China as it is

The Australian

Advice holds: see China as it is, not as it ought to be


TOM SWITZER


A good mate of mine died this year. He was 90 — four decades my senior — and I think of him a lot and miss him very much. His name was Owen Harries, once a significant foreign policy player in Canberra and Washington.

During the 25 years of our intimate friendship, I never completed a discussion with Owen without having been made to think about something that mattered. Many more important people — from Liberal figures Malcolm Fraser and Andrew Peacock to leading neoconservatives Irving Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, to US national security advisers Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski — would have said the same.

According to Scott Morrison and Marise Payne, Owen was “one of the architects of Australia’s modern foreign policy”.

I often wonder what Owen would make of the deteriorating state of relations with China this year. Like most Australians, he supported engagement — as he wrote in 2000, “an illusionless engagement that does not mistake itself for partnership, that is tough-minded and alert to abuse of the relationship by Beijing”. He also represented the realist school of foreign policy thought, with its belief in the inevitability of power politics. If Owen were alive today, my sense is he would see China as it is, not how it ought to be.

He had, after all, no time for utopianism. He recognised that utopian beliefs — longings for a perfect, harmonious world, free of conflict and evil — are strong in the human breast and nowhere stronger than in Australia and the US. (Owen used to say it is hard to sustain utopian illusions if, say, you live your life in Poland or Israel; easier if you are insulated from other major powers by two huge oceans and have neighbours who are too nice or too weak to threaten you.)

We often talked about the utopian idea that a world of nation states would be replaced by a “global village”. This argument, which gained currency at the end of the Cold War, held that enmity between peoples was the result of misunderstanding and ignorance rather than genuine conflicts of interest. A more interdependent world, it was assumed, would mean peace and harmony.

Owen made several points to rebut the thesis.

First, the most interdependent institution ever constructed by human beings is the family, yet most murders occurred in or around the family. Second, real villages, as opposed to metaphorical ones, are usually not havens of sweetness and light but are characterised by a great deal of suspicion, envy, enforced conformity, rivalry, feuds and intrusive interferences in the affairs of neighbours. Proximity and interaction can just as well mean more conflict as more harmony.

Owen’s final point: reflect on the fact Europe in 1914 — on the eve of the Great War — had achieved a degree of economic interdependence that was unprecedented, and quite comparable to the level existing among states before the pandemic.

Viewed through Owen’s prism, if utopianism has been an obstacle to clear thinking about international relations (which leads us to see the world as it ought to be rather than as it is), another has been habit (that is, seeing China as it was rather than as it is). Owen recognised that habit is one of the most powerful forces in human life, not least because it is such a labour-saving device, making it possible to dispense with thought. He often quoted 19th-century British prime minister Lord Salisbury: “The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.”

We can see that error being committed every day in the relentless criticism of the Morrison government’s dealings with China. In recent times, especially since Canberra’s call for an international inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus, a group of academics, columnists, business lobbyists and former diplomats has attacked Australia for provoking our largest trade partner. If only we could rebuild trust with Beijing, we are told. As a result, the critics reflect powerful, deeply ingrained habits that have existed since Gough Whitlam’s opening to China nearly a half-century ago. These habits persist despite radically altered circumstances.

Far from becoming a responsible stakeholder in world affairs, a hyper-nationalist China has used the COVID-19 crisis to expand its reach and influence and to threaten the status quo.

Witness its escalating defence spending, its build-up of military outposts in the South China Sea, its persistent cyber-espionage, its huge disinformation campaigns, its “wolf warrior” threats to our sovereignty, its intimidation of Taiwan, its takeover of Hong Kong, and so on.

Anxiety about Xi Jinping’s China is hardly confined to the Liberal Party’s “Wolverines”.

The ignoring of changed circumstances and the persistence of habit denote not only laziness. For some, it is functionally necessary. It is not being cynical to point out that many of the advocates of close ties with Beijing represent huge vested interests, in terms of careers, contracts, consultancies, reputations and so on. Trade is important, but security trumps prosperity.

Bear all this in mind when you hear the latest outpouring of utopianism. It just leads us to see China as it ought to be rather than as it is. Somewhere, Owen would agree.

Tom Switzer is executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies and a presenter at ABC Radio National.

The woke world

 

OXFORD’S ALL SOULS HAS SHED ITS OWN

HENRY ERGAS

Ending slavery was the greatest landmark of willed moral progress


Having held out for many months, All Souls capitulated last week, erasing the name “Codrington” from its world-famous library.

Coming after the British Museum’s decision to “reposition” its bust of Sir Hans Sloane — placing in a rogue’s corner the sculpture of the wealthy 18th century naturalist and physician whose collection underpinned its founding — the move by Oxford’s most prestigious college was not unexpected.

But that doesn’t make it less troubling. After all, whatever one’s assessment of Christopher Codrington, he was scarcely the devil incarnate.

Dying in 1710 aged only 42, the third generation Barbados planter packed into his short life careers as a respected scholar, an outstanding soldier and a reforming governor of the Leeward Islands.

A deeply pious man, Codrington’s letters show that he was “mortified” at the condition of slaves in the West Indies and “shocked at the barbarous way in which they were treated”. He therefore sought during his governorship “to make the death penalty mandatory for killing a Negro or Indian”, and to ensure that slaves had access to Christian education.

Those aims precipitated a fierce clash with the West Indies’ leading slave-owners who — in an episode which became a wellknown precursor to the issues that beset the islands’ demands for representative government in the 19th century — managed to end his appointment.

Undaunted by the planters’ hostility, Codrington — as well as leaving to All Souls (of which he was a fellow) his magnificent library and a substantial financial donation — bequeathed his plantations to the recently established Society for the Propagation of the Christian Religion.

The society, his will specified, was required to establish a theological college in Barbados which would provide for the education of “three hundred Negroes at least” and “endear itself to the people (by) doing good to men’s souls whilst taking care of their bodies”. Far from supporting slavery, the college helped prepare the ground for the great slave revolts of 1816.

None of that, however, made any difference to those clamouring for Codrington’s posthumous shaming; nor was it even mentioned in the terse announcement by All Souls, which merely stated that his “wealth derived largely from his family’s plantations (which were) worked by enslaved people of African descent”, as if it was the inheritance he had received, rather than his own character and achievements, which counted.

He was, in other words, condemned not for what he did but solely for who he was. To call that scandalous would be an understatement; unfortunately, the British Museum’s denigration of its founding benefactor is every bit as disgraceful.

In effect, Hans Sloane’s links to slavery were, at most, incidental: his wife’s one-third interest in a plantation, which she obtained on the death of her first husband, provided some 7 per cent of Sloane’s income. And even though those links certainly existed, no one could sensibly view them as the defining feature of Sloane’s historical significance.

On the contrary, Sloane was not just a tireless philanthropist; as the only person to serve simultaneously as president of the Royal Society and of the Royal Society of Physicians, he played a vital role in the scientific revolution — a role the British Museum itself recognised in 2003 when it named its new Gallery of the Enlightenment in his honour.

To treat him as if he were no better than a perpetrator of unforgivable savageries is consequently absurd.

And to strip Codrington and Sloane of their renown is an injustice rendered all the more abhorrent by the fact that they are unable to defend themselves.

At least in part, that injustice reflects an age which no longer properly understands what it means to judge.

Long forgotten is Saint Augustine’s warning that because there is inevitably “a darkness that attends the life of human society”, those who sit “on the judge’s bench” should be seized by the “fear and trembling” that comes from knowing that as we judge, so shall we be judged.

And long forgotten too is the importance, which Augustine stressed, of separating moral discernment from moral condemnation, protecting judgment from the temptations of judgmentalism, and seeking to be righteous without descending into the idolatry of self-righteousness.

But it is not only a perverted form of moral absolutism that drives the inflamed militants who want the memories of these men, and of so many others, “cancelled”.

Rather, it is a conscious political strategy that seeks to elevate slavery into the horror that outweighs all of the past’s other horrors, making even the slightest association with it the ultimate offence. And by thus positing the Atlantic slave trade as history’s supreme evil, their goal is to paint the West and its civilisation as a hideous imposture whose foundations were incurably rotten from the start.

That strategy’s success is apparent; yet it is hard to think of a greater distortion of historical reality.

To say that isn’t to deny that slavery was monstrous; unquestionably, it was. However, it was not slavery which was remarkable: it had existed, often in even more horrific forms, for millenniums. Rather, what was extraordinary

— indeed, almost unbelievable — is that the West, to its undying credit, abolished it.

As David Brion Davis, the preeminent historian of slavery, put it in concluding his magnificent trilogy, the emancipation of the slaves was “the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in history”. No economic imperative dictated it; no political pressures ensured its inevitability. But the West’s Judeo-Christian tradition unleashed a moral force which, for the first time, held out the promise of eliminating human bondage.

The tension between that moral force, with its regulative principles of reason, justice and mercy, and the world in which we live is not over and may not end until mankind ceases to inhabit the earth. But if its vitality dims it will not be because its message has become redundant; it will be because our confidence in the civilisation it generated, and which we received in trust, has faltered under the onslaught of sloganmongers and pseudo-philosophers.

That is why the abject spinelessness of institutions such as All Souls and the British Museum matters. And that is why cowardly outrages such as those committed to Codrington and Sloane need to be exposed, regardless of how distant they may seem from the crises which dominate our day-today preoccupations.

Three centuries ago, Sloane and his collaborators spearheaded a campaign that led to the Witchcraft Act of 1735, which abolished the prosecution and punishment of witches in Great Britain. Now the witch hunts, show trials and summary executions are back. If their pyres are allowed to burst into flames, it is our culture, by far the richest of all inheritances, that will be reduced to dust and ashes.

A little church history

Every 250 Years the Church Faces Certain Destruction

Timothy Flanders November 13, 2020 0 Comments


In my study of history, I’ve noticed a few patterns. One of these is the cycle of impossible situations. It seems that about every ten generations—250 years, sometimes less—the Church is faced with one of these. It is some crisis which threatens to the destroy the whole Church and prove God false. At the time, it is unprecedented—unlike anything the Church has faced up to that point. During such a crisis many think that the world is at an end and start to identify the Antichrist among their contemporaries. Apocalyptic literature begins to proliferate. Yet somehow, against all odds, God delivers His Church once again.

The Lord’s military strategy for Gideon was to reduce his army from 32,000 to 300 lest Israel should glory against me, and say: I was delivered by my own strength (Jdg. 7:2). This tactic doesn’t seem to have changed over the years. If Church history shows us anything, it is that the “liberty and exaltation of Holy Mother Church” with men is impossible: but with God all things are possible (Mt. 19:26). I think it is important for us to remember these things in order to face our own situation. So here I will review a few of these in succession.





Crucifixion and Persecution (33-313)


The Church was born out of the most devasting crisis—the crucifixion of Christ. The Apostles abandoned him alone, and all their hopes were destroyed when he was buried. They were certain now that their movement was at an end. Consider how they felt when He was in the grave—this temptation to despair would be faced by all our fathers in every impossible crisis to come. But we hoped, that it was he that should have redeemed Israel (Lk. 24:21).

Against every conception of human imaginings, our Lord arose and sent them power from on high. Emboldened, they faced the persecution of the Jews and the Romans (the latter being the fiercest empire the world had ever known). St. Paul traveled throughout the empire boldly proclaiming Christ the King.

But even at the death of the last Apostle, the Church was a tiny movement with a handful of adherents which almost no one believed would amount to anything. The triumph predicted in the book of Revelation must have seemed like raving lunacy in 100 AD. The Church was mercilessly and systematically persecuted again and again by the Roman Empire, and somehow they endured and conquered. In 301, Armenia converted. In 313, Constantine revoked the persecutions and began favoring the Church. Suddenly the unthinkable began to happen.



The Arian Crisis (321-381)

No sooner was a shocking triumph begun for the Church but a new crisis arose which quickly engulfed the faithful. The vast majority of bishops denied the divinity of Christ. The stalwart defender of orthodoxy seemed to be only a single bishop, who was mocked as a lunatic with the phrase Athanasius contra mundum (“Athanasius against the world”). It was a brave new Arian world as Jerome lamented, “The whole world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Arian.”

The emperors renewed the persecution against the orthodox, and paganism was even revived by Julian the Apostate. Athanasius was driven from his see again and again. Martyrs shed their blood once more. Churches were seized for the Arian creed. All bishops seemed to abandon the faith as well as the pope. The laity were left alone to fight for truth. Yet once again, against all odds, this raging heresy was beaten back.



The Sassanian and Muhammadan Invasions (602-661)

But as the generations of Arians died away (in the east), a new fracture appeared in Christendom: Monophysitism. This heresy became the cause of the first lasting schism between East and west (the Acadian schism 484-519). It continued as the bishops attempted to resolve it over the successive generations, but by the 6th century bloodshed began to increase between the factions of Christians. While the west was grappling with barbarism, the stability of the east was breaking down as well.

The crisis took a turn for the worst when the divided Eastern Roman Empire could not withstand the incursions of the Sassanians beginning in 602. They penetrated to the Holy City of Jerusalem and even captured the True Cross. The situation was dire, provoking Emperor Heraclius to lead a crusade and recover the True Cross. But he too fell into heresy with another compromise with truth called Monothelitism.

Then the most devastating force arose on the frontier: an army of Arabs with a neo-Arian creed who quickly conquered most of the Christian lands in the East. At this point men were sure that the Apocalypse had come upon them, and numerous eschatological theories were put forth. But a new Athanasius arose who defeated Monothelitism: Maximus the Confessor against the world. The heresy was condemned and the advance of Muhammad was checked.



The First Pornocracy and the Viking Invasion (882-964)

Later, even as the east was experiencing its last great heresy under Iconoclasm, the west experienced a revival and advance under Charlemagne. But around this time a new menace emerged: the Northmen, (“Vikings”) who devastated western Europe like no one had seen before. A new petition was added to various oral litanies: from the fury of the Northmen, deliver us O Lord. They raped and pillaged across the continent, singling out monasteries for destruction.

To make matters worse, the Roman see fell into its first sustained period of corruption. It was a period later known as the Pornocracy, due to the unspeakable acts of sacrilege, profanation, and debauchery committed by the popes and their allies in this time. This hit rock bottom with John XII whom St. Robert Bellarmine called “practically the worst of all pontiffs.”

The people of Rome rebelled against him and the pious Emperor Otto I helped depose the pope and turn the tide against evil men in the hierarchy. This led eventually to the Cluniac reform to cleanse the clergy. Within a few generations St. Peter Damien (1007-1073) was leading the charge against clerical abuse, and shortly later the Gospel was conquering the vicious Northmen. The barbarity of our fathers was being turned into the chivalry of knights for Christendom.



The Great Western Schism (1378-1417)

After a great period of revival in the Church with the glorious 13th century and the Crusade in Southern France and the continued success in Spain, the Church again fell into a period of decline. First, the papacy became the pawn of French politics, a period known as the Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy (1309-1376), or the Avignon Papacy, named for its residence in modern France. This papal palace saw seven popes and five antipopes. Within a generation of this unhappy circumstance, France and England abandoned the glory of the crusade in favor of fighting each other in the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). Then the Black Death hit Europe, which peaked in 1348, and struck dead about half of the population. Bodies were stacked in the streets.

If this situation weren’t bad enough, the Great Western schism broke out in which Europe divided between two different popes. And then a third pope was added. Ecclesiastical revolt was gaining steam between Ockham (d. 1347), Wycliffe (d. 1384), and Huss (d. 1415). Despite this darkness, another Athanasius arose, the miracle-working preacher St. Vincent Ferrer (1350-1419). He is credited with turning back the apocalypse that everyone thought was coming down upon the world. He convinced the adherents of antipope Benedict XIII (whom he himself believed to be the true pope) to remove their obedience from him and give it to the Council of Constance, which eventually resolved the schism.



The Second Pornocracy and the Protestant Looters’ Revolt (1517-1563)

But once again the Church fell into decline as the Renaissance popes took control. The Black Death seems to have killed off most of the good priests, and by 1500 there was widespread debauchery and corruption, while the papacy followed suit with the worst of the worldly. We may call this time the Second Pornocracy due to its imitation of the First. Luther went to Rome and the scandal helped provoke him.

Suddenly Europe erupted in civil war as Protestants began revolting, looting churches and destroying statues. It was the Second Iconoclasm. Princes and kings joined the movement so they could commit adultery and theft with impunity, and were not above getting military aid from the Muhammadans to fight Catholics. The papacy was mired in corruption, and hesitated desperately to address the situation for almost thirty years while destruction reigned.

Finally, with the great efforts of new saints, the Council of Trent was convened and decreed. Despite fierce opposition even from Catholic kings, the Council succinctly clarified the vast majority of Catholic doctrine under attack and laid out the basic program of true reform. Within a few generations the Catholic Church was back on the offensive, winning back souls to the Church and stopping the advance of Protestantism in Europe. More than this, they began to spread the faith throughout the world from China to Japan to North and South America.



The Republican Revolutions (1789-1800)

But even as the Counter-Reformation gained momentum, Pope Urban VIII betrayed the faith. He induced France to side with the Protestants in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), which turned the tide in favor of the heretics. As France became increasingly secular in the 1700s, a wave of anti-Catholic sentiment stirred among the elites who sought a way out of Catholic order. Finally in 1789, inspired by the American revolutionaries, the French began the revolt known as the French Revolution. This targeted the Church for genocidal attacks and mass murder, helped to justify pornography as free speech, and started to replace Catholic tradition with liberal public education.

Eventually this movement turned into an empire, and Napoleon conquested most of Europe, destroying the Catholic infrastructure everywhere. He captured the pope and brought him to France where he died. The enemies of the faith were proclaiming their victory over the old Catholic order by 1800.

But once again a revival took place, against all opposition. The papacy was revived and the Romantic and Ultramontane movements set off a renewal of Catholicism across Europe. France finally began implementing the Council of Trent, and even restoring Gregorian Chant (which had falled into widespread disuse even in Rome). Bl. Pius IX and Leo XIII both worked to bring about a counter-revolution of Catholicism, and especially Thomism after 1879.



The Third Pornocracy and the New Iconoclasm (1965-Present)

But the world responded by killing each other on the most massive scale ever seen in two world wars, refusing to repent even after the Miracle of the Sun. The errors of Russia spread and eventually found their way into the Church. Corrupt men began wielding power in the Vatican, and by 1965 a violent New Iconoclasm had arisen. The popes and bishops responded with timidity, allowing widespread destruction of statues, churches, liturgy and theology. Marriage began to break down across the world, and the unborn holocaust spread its silent bloodshed. In the late 1970s, the dossier of Cardinal Gagnon showed Paul VI that he was living in the Third Pornocracy, in which the debauchery gripping the Vatican had once against reached nadir levels. John Paul II refused to crack down on it, and by the time Benedict began to act, the evil machine was too strong for him to control. And then Pope Francis.

This story is known all too well, as readers of One Peter Five are aware. But when we look at the context of history, I think it is easier to see our present darkness, though unprecedented, as something that God can handle. And He will. Let us consider the faith of our fathers and the saints who continued the tradition of Athanasius against the world. God permits these things so that we may not ascribe to ourselves any sort of glory, since no man can fix the new unprecedented crisis we face. It is literally impossible to resolve. But not for Almighty God. Let us pass down the faith to our children and never lose hope.

US Historical Temps

List of Historical Temperature Extremes by U.S. State shows no sign of Global Warming

 

More than 210 degrees Fahrenheit separates the highest and the lowest temperatures on record in the United States, and it isn’t a coincidence that the majority of these temperatures records –for both hot and cold– occur during solar minimums.

This is because low solar activity weakens the jet stream, reverting its usual tight ZONAL flow to more of a wavy MERIDIONAL one. This violent “buckling” effect FULLY explains how regions can experience pockets of anomalous heat while others, even relatively nearby, can be dealing with blobs of record cold: basically, in the NH, Arctic cold is dragged anomalously far south and Tropical warmth is pushed unusually far north (for more see the two links below).

The Changing Jet Stream and Global Cooling

Grand Solar Minimum and the Swing Between Extremes

And for you alarmists out here claiming that one-off temperature records can’t be evidence of anything, that the data is far too narrow and open to natural variability, no: if catastrophic global warming was actually a thing then we should absolutely see evidence of this in the all-time maximum temperature records–yet only two U.S. states have set heat records since the turn of the millennium (SO, 2012 & CO, 2019).

While those in control of the temperature graphs (NASA/NOAA) are all too happy to fraudulently increase the running average, what they haven’t (yet) had the balls to do is rewrite the history books:

Historical documentation destroys the man-made global warming theory

The maniacal sociopaths of the world may have won control of the narrative, but they seemingly have little sway over the will of the people. You need only browse the comment section below any “climate change” article or social media post to see the wave of folks resoundingly rejecting the scam-of-a-world-view assembled before them (one of the few positives of SM).

The man-made global warming rejection is likely down to two things: the first being that the so called “scientific consensus” has been failing for far too long — you can’t start warning people in the 1980s that we have 10 years left to save the planet, only to keep repeating that prophecy for the next 4 decades. This is probably the reason our youth have become the new target — kids don’t have this history of failure to draw-upon when browsing the bullet points of the latest IPCC report -for example- meaning they’re far easier to manipulate.

The second reason is likely the availability of climate information these days–namely historical data. Thanks to the internet, researching past climate catastrophes and comparing them to what’s happening today is a simple task. I’m talking about raw historical data, such as the number of deaths caused by a certain natural disaster, or the year and decade of the highest U.S. state temperature records:

The raw data ALWAYS speaks for itself — out of the 50 U.S. state record high temperatures, 23 were set during the 1930s, while 36 occurred prior to 1960. But the powers that be have constructed a rather tenacious, loud, and bullish narrative — on top of the world burning to a crisp, the story also warns that droughts and floods are becoming more extreme.

Comfortably crushing that assertion, however, is another NOAA nugget named the Palmer Drought Index — a century+ dataset plotting the portion of the continental U.S. that is either very wet or very dry.

What the index reveals is that there is no significant trend of increasing drought or flood:

An uptick in hurricanes is another li(n)e we’re fed, it’s actually listed as one of the main results of human-caused global warming. But again, there is no dataset out there that supports either an increase or an intensification of severe storms. In fact, quite the opposite is true, with 9 of the 13 strongest hurricanes to make U.S. landfall occurring prior to 1965. 

NOAA data shows both the number of hurricanes and the number of “strong” hurricanes making U.S. landfall declining since 1900.

When folks are permitted to look at climate data prior to 1980, natural cycles ALWAYS reveal themselves. There are ups & there are downs, and there are ups & downs within the ups & downs — and not a single scientist on the planet fully understands the mechanisms involved, no matter what you’re told.

However, the raw data speaks volumes — it clearly reveals the United States was hotter in the past, meaning that unless the U.S. –the third largest country in the world– is somehow immune, that anthropogenic global warming is a lie.

Perversely, a bout of GLOBAL COOLING will likely be Earth’s next temperature swing, one arriving in line with historically low solar activity, cloud-nucleating Cosmic Rays, and a meridional jet stream flow.

Both NOAA and NASA actually appear to agree, if you read between the lines, with NOAA saying we’re entering a ‘full-blown’ Grand Solar Minimum in the late-2020s, and NASA seeing this upcoming solar cycle (25) as “the weakest of the past 200 years”, with the agency correlating previous solar shutdowns to prolonged periods of global cooling here.

Furthermore, we can’t ignore the slew of new scientific papers stating the immense impact The Beaufort Gyre could have on the Gulf Stream, and therefore the climate overall.

Prepare accordingly— learn the facts, relocate if need be, and grow your own.

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The site receives ZERO funding, and never has. So any way you can, help us spread the message so others can survive and thrive in the coming times.

Is the west destroying itself?

Life’s a riot for children of the revolution


LIONEL SHRIVER

REUTERS , AFP


Seemingly blindly, madly, the West is destroying itself

The widespread COVID-19 lockdowns and the increasingly venomous Black Lives Matter movement are both destabilising phenomena instigated by people suffering from a perilous complacency. A surfeit of Western security, with no major wars and nearly uninterrupted prosperity for 75 years, has created an ahistorical underappreciation for the fragility of order. Perhaps the hyper-racialising of the West in the second half of this year will prove a temporary mania, at the end of which we’ll have fairer, more sensitive societies. But somehow I doubt it.

We don’t commonly characterise folks who want to altogether overturn the way a country works “systemically” as complacent. But I would argue that most of this year’s abundantly white, middle-class protesters embody the epitome of complacency. These are not people who expect to make any personal sacrifice to make the world a better place. To the contrary, by positioning themselves as “allies” on “the right side of history”, they expect to reap rewards, and to jettison older, purportedly prejudiced generations even more rapidly than younger generations do as a matter of course. BLM bandwagoners assume they can change everything while everything they fancy stays the same.

Weekend revolutionaries imagine they can bring an end to capitalism and still keep all the fruits of capitalism that they take for granted. They think they can install a neo-Marxist equality of outcome, boot out all the wicked old white guys like Tim Cook, and keep their iPhones, replete with regular OS updates. They imagine they can pack faculties and student bodies with minorities regardless of qualification and “decolonise” the curriculum to rid it of “white knowledge” and still have prospective employers regard their degrees from Harvard as meaningful commendations. They want to undermine the means by which their parents earn a living yet still expect to crash back home when they’re low on cash, where they can always raid the refrigerator when feeling peckish. Woke white activists want to demonise “whiteness” as the sole source of all evil, while mysteriously believing this does not entail demonising themselves. Apparently the joyful embrace of one’s own “fragility” grants the right to hector others while triggering a racial optout clause.

The same brand of white activist helped draft “open letters” to Princeton and Stanford, the Poetry Foundation, and a beleaguered liberal bookstore in Denver, to name a few. The signatories reliably demanded aggressive, instantaneous affirmative action, often well in excess of regional or national demographic proportions. Yet if governments, schools and businesses embrace “anti-racism” as their sole prime directive, as opposed to producing a saleable product or performing a valuable service, competency is bound to decay at what was once these entities’ driving purpose: to provide for the common defence, to educate students for viable careers, to manufacture products that consumers want to buy. Should most Western institutions and corporations devote their principal energies to “antiracism”, China will clean up. As a result, “equality” zealots will level the playing field by making everybody poor. Forgive me for stating the selfevident, but advocates of wealth redistribution need wealth to redistribute.

Rioters are dependent on a functional society or they have nothing to disrupt. Hoodlums still assume that if they get thumped with a truncheon a well funded and skilfully staffed hospital will patch them up. Looters rely on a generous supply of operational businesses whose premises can be ransacked and which are chock-full of the fruits of capitalism like high-end trainers. Eager to acquire more free stuff, looters blithely expect these businesses to replace their windows and restock, the better to get ransacked again.

As with cake, this northern summer’s activists wanted to have their police and defund them, too. We can take it as a given that none of these often well-off white protesters have any desire to live in truly lawless cities — where their phones are snatched on the street and their homes are repeatedly burgled. Where women are raped with impunity and petty grudges are settled with violent assault. Where everyone lives in fear of arbitrary injury or even death because this is a city without legal recourse. By the time this summer’s failed utopian project nicknamed CHOP in Seattle had lived with no police presence for three weeks, four shootings had occurred within the zone’s mere six blocks, one of them fatal. With chastened, demoralised police forces embracing passivity as a means of selfprotection, murders in Chicago, Minneapolis and New York have been soaring. Yet according to a core tenet of the BLM-inspired American medical students in White Coats for Black Lives, “Policing is incompatible with health.” You’ve got to be kidding me. Nothing is less healthy than being dead.


‘Equality’ zealots will level the playing field by making everybody poor

For all their demands for “systemic” transformation, 2020’s protesters don’t really want that much to change. They want to keep curating their playlists on Spotify and ordering oat milk from Amazon Fresh. They want Netflix to keep churning out new entertainment, through whatever nefarious corporate machinations, because they’ve already binged the fifth season of Ozark.

Thanks to horrible racist capitalism and centuries of oppression, their computers can communicate instantaneously with Minsk. They not only have enough to eat but a range of dim sum in their local supermarket’s freezer, from shrimp to pork to vegan pumpkin. This past spring, you can be sure that these same young people got as consternated as everyone else when those supermarkets ran short of paper towels. Thanks to the police they detest, in many smaller cities these protesters still enjoy safe spaces — in the sense that safety used to mean, protection from physical harm.

Up to a point, dedication to racial equality — in countries that have never been less prejudiced — is laudable. But in a society that provides shelter, clean water and sustenance to the vast majority of its inhabitants, even in densely populated cities where otherwise we’d be slaughtering each other in packs, the opportunity to obsess fetishistically about microaggressions and unconscious bias is one more luxury born of the system they abhor. Even the right to demand curtailment of free speech requires the right to free speech.

In the US, I’m loath to histrionically predict a second civil war. Nevertheless, in Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, DC, San Francisco, New York and Kenosha, arsonists are literally and figuratively playing with fire. This northern summer has seen the most tumultuous civil unrest since the 1960s. Opposing sides in the culture war no longer seem to feel like citizens of the same country. Few in the white majority feel any responsibility for slavery and many white Americans are themselves struggling to pay bills or unemployed; should the reparations movement be victorious, white resentment could be incendiary. And if a deadly confluence of logistical disarray and mutual distrust means there’s no clear winner after November’s presidential election, I foresee mayhem.

Centuries in the making, contemporary Western civilisation is so complex that it shouldn’t really work at all — but somehow, after a fashion, it does. In fact, on the whole we’ve never lived more comfortably, more peaceably or more justly. Yet shrill voices on the hard left preach that countries such as the US, the UK and Australia are a disgrace and should inspire only shame. Subjecting the fruits of one’s forebears’ toil to contempt signals not only complacency but ingratitude.

Nevertheless, I reserve my own contempt not primarily for callow protesters with no appreciation for how utterly dependent they are on social order to afford to dabble in disorder. Young people have always erred on the side of poorly thought through idealism and sanctimonious hot-headedness. In my own teens and 20s I wasn’t any different. Far more do I deplore the grown-ups: global leaders in 2020 who should know better.

With rare sane exceptions such as Sweden’s, Western governments have installed unprecedented lockdowns of their societies for month upon month, and continue to threaten the reimposition of economically catastrophic, near police-state conditions on their ostensibly “free” populations. These governments are also guilty of an obscene complacency. Having done no costbenefit analysis before pressing a giant pillow over the territories entrusted to their guidance, politicians have credulously assumed that civil liberties can always be magically restored (and that’s assuming these officials don’t come to rather fancy wielding unlimited power). There will always be more taxpayers. Treasuries can always “borrow” — meaning print — more money, and the currency will still retain its value.

The authorities’ capitulation to COVID hysteria — which set the emotional table for racial hysteria

— has inflicted a scale of destruction that might, had anyone looked before they leapt, have been anticipated. Indeed, a 2006 paper by Thomas Inglesby, director of Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health, predicted nearly every disastrous consequence of a theoretical lockdown that we can now verify in practice. This expert on epidemics wrote: “The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so extreme … that this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious consideration.” Yet even poor countries have aped this clumsy protocol, which may kill millions from starvation.

Once lockdowns are finally eased, successfully terrified workforces refuse to venture out their front doors — especially in the UK, where two-thirds of employees are still working, or neglecting to work, from home. For some processes are far easier to set in train than to reverse. It’s not that difficult to frighten people. Un-frightening them is a bastard.

Small business has been ravaged by bankruptcy. Public transportation with minimal ridership is running unsustainable deficits and many systems will enter a death spiral of reduced services followed by even smaller riderships. Financial and commercial centres of great cities such as New York and London are hollowed out. Midtown Manhattan, Wall Street, the City of London, and Canary Wharf are ghost towns, as if commandeered by film crews for movies about the end of the world.

The West’s collective GDP looks like an apple that a St Bernard took a bite of. The performing arts, precious in and of themselves but also vital engines of tourist revenue, have been incinerated. Airlines are on their knees. Unemployment is headed to a scale not even seen in the Depression, and job losses are often as irreversible as fear. Swathes of restaurants, bars, hotels and nightclubs have closed for good. Tax bases have effectively been plunged into vats of acid as demand on the public purse has skyrocketed.

Widespread, simultaneous, long-lasting and often repeated international lockdowns may be unprecedented but COVID-19 is not. Asian flu in 1957 killed between one million and two million worldwide. Hong Kong flu in 1968 killed between one million and four million. During both pandemics, world leaders didn’t close so much as a newsagent. COVID deaths worldwide have killed just over one million — and owing to peculiar data collection whereby anyone with COVID necessarily died from COVID, Western coronavirus death counts may be inflated. The disproportionate response to one more disagreeable, albeit occasionally lethal, virus boggles the mind. There’s growing acknowledgment that lockdowns will cost many more lives than they saved, and that’s assuming they saved any lives, rather than simply dragging out inevitable fatalities over a longer period.

But my biggest worry isn’t the immediately devastating economic losses and personal suffering that this copycat, kneejerk overreaction has wrought. I’m worried about implosion on a more historic scale. Lockdowns have sped up the rate at which national debts are burgeoning. How tall can a house of cards rise before it topples? According to “Magic money tree” thinking, aka modern monetary theory, a government that controls its currency can print money to cover its expenses without limit. We can see why this theory is so popular: everything for nothing.

What’s wrong with this fairytale? It’s deeply counterintuitive, and never underestimate common sense. I can’t cite a single product that can be manufactured in infinite quantity and still retain its value. Flood the market with corn, and the price of corn plunges to below the cost of production. Our gut intelligence dictates that the logic of oversupply also pertains to money: the more you conjure from thin air, the less it will buy. As an ominous early warning, the US Federal Reserve announced last month that it would not be raising interest rates, even if inflation rose to above the Fed’s target. Stay tuned for more such cheerful news from the Bank of England and the European Central Bank.

The international monetary system is held together with rubber bands, bits of string and appeals to divinity. Because it’s in everyone’s interest to have confidence in this fragile kludgeocracy, we all determinedly have confidence in it. But frankly, ever since all money became fiat money — backed by nothing and therefore generated ad infinitum at no apparent cost — countries have competed with each other over whose currency could be more worthless. The race to the bottom is well under way. Me, I’m astonished that any currency in the world right now is worth anything at all. I’m positively impressed that the pound and the dollar continue to be accepted in exchange for genuinely valuable tangibles such as wheat and oil. But we have succumbed to complacency. The insouciant assumption runs that because we’ve been getting away with murder for all this time, and so much rides on our continuing to get away with murder, we will therefore be able to get away with murder forever more. We can thus pile up national debts of over 100 per cent of GDP, even over 200 per cent, so why not three or four hundred per cent? A thousand? Isn’t the sky the limit? Yet all Ponzi schemes collapse. The only uncertainty is when.

I dread ever having to watch the civilisation that has nurtured me, and that has provided me such an exhilarating cultural inheritance, fall apart. I could not bear a real-life dystopia in which the Statue of Liberty is toppled and Parliament burns to the ground. In which libraries and online search results are strictly policed to serve a single, narrow, fanatical dogma (a process Facebook and YouTube have already begun).

Today’s hard leftists are eager to bulldoze their “systemically racist” societies into landfill but have no constructive replacement for what they would gleefully destroy. Their blind rampages go hand-inhand with our idiotic COVID lockdowns. Both the Marxist Trojan horse of BLM zealotry and these suicidal, shortsighted “public health” policies eat away at everything in Western life that I treasure, from reading artful, ideologically unorthodox books to being able to buy a chicken.

Yet in protesters and politicians alike, I detect that deadly complacency, as if you can rock a boat as wildly as you want — all because it has stayed afloat so far.

Lionel Shriver is an award-winning author and journalist. This is an

edited extract of her Ramsay

Lecture to be broadcast on

Wednesday at ramsaycentre.org.


In a society that provides shelter, clean water and sustenance to the vast majority … the opportunity to obsess about microaggressions and unconscious bias is one more luxury born of the system they abhor

Australian Super Problems

Superannuation must be built on reality, not stereotypesADAM CREIGHTONFollow @Adam_Creighton
Dangling the carrot of an optional near 10 per cent pay rise for workers or promising a universal age pension would be a significant proposal with plenty of merit.
12:00AM AUGUST 29, 2020

The biggest policy battleground over the next year will almost certainly be superannuation.

The government is sitting on the retirement income review, a recommendation of the Productivity Commission from 2018 that is bound to raise troubling questions for the super sector.

Aware of the political risks of tinkering with super, the government instructed the panel not to make specific recommendations, but the facts alone should make it obvious what needs to be done.

The review will probably show, just as the Henry tax review did a decade ago, that lifting the superannuation guarantee to 12 per cent, as is currently legislated, will cost far more in fees and forgone tax revenue than it could ever save in age pension outlays.

Fees are about $30bn a year, concessions are about $36bn, while age pension savings are, very generously, less than $10bn a year.

Proceeding with a policy that’s a net drain on public finances, especially when budget deficits and debt have ballooned, is questionable. The review will also make it clear mandatory super contributions are paid by workers, out of their gross incomes, rather than by employers. The genius of Paul Keating’s innovation, compulsory super, is that it appears to workers as if contributions are made by their employers.

But the economic incidence is very different from the legal incidence. Employers pay workers’ income tax, on their behalf, yet few believe an increase in income tax would be borne by the boss.

From the employer’s point of view, employees’ income tax and superannuation contributions are the same. The government says what proportion of workers’ pay goes in tax, super and disposable income.

In the short term an employer might choose to absorb an increase in the compulsory savings rate, but in the long run the government cannot dictate how much a business will spend on payroll. It must by definition mean lower take-home pay for workers.

Absent these two arguments, the super industry is likely to fall back on a paternalistic one: people don’t save enough without compulsion. While savings myopia might feel right, it’s empirically wrong. People are simply not spending their accumulated savings in retirement and instead are leaving significant bequests, research shows.

To be sure, uncertainty about how long we will live naturally induces precautionary saving, although this becomes less and less a justification the older we become (and the probability of dying increases).

A major study of 10,000 age pensioners in 2017 found that at death the median pensioner still had 90 per cent of their wealth compared to the start of their retirement. “On average, age pensioners preserve financial and residential wealth and leave substantial bequests,” the authors concluded.

We are hardwired, whether for cultural or biological reasons, to protect or grow our wealth. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does undermine the claim that people aren’t saving enough. On the contrary they might be saving too much.

Grattan Institute analysis of the Survey of Income and Housing conducted by the ABS similarly found retirees typically maintained or increased their non-housing wealth through their retirement.

“Wealth appears to have dipped only because the global ­financial crisis reduced capital ­values, rather than because retirees drew down on their savings,” says Grattan.

“The bottom third by wealth of the cohort born in 1930-34 (aged 71-75 in 2005) increased their non-housing wealth from $68,000 in 2005 to $122,000 in 2015,” the ­authors pointed out.

The government has known this tendency for some time, too. As social security minister in 2015, Scott Morrison pointed to research by his own department that showed 43 per cent of pensioners increased their asset holdings during the last five years of life, and a quarter maintained them at the same level. “Less than a third of pensioners actually saw their ­assets decrease in their last five years,” he said.

What is the point of providing concessions if the savings are not being used to fund retirement but are simply passed on? It would be better to scrap the concessions, pay a bit more in age pension, and use the difference to radically cut income tax rates for everyone.

While the Coalition government is unlikely to propose anything like that, there’s an argument for being bold. The fact around three million Australians have just accessed their superannuation is a massive chink in the armour of compulsory super.

The government could make super voluntary, in effect offering a significant pay rise to any worker who wanted it. Remember, employers don’t care whether workers’ pay is sent to a super fund or the worker’s bank account.

The savings could be used to make significant cuts to income tax, or make the age pension universal, thereby scrapping the means testing that has so twisted the incentives of the over 65s. About 80 per cent of retirees already receive the full or part age pension. A universal pension would remove the significant disincentives to work that pensioners face, dramatically simplify retirement and end the game of retirees’ engineering, quite understandably, their affairs in order to receive a part-pension.

There are powerful political reasons for being bold, too.

Labor will be hoping the government does seek to delay or stop the increase in the super guarantee. That would give the party, rendered irrelevant by the corona­virus, something to fight for, even if it were for the vested interest of the super industry rather than working people. Indeed, a senior Liberal once told me the biggest supporters of compulsory super were older, wealthy Liberal voters, who believed the poor should be forced to save for their retirement so as not to be a burden. The ­median worker, let alone the poor, can never save enough to provide the equivalent of an age pension.

Regardless, facing a hysterical campaign from Labor and the doubts among its own base, it could lose the debate.

The government needs a positive plan rather than promising to stop something from occurring. Dangling the carrot of an optional near 10 per cent pay rise for workers or promising a universal age pension would be a significant proposal with plenty of merit.

The government’s successful early access scheme, which has seen around three million people withdraw almost $40bn, has delivered a body blow to compulsory super. Now is the time to reform it.

Covid-19

IF NEW ZEALAND’S THE ROLE MODEL THEN WE’RE IN STRIFE

ADAM CREIGHTON

There must be a better way to protect the vulnerable without smashing the economy

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing,” George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

If social media is any guide it is our intelligence, rather than our health, that has been dealt a heavier blow by the coronavirus pandemic and the vested interests that benefit from it. The debate about how to respond to the virus has been undermined by widespread ignorance and the plethora of fallacies that surely call for compulsory teaching of logic in schools.

Top consulting firm McKinsey revealed the extent of the ignorance on Tuesday in survey evidence that found young people in Australia were more than twice as worried about the coronavirus impact on their own health as those aged over 75, who are at far greater risk. Almost 40 per cent those aged 25 to 44 were “very or extremely” concerned about their health. Almost half of that group also said they had been “emotionally affected” by the pandemic, compared with 8 per cent of the over-75s.

In light of six months of data on the coronavirus, such beliefs make little sense. They raise serious questions about the quality of education and the insidious role some of the media have played in fuelling the biggest erosion of civil liberties in our history — without accompanying evidence or cost benefit analysis — and a recession whose long-terms impacts can only be guessed with trepidation.

There are almost eight billion people in the world and six months into the pandemic barely any young have died from the virus.

Based on Swiss data published in respected medical journal The Lancet last month, the infection fatality rate from COVID-19 for under those aged 20 to 50 is one in 10,870, or about the same as being hit by a car.

Young people should be far more worried about the collapse in education, their inability to travel and enjoy their lives, and their highly diminished job opportunities and incomes that the Treasury and Productivity Commission have recently laid out.

For those aged up to 44, the coronavirus is less of a threat than dying from a random accident each year, according to the US National Centre for Health Statistics.

“Population-wide estimates of the infection fatality rate (0.64 per cent) mask great heterogeneity by age and point towards the importance of age-targeted interventions to reduce exposures among those at highest risk of death,” the Lancet authors wrote.

Alas, age-targeted interventions weren’t top of mind in the Victorian government, whose decision to move into stage four lockdown is an incredibly high-stakes gamble. If no vaccine emerges — or no vaccine with side effects mild enough that people are willing to take it — what is the point of another six weeks of draconian restrictions with all the attendant social and economic costs that will last years?

New Zealand is held out as a role model, but it’s a small, remote country. Its biggest industry, tourism, has been ruined, and at some point its citizens may want to come and go.

The debate is as rancorous as it is littered with fallacies; beyond trusty ad hominem, the straw man, post hoc, appeals to pity and bandwagon fallacies are the most prominent. No one seriously advocates doing nothing; indeed, individuals naturally take their own precautions, without government having to do anything except provide information.

The question is whether a civilisation that put man on the moon a half-century ago could have come up with a more targeted way of protecting the elderly and vulnerable than causing a downturn so serious forecasting has become impossible.

Indeed, with six months’ more data, reacting in August similarly to how China, Spain and Italy reacted in March — as Victoria has

— surely ignores our improved knowledge and treatment since.

For instance, we now know that herd immunity tends to cut in at 20 per cent, not the 60 per cent feared, and certainly not 100 per cent — the favoured level of fearmongers who mindlessly multiply infection fatality rate by populations. Meanwhile, the belief A causes B simply because B comes after it in time has proved more contagious than the virus itself.

Observing a decline in deaths or case numbers after a government took a sledgehammer to its economy says nothing about the effectiveness. Pointing to New Zealand in rapture proves nothing.

In fact, there’s no reliable relationship between lockdowns and viral trajectories across countries.

“Full lockdowns and widespread COVID-19 testing were not associated with reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality,” the authors of another recent Lancet study looking at Europe and the US found.

Then there’s good old appeal to pity. Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews on Tuesday described the deaths of three people in their 90s and older on Tuesday as “tragedies”. He either doesn’t understand the word or has lost all sense of proportion. It should go without saying, but the chance of dying in one’s 90s is naturally elevated. In any case, what about 1.5 million deaths a year of children in Africa and Asia from vaccine-preventable diseases? They won’t be getting those vaccines in a depression.

That brings us to the bandwagon fallacy, thinking something is correct because everyone else seems to. Perhaps frustrated Sweden’s death toll petered out at 5700 rather than the 90,000 it was warned to expect, proponents of draconian responses say “serious long-term health effects” warrant extreme precaution. The virus has been endemic only since March; how can there be any strong evidence of long-term effects, which by definition mean years?

Economists have been guilty of their own bias, an obsession with gross domestic product - an obsolescent, abstract statistic with little connection to anyone’s life - to determine whether lockdowns have costs.

China has enjoyed strong GDP growth, but many Chinese are incarcerated or worse if they disagree with their government. There’s more to life than GDP.

One could try to work out the dollar value of freedom of movement, physical association, by asking how much people would pay for it. But that somehow defeats the point. Transfixed by the supposedly existential menace of the coronavirus and the “long-term” health costs, not enough are focusing on the long-term costs that aren’t captured by GDP.

If no vaccine emerges … what is the point of another six weeks of draconian restrictions?

TertiaryEducationFailures

US elite betrays the people in its casting of the evil empire

WORLD COMMENTARY

GERARD BAKER

That was quick.

At the end of the 20th century, the US had won World War II and the Cold War, liberated half the planet from history’s most dehumanising ideologies, advanced a freemarket capitalism that had led more humans out of poverty than any economic system ever devised, and given the world the richest bounty of intellectual, cultural and scientific capital since the Enlightenment.

Americans could — and did

— look at themselves and the nation they had built with immense pride.

Twenty years later, much of the country’s political leadership, almost its entire academic establishment, most of the people who control its news and cultural output, and a good deal of its corporate elite view the US as an irredeemably malignant force for enslavement and oppression, a uniquely evil power founded on an ideology of racial supremacy. These Jacobins demand that Americans repudiate most of the nation’s history, tear down the icons of its creation and engage in a collective cultural expurgation of its sins.

Only four years ago, senator Bernie Sanders, a man not noted for a surfeit of patriotic fervour, visited Mount Rushmore and pronounced: “It really does make one very proud to be an American.” On Friday (Saturday AEST), when President Donald Trump made the pilgrimage, we were told that he was appearing, in the words of a CNN reporter, “in front of a monument of two slave owners and on land wrestled away from Native Americans”.

If the self-image of Americans a generation ago was that of a smiling GI receiving flowers from liberated peoples, today we’re told it’s a police boot stamping on a human face forever. What happened?

We can hope that the present mania is in part one of the baleful consequences of the lockdown lunacy. If you’ve been stuck at home mainlining the distortions of the media for four months, your tolerance threshold for fiction has doubtless been raised.

But the roots of the current insanity are more profound than the inch-deep scholarship of the sophomores now in control of America’s newsrooms.

With hindsight, it’s clear that the US in 2020 was ripe for the kind of mindless Maoism that demands fealty to its gospel of ideological cleansing. The nation has reached a combustive moment. The rot in America’s cultural institutions was spread for more than half a century by a self-loathing cultural establishment. Now it has matured amid a public malaise induced by 20 years of elitedriven political and economic failure that has undermined faith in the system that made America great.

The cultural corrosion has been evident for decades. Perhaps what we should have seen better were its consequences: generations of students fed a steady diet of critical race theory and postcolonial gender studies — all delivered in safe spaces protected by an intolerance of dissent — poured out of college campuses into the world, waving their white-fragility texts like little red books.

But they graduated into an America that has been convulsed by two decades of unaccustomed failure and loss. In 20 years, wars and foreign-policy failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere; financial breakdown; and now the pandemic have exposed a hollow political leadership.

All the while the capitalism that had produced so much opportunity for so many has become increasingly a vehicle of power for a few. Megacompanies in finance and technology have grown unchecked. The modern woke corporation publicly disdains and derides the values on which the nation — and its profits — were built, even as it pursues global opportunities at the expense of American communities.

It won’t be enough to reassert America’s great historic virtues. It will require weakening the power of the totalitarians on campus, ensuring fair access for all voices on tech platforms, holding to account the lawless mobs defacing and defaming the nation’s legacy.

But it will also require addressing the rot in American capitalism, reining in the power of bloated monopolies and ensuring that corporations prioritise Americans over their globalist, progressive agendas.

This is personal for me. I came to this country as that great American century was closing. Like millions of immigrants I was drawn by the irresistible allure of a nation forged in pursuit of a universal ideal it had actually succeeded in achieving. Of course, we knew there was a sharp tear in America’s vibrant fabric, a legacy of racial prejudice that mocked the ideals of the founding. But the nation’s demonstrated ability to advance beyond that, to mend and improve itself, makes America even more admirable.

This country hasn’t passed from great to evil in two decades. America hasn’t failed. But Americans have been failed — misled by inept and deceitful political leaders, deserted by predatory and mercenary corporate chiefs, and, above all, betrayed by a parasitic cultural elite that exploited American freedom to trash the country. It isn’t America’s history that needs to be repudiated. It’s its present.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Climate A Change In Alarm

Sorry, but I cried wolf on climate change

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologise for the climate scare we created over the past 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.

I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.

But as an energy expert asked by the US congress to provide objective testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to serve as a reviewer of its next assessment report, I feel an obligation to apologise for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know: Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”;

The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”;

Climate change is not making natural disasters worse;

Fires have declined 25 per cent around the world since 2003;

The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska;

The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California;

Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany and France since the mid-1970s;

The Netherlands became rich, not poor, while adapting to life below sea level;

We produce 25 per cent more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter;

Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change;

Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels;

Preventing future pandemics requires more, not less, “industrial” agriculture.

I know the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism. In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and other leading scientific bodies.

Some people will, when they read this, imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women’s co-operatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.

Green beginnings
I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $US90bn into them. Over the past few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions

But until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an “existential” threat to human civilisation, and called it a “crisis”.

But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.

I even stood by as people in the White House and many in the media tried to destroy the reputation and career of an outstanding scientist, good man, and friend of mine, Roger Pielke Jr, a lifelong progressive Democrat and environmentalist who testified in favour of carbon regulations. Why did they do that? Because his research proves natural disasters aren’t getting worse. But then, last year, things spiralled out of control. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said: “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “climate change kills children”.

Turning point
The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would “wipe out civilisations”. Mainstream journalists reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of the world”, and that deforestation was like a nuclear bomb going off.

As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change.

Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened.

I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough. I needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence. And so my formal apology for our fearmongering comes in the form of my new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.

It is based on two decades of research and three decades of environmental activism. At 400 pages, with 100 of them endnotes, Apocalypse Never covers climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, species extinction, industrialisation, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.

Some highlights from the book:

› Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress.

› The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land.

› The most important thing for reducing pollution and emissions is moving from wood to coal to petrol to natural gas to uranium.

› 100 per cent renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5 per cent to 50 per cent.

› We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities. › Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4 per cent. › Greenpeace didn’t save the whales — switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did. › “Free-range” beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300 per cent more emissions. › Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon.

› The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants.

Why were we all so misled? In the final three chapters of Apocalypse Never I expose the financial, political and ideological motivations. Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist beliefs forced the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make poverty “sustainable”. And status anxiety, depression and hostility to modern civilisation are behind much of the alarmism.

Reality bites
Once you realise just how badly misinformed we have been, often by people with plainly unsavoury motivations, it is hard not to feel duped. Will Apocalypse Never make any difference? There are certainly reasons to doubt it. The news media have been making apocalyptic pronouncements about climate change since the late 1980s, and do not seem disposed to stop. The ideology behind environmental alarmism — Malthusianism — has been repeatedly debunked for 200 years and yet is more powerful than ever.

But there are also reasons to believe that environmental alarmism will, if not come to an end, have diminishing cultural power.

A real crisis
The coronavirus pandemic is an actual crisis that puts the climate “crisis” into perspective. Even if you think we have overreacted, COVID-19 has killed nearly 500,000 people and shattered economies around the globe.

Scientific institutions including WHO and IPCC have undermined their credibility through the repeated politicisation of science. Their future existence and relevance depends on new leadership and serious reform. Facts still matter, and social media is allowing for a wider range of new and independent voices to outcompete alarmist environmental journalists at legacy publications.

Nations are reverting openly to self-interest and away from Malthusianism and neoliberalism, which is good for nuclear and bad for renewables.

The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilisation is better for people and nature than the low-energy civilisation that climate alarmists would return us to.

The invitations from IPCC and congress are signs of a growing openness to new thinking about climate change and the environment. Another one has been to the response to my book from climate scientists, conservationists and environmental scholars. “Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book,” writes Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. “This may be the most important book on the environment ever written,” says one of the fathers of modern climate science, Tom Wigley.

“We environmentalists condemn those with antithetical views of being ignorant of science and susceptible to confirmation bias,” wrote the former head of The Nature Conservancy, Steve McCormick. “But too often we are guilty of the same. Shellenberger offers ‘tough love’: a challenge to entrenched orthodoxies and rigid, self-defeating mindsets. Apocalypse Never serves up occasionally stinging, but always well-crafted, evidence-based points of view that will help develop the ‘mental muscle’ we need to envision and design not only a hopeful, but an attainable, future.”

That is all I hoped for in writing it. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll agree it’s perhaps not as strange as it seems that a lifelong environmentalist and progressive felt the need to speak out against the alarmism. I further hope that you’ll accept my apology.

Michael Shellenberger is president of Environmental Progress, an independent research and policy organisation. He is the author of Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, published by Harper Collins

Once you realise just how badly misinformed we have been … it is hard not to feel duped

DeathsInCustodyFacts

GEOFFREY BLAINEY
No point in ignoring facts and history

1:55PM JUNE 14, 2020

On New Year’s Day, no major economist, no famous medical scientist and no political leader had predicted that this would be a tumultuous year.

At first the coronavirus was the world’s feared enemy. Soon it turned into an economic crisis, and now in many nations it is a looming threat to law and order or the sparks of a cultural revolution.

That the campaign against statues is occurring especially in England is a shock. On reflection it should not be puzzling because the British Isles have enjoyed such political continuity, having suffered no invasion since 1066 and no civil war since the 1640s. Therefore it has centuries of statuary and art still standing in public places.

While some Australians publicly applauded the events in Bristol this week, most probably watched with surprise and even apprehension. The statue of Edward Colston was attacked by a small crowd consisting of protesters and — judging by the media illustrations — spectators who seemed more intent on taking photos. The deputy governor of the British company that once held a monopoly for transporting slaves in British ships from West Africa to the West Indies, Colston could be denounced as partly responsible for the 19,000 slaves who died during those voyages. Yet Colston was also a benefactor of Bristol, helping to found schools in an age when education was a luxury.

Why should a mob and not an elective assembly reach this sudden decision that Colston’s statue be heaved into the harbour? A civic statue is a work of art. Don’t works of art merit some protection, or do we allow the statue-thugs to break into an art gallery and cut the nose off a portrait of a long-dead person? As for the city library, why not set fire to offending books?

You might excuse this censorship of the enemy’s culture during an all-out war, but this is not a war. Or perhaps it is already a culture war.

In the eyes of moderate radicals living in Britain, their nation’s most admired prime minister in the 19th century was William Ewart Gladstone, for whom we once barracked when studying history at school long ago. Yet he was the son of the wealthiest owner of slaves in the West Indies, and as a member of the House of Commons the young Gladstone indirectly helped his father’s income from slavery at the time when the slave trade was being abolished.

Now the statue-breakers in Australia, invisible for years, have emerged with their hammer or paint-splasher. James Cook is already a target. A discordant band of Western Australians have rediscovered governor James Stirling. South Australian rebels have turned on CC Kingston in a glaring display of ignorance. They are shattering the reputation of the politician who, perhaps more than any other, took the steps by which Australia became the world’s first nation to give to women both the right to vote and the right to stand for parliament. The long-dead Kingston is now vulnerable because he was one of the legislators who voted for the White Australia policy. Another offence — he should know better — is that his statue stands near an Aboriginal flagpole.

While this month’s Australian marchers were provoked by the dreadful death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, they were stirred equally by our history of Aboriginal deaths in custody. Many of the marchers tried to publicise these deaths not only to fellow Australians but to people around the world.

Australia has its faults and failings, past and present, but by today’s world standards it can hardly be singled out as racist. It has never tolerated slavery.

Even in the era of the White Australia policy, Australians’ attitude to exotic migrants was little different to the attitudes of most European nations.

In the past 30 years we have, measured by the size of our population, admitted more refugees than almost any other nation, and usually afforded them housing ahead of our own homeless Australian-born people.

It is easier for a new migrant to gain voting rights here than in any nation in Asia or the Middle East. But some Australian universities display a tendency to be servile rather than independent. Beijing, and Uluru at times, must not be offended. The anti-statue crusade found instant supporters here.

The essence of studying history is that, as best we can, we try to wear the shoes and put on the spectacles worn by people of the past. We try to see the obstacles and dilemmas they struggled against or evaded. We also hope that the future will try to understand why we made blunders, and learn from failures and achievements of our era.

The statue-topplers, however, have no time for debate. Those who have just banned the once-prized film Gone With the Wind have no time for discussion. In the US it is almost taboo to ask questions publicly about the campaign Black Lives Matter.

In Australia those critics who doubted whether crowded street marches should be permitted when the coronavirus was still at large were reminded that the fight against racism — an enemy loosely defined — was as crucial as the war against a deadly virus. Those painful minutes in Minneapolis were a timely reminder of painful decades in Australia.

This burning topic was already entangled with another. In 1987 the Hawke Labor government, in a courageous gesture, set up a royal commission to investigate Aboriginal deaths in prison and in police custody.

The belief then was widespread that there the Aborigines had suffered an exceptionally high death rate. It was agreed that this exhaustive inquiry would probably harm our international reputation, but might also find a way for reform and prevention.

Learned judges, and many witnesses from every state and territory, met in a variety of courtrooms.

More than three years later the official verdict surprised most mainstream citizens. In short, the typical indigenous prisoner had been no more likely than the typical non-indigenous prisoner to die in custody. They were just more likely to be arrested and to end up in prison.

The Australian Institute of Criminology assiduously began to count and monitor, year after year, the total of deaths in custody, but their observations and statistics are not familiar to most people who, in good faith, marched last weekend. Their findings were not familiar to the television reporters who courteously questioned the marchers.

I heard no mention, saw no slogan, that proclaimed the truth that non-indigenous prisoners were more at risk than indigenous prisoners of dying while in police custody or prison. Expressed another way: the death rate for each 1000 prisoners is lower for the indigenous than for the non-indigenous.

Prison deaths probably cause more concern among the Aboriginal public. Many of their relatives die in prisons far from home and close relatives. Many commit suicide.

Since the early 1990s one-third of all indigenous deaths in prison have been the result of suicide, usually by hanging. Moreover, half of those prisoners had previously attempted suicide.

Fortunately, strong attempts have been made by governments and prison officials to lower the suicide rate in recent years. The main cause of death of indigenous prisoners, especially after 2004, is natural causes: heart troubles predominate, but they might well be a result of earlier living conditions.

An unexpected trend is for the indigenous prison population now to increase at the faster rate; they now constitute 30 per cent of all prisoners.

The high Aboriginal incarceration rate has been the topic of numerous reports and was the message on many of the handwritten notices held aloft by protesters last weekend. It has given Australia a burst of unfavourable publicity, and China this week subtly exploited it.

To solve the prison problem will not be easy. Money alone has failed to solve it. In my eyes — I could be astray — the prison dilemma now seems far more urgent than the question of whether the Constitution should be altered as to embrace or favour the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.

The global surge of unrest in the past fortnight had another surprising effect. The British history of this land began as a kind of prison. How to reform that prison was a major debate in the middle of the 19th century. Unexpectedly the prison debate is back again.

Historian Geoffrey Blainey’s latest book is Captain Cook’s
Epic Voyage.