Grift away

Jake Tapper' and Alex Thompson's Original Sin is not a pleasant read, or listen. It is the intersection of politics and gerontology. Some readers who have experienced the decline of aging loved ones will relate to the Democratic politicians who, alarmed at President Biden's noticeable decline, implored him not to seek re-election, because he reminded them of their own aging parents. They, and the author, would have done well to have spoken up earlier, and more boldly. Goodness knows why they failed to do so. 

Real men read

Australians, especially young men, are reading less than ever before. The data shows that the population cohort that reads the least is males aged 15-24, with only 10.1% reading on any given day. The trend is reinforced from a young age, with parents more likely to read to their daughters than sons. The book industry initiative Australia Reads is calling for a national strategy to remind people of the benefits of reading, such as improved mental health, empathy, and focus.

I see that libraries are involved in this campaign. I support this, unlike some other initiatives that libraries are involved in. 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-14/australians-especially-men-are-reading-less-than-ever-before/105422070

https://australiareads.org.au/

Christians are a bunch of dills

An excerpt from Gerard Henderson's Media Watchdog blog, that I felt compelled to repost here. A leftist media outlet attempts to give former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, well known for being a Pentecostal Christian, a fair interview. 

 Issue 683 – The Sydney Institute

Out they go

I'm not happy about this. I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall in the library management committee when it took this decision. 

Let the sunshine in

As a dispassionate observer of American politics, I just finished listening to the audiobook edition of The Courage to Be Free: Florida's Blueprint for America's Revival, by Florida Governor, and as yet undeclared 2024 Presidential candidate, Ron DeSantis.

It certainly reads like a campaign biography, recounting his life story, his taking on cultural elites, woke corporations and the news media, and managing to keep his state out of lockdown when the Covid 19 pandemic was at its height. Some of this record may resonate with potential voters. While he seems to be a solid conservative, and a staunch family man, unlike his likely main rival in the primaries, it will fall to other biographers and commentators to assess his character. 

It was a good decision to have a professional voiceover artist narrate most of the book. DeSantis sounded flat and monotone in the dedication, epigraph, and closing credits. He will need to develop his speaking skills if he wants to lift his poll numbers and be competitive in what will probably be a tough campaign, perhaps as bitterly fought as the 2016 campaign. 

According to the most recent RealClearPolitics polling data for the 2024 Republican nomination, he is placed a distant second behind former President Donald Trump. 

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-courage-to-be-free-ron-desantis?variant=40977857544226

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2024/president/us/2024_republican_presidential_nomination-7548.html

The non-inclusive caterpillar

My hot take: Let kids be kids. Let parents choose appropriate books for their own children. Must all aspects of life be politicised? 

The author of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle, passed away in 2021. He is no longer around to defend his work. In a 2009 interview, Carle described it as a book of hope. 

"That you, an insignificant, ugly little caterpillar can grow up and eventually unfold your talent, and fly into the world. As a child, you can feel small and helpless and wonder if you’ll ever grow up. So that might be part of its success."  

Although I am not a parent, I would have thought that was a positive thing for children to learn as they make their way in the world. 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10869427/Australian-researcher-warns-childrens-book-Hungry-Caterpillar-detrimental-kids.html

Right wing people are evil

While I no longer work in higher education, I still take a passing interest in it. Political and cultural trends impact the academic world, and certainly the humanities, but in my day, it was possible to be a conservative and not feel like a pariah on campus. It is reasonable to speculate if the current crop of students could say the same thing. 

According to Kevin Donnelly, university Arts departments in Australia are now infested with:

"neo-Marxist critical theory intent on imposing cultural-left group think based on a rainbow alliance of radical philosophies ranging from postmodernism, deconstructionism to radical feminist, gender and postcolonial theories."

If it is valid to connect this with another trend, revealed in a survey published in late 2020; the problem of British university students hiding their opinions from their peers, both in the classroom and on campus in general, because they feared negative repercussions. 

No Australian data is available, but there is no reason to believe that the situation would be any different in that country. This would be a fascinating research project for someone with the time and inclination to establish this definitively. 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8973601/QUARTER-students-self-censor-opinions-fear-universitys-woke-cancel-culture.html

https://www.spectator.com.au/2021/04/the-federal-government-didnt-kill-university-arts-departments-try-cultural-marxism/

Staying apart keeps us together

Whilst it's unusual to write a review of a book that you haven't finished reading, this is an example of a history book that speaks to the present day, and the current world situation. Richard J Evans is a prolific historian, specializing in Nazi Germany. Published in 2020, his latest work, The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination, deconstructs and debunks conspiracy theories involving Hitler and the Nazis: that the Jews had a secret plot to undermine civilization, as outlined in the Protocols of Zion, that Germany lost the First World War because it was "stabbed in the back" by socialists and Jews in 1918, that the Nazis burned down the Reichstag in February 1933 in order to seize power, Rudolf Hess's 1941 flight to the UK to offer the British a peace deal was sanctioned by Hitler, and that Hitler escaped the bunker in 1945 and fled to South America. 

One way to counter conspiracy theories is with sober, factual analysis. The author offers this book for "our own troubled times." It was published before the start of the Covid pandemic, but plenty of conspiracy theories have arisen surrounding it, circulated rapidly by alternative news outlets and social media, perhaps adding to the general sense of fear and uncertainty that presently pervades the world. For this reason, this type of book is needed more than ever.  

https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-hitler-conspiracies-9780241413463

https://www.richardjevans.com

Just the thing to get kids reading

A Hardy Boys reboot series is about to premiere. Unfortunately, in this version, they won't be in a pop group. 

https://nerdist.com/article/the-hardy-boys-trailer-hulu/

The new red scare

There is no question that the Chinese government is a serious threat to international stability and the democratic world. Last night I participated in a webinar with Clive Hamilton, one of the authors of the new book, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World.

Two things from this webinar stood out for me. I intend to read this book as soon as my local library has it available. Through its contentious Belt and Road Initiative, China seeks to expand its international footprint. It is highly likely that any infrastructure deals made under this initiative will be more favourable to China than other partner nations. In order for these projects to go ahead, partner nations will have to accept Chinese ownership of them, and a large proportion of Chinese guest workers rather than locals. 

Through its United Front Work Department, or United Front, which presumably it would prefer to keep secret, news outlets have revealed China's attempts to directly influence Australian politics by building links with politicians of both major parties.

This, sadly, is the price of having China as Australia's largest economic partner, especially for its mining and education industries. Maintaining this economic relationship means dealing with a corrupt and oppressive dictatorship.

https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/australian-economy/china-is-infiltrating-australia-on-multiple-fronts-from-politics-to-business-via-its-powerful-and-covert-united-front-agency/news-story/9318c7799e540164dd0b985b9e8969c2

https://www.hardiegrant.com/au/publishing/bookfinder/book/hidden-hand-by-clive-hamilton/9781743795576

What is it good for?

My, how time flies. Next month marks 45 years since the end of the Vietnam War. I listened with interest to Carl Robinson, former American journalist and aid worker who worked in Vietnam at the height of the war, discuss his book, The Bite of the Lotus: An Intimate Memoir of the Vietnam War. In this talk, Robinson openly discusses how his traumatic war experiences led to heroin addiction. He is now in a better place in life, living in Australia since 1977, and he now makes a living writing books and running boutique tours to Vietnam.

https://thesydneyinstitute.com.au/blog/the-vietnam-war-a-memoir-carl-robinson/

What year is it?

I just finished reading Labor's Forgotten People: The Triumph of Identity Politics, by Michael Thompson. According to the blurb, Thompson argues that "the influence of identity politics on modern Labor's political agenda – assisted by a political class whose sole concern is power – poses an "existential threat to Labor. the warning signs are clear. Popular disaffection with the political class is increasing, and the Party's embrace of left-wing, progressive issues is sidelining core working class aspirations and grievances that used to be the focus of Labor politics." Labor's unexpected loss of the May 2019 federal election, not even anticipated in this book, arguably supports this thesis.

This book was very dry and academic, so I found it hard to engage with. Other reviewers have pointed out the number of typographical errors in it. Here, the author writes that Whitlam suffered a "crushing defeat as Opposition Leader in 1997." This actually happened in 1977, when in that year's federal election, when the Fraser government maintained its strong majority in the House of Representatives. The Liberal Party won 67 seats to the Labor Party’s 38, with 19 seats going to the National Country Party. This was Whitlam’s last election, as he resigned from his seat in Parliament on 31 July 1978.

The cold war on pedantry

Pictured here is the synopsis from the back cover of a children's visual guidebook about the world of espionage. As you can see, it has pictures of a World War III sabotage pack. Huh? Presumably, an editor at the publishing company messed up here. It's never a good look when a childrens' book is produced with such a glaring and easily avoidable error. Anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of history would know that there has been two world wars. By the grace of God, there will not be a third one.

Boss cocky

Edmund Barton

When you're Australian, you know things are awry when broadly speaking, you know more about Presidents of the United States than your own country's Prime Ministers. To correct this imbalance, I'm taking on a personal project of reading a biography of every Australian Prime Minister since 1901, starting with Edmund Barton (1849-1920). One of several Prime Ministerial biographies published to commemorate the centenary of Australian federation in 2001, I just finished reading Geoffrey Bolton's Edmund Barton: The One Man for the Job.

Barton was educated at the Fort Street Model School, Sydney Grammar School and the University of Sydney. Whilst a student at the University of Sydney, Barton was secretary of the University cricket club. Before entering the New South Wales Parliament, he worked in the legal profession, and continued to work sporadically as a barrister and solicitor during his political career. He was also a leading campaigner for Australian federation during the 1890s, rising to become Australia's first Prime Minister in January 1901.

He resigned from office in September 1903, to take up a position as a judge in the first High Court of Australia, remaining in this position until his death in 1920.

Just think, if you are secretary of your cricket club, you too could one day become Prime Minister of Australia. Then again, you might have more job security at the cricket club than as Prime Minister.

The wild dogs cry out in the night

I just finished reading The Looting Machine by Tom Burgis. This book is the written equivalent of the blues bar that Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) visits in The Naked Gun 2 ½. There were pictures of the Hindenburg disaster, the sinking of the Titanic, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and failed US presidential candidate Michael Dukakis hanging on the walls. In other words, quite depressing. Despite having highly productive oil, mining, and diamond industries, African countries such as Nigeria, Niger, Congo, and Angola are mired in poverty. Corrupt local and  international government officials, corporations, and financial services firms collude to loot the wealth generated from these industries, while ordinary people subsist. It seems that there is neither the will nor the prospect of these problems being solved, and Burgis doesn’t offer any solutions either.

Misty thinking

This is an embarrassingly common cataloguing error, in which the wrong description has been assigned to a wrong book. This book is a novel about a midwife, and not machine learning.

By their fruits

I just finished listening to The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, by Dinesh D'Souza. If you are a student of history, politics, and competing worldviews, the book is worth reading, despite its provocative title.

As a foreign outsider, I cannot offer informed comment on the some of the information he presents, such as the academic question of whether Nazism is to be classified as a extreme left or extreme right ideology. However, I was astounded to learn that the Nuremberg race laws were partially based on the Jim Crow laws of the American South, Nazi eugenics programs being partially modeled on those in some American states, the idea for the Nazi genocides came from that which was perpetrated on Native Americans, and that the Democrats, who in the present time position themselves as the progressives, were historically the party of slavery and the Ku Klux Klan. There was what D'Souza terms as "two way traffic" between Nazism and the American left.

I will deal with the portions of this book that I am informed about. Atheists have often claimed that Adolf Hitler was a Christian, and that the Nazi movement was a Christian one. These claims do not stand up to historical scrutiny. D'Souza's earlier work has dealt with this question, and he addresses it again in this book.

D'Souza writes:

"Hitler's Table Talk, a revealing collection of the Fuhrer's private opinions, assembled by a close aide during the war years, shows Hitler to be rabidly anti-religious. He called Christianity one of the great "scourges" of history, and said of the Germans, "Let's be the only people who are immunized against this disease." He promised that "through the peasantry we shall be able to destroy Christianity." In fact, he blamed the Jews for inventing Christianity. He also condemned Christianity for its opposition to evolution.

Hitler reserved special scorn for the Christian values of equality and compassion, which he identified with weakness. Hitler's leading advisers like Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich and Bormann were atheists who hated religion and sought to eradicate its influence in Germany."

Here we have definitive statements from Hitler and other top ranking Nazis, clearly stating their contempt for Christianity and Christian ethics. To them, it was a disease that had to be eradicated. There is no way that they were Christians, not even in the broadest sense of the term. It is time that this fiction was stopped.

Sneering

I have recently started to use Audible. I'm currently listening to True Girt: The Unauthorised History of Australia, Volume 2, by David Hunt. I read the print version of the first volume, but wanted to save time, and have enough books to read as it is. The blurb describes Hunt's work as "side splitting."

If you are are inclined towards chronological snobbery, are amused by cheap shots at conservative newspaper columnists, and enjoy hearing Christians (whether clergy, missionaries, or laity) being bagged out, you might get the odd belly laugh out of reading this.

To be fair, I did smile when Hunt wrote about the book that has the longest title of any book ever published in the history of Australia, and has been causing library cataloguers grief ever since. William Wentworth (1790-1872) was a noted explorer, journalist, and politician. The electorate of Wentworth, currently held by our beloved Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, is named after him. In 1819, Wentworth published (deep breath): A Statistical, historical, and political description of the colony of New South Wales, and its dependent settlements in Van Diemen's Land: with a particular enumeration of the advantages which these colonies offer for emigration, and their superiority in many respects over those possessed by the United States of America. (Exhale).

Wentworth's work is readily available from both bricks and mortar and online bookstores, as is David Hunt's.

Page turner

For a librarian, I don't write much about books on this blog. Pardon my indulgence, but I wish to say "Happy Birthday" to British novelist, Robert Harris. He was born on this day in 1957. I have only read his first novel, Fatherland, published in 1992. This book was so impressive, that to this day, I have not forgotten it.

Since Fatherland, he has published several other novels, including Enigma (1995), Archangel (1998), Pompeii (2003), Imperium (2006), The Ghost (2007), Lustrum (2009), The Fear Index (2011), An Officer and a Spy (2013), Dictator (2015), Conclave (2016), and Munich (2017). I must get around to reading the rest of his extensive body of work one day.

By Krimidoedel Dr. Jost Hindersmann - Own work, CC BY 3.0, Link

Words will hurt me

In a worrying development, leftist university students at some universities have drawn up a list of trigger words, and demanded that any books containing them be removed from their campus libraries. This offends me as both a librarian, and a university graduate. This sort of talk of trigger warnings and microaggressions was unheard of back in my day. Students came to university to learn, to train for a career, and to participate in the free exchange of ideas.

Librarians should reject the idea of removing books because they offend some people. The Australian Library and Information Association has a core values statement. One of these values is to promote the free flow of information and ideas. Similarly, the American Library Association's core values statement states that "we uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources."

Even if education ministers nip this in the bud, that doesn't mean that the problem will go away. The idea may well spread to other universities, and may well turn out to be a persistent problem. I hope that my peers in the library profession resist it. If you don't like a book, don't read it. Problem solved.

http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/corevalues

https://www.alia.org.au/about-alia/policies-standards-and-guidelines/alia-core-values-statement

http://www.culturewarresource.com/leftist-students-are-demanding-books-containing-trigger-words-are-removed-from-university-libraries/

http://www.news.com.au/national/im-a-student-heres-how-free-speech-died-at-university/news-story/748b6979096c523fb7c8cbc89fef7102