Patriot Realm

One’s personal character should be a life-long investment.

When a politician offers you something at other people’s expense, remember these words of the poet John Dryden: “Better to shun the bait than struggle in the snare.”

Dryden’s admonition would have saved us a lot of trouble if we had applied its insight consistently to our economic and political thinking. The failure to do so has produced one disaster after another. This, I believe, is a character issue. Just as Christmas is a core spiritual foundation of Christianity, so too should personal character be a core foundation of our lives—and one we should champion on more days than just December 25.

It is so tragic. What a terrible place that we inhabit.

We all want to turn the clock back to days when boys were boys and men were men.

Women were elegant and nurturing mothers. Children were respectful and the family unit was a given, not an oddity.

Yet we have so many elephants in the room these days. What a shame. Because the real elephant in the room is a change to our Australian Constitution. 

I would not normally comment on matters published on other sites. However, the thrust of the article was a denigration of Australia’s supposed subservience to the United States starting with our involvement in WW2 and gradual acceptance of American culture following WW1. 

If I have any comment to make I make it on the offending site but in this instance a comment posted on social media prompts me to break my own rules. I do not subscribe to it as a commentator. The reason being that I have run out of patience with having to conform to the regimes of user name, password, PIN number, one time PIN number and other requirements of identification I refuse to take on anymore.

The council man was adamant:
“The Law must have its way,
The shed you built is not approved
It must come down today.”

“No doubt the shed is safe and strong
And no one has complained,
But plans and rules must bind us all
Or anarchy will reign.”

Failure to secure the islands shows why St. Petersburg couldn’t gain a foothold in the New World

Almost everyone in Russia and the United States is familiar with the story of how Alaska was sold to the Americans for next to nothing. Considerably fewer people have heard about the Russian colony in California.

And only historians seem to know that mere chance prevented the future 50th state of the US from becoming a part of the Russian Empire 205 years ago.

Marianne Faithfull famously sung that at the age of thirty-seven, Lucy Jordan realised she'd never ride through Paris in a sports car, with the warm wind in her hair.  It’s taken me a lot longer, being more than twice that age, but I’m on the same page.  I used to care a bit, but I don’t give a rat’s arse anymore (No offence intended Esra).

When you think about it, we are all so insignificant in the whole scheme of things, any achievement, no matter how great and earth-shattering it may seem at the time, is illusory.  You only have to ponder that it takes 200,000 years for light from a distant star travelling at the speed of light, which is about 300,000 kilometres per second, to cross our galaxy, and there are as many galaxies in the universe as there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world.  The magnitude of it all is too large to grasp.