Here Rory Sutherland argues that the circumstances of our lives may matter less than how we see them. At TEDxAthens, he makes a compelling case for how re-framing and the importance of choice is the key to happiness. Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian School of Economics get a substational 'shout-out' early in the 13th minute but you should watch the whole presentation.

On Saturday the citizens of Brisbane visited polling booths to elect their 'representatives'. Up for grabs in the local city election were Major, and numerous councillor positions for the various wards.

The end result was that Graham Quirk from the LNP was re-elected Mayor of Brisbane. The Liberal-National Party extended their lead by three seats to hold 18. The ALP holds five, an Independent one, and two (Northgate and Deagan) currently hang in the balance.

It is also interesting to note that,

"Tennyson Ward voters have ushered in Brisbane City Council's first independent councillor in 60 years. Councillor Elect Nicole Johnston ruffled LNP feathers when she quit the party in her first term going on to develop an extremely inharmonious relationship with Lord Mayor Graham Quirk."

Unimpressed with being forced to vote, some entrepreneurial minds got creative.

No this isn't a special Clarke and Dawe, or Newstopia skit. Here Mr Shorten from the Labor Party of Australia elucidates his support behind the Prime Minister and her 'position' regarding the recent Peter Slipper scandal.

I didn't watch this clip, but I'm sure it's great.

The Australian reports that counterfeiters are at-large!!

"POLICE are warning people in northern New South Wales to be on the lookout for counterfeit cash after a number of fake $20 notes were found in Lismore.

Police seized the fake bills, which totalled $240, for forensic examination."

I'm glad the police are now pursuing counterfeiters as I recently put together my own crack team of investigators, and we managed to track down two of the biggest counterfeiting centres in this country.

Here are some of our grainy surveillance photographs ...

The problem appears to be a bit bigger than $240 dollars.

UPDATE: We managed to photograph one of the perpetrators.

We all remember the infamous Planet Slayer game that the ABC was forced to take offline a few years ago, but that hasn't stopped the ABC from continuing the practice of using web games to brainwash children.

They now have games like "Defend the Beach", where you protect the beach from the evil drums of oil ...

... and "Fergus on Ice", where you must save precious Antarctica from melting away, and avoid the wicked black jelly beans. Say ... I wonder if those black jelly beans might represent carbon dioxide?

Granted, it is far more subtle, however is there any doubt the ABC will, at some point, produce another outrage like Planet Slayer, that they hope will remain under the radar?

Keep in mind, all of this is on the taxpayers dime.

The recent Queensland elections prove that there exist alot of deluded people in Australia who think the Liberal Party is the answer to the extreme statism of the Labor Party. You wonder how on earth that is possible when the leaders of this Party, in the two most populous states, are Barry O'Farrell and "Red Ted" Baillieu...

"THE Baillieu Government has spent more than $2 million in less than a year keeping tabs on what is said about it in the media.

Despite Premier Ted Baillieu committing to cut bureaucratic costs, 10 government departments racked up the huge bill keeping track of articles in the press in country and regional Victoria."

 

Most central banks are staffed by unelected bureaucrats. They are considered outside the realm of political control. The Treasurer, no matter how much he may disagree, is bound by convention not to interfere with the monetary policy decisions of the bank.

This state of affairs has insulated them from accountability. Parliament does not control the Reserve Bank of Australia’s budget, as it does for the High Court.

Full disclosures of monetary policy dealings domestically and internationally are not accessible. The RBA’s exemption from Freedom of Information laws prevents the public from finding out the extent of its relationships with external actors. Like the Fed, no parliamentary committee truly oversees every aspect of its decision-making, meaning it is probably more secretive than the Australian Security Intelligence Service.

I like Soccer. I like Aussie Rules.

However, the idea that it is the role of government to fund sports, is deeply offensive. Surely Australia - the greatest sporting nation on earth - doesn't need government handouts for sport.

Nevertheless, at a time when we are trying to pay down a massive federal debt, Prime Minister Julia Gillard today announced that a massive $8 million tax-payer dollars will go to soccer in Western Sydney.

This is nothing more than an exercise in vote-buying, given that Western Sydney is now marginal, and Labor needs to secure their dwindling ethnic base to prevent decimation at the next federal election.

Modern life in the West has left us complacent with regard to the true evil of which the state is capable. A sickening photo of a coercively aborted foetus has emerged from China. I won't embed the photo but I have linked to it here.

The story behind the photo is all too familiar in China. A woman is kidnapped by bureaucrats, drugged, and her child aborted. The Epoch Times describes a case from 2009 in which the mother also died:

"According to a doctor from the hospital where she died, the Birth Control Office staff kidnapped the unnamed mother and took her to the local hospital... Half a dozen men pushed the woman down on a bed and injected her with a drug to induce labor. The woman fought desperately and got away twice, but not the third time. In the early morning of June 12, the woman had repeated pains in her abdomen. At around 6 a.m., she had a stillbirth. The injection had poisoned and killed the fetus. According to the doctor, immediately after the woman’s placenta was passed, she had a massive hemorrhage."

Such a case ought to remind us of the evil that the state, and its most ardent advocates, are capable of. Such barbarism is not confined to countries like China. One-child polices have been advocated by prominent people and publications in every Western country:

• In 2009, former Upper House Democrat in South Australia Sandra Kanck advocated a one-child policy.

• In his 1977 book Ecoscience, current White House science czar John P. Holdren floated the idea of forced abortions and compulsory sterilization, amongst a raft of other draconian population control measures, all of which would be carried out by a “Planetary Regime”.

• In 2009, an article written in Canada’s National Post argued for “A planetary law, such as China’s one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate.”

• In 2010, Ted Turner called on world leaders to institute an international one-child policy akin to that being enforced in China.

In addition, academics at the University of Melbourne have argued that legalised abortion should be extended to make the killing of newborn babies permissible, even if the baby is perfectly healthy.

We must remember that totalitarian policies, on par with coercive abortion, are far from being unheard in the West. In the early 20th century, over 30 state governments in the United States implemented forced sterilisation laws. Thousands were sterilised against their will, and in some states the practice continued into the 1970s.

The most prominent country to implement forced sterilisation was, of course, Nazi Germany. The Nazis took the further step of implementing forced euthanasia, via their T4 program.

Mises said ...

"The fundamental discrepancies in worldview and patterns of behavior do not correspond to differences in race, nationality or class affiliation. "

Race and class are, however, the very differences played up in popular culture, and indoctrinated via public schooling. Hence statists so ably use them as a means to artificially divide the people and further their philosophy.

In playing-up the specific case of Trayvon Martin - one of many homicides that occur daily in the United States - the media even go so far as to use a novel phrase - "white Hispanic" - in describing the race of the shooter George Zimmerman, who, like Obama, has one "white" parent and one non-white parent. If George Zimmerman is racially classified as "white-Hispanic", is Barack Obama himself not "white-African"? And yet, have you ever heard Mr Obama described in that way?

Obama and his biological mother

No doubt, if we looked, we would find white-skinned folks in Trayvon's family tree. Such facts highlight the superficial delusions in the discourse. That however, won't stop the Barack Obama re-election campaign from cynically using the case as a means of securing a second term, not only via securing the "black" vote, but by playing up delusional feelings of "racial guilt" among the lighter-skinned in the United States.

Statists deceive by indoctrinating the idea that the enemy is always something other than the state. If people are focused on race and economic stratum (think 99% demagogy) they lose focus of the true and common enemy of all the people: the state.

Don't be deceived.