Going nuclear

Recent events in Japan, and the media bun-fight that ensued has led me to adopt what you might call a ‘reactionary’ position regarding nuclear power. The news media coverage of the Fukushima incident was little more than an exercise in ‘disaster porn’, and shamed all good taste and rational analysis of the situation.

So in order to do my bit in support of a clean, safe, and dependable industry I believe should be adopted widely by all civilised nations, from this month New England has had nuclear power written into the fabric of its story. Instead of a nation that had no nuclear because of a lack of fuel, our favourite fictional country now gets a range of existing and new power stations, and a rich deposits of uranium ore to fuel them. There is also a sophisticated nuclear research site in order to conduct vital research into nuclear medicine and other allied industries.

A controversial move? Sure. Of course it is. But readers must not forget that New England Online is not an exercise in just building a nation for its own sake. There is, and always will be, a strongly political element to why I have created this website. Nuclear power makes sense, and for those of you out there who believe that energy should be clean and ‘carbon-free’, I’m glad to say that nuclear is only viable option available. Even if one rejects the need to cut carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (as I most certainly do), going nuclear is good for creating jobs, creates economic diversity, allows Australia to value-add to a raw product it has in abundance, and breaks our reliance on coal as the primary source of base-load electricity.

Food for thought surely?

A year in review

The time has come to undergo a small stock take. Looking back on 2010, it should be obvious just how much has been added to the website in the last twelve months.

There are now 825 pages on content and 1,320 uploaded files on the Encyclopaedia of  New England Online.In addition, there are a further 1,281 page that have not yet been created, with the list of wanted pages actually continuing to rise as more content is added. The old saying of one step forwards, two steps backward seems to have been the order of the day in 2010.

Unfortunately, I do not have a record of how many pages and files existed on the site this time last year. This timer next year, however, I will be able to look at this page and see just how far the site has progressed.

The future

2010 was the sixth year of New England Online. I am very proud of the work I have done so far. HOWEVER, there is much more that needs to be done in order to get the website up to the standard I demand of it. The truest maxim of the entire enterprise is the idea that content is king. This applies as much today as it did in June 2004 when for no sane reason I kicked off this crazy venture.

The political events of 2010 in Australia and elsewhere demonstrate that a conservative alternative approach to the idea of socialism and big government is desperately needed. In a very small way, I want New England Online to show the world an alternative to tradition-bashing progressives who value nothing over themselves and their own selfish needs.

For a couple of years now I have been talking about multimedia content, and I still want to develop videos to add a further level of believability to the site. The kind of short little videos that has been used by Sweden to promote that realm are the sort of thing I still have in mind:

Sweden: Open Skies, Open Minds tells one everything you could ever want to glean in four minutes about Sweden. A cursory exportation of the video and want it is trying to say about the country and it’s people can be readily deducted. Sweden is not New England of course, and what this video is trying to say is not what New England is about. That said, this is a marvellous video that provides a brilliant insight into what the Swedes think of themselves and how they want us to think of them.

I hope 2011 affords me some opportunity to something very similar for New England.

The local revolution

Some months ago I purchased The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain by Douglas Carswell and Daniel Hannan.  The central premise of the book is the idea that too much power has been taken away from Parliament and local communities and handed to unelected bureaucrats in Whitehall and Brussels. Twenty-first century Great Britain is the sorry story of a nation overrun by qangos and the EU, and as a result, politics in the country is failing.

Since I bought the book, I have read and re-read it, looking for ideas that can be applied to the New England experiment. It goes without saying that I have found a number of things that any sensible politician should consider adopting as policy, but the most important thing I have gathered from the book is the idea that any decision affecting people should be made as close as possible to those same people. It seems obvious, and very simple, but in recent times there has been a swing back to the big spending centralist governments of the left who quite frankly, couldn’t run a whelk stall.

Here are just some of the many ideas discussed in The Plan that have been translated to the New England experiment:

• No public funding for political parties;
• Devolution of social security to local authorities;
• Singapore style health insurance; and
• Referendums that can block any legislation passed by Parliament.

It goes without saying that I think this policy should apply to Australia as well. There need to be more states, not less; and the ever increasing power of the Commonwealth should be curtailed. At the present, it is far too big.  Given the centralist policies of all the political elite in this country, there isn’t a snowflakes chance in Hell this would happen.

And people wonder why I gave up on the real world years ago and started New England Online…

Ring in the Changes

What an amazing six months!

The site really has been transformed by the decision to embrace traditionalism last year. Many ideas for pages that had been discarded for seeming too reactionary have now been embraced and published. These changes aren’t without controversy, and the very act of writing and publishing them makes the site a target for political criticism. But, I wouldn’t really be doing this if I didn’t want to engage in some sort of political discourse on the fate of western civilisation, and I sincerely and strongly believe that these new pages introduced are necessary if we are too survive.

To summarise, these changes have included:

• Establishment of Christianity as the state religion. All major denominations are included;
• Establishment of a peerage and baronetage in New England as part of the honours system;
• The introduction of a quadripartite system for secondary school education;
• The replacement of social democracy with liberalism as the major progressive political ideology; and
• Reintroduction of capital punishment for the most serious and aggravating of offences (I freely admit that this is probably the most controversial idea I have introduced to the website, but I do not shy away from the need for it).

In 2004, New England Online was featured in the book High Lean Country: Land, People and Memory in New England. For me, it was a great honour to be featured in this academic work, and confirmed that what I was doing for of both academic and artistic, merit. In the prelude to the book, Professor J.S. Ryan described the site as “A utopia built on the realities and values of the present” and “New England idealism wonderfully updated”.

I doubt very much that Professor Ryan would view New England Online of 2010 in quite the same light, not least because of the massive changes wrought by the passage of time, as the author has grown up and his political views have changed almost beyond recognition. But even if I lost the admiration of academia for now, I don’t believe that what I am doing has any less value as an academic exercise. Time, and the chance to complete many more pages of New England Online, will provide me with a product that can argue my case for a traditionalist state in the south pacific.

New Things

New England Online has grown up a lot these last five years. Originally written as a means of salving the wounds of electoral defeat, it has changed in nature to become a treatise on the merits of traditional conservatism. That’s quite a leap, as I’m sure you can appreciate. But to be truthful, New England Online was always slightly more conservative in outlook than my pinko liberal beliefs might have been willing to admit. I am fortunate that this change in the political affiliation of the beast means very little of the content has had to be adjusted to suit.

For five years, the site has been intellectually confused. One can see this in the some of the stranger notions that existed in the earlier drafts. There was no marriage, yet national service was compulsory. A strong faith system was seen as essential, and yet the largest religious group were the largely godless Unitarians. These examples probably prove that despite my best intentions, the site was, and I suppose still is, without purpose. That raises the question, what is the raison d’être of this enterprise?

The philosophy of traditional conservatism provides the intellectual bedrock to the entire exercise. It gives me an opportunity to craft stories that are both entertaining, while at the same time providing a sound explanation and account of why traditional conservatism is the only way the build a prosperous society. But even more than this, having re-engaged my brain and found a philosophy that compels me to serve my God, my Queen and my Country, I find that my life is open to me again in a way that it has not been in many years. From such a sound place, the quality of the work I do here can only be improved.

As I mentioned in my last entry, there can be little doubt that New England Online has become a subversive influence on my life. Apart from burden that the website has placed on my long suffering fiancée and friends, it is telling that my interest in the affairs of the real world have taken a back seat to the affairs of the two and half million fictitious New Englanders of my imagination. Whatever I have taken an interest in has only been so because it might form the basis of a new page on the website. I think by anyone’s appraisal, that it a far from a healthy way to live one’s life.

But in the ten days so far of my four month mental holiday, I have come across a range of new things. As a reward for being prepared to think and explore, this afternoon came the first flowering of an intellectualism that has been dormant in my mind almost since I took up writing the behemoth in 2004. When you look at it, it is hard to argue that the apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree just yet, but just the fact that ideas are finally reaching into my mind must surely be a source for celebration.

I have at last discovered new things.