This is an odd week locally. Yesterday was Otago Anniversary Day. This is not celebrated by the university, who (by long tradition) account the anniversay as the Tuesday after Easter. However, Easter in early this year, and if you do not work on the Monday of this week you will be trying to cram five days work not onto four days, but three.

Which is what I will do next week. But, as a good employee of the University, I went to my clinical job yesterday (which was a holiday for the Hospital). The medical students (on university calendar) were there, and the other consultants (on hospital calendar) were not. But we did some work, and that may have helped today, For today was busy enough.

In the meantime, the Cyprus situation has not only imploded, but is spreading. As I head out to work today, I tell my son (who is on mid term break) to watch the news… it could be interesting. I popped home at lunch to find Fox talking…. about some idiotic show involving Phil Spector.

This is not reporting the news. This is peddling lethe, so we slide sedated into the collapse.

So I’m going to spend some time trolling around the intertubes looking for decent quotage. Firstly, we need to look at the issue of immigration, From the Daily Mail, with a hat tip to the Woodpile report. David Goodheart writes:

Among Left-leaning ‘Hampstead’ liberals like me, there has long been what you might call a ‘discrimination assumption’ when it comes to the highly charged issue of immigration. Our instinctive reaction has been that Britain is a relentlessly racist country bent on thwarting the lives of ethnic minorities, that the only decent policy is to throw open our doors to all and that those with doubts about how we run our multi-racial society are guilty of prejudice. And that view — echoed in Whitehall, Westminster and town halls around the country — has been the prevailing ideology, setting the tone for the immigration debate.

I am now convinced that public opinion is right and Britain has had too much immigration too quickly. For 30 years, the Left has blinded itself with sentiment about diversity. But we got it wrong.

I still believe that large-scale immigration has made Britain livelier and more dynamic than it would otherwise have been. I believe, too, that this country is significantly less racist than it once was. In many places immigration is working as the textbooks say it should with a degree of harmony, with minorities upwardly mobile and creating interesting new hybrid identities in mixed suburbs.

…

For a democratic state to have any meaning, it must ‘belong’ to existing citizens. They must have special rights over non-citizens. Immigration must be managed with their interests in mind. But it has not been. The justification for such a large and unpopular change has to be that the economic benefits are significant and measurable. But they are not.

One of the liberal elite’s myths is that we are a ‘mongrel nation’ that has always experienced high inflows of outsiders. But this isn’t true. From 1066 until 1950, immigration was almost non-existent (excluding Ireland) — a quarter of a million at the most, mainly Huguenots and Jews.

Post-World War II immigration has been on a completely different scale from anything that went before. These days, more people arrive on our shores as immigrants in a single year than did so in the entire period from 1066 to 1950, excluding wartime. Much of this happened by accident. When the 1948 Nationality Act was passed — giving all citizens of the Empire and Commonwealth the right to live and work in Britain — it was not expected that the ordinary people of poor former colonies would arrive in their hundreds of thousands.

Nor was it expected after 1997 that a combination of quite small decisions would lead to 1.5 million East Europeans arriving, about half to settle. But come they did, and a net immigration of around four million foreign-born citizens since 1997 has produced easily the most dramatic demographic revolution in British history. The whole post-war process of immigration has been badly managed or, rather, not managed at all

…

We are deep into a huge social experiment. To give it a chance of working, we need to heed the ‘slow down’ signs that the electorate is waving. And all the more so given that the low economic growth era we are now in means people’s grievances cannot easily be bought off with rising wages and public spending.

…

Democratic common sense demands that politics and law cannot concern themselves only with the problems of minorities. The majority must have a voice, too, in how we manage a multi-racial society.

Like most white British people of my generation, I am happy living in a multi-racial society. I relish the fact that the immigration-related changes of the past few decades have been overwhelmingly accepted and even celebrated by white Britain. Caribbean and Chinese men and women ‘marry out’ in large numbers, and there are many places where a cross-ethnic common life is the norm, especially among younger people.

But one of the challenges is how to allow older and poorer white people a safe space in which to express a sense of loss and homesickness for the past, without this mood spilling over into racism.

I better disclose that I have committed that sin against the Aryan nation: miscegenation. My wife was Chinese: she is a second to third generation NZer (her family was here in the time of the Poll tax). We had a census recently, and instead of writing NZ European / Pakeha and/or Chinese… we all simply wrote “New Zealanders”. I am more interested in the quality of your character than bow brown your skin is.

But a nation is not just something that sits in a territory. It is folkways, history, high culture, shared jokes, shared history, and a shared sense of honour. If an immigrant group does not bend to this — at least in part — then racial strife will occur. It is for this reason that Jim Rawles argues that the American Redoubt should consist of Calvinists, traditional Catholics, and Orthodox Jews. They share enough commonality to preserve a culture. I treasure the thoughts of my parents and grandparents (who tolerated me marrying a Chinese chick) who recall a more homogeneous society. That homogeneity, those unwritten rules, allowed for fewer laws and less regulations. Mistrust breeds oaths and certification: we used to instead trust each other.

One of the reasons I live in Otago is that the core culture is Scottish/Chinese. The Chinese are part of the establishment, and multiethnic kids just fit in. This is not the case in Auckland, where there are more immigrants, and there are ghettos developing.

But back to the elites. I’m not quoting the article at Taki’s. but the ruling elite in the UK, is both peculiarly traumatized and sheltered… by their education. This has been made worse by the professionalisation of all the arms of authority, so that when part of the establishment falls, it all falls.

In September 1955 The Spectator’s political commentator, Henry Fairlie, coined a term to describe the way in which Britain works which has been used ever since. The ‘Establishment’, he said, was the real mechanism through which power was exercised in this country. The elites of the business, political and media worlds wielded power via a ‘matrix of official and social relations’, which varied from the banks to the director-general of the BBC to ‘divinities’ such as Violet Bonham Carter (Baroness Asquith of Yarnbury). The social and economic upheavals of the following decades only caused this Establishment to regenerate. But it has never faced an existential threat — until now.

The Establishment is in chaos. Financiers are still being routed, as the recent Barclays upheaval shows. Politicians are being found guilty of breaking laws: Chris Huhne’s predicament is remarkable only because of his fairly recent status as a Cabinet member. The sight of politicians being put behind bars is no longer unusual in Britain: six have been sent to prison in the last three years.

Journalists may not be far behind. There have, so far, been 100 arrests in the hacking scandal, which has turned into the biggest criminal investigation in modern British history. Police are arresting police; a 50-year-old officer was grabbed in a dawn raid this week. Newspapers face state regulation now not because they are powerful, but because they have grown too weak to defend themselves and their right to free speech.

I’m a Calvinist. As such, I consider the church has a duty to guide, nudge if you will, society into functional and sustainable modes of living and acting. I don’t consider this happens because we are good (that would be rank heresy for we are all evil) but because we are all pragmatic. For a civilization to exist, every member of that civilization must subscribe to certain ways of living. The messages we give matter: and the messages we have been giving have been designed to make us scared. That intrepid anthropologist of the English, Kate Fox, uses hyperbole to make a point…

If I were given total power, I could very easily engineer a nation in which coffee would become a huge social problem – a nation in which young people would binge-drink coffee every Friday and Saturday night and then rampage around town centres being anti-social, getting into fights and having unprotected sex in random one-night stands. I would restrict access to coffee, thus immediately giving it highly desirable forbidden-fruit status. Then I would issue lots of dire warnings about the dangerously disinhibiting effects of coffee.

I would make sure everyone knew that even a mere three cups (six “units”) of coffee “can lead to anti-social, aggressive and violent behaviour”, and sexual promiscuity, thus instantly giving young people a powerful motive to binge-drink double espressos, and a perfect excuse to behave very badly after doing so. I could legitimately base many of my scary coffee-awareness warnings on the known effects of caffeine, and I could easily make these sound like a recipe for disaster, or at least for disinhibition and public disorder.

Now, the message we are given is that Christians are boring, that being married is a prison, and that one should follow one’s dreams. We are told that the government is wise and will be able to regulate commerce to ensure that we are employed and have an increasing standard of living, if we work or if we do not.

And we are told alcohol and nicotine and cannabinoids are evil. But casual sex is your right. (Which is crazy: I have seen many lives screwed up by substances but more ruined by betrayal, jealousy, and that hellhound that hunts with them, despair).

These messages have consequences. Let’s look at some of the economic ones. This is from Survivalblog.

“To see why stock prices and hiring are not correlated, imagine yourself as the owner of a pizza shop. The economy has been bad, and people are buying less pizza, so you fire two of your cooks and reduce the number of pies you prepare. Suddenly, your cousin Ben wins the lottery and decides to give you $10,000 for a piece of your business. Now that you have another 10 grand in the bank, and your business is worth a bit more, are you suddenly going to hire back the two cooks to make more pies that nobody will buy? Or will you just put the money in the bank and wait for when demand returns? The stock market exists to help companies raise capital. With most stocks near all time highs and US corporations holding record cash on their balance sheets, access to capital is not the problem. Lack of demand is the problem, and no amount of financial manipulation is going to change that.

The second quote is about the fact demand is down.

FedEx raised red flags about global economic weakness, as it reported a steep drop in earnings and issued weak guidance. The Memphis-based express delivery company said shipments to and from Asia fell, and that customers are shifting more of their business to slower shipping methods in an effort to save money. FedEx is often considered to be a bellwether of the global economy due to both its size and worldwide presence. The lower earnings and outlook is considered a discouraging symptom of a global weakness.

I have said many times we need to return to the basic teaching of the Bible and the church. The prophets, psalmists and apostles warn us frequently not to trust our rulers. So to finish, I’m turning to the text of the Book of Common Prayer, from 1662

Psalm 146

1 Praise the Lord, O my soul; while I live will I praise the Lord yea, as long as I have any being, I will sing praises unto my God.
2 O put not your trust in princes, nor in any child of man for there is no help in them.
3 For when the breath of man goeth forth he shall turn again to his earth and then all his thoughts perish.
4 Blessed is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help and whose hope is in the Lord his God;
5 Who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that therein is who keepeth his promise for ever.
6 Who helpeth them to right that suffer wrong who feedeth the hungry.
7 The Lord looseth men out of prison the Lord giveth sight to the blind.
8 The Lord helpeth them that are fallen the Lord careth for the righteous.
9 The Lord careth for the strangers; he defendeth the fatherless and widow as for the way of the ungodly, he turneth it upside down.
10 The Lord thy God, O Sion, shall be King for evermore and throughout all generations.

The elite of this age will fall, and the ideology of the elite will fall with them. This time will be seen as akin to the 3rd Empire in France, or the late Weimar Republic. It will become part of history. Trust instead, on this earth, in the Lord of Zion. For our time here is limited, and we can rest when we are dead.