Fetal Cell lines

By AnnaMaria Cardinalli

In conversations with friends, I have noticed that many of us calm our consciences with certain facts. We know that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines do not use any cells derived from abortion in the production process. That is, we know that we are not being directly injected with fetal cells or their engineered descendants (though this fact differs with other manufacturers). We hear that the abortion-derived cell lines were only used in testing, which should somehow comfort us, though it still means that the vaccines from which we seek to benefit depend on the involvement of abortion. We are told that the cell line used in testing came from one abortion, which took place decades ago. These things are all true, but they do not serve to inform us fully.

What we may not know follows. The most prominent cell line, called HEK 293, comes from an abortion performed in the 1970’s. It’s labeled 293 because that’s how many experimental attempts the researchers needed to get a working cell line. Therefore, though the abortion-to-experiment ratio is not precisely one-to-one, hundreds of abortions went into the project, even if they didn’t result in the working line.

HEK stands for human embryonic kidney. To harvest a viable embryonic kidney for this purpose, sufficiently healthy children old enough to have adequately-developed kidneys must be removed from the womb, alive, typically by cesarean section, and have their kidneys cut out. This must take place without anesthesia for the child, which would lessen the viability of the organs. Instead of being held, rocked, and comforted in the time intervening between their birth and their death, they have organs cut out of them alive.

There is no way that a spontaneous abortion could result in the cell line (as the kidneys cannot remain viable past the brief window in which they must be harvested) or that some brilliant researcher found a way for great good to come out of a rare tragedy by making use of a child’s body donated to science after it was aborted. The deliberate killing of an unwanted child (a little girl, in the case of HEK 293) took place in the tortuous manner it did precisely to obtain her organs for research. The harvest of her organs was the direct cause of her death, prior to which, she was a living child, outside the womb.

I fear that Pope Francis and Pope Emeritus Benedict may not have had this information when they received the vaccines. If we re-examine the Vatican statement that “it is morally acceptable to receive COVID-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted fetuses in their research and productions process,” we see that it does not apply here. It does not imagine this scenario. To approve of the currently-available vaccines, it would have to read “it is morally acceptable to receive COVID-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from living persons, killed by the harvest of their organs for use in medical research and productions processes,” but the Church’s moral teachings could never truly bend so far.

Similar to the human rights abuses exposed by international tribunal in today’s China, where unwanted individuals such as religious and political dissidents are executed by the harvest of their organs for profit, the little girl whose cells gave rise to the COVID-19 vaccines was brutally sacrificed for the purpose, as were all the children whose cell lines failed before her.

Still, many rightly argue, when we discuss the COVID-19 vaccine, there are more lives at stake than even those of the hundreds of children who suffered and died for one specific cell line in the past. Concern for these lives must most certainly bear our consideration as well.

The information about how HEK 293 was created may call vividly to mind the current scandal of Planned Parenthood, who is selling human tissue to the highest bidder, and performing abortions in specific ways to obtain organs and preserve their viability—for the right price. Put more bluntly, the abortion industry performs vivisections on viable, healthy, and well-developed living children for massive profit, on a massive scale. What we are seeing now is the explosion of an industry trafficking in children’s bodies, which began with experiments in the 1970’s, including those on which the available COVID-19 vaccines rely.

Why does this go on? Money is a central motivator in any industry, and it goes on because we support it. We are consumers. If we boycotted, science would be forced to pursue alternative solutions. Even remotely, every one of us who benefits from an industry that functions this way plays our part in its perpetuation. This is why Pope Francis encourages Catholics to voice our dissent, even while receiving the vaccine. Unfortunately, when money is the motivator, voiced dissent does not speak as loudly as refusal.

However, we now find ourselves in a situation where put before us is either concern for our vulnerable neighbors who, we are told, might catch COVID-19 if we ourselves are not vaccinated, or concern over perpetuating an industry we know with certainty very deliberately and brutally kills the most vulnerable among us.

If concern for our neighbors does not burden our hearts into the acceptance of evil as a means to an end, even a good one such as the prevention of COVID-19, there exist other mechanisms of coercion that appeal to our own self-preservation. These are the social disincentives to refusal of ethically-tainted vaccines, from which our Church will now not protect us. Instead of saying, “my Church objects,” those whose informed Catholic conscience now binds them to refusal of the vaccine must now only say, “I object.”

In accepting these persecutions, conscientious Catholics’ choice to refuse an ethically-tainted vaccine may be a source of assurance to their neighbors that they do not lack care for their welfare, as they are themselves willing to assume a degree of self-sacrifice to avoid the deliberate murder of newborns rather than the possibility of infection from a disease primarily affecting adults. It is a dark parallel to the Eucharist—Christ’s perfect sacrifice by which we receive, in our own bodies and for our salvation, the innocent Divine Victim Himself. In the end, this chilling reflection frames the question that now conscience alone must answer.

Embryonic testing

Human embryos are people, and should be treated as such


ANTHONY FISHER


Science is wonderful, but we must beware those who wish to make early human life expendable

This week the media celebrated the achievement by Monash University scientists of so-called “model human embryos”, or “artificial human embryos”.

There was unadulterated excitement about another Aussie first in the field. It promises to be a cure for infertility, miscarriage, you name it. And it all happened, we were assured, “by accident”.

But hold on. Even if we take at face value that this was “accidental”, does anyone really believe it was unexpected? Or unlikely? Haven’t Monash researchers been experimenting on early human life for decades, pushing the boundaries on what is technologically possible and legally permissible?

Accident or not, is this really such a good thing? Remember when embryonic stem-cells were going to cure almost anything, as long as enough restrictions on human embryo experimentation were removed, and enough government money was thrown at them? Two decades later, there are no such cures. Indeed, the majority of the licences granted went not to those institutions researching cures for disease or spinal cord injuries, as promised, but to the IVF industry that pulls in revenues of half a billion dollars each year in Australia alone.

Remember when gene therapy was going to be the panacea, as long as there were no legal or ethical constraints? There’s not much to show for these promises either. So we should dial down expectations that artificial embryos will cure disease or alleviate suffering.

Thirdly, it’s interesting that although the Embryo Research Licensing Committee says these are human embryos, the researchers are saying they are “not really” and calling them names like “iBlastoids”. Is this label just a matter of convenience, masking legitimate questions about their identity and making them sound more like the latest Apple product and less than a human being worthy of respect or protection?

As the saying goes: “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.” So, too, with an embryo: if it has human genes, develops as a human being develops, and does the things a human embryo does, it’s probably an embryonic human.

Nature already provides for a significant variance in early human development. Those human embryos that do not develop exactly as expected because of some chromosomal abnormality or other genetic issue are still embryonic human beings, and it would be outrageous for anyone to suggest these were not human, just because their development did not appear “normal”. Until we know for certain, we must give these embryonic human beings the benefit of the doubt.

Fourthly, if these organisms do not have such a developmental trajectory, then they might not be bona fide embryos after all. In that case there might be ethical uses for them, and we would support and encourage such ethical use. That’s why for two decades now, the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney has funded competitive research into the therapeutic potential of stem cells that are not human embryos, nor derived from human embryos, and perfectly ethical.

Fifthly, if these organisms are human embryos, they deserve the respect owed to early human lives. We should be suspicious of those who rush to characterise them as no embryo at all, particularly when they stand to benefit from this type of dehumanisation. This could just be an Orwellian way of ensuring no one feels too queasy about the laboratory manufacture of human lives for experimental purposes, or that no one engages in much scrutiny of the project.

Some people evidently think Ethics is a place in England. Or that ethics are optional when results, profits or prizes are in view. Or that everything that can be done should be done and inevitably will be done. Researchers are already pushing to lift the period for experimentation on early human life beyond the 14-day limit. Others think this sort of thing is playing god — or playing the devil — and just plain bad.

But we don’t have to presume the best or worst of the embryo experimenters to be sceptical about the breathless celebration of every Aussie first in this arena, or call for caution while more investigation is done. We should all take a deep breath and ask: what’s the moral cost and where is this taking us?

Has the ready expendability of early human life now become an acceptable social norm?

Archbishop Anthony Fisher is the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney and holds a doctorate in bioethics from the University of Oxford.


Some people evidently think that Ethics is a place in England

Historical Crimes

Public shaming can’t replace justice


HENRY ERGAS



As extremely serious accusations proliferate about behaviour by senior politicians that is claimed to have occurred years or even decades ago, the greatest damage is likely to be to the cause of justice itself.

To say that is not to contend that the allegations, which have been strenuously denied, are necessarily ill-founded. But there are good reasons the Athenians, whose legal system allowed any citizen to act as a prosecutor and press claims on behalf of alleged victims, introduced a five-year limit on the time that could elapse between when crimes (other than murder) allegedly occurred and when an accusation was launched.

Underpinning the restrictions, which pioneered the modern notion of statutes of limitations, was the harm being done to the city’s integrity by “sycophants” — a term that, in classical Greek, referred not to flatterers but to those who used the right to press charges on behalf of others as a way of advancing their own interests. Originally, the sycophants primarily aimed at enriching themselves by blackmailing the alleged perpetrator or by obtaining a share of the winnings should the claim proceed and succeed.

However, as Athenian politics turned poisonous, sycophancy became as focused on vilifying rivals as it was on pursuing alleged breaches of the law.

That change led to sycophants being known as “borborotarax” — stirrers of muck or excrement — who spread scurrilous rumours in the city’s main meeting places, inflaming partisan tensions and fuelling the rise of the demagogues many of them served.

Characterised, according to Aristotle, by rancour, slander and malice, the sycophants relied on digging up old claims, which were inevitably hard to disprove, and then used the pretence of assisting a victim’s search for justice as an excuse for their defamatory attacks. As Demosthenes, one of Athens’ greatest patriots and orators, put it in commenting on a prominent case, “Nikomakhos, (were you genuinely seeking justice,) you would have brought matters forward when they occurred — but that was 20 years ago.”

Whether the constraints that were eventually imposed on the sycophants proved effective is controversial; what is certain is that even after Athens’ glory had faded, time limits on initiating criminal proceedings remained, though they sank into irrelevance when the collapse of the Roman Empire threw Europe back into tribal law.

However, as modern systems of justice evolved, time limits once again became a major concern of legal scholars and of political philosophers. Central to that reemergence was a new conception of justice that came out of the renewal of Christian scholarship that began in the 11th century.

In tribal law, justice was mainly a private responsibility, pursued by individual families and clans, often to the point of mutual destruction. But for Anselm of Canterbury and later for Thomas Aquinas, justice’s role was not to satisfy the private demand for revenge; it was to restore the “right ordering” of human affairs by punishing those whose actions not only harmed others but defied the law itself, threatening the divine gift that made human coexistence possible.

Justice was therefore a public responsibility whose task was to use the community’s power to preserve its material and spiritual foundations, including by giving victims their due. However, if public powers of coercion were to be used on victims’ behalf, the victims themselves had an imperative obligation to facilitate justice’s effective operation, not least by pressing claims in a timely manner and allowing their own credibility to be tested.

The importance of timeliness came even more sharply into focus as the absolutist monarchies of the 18th century dramatically expanded the state’s coercive powers, exposing citizens to the danger that they would be disgraced and horrifically punished for crimes allegedly committed long ago.

It was precisely so as to prevent those abuses, and protect the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial enshrined in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, that the French liberals who drafted the criminal code of 1791 gave new life to the Athenian statutes of limitation.

While that code was swept aside in the Terror of 1793-94, the need for strict limits on how far back the law could reach was prominently recognised in 1808 as an integral part of the great Napoleonic codification of criminal procedure, which influenced legal systems worldwide.

“Civil peace cannot persist if claims for vengeance are allowed to remain eternally armed and active, hanging over social life,” Pierre-Florent Louvet explained, in presenting the draft provisions to parliament; “instead, wisdom requires that the passage of time should lead society to remove legal culpability from events (whose contours) have blurred into the distant past.”

The restrictions time limits imposed on human justice were, no doubt, easier to accept in an age universally convinced that a far higher justice than that which could be secured in this life awaited both the guilty and the innocent in the next; and which was also convinced that where there was sin, there could in time be remorse and redemption.

Now those convictions have all but disappeared. And what has filled the vacuum is a renewed culture of retribution, in which those who rightly or wrongly define themselves as victims assert a moral right to be vindicated, quite regardless of whether they have respected their own moral obligation to assist, where they reasonably could, in justice’s timely pursuit.

Aided and abetted by a media that, while claiming to act in the public interest, repeatedly ignores the fundamental Roman axiom of justice — Audi alteram partem, hear the other side — public shaming is replacing the judicial establishment of guilt. And with these contemporary sycophants leading the search for charges that can neither be proven nor rebutted, politically motivated scavenging through the detritus of the past is overshadowing the impartial ascertainment of legally actionable facts.

No one could deny the heartwrenching torment real or imagined wrongs that have long been left to fester can cause. But Franz Kafka was right when he emphasised in The Trial that the justice “which never forgets” — yet is also incapable of accurately remembering — is no justice at all; it is, as he graphically put it, an ambush perpetually waiting to happen, a disease from which there may be temporary remission but no cure, a nightmare weighing even more heavily on the entirely innocent than on the irretrievably guilty.

It is, in other words, the essence of the Kafkaesque. And in reverting to it, we are not advancing into a brave new world but descending into a very ancient one, for which the Athenians also had a name: barbarism.

Masks

Masks ‘a possible risk’ for spreading COVID, ‘predisposing’ people to infections: study
Mask mandates ‘have resulted in no reductions in incidence of COVID-19, as detected by positive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests among nations or US states.’

By Michael Haynes


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February 16, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — A new study warns that the wearing of face masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 is not only non-effective, but also a hazard to individuals’ health, given that mask wearing seems to lead to an increase in infection rates.

The , a “peer-reviewed online medical journal” without attachments to businesses or political interests, published a four-part study on the use of masks in relation to COVID-19. The study is entitled, “Masks, false safety and real dangers.”


The of the study details the “proposed mechanisms by which masks increase risk of COVID-19,” and is authored by Colleen Huber, a Naturopathic Medical Doctor and Naturopathic Oncologist (FNORI) who specializes on the issues of masks, COVID-19, cancer and nutrition.

Huber’s findings, which have already been subject to peer review and revised accordingly, reveal that the various mask mandates which were implemented throughout the world so quickly in 2020 “have resulted in no reductions in incidence of COVID-19, as detected by positive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests among nations or US states.”

Quite the opposite is true, states Huber, as she found that “[i]ncreased rates or insignificant change in incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infections, as detected by PCR tests, have followed mask mandates throughout the world and in US states.” As a result of her findings, Huber wrote that masks “are therefore a possible risk factor for infection with SARS-CoV-2 and higher incidence of COVID-19 disease.”


In order to defend her statements, Huber points to the results of various studies of mask enforcement and wearing. Following up on a study of 25 countries conducted by the Council on Foreign Relations regarding masks, Huber’s team found that three months later, there was no “clear, identifiable pattern with regard to deaths.” In fact, the countries which had reported the lowest mask wearing in the study had “generally fewer” cases of COVID-19.

Referring to results for a number of U.S. states and various countries drawn from the COVID Tracking Project Data Download and Our World In Data, Huber noted that the cases of the virus had “more often increased than decreased after government ‘mandates’ to their citizens to wear masks in those jurisdictions.”

Seven countries (Israel, Peru, the Philippines, Spain, France, Hungary and Argentina) revealed “no impact” of the mask mandates in terms of either cases or hospitalizations.

However, in the next three months, all seven countries showed an increase in cases, and the same was found in the results from the U.S. Only Mississippi and New York City had drops in infections, as they were found to continue on their “sharp descent” of COVID cases, which had begun two weeks before the respective mask mandates.

“None of the examined jurisdictions experienced decreased incidence of COVID-19 after the introduction of mask mandates, except two that had already begun a sharp descent in COVID-19 cases weeks earlier.”

Huber also drew on the results of the Danish mask study, the first of its kind, which found that masks had no “statistical significance” in reducing the prevalence of infections. She observed that the authors of that study had admitted to having a pro-mask bias, yet could not find any significant effects mask wearing.
Masks as an aid to infection


Huber also warned that masks can be not only an aid in spreading infection, but also pose a risk to personal health. A 2020 study performed by North Carolina’s Duke University found that respiratory droplets fall to the ground quicker, and therefore are less likely to reach someone, when one does not wear a mask. This was due to the “mesh of certain masks” dividing larger, heavier respiratory droplets into smaller, lighter fragments, which were “more likely to stay airborne longer.” With results like these, Duke University declared cloth masks to be “counterproductive.”

Huber mentioned the “nozzle effect” which masks have in channeling the exhaled air through the side openings. Due to higher air pressure behind the mask, “side jets, back jets, a crown jet, brow jets and a downward jet … emerge from the mask in each of those directions.” Furthermore, “[b]ackward airflow was found to be strong with all masks and faceshields studied, compared to not masking,” Huber wrote.

A jet of exhaled air, capable of travelling “up to several meters” could come from an individual wearing a mask.

In contrast to such mask-propelled jets of exhaled air, those without masks do not pose a risk of being able to transmit particles of the virus “anywhere near the distance that a masked individual can unwittingly contaminate.”
Masks damaging the health of the wearer

Aside from an increased risk of infecting those around, a mask poses a health risk to the one wearing it, Huber wrote. In just ten seconds of wearing a mask, the “available oxygen as a percentage of available air volume decreased to less than the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) required minimum of 19.5%,” and stayed below that figure.

This state of hypoxia causes the body to produce “hypoxia-inducible factor-1 (HIF-1),” which is known “to lower T-cell function.” The cells which suffer as a result, are those known to “fight viral infections,” and hence the mask places the wearer at risk by virtue of depriving the body of the necessary oxygen and cell function needed.

Another effect of HIF-1 is the reduction in an enzyme (ACE2) which “plays key roles in maintaining blood pressure and electrolytes and controlling inflammation.” The receptors for the enzyme ACE2 are the “initial portal” used by the COVID-19 virus to “enter cells of the upper respiratory tract.” Since COVID-19 attacks the receptors for ACE2, and the enzyme itself had already been reduced through lack of oxygen, “the masked person with a new SARS-CoV-2 infection is especially at risk of marked inflammation and accompanying disease severity.”

Huber also explained the danger of hypercapnia (carbon dioxide retention), as carbon dioxide had been found to rise after just “30 seconds” of mask wearing. The retention of carbon dioxide leads to the immobilization of microscopic-sized “cilia,” which play a key role in removing harmful pathogens from the airways. “This leads to predisposing mask wearers to respiratory tract infections and vulnerability to deep entry of pathogens,” Huber warned.

In light of such evidence, not only against the effectiveness of masks in preventing infection, but also concerning the very real danger posed by their use, Huber stated: “This raises concerns that masked persons might more easily acquire, incubate and subsequently transmit a virus that has been the focus of intense attention, fear and concern throughout the world in 2020.”

“Caution is therefore urged against use of masks among those who wish to reduce the risk, either for themselves or others, of infection with SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 disease,” she closed.

Covid19

Lockdown lunacy is frying our minds


ADAM CREIGHTON


Victoria to Western Australia: hold my beer.

If you thought Perth’s bizarre five-day lockdown over a single person, who wasn’t sick and infected no one else, was strange, then Victoria’s statewide third lockdown of 6.6 million people is so freakish it raises a worrying possibility.

The west, and Australia and New Zealand in particular, are suffering mass psychogenic illness, where only sociology, psychology and the perverse incentives of large welfare states, can explain the ongoing obsession with COVID-19 and our medieval responses to it after almost a year of improved treatments and new information.

For three German and Spanish economists, it’s time to ask this question: have we forgotten the rationality that’s meant to define policymaking in advanced liberal democracies? Their new research paper, COVID-19 and the Political Economy of Mass Hysteria, lays out how our biological tendency to overreact coupled with a social and mass media that profit from panic, plus powerful welfare states, make mass psychosis likely, and hard to reverse.

“Governments have prohibited activities that reduce fear and anxiety, such as sports and socialising, thereby contributing to anxiety and psychological strain,” one of the authors, Philipp Bagus, told The Australian.

“They have instilled fear in the general public to achieve political goals, exploiting the negativity bias of the human brain,” he said, revealing how a leaked German government paper last year recommended scaring people to ensure compliance with health advice. “Politicians have an incentive to overshoot the mark in their responses to a threat because they are largely exempt from the risk of possible wrong decisions and their costs, which they pass on to others,” Bagus added.

Whether we’ve reached mass psychosis is debatable, but some seriously weird behaviours have emerged, quite beyond doublemasking and the odd burst of toilet paper hoarding.

Australia and New Zealand have incurred costs equivalent to a world war — and more than any other nation has — fighting a pandemic that has killed not even 1000 people, with a median age in the mid-80s, between them. And this is widely seen as brilliant.

Having insisted early last year that lockdowns were necessary to “flatten the curve”, rolling capital city “snap” lockdowns of millions of people have become the norm, at extraordinary economic, psychological and social cost, without a single person in ICU across either country.

The nation tuned into the Victorian Premier’s 100-minute press conference on Monday to hear how the state was handling one new COVID case, while a few kilometres away tennis stars Nadal and Medvedev were about to square off to the sound of artificial clapping.

Two exhausted Auslan interpreters tag-teamed to convey the latest daily update from Daniel Andrews on Melbourne’s “ring of steel”, nebulisers, and the “highly infectious UK strain”, which has barely infected a soul and killed no one in Australia or New Zealand. A day earlier more than 25,100 Victorians, on government orders, flocked to testing centres to see if they had COVID-19.

“I am proud,” said Mr Andrews. Well, I’m embarrassed that so many people, the bulk of them healthy, waste hours and the $100 it costs taxpayers for each of the 13.7 million tests carried out so far.

Across the Tasman, Auckland entered its own three-day lockdown (the science is a little different there) on Sunday. Valentine’s Day diners fled restaurants midmeal at 8.30pm, the media reported, as patrons’ mobile phones, courtesy of government apps designed for earthquakes, lit up with the announcement of the city’s third lockdown.

The venerable Economist magazine even wrote last week that 150 million people would die (three times the number killed by the Spanish flu) from COVID-19 without strong government action, a claim breathtaking in its absurdity. Globally, 2.4 million people have died from or with COVID-19, yet every year other communicable diseases kill more. A death is a death, whatever its cause, yet the world is not shut down. It’s time our leaders started pouring cold water over an electorate that’s worked itself into a lather. Welcome vaccines are not a silver bullet. Israel with a population of nine million, where more than 80 per cent of the population had been vaccinated by the end of January, is still recording about 40 deaths and 5000 new coronavirus cases a day.

The idea that all Australian adults — only 19 per cent of whom bothered to get a flu vaccine in 2009, a pandemic year — will voluntarily vaccinate themselves against COVID, a lesser threat for most, now and forever, is ridiculous. I’m not an anti-vaxxer but I’ve never had an influenza shot, given the minuscule risk to me.

Our leaders should level with voters that we can’t remain an open liberal society without incurring further deaths and cases from COVID-19. Let vulnerable groups be vaccinated, and let everyone else get on with their life. The three authors, at universities in Spain and Chile, argue that hysteria dissipates more quickly in nations that respect civil liberties, where the minority who wish to behave rationally “can just ignore the collective panic and continue to live their normal lives”, illustrating to the hysterical majority that they too can safely return to normal.

Unfortunately that’s not an option in Australia or New Zealand, where the freedoms taken for granted before 2020 — to come and go, see whomever, and privacy — have been sacrificed to the god of “public health”.

Pockets of sanity remain. Norway apologised to its people last June for a lockdown, promising never to do it again. Meanwhile Sweden, where deaths from all causes were no higher last year than in 2015, valiantly trudges on, letting Swedes live their lives relatively normally, as the pandemic rule book allows, notwithstanding the fact that every other nation has torn it up.

And in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. So thank god for NSW, where relative sanity has prevailed for now.


A death is a death, whatever its cause, yet the world is not shut down

ClimateMadness

Climate of fear dooms rational decision-making


JUDITH SLOAN


Last month I wrote a column about overblown environmental prophecies that pique the attention of the progressive media, particularly during quiet news periods.

You know the sort of thing: parts of Sydney will become uninhabitable in the coming decades. The rise in sea levels will be even bigger than expected, with parts of Melbourne to be flooded out this century. These dubious projections were picked up by a small number of media outlets.

Mind you, there have been some similar doozies when it comes to epidemiological predictions. Last year, one academic had the number of COVID-19 deaths in Australia at 138,000. Another estimate put the figure at 250,000.

The ABC’s Norman Swan had the number of cases in Australia at between 70,000 and 80,000 for just April last year.

Given that the actual numbers have been tiny fractions of these estimates — just more than 900 deaths and less than 29,000 cases in total — you may think an apology is in order. But doomsayers tend not to apologise.

In the main, the purpose of putting out truly scary forecasts is not to be accurate but to induce responses — preferably the responses they advocate. They want people to be scared. They want governments to take notice. They want bureaucrats to take their chilling projections into account when making decisions and advising ministers. And here’s the tragic thing: it works. While those proselytisers standing on the boxes in Hyde Park corner declaring the end is nigh provided good theatre but were easy to ignore, these modern-day doomsayers mean business.

Take the famous prediction that mammalogist Tim Flannery made in 2007, that “even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and river systems”. Just a few years later it was clear this was utterly wrong. Indeed, I’m told residents of Tully in Queensland — a very wet place — now call inches of rain “Flanneries”.

But here’s the key: Flannery’s bravado contributed to real impacts. In particular, the Victorian government was dissuaded from constructing any new dams, including one in Gippsland that could also aid flood mitigation, but invested instead in a ruinously expensive desalination plant.

This plant has never been needed since it was completed at extraordinary cost. Victorians continue to pay for its existence — more than $600m a year — because of the take-or-pay arrangements in the contract.

The desal plant has been turned on from time to time for political purposes, but that’s about it. Rats have eaten through the pipes and costly repairs have been required. It was recently flooded out. Now that’s ironic.

When it came to the Brisbane floods of 2011, the failure of the managers of the Wivenhoe Dam to release water earlier in the year was one factor contributing to the devastating outcome.

Obviously these examples were not Flannery’s errors but those of the Victorian government and the dam operators, but it’s not a stretch to imagine his words — the dams will never fill again — must have been ringing in their ears. Is it surprising their professional judgment was impaired?

Then we have all the predictions of rising sea levels and the impact this will have on properties close to the coast. This is notwithstanding that some of the strongest climate change advocates are more than happy to live in expensive waterfront houses.

Local officials have taken up this cause with gusto, egged on by some Green-left council members. Restrictions have been placed on developments and values of properties have been reduced in some cases. Rarely is any distinction made between localised erosion and the presumed impact of climate change.

In Victoria, local governments have been instructed to take into account a rise of 0.8m in sea levels by 2100 when considering planning applications. It is being proposed that this number be raised to 1.1m. But one council in western Victoria has got ahead of the game. The Moyne Shire uses a sea level rise of 1.2m by 2100 in its coastal strategy.

That a country such as The Netherlands is able to survive and thrive with land below sea level and the possibility of various engineering solutions are rarely taken into account.

Of course, local government actions go well beyond restricting developments because of presumed rising sea levels. In the Melbourne CBD, with its ostensibly pro-business mayor, the city is completely hostile to cars, with bike lanes turning once wide twolane roads into choked, singlelane thoroughfares.

The insurance companies also have got into the climate change game by warning us all of the potential damage caused by extreme weather events and the need to raise premiums to cover this eventuality.

This linking just might be a convenient excuse to put up prices and become more profitable given that extreme weather events, worldwide, have not become more common. Indeed, there is evidence that the incidence of cyclones, for instance, has declined in many parts of the world.

A careful reading of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports points to only low to medium confidence in the future path of extreme weather events. But promoters and followers of the climate change cause tend not to worry about details: they probably don’t even bother to read the dense and lengthy periodic reports put out by the IPCC.

(Here’s a warning: it’s not enough to read the executive summaries of the reports; the hands of other authors, possibly not trained in science, are easy to detect.)

There’s also the recycling religion. Apart from a small number of products — aluminium cans and possibly lithium car batteries

— the most efficient and environmentally sensitive means of dealing with rubbish is to use wellmanaged landfills.

But that doesn’t meet the requirements of the climate change urgers, including the CSIRO. (Check out its recent abysmal report on the circular economy, a current trendy term.)

For some media outlets, doomsaying climate prophecies no doubt attract readers, particularly if it is linked with the evils of capitalism. Indeed, a few hot days are now regularly reported on as if they are newsworthy. That’s what summer throws up.

The more fundamental problem is that too many ill-advised government decisions are made on the basis of dubious projections while ignoring the scope for offsetting actions and adaptation. Mind you, there has never been a better time for unelected, activist bureaucrats.

Federation

Coronavirus is bad, but we’ve been through much worse


GEOFFREY BLAINEY


IAN CURRIE


As history shows, Australians have faced more acute hardships

The year that has just ended was the most unexpected in the lives of the overwhelming majority of Australians. It is said to have changed forever our way of living and working. But was it such a unique year?

Certainly it was a zigzag year. At first, when the coronavirus gripped China and then northern Italy, there were fears that it might be as deadly as the Spanish flu pandemic, which at the end of World War I devastated most lands and especially India. In Europe in the middle of last year the modern virus seemed more tameable, only to surge again in the winter.

It was like a typhoon, the way it changed direction. Nobody is on record as predicting that in the space of 10 months it would play havoc with the US, the home of medical innovation, and would even shape the presidential election.

Contrary to prevailing opinion, Australia itself has experienced times that were more shattering than last year. We now know that eight centuries ago the Aboriginal people, especially in the temperate zone, faced a goliath of a drought. Starting in 1174 and persisting for 39 years, it must have reduced the population of Australia substantially and caused intense anxiety among most of the survivors. We know of this calamitous drought because in the thick ice of the Law Dome in East Antarctica a deep hole was drilled, providing valuable evidence for climate scientists led by Tessa Vance of the University of Tasmania.

It is not minimising the grief and suffering in Australia today if we remind ourselves that 1788

— the first year in the history of Sydney Town — was far more hazardous locally than was last year. Aboriginal people, having no immunity to diseases prevailing in the outside world, soon suffered from smallpox and other infections. Within two years the Indigenous population living close to Sydney fell by half, according to a well-known essay by JL Kohen and Ronald Lampert; and the traditional form of burial had to give way to sad chaos, with bodies “found floating in the harbour and lying in rock shelters”.

Many British marines and convicts living in the tents and thatched huts near Sydney Cove were soon disabled by severe and painful scurvy arising from a deficiency of vitamin C. Scurvy, crop failures and malnutrition combined to end many lives. The deaths of both black people and white people in infant Sydney far exceeded, in proportion to population, that inflicted by the coronavirus on the suffering people of the US.

Governor Arthur Phillip, fearing that his convict colony might run out of food and, just as alarming, store insufficient seeds to plant for the next year’s harvest, dispatched his only available ship all the way to Cape Town to procure a cargo of flour and grain. The return voyage of seven months was impeded by the outbreak of scurvy among its sailors.

Again and again the Australians of an earlier era, when hospitals and doctors were few, faced a high risk of premature death or prolonged illness. In 1852 a new sailing ship, the Ticonderoga, crammed with 798 British emigrants, sailed from Liverpool to the new Victorian gold rush. Typhus and other diseases appeared long before the surviving passengers were sent ashore to the quarantine station at Port Phillip Heads near Melbourne.

At least 178 passengers and two crew died; presumably the sailors were less vulnerable because they spent so much time outside in the windblown air. On this single voyage the formidable death toll was equal to one-fifth of all the coronavirus deaths recorded in Australia so far.

It seems heartless to be emphasising the more acute hardships of earlier generations, and thus seemingly overlooking the present-day families whose close relatives died all alone in aged-care homes. Maybe I can venture these thoughts because, like other 90-year-olds, I’m standing rather close to the line of fire. But no matter our age, we must learn more about this galloping crisis that has been so difficult for medical experts to agree on and for politicians to unravel.

It is probable that death, especially untimely death, is now viewed differently. In the past 100 years the triumphs of doctors and hospitals, of sewerage and water schemes, and vaccinations and antibiotics, have prolonged human life. Longevity is becoming a right. And now suddenly arrives a mysterious malady that, without any warning, smites that right. Naturally we are all shocked and bewildered.

We are also imprisoned. Our generation more than any other loves to travel and often can afford it, but this pandemic has suddenly erased travel plans. Even travel within one’s own city has been curtailed. In addition there is a general ban on Australians leaving their own country. By strange contrast, during the convict era, the powerful governor did not prevent convicts from boarding a ship returning home to the British Isles — if they had dutifully served their transportation sentence of seven or 14 years.

One advantage we perhaps fail to see clearly. So far Australia has been more successful than nearly every other nation in fighting the coronavirus. Therefore some of our political leaders and health officials, and many humble employees of the aged-care homes, deserve high praise. For generations we have had numerous first-class doctors and medical researchers and nurses.

New Zealand has an impressive record in controlling its pandemic, and with only 25 deaths it is justly applauded on the international stage. But I’m safe in suggesting that, proportionally, it has not performed as well as several major Australian states. Thus, Queensland and NZ contain roughly the same population but the Queenslanders’ deaths are only one-fourth as many. What a triumph, though a sombre triumph! Similarly, to their credit, Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory have each outperformed the proud land across the Tasman Sea.

In proportion to population, NZ has not fared as favourably as the huge Australian tract of populated land embracing seven of the eight states and territories. In essence, if we leave out Victoria and its quarantining blunders, our nation’s record in combating coronavirus has been extraordinary.


1788 — the first year in the history of Sydney Town
— was far more hazardous locally than was last year

But such statistics mask another reality. The impressive gain in lives saved is perhaps offset by lives endangered. How many suicides among the young were recorded last year? The young — and the women too — have been foremost among the unintended victims of the nation’s urgent economic policies. How many people locked in their own homes have suffered in mental health? A major organisation, SANE Australia, spreads quiet gloom in its latest annual report.

How many people with major maladies have drifted away from hospitals that have had to pursue more urgent priorities? How many families have been stunned and upset by funerals and weddings postponed or marginalised?

At the same time hundreds of thousands of Australians, when looking back in years to come, will probably recall the benefits: the ability to work at home rather than endure the congested roads and the crowded public transport at peak hours in cities that are growing too rapidly.

Certainly the job schemes of Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg promptly curbed a dramatic rise in unemployment. They removed hardships on a massive scale, especially in that huge but fragile sector embracing small businesses. Another sign of their success is the huge increase — revealed this Tuesday — in the number of new jobs advertised in the private sector in December. Future generations, however, will probably pay with their taxes for these job schemes.

The nation’s big debts also have been magnified by the closing of the borders by state governments and the lockdowns, curfews and work-at-home rules imposed, and the consequent decline in economic activity and public revenues.

We gain perspective on the obstacles faced by the Prime Minister and his national cabinet if we revisit the economic depression that baffled Australia’s political leaders in the 1890s. Indeed some of our present problems, including the sudden locking and unlocking of state borders, were moulded by that depression. Australia, consisting then of six rival colonies, had become one of the most prosperous countries. Alas, the long boom came to an end with a banking collapse in 1893 and the start of the long Federation Drought. But the economic crisis, more severe than the one we experience today, did spur a radical change in the way Australia was governed.

In 1893, at the Murray River town of Corowa, John Quick, a dour and patriotic Bendigo lawyer, led a group that resolved that Australia could become a federation and a nation only if it ceased to be so dominated by politicians.

The resultant formula for achieving a federation, sold by the persistent Quick to leading politicians, was that the people in each of the six colonies should make the vital decisions at a series of referendums. His formula with its popular stepping stones paved the way for the Commonwealth of Australia.

So the Australian people by their votes created in 1901 not only one of the largest free-trade zones in the world but also removed the old Customs houses and border barriers that had impeded prosperity. This is the irony of the nation’s dilemma today. The premiers have largely regained control of the borders. In spirit the 1890s are back again.

Queensland and Western Australia are now the most zealous in shutting borders. Significantly, they had been the most reluctant to enter the commonwealth. In 1898, unlike the four other Australian colonies, they shunned the initial people’s referendum held to decide for or against the creation of a federated Australia. The next year Queenslanders voted yes, though by a margin of fewer than 4000 votes.

A year later Western Australia voted yes, but mainly because of the enthusiastic goldfields voters who had recently arrived from Victoria and South Australia. The step proved to be controversial. In 1933, in the stormiest episode in the history of the federation, most West Australians voted for their state to withdraw and form a separate nation. They had valid reasons, chief of which were the economic burdens imposed on them by sheer distance and by national policies that deliberately favoured the factory states of NSW, Victoria and SA. Some of those burdens have vanished but faraway Canberra, they insist, still does not always understand.

Perth was not alone in its disillusionment with federation. The Labor Party had long been an exponent of a strong central government. In the federal election in 1919 Labor actually called for the abolition of the states, replacing them with a necklace of several dozen provinces or regional councils including one each for the Northern Territory and Papua. Even Billy Hughes, the Nationalist prime minister, sought more power for the federal government though he did not dream of abolishing the states.

Labor lost the 1919 election, but the abolition of the states remained a vital plank in its platform. That plank was abandoned in 1969, with persuasive support from Gough Whitlam, but he certainly believed that Canberra should be mightier. Significantly he replaced the term federal government with the phrase Australian government.

Indeed there persists a deep belief in certain circles in Sydney and Melbourne and Canberra that the federal system has passed its prime and that Australia needs one government and particularly needs it during this coronavirus crisis. The Constitution of 1901 had effectively divided and apportioned activities and roles between the federal government and the states, but now the overlap and duplication stand out.

An expensive bureaucracy is one sign of the overlap. Three layers of government sometimes compete and thereby misuse money in health and welfare and

— keeping in mind the municipal principalities in some cities — in foreign policy. The creation of the national cabinet is presumably an attempt, in a crisis, to grapple with the problem. It is beyond doubt that the federal system requires fixing here and there. But who will be the fixer?

A federation is most satisfactory for a big nation with a scattered population and a large area. It is, however, not always effective at a time of crisis. In Australia during the two world wars, enormous power was temporarily concentrated in the federal government. Today many Australians would argue that a pandemic is also a war that calls for the utmost power to be vested in the federal government. But it could also be emphasised that this pandemic and its death toll cannot even be compared with the two world wars.

Meanwhile our democracy has been weakened by the coronavirus. Democracy is government by debate. Where now is the debate? Last year, Australia’s depleted parliaments in total must have sat for a relatively small number of hours. Has the annual tally of hours yet been calculated?

Rarely has officialdom made so many decisions affecting personal freedom, without advancing detailed and logical reasons for such decisions. Were schools closed at the appropriate time? Why were golf and fishing and boating banned? Why could priests and pastors not enter their own church? Why should an ill Australian be refused permission to travel across a nearby interstate border to undergo an urgent operation, while a wealthy foreign celebrity is quietly ushered in for a beachfront holiday?

Morrison, in inventing his national cabinet and in seeking national unity, has generously given every premier a grandstand on which to barrack and perform.

More than at any time in the past 100 years the premiers dominate each day’s political theatre with resounding success or at least a display of stamina. Their long, televised press conferences, with most of the questioners partly inaudible and mostly invisible, are not really a substitute for debate.

At present we are citizens of a shadow democracy. Perhaps that is the price we had to pay.

One of Geoffrey Blainey’s recent works is The Story of Australia’s People, now in paperback.


Queensland and Western Australia are now the most zealous in shutting borders … they had been the most reluctant to enter the commonwealth

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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