There is a push on to “fix” Downs Syndrome by aborting all babies with the chromsomal condition. It could be the first attempt to eradicate a “disease” by killing the victims. Imagine the outrage if that had been suggested as a cure for AIDS.
Australia
Decision Time
Next Saturday there is a state election in NSW. State elections tend not to gain a lot of attention in Australia but this one is a turning point in the history of the nation.
In a few months there will be a Federal election which will pit a christian PM against an extreme left wing opposition leader. The choice in NSW will set the path for the general election later.
Here are the issues that the media are burying but are critical to our future.
Labor are set to legalise abortion if elected. NSW is one of just two states where abortion remains illegal, at least in theory. There is no doubt that this will change if Michael Daly becomes premier.
SRE or Scripture in Schools will be in the sights of a Labor Government. There is no doubt of that at all. For years the Teachers Unions have dominated ALP education policy. they will move quickly to keep christians out of schools.
The deceptive Safe Schools program will again be indoctrinating our kids against christian family values.
These three things by themselves will lead the Government in a path that takes the state further from Christian values.
Mario Murillo, in a recent blog, points out that in California, the people claiming to be christians voted for a state government that is as far left as anything we can imagine here. Political ideology outweighs faith commitments,
We need to pray about who we vote for, but we also must pray for the whole state, that righteous men and women will rise to power- in both the state and Federal elections.
Voting In A Post-God Culture
It is clear that our society has largely turned its back on Christ and Christian values over the last 50 years.
Every night when I watch the TV news I think on at least one, often more occasion, “What are they thinking?”
The latest Christian Values check list produced for the imminent NSW Election is a shocker. Where do our politicians stand on critical issues like abortion and euthanasia? Take a look.
Only a few years ago that chart which is now dominated by red squares was split evenly between green and red. The shocker is the Nationals who have, at best, become very equivocal about their positions, possibly to try and maintain their seats on the North Coast from the Greens.
There are only two parties that come close to supporting a Christian worldview, and they are fringe parties- the Christian Democrats and the Australian Conservatives. I note that the Shooters, Farmers and Fishers are not included, so their position is not known.
This is an horrendous state of affairs. This election is critical for NSW, as will be the following Federal election.
If Labor win in NSW they will move to amend the Education Act so that SRE or Scripture in Schools will no longer be allowed. If the Liberals win, no doubt the current policy of strangulation by red tape will continue.
Labor have very quietly indicated that they will legalise abortion. At the moment it is a crime to seek or provide an abortion in NSW, but court decisions over the years have allowed for doctors to perform abortions where they consider the mother’s health to be at risk and normally not much beyond about 22 weeks.
The reason that they have been very quiet about this is that certain Muslim and other ethnic groups who vote for the ALP are very conservative in sexual matters, and would revolt against such a policy.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian stated the other day that she is “pro-choice” so if a bill came up to a vote she would vote in favour.
Even worse, Federal Labor have stated that they will make funding for hospitals contingent on them providing free abortions.
I have said in church that politicians will not save us. The other side of the coin is that in a democracy, christians have a responsibility to pray and then vote according to their conscience and the leading of the Holy Spirit.
Barwon, where I live, is a very safe Nationals seat. I would recommend voting for a minor party, such as Liberal Democrats or Shooters, Fishers, Farmers with a second preference for the Nationals.
In the Legislative Council vote for Christian Democrats or Australian Conservatives first with your choices further down the list. The Christian Democrats have 2 members at the moment (Fred Nile and Paul Green). They have been instrumental in holding back a flood of harmful legislation over the years.
Note that if you vote above the line you can only vote for 1 group or party, but voting below the line gives you the options of voting how you think they should be selected.
This is a tough time for christian voters. We need to use discernment and vote for christian values.
The Joys of Electricity
They say it pays to shop around. They don’t tell you it will drive you insane.
For some reason, the standard electricity contract in Australia is the most expensive option. If you don’t negotiate a contract you can end up paying lots more than you need to. But the electricity companies don’t make it easy to compare prices, offering percentage discounts off their “standard” rates, which vary a little. Even someone like me who can cope with numbers finds it mind-bogglingly complex.
Last year, for the church, I took up an offer from Company A which offered a 12 month contract with a 24% discount. When the contract expires next month, they would only offer a 12% discount.
So I consulted the meerkat people who aggregate offers from different companies and they came up with an offer from Company B which offered a 24% discount and 11c solar feed in. I signed up for that contract, thinking I was done and dusted for two years.
This morning, just after I got home from my bike ride, a representative from Company A rang me and asked why we were transferring to Company B. I explained how I was able to do better with Company A. His counter offer was a 32% discount, but just 8c for solar. He would backdate the offer to January 17th. So I thought, “This is even better.” so I accepted his new offer. He even helped me by transferring me direct to Company B’s cancellation number.
Now Company B decided to match the offer but with 11c feed-in, if I complete the transfer to them.
I hope that’s the end of the ping-pong! I really don’t like this business of working your way down to a lower price, especially when that price was always available but they just don’t want to tell you about it up front.
In the old days, where the electricity market was a Government-controlled monopoly, you just got a price and that was it. Competition has to be better for everyone, but sometimes it is hard work to save a few bucks!
Breaking Christian News: Most Marriages Do Survive
From “Breaking Christian News” comes this great encouragement. Obviously the stats are for the U.S. but the situation here is probably comparable.
DIVORCE STAT SHOCKER IS “GAME-CHANGING”: MOST MARRIAGES DO MAKE IT
Paul Strand : Feb 15, 2019 : CBN News
“We need to change the paradigm of how we talk about marriage—from marriage being in trouble and all this discouraging stuff to saying, ‘No, wait. Most marriages are strong and happy for a lifetime. That makes a total difference to a couple who can now say, ‘You know what? Most people get through this and we can, too.'” -Shaunti Feldhahn
(Atlanta, GA)—[CBN News] Most people believe only half of US marriages make it. But a leading researcher is announcing the true divorce rate is much lower and always has been. (Photo: Pixabay)
Shaunti Feldhahn received her research training at Harvard. She and her husband Jeff help people with their marriages and relationships through best-selling books like, For Women Only and For Men Only.
This Atlanta-based couple often quoted in their writings and at conferences what they thought was accurate research: that most marriages are unhappy and 50 percent of them end in divorce, even in the Church.
“I didn’t know,” Feldhahn told CBN News. “I’ve stood up on stage and said every one of these wrong statistics.”
More than ten years ago, she asked assistant Tally Whitehead for specific research on divorce for an article she was writing. After much digging, neither of them could find any real numbers.
That kicked off a personal, years-long crusade to dig through the tremendously complicated, sometimes contradictory research to find the truth. The surprising revelations are revealed in her new book, The Good News About Marriage.
The Real Divorce Rate
“First-time marriages: probably 20 to 25 percent have ended in divorce on average,” Feldhahn revealed. “Now, okay, that’s still too high, but it’s a whole lot better than what people think it is.”
Shaunti and Jeff point out the 50 percent figure came from projections of what researchers thought the divorce rate would become as they watched the divorce numbers rising in the 1970s and early 1980s when states around the nation were passing no-fault divorce laws.
“But the divorce rate has been dropping,” Feldhahn said. “We’ve never hit those numbers. We’ve never gotten close.”
And it’s even lower among churchgoers, where a couple’s chance of divorcing is more likely in the single digits or teens.
Hopelessness = Divorce
As the truth about these much lower divorce rates begins to spread, Feldhahn said she believes it will give people hope, which is often a key ingredient to making marriage last. She said hopelessness itself can actually lead to divorce.
“That sense of futility itself pulls down marriages,” Feldhahn said. “And the problem is we have this culture-wide feeling of futility about marriage. It’s based on all these discouraging beliefs and many of them just aren’t true.”
Christian psychotherapist Angel Davis has also written about marriage in her book, The Perfecting Storm. The Athens, Georgia-based therapist agreed with Shaunti Feldhahn’s warnings about hopelessness.
“The Bible says hope deferred, it makes a heart sick,” Davis said. “And we are so influenced by numbers and by culture.”
Jeff Feldhahn said anytime he tells people about his wife’s findings about how incorrect the 50 percent divorce rate actually is, they’re stunned.
“Their mouth drops open and they’re just shocked,” he said. “They go, ‘I can’t believe I believed this all these years. And I’ve heard it so many times. And I’ve heard it from the pulpit so many times.'”
Shaunti added, “This is a great chance to stand up and say. ‘We were all fooled. Not anymore.'”
Spreading the Good News
To that end, Feldhahn has been working to spread the news to pastors and other leaders as fast as she can. The news is changing Pastor Daniel Floyd’s counseling because he had bought into fictional research, he admitted to Feldhahn.
“I told her, ‘I’ve said this. I’ve taught this,'” the pastor at Lifepoint Church in Fredericksburg, Virginia, recalled.
Floyd said he’s sure this news will change a generation of marriage counseling.
“I think it’s significant,” he said. “And it could change the conversation from one that is ‘Wow, it’s just the way it is, and half of you are going to make it, half of you are not,’ and change the conversation to know historically, an overwhelming majority have made it and you can make it.”
Psychotherapist Davis said this belief can change lives and marriages.
“We know in psychology that what you believe affects how you feel, and then it leads to action,” Davis stated. “So, when other people are accomplishing something we think is hopeless, it gives us hope. And then we start feeling different and start acting different.”
Feldhahn has more shocking research: four out of five marriages are happy. That number flies in the face of the popular belief that only about 30 percent of marriages are happy.
“Most people think most marriages are just kind of ‘eeh’—just kind of rolling along,” she said. “And they’re shocked when I tell them that the actual average is 80 percent: 80 percent of marriages are happy.”
Not knowing the true statistics often leads couples to avoid marriage and just shack up instead.
A Game-Changer?
Feldhahn said that couples who avoid marriage do so based on wrong assumptions.
“Like, ‘if I’m just going to get divorced and I’m not going to be happy, why bother getting married, right?’ And it’s based on a lie,” she said. “That feeling is based on a lie.”
Pastor Floyd said these new facts can be a game-changer for married couples.
“I think it really helps people in the challenging moments to say, ‘If I’ll just stick with it, then there’s a good chance I’m going to make it the distance,'” he said.
“With hope, you feel you can make it through, even though you’re in a tough patch,” Jeff Feldhahn said.
His wife also pointed to other research that proves most of the unhappily married can turn it around.
“The studies show that if they stay married for five years, that almost 80 percent of those will be happy five years later,” she said.
The Good News About Marriage also reveals the divorce rate among those active in their church is 27 to 50 percent lower than among non-churchgoers. Feldhahn’s hope is that once people learn the truth that they will spread it far and wide.
“We need to change the paradigm of how we talk about marriage—from marriage being in trouble and all this discouraging stuff to saying, ‘No, wait. Most marriages are strong and happy for a lifetime,'” she told CBN News. “That makes a total difference to a couple who can now say, ‘You know what? Most people get through this and we can, too.’
Whooping Cough Today. What The?
I remember a fragment of a conversation with my mother when I was a small child. It must have been about the time I was to get some vaccinations. She said with some passion “whooping cough is a wicked thing.”
Who could argue against that? The thought of a tiny baby literally coughing itself to death is just awful. The ready availability of vaccines for this and other deadly diseases means that some of the deadliest diseases are no longer a threat.
So why is it that in the last three weeks two families in our town have been infected with whooping cough with at least one member in each family seriously ill? How can this even be a thing in 2019?
As far as I know both families are fully immunised, and don’t have much direct contact. Which means that there is at least one other family carrying the bacteria in town.
As I understand it, in Australia immunisation rates are about 95%. The whooping cough vaccine gives about 80% protection, and if you do come down with the disease it is generally a less severe condition. In Narrabri there are likely to be about 350 people who are not immunised.
The effectiveness of the vaccine relies on everyone in a community being immunised so that the chances of being exposed to the disease is close to zero. But if the rates of vaccination fall, then everyone in the community is put at risk.
At particular risk then are babies who are yet to be sufficiently old to receive the vaccination. In recent years, pregnant women often receive a booster to pass on immunity to their child.
Some people refuse to immunise their children for all kinds of reasons, most of them not based in fact. There are rare side effects from some of these vaccines, and sometimes these are exaggerated in certain groups.
Whooping cough is still a wicked thing. Sadly it is still a real thing.
Dalrock: The symbolism of the line of men grilling in the Gillette ad.
Christian blogger Dalrock nails the visceral reaction to the Gillette ad.
The symbolism of the line of men grilling in the Gillette ad.
Posted on January 28, 2019 by Dalrock
Barbara Kay at The Post Millennial puts her finger on what is so disturbing about the central image of the Gillette ad. The line of worthless men manning their grills symbolizes hard working married fathers. From “Toxic masculinity” in advertising: keeping women scared and men shamed:
For what does a neatly-dressed man standing behind a barbecue signify? Think of every Father’s Day ad you have ever seen. How many of them feature barbecue tools? Maybe 50%? Why? Because when men barbecue, they are usually in a back yard. If men have a back yard, it means they live in a house. If they have a house, they are generally married with children. When men barbecue, they are usually feeding their families and friends and having fun doing it. In other words, barbecue men are deeply invested in family life.
They are, in short, fathers. And what is the easiest way to produce boys who do not understand or respect the boundaries between positive and negative masculinity? Take away their fathers.
…
The barbecue men are the reason most boys with loving fathers grow up to be strong, productive men: men who will never be a threat to anyone—except to bad guys who never learned the boundaries for—or how to positively channel—aggression, because so many of them had no fathers to teach them.
Kay says that after realizing this she finally understood why the ad prompted such a visceral reaction for her. I think she is dead on here. Gillette’s ad isn’t just garden variety misandry, it is an attack aimed primarily at respectable men. I understood that at some level, which you can see from the title of my original post on the ad, but I didn’t put my finger on the meaning of the men grilling. It is the masculine equivalent of women baking apple pies.
It is interesting to see that while Christian culture has been going after married fathers for years both via sermons and films with no complaint, when Gillette crossed that same line secular culture was outraged. I also think it wasn’t a coincidence that the central theme of the movie Courageous was expressed by the Christian men complaining about their fathers while sitting in Adam’s backyard, eating the steaks he had just grilled for them. The symbolism of the barbecue is important enough in Courageous that the scene appears prominently twice in the movie’s trailer. The first time is immediately after the words “Fathers Struggling to Connect”, and the second time is when Adam hands the other men his resolution and announces “I don’t want to be a good enough father.”
Jo Nova- The Price of Renewable Energy in Australia
Nearly a billion dollars for electricity for just one day — $500 per family
The Electro-pyre conflagration escalates.
The cost of electricity on Thursday in two states of Australia reached a tally of $932 million dollars for a single day of electricity. Thanks to David Bidstrup on Catallaxy for calculating it.
As Bruce of Newcastle says ““Three days and you could buy a HELE plant with the money wasted.” That’s a power plant that could last 70 years, and provide electricity at under $50/MW. (Forget all the high charges for 30 years to pay of the capital (in red below), we could just buy the damn thing outright, paid off in full from day one.)
Cost of old coal plants in the USA. From the report by Stacy and Taylor, of the Institute for Energy Research (IER)
Burned at the stake: $500 per family
In Victoria, per capita, that means it cost $110 for one day’s electricity. For South Australians, Thursday’s electricity bill was $140 per person. (So each household of four just effectively lost $565.) In both these states those charges will presumably be paid in future price rises, shared unevenly between subsidized solar users and suffering non-solar hostages. The costs will be buried such that duped householders will not be aware of what happened. Coles and Woolworths will have to add a few cents to everything to cover their bills, and the government will have to cut services or increase taxes. No one will know how many jobs are not offered or opportunities lost. This is the road to Venezuela.
If Hazelwood had still been open, the whole bidstack would have changed, quite probably saving electricity consumers in those two states hundreds of dollars. Eight million Australians could have had a weekend away, gone to a ball, or bought brand new fishing gear. And this is just one single day of electricity. If Liddell closes, things will get worse, no matter how much unreliable not-there-when-you-need-it capacity we add to the system. Indeed, the more fairy capacity we add, the worse it gets. NSW will soon join the SA-Vic club.
This is what happens when an electricity grid is run by kindergarten arts graduates who struggle with numbers bigger than two.
This is utterly and completely a renewables fail
The socialist Labor-Greens are already trying to blame it on coal, but we ran coal plants for decades without these disasters. Right now, no one is investing in coal because of bipartisan stupidity. What company would pay the maintenance fees on infrastructure so hated by the political class? The coal plants are being run into the ground. Maintenance is even being delayed to keep the plants running through peaks like this.
No country on Earth with lots of renewables has cheap electricity. How many times do I have to repeat it? This is my mantra for 2019.
In Australia when we had mainly coal and no renewables our electricity was cheap and reliable. Now we are still mainly coal, but all it takes is a poisonous small infiltration of subsidized unreliable renewables to destroy the former economic incentives, the whole market, the system: our lifestyle.
The Liberal Party needs to grow a spine
This is surely a crisis. As long as the Liberals are a Tweedledum version of the Labor party, they can’t solve this and deserve to lose. New renewables installations must be stopped immediately — put on hold indefinitely — until they no longer need forced subsidies, until the RET is gone, the carbon taxes, the hidden emissions trading scheme and we have a proper free market. Then new renewables can be permitted to compete with all generation alternatives, though all new generators will also have to be responsible for paying for extra transmission lines, back up batteries, and any other frequency stabilization required. On net a generator must be able to guarantee that when the people call on it, it can provide, lets say, 80% of total nameplate capacity. When that day comes (thirty, fifty, years from now or maybe never) I will be happy to support renewables. Until then, we are global patsies handing over glorious profits to energy giants, renewables companies, Chinese manufacturers, and large financial institutions.
Lets have a plebescite: How many Australians would rather have a weekend away with their family or make the world 0.00 degrees cooler in 100 years in a symbolic display to assuage the Gods of Storms?
Abortion in Australia
I’m seeing lots of Australians post about the abortion laws in New York where abortion is a “right” right up until birth.
Meanwhile in Victoria and Queensland abortion is a right until 20-22 weeks and right up until birth if two doctors agree it is in the mother’s interest.
In NSW, abortion is only lawful if a doctor believes that the mental or physical health is at risk from continuing the pregnancy. A bit of a huge loophole there.
“Choice” is a great idea, if you ignore the choice of the baby.
I often see human rights advocates express concern for the “most vulnerable” people in our society, but they never mention pre-birth babies who are literally the most vulnerable people in our society.
This is a great evil, a terrible blight in our society, which must be overcome.
All That “Free” Power Driving Up Prices
Here is a graph that tells you why our electricity prices have gone from being the cheapest in the developed world to amongst the most expensive. Yes it is the “unreliables”- solar and wind.
The 1970’s through to 2005 suddenly look like a golden age.
New Life Narrabri 