The murder of little Sharon, the 5yo girl taken from her bed in a 'town camp' in Alice Springs, should be a clarion call for the government.
And I have some suggestions.
1. Ban the term 'Stolen Generations'. They are the 'Rescued Generations' - rescued from abuse and neglect.
2. Rescue and remove all children being brought up in substandard accommodation or by those who are too drug or alcohol-affected to provide proper care.
3. Apply the above as it would be applied to white folk in cities, without this nonsense 'cultural sensitivity' which is just a euphemism for acceptance of lower standards that would be unacceptable anywhere else.
3. Cease the notion that they must be placed 'with kith, kin, community or on country' where it cannot be proven that that care is as good as fostering/adoption by others in other locations - and not selected for their race. Too often children are shunted from one form of dysfunction to the next.
4. Demolish all ramshackle 'town camps' and relocate 'long-grassers' into appropriate accommodation within towns. This relegation of out-of-sight, out-of-mind has to stop.
5. Enforce mandatory school attendance with fines, deducted from fortnightly welfare if necessary. Non-attending children are most likely to be neglected or abused. They should be removed from parents who would deny them any sort of meaningful future because they can neither read nor write. This, after all, is passive child abuse.
6. Audit all expenditure on Aboriginal individuals, groups, charities, businesses, land councils and services - including mining royalties.
7. Begin to wean Aborigines off soul-destroying passive welfare that leads to hopelessness, helplessness, depression and escapism through numbing drugs and alcohol.
8. Create meaningful work to assist the above. Thousands of houses require repairs, maintenance, cleaning. Communities need rubbish collection and road maintenance, especially during the wet season, along with self-sustainability: growing fruit and vegetables, rearing chickens for meat and eggs, thereby overcoming the other problems of poor health and nutrition as a result of the cost of remote transport. There are countless opportunities for actual work that benefits the communities, in the broadest sense.
9. Apply the law and sentencing as it would be applied to a white person in a city. Justice is supposed to be blind, so there should be no privilege due to race or hardships during upbringing - we've all experienced hardships.
10. Stop 'othering' Aborigines. We are all Australians. We are all equal. Stop favouring one race over another. It's achieving the complete opposite of what is intended.
Here endeth actual truth-telling.
Ponga seeing the 116k monthly cheque hit his bank account and personal message of origin selection from Billy after heโs half assed the last 4 rounds
They did not take cursive from the schools because children no longer needed it. They took it because of what it was quietly building in them.
Consider what the exercise actually is. A child, six years old, is handed a pen and asked to draw a single unbroken line that becomes a word. The wrist must float. The fingers must hold a living pressure, never quite the same twice, always correcting. The eye must follow the ink forward and trust the hand to finish what it has begun. There is no lifting, no stopping, no starting over mid-word. The loop must close. The ascender must rise and return. The sentence must travel from one margin to the other as a single continuous gesture, and at the end of it the hand must still be steady.
Twelve years of this. Every day. Ten thousand small acts of sustained, self-correcting attention, carried out below the level of conscious thought, until the motion belongs to the body and the body belongs to the motion.
This is not penmanship. It is the slow construction of an interior form.
The hand that has learned to carry a line without breaking it is the hand of a mind that has learned to carry a thought without breaking it. The two are not metaphors for one another. They are the same faculty, trained in the same child, by the same daily discipline. Continuity of the stroke becomes continuity of the reasoning. The patience of the loop becomes the patience of the argument. The commitment to finish a word one has started becomes the commitment to finish a sentence, a paragraph, a life's idea, without reaching for the nearest distraction halfway through.
Print is a different creature entirely. Print lifts. Print stops. Print assembles a word out of separate, stamped, interchangeable pieces, each one beginning and ending in isolation. A mind raised only on print learns to think the way print is made, in discrete tokens, in replaceable units, in fragments that can be recombined by any outside hand without the owner noticing the substitution. It is precisely the shape of thought a language model produces. It is precisely the shape of thought a language model can steer.
Cursive is kata. This is the whole of it. A form repeated daily, for years, not for the sake of the form but for what the repetition lays down in the practitioner beneath the form. The swordsman does not train kata so that one day he may fight in kata. He trains it so that when the moment comes and there is no time to think, the movement is already inside him, older and deeper than thought, and it rises on its own. Cursive was the kata of the literate mind, the daily quiet drilling of continuity, of patience, of a line held steady under the long pressure of its own length. And the signature it produced at the end, that small flourished mark unique to a single human being on earth, was only the outward proof of an inward form no machine and no other hand could ever reproduce.
Take the kata away and the practitioner is left with vocabulary in place of faculty. He can recognise a whole thought when he encounters one. He cannot carry one himself. He can admire a finished argument. He cannot sustain one long enough to close its loop. He begins books he does not finish, sentences he does not end, ideas he abandons the moment the screen in his palm offers him a brighter one. And when the machine begins feeding him tokens in the exact shape his schooling taught him to receive, he meets it with no interior resistance at all, because no interior form was ever built in him to push back with.
They removed it quietly, across a generation, and they removed it in the last years before the machines arrived. Twelve years of daily practice in unbroken, embodied, self-authored thought, gone from the curriculum of almost every child in the Western world, just as the instruments designed to complete their sentences for them came online.
The hand forgets. The mind, having never been taught the kata, forgets a thing it never knew it had.
That is what cursive was. That is what was taken. And that is why the thought of anyone who still writes by hand, in long unlifted lines, remains, quietly, stubbornly, and without their ever needing to announce it, their own.
Now the question stands open. What else has been banned, phased out, quietly retired from the curriculum and from common life over these same decades, under the same soft excuses? Mental arithmetic. Memorisation of poetry. Latin. Logic as a formal subject. Map reading. Knot work. The keeping of a commonplace book. The reading aloud of long passages in class. Singing in parts.
What was each of those actually building in the child, beneath the surface of the lesson, and whose interest was served by its disappearance?
Calling everything fake is easy.
Knowing what's real is much more difficult.
We're living in a time when people are finding out they've been lied to, but without any other source of truth to turn to, they lose hope and become more cynical and hateful.
Not everything is fake.
The more you awaken, the more you realize how pitiful the dark powers of this planet actually are compared to the light.
It needs to be understood that what you put your focus toward will always become your reality. If you only look for evil and lies, then everything becomes an evil lie.
Once again, challenges will increase until the Shift, and it will be many truth seekers who give up first because they chose to see only darkness.
Master thread on the 2015-2022 closure of the Internet, the process by which every major Internet platform went from broadly open with a few basic guidelines to strict narrative enforcement, often with the collaboration of govts and outsourcing moderation power to NGOs.
Not one foreigner should be on any form of welfare. What utter lunacy from our current โleadersโ - a disgrace to our ancestors who toiled and bled for this nation.
Our nation needs a restoration ๐ฆ๐บ
The people of Afghanistan are enduring one of the worldโs worst protracted humanitarian crises, exacerbated by the Talibanโs failure to meet basic needs. In response, the Australian Government will provide a further $50 million in support through established UN partners.
Divorce lawyer James Sexton drops a marriage-saving secret: "You'll never win an argument with your spouse."
He teaches the "problem of the lemon": Two people fight over one lemon โ cut it in half, both get 50%. But one wants rind for baking, the other juice for lemonade. Ask "why do you want it?" โ both get 100% of what they need.
Nobody asks. Assumptions lead to compromise that leaves everyone shortchanged.
In relationships, fights aren't about the "lemon"โthey're about underlying needs. Curiosity wins where winning loses.
(From his negotiation class wisdom.)
Couples: Ever turned a fight into win-win by asking "why"?
Culture is not just food, clothes, music, and language.
Culture is values, law, heritage, institutions, shared experiences, community roots, common stories and beliefs, historical references.
Multiculturalism has destroyed this - deliberately, maliciously.