Elina Excellent

I like music, despite having a dreadful voice and failing with every instrument I even so much as touched. And I despair of  the modern wailing 'lerve' and lust  and screetching lewdness from under-dressed young women and from pseudo-blokes with four days beard growth who rap filth. 

But, as a chap rides slowly across field and through forests searching out dragons and the occasional small beast for supper, I do like to hum to m'self. And my mind goes to favourites artists, usually people whose career I have followed.

One such who I have admired from afar for more years than this tavern has been around visited the Music Room for the evening. The delectible Elina Garanca. I swear that were I 40 years younger and she had played her cards aright, she could have had me. But I am content to be an admirer of her womanliness and superb voice. And her choice of repertoire. 

For example, here, "Mon Coeur S'ouvre à Ta Voix" (My Heart Opens Up At the Sound Of Your Voice) from the opera "Samson and Delilah"  by Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns. On May 2018 Garanča made her stage role debut as Dalila in Camille Saint-Saëns' Samson et Dalila at Wiener Staatsoper conducted by Marco Armiliato.

Elīna (born 16 September 1976) is a Latvian mezzo-soprano. 

With a musical family background, she began to study singing in her hometown of Riga in 1996 and continued her studies in Vienna and in the United States. By 1999 she had won first Place in a significant competition in Finland and had begun a career in Europe. Worldwide engagements quickly followed her 2003 Salzburg Festival appearances.

Her father was a choral director, and her mother Anita was a lieder singer, a professor at the Latvian Academy of Music, an associate professor at the Latvian Academy of Culture, a vocal music teacher at the Latvian National Opera, and also a private voice tutor. Her brother Jānis (sometimes spelled Jaanis) Garančs, three years older than Elīna, started out in music studies, but is now an artist and consultant working with interactive computer-generated visual media. Since 2015 she has been continuing her vocal development with voice teacher Dale Fundling.

She entered the Latvian Academy of Music in 1996 to study singing with Sergej Martinov. She continued her studies in Vienna with Irina Gavrilovici and in the United States with Virginia Zeani. Garanča began her professional career at the Meiningen Court Theatre in Meiningen, Germany, and later worked at the Frankfurt Opera. In 1999, she won the Mirjam Helin Singing Competition in Helsinki, Finland.

Here is a very early appearance, in competition. Villa-Lobos' Aria-Cantilena, a piece not played and sung often enough, From the Mirjam Helin Contest 1999.

Elina's international breakthrough came in 2003 at the Salzburger Festspiele when she sang Annio in a production of Mozart's La clemenza di Tito, conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Major engagements followed quickly, such as Charlotte in Werther, Dorabella in Così fan tutte at the Vienna State Opera (2004) and Dorabella in a Paris production directed by Patrice Chéreau (2005). In 2006, she returned to La clemenza di Tito, this time singing the part of Sesto. 

On 12 January 2008 Garanča made her company and house debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, in the role of Rosina in Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia.  Of her debut, Bernard Holland wrote in The New York Times: 

"Ms. Garanca is the real thing ... Modern singing techniques adapt with difficulty to Rossini's early-19th-century emphasis on speed, lightness and athletic articulation, and Ms. Garanca was the only one onstage sounding completely comfortable. The lyric passages sang out; the episodes of racecourse delivery were fully in hand". 

She spoke for herself too, impromptu, sitting in a quiet corner of the Tavern's music rooms. 

Garanča sang the leading role of Georges Bizet's Carmen in the 2010 production of the Metropolitan Opera. In the opening concert of the 2011 Rheingau Musik Festival in the Eberbach Abbey she performed Alban Berg's Sieben frühe Lieder with the hr-Sinfonieorchester, conducted by Paavo Järvi.

She is also very well known, not only for 'spirited gal' roles but for her renditions of Sacred music.

Elina Garanča: "To me it’s not professional to go onstage and burn up. My first goal is to present my voice. To this, I add—in no particular order—expression, character, emotion. But first of all it’s about the voice. I’m a singer after all. Otherwise I would have been an actress."

Awards
1999: First Place: Mirjam Helin International Singing Competition (Finland)
2000: Latvian Great Music Award
2001: Finalist: Cardiff BBC Singer of the World Competition (UK)
2005: Nominated: Grammy Award for the recording of Bajazet
2006: MIDEM Classical Award: "Best Opera", recording of Vivaldi's Bajazet with Fabio Biondi, conductor; Patrizia Ciofi, David Daniels, Ildebrando D'Arcangelo, Vivica Genaux and Marijana Mijanovic.

And she is a fine duetist. Here singing the Flower duet with Anna Netrebko (Lakmé de Delibes)

2006: European Culture Prize in Music (Soloist Category) awarded by the Pro Europa / European Foundation for Culture (Switzerland/Germany)
2007: Echo Klassik Award: "Singer of the Year" for the solo CD "Aria Cantilena"
2007: Three-Star Order: awarded by the Latvian State
2009: Echo Klassik Award: "Singer of the Year"
2010: Musical America Award: "Vocalist of the Year"
2010: MIDEM Classical Award: "Singer of the Year"
2010: Latvian Great Music Award
2013: Austrian Kammersängerin
2013: Echo Klassik Award: "Best Solo Recording of the Year", (duets/opera/opera arias for Romantique, works by Berlioz, Donizetti, Gounod, Lalo, Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky and Vaccai). Filarmonica del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Dir. Yves Abel

2015: Echo Klassik Award: "Solo recording of the year"

I could look at and listen to her all day. There is music that can set feet a'tapping. A pleasant background when doing something. There is music that can raise the heart rate and pump the blood.  Or fists in the air. The mindless young seem to be captivated by it... and often not in a good way. 

I prefer music that can touch my heart: caress it; shed tears on it. Music that enters my Soul and lifts it: turns my attention to Higher matters and is a Gift to Him in the Crypt.

It is a counter to the Dragon's breath.

But now I have ale to serve.

Drink up and drink in real music from a most excellent songstress.

Pax

So Easy to Forget

Today, all good Englishmen and women and not a few good folk elsewhere remember the Battle of Britain. Many not so good and even more of the young do not remember it at all. But we do here in the Tavern. 

In the Summer of 1940, following resounding military victories which captured pretty well every country in Europe, apart from a few spots left neutral as a spy watering holes, Nazi Germany set its sights on Britain.

Hitler's early-war momentum was driven by the power of his airforce, the Luftwaffe. And so he would deploy them again in an attempt to intimidate Britain into peace negotiations.

But up against the RAF's industrious Hawker Hurricane and adaptable Supermarine Spitfire, the Nazi fighters and bombers failed. 

Towards the end of the air battle, Germany began its eight-month blitz bombing campaign to cripple Britain's war economy — which also did not have the desired effect.

The Battle of Britain - named by Winston Churchill before it even began - was the first major defeat for Germany in World War II, and although the war continued for five more years, it is widely seen as one of a just a handful of 'turning points' for the allied forces.

Here are the key stats from great battle.

It lasted 112 days.

From July 10th till October 31st, there were regular clashes in the skies between Britain's Royal Air Force (RAF) and the Luftwaffe.

It began with a series of Luftwaffe raids on shipping convoys in the Channel. The RAF shot down 14 German aircrafts and severely damaged a further 23.

More than 3,000 aircraft were downed from both sides

That was 1,023 from the British side and 1,887 of the Luftwaffe, according to RAF statistics.

544 RAF Fighter Command pilots died

From an estimated crew of 3,000, only around half survived the four-month battle. 544 Fighter Command pilots and crew were among the dead, as were more than 700 from Bomber Command and nearly 300 from Coastal Command.

There are less than two dozen left alive today.

Of the more than 2,900 RAF pilots who served in the Battle of Britain, only around 2,350 were British. 

The rest were natives of Commonwealth territories such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, as well as expatriates from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium and other countries under Nazi occupation. 

There were even a handful of American pilots, most notably Billy Fiske, a 29-year-old sportsman who had previously won a gold medal for bobsledding at the Winter Olympics. 

The international contingent proved especially deadly in the cockpit. 

The Polish No. 303 fighter squadron downed 126 German planes during the battle—more than any Allied unit—and the RAF’s top scoring ace was Josef Frantisek, a Czech aviator who singlehandedly claimed 17 aerial victories.

2,500 Luftwaffe aircrew were killed

With more lives lost and aircraft destroyed than the German High Command had ever anticipated, this devastating defeat forced the German forces to rethink their strategy for attacking Britain: 

The commenced The Blitz.

The Blitz that followed killed more than 40,000 British civilians

On September 7, as it became clear that Germany was failing to win the air fight, Hitler gave the greenlight for relentless bombing of British cities in an attempt to crush its war economy. 

Though the eight-month campaign failed to significantly damage Britain's military operations, more than 40,000 civilians were killed and and places such as the city centre of Coventry were levelled.

Only four out of 10 young people know about the Battle of Britain

According to a RAF Benevolent Fund study, a large proportion of 18 to 24-year olds do not even know what or when the historic World War II clash was.

But we will not forget.

Raise your glasses, horns, tankards and tea cups to

 The Few.

Pax

Look Them in the Eye

As our civilisation sinks we need to look at who is dragging it down and what 'circumstances' drive us down. Try a mirror for a start and see what you can tell of yourself. It is not as though the examples and proofs, of the 'Them' out there and the Us in here are hidden. We just need to look.

Take Mrs May, for example. The UK cannot really have any pride in their 'leader' as she is sheer evil.

Oh yes, I know. I have said it in the bars before that the most usual explanation for failures and cock-ups is most likely incompetence. But some will look deeper to find the conspiracies which abound. Most things take more than one person to make a complete mess. But deeper still, behind much of what is going on beyond the hedges is sheer malevolence. 

The childless Mrs May recently announced, so I am told, that she is 'giving' 200 million UKPounds to fund international abortions. The UK is in deep debt, yet she finds monies to kill babies. 

And she is just one of many who are in the driver's seat. Bad or mad? 

Marcus Aurelius two millenia ago said: 

‘The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane’. 

Do things really change?

Change though is inherent in Humans and societies. We start out in life totally without knowledge, other than that written in our blood. 

It is a hard road learning what we need to know about the perfidiousness of others and even of ourselves.

The first and most important lesson is how to be a Good man or woman. Funding or refusing to even countenance the killing of innocents should not be a hard choice.  It simply requires Virtue being employed: rather than just signalled. But real virtue (from the Latin, Vir... manly), demanding virtue seems to be on the nose these days.

Paul Collits was in the bar and had some things to say. Paul is a strategist, civic entrepreneur, writer, university lecturer, independent researcher, policy adviser, business mentor and ideas gardener working at the intersection of business support and economic development.

Sanity Banished, Standards Cast Down

 

Western societies no longer exhibit true virtue, having traded the genuine article for the posturing which draws applause on Twitter.  

They no longer yearn for excellence.  

They do not seek truth. 

What we have witnessed is a wholesale collapse in the decency of our institutions

 http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/09/sanity-banished-standards-cast/

That great culture warrior and conservative, Douglas Murray, recently observed, following a visit to Australia:

"I cannot think of a time when more people have lost their minds — opponents and erstwhile allies alike. I am a minimalist in my expectations for this era. I think our main job is not to be driven mad. 

Or at least not to behave in ways that will make us feel shame in the future."

Well might we feel broad and deep shame for our era. Conservatives, many of us, have all but given up on the party of Menzies, as it lurches from crisis to crisis, unseats elected leaders at will, sidelines just about everybody to the right of Clive Hamilton, and engages in systemic fixing, branch-stacking, the career-destruction of enemies and lining the pockets of mates.

The once great Labor Party, the party of Curtin and Chifley, has upended its old, honest, defensible, socially conservative policies and embraced holus-bolus the core ideas of the post-1968 generation of post-modernist ratbaggery.

Those once trusted organisations, the banks, have their criminal acts and corporate idiocies paraded before us on a daily basis.

We have a Royal Commission in play in Oz at the moment, into Banks and Insurance Companies. It is revealing complete dishonesty and corruption. 

Sporting codes embrace cloying political correctness, especially as it relates to race and sex, and enforce it with sanctions.

Corporations bully employees who dare to challenge the party line of big (social liberal) brother.

Fake news abounds.  The very term, newly coined to describe old, old practices, is itself used as a weapon.  The media, once able to differentiate news from opinion, no longer does or can.  

The ABC is no longer the network of James Dibble, having adopted activism and partisan advocacy as its virtuous mission.

Institutions of higher learning stop (certain) people from speaking on their campuses, lest someone be offended.  The universities accept money from all comers — save those who simply wish to teach literature, philosophy and history as they have been taught for a millennium.  

Police forces now charge (monetarily) the innocent while failing to charge (legally) the patently guilty.

Scientists, those supposed exemplars of Enlightenment thinking, have in large measure opted for groupthink and venal grant-troughing even when this means the abandonment of scientific method.

That foundational institution, the source of all others, the family, now cannot even be defined without bastardising its core characteristics.  The family is now, to borrow from Paul Keating, two gays and a cocker spaniel.  Or whatever we want it to be.

Institutions across the whole of Western society no longer have standards.  

They no longer exhibit true virtue, having traded that for the posturing which draws applause on Twitter.  They no longer yearn for excellence.  They do not seek truth. What we have witnessed is, in effect, a wholesale collapse in the decency of our institutions.

Melanie Phillips, in one of her excellent books, describes a world “upside down”.  Murray talks of the “shame” of our era.  The traditionalist Catholic rag The Remnant – no fan of the current pope, of course – featured a recent, “Vatican going bonkers”.

The late philosopher and thorn in the side of the New Left of the ’80s and ’90s at the University of Sydney, David Stove, used the telling phrase “anything goes” to describe some of the sillier philosophical and cultural developments of the recent age.

Another cultural critic, Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple) has written a work with the very same title, exploring the “death of honesty” and referring to our Kafka-esque, “curious” times.

The urbane art critic and acute observer of culture, Giles Auty, regularly laments the destruction of truth and beauty in art and architecture.

The late Christopher Pearson’s centrist coalition, which he termed “club sensible” and which amounts to a sort of pub test for what might be seen as working or not working in the world of ideas and policy — a bedrock of sanity you, might say — 

is either shrinking or in hiding as the whole world goes barmy.

The current woes in the UK, excluding many, include the manner in which Mrs May and her ilk treat all others who have a different mindset.  Some issues illustrate and illuminate beyond their immediate footprint.

It must be asked how did the relatively sane world of that much maligned but really quite brilliant age – the 1950s – where the core concepts and understandings of life reflecting accumulated wisdom over at least a thousand years were accepted without rancour or demur by most people, disappear so completely over a mere half century?  

Not a perfect world, by any stretch, but at least a relatively sane one.

So, what happened in the 1960s to change everything?  

After all, the seeds of much of our contemporary philosophical and cultural confusion were sown many moons before the Sixties.  Philosophical nominalism dates to the Middle Ages, after all, and the nonsense of the radical enlightenment is very old as well.  The madness of Marxism was visited on the world in the mid nineteenth century. As Richard Weaver once noted, ideas have consequences, though these are not always immediately apparent.

No, what changed in the Sixties was a newly emerged willingness of the many to accept whacko ideas (relativism) without comment and, sometimes, as gospel. 

From there it was a short step to institutionalising the absurd and the offensive, 

incorporating acceptance of the asinine as the acid of acceptable opinion.  This is, in effect, a new and alarming version of Charles McKay’s madness of crowds.  Societal dumbness and gullibility are the hallmarks of our age.

It was the seductive appeal of tolerance to those coming of age in the Sixties that was the ace up the sleeve of those who bent on changing the world. 

It was, to some views, The Pill that did us in. The rationale for it was seen as worthy but it fundementally altered 'humanity'. Not only did it reduce love to sex but it changed the hormonal balance of the women - the majority - who flocked to take it.  

Soon lost was the empathy and nurturance that Mrs May sorely needs.

My Generation, a documentary narrated by Sir Michael Caine, told of a generation of cultural and moral freedom fighters liberating itself and the world from the ancien regime of tedious order, constraint, (self) control and black and white morality.  This was all of a piece with Maslow’s self-actualisation as the zenith of human achievement

Second, there was also now the sheer genius and rat cunning of the European Marxists (often operating in the US as well) who correctly saw the infiltration of culture and the transformation of society’s institutions from within as the means to overturn society once and for all, and began to roll it out.  The capacity of the Adorno-Gramsci-Alinsky model to scale and dominate education, the media and global fora within a generation or two has been efficient to the point of being breathtaking.

Third, and providing the icing on the cake for society’s makeover and the destruction of the decency of institutions, was the coming of the age of “management”, and within two generations, the corporatisation of pretty much the whole of life.  

In 1941, William F Buckley Jr’s able lieutenant, James Burnham, wrote The Managerial Revolution, in which he laid out the transformation of capitalism and society’s power structures, from the business-owner class to the newly ascendant class of managers.  Management as a discipline of business studies was itself born in the Sixties.  

Management became the mechanism for controlling all organisations, and pretty well all institutions, one by one, came under its spell.  Managerialism was corporatism’s operating system, in effect.  

Burnham’s work was the subject of great interest and of critical review by none other than the management guru’s guru, Peter Drucker, as well as by that other great seer, George Orwell, who found the book both “magnetic and repellent”.  We don’t have world government yet, as Burnham feared, but we are well on the way, and we certainly have a new ruling class.

So, the ingredients were all in place for fundamental change and a hollowing out of the decency of institutions.  We had a gullible generation longing for liberation and pleased to be termed “progressive”; an intoxicating, foundational big idea – tolerance borne of relativism; some clever underminers of truth in all its dimensions and of traditionally conceived morality; and freshly minted management systems for control.

One only has to look at the modern university to witness in stark relief both the outworkings and the impact of the marriage of progressive ideology to corporatisation two generations back.

Now, to top it off, we have, half a century later, ubiquitous social media and global reach by subtle and not-so-subtle mechanisms for control and bullying.  These weapons are now in the hands of those who would change the world.  A world that the media guru of yore, Marshall McLuhan, could only have dreamed of.

It is indeed an upside down world, where anything goes, where groupthink reigns, where tradition and morality (conventionally conceived) are in universal retreat, and where institutions, even those created by God, behave very, very badly.

Look at the eyes of those illustrated above.  What do you see? 

When you are after dragons you have to get pretty close to do any reasonably professional slaying.  Even if you want to capture the beast to perhaps provide heat for the villagers in winter, you have to get close. A Knight will look it in the eye.

Mind you, it does need some courage.

So have a drink.

And Pray.

Pax

Sovereignty of the Soul is Sacred

I have been out and about. For three months, adopting a King's disguise, I have travelled the highways and byways of this Soul's landscape, passing among and listening to the sundries, the hoi poloi and the hoity toity, un-noticed. A chap has to from time to time and I left the Tavern in the good hands of ny bar staff and cooks, returning only to pray in the Crypt and wash the floors. I have encountered Dragons. They are proliferating out there beyond the hedges, in the forests.  And in the hearts, minds and Souls of men. A 'Free Lance' can achieve a lot when left to it.

I am back, weary, and after a long bath somewhat cleaner than before. I am Captain of my Soul and give allegience to a Greater King than I could ever hope to aspire. I am sovereign only here in the Tavern.  It is a Sacred Place.

Much evil has been afoot, not only here but all around the Anglophile world and even in those Institutions that claim Sacredness. Yes, the Church is under attack from inside and out: a mirror to the Soul both individually and Nationally. 

Yes, Nations have Souls.

David Flint, an erudite fellow, shed some light on some of the Anglophile  world's problems. I had a barman pull me a very welcomed pint and sat by the fire ('tis still winter here, although Spring is more than a promise) and I listened.  As he spoke I noted that the great One World Hope from 1945 barely exists now, except as a warning of what happens when we take little notice of the evil that creeps and seeps: 

the U.N. fell many years ago to Communists, Dictators, Muslims and Socialists: the four horsemen sent to destroy the secular world.  The most evil sit atop the Human Rights committees. It beggars belief.

We must look to ourselves. Clean our stables. Ready for the fight.

David stood:

Sovereignty is sacred

Increasingly, many if not most Australian, British, American and other Western politicians have been imposing policies the people would never vote for by hiding behind the skirts of the unelected — from activist judges to UN and Brussels-based bureaucrats. 

Whether it is destroying the economy through blind adherence to global warming theory or abandoning control of national borders, these objectives are achieved by those politicians pretending they are impotent, instead of honestly admitting that ...

the resulting chaos is exactly what they want.

It was refreshing then to welcome not only the most important but the most successful British politician of the last decade, Nigel Farage.

Not only was he right to plan the return of the UK to independence, once his goal was in reach, he did what Cincinnatus and Washington did, he stood down and went back to whatever is the equivalent of his farm. 

As George III reportedly said of Washington’s gesture, this made him ‘the most distinguished of any man living’.

Farage’s visit coincided with that of the UK’s leading media personality, uniquely successful across the media as a journalist, editor, TV presenter, owner and publisher. He is Andrew Neil, publisher of The Spectator. 

When invited by 2GB’s Alan Jones to denounce the increasingly discredited global warming theory, Neil demurred in favour of his Australian editor, Rowan Dean. This was not to taint, even at this distance, his role as presenter on the BBC which unlike our public broadcasters, still observes C. P. Scott’s dictum that comment is free but facts are sacred.

I spluttered quietly in my tankard, but did not interject. We all know that the BBC is about as far left and socialist as it can be without falling over or knocking CNN off its faux-moral perch atop mendacity, PC and sheer AgitProp.  But Mr Flint was giving a small stroking so as not to queer the pitch for the BBC's only sane voice.

It remains extraordinary that the United Kingdom ever agreed to hobble and demean herself by surrendering her sovereignty to lesser men, so that she was, as John of Gaunt warned, ‘leased out…with inky blots and rotten parchment bonds.’

Britain remains after all that ancient kingdom which was at the centre of the greatest and most benevolent empire the world has ever seen, and which, with her dominions, fought alone for the first two years of the second world war against the most evil empire the modern world had then seen.

Even before the general recognition of state sovereignty through the Peace of Westphalia, England and Scotland had long been sovereign states with secure borders. The entry of the UK into the European Communities was achieved only by misleading the people that Britain would retain her ‘essential sovereignty’ and that it was only about trade. 

This was done by hiding the declared EC agenda for an ‘ever closer union’ involving economic, monetary and political integration. 

Worse, rather than being a democratic federation, it was to be a political and bureaucratic directorate with a façade of a parliament and a powerful court working more against the law-abiding than the delinquent, something I discovered when I introduced into Australian universities the study of EU law. 

On any closer examination, it was clear that while the UK was meticulous in applying EU law, some others took a far more nonchalant attitude to the binding effect of EU norms. 

Nor were the British told that while they would be one of the largest contributors to the budget, they would never have the export benefit Germany would enjoy from the single currency nor the free ride Germany has long had for her defence. Nor was it explained that a high level of protectionism was the price paid for French participation.

Above all, it was never explained to the British people that entry would punish efficient agricultural exporters like Australia and worse, would every day at Heathrow deliver a gratuitous slap in the face to citizens of Australia and other countries who had stood by Britain in her darkest hour.

The fundamental reason for entry was the elites’ belief that the British prime minister would take his rightful place in the cockpit of Europe from which the continent is governed. This was never to be; the cockpit was always well and truly filled by the capacious bodies of those two co-princes, the French president and the German chancellor. 

Instead the UK would be bled dry, cynically demonstrated at the time of the UK application, when the EC rushed through a Common Fishing Policy which expropriated most of Britain’s interest in the richest fishing waters in the world. 

A government with any respect would have immediately withdrawn the British application.

Even under Eurocrat tutelage, the UK remains one of the world’s great powers exerting significant economic, political, military, intelligence, scientific, cultural and ‘soft power’ influence. While the UK had doomed herself to the economic doldrums by the introduction of socialism in 1945 and then EC membership, much of this was reversed when Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979.

If, after Brexit, there is a resurgence of Thatcherism and Britain is again committed to maximum freedom, limited government, deregulation and low taxation, she will undoubtedly surge ahead of the EU laggards.

What Britain needs is an economic agenda similar to that of President Trump’s, and a PM with Trump’s unique ability to achieve so much so early in his term. 

As incidentally does Australia, an opportunity recently forgone by the federal Liberal caucus.

Nevertheless, Australia remains exceptionally fortunate in being settled by the British who immediately introduced four of our six foundation pillars — the rule of law, our language, constitutional government and civil society based on Judeo-Christian principles. 

Britain soon gave us the fifth pillar, self-government under the Westminster system and then facilitated the sixth, the fulfilment of our wish to form one (Independant) country. 

Our extraordinary good fortune continued when the United States, another benign and benevolent force, succeeded the UK as the world’s dominant power.

A newly independent Britain will return to her full place in an Anglosphere strengthened by this and by the restoration of the US, economically and militarily. Even without its natural associate states such as Israel and India, this group already represents almost half the world’s wealth, and is united in a common language and culture and in sharing the values and institutions whose origins go back through the Declaration of Independence, the Glorious Revolution and beyond (to) the Magna Carta.

( David Flint The Spectator Australia 15 September 2018 )

A vision of hope, but against a rising tide polluted well beyond any greeny's nighmarish imagination. A pollution of the Spirit, of the Soul: Hordes of mindless but paid-for thugs on our streets, some home grown and tutored in hatred of the West in our Universities, and others imported immigrants and 'refugees' against the will of the people and bereft of any civilised qualities.

Those that do not fight good people in the streets, 

defecate in the streets.

Is the 'end nigh'?

Our legislatures are filled with the spineless, the weak, the mendacious and the criminal. 

One throws hands up in despair at the nonentities offered for election by our decayed 'Party' system. 

A Pox on all their Houses.

The much vaunted 'gentler', nurturing, empathetic nature of women in the corridors and seats of power has proven a false expectation. They continue, in Oz at least, to be profligate with the monies earned mainly by menfolk, buying promised favours from nations of proven liars and the corrupt that vaporise the moment the odd billion dollars (borrowed, at that) is handed over. And over. And over.

The 'Lucky Country' of Oz mindlessly, generously and foolishly hands over vast tracts of land and vital infrastructure to Chinese businesses; the same Chinese who have business interests identical in aim to their government. It is NOT in Australia's interests.

Mosques proliferate, funded by both Saudi Arabia and the taxpaying chap in the next street (unbeknownst to him) as Churches are sold to pay 'compensation' for the sins of  sexual abuse by homosexuals, even as homosexuals gain power in the Law, strut in the street as lewdly as they can get away with on a cool night, and  even try to ally with Islamists who are busy working toward supplanting the Judeo-Christian based laws with Sharia.

No one investigates the mosques where sexual abuse is preached, expected, practiced and demanded. Homosexuals are lauded and encouraged unless they are priests, of course, in which case they are differentiated mendaciously from Paedophiles. Islamists kill homosexuals, of course, so they may well cancel each other out in time. No doubt they will see the paedophiles as brothers.

But, do not weep. Drink up. Gird yourself. Stride out. Make sure your weapons of Righteousness, Faith and Integrity are at hand. And your Rosary.

Now I must rest my weary bones.

Pax.

Tearing Down the Mighty

The Oz Defence Minister and Senior Defence leaders are intent on finding a new 'Breaker' Morant to haul infront of a Court Martial. Disgrace follows on from disgrace as coals are raked over, and the current British hounding of soldiers who were fighting to establish and keep the peace in Northern Ireland is emulated by the same sort of left chaos-makers here as there. 

The SASR, our premier fighters, are under 'freindly' fire from politicians and the press who are gleeful at the prospect of blood on the Oz Flag.

Those doing the baying and braying have not one ounce nor milligramme of the courage of the elite soldiers who preserve and defend our way of life. They have never endured the privations and dangers that such men have to on our behalf. 

The Politicians 'visit' to get their pictures amongst the brave: the press apply for transportation and protection so they can have a jolly to somewhere near the front, but sufficiently protected from the bullets and dust, the mud and the gaping wounds. They love to fly in the helicopters but would not even dream of learning how to fly one.

It would appear that sometime, a few years ago, a SASR (Special Air Service Regiment) team did not behave like gentlemen. They are not trained, of course, to be gentlemen, but to kill. That is their job. They did not take to the field in dinner jackets but armoured vests. They faced death daily and countered with dark humour and occasionally terse treatment of those who shot at them, planted landmines (IEDs) and ambushed them. They killed people.

It is said that 'someone' killed someone they should not have.

It is said that a vehicle flew a flag denoting a reprehensible regime. A Nazi flag. To me it looked photoshopped, but who knows what is real and what is not in our media today. 

What a furious response our press has created. Particularly the national broadcaster, the taxpayer funded ABC. 

Australian soldiers have been photographed flying a Nazi swastika flag from their vehicle while on operations in Afghanistan.

 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-14/photo-shows-nazi-flag-flown-over-australian-army-vehicle/9859618

The photo, obtained exclusively by the ABC, was taken in August 2007.

2007.  That's just 11 years. Hey, why not go all the way back to Gallipoli? How about digging up our soldiers from WW2 and 'exposing' rough behaviour.  At  least try to keep up with the British who are raking over events from 30 years ago.

The photograph shows the large swastika emblem hoisted over an Australian military vehicle.

Two separate Defence sources have identified a particular soldier as the individual who took the flag to Afghanistan.

"The flag was briefly raised above an Australian Army vehicle in Afghanistan in 2007.

"The commander took immediate action to have the offensive flag taken down.

I doubt very much there would be a murmer if a flag showing the face of 'Che' was attached to a vehicle aerial. Heck, even Lenin's or Mao's would have gained some applause from the Age instead of approbation.

Mike Smith brought in an SAS chap who sat in the corner of the Tavern, face obscured, to speak about it. He was terse too, but no glasses or tankards were broken as he spoke. No fine Ale was spilled. 

He wants to remain anonymous, the way the SAS likes things.  Let us call him 'John Anon'. He served 14 years in the ADF, 9 years as a Royal Australian Regiment infantryman and 5 years with the Special Air Service Regiment. He was a man who had earned respect and the customers gave it.

The Special Air Service Regiment seeks out and destroys Australia’s most dangerous enemies.

It targets the leaders of terror organisations who are shielded by suicidal, heavily armed Jihadis embedded amongst co-operative “civilians”. 

Our enemies don’t like us and they do their best to kill us with no moral restraint and complete impunity.  The Mujahideen don’t have much use for a Human Rights Commission.

The SAS cannot fight enemies like that by adhering to normal Western moral standards. 

If we did, it would be leveraged as a weakness by the enemy.  We have to keep them guessing about our limits.  I wouldn’t deploy if I was working with blokes who operated like predictable Mr Nice Guys. 

 http://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2018/06/article-written-by-former-sasr-trooper-in-response-to-recent-allegations-against-the-regiment.html

The ADF is currently conducting a full-blown enquiry into "rumours of possible breaches of the laws of armed conflict” by Australian special forces in Afghanistan.  We are alleged to have operated with “disregard for human life and dignity”.  Fair enough.  I don’t know one bloke I served with who has a high regard for the lives of terrorists.  There’s nothing dignified about IEDs and their fighting methods either.

We are not sent out to deliver a personal dignity entitlement to our enemies.  

We go out to kill them.

Right now the Chief of Defence Force is doing immense damage to our troops deployed in Afghanistan.

Australian taxpayers are paying for ads in the Afghani press encouraging Afghanis to dob in Australian troops for war crimes. 

How idiotic is that?  What a propaganda gold mine;  and you can be certain the enemy will be using it against us.

The Australian enquiry will receive heaps of responses from the enemy, let’s face it they are embedded among the local Afghans.

And what will it achieve?  How do you think Australian troops will respond to allegations against them from the enemy? This might be difficult for outsiders to hear, but even if boundaries have been overstepped, unless the entire patrol turned on each other there will be little chance of any evidence to support any claims made by the enemy or Afghan civilians.

Indeed, the Age today is reporting that a 'threatening letter', has been sent to a witness to the inquiry. 

SAS troops obey orders.  We go where we’re ordered to go and act as we’re ordered to act.  There’s no allegations that I know of that say SAS troops have failed to obey orders.  Whatever’s been done has been the work of a highly disciplined team of professional, accountable soldiers operating within their own internal chain of command - and that goes all the way to the top.  

Smiling politicians are always on hand to get their photo taken and congratulate us on our results.  Well God help any ADF leadership that tries to hang a few young troopers out to dry.

So what are we stuck with?

• A bombardment of allegations that will ALL have to be investigated at taxpayer expense.

• SAS unit members taken away from their duties to “help” the investigation and for interviews with investigators.

And of course conspicuous in their absence, sowing concern and distrust amongst those yet to be singled out for interrogation. 

• The usual bags of tax payers money given to the enemy in compensation for alleged wrongdoing by us - even if unproven

• SAS tactics and operational security compromised by our own Government and Defence force due to a call for an open investigation and for transparency from left wing journalists to mention a few. 

• Resentments amongst the SAS members and as is common practice much more secrecy, which is a certainty at the grass root levels. 

The ADF’s investigation into the rumours has already been leaked to Fairfax and the ABC who've made the leaked material public.

As a result of Fairfax and the ABC’s reports, the Russians have now joined in to make life more difficult for us in the field.  

On Saturday the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement about “The crimes committed by Australian troops in Afghanistan”.

Using the ABC and Fairfax’s reports, the Russian statement said Australians have engaged in “systematic, unauthorized and groundless use of weapons, particularly against  civilians.”  It quotes the ABC as the source for “shocking facts about cold-blooded murders committed by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan”.

Total bullshit, created by our taxpayer funded broadcaster to be used by our enemies against us.  

The ABC is always going on about Russia and scandals.  Looks like they've made one of their own.

There are plenty of problems in Australian society.

There is definitely a problem in the ADF.  

But it’s not the war fighters.   

It’s our leadership and the tone they set - from the PM down.

John Anon.

The top people in the ADF have 'commanded' from their desks, writing papers on 'Inclusivity' and struggling to find woman willing and able to fight alongside men in the field. 

They promote Muslims to command positions and sweetly promote transgendering girly-men. 

They force soldiers to march in the Gay Mardi-Gras and wear red high heels ala the ladies.  They award themselves silver medals as they sit around tables covered in silverware. 

They are a disgrace.

The chaps on the front lines and behind the enemy lives do not drink from silver cups, nor even glass.  Their rewards are sweaty nights riven with nightmares and for some 'inclusion' in the Invictus Games.

Pray for 'enlightenment' in our faux-commanders and for the redemption of our courageous men on whom fall the requirement to kill our enemies. 

Our soldiers are extraordinary men. They face death and they deal in death.

They are prepared for battle but only physically. Only with extraordinary skills. They are rough and tough and do not get the sort of spiritual training that would eschew the flying of nazi flags. But most of course would not anyway. Just the occasional one who crossed that thin moral line.

None of them is an Angel: Barely any will become a Saint. Many are or will be Heroes.  But rarely will you hear about that. 

ALL are Warriors.

But just one instance of poor manship is enough to bring out the virtue-signallers; the nasty-minded brigade in our media; in 'our' ABC.

Oz is on a downward slope and it will take warriors to hold the line and turn the tide.

Drink to the men of the SASR.

Pax