Climate Alarmism

 The Australian
Sat 3rdJune2017

CLIMATE ALARMISTS WILL PLAY IT COOL

CLIVE JAMES

Don’t expect them to beat a retreat just because they were proved wrong.

When you tell people once too often that the missing extra heat is hiding in the ocean, they will switch over to watch Game of Thrones, where the dialogue is less ridiculous and all the threats come true. The proponents of manmade climate catastrophe asked us for so many leaps of faith that they were bound to run out of credibility in the end.

Now that they finally seem to be doing so, it could be a good time for those of us who have never been convinced by all those urgent warnings to start warning each other that we might be making a comparably senseless tactical error if we expect the elastic cause of the catastrophists, and all of its exponents, to go away in a hurry.

I speak as one who knows nothing about the mathematics involved in modelling non-linear systems. But I do know quite a lot about the mass media, and far too much about the abuse of language. So I feel qualified to advise against any triumphalist urge to compare the apparently imminent disintegration of the alarmist cause to the collapse of a house of cards. Devotees of that fond idea haven’t thought hard enough about their metaphor. A house of cards collapses only with a sigh, and when it has finished collapsing all the cards are still there.

Although the alarmists might finally have to face that they will not get much more of what they want on a policy level, they will surely, on the level of their own employment, go on wanting their salaries and prestige.

To take a conspicuous if ludicrous case, Australian climate star Tim Flannery will probably not, of his own free will, shrink back to the position conferred by his original metier, as an expert on the extinction of the giant wombat. He is far more likely to go on being, and wishing to be, one of the mass media’s mobile oracles about climate. While that possibility continues, it will go on being dangerous to stand between him and a television camera. If the giant wombat could have moved at that speed, it would still be with us.

The mere fact that few of Flannery’s predictions have ever come true need not be enough to discredit him, just as American professor Paul Ehrlich has been left untouched since he predicted that the world would soon run out of copper. In those days, when our current phase of the long discussion about man’s attack on nature was just beginning, he predicted mass death by extreme cold. Lately he predicts mass death by extreme heat. But he has always predicted mass death by extreme something.

Actually, a more illustrative starting point for the theme of the permanently imminent climatic apocalypse might be taken as August 3, 1971, when The Sydney Morning Herald announced that the Great Barrier Reef would be dead in six months.

After six months the reef had not died, but it has been going to die almost as soon as that ever since, making it a strangely durable emblem for all those who have wedded themselves to the notion of climate catastrophe.

The most exalted of all the world’s predictors of reef death, former US president Barack Obama, has still not seen the reef; but he promises to go there one day when it is well again.

In his acceptance speech at the 2008 Democratic convention, Obama said — and I truly wish that this were an inaccurate paraphrase — that people should vote for him if they wanted to stop the ocean rising. He got elected, and it didn’t rise.

The notion of a countdown or a tipping point is very dear to both wings of this deaf shouting match, and really is of small use to either. On the catastrophist wing, whose “narrative”, as they might put it, would so often seem to be a synthesised film script left over from the era of surround-sound disaster movies, there is always a countdown to the tipping point.

When the scientists are the main contributors to the script, the tipping point will be something like the forever forthcoming moment when the Gulf Stream turns upside down or the Antarctic ice sheet comes off its hinges, or any other extreme event which, although it persists in not happening, could happen sooner than we think. (Science correspondents who can write a phrase like “sooner than we think” seldom realise that they might have already lost you with the word “could”.)
When the politicians join in the writing, the dramatic language declines to the infantile. There are only 50 days (former British PM Gordon Brown) or 100 months (Prince Charles wearing his political hat) left for mankind to “do something” about “the greatest moral challenge … of our generation” (Kevin Rudd, before he arrived at the Copenhagen climate shindig in 2009).
When he left Copenhagen, Rudd scarcely mentioned the greatest moral challenge again. Perhaps he had deduced, from the confusion prevailing throughout the conference, that the chances of the world ever uniting its efforts to “do something” were very small. Whatever his motives for backing out of the climate chorus, his subsequent career was an early demonstration that to cease being a chorister would be no easy retreat because it would be a clear indication that everything you had said on the subject up to then had been said in either bad faith or ignorance. It would not be enough merely to fall silent. You would have to travel back in time, run for office in the Czech Republic instead of Australia, and call yourself Vaclav Klaus.

Australia, unlike Rudd, has a globally popular role in the climate movie because it looks the part.

Common reason might tell you that a country whose contribution to the world’s emissions is only 1.4 per cent can do very little about the biggest moral challenge even if it manages to reduce that contribution to zero; but your eyes tell you that Australia is burning up. On the classic alarmist principle of “just stick your head out of the window and look around you”, Australia always looks like Overwhelming Evidence that the alarmists must be right.

Even now that the global warming scare has completed its transformation into the climate change scare so that any kind of event at either end of the scale of temperature can qualify as a crisis, Australia remains the top area of interest, still up there ahead of even the melting North Pole, despite the Arctic’s miraculous capacity to go on producing ice in defiance of all instructions from Al Gore. A C-student to his marrow, and thus never quick to pick up any reading matter at all, Gore has evidently never seen the Life magazine photographs of America’s nuclear submarine Skate surfacing through the North Pole in 1959. The ice up there is often thin, and sometimes vanishes.

But it comes back, especially when someone sufficiently illustrious confidently predicts that it will go away for good.

After 4.5 billion years of changing, the climate that made outback Australia ready for Baz Luhrmann’s viewfinder looked all set to end the world tomorrow. History has already forgotten that the schedule for one of the big drought sequences in his movie Australia was wrecked by rain, and certainly history will never be reminded by the mass media, which loves a picture that fits the story.

In this way, the polar bear balancing on the Photoshopped shrinking ice floe will always have a future in show business, and the cooling towers spilling steam will always be up there in the background of the TV picture.

The full 97 per cent of all satirists who dealt themselves out of the climate subject back at the start look like staying out of it until the end, even if they get satirised in their turn. One could blame them for their pusillanimity, but it would be useless, and perhaps unfair. Nobody will be able plausibly to call actress Emma Thompson dumb for spreading gloom and doom about the climate: she’s too clever and too creative. And anyway, she might be right. Cases like Leonardo DiCaprio and Cate Blanchett are rare enough to be called brave. Otherwise, the consensus of silence from the wits and thespians continues to be impressive.

I speak as one who knows nothing about the mathematics involved in modelling non-linear systems. But I do know quite a lot about the mass media, and far too much about the abuse of language

If they did wish to speak up for scepticism, however, they wouldn’t find it easy when the people who run the big TV outlets forbid the wrong kind of humour.

On Saturday Night Live back there in 2007, Will Ferrell, brilliantly pretending to be George

W. Bush, was allowed to get every word of the global warming message wrong but he wasn’t allowed to disbelieve it. Just as all branches of the modern media love a picture of something that might be part of the Overwhelming Evidence for climate change even if it is really a picture of something else, they all love a clock ticking down to zero, and if the clock never quite gets there then the motif can be exploited forever.

But the editors and producers must face the drawback of such perpetual excitement: it gets perpetually less exciting. Numbness sets in, and there is time to think after all. Some of the customers might even start asking where this language of rubber numbers has been heard before.

It was heard from Swift. In Gulliver’s Travels he populated his flying island of Laputa with scientists busily using rubber numbers to predict dire events. He called these scientists “projectors”. At the basis of all the predictions of the projectors was the prediction that the Earth was in danger from a Great Comet whose tail was “ten hundred thousand and fourteen” miles long. I should concede at this point that a sardonic parody is not necessarily pertinent just because it is funny; and that although it might be unlikely that the Earth will soon be threatened by man-made climate change, it might be less unlikely that the Earth will be threatened eventually by an asteroid, or let it be a Great Comet; after all, the Earth has been hit before.

That being said, however, we can note that Swift has got the language of artificial crisis exactly right, to the point that we might have trouble deciding whether he invented it or merely copied it from scientific voices surrounding him. James Hansen is a Swiftian figure. Blithely equating trains full of coal to trains full of people on their way to Auschwitz, the Columbia University climatologist is utterly unaware that he has not only turned the stomachs of the informed audience he was out to impress, he has lost their attention.

Paleoclimatologist Chris Turney, from the University of NSW, who led a ship full of climate change enthusiasts into the Antarctic to see how the ice was doing under the influence of climate change and found it was doing well enough to trap the ship, could have been invented by Swift. (Turney’s subsequent Guardian article, in which he explained how this embarrassment was due only to a quirk of the weather and had nothing to do with a possible mistake about the climate, was a Swiftian lampoon in all respects.)

Compulsorily retired now from the climate scene, Rajendra Pachauri, formerly chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was a zany straight from Swift, by way of a Bollywood remake of The Party starring the local imitator of Peter Sellers; if Dr Johnson could have thought of Pachauri, Rasselas would be much more entertaining than it is. Finally, and supremely, Flannery could have been invented by Swift after 10 cups of coffee too many with Stella. He wanted to keep her laughing. Swift projected the projectors who now surround us.

They came out of the granthungry fringe of semi-science to infect the heart of the mass media, where a whole generation of commentators taught each other to speak and write a hyperbolic doom-language (“unprecedented”, “irreversible”, et cetera), which you might have thought was sure to doom them in their turn. After all, nobody with an intact pair of ears really listens for long to anyone who talks about “the planet” or “carbon” or “climate denial” or “the science”. But for now — and it could be a long now — the advocates of drastic action are still armed with a theory that no fact doesn’t fit.

The theory has always been manifestly unfalsifiable, but there are few science pundits in the mass media who could tell Karl Popper from Mary Poppins. More startling than their ignorance, however, is their defiance of logic. You can just about see how a bunch of grant-dependent climate scientists might go on saying that there was never a Medieval Warm Period even after it has been pointed out to them that any old corpse dug up from the permafrost could never have been buried in it. But how can a bunch of supposedly enlightened writers go on saying that? Their answer, if pressed, is usually to say that the question is too elementary to be considered.

Alarmists have always profited from their insistence that climate change is such a complex issue that no “science denier” can have an opinion about it worth hearing. For most areas of science such an insistence would be true. But this particular area has a knack of raising questions that get more and more complicated in the absence of an answer to the elementary ones. One of those elementary questions is about how manmade carbon dioxide can be a driver of climate change if the global temperature has not gone up by much over the past 20 years but

the amount of man-made carbon dioxide has. If we go on to ask a supplementary question — say, how could carbon dioxide raise temperature when the evidence of the ice cores indicates that temperature has always raised carbon dioxide — we will be given complicated answers, but we still haven’t had an answer to the first question, except for the suggestion that the temperature, despite the observations, really has gone up, but that the extra heat is hiding in the ocean.

It is not necessarily science denial to propose that this long professional habit of postponing an answer to the first and most elementary question is bizarre. American physicist Richard Feynman said that if a fact doesn’t fit the theory, the theory has to go. Feynman was a scientist. Einstein realised that the Michelson-Morley experiment hinted at a possible fact that might not fit Newton’s theory of celestial mechanics. Einstein was a scientist, too. Those of us who are not scientists, but who are sceptical about the validity of this whole

issue — who suspect that the alleged problem might be less of a problem than is made out — have plenty of great scientific names to point to for exemplars, and it could even be said that we could point to the whole of science itself. Being resistant to the force of its own inertia is one of the things that science does.

When the climatologists upgraded their frame of certainty from global warming to climate change, the bet-hedging manoeuvre was so blatant that some of the sceptics started predicting in their turn: the alarmist cause must surely now collapse, like a house of cards. A tipping point had been reached.

Unfortunately for the cause of rational critical inquiry, the campaign for immediate action against climate doom reaches a tipping point every few minutes, because the observations, if not the calculations, never cease exposing it as a fantasy.

I myself, after I observed journalist Andrew Neil on BBC TV wiping the floor with the then secretary for energy and climate change Ed Davey, thought that the British government’s energy policy could not survive, and that the mad work that had begun with the 2008 Climate Change Act of Labour’s Ed Miliband must now surely begin to come undone. Neil’s well-informed list of questions had been a tipping point. But it changed nothing in the short term. It didn’t even change the BBC, which continued uninterrupted with its determination that the alarmist view should not be questioned.

How did the upmarket mass media get themselves into such a condition of servility? One is reminded of that fine old historian George Grote when he said that he had taken his A History of Greece only to the point where the Greeks failed to realise they were slaves. The BBC’s monotonous plugging of the climate theme in its science documentaries is too obvious to need remarking, but it’s what the science programs never say that really does the damage.

Even the news programs get “smoothed” to ensure that nothing interferes with the constant business of protecting the climate change theme’s dogmatic status.

To take a simple but telling example: when Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s Vice-Chancellor and man in charge of the Energiewende (energy transition), talked rings around Greenpeace hecklers with nothing on their minds but renouncing coal, or told executives of the renewable energy companies that they could no longer take unlimited subsidies for granted, these instructive moments could be seen on German TV but were not excerpted and subtitled for British TV even briefly, despite Gabriel’s accomplishments as a natural TV star, and despite the fact he himself was no sceptic.

Wrong message: easier to leave him out. And if American climate scientist Judith Curry appears before a US Senate committee and manages to defend her anti-alarmist position against concentrated harassment from a senator whose only qualification for the discussion is that he can impugn her integrity with a rhetorical contempt of which she is too polite to be capable? Leave it to YouTube. In this way, the BBC has spent 10 years unplugged from a vital part of the global intellectual discussion, with an increasing air of provincialism as the inevitable result. As the UK now begins the long process of exiting the EU, we can reflect that the departing nation’s most important broadcasting institution has been behaving, for several years, as if its true aim were to reproduce the thought control that prevailed in the Soviet Union.

Even the news programs get ‘smoothed’ to ensure that nothing interferes with the constant business of protecting the climate change theme’s dogmatic status

As for the print media, it’s no mystery why the upmarket newspapers do an even more thorough job than the downmarket newspapers of suppressing any dissenting opinion on the climate.

In Britain, The Telegraph sensibly gives a column to the diligently sceptical Christopher Booker, and Matt Ridley has recently been able to get a few rational articles into The Times, but a more usual arrangement is exemplified by my own newspaper, The Guardian, which entrusts all aspects of the subject to George Monbiot, who once informed his green readership that there was only one reason I could presume to disagree with him, and them: I was an old man, soon to be dead, and thus with no concern for the future of “the planet”.

I would have damned his impertinence, but it would have been like getting annoyed with a wheelbarrow full of freshly cut grass.

These byline names are stars committed to their opinion, but what’s missing from the posh press is the non-star name committed to the job of building a fact file and extracting a reasoned article from it. Further down the market, when The Daily Mail put its no-frills newshound David Rose on the case after Climategate, his admirable competence immediately got him labelled as a “climate change denier”: one of the first people to be awarded that badge of honour.

The other tactic used to discredit him was the standard one of calling his paper a disreputable publication. It might be — having been a victim of its prurience myself, I have no inclination to revere it — but it hasn’t forgotten what objective reporting is supposed to be. Most of the British papers have, and the reason is no mystery.

They can’t afford to remember. The print media, with notable exceptions, is on its way down the drain. With almost no personnel left to do the writing, the urge at editorial level is to give all the science stuff to one bloke. The print edition of The Independent bored its way out of business when its resident climate nag was allowed to write half the paper.

In its last year, when the doomwatch journalists were threatened by the climate industry with a newly revised consensus opinion that a mere 2C increase in world temperature might be not only acceptable but likely, The Independent’s chap retaliated by writing stories about how the real likelihood was an increase of 5C, and in a kind of frenzied crescendo he wrote a whole front page saying that the global temperature was “on track” for an increase of 6C. Not long after, the Indy’s print edition closed down.

At The New York Times, Andrew Revkin, star colour-piece writer on the climate beat, makes the whole subject no less predictable than his prose style: a cruel restriction.

In Australia, the Fairfax papers, which by now have almost as few writers as readers, reprint Revkin’s summaries as if they were the voice of authority, and will probably go on doing so until the waters close overhead. On the ABC, house science pundit Robyn Williams famously predicted that the rising of the waters “could” amount to 100m in the next century. But not even he predicted that it could happen next week. At The Sydney Morning Herald, it could happen next week. The only remaining journalists could look out of the window and see fish.

Bending its efforts to sensationalise the news on a scale previously unknown even in its scrappy history, the mass media has helped to consolidate a pernicious myth. But it could not have done this so thoroughly without the accident that it is the main source of information and opinion for people in the academic world and in the scientific institutions. Few of those people have been reading the sceptical blogs: they have no time. If I myself had not been so ill during the relevant time span, I might not have been reading it either, and might have remained confined within the misinformation system where any assertion of forthcoming disaster counts as evidence.

The effect of this mountainous accumulation of sanctified alarmism on the academic world is another subject. Some of the universities deserve to be closed down, but I expect they will muddle through, if only because the liberal spirit, when it regains its strength, is likely to be less vengeful than the dogmatists were when they ruled. Finding that the power of inertia blesses their security as once it blessed their influence, the enthusiasts might have the sense to throttle back on their certitude, huddle under the blanket cover provided by the concept of “postnormal science”, and wait in comfort to be forgotten.

As for the learned societies and professional institutions, it was never a puzzle that so many of them became instruments of obfuscation instead of enlightenment. Totalitarianism takes over a state at the moment when the ruling party is taken over by its secretariat; the tipping point is when Stalin, with his lists of names, offers to stay late after the meeting and take care of business.

The same vulnerability applies to any learned institution. Rule by bureaucracy favours mediocrity, and in no time at all you are in a world where the British Met Office’s (former) chief scientist Julia Slingo is a figure of authority and Curry is fighting to breathe.

On a smaller scale of influential prestige, Nicholas Stern lends the Royal Society the honour of his presence. For those of us who regard him as a vocalised stuffed shirt, it is no use saying that his confident pronouncements about the future are only those of an economist. Klaus was only an

economist when he tried to remind us that Malthusian clairvoyance is invariably a harbinger of totalitarianism. But Klaus was a true figure of authority. Alas, true figures of authority are in short supply, and tend not to have much influence when they get to speak.

All too often, this is because they care more about science than about the media. As recently as 2015, after a full 10 years of nightly proof that this particular scientific dispute was a media event before it was anything, Freeman Dyson was persuaded to go on television. He was up there just long enough to say that the small proportion of carbon dioxide that was manmade could only add to the world’s supply of plant food. The world’s mass media outlets ignored the footage, mainly because they didn’t know who he was.

I might not have known either if I hadn’t spent, in these past few years, enough time in hospitals to have it proved to me on a personal basis that real science is as indispensable for modern medicine as cheap power. Among his many achievements, to none of which he

has ever cared about drawing attention, Dyson designed the TRIGA reactor. The TRIGA ensures that the world’s hospitals get a reliable supply of isotopes.

Dyson served science. Except for the few holdouts who go on fighting to defend the objective nature of truth, most of the climate scientists who get famous are serving themselves.

There was a time when the journalists could have pointed out the difference, but now they have no idea. Instead, they are so celebrity-conscious that they would supply Flannery with a new clown suit if he wore out the one he is wearing now.

A bad era for science has been a worse one for the mass media, the field in which, despite the usual blunders and misjudgments, I was once proud to earn my living. But I have spent too much time, in these past few years, being ashamed of my profession: hence the note of anger which, I can now see, has crept into this essay even though I was determined to keep it out. As my retirement changed to illness and then to dotage, I would have preferred to sit back and write poems than to be known for taking a position in what is, despite the colossal scale of its foolish waste, a very petty quarrel.

But it was time to stand up and fight, if only because so many of the advocates, though they must know by now that they are professing a belief they no longer hold, will continue to profess it anyway.

Back in the day, when I was starting off in journalism — on The Sydney Morning Herald, as it happens — the one thing we all learned early from our veteran colleagues was never to improve the truth for the sake of the story. If they caught us doing so, it was the end of the world.

But here we are, and the world hasn’t ended after all. Though some governments might not yet have fully returned to the principle of evidence-based policy, most of them have learned to be wary of policy-based evidence. They have learned to spot it coming, not because the real virtues of critical inquiry have been well argued by scientists but because the false claims of abracadabra have been asserted too often by people who, though they might have started out as scientists of a kind, have found their true purpose in life as ideologists.

Modern history since World War II has shown us that it is unwise to predict what will happen to ideologists after their citadel of power has been brought low. It was feared that the remaining Nazis would fight on, as werewolves. Actually, only a few days had to pass before there were no Nazis to be found anywhere except in Argentina, boring one another to death at the world’s worst dinner parties.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, on the other hand, when it was thought that no apologists for Marxist collectivism could possibly keep their credibility in the universities of the West, they not only failed to lose heart, they gained strength.

Some critics would say that the climate change fad itself is an offshoot of this lingering revolutionary animus against liberal democracy, and that the true purpose of the climatologists is to bring about a world government that will ensure what no less a philanthropist than Robert Mugabe calls “climate justice”, in which capitalism is replaced by something more altruistic.

I prefer to blame mankind’s inherent capacity for raising opportunism to a principle: the enabling condition for fascism in all its varieties, and often an imperative mindset among high-end frauds.

On behalf of the UN, Maurice Strong, the first man to raise big money for climate justice, found slightly under a million dollars of it sticking to his fingers, and hid out in China for the rest of his life — a clear sign of his guilty knowledge that he had pinched it.

Later operators lack even the guilt. They just collect the money, like the Prime Minister of Tuvalu, who has probably guessed by now that the sea isn’t going to rise by so much as an inch; but he still wants, for his supposedly threatened atoll, a share of the free cash, and especially because the question has changed. It used to be: how will we cope when the disaster comes? The question now is: how will we cope if it does not?

There is no need to entertain visions of a vast, old-style army of disoccupied experts retreating through the snow, eating first their horses and finally each other. But there could be quite a lot of previously well-subsidised people left standing around while they vaguely wonder why nobody is listening to them any more. Way back in 2011, one of the Climategate scientists, Britain’s Tommy Wils, with an engagingly honest caution rare among prophets, speculated in an email about what people outside their network might do to them if climate change turned out to be a bunch of natural variations: “Kill us, probably.” But there has been too much talk of mass death already, and anyway most of the alarmists are the kind of people for whom it is a sufficiently fatal punishment simply to be ignored.

Nowadays I write with aching slowness, and by the time I had finished assembling the previous paragraph, the US had changed presidents. What difference this transition will make to the speed with which the climate change meme collapses is yet to be seen, but my own guess is that it was already almost gone anyway: a comforting view to take if you don’t like the idea of a posturing zany like Donald Trump changing the world.

Personally, I don’t even like the idea of Trump changing a light bulb, but we ought to remember that this dimwitted period in the history of the West began with exactly that: a change of light bulbs. Suddenly, 100 watts were too much. For as long as the climate change fad lasted, it always depended on poppycock; and it would surely be unwise to believe that mankind’s capacity to believe in fashionable nonsense could be cured by the disproportionately high cost of a temporary embarrassment. I’m almost sorry that I won’t be here for the ceremonial unveiling of the next threat.

Almost certainly the opening feast will take place in Paris, with a happy sample of all the world’s young scientists facing the fragrant remains of their first ever plate of foie gras, while vowing that it will not be the last.

This is an exclusive extract from the essay Mass Death Dies Hard by Clive James in Climate Change: The Facts 2017 edited by Jennifer Marohasy, published next month by the Institute of Public Affairs.

Though some governments might not yet have fully returned to the principle of evidence-based policy, most of them have learned to be wary of policy-based evidence

ConstitutionalChange

The Australian 1stJune2017

LIBERALS MUST JOIN BARNABY JOYCE’S ULURU REJECTION

GREG SHERIDAN
FOREIGN EDITOR

The misguided proposals of the Aboriginal leadership risk fracturing Australian society
Much of what stability the Turnbull government enjoys derives from the common sense and good instincts of Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce. Were it not for the Nationals’ stellar performance at the election last year, the Coalition would now be in opposition.

So his straightforward rejection of the recommendation of the Uluru gathering of Aboriginal leaders for an elected indigenous consultative body to be inserted into the Constitution ought to put the matter to rest. Surely even a government as prone to self-harm as this one would not repudiate Joyce’s sound judgment.

Joyce has not been peremptory or unduly hasty. A false narrative is springing up that proponents of radical constitutional change are entitled and encouraged to canvass every option, but people opposed to constitutional change in principle are somehow or other impolitely jumping the gun.

It is of the utmost importance that the Liberals and Nationals indicate their red lines on constitutional change. Over the past 1½ centuries, nationalism, and the associated issue of sovereignty, has been the most important dynamic in international life, while in recent years the wholly destructive movement of identity politics has become the chief obsession of cultural progressives.

Australia is in grave danger of provoking internal divisions that would unleash the forces of nationalism and identity politics in profoundly destructive ways. Nationalism can be good or bad. Its gruesomely exaggerated version led to aggression in World War II, but nationalism as love of nation also impelled the Australian soldiers who defended this country to their last measure on the Kokoda Track. Part of the task for a civilised, mature democracy is to sustain decent nationalism and reject its exaggeration or its repudiation by extremist or misguided political forces.

The Aboriginal leadership over the past 10 years has taken a terrible wrong turn in seeing continued political and constitutional change as the main engine for advancement of indigenous people. It has been encouraged in this grievous, historical error by both sides of politics, though the culpability rests more with the Coalition than with Labor because the Coalition’s political tradition, with its emphasis on the exclusive rights and obligations of a universal citizenship, should help it to more strenuously resist this mistake.

Many members of the government, frontbench and back, are extremely unhappy with the proposals for constitutional change but for many reasons have kept silent. That silence is now damaging Australia, as the expectation of radical change will ultimately become self-fulfilling if there is never an in-principle counterargument.

The Uluru gathering recommended a new consultative body for Aborigines be guaranteed in the Constitution, a new process heading towards a treaty, and a species of truth and reconciliation commissions such that Australia’s historic crimes against Aborigines can be run through time and again.

All these proposals are wrong in principle and would be profoundly damaging in practice.

Five years ago I would have supported recognition in a constitutional preamble, so long as it was inclusive and non-divisive, of the Aboriginal presence in Australia before European settlement. But as I have reflected on the matter more deeply, I see now that any departure from the single treatment of all Australians as citizens is bad in principle and would be damaging in the real world.

Tony Abbott promoted the preamble recognition idea as “completing the Constitution”. This meant it was a one-off symbolic gesture. But it’s clear that this process will never end. Not only has the Aboriginal leadership rejected such recognition, it has repudiated the idea that the Constitution can ever be completed. Instead there is an endless series of demands, all of which compromise national sovereignty and create different classes of Australian citizens.

If Liberals cannot oppose this in principle, it is difficult to know why they exist at all as a political party.

The point of constitutions and symbols is that they should be stable and mostly not front of mind. You get your symbols right partly so that you can forget about them and get on with life.

The prospects for Aboriginal advancement, which every decent person desires profoundly, lie in business, employment, family life, community, education, sports, religion and every other decent part of Australian life. The greatest disadvantage felt by contemporary Aborigines is in remote communities. It is difficult for remote communities to offer their residents the range of opportunity and support that non-remote communities take for granted.

This is a problem governments have addressed without much success. Nothing in constitutional change would have any effect on this. There is nothing useful a government could do with a changed Constitution that it can’t do now.

When the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission was born in 1990, I was a reporter in the Canberra press gallery. I well remember the minister at the time, Gerry Hand, making speeches about the beneficial effect ATSIC would have, which were almost word for word, certainly sentiment for sentiment, the same as the rationale coming out of Uluru. Once Aboriginal people had control over their own affairs, the promoters of ATSIC said, they would “own” the policies and the community buy-in, and community pride, would soar, and so on.

In the event, ATSIC was a disaster. Because it didn’t exist in the Constitution it could be, rightly, abolished.

It is no longer paranoid to conclude that the drift of Aboriginal politics over the past decade has gone into the very dangerous waters of a challenge to the normal understanding of Australian sovereignty, has embraced illiberal ideas of distinguishing citizens from each other on the basis of membership of a race or ethnic group, and would have devastating consequences for our society, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal alike, if implemented.

Why might the consequences be devastating? Here’s one example. The rise of Donald Trump indicates that if you have enough fixation on identity politics of racial subgroups, you will ultimately provoke a movement of identity politics among whites.

This is wholly destructive territory. For Australia to go down this road is crazy.

For the past 10 or 15 years, the US Democratic Party strategists thought they were heading for success because of their support among African-Americans and Hispanics. But the more exaggerated their rhetoric and claims became, the more they demeaned and alienated the white working class — the people who join the police and military, who hate it if they have to live off welfare and whose patriotism has been least affected by the postmodern fashions of academe.

Trump does not represent the idealism of the white working class but he did get its anger. Many Hispanics also rejected identity politics and voted for Trump.

Do we really now, in the context of changing the Constitution, want to relitigate whether the Aborigines who were here 250 years ago formed a single sovereign nation, and what was their sovereign relationship to each other and to the other peoples they displaced, and what implications should that now have for declaring different classes of citizen in contemporary Australia?

Will a future Labor government aim for a treaty without a referendum, and would the Liberals be capable of resisting such a move?

A nation forever fighting over its past is seldom happy. Mainstream political leaders owe it to Aborigines, and to all Australians, to repudiate this dreadful wrong turn.

Part of the task for a civilised, mature democracy is to sustain decent nationalism

Health & Immunity

We must stop pandering to risky food fads

WORLD COMMENTARY

MATT RIDLEY

I suggest you finish your breakfast before reading this column. When Britain’s National Health Service announced last month that it would no longer prescribe glutenfree food, it surprised me that it had been doing so in the first place. Whether you have genuine gluten intolerance — such as those with coeliac disease — or are merely following the fad, why should the taxpayer subsidise your diet, when the shops are groaning with gluten-free products? As I shall explain, perhaps the NHS should prescribe worms instead.

Where nutrition is concerned, the line between medical disorder and dietary preference has blurred. There are genuine medical issues relating to food, but they are hidden under a heap of fads. The recent news that milk consumption is dramatically down among young people seems to be because of a large amount of fashion with a small amount of disease.

It is the medical issue that concerns me here, but before I get to that, a word about fads. Lucrative obsessions among the wealthy with “clean” food, raw food, “detox” diets and “superfood” are pseudoscience, shamelessly exploiting gullible people and worsening the epidemic of eating disorders. Much of anorexia starts with “orthorexia”, or fussy eating, driven by irresponsible advice from celebrities who should know better. Nutrition education should be a priority, and public heath authorities need to get over their monomania about the sugar industry and start thinking about the damage being done by food fads.

At the heart of the problem is a misunderstanding of the concept of dose. Any kind of food is bad for you in excess, but that does not mean it is bad for you in small doses. Likewise, if something is harmful when missing from the diet, it does not mean it is good for you when supplied in overabundance. Vitamin C is vital for people with scurvy, but of zero benefit for people who are getting enough vegetables and fruit in their diet.

However, with that off my chest, there is nonetheless a growing food and health problem. Beneath the nonsense fads, beneath the worship of kale and goji berries and the absurd detox mythology, there clearly is increasing food intolerance among a smaller number of people. It urgently needs attention, because otherwise we might find in a few decades that more and more lives are ruined by allergies and illnesses.

This is a global issue. The menu in the restaurant in Guatemala City where I dined last Friday was sprinkled with symbols: glutenfree, dairy-free or peanut-free. These are real dangers for some people, who must avoid wheat, milk and nuts, three of mankind’s oldest staple foods. In a world where almost everything has been getting better, allergies have got steadily worse. Why?

I reckon the cause is now pretty clear: a lack of worms. The allergic reaction to these foods is caused by immunoglobulin E, a component of the immune system whose day job in the past was to combat parasitic worms. A recent study by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine found that key proteins from 31 species of parasites are very similar to allergenic proteins. A protein in birch pollen that triggers hay fever is very similar to a protein found in parasitic worms that causes the infection schistosomiasis, for example.

It’s not that the immune system is “bored” now we have got rid of worms. The theory is more persuasive than that: worms have the capacity to damp down inflammatory immune reactions in their hosts, the better to survive. So human immune systems evolved to “expect” suppression by parasites; without it they overreact. To put it another way, we outsourced part of the regulation of our immune system to parasites.

Milk intolerance may be different because in most parts of the world it is caused by a sugar, lactose, whose indigestibility is a genetic trait. The gene for lactase, the enzyme that tackles lactose, is switched off in mammals when they are weaned. Only in Europe and parts of Africa, where people began milking cows a few thousand years ago, did mutations spread that kept the gene for digesting lactose switched on during adulthood.

But much milk intolerance in Westerners is probably not lactose intolerance, but an allergic reaction to a protein called beta casein A1. Hence the growing popularity of “A2 milk”, a product pioneered in New Zealand from cows that don’t make A1. So milk intolerance, too, may be about proteins and may also be related to wormlessness.

As recounted in a fascinating book, An Epidemic of Absence, by Moises Velasquez-Manoff, the correlation between the disappearance of worms and the appearance of asthma, allergies, type 1 diabetes and dietary intolerances is remarkably precise in time and place. In and around the Ethiopian town of Jimma asthma suddenly became common in the 1990s only in the places and at the time that hookworm was eradicated. No other factor — air pollution, dust mites, pesticides, viral epidemics — could explain the change. In Karelia, a region divided between Finland and Russia, very similar people had far more coeliac disease and allergies on the Finnish side, where sanitation was much better and parasites fewer.

Moreover, experiments have now been done to give allergic people hookworms or whipworms. Sure enough, their allergic symptoms — from asthma to irritable bowel disease — often clear up fast. A whole industry of “helminth hackers” has emerged in the US supplying worm eggs through the post for people with intolerances. Be warned that it is not necessarily worth it.

Ideally, we would now work out how the worms regulate the immune system and replicate the effect with safe pharmaceuticals. That should not be beyond the wit of 21st-century science.

It is probably not just worms. The impoverishment of our gut flora — the bacteria in our intestines — in the modern world, as a result of excessive hygiene and antibiotics, looks increasingly likely to be the cause of various other health issues, including obesity and possibly autism, though early experiments on the latter are inconclusive. Open Biome is a “stool bank” that will supply you with faecal transplants from healthy people to enrich your gut garden. It will also pay good money for faecal donations from healthy people.

I do hope you enjoy your lunch.

THE TIMES

The Weekend Australian  8th April 2017

The melodrama of the Cross and the Resurrection remains top of the pops

PETER CRAVEN

The incredible story of Easter runs through the greatest art and music in Western culture

It’s strange the premonition of Easter, the way the hot cross buns start coming into the supermarkets even as the last days of the heat beat down on us. And then we hear, generally from afar, from some churchy person that it’s Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent when Catholics and High Anglicans have ashes put on their forehead and are reminded they are dust and unto dust they shall return.

And the 40 days of Lent are supposed to be a time of austerity and sacrifice preparing for Easter, for Good Friday, the day that commemorates how Christ died for the wrongs that had been done in the world, and Easter Sunday when he rose from the dead.

Easter is the top of the pops in the Christian liturgical calendar, outstripping Christmas with the coming of the Christ child, at least officially. It is the essence of the Christian story. St Paul says in one of his endless glosses on what the mystery of the coming of Jesus, the Son of Man, the Son of God, may mean: “If Christ be not risen, our faith is vain.”

But what faith clings to us in this all but forgotten saga of what life may mean?

And why do we celebrate this post-Jewish myth of salvation, this revamp of the Passover that we somehow conflate with the coming of spring — particularly absurd in an upside-down southern hemisphere world of autumn and falling leaves — by juxtaposing Jesus, the man who was God, burst from the tomb like an apparition of the most WTF kind, with eggs that are the symbol of fertility, and in our modern world chocolate with its euphoric buzz?

So Judeo-Christian, so pagan, so confused. Someone I was close to said once that the good thing about Easter was that you didn’t have to see people. It was a stolen holiday where you did your own thing and went to the football or the pictures, or caught up with a book, without the endless lovehate rituals of family devotion: the gifts, the turkeys, the rows.

Still, the memory of Easter is buried deep in the world we inhabit. Has the world ever seemed more dead than it can on Good Friday?

Well, you could argue that where I live in Melbourne’s Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, one of the greatest strips of alternative bars and cafes south of Greenwich Village — everyone eating and drinking and listening to music and grabbing books and magazines — Good Friday is just another pagan fiesta for hipster kids and chardonnay-sipping, barramundi-munching elders.

Then again, a lot of fish and chips are eaten on Good Friday — just as no one would have eaten anything but fish in Shakespeare’s London on this day — and even in Fitzroy people make the trek to St Patrick’s or St Paul’s cathedral or some local church on this one day of the year when the mass, the Eucharist, the sacrament whereby Christ gave his body and his blood to the world, is not celebrated.

Not celebrated as a sacrament because it is actively remembered. The altars of churches are stripped, the statues are covered in penitential purple, the priest in the plainest garment, an anti-vestment, recites the psalm about being a worm and not a man.

And people listen to the Passion story. Is it the deepest dream our bit of civilisation has ever dreamed? After the Last Supper in the upper room, when Jesus broke bread and blessed it and said it would become his body and blood, they come for him and Judas betrays him with a kiss for 30 pieces of silver. He has been praying in the garden of Gethsemane. “If this cup cannot pass by without my drinking it, thy will be done,” he says to the Father on high.

He appears before the high priests and, when they ask him who he is, he offers (after apparently attempting to fend them off) a traditional Hebraic definition of godhead. He says he will stand among the clouds by the power of the Most High and they rend their garments. He is taken before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, who wants nothing to do with him but falls under his spell. “Are you a king then?” “My kingdom is not of this world. I came into the world to bear witness unto the truth. Everyone that is of the truth hears my voice.” “What is truth?” Pilate asks.

Pilate is unnerved for all his initial disdain. “Am I a Jew?” he had asked, indicating that the charges brought against Jesus were beneath contempt, issuing as they did from his own despised people.

But then Pilate’s wife had come to him and said to him have nothing to do with this man, she had been so troubled by the image of him in her dreams.

So Pilate has Jesus scourged but tries to get the crowd to release him rather than Barabbas, the other prisoner. “Crucify him!” they cry. “Shall I crucify your king?” And the reply comes back like the dreadful conformism of the ages: “We have no king but Caesar.”

Everyone knows this story or should, how Pilate washes his hands and says, kidding himself, “I am innocent of the blood of this just man”, and later has written above the cross in Greek and in Hebrew and in Latin “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews”, and when the high priests tell him to say that this was just Jesus’ mad pretension, Pilate says, “Quod scripsi, scripsi” (“What I’ve written, I have written”) .

Jesus is crucified beside two thieves. One rails at him but the other says: “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus replies: “I tell you that this night you will be with me in paradise.” Then on the third day he comes out of the tomb. Mary Magdalene, the woman of the streets who had washed his feet with her hair, meets him and doesn’t at first recognise him, and he says to her, “Noli me tangere” (“Touch me not”). Then she does recognise him and cries, “Rabboni” (“Master”).

This is the blissful triumph, this resurrection, and it is the answer, the complement to the great cry on the cross, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani” (“My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”), the only Semitic words in the New Testament, which recapitulate the agony of the psalmist (from Psalm 22). Somehow that’s the way of the spiritual search in our neck of the woods.

Here is the Messiah, the Son of God, dying on the cross and taking upon himself all the evil of the world and feeling the agony of a world bereft of God or any comfort of God, bereft of the essence that has brought the world into being of which he is the human embodiment. It is stark stuff, the Good Friday story. It figures that this should be the fundamental path of the seeker after truth in a civilisation that cracked its teeth, cracked everything in its soul, in all those dark and troubled and exalted psalms, all those songs of David in the Hebrew Bible.

Our Western tradition is grounded in the existential starkness of the Hebrew tradition, just as it takes its bearings from that aspect of Greek civilisation that issued into tragedy as the highest form of literary and dramatic art.

TS Eliot, the greatest modern poet who was a believer, wrote somewhere in his Four Quartets: “You must go by a way in which there is no ecstasy.” That is only pragmatically true of Christian spirituality but it certainly corresponds to the sweeping evocation of suffering — and, with it, the supreme value of the human personality that suffers, that sense of the supreme and sublime value of the suffering face of Christ — which is central to the Christian story, to our whole apprehension of why Easter is somehow a quiet time, even a profound one, when we ponder for a moment the thought that everything that is most precious and most sacred to us can die, that the very intimation of the reality of the good, the principle on which the world is grounded, what the greatest of Italian poets, Dante, called the love that moves the sun and other stars, could die.

Which makes it a thing of wonder and a thing of joy that the figure of Christ can then come back to life, as surely as spring follows winter, or in our own antipodean terms, the harshness of summer can be followed by the soft light and soothing cold nights of autumn. “Death, where is thy sting? Grave, where is thy victory?” that old propaganda monger St Paul sang.

Yes, but then there is the perplexing character of the risen Christ and the figure of doubting Thomas, who said he wouldn’t believe a word of all this resurrection drivel unless he could place his hands in the wounds.

Then he does, then he sees. And he comes out with that cry of hope, that expression of faith that encompasses its opposite: “Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief.”

The world has a great unbelief in this Easter story from which we take our bearings. It seems too old, too corny, too full of the melodrama of old-time religion, so why have a bar of it? Yes, well the spirit blows as it lists. The story of Easter

— the high point of the comedy and tragedy of Christianity — runs through the greatest art and music we know.

There are other immeasurably rich revelations: think of the face of the Buddha, the richness of Islam, especially in its mystical Sufi aspect, the infinite variety and metaphysical precision of the Hindu tradition, think of how Eastern meditation has transformed our world.

Yes, but Easter, the Cross and the Resurrection, Good Friday and Easter Day are us. They have formed us for more than 2000 years and there’s no getting away from them.

This should be the fundamental path of the seeker after truth in a civilisation

Democracy At A Crossroad?

The Australian

CRISIS TIME: WE CAN TAKE A STAND — OR SOLVE A PROBLEM

PAUL KELLY
EDITOR-AT-LARGE

Everyone loses when our democracy is at loggerheads with economic progress
The question for Australia and many Western nations in the Trumpian age of populism and debt is whether democracy’s selfdestructive flaws are reaching a tipping point — is democracy becoming incompatible with economic progress?

This is the debate Australia needs to have. It is the debate the US, one way or another, cannot avoid under Donald Trump. It is the debate Britain, post-Brexit, is starting to confront. It is the central dilemma facing Europe, from France to Italy.

In their 2014 book The Fourth Revolution, authors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge write: “For better or worse, democracy and elephantiasis have gone hand-in-hand. Our politicians have been in the business of giving us more of what we want — more education, more healthcare, more prisons, more pensions, more security, more entitlements. And yet — there is the paradox — we are not happy.

“Having overloaded the state with their demands, voters are furious that it works so badly. From Seattle to Salzburg the worry is that the system that has served the West so well has become dysfunctional, that ‘things are on the wrong track’ … In America the federal government has less support than George III did at the time of the American Revolution. America continues to tax itself like a small government country and spend like a big government one.”

This critique of US polity remains true today. It is increasingly true of Australia. Have you noticed Australians getting even more angry and raging about rotten, hopeless, inept politicians yet demanding governments must do more, spend more money, intrude into more aspects of daily life, resolve more problems, regulate the path to solving every problem from racism to childcare needs to obesity to corporate greed?

Voters loathe the system yet demand more of it — and the more the politicians fail, the angrier the public gets.

In her recently released book Still Lucky, social researcher Rebecca Huntley asks of Australians: “Why do we hate politicians but love government?” Good question — it is the great Australian paradox.

Huntley finds “an almost permanent sense of insecurity exacerbated by economic downturn, the disruptive effects of new technology, cuts to the public service and changes to industry conditions”. She suggests “the idea of secure, protected and well-paid employment” — one of the pillars of the old lucky country — “has been destroyed”.

Fear and insecurity drive people to protect what they’ve got. They drive their anger about inequity, the sense the better-off are ripping off the system. This is the universal narrative flowing from the 2008-09 global financial crisis.

Worried about income and job pressures, people fight politicians to retain every cent of benefit from welfare, health and education spending and, fearing they now live in a rip-off society, say it’s time companies and high-flyers paid their own way. The social contract is deteriorating.

The political debate in Australia today is 80 per cent redistribution and 20 per cent income and growth generation.

This typifies a nation turning on itself. It is the western European disease. If perpetuated, it will end in grief.

Micklethwait and Wooldridge say the Western state is in a condition of “bloat” and that it is the direct consequence of democracy. They brand the state an “omnipresent nanny”.

Politicians of the left and right bid for votes by raising nearly endless expectations the state can do more. It is extraordinary to think historian AJP Taylor said that in 1914 “a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state”.

Life got a lot better in the century after 1914 but the “happiness of the greatest number” is hardly working in 2017.

As current numbers prove, every effort to reverse the growth of the state has failed — from Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, to Bill Clinton in the 90s, to the Hawke-Keating-Howard era, to deluded hopes that globalisation would do the job.

State expansion is now fuelled by huge forces — demography, the ageing population, benefit entitlement culture, weak growth and poor productivity. The Abbott and Turnbull governments have tried to restrain state expansion and spending, but the opposing forces are too great.

While the government has made some progress in spending restraint, you need only to read Senate Hansard to grasp the hopelessness of the situation. Senators rage about the injustice of any spending cuts (outside the top end), compete with each as the battlers’ friend, and almost always prefer tax rises as the means to resolve the nation’s unsustainable spending levels.

They do so with public support. There is scant evidence the government has persuaded the public that deficits and debt are the public’s problem. We are in the eighth year of budget deficits under which borrowings are being used to finance living standards because of the annual gap between spending and revenue.

The consequences are documented each year in budget papers, the latest evidence coming from the Business Council of Australia 2016-17 budget submission. It says: “A perfect storm is looming. Structural spending pressures continue to build rather than abate. These pressures come principally from an ageing population which will significantly increase demand for pensions, health and aged-care services and new programs such as the NDIS.

“Structural deficits of at least 3 per cent are being locked in creating (in today’s terms) some $50 billion additional debt each year. The consequences are inevitable and unpalatable. Closing this gap would require taxes to rise by $5300 per household per year or $2000 per person.”

The government’s late 2016 budget review projected real spending growth will blow out to 3 per cent a year beyond 2020-21 compared with 1.8 per cent for the current four-year period.

The BCA report says: “Put simply, this means that spending growth will outpace the economy’s capacity to pay. We are facing a structural spending and deficit problem that will not correct itself. Without action, the fiscal gap will grow ever wider — until it provokes a painful economic correction involving both cuts to services and higher taxes.”

There is an absence of will in the parliament to correct this problem. The electoral incentives to act do not exist. The Senate is a veto chamber, dominated by gesture politics where it is more important for parties, big and small, to take a stand rather than solve a problem. Taking a stand is good politics; it plays to your sectional voting base, big or small.

This week the Menzies Research Centre released the first of its reports on our national challenges, headed by businessman Tony Shepherd, who says “the average Australian” no longer cares “about the deficit and the borrowing required to fund it”. It is unsurprising Shepherd says the nation faces a “genuine crisis” over the budget.

In Australia the trend is unmistakeable — it is the growing nexus of bigger government and populist democracy. As Micklethwait and Wooldridge say: “People have voted again and again for the state to do more. But it is not as if either democracy or the state looked any better for it. Government backed by the general democratic will … has seldom been as unloved or inefficient. Freedoms have been given up but the people have not gotten much in return.”

Democracy in Australia is sinking into a self-destructive spiral. The sickness at its heart is the demise of individual responsibility and expecting more from the state when the national interest says state responsibilities should be cut, not increased. Our democratic system now works to undermine economic progress.

We are facing a structural spending and deficit problem that will not correct itself

Future Union Movement

BATTLE PLAN READY FOR SALLY’S ARMY

GRACE COLLIER

Businesses have two years to establish fortifications against a union power grab
Like a ray of sunshine beaming through storm clouds, some cheery news has arrived. The ACTU elected a new secretary this week. Despite our gloomy national predicament, no doubt you will take a moment to send Sally McManus congratulations.

Whoever leads the ACTU must act as the public interface between the union movement and the rest of society, so they must be a palatable cleanskin. Naturally, this somewhat narrows the pool of contenders.

As well as having a PR role, the ACTU houses the bureaucratic brains of the union movement and what is left of its heart: true believers who think they hold “light on the hill” values. These Labor values are a set of “working-class” beliefs mostly imbibed at middle-class institutions, for instance by university students who listen to Billy Bragg and rail against capitalism before becoming student union operatives, then expand their cred by working seven hours and 36 minutes a day, nine days a fortnight, in a public service job before heading into the union movement.

Consequently, the ACTU is the hallowed place where passionate union theorists with limited experience in the real world attempt to administer the labour movement. Don’t think McManus is condemned to a boring existence, though. Any ACTU secretary must tiptoe down a hazardous path.

For a start, there are meetings to chair with the people who run the unions. Important discussions about divvying up other people’s money can become heated and must be adjudicated. The union secretaries all passionately hate each other, almost as much as they hate the concept of private profit, the bosses and Tories.

Bitter arguments rage over union coverage of various worker categories. For Australian unions, there are slim pickings out there. The shrinking pool of union members and the revenue they generate is a regular topic. Like seagulls fighting over chips, union bosses wheel and swoop, screeching all the while. Anyone trying to referee will find themselves deafened, pecked and shat on.

ACTU people also think up grand industrial relations policies to inflict on the economy, and hope to get as many of them in place as possible. It is important to leave a legacy before jetting off to a better job in politics, industry superannuation or a posh union bureaucracy in Europe.

The policies are designed to be implemented by the political arm of the union movement, the Labor Party, through which the unions anticipate taking back control of the nation. So, like sleeper agents activated by a secret signal, brainiacs are springing out of the woodwork with grand policy suggestions for their future prime minister, Bill Shorten, to implement.

In The Australian this week, on ABC TV and in an address on Facebook, McManus gave us a few clues about union thinking: “radical change” is needed because working people are at “breaking point”. A people’s movement for fairness will form an army and fight for serious amendments to law. In the meantime, unions will simply break laws they find unjust.

McManus says her priority is to “lead a movement to take on corporate greed”. There will be demands for less red tape around going on strike, limits on the use of casuals and labour hire, and a reversal of penalty rate reductions. It is intended the Fair Work Commission will be given increased power to arbitrate on disputes between companies and unions. Conversely, the FWC is to lose its power to cancel enterprise agreements and move employees back on to the award.

Recently, at a conference in Canberra, two people from the National Tertiary Education Union presented a brief and clearly written paper called The Future of Trade Unions in Australia. This fascinating paper provides valuable insight into union thinking. If all goes according to plan, legislative change will ensure 50 per cent of Australian workers become union members within five years. This will eliminate “the free-rider problem”: when unions in bargaining represent workers who don’t ask them to, then become cross because they won’t join up.

The ACTU, unions and employer groups are to get together and determine “bargaining electorates” of at least 2000 employees. Once a bargaining electorate is declared, unions can apply for a ballot and within 60 days employees would vote to establish a “collective bargaining unit”. Employers could send written material urging staff to vote against the move but not “hold meetings with employees individually or in groups to discuss it”.

If most employees vote yes, all employees in the electorate would be forced to join the relevant union and pay dues. After that, only the union could negotiate enterprise agreements with employers, and workers would be denied the right to vote on these agreements.

Don’t dismiss these ideas as outlandish. What this paper describes is essentially the American model of industrial relations. Australian unions have always coveted the American system and it isn’t outside the realm of possibility that they might achieve their goal one day.

Australian businesses better get their industrial relations management strategies in order, pronto. They have two years to terminate their enterprise agreements, exit the bargaining system and escape the reach of the FWC, forge great relationships with their staff and build protections against unwanted union interference.

FakeStateOfPalestine

'Palestinian' Is a Fabricated Nationality


By Dan Calic


While talk of a comprehensive Arab - Israeli peace agreement seems never ending, newly elected President Trump has described securing such an agreement as the “ultimate deal.” However there is ample reason why no deal has been struck, and why likely it will remain beyond reach.

The most important factor in reaching an agreement is both sides must want peace. However in this conflict, indisputable evidence shows only one side actually wants genuine peace and co-existence. A sober look at the facts reveals the Arab “Palestinians” have no interest in peace. In order to draw reasoned conclusions it’s also essential to separate fact from fiction.


While talk of a comprehensive Arab - Israeli peace agreement seems never ending, newly elected President Trump has described securing such an agreement as the “ultimate deal.” However there is ample reason why no deal has been struck, and why likely it will remain beyond reach.

The most important factor in reaching an agreement is both sides must want peace. However in this conflict, indisputable evidence shows only one side actually wants genuine peace and co-existence. A sober look at the facts reveals the Arab “Palestinians” have no interest in peace. In order to draw reasoned conclusions it’s also essential to separate fact from fiction.

Who’s Who?

The Arab Palestinians are in a different category than the rest of the Arab world, which consists of 22 sovereign Middle Eastern nations. They do not have the distinction of being a sovereign nation, which they feel they are entitled to. However, shouldn’t we first understand who they are, as well as their motives?

They are a mix of Jordanians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Syrian, Sudanese etc. who settled within the area known as the British Mandate of Palestine. This land encompassed 43,000 square miles and was promised to the Jews as a national homeland in the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Yet, in 1922 the British turned over 75% of it to create the nation of Transjordan, (today’s Jordan). This left roughly 25% or 11,000 square miles of land to be dealt with.


In 1947 the British decided to leave the area and turned the issue over to the United Nations, which by a 72% majority voted to partition two separate states, one Jewish and one Arab. However, the surrounding Arab nations rejected the vote and attacked the new Jewish state one day after its independence, intending to destroy it. This is all indisputable fact.

The coming storm

Regional leadership directed local Arabs living in the area to relocate temporarily, while the armies of the surrounding countries carried out their plan to destroy the UN partitioned Jewish state. Thinking they would soon be able to return and grab a huge windfall, the majority of Arabs chose to leave.

However, their destructive aspirations failed, and the tiny nation of Israel not only was reborn, it remains and flourishes.

One can only lament how different history might have been if the Arab nations chose to accept the UN partition vote. Yet they chose war and have never taken responsibility for their action. What’s worse is the nations of the world have never required it of them.

So what happened to those Arabs who left hoping the Jews would be wiped out, allowing them to reclaim their homes, plus those of the defeated Jews? Many ended up in “no man’s land,” which gave birth to the so called “Palestinian “refugees.” Yet are they truly refugees? They did not leave with the intention of relocating elsewhere to start a new life as refugees typically do. They left because they were hoping the Jewish state would be destroyed and they could return to claim what was theirs, plus what wasn’t theirs. An honest assessment disqualifies them from being classified as “refugees.” It was nothing less than bloodthirsty greed.

Since then they have portrayed themselves as victims deserving of compensation; not from the Arab nations who directed them to leave in order to launch their attack, but from Israel or Britain. If anyone is to blame for their plight it surely rests with Arabs, not the Jews. Unquestionably their fate was driven by hatred, greed and destructive intentions.

Have they ever admitted this? No. Instead they went on the offensive and to this day the Arab nations and the “Palestinians” lay blame elsewhere. This is precisely what Yasser Arafat did when he founded the first “Palestinian” terror group in 1964, the PLO. He blamed the Jews, and took no responsibility for the intent of the Arabs to destroy the Jewish state. He also rejected the United Nations partitioning of a sovereign Arab state, because it meant the existence of a Jewish state, which he refused to accept. His PLO charter defined the “Balfour Declaration, the British Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them null and void.” (PLO Charter Article 20)

Moreover, his organization’s charter specifically calls for the “Palestinian people to assert their absolute determination and firm resolution…to work for an armed popular revolution for the liberation of their country and the right to return to it.” (PLO Charter Article 9)

So much for peaceful co-existence.

“Their Country”?

Moreover, what country is he talking about? The so-called “Palestinians” did not have their own country. The area he is referring to was under the British Mandate and was turned over to the UN who voted to partition an Arab and Jewish state, which was rejected by the Arab nations. The fact is the “Palestinians” never had “their own country,” to return to and “liberate.” They could have had a country if the UN partition had been accepted. However, hatred of the Jews and refusal to accept the existence of a neighboring Jewish state outweighed the gift of having their own state. This abhorrent fact renders Arafat’s statement about the existence of “their country” as a lie.

It should also be noted the Jews have had a constant presence here dating back over 3,000 years. Plus, since they were victorious in defending themselves in the Six Day War of 1967, international law allows them to claim the disputed land, which gave them the legal right to build communities.

It’s time to call a spade a spade. The entire premise on which the PLO was founded is a fabrication. There was never a “Palestine” and no “Palestinian” people. What is correct is there were Arabs of various ethnic origins living together with Jews in an area which was under the control of the British. Arafat himself for example, was a transplanted Arab Egyptian, not a “Palestinian.”

Part of the challenge of this unending conflict is separating fact from fiction. Suggesting the “Palestinians” have the right to “liberate their country” assumes they have or had one. They don’t and never did. This cannot be overstated. Any reference otherwise is pure fabrication. However, this has not stopped them from spreading outright lies and others from buying into it. This includes defining the land they claim as “occupied Palestinian territory,” while blaming Israel as the cause for a lack of peace.

The charters of all the ‘Palestinian’ terror groups, including Fatah, (which means “conquest”) -- the party of Mahmoud Abbas -- don’t merely speak of self-determination within the area commonly referred to as the” West Bank.” Each charter places equal weight on the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel through armed struggle, and replacing it with one “Palestinian” state. It makes clear their goal is to eliminate the world’s only Jewish country, and replace it with another Muslim dominated country. This would bring the total to 23 in the Middle East, while the Jews would have none, and be subjected to live (or die) under Muslim rule in what used to be their own country.

If the community of nations decides to reward those who seek Israel’s destruction with nationhood without requiring them to alter their charters, renounce terror and recognize the Jewish state of Israel, it will be a black mark on humanity.

Then again the community of nations has ample history of treating the Jews unfairly. Evidence today’s United Nations for starters.

PC World

Crisis Magazine

MARCH 10, 2017

The Iron-Fisted Tyranny of Political Correctness

REGIS NICOLL

In the span of a few years, the dictatorship of relativism has given way to the tyranny of political correctness. Under the first regime, universal truth was supplanted by personal truth; under the current one, it is exchanged for outright falsehood. Consider the rise of statements such as,

Sexual orientation is inborn and fixed.
Gender is not inborn or fixed, or binary.
Homosexuality is not abnormal, unnatural, or disordered.
Marriage is a matter of love not gender.
Children flourish as well (or better!) with same sex caregivers as with their biological parents.
Islamic terrorism is not driven by religion.

Each is factually false (as are all politically correct statements) and, yet, advanced through tautology, pimped out in sophistic lip gloss, and enforced by intimidation, has become Western orthodoxy. So entrenched is the groupthink that those who challenge it can find themselves outside of the camp of polite company.

Think not? At your next social gathering, try explaining why you believe marriage is not the right to marry “whomever you love.” If the guests don’t blanch as if a skunk had leapt out of your pocket, it will set off a wave of fidgeting even among Christians who have made rationalizations for gay friends or relatives or who fear coming across as bigoted and intolerant.

The Cost of DissentWhile sharing your beliefs over cocktails can result in social shunning, owning a business, supporting a cause, or belonging to an organization that runs afoul the PC canon puts you at risk for everything from public shaming to loss of livelihood.

Just ask bakery owners Aaron and Melissa Klein who were fined and put out of business, not for refusing to serve homosexual customers, but for declining to create a cake for a same-sex wedding.

Or David and Jason Benham who lost their popular HGTV program, Flip it Forward, for statements David made about genderless marriage. Statements that would have been uncontroversial a decade ago, and, in fact, were uncontroversial in 2008 when presidential nominee Barak Obama told Rick Warren, “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.”

Or Chip and Joanna Gaines, stars of HGTV’s Fixer Upper, who were threatened with the cancelation of their show and financial ruin, not for anything they had said or done, but for membership in a church that affirms the natural heterosexual design of marriage.

Then there’s the state of North Carolina that is being boycotted by entertainers, professional sports organizations, and Fortune 500 companies for legislation that, in accordance with physical reality and common sense, protects girls in rest rooms from the prurient enthusiasms of males.

Most recently, St. Joseph’s Healthcare System, a Catholic institution, is being sued for declining to perform an elective hysterectomy on a transgender woman.

As PC agitations have spread from the boardroom to the bedroom to the bathroom, many people have chosen to remain silent or self-censure their remarks to avoid the untoward attention of the thought police. It all serves an Alice in Wonderland reality with a history.

Tracing the rootsThe PC culture is a product of progressivism that approaches reality as a social construct that must be changed to achieve the claimed progressive ends of prosperity and peace. Originating under communism, political correctness was institutionalized in the 1930’s to promote the Party’s reality “above reality itself,” writes Claremont Institute senior fellow Angelo M. Codevilla.

For all progressive movements, the supernal reality is the creation of a new humanity in a utopian existence where all conflicts and contradictions are resolved: in Communism, by dismantling all class distinctions; in Freudianism, by overcoming sexual repression; in social liberalism, by gaining public acceptance for any and all lifestyle choices; in secularism, by exalting science and extinguishing religion. Each requires a revolution against realities that do not bend to the “realities” of progressives.

For instance, a scalpel and lifetime supply of hormones cannot change a sex chromosome from a Y to an X; a judicial ruling cannot make a same-sex coupling a marriage (any more than it can make two sodium atoms salt); free, no-consequence sex ends not in a Freudian utopia, but in a post-Sexual Revolution dystopia of marital infidelity, divorce, STD’s, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and abortion; and, despite the rise of secularism in a time that has seen more religious persecution than in any other, the religiously-affiliated population is increasing and projected to rise from 84 to 87 percent of the global population by 2050.

“Soft” ExploitationThe job of political correctness, Codevilla explains, is to overcome these and other intransigent realities by silencing dissent, delegitimizing opposing points of view (particularly those informed by the moral foundations of Western civilization), marginalizing people who hold them, and possibly criminalizing those who act on them. So, the revolution rages on.

With no compelling vision of truth, beauty, goodness, or conspicuous value added for the masses, the progressive interest is not in winning society over with rational argument and civil discourse, but in subduing it with the threat of social censure, or worse. The sad irony, to paraphrase economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s quip on Communism, is that “Under Capitalism man exploits man; under Progressivism, the situation is reversed.”

The success of this “soft” exploitation requires the clever appropriation of language by the PC architects. Terms like justice and equality are retained, but their definitions and applications are changed.

Justice, in the classical understanding, is giving people their due; in the Christian view, it is giving them what they need; to the progressive mind, it is giving people what they want, or what the ruling class has decided they need which, under the umbrella of social justice, includes economic justice, climate justice, environmental justice, resource justice, and reproductive justice.

Equality, according to our nation’s founding, is about equal opportunity and the fair and unbiased treatment of all people regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, or religion. Its progressive stepchild is about equal outcomes, which, by necessity and contrary to the principle of equal treatment, disadvantages some people through progressive tax structures and diversity, inclusion, and affirmative action policies. Whereas, the former gave birth to the great social movements of abolition, emancipation, women’s suffrage, and civil rights, the latter has sired everything from the legalization of abortion and same-sex “marriage” to bathroom laws and the elimination of honorary distinctions in public schools.

Engaged in a movement with no definable end—there is always “progress” to be made, an enemy to defeat, a wrong to right—progressives are always sniffing around for some reality to deconstruct and another to create. Which explains why the legalization of same-sex “marriage” was followed so rapidly by the recognition of sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes. And why LGBT activists and their sympathizers are not satisfied with winning legal battles and gaining their rights; offenders (bakers, florists, photographers) must be punished and ground into the dust.

Such fulfills a deep yearning for personal absolution. As Codevilla rightly notes, “feeling better about one’s self by confessing other people’s sins, humiliating and hurting them, is an addictive pleasure the appetite for which grows with each satisfaction.”

But for the victims of PC and those who refuse to be cowed by its tyranny, it produces resentment that can build into a counter revolution—one which, arguably, Donald Trump’s improbable ascendency to the presidency, over the best crop of prospects the GOP has ever fielded, is the opening salvo. If so, whether it will be the end of one tyranny or the beginning of another, one thing is certain: it will be a bumpy ride; so fasten your seat belts.

CFS

newscientist

13 February 2017

Metabolic switch may bring on chronic fatigue syndrome

By Andy Coghlan

It’s as if a switch has been flicked. Evidence is mounting that chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is caused by the body swapping to less efficient ways of generating energy.

Also known as ME or myalgic encephalomyelitis, CFS affects some 250,000 people in the UK. The main symptom is persistent physical and mental exhaustion that doesn’t improve with sleep or rest. It often begins after a mild infection, but its causes are unknown. Some have argued that CFS is a psychological condition, and that it is best treated through strategies like cognitive behavioural therapy.

But several lines of investigation are now suggesting that the profound and painful lack of energy seen in the condition could in many cases be due to people losing their ability to burn carbohydrate sugars in the normal way to generate cellular energy.

Instead, the cells of people with CFS stop making as much energy from sugar as usual, and start relying more on lower-yielding fuels, such as amino acids and fats. This kind of metabolic switch produces lactate, which can cause pain when it accumulates in muscles.

Together, this would explain both the shortness of energy, and why even mild exercise can be exhausting and painful.

Sex differences

Øystein Fluge of Haukeland University Hospital in Bergen, Norway, and his colleagues studied amino acids in 200 people with CFS, and 102 people without it. The levels of some amino acids in the blood of women with CFS was abnormally low – specifically for the types of amino acid that can be used by the body as an alternative fuel source.

These shortfalls were not seen in men with CFS, but that could be because men tend to extract amino acids for energy from their muscles, instead of their blood. And the team saw higher levels of an amino acid that’s a sign of such a process.

“It seems that both male and female CFS patients may have the same obstruction in carbohydrate metabolism to energy, but they may try to compensate differently,” says Fluge.

Both sexes had high levels of several enzymes known to suppress pyruvate dehydrogenase (PDH), an enzyme vital for moving carbohydrates and sugars into a cell’s mitochondria – a key step for fully exploiting sugar for energy.

Fluge thinks PDH is prevented from working in people with CFS, but that it can spontaneously recover.

Starvation effect

Several studies have now hinted that defects in sugar burning can cause CFS, but there is still uncertainty over how exactly this is disrupted. However, a picture is emerging. Something makes the body switch from burning sugar to a far less efficient way of making energy.

“We don’t think it’s just PDH,” says Chris Armstrong at the University of Melbourne in Australia, whose research has also uncovered anomalies in amino acid levels in patients. “Broadly, we think it’s an issue with sugar metabolism in general.”

The result is not unlike starvation, says Armstrong. “When people are facing starvation, the body uses amino acids and fatty acids to fuel energy for most cells in the body, to keep glucose levels vital for the brain and muscles as high as possible.”

“We think that no single enzyme in metabolism will be the answer to CFS, just as no single enzyme is the ‘cause’ of something like hibernation,” says Robert Naviaux of the University of California at San Diego, who has found depletion of fatty acids in patients suggesting they were diverted as fuel.

Not psychosomatic

So what could flick the switch to a different method of metabolism? Fluge’s team thinks that a person’s own immune system may stop PDH from working, possibly triggered by a mild infection.

His team has previously shown that wiping out a type of white blood cell called B-cells in CFS patients seems to relieve the condition. These white blood cells make antibodies, and Fluge suspects that some antibodies made to combat infections may also recognise something in PDH and disable it.

The team is now conducting a large trial in Norway of the cancer drug rituximab, which destroys the cells that make antibodies, in people with CFS. Results are expected next year.

Together, these metabolic approaches are suggesting that CFS has a chemical cause. “It’s definitely a physiological effect that we’re observing, and not psychosomatic, and I’ll put my head on the block on that,” says Armstrong. However, he adds that psychological and brain chemistry factors might be involved in some cases.