Ok, I’ve just been reading about the British Penal System prior to the First Fleet. Now this was a time when they really knew how to dish out severe punishments but strangely the crime rate was still rather high. Now when I say dish out severe punishments, I naturally meant to the lower classes. The important people – lords and the like – were judged by the House of Lords until 1948, and they seemed to believe that – as with Peta Credlin’s drink driving charge, the public humiliation was enough punishment.
Of course, we still have people arguing that harsher penalties will act as a deterrent to crime. While this may be true in very rare cases, I suspect most people don’t stop and think, before committing a criminal act, “Hey, I only get five years for this, if it were ten, I’d definitely stop right now, and go and become a doctor.”
But, let’s be real! Nearly half the population is below average intelligence. (When this simple fact is applied to schools, it’s a sign of how badly they’re failing.)
My concern is not that we have stupid people. It’s that their opinions seem to be given such prominence in the media. Instead of giving scientists a chance to write a column, “The Australian” decided that it was worth giving Maurice Newman the space to explain to us all that the Bureau of Meteorology is caught up in this “warmist” conspiracy and have been falsifying figures.
Strange that during the period of so-called “global cooling”, there was no suggestion that the figures may be wrong. These were “facts” that the green movement were told were indisputable.
Yet now it seems that the BOM may be fallible after all. How do we know? Well, Maurice Newman says so! And he’s Tony Abbott’s Business Adviser, so he must know what he’s taking about. I mean, he was attacking wind farms even before Joe realised that they were incredibly ugly and lacked the raw beauty of a coal-fired power station.
Maurice Newman has refused meet with scientists about his comments. After all, scientists are part of that whole conspiracy that began with the Age of Enlightenment. They were probably even suggested that just transporting convicts to Australia won’t actually put an end to crime.
Mr Newman, like Tony Abbott, arrived in Australia by boat from England as a young boy, but neither were convicts as the English stopped sending their convicts here some time before either of them arrived. In the twentieth century, they only sent people who understood the superiority of the English class system while preferring the Australian weather.
Mm, perhaps there is a strong case for stopping the boats, after all.
