeneas and Lavinia, daughter of Latinus.

Julius Caesar frequently alluded to the divine origin of his race...

This was all bullshit of course, but it helped him create a “personality”, a “hero” status as a “leader” of men and a "Legend”… Most likely he descended from Greeks of Asia Minor (present day Turkey), Iranian stock — Eastern Mediterranean origins mixed with Western Hunter-gatherers. Rome was created like a coloured soap bubble, where Africans, North Africans, Arabs, Jews, even some northern Aryans, all mixed in order to build the city, the Republic and subsequently the Empire — from slaves to decision makers. People used their hubris and their abilities to climb the ladder of classes and lead armies to victory. Luck “of the devil” also played a big part.

Here we see how gifted gasbaggers, how loony as they are, can become the head of government: Hitler, Stalin, Trump, Boris and Scott Morrison. The CONservatives are very good at this game: any smart psychopath/sociopath can win the trophy and be crowned with the head-palms.

What socialists (Labour/Labor) have been lacking recently (and in general) is a strong leading “personality”. The sharing consensus process tends to dilute the personal sword-wielding to lead troops. It’s impossible to lead armies with flowers and love — and equal status of people running backwards. 

The Democrats in the USA have Bernie, but he won’t make the cut. In Australia, Bill Shorten was not the top of the tree. Despite his stamina that made him resilient to media attacks, he had the political charisma of a wet cardboard box. He was not going to cut the mustard beyond this. Policies are half the battle of the sell. Image is the other half. The image of a lying bastard who offers the world with brilliance is more likely to collect voters than a cardboard box introducing the quiet truth by the family fireplace. 

The media, which in the time of Caesar was the public forum and the “august” marble statues, play a big part in maintaining the illusion of the “born to rule” in front of adoring and spurred crowds… One needs to be cunning, devious and strong-willed — able to overcome contrary winds by bombast and alliances. Most people love the hubris and populism, in which they are made to feel special — not be like everyone else in a sharing community. We’re better than our next door neighbour, aren’t we? The bogans “en masse” are valued for their “individualism” if you see the trick.

The purpose of this line of article is mostly to show the ”divine” origin or motivation of the CONservative leaders (read from top). They have no shame. Socialist/leftie leaders have doubts and consensus to manage — except Tony Blair, who learned early that religion was the leaders' friends, even if one did not believe — one had to appear to believe. He thus successfully borrowed the CONservative mantra: God, Guns and Greed — and democracy was plunged into the toilet.

In Australia, the last leftie leader, after Gough, Bob and Paul, with heroic courage and decisive power was Julia Gillard, but because she did not have any divine antecedents (she was a full-blown atheist) — unlike Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison who must have been born in a manger after the big Noah’s floods — the media, including Alan Jones in relation to her dad and some chaff-bag, the CONservatives and some jealous people in her own disunited party, were dreadful to her… Her party even brought back a second hand hubristic catholic leader who, straight away after having been lauded by the Murdoch media to take over from the red-headed woman, was destroyed by the said media. We know the tricks. Tony Abbott, the worse leader of the CONservatives, before Scott Morrison came along, was the biggest liar on the planet and muffed things up down the bog-hole, that August Turnbull-the-Blancmange had to throw him out, himself thrown out by a cabal of representatives who all should have died of shame. But this is how the CONservative side of politics survives: advertising, media, lies, bullshit, porkies, deception through God, Guns and Greed.

So, what about the future? Who on the left, in Australia and in the rest of the western world is going to LEAD. Warren for President? You’re joking, aren’t you? All the US president Democrat hopeful are a woeful lot, apart from Pete possibly, who, despite all the amusing negative from the media, can represent the religious gays, the vicious deep state and the general freedom to be, with a young fresh face and a smart stand-up comedian demeanour who can hold a debate against a godly tweeting Trump. 

In Australia, despite having had his teeth straightened, Albo has taken the cardboard box mantle. The only smart one in the Labor Party who could hold court on par with the godly Morrison is Penny Wong. Not only her origin would represent the Roman melting pot with emancipation from humble origins, her female gayness would stump all the bogans from the shire and be like our own Pete on the barricades. She is smart and clever beyond the hubris. But of course never in a million years, her party, the Labor Party — full of catholics and uptight infighting socialists, would pick her as leader… She would run rings around the Morrisons of the other mob. Here the media need to play their part and they won’t. So, back to square one: the cardboard box it is. 

We need an Augustus Caesar — an Albertus Einsteinium — in the Labor Party to lead us towards our scientific clever future, away from the God, Guns and Greed delusions. It could be a while...


GL

US Vice President Mike Pence’s speech on the Holocaust left the impression it was American soldiers who liberated Auschwitz, erased the Soviet Union’s well-documented act, and even used the solemn occasion to lash out at Iran.

Speaking at the World Holocaust Forum in Israel on Thursday, Pence said that it was “soldiers” who opened the gates of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. Which soldiers? Pence does not say, whether accidentally or on purpose. 

Pence’s omission became much more glaring a few moments later, when he honored the memory of “all the Allied forces, including more than two million American soldiers, who left hearth and home, suffered appalling casualties, and freed a continent from the grip of tyranny.”

Listening to Pence’s speech, one might be tempted to conclude that it was these American soldiers who liberated Auschwitz, or bore the brunt of the burden of liberating Europe from the Nazis. Yet if we want to talk about truly “appalling casualties,” how about the nearly 27 million soldiers and civilians of the Soviet Union who perished in that war? 

What about the Red Army’s 322nd Rifle Division, under General Pyotr Ivanovich Zubov, that actually kicked in the doors of Auschwitz, only to be ‘erased’ from memory by an American vice-president 75 years later? One word – “Soviet” before “soldiers” – would have sufficed to give credit where it’s due. 

There is nothing wrong with being an American patriot, but this sort of dissembling is at best ignorance, and at worst outright stolen valor, both entirely unbecoming of a statesman. 

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/479142-pence-auschwitz-erasing-history/

 

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