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Canberra's doomsday plan
16/02/2005
By Paul Daley
The government is preparing top-secret plans to evacuate key politicians and advisers in the event of an attack on Canberra, Paul Daley reports.
The prime minister, his senior ministers, the governor-general and top public servants will be whisked off to a top-secret location, possibly a purpose-built underground bunker, so government can continue to function after a terror strike or nuclear attack on federal parliament.
Government and intelligence sources have told The Bulletin that Cabinet’s National Security Subcommittee, headed by Prime Minister John Howard, approved broad elements of the government post-doomsday blueprint in mid-2004 after a formative American model was put into action following al Qaeda’s September 11 strikes on Washington and New York.
Australia’s final "continuity of government" plan, which deals with the practicalities of moving the executive, is now being prepared by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet in limited consultation with the states and territories and their emergency service providers.
Sources said Australia’s plan would be triggered in the event of a nuclear strike or terrorist attack on Parliament House or any other area – for example, federal offices in Sydney or Melbourne – from which the government’s executive was operating. It would also be enacted in the event of a strike which affected the availability of power, security and communications to the Cabinet.
One figure closely involved with the plan said that in the event of a major terrorist attack on Parliament House, uninjured senior ministers and advisers would be evacuated to their new, secret location from the parliamentary precinct, if possible by road, with the help of the Australian Capital Territory’s emergency services providers.
While the dead and injured would be taken to hospital, the formative plan did not provide for an evacuation of the backbench or opposition to an alternative, secure parliament, sources said. This implies the executive would effectively work, unimpeded, without opposition.
"It is, effectively, a plan that takes into account the worst-case scenario of a terrorist or, less likely, a nuclear attack on parliament when the House and Senate are sitting," a source involved in the plan said.
"What happens, for example, if there is a terrorist attack at the joint sitting at the opening of parliament and the governor-general and the prime minister and a host of senior ministers are incapacitated? Where does the country run from if the seat of the executive is badly damaged?"
The plan’s existence was confirmed by the prime minister on Wednesday when he tabled answers to a series of questions on notice asked last year by a Labor backbencher, Daryl Melham.
He asked Howard:
• To confirm the government’s "continuity of government plans to minimise the impact of a terrorist attack or other emergency on the executive government".
• What resources have been allocated to "the development or enhancement of facilities outside Canberra which would allow the governor-general or an administrator of the Commonwealth, the prime minister and other ministers and key public servants to carry out government decision-making".
• Whether the government had considered the potential for "mass vacancies in the parliament of large numbers of incapacitated members or senators leaving the parliament unable to function for many months thus leaving a vacuum in constitutional legislative authority".
• To give an assurance that any plans also included the protection and relocation of MPs as well as senior ministers and important public servants.
Howard responded: "I can confirm that the government has continuity of government plans. These plans aim to minimise the impact of national security emergency on critical government operations and provide for the rapid resumption of 'near normal' government business under alternate arrangements until normal operations can be resumed."
Sources told The Bulletin that a range of possible sites close to – but outside – the ACT had been considered, including a purpose-built deep underground bunker, such as that below the White House to which US Vice-President Dick Cheney and senior members of the Bush administration fled after the September 11 attacks.
The Bulletin understands that one possible location for the post-doomsday executive is a secure, possibly underground, facility at the Australian military’s Headquarters Joint Operations facility which is due to open at Bungendore, about 35km outside Canberra, in 2008.
Other interim sites in country NSW are also being considered to cater for the possibility of an attack before 2008.
Howard’s answers do not rule out the possibility of a purpose-built facility. But, he says, "wherever practicable, the plan relies on the use of existing facilities, resources and protocols … but in some instances, modest additional resources may be required to develop or enhance facilities outside Canberra which would allow the governor-general or an administrator of the Commonwealth, the prime minister and other ministers and key public servants to carry out government decision-making and communicate with the Australian public in the aftermath of a large-scale attack on the Commonwealth parliament."
Howard said that arrangements for parliament’s continued operation "should there be a catastrophic event resulting in mass vacancies or incapacity of members, are an important part of recovery plans".
He said the parliamentary departments would be responsible for maintaining the continuity of parliamentary business "including planning for significant vacancies".
He also pointed out new measures were underway to significantly increase security at Parliament House.
Melham also asked Howard if, in accordance with the Constitution and the governor-general’s letters patent, anyone had been appointed to serve as the governor-general’s deputy.
In a worst-case scenario where the governor-general and the prime minister were incapacitated, the letters patent makes it clear that dormant commissions given to several state governors would be activated by the most senior remaining cabinet minister.
Howard confirmed that on August 21, 2003, the government had appointed the respective governors of NSW and Victoria, Marie Bashir and John Landy, to be the governor-general’s deputies.
Material in The Bulletin is protected under the Commonwealth Copyright Act 1968. No material may be reproduced in part or in whole without written consent from the copyright holders.
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Thursday, February 17, 2005
Normally the BBC would bury a story like this in the name "racial harmony"
Born to be a slave in Niger
By Hilary Andersson BBC Africa Correspondent, Niger
Slavery continues to blight the lives of many millions around the world. Although officially abolished in some countries two centuries ago, people trafficking, bonded labour and child labour still exist.
There are some places on earth that few outsiders visit or know about, vast empty sections of the earth where time has stood still for centuries.
Niger is one of those places. It is a country that you can drive through for hours without seeing a soul.
A nation of vast, barren and windswept landscapes, a country of people who live almost entirely off cattle, and off the labour of human slaves.
Slavery in Niger is not an obscure thing, nor a curious relic of the past, it is an intrinsic part of society today.
A Nigerian study has found that almost 8% of the population are slaves.
You wonder how this can be in the 21st Century and why people do not know about it?
We began a journey to find out more.
Humiliation
We drove for hundreds of miles north across the desert. There were no roads for much of the journey and our cars rattled and jarred across plains set with, what seemed like, solidified waves of sand every few feet.
We choked on the dust, hour after hour, wondering if we would ever see another human being at all in this desolate place, let alone a slave.
We were heading for a well, owned by a local nomadic leader and we had been told he, like many here, owned slaves.
We eventually found his tents and reversed our cars immediately, hoping to locate his slaves without his knowledge first, so that we could speak freely to them, without them being afraid of intimidation.
We found the slaves' tents some way off, and there we met Fatima, a mother of seven children.
She lived in a scrawny brown tent that rose no higher than my elbow off the ground. Her children were all around and one of them had a face bloated with a terrible infection for which she had no medicine.
She seemed humiliated by her status, but seemed to have no greater expectations of her life
Fatima told us she had been working for her master for as long as she could remember.
She said her master did not pay her, but fed and clothed her.
"What can I do?" she said. "I have no money, I need food, I have children and so if I can work for a man who at least feeds me then that is good."
When I asked her if she was a slave she looked at the ground, and said yes.
She seemed humiliated by her status, but seemed to have no greater expectations of her life.
Appalling abuse
When we spoke to her masters they denied owning slaves. The practice of slavery was outlawed in Niger last year.
Trading in slaves has been banned in Niger since the days of the French colonists in the last century, but ownership of slaves was never specifically banned.
Most slaves in Niger today are the descendents of slaves who were kidnapped in wars and raids centuries ago, and were simply born into their status.
Many slaves in Niger are appallingly abused by their masters.
Slave children are taken away from their parents before they are two-years-old, to break the bonds between parent and child and to eliminate any sense of identity.
The children grow up working in the house of the master.
The slave owners encourage the slaves to reproduce to increase their numbers, sometimes even determining when they have sexual intercourse.
They treat the slaves like their cattle.
Slaves are often beaten for small misdemeanours.
They work long hours and are sometimes deprived of food as punishment.
There are documented cases of slaves being stripped naked in front of their families to humiliate them, of female slaves being raped by their owners, and even of male slaves being castrated by their owners as punishment.
Hopes and fears
Assibit, another slave we met, could not bear the punishment any longer and ran away from her master last July, leaving her husband, also a slave, behind.
She undertook a traumatic journey back to her former owner with us and a human rights worker to see if, under Niger's new laws, her husband could be freed.
When we got to his tents, she lowered herself in the seat so that she would not be seen.
The human rights activist confronted the owner, a lanky thin older man, surrounded by his tall sons.
They became aggressive and began to shout at us to turn off our cameras and leave.
They screamed that the human rights activist was a slave too, and that he deserved a beating.
An entire section of the population would have to be taught that they are not intrinsically inferior to others
We tried to retreat into the car, but our vehicle was stuck in the deep soft sand and would not move.
Eventually, with the sons banging on the windows the car began to plough forward slowly, and we fled.
When Assibit first ran away from her owners she was asked what it was like to be free, but she did not understand the question.
She did not understand the concept of freedom, or even the word.
When I arrived in Niger, I could barely believe that slavery exists in this century on such a scale, but when I left I could not see how it could end in our generation.
Ending slavery in Niger would require a social revolution.
An entire section of the population would have to be taught that they are not intrinsically inferior to others, but that is what they have believed for generations.
The slave owners, and the establishment, are reluctant to teach them.
From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 12 February, 2005, at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.
Story from BBC NEWS:http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/4250709.stmPublished: 2005/02/11 15:34:47 GMT© BBC MMV
By Hilary Andersson BBC Africa Correspondent, Niger
Slavery continues to blight the lives of many millions around the world. Although officially abolished in some countries two centuries ago, people trafficking, bonded labour and child labour still exist.
There are some places on earth that few outsiders visit or know about, vast empty sections of the earth where time has stood still for centuries.
Niger is one of those places. It is a country that you can drive through for hours without seeing a soul.
A nation of vast, barren and windswept landscapes, a country of people who live almost entirely off cattle, and off the labour of human slaves.
Slavery in Niger is not an obscure thing, nor a curious relic of the past, it is an intrinsic part of society today.
A Nigerian study has found that almost 8% of the population are slaves.
You wonder how this can be in the 21st Century and why people do not know about it?
We began a journey to find out more.
Humiliation
We drove for hundreds of miles north across the desert. There were no roads for much of the journey and our cars rattled and jarred across plains set with, what seemed like, solidified waves of sand every few feet.
We choked on the dust, hour after hour, wondering if we would ever see another human being at all in this desolate place, let alone a slave.
We were heading for a well, owned by a local nomadic leader and we had been told he, like many here, owned slaves.
We eventually found his tents and reversed our cars immediately, hoping to locate his slaves without his knowledge first, so that we could speak freely to them, without them being afraid of intimidation.
We found the slaves' tents some way off, and there we met Fatima, a mother of seven children.
She lived in a scrawny brown tent that rose no higher than my elbow off the ground. Her children were all around and one of them had a face bloated with a terrible infection for which she had no medicine.
She seemed humiliated by her status, but seemed to have no greater expectations of her life
Fatima told us she had been working for her master for as long as she could remember.
She said her master did not pay her, but fed and clothed her.
"What can I do?" she said. "I have no money, I need food, I have children and so if I can work for a man who at least feeds me then that is good."
When I asked her if she was a slave she looked at the ground, and said yes.
She seemed humiliated by her status, but seemed to have no greater expectations of her life.
Appalling abuse
When we spoke to her masters they denied owning slaves. The practice of slavery was outlawed in Niger last year.
Trading in slaves has been banned in Niger since the days of the French colonists in the last century, but ownership of slaves was never specifically banned.
Most slaves in Niger today are the descendents of slaves who were kidnapped in wars and raids centuries ago, and were simply born into their status.
Many slaves in Niger are appallingly abused by their masters.
Slave children are taken away from their parents before they are two-years-old, to break the bonds between parent and child and to eliminate any sense of identity.
The children grow up working in the house of the master.
The slave owners encourage the slaves to reproduce to increase their numbers, sometimes even determining when they have sexual intercourse.
They treat the slaves like their cattle.
Slaves are often beaten for small misdemeanours.
They work long hours and are sometimes deprived of food as punishment.
There are documented cases of slaves being stripped naked in front of their families to humiliate them, of female slaves being raped by their owners, and even of male slaves being castrated by their owners as punishment.
Hopes and fears
Assibit, another slave we met, could not bear the punishment any longer and ran away from her master last July, leaving her husband, also a slave, behind.
She undertook a traumatic journey back to her former owner with us and a human rights worker to see if, under Niger's new laws, her husband could be freed.
When we got to his tents, she lowered herself in the seat so that she would not be seen.
The human rights activist confronted the owner, a lanky thin older man, surrounded by his tall sons.
They became aggressive and began to shout at us to turn off our cameras and leave.
They screamed that the human rights activist was a slave too, and that he deserved a beating.
An entire section of the population would have to be taught that they are not intrinsically inferior to others
We tried to retreat into the car, but our vehicle was stuck in the deep soft sand and would not move.
Eventually, with the sons banging on the windows the car began to plough forward slowly, and we fled.
When Assibit first ran away from her owners she was asked what it was like to be free, but she did not understand the question.
She did not understand the concept of freedom, or even the word.
When I arrived in Niger, I could barely believe that slavery exists in this century on such a scale, but when I left I could not see how it could end in our generation.
Ending slavery in Niger would require a social revolution.
An entire section of the population would have to be taught that they are not intrinsically inferior to others, but that is what they have believed for generations.
The slave owners, and the establishment, are reluctant to teach them.
From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 12 February, 2005, at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.
Story from BBC NEWS:http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/4250709.stmPublished: 2005/02/11 15:34:47 GMT© BBC MMV
The new Science of Man
The New Science of Man
http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2005/02/the_new_science.php
AR Articles on Racial Differences
Race and Psychopathic Personality (Jul. 2002)
Race and Teenage Pregnancy (Feb. 2002)
The Biological Reality of Race (Oct. 1999)
Why Race Matters (Oct. 1997)
Race and Health (May 1996)
A New Theory of Racial Differences (Dec. 1994)
More news stories on Racial Differences
Samuel Francis, American Renaissance, March 2003
http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2005/02/the_new_science.php
Steven Pinker
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Viking, 2002, 528 pp., $27.95
In the recent film thriller Red Dragon, actor Ralph Fiennes plays a serial killer whose psychopathic urge to commit murder is the product of his upbringing by an abusive grandmother. Unfortunately for the producers, the film and the book on which it is based were written and produced before the appearance of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, one of the targets of which is the notion that social environment causes criminal behavior. The broader target Prof. Pinker’s book seeks to demolish is the closely related idea that human beings have no inherent nature but are merely empty vessels into which the “culture,” the “social environment,” the “class structure,” “history,” or some other abstraction may pour whatever fluids it wills. Prof. Pinker, a world-renowned linguist at M.I.T. and the author of several earlier books arguing similar positions, is well-suited to this work of demolition, and on the whole he succeeds.
Obviously, the “blank slate” is merely one more metaphor for the “empty vessel,” but whatever the metaphor, it is an idea that denies the meaning and importance, if not the very existence, of race, and the denial of race has been one of the principal uses to which the blank slate doctrine has been applied in the last century. The phrase itself comes from the 17th century English philosopher John Locke, whose treatise on psychology described human nature as a “tabula rasa,” an “empty tablet,” that merely receives sense impressions and is the product of those impressions. Locke was also a major architect of modern liberalism, and the blank slate theory in one form or another underlies much of modern liberal thought. In the 20th century the same idea was embraced not only by Marxists, whose application of it to human beings produced much of the chaos and tyranny associated with modern communism, but also by Western liberals—John Dewey, John B. Watson and the “behaviorist” school of psychology that he founded—and, perhaps most notably, by Franz Boas and the school of anthropology he and his disciples imposed throughout American universities until recently.
What liberals wish we were.
It was in the Boasian school of anthropology that the blank slate denial of human nature was most influential, and it reached what was perhaps its reductio ad absurdum (in American academic quarters, at any rate) in the concoctions of Boas’s student, Margaret Mead, about the sex lives of Samoans. Despite their transparent absurdity, both the blank slate theory and its bizarre applications in scholarship and thought have been taken seriously by psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and most other academics, as well as journalists, creative writers, and even by Hollywood, whence they have come to infect the minds of otherwise sensible people who are not professional intellectuals. Politically, much of what the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society did or tried to do was justified in terms of blank slate doctrine. In the Soviet Union, not only the forced redistribution of property and the attempt to abolish class and other forms of social hierarchy but also the disastrous dogmas of “Lysenkoism” were applications of blank slate theory.
Prof. Pinker argues that the blank slate concept is closely related to two other ideas with which he takes issue: the idea of the “Noble Savage” (essentially, that human beings are naturally good or peaceful, non-dominating, non-aggressive, and non-acquisitive) and the idea of the “Ghost in the Machine” (essentially, that a non-material mind exists distinct from the material body), a concept he firmly rejects. Margaret Mead’s depiction of cute and harmless little Samoans copulating with no guilt, fear, or jealousy is one of the better-known examples of the former concept, which she managed to combine with the blank slate doctrine she picked up from her mentor Boas.
Prof. Pinker slaughters the noble savage mythology with little trouble. “As the anthropologist Derek Freeman later [after Mead] documented,” he writes, “Samoans may beat or kill their daughters if they are not virgins on their wedding night, a young man who cannot woo a virgin may rape one to extort her into eloping, and the family of a cuckolded husband may attack and kill the adulterer.” As for “peaceful” or “gentle” primitives, anthropologists have found that “the !Kung San [of the Kalahari Desert] have a murder rate higher than that of American inner cities,” while the “gentle Tasaday,” a tribe discovered in the Philippine rain forest that supposedly lived “with no words for conflict, violence, or weapons,” turned out to be an outright fraud concocted by the crooked government of Ferdinand Marcos.
The death rates from primitive warfare may sound low compared to those of modern wars, but many of the intellectuals impressed by them “do not notice that two deaths in a band of fifty people is the equivalent of ten million deaths in a country the size of the United States.” Prof. Pinker cites data that show that the proportion of male deaths caused by war in primitive cultures dwarfs that of the United States and Europe even in the bloodiest of all centuries, the 20th. It is civilized man who reduces the number of war deaths, not primitives.
Prof. Pinker is firm and clear about the “inherent” or “innate” characteristics and behavior of human beings—human nature—that exist before anyone has a chance to scribble on the blank slate. Not only aggression and sexual differences but also intelligence he acknowledges to be in large part genetically grounded, but on the Big Taboo—race—he is vague and even contradictory.
He endorses the environmentalist theories of the origins of civilization of Jared Diamond and Thomas Sowell as opposed to racial ones, and tells us that “My own view … is that in the case of the most discussed racial difference—the black-white IQ gap in the United States—the current evidence does not call for a genetic explanation.” Yet, six pages later, he tells us that “… there is now ample evidence that intelligence is a stable property of an individual, that it can be linked to features of the brain (including overall size, amount of gray matter in the frontal lobes, speed of neural conduction, and metabolism of cerebral glucose), that it is partly heritable among individuals, and that it predicts some of the variations in life outcomes such as income and social status.” Combined with the different scores of blacks and whites on IQ tests, of course, this implies that the “most discussed racial difference” has a significantly genetic and not an environmentalist explanation.
Prof. Pinker also tries to evade the implications of racial differences by emphasizing the universal meaning of human nature.
Not only aggression and sexual differences but also intelligence he acknowledges to be in large part genetically grounded, but on the Big Taboo—race—he is vague and even contradictory.
“Discarding the Blank Slate has thrown far more light on the psychological unity of humankind than on any differences,” and, further:
“People are qualitatively the same but may differ quantitatively. The quantitative differences are small in biological terms, and they are found to a far greater extent among the individual members of an ethnic group or race than between ethnic groups or races. These are reassuring findings. Any racist ideology that holds that the members of an ethnic group are all alike, or that one ethnic group differs fundamentally from another, is based on false assumptions about our biology.”
That’s all swell, except that (a) the members of an ethnic group are all alike, in that they are closer genetically to each other than to members of other groups and (b) no one seriously claims that every black is intellectually inferior to every white, let alone that blacks and whites “differ fundamentally.” The point is that modern psychology (and increasingly, biology) shows that blacks on average have significantly lower intelligence than whites. If the norms of a society are to be determined by what is true on average of its members (as social norms almost always are), then the racial differences in IQ are socially significant. How the society will define and institutionalize that significance is another matter, and not one necessarily determined by science.
What is perhaps more important about Prof. Pinker’s book than what he says or contrives not to say about race, however, is how he tries to wiggle out of the implications of discarding the blank slate/noble savage ideology. That ideology has implied that human beings are malleable and that human society can be reconstructed along utopian lines; its proponents, Prof. Pinker writes accurately, “saw the malleability of humans and the autonomy of culture as doctrines that might bring about the age-old dream of perfecting mankind. We are not stuck with what we don’t like about our current predicament, they argued. Nothing prevents us from changing it except a lack of will and the benighted belief that we are permanently consigned to it by biology.”
But if the blank slate concept is not true, it follows that not only the political agenda that sought a perfected mankind and society but also the very ethic that championed such perfection as the morally obligatory ideal is without foundation. If a classless, pacific, racially and sexually equal and non-discriminatory, and far less acquisitive society is not possible, then the moral ideal that demands that we try to create and realize that society becomes at least meaningless and at worst dangerous—for the simple reason that trying to reach such a goal merely undermines or destroys the existing society with its traditions, institutions, moral values, and disciplines, and enhances political power to the level of outright tyranny.
Samoan girl: happy little sex fiend?
Prof. Pinker does glimpse at least part of this truth in pointing out the political horrors to which unrestrained blank slate-ism has actually led. “The Nazi Holocaust was a singular event that changed attitudes toward countless political and scientific topics,” he writes, “but it was not the only ideologically inspired holocaust in the twentieth century . . . the mass killings in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia and other totalitarian states carried out in the name of Marxism” were also justified by their perpetrators precisely in terms of the blank slate doctrine that Marx and his disciples endorsed. “A blank sheet of paper has no blotches,” Mao Tse tung wrote, “and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it, the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.” Prof. Pinker offers as an earlier example of blank slate-ism run mad the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror against “aristocracy” and inequality. He might also have mentioned the almost equally ruthless crusade that modern liberalism has waged against racial, social, and economic institutions that barred its path to human perfection. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve and Philippe Rushton in Race, Evolution, and Behavior made much the same points about the bloody legacy of egalitarianism.
But what Prof. Pinker does not get or at least what he tries to avoid is the conclusion that rejecting blank slate/noble savage theory leads to the rejection of the liberal-radical-progressivist moral ideals and ethic that the theory created and legitimized. Much of his book is devoted to trying to show that liberal morality and the liberal ethic can survive and indeed are not seriously harmed or challenged by the rejection of the blank slate. Thus, with respect to what we now know about “human differences” and the inherent inequality of human beings, he writes:
Margaret Mead wanted to believe it.
“The problem is not with the possibility that people might differ from one another, which is a factual question that could turn out one way or the other. The problem is with the line of reasoning that says that if people do turn out to be different, then discrimination, oppression, or genocide would be OK after all. Fundamental values (such as equality and human rights) should not be held hostage to some factual conjecture about blank slates that might be refuted tomorrow.”
Read closely, the last sentence is rather amazing, because what it claims is that no matter what science concludes about human nature, the liberal ethic of equality and human rights will remain valid—that they are, in a word, sacred, beyond dispute, and beyond the limits of scientific falsification. Indeed, much of Prof. Pinker’s book can be read as a far-reaching attempt to salvage the liberal ethic of equality and human rights as they are currently understood against efforts by the “right”—meaning, presumably, “racists,” “sexists,” and other supposed advocates of “discrimination, oppression, and genocide”—to use the new science of man to challenge that ethic and the political agenda based on it.
But it just doesn’t work, which is why the slowly vanishing champions of the blank slate get so furious whenever someone like Arthur Jensen or Edward O. Wilson or Philippe Rushton or Herrnstein and Murray, et al. challenges their ideology. They know that if human nature is not perfectible, then not only is there no point in trying to perfect it but also there is every good reason not to try—just as there is every good reason for not trying to make an automobile function like a submarine or an airplane. They will claim that rejecting the blank slate will lead to “genocide” and “oppression,” and while it doesn’t, it certainly leads to the rejection of the universalism, egalitarianism, radicalism, and obsession with “rights,” and of the tyranny and genocide these have helped cause and justify.
If human beings are not blank slates and noble savages of liberal myth, then they are born with certain inherent traits that social reform and political power cannot alter, and at least a prudential ethic can be grounded on these ineradicable traits of human nature. Prof. Pinker is willing to admit that the more extreme versions of utopianism are not possible, but his catalogue of what he affirms as some of the most indelible and unmistakable traits of human nature suggests an entirely different ethic from that of Rousseau, Marx, and Boas. These traits, which he describes on p. 294, include:
The primacy of family ties in all human societies, which results in nepotism and inheritance.
The limited scope of communal sharing in human groups, which means people will loaf and will not contribute to public goods if reciprocity is not required.
The universality of dominance and violence across human societies and the genetic and neurological mechanisms that underlie it.
The universality of ethnocentrism and other forms of group-against-group hostility, and the ease with which such hostility can be aroused.
The partial heritability of intelligence, conscientiousness, and antisocial tendencies, implying that inequality will arise even in perfectly fair economic systems; that we therefore face an inherent trade-off between equality and freedom.
The prevalence of defense mechanisms, self-serving biases, and cognitive dissonance, by which people deceive themselves about their own autonomy, wisdom, and integrity.
A preference for kin and friends.
A susceptibility to a taboo mentality.
A tendency to confuse morality with conformity, rank, cleanliness, or beauty.
Blank slate-ism run amok.
Given that such traits are inherent in human nature and manifest in human behavior, nothing short of massive genetic engineering could create a species capable of realizing liberal ideals. Liberalism (whether the classical version of the 19th century or the modern, social-democratic variety) is characterized by such beliefs as the doctrine of progress (the idea that human nature changes or can change for the better over time), the capacity of human beings to mold their own nature and their societies to their preferences, the equality of human beings and the desirability of a more egalitarian society in power and property, the possibility and desirability of world peace and the end of war, the wickedness of any sexual or ethnic discrimination, the rationality and benevolence of basic human instincts, the illegitimacy of any social or political institutions not based on consent, the primacy of the individual and individual freedom over social obligation, and the universality of natural “rights” that belong to all human beings at all times. What we now know of the biological traits of human nature tells us that all these beliefs are false and that the morality that such traits suggest is not a liberal one.
Yet it is by no means clear what kind of morality or ethic Prof. Pinker, given his stated views, is capable of coming up with anyway. “The moral sense is a gadget,” he writes, “an assembly of neural circuits cobbled together from older parts of the primate brain and shaped by natural selection to do a job,” and moral convictions “issue instead from the neurobiological and evolutionary design of the organs we call moral emotions.” Since Prof. Pinker has already stated that what is moral (an “ought”) cannot validly be derived from what is natural (an “is”), his naturalistic explanation of the moral sense denies it any genuine authority. Why should we pay any more attention to the promptings of “neural circuits cobbled together from older parts of the primate brain” than to the unpleasant feelings of indigestion or headaches? If by surgery or genetic engineering we could eliminate the moral sense or alter it to suit our preferences—humanitarian or genocidal as the case may be—why shouldn’t we? Prof. Pinker’s naturalism as far as I can see offers no answer or grounds for an answer.
In fact, there seems to be no particular reason to think that the new scientific understanding of human nature leads to any new morality or ethic at all, but rather that it largely substantiates what virtually all cultures regard as “traditional morality”—a morality that assumes the legitimacy of traditional social, family, sex, and race relationships, a morality that evolved naturally because it was grounded in the nature of human beings and was conducive to their survival. The destruction of blank slate foolishness by science, if not by simple common sense, does not so much destroy all morality and ethics as open the door to restoring the old morality. The only “morality” the new science destroys is the false and vicious one concocted by those whose minds are enslaved by blank slate doctrine.
Prof. Pinker has written an outstanding account of why that doctrine leads to false and vicious consequences, but he remains too wedded to the mythological morality spawned by the very blank slate dogmas he refutes to be able to see that the new ethic that should emerge from the new science of man is very much like the old ethic by which a healthier Western man actually lived before the blank slate myth and its proponents seized power and began pouring their poison into our heads.
(Posted on February 16, 2005)
http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2005/02/the_new_science.php
AR Articles on Racial Differences
Race and Psychopathic Personality (Jul. 2002)
Race and Teenage Pregnancy (Feb. 2002)
The Biological Reality of Race (Oct. 1999)
Why Race Matters (Oct. 1997)
Race and Health (May 1996)
A New Theory of Racial Differences (Dec. 1994)
More news stories on Racial Differences
Samuel Francis, American Renaissance, March 2003
http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2005/02/the_new_science.php
Steven Pinker
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Viking, 2002, 528 pp., $27.95
In the recent film thriller Red Dragon, actor Ralph Fiennes plays a serial killer whose psychopathic urge to commit murder is the product of his upbringing by an abusive grandmother. Unfortunately for the producers, the film and the book on which it is based were written and produced before the appearance of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, one of the targets of which is the notion that social environment causes criminal behavior. The broader target Prof. Pinker’s book seeks to demolish is the closely related idea that human beings have no inherent nature but are merely empty vessels into which the “culture,” the “social environment,” the “class structure,” “history,” or some other abstraction may pour whatever fluids it wills. Prof. Pinker, a world-renowned linguist at M.I.T. and the author of several earlier books arguing similar positions, is well-suited to this work of demolition, and on the whole he succeeds.
Obviously, the “blank slate” is merely one more metaphor for the “empty vessel,” but whatever the metaphor, it is an idea that denies the meaning and importance, if not the very existence, of race, and the denial of race has been one of the principal uses to which the blank slate doctrine has been applied in the last century. The phrase itself comes from the 17th century English philosopher John Locke, whose treatise on psychology described human nature as a “tabula rasa,” an “empty tablet,” that merely receives sense impressions and is the product of those impressions. Locke was also a major architect of modern liberalism, and the blank slate theory in one form or another underlies much of modern liberal thought. In the 20th century the same idea was embraced not only by Marxists, whose application of it to human beings produced much of the chaos and tyranny associated with modern communism, but also by Western liberals—John Dewey, John B. Watson and the “behaviorist” school of psychology that he founded—and, perhaps most notably, by Franz Boas and the school of anthropology he and his disciples imposed throughout American universities until recently.
What liberals wish we were.
It was in the Boasian school of anthropology that the blank slate denial of human nature was most influential, and it reached what was perhaps its reductio ad absurdum (in American academic quarters, at any rate) in the concoctions of Boas’s student, Margaret Mead, about the sex lives of Samoans. Despite their transparent absurdity, both the blank slate theory and its bizarre applications in scholarship and thought have been taken seriously by psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and most other academics, as well as journalists, creative writers, and even by Hollywood, whence they have come to infect the minds of otherwise sensible people who are not professional intellectuals. Politically, much of what the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society did or tried to do was justified in terms of blank slate doctrine. In the Soviet Union, not only the forced redistribution of property and the attempt to abolish class and other forms of social hierarchy but also the disastrous dogmas of “Lysenkoism” were applications of blank slate theory.
Prof. Pinker argues that the blank slate concept is closely related to two other ideas with which he takes issue: the idea of the “Noble Savage” (essentially, that human beings are naturally good or peaceful, non-dominating, non-aggressive, and non-acquisitive) and the idea of the “Ghost in the Machine” (essentially, that a non-material mind exists distinct from the material body), a concept he firmly rejects. Margaret Mead’s depiction of cute and harmless little Samoans copulating with no guilt, fear, or jealousy is one of the better-known examples of the former concept, which she managed to combine with the blank slate doctrine she picked up from her mentor Boas.
Prof. Pinker slaughters the noble savage mythology with little trouble. “As the anthropologist Derek Freeman later [after Mead] documented,” he writes, “Samoans may beat or kill their daughters if they are not virgins on their wedding night, a young man who cannot woo a virgin may rape one to extort her into eloping, and the family of a cuckolded husband may attack and kill the adulterer.” As for “peaceful” or “gentle” primitives, anthropologists have found that “the !Kung San [of the Kalahari Desert] have a murder rate higher than that of American inner cities,” while the “gentle Tasaday,” a tribe discovered in the Philippine rain forest that supposedly lived “with no words for conflict, violence, or weapons,” turned out to be an outright fraud concocted by the crooked government of Ferdinand Marcos.
The death rates from primitive warfare may sound low compared to those of modern wars, but many of the intellectuals impressed by them “do not notice that two deaths in a band of fifty people is the equivalent of ten million deaths in a country the size of the United States.” Prof. Pinker cites data that show that the proportion of male deaths caused by war in primitive cultures dwarfs that of the United States and Europe even in the bloodiest of all centuries, the 20th. It is civilized man who reduces the number of war deaths, not primitives.
Prof. Pinker is firm and clear about the “inherent” or “innate” characteristics and behavior of human beings—human nature—that exist before anyone has a chance to scribble on the blank slate. Not only aggression and sexual differences but also intelligence he acknowledges to be in large part genetically grounded, but on the Big Taboo—race—he is vague and even contradictory.
He endorses the environmentalist theories of the origins of civilization of Jared Diamond and Thomas Sowell as opposed to racial ones, and tells us that “My own view … is that in the case of the most discussed racial difference—the black-white IQ gap in the United States—the current evidence does not call for a genetic explanation.” Yet, six pages later, he tells us that “… there is now ample evidence that intelligence is a stable property of an individual, that it can be linked to features of the brain (including overall size, amount of gray matter in the frontal lobes, speed of neural conduction, and metabolism of cerebral glucose), that it is partly heritable among individuals, and that it predicts some of the variations in life outcomes such as income and social status.” Combined with the different scores of blacks and whites on IQ tests, of course, this implies that the “most discussed racial difference” has a significantly genetic and not an environmentalist explanation.
Prof. Pinker also tries to evade the implications of racial differences by emphasizing the universal meaning of human nature.
Not only aggression and sexual differences but also intelligence he acknowledges to be in large part genetically grounded, but on the Big Taboo—race—he is vague and even contradictory.
“Discarding the Blank Slate has thrown far more light on the psychological unity of humankind than on any differences,” and, further:
“People are qualitatively the same but may differ quantitatively. The quantitative differences are small in biological terms, and they are found to a far greater extent among the individual members of an ethnic group or race than between ethnic groups or races. These are reassuring findings. Any racist ideology that holds that the members of an ethnic group are all alike, or that one ethnic group differs fundamentally from another, is based on false assumptions about our biology.”
That’s all swell, except that (a) the members of an ethnic group are all alike, in that they are closer genetically to each other than to members of other groups and (b) no one seriously claims that every black is intellectually inferior to every white, let alone that blacks and whites “differ fundamentally.” The point is that modern psychology (and increasingly, biology) shows that blacks on average have significantly lower intelligence than whites. If the norms of a society are to be determined by what is true on average of its members (as social norms almost always are), then the racial differences in IQ are socially significant. How the society will define and institutionalize that significance is another matter, and not one necessarily determined by science.
What is perhaps more important about Prof. Pinker’s book than what he says or contrives not to say about race, however, is how he tries to wiggle out of the implications of discarding the blank slate/noble savage ideology. That ideology has implied that human beings are malleable and that human society can be reconstructed along utopian lines; its proponents, Prof. Pinker writes accurately, “saw the malleability of humans and the autonomy of culture as doctrines that might bring about the age-old dream of perfecting mankind. We are not stuck with what we don’t like about our current predicament, they argued. Nothing prevents us from changing it except a lack of will and the benighted belief that we are permanently consigned to it by biology.”
But if the blank slate concept is not true, it follows that not only the political agenda that sought a perfected mankind and society but also the very ethic that championed such perfection as the morally obligatory ideal is without foundation. If a classless, pacific, racially and sexually equal and non-discriminatory, and far less acquisitive society is not possible, then the moral ideal that demands that we try to create and realize that society becomes at least meaningless and at worst dangerous—for the simple reason that trying to reach such a goal merely undermines or destroys the existing society with its traditions, institutions, moral values, and disciplines, and enhances political power to the level of outright tyranny.
Samoan girl: happy little sex fiend?
Prof. Pinker does glimpse at least part of this truth in pointing out the political horrors to which unrestrained blank slate-ism has actually led. “The Nazi Holocaust was a singular event that changed attitudes toward countless political and scientific topics,” he writes, “but it was not the only ideologically inspired holocaust in the twentieth century . . . the mass killings in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia and other totalitarian states carried out in the name of Marxism” were also justified by their perpetrators precisely in terms of the blank slate doctrine that Marx and his disciples endorsed. “A blank sheet of paper has no blotches,” Mao Tse tung wrote, “and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it, the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.” Prof. Pinker offers as an earlier example of blank slate-ism run mad the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror against “aristocracy” and inequality. He might also have mentioned the almost equally ruthless crusade that modern liberalism has waged against racial, social, and economic institutions that barred its path to human perfection. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve and Philippe Rushton in Race, Evolution, and Behavior made much the same points about the bloody legacy of egalitarianism.
But what Prof. Pinker does not get or at least what he tries to avoid is the conclusion that rejecting blank slate/noble savage theory leads to the rejection of the liberal-radical-progressivist moral ideals and ethic that the theory created and legitimized. Much of his book is devoted to trying to show that liberal morality and the liberal ethic can survive and indeed are not seriously harmed or challenged by the rejection of the blank slate. Thus, with respect to what we now know about “human differences” and the inherent inequality of human beings, he writes:
Margaret Mead wanted to believe it.
“The problem is not with the possibility that people might differ from one another, which is a factual question that could turn out one way or the other. The problem is with the line of reasoning that says that if people do turn out to be different, then discrimination, oppression, or genocide would be OK after all. Fundamental values (such as equality and human rights) should not be held hostage to some factual conjecture about blank slates that might be refuted tomorrow.”
Read closely, the last sentence is rather amazing, because what it claims is that no matter what science concludes about human nature, the liberal ethic of equality and human rights will remain valid—that they are, in a word, sacred, beyond dispute, and beyond the limits of scientific falsification. Indeed, much of Prof. Pinker’s book can be read as a far-reaching attempt to salvage the liberal ethic of equality and human rights as they are currently understood against efforts by the “right”—meaning, presumably, “racists,” “sexists,” and other supposed advocates of “discrimination, oppression, and genocide”—to use the new science of man to challenge that ethic and the political agenda based on it.
But it just doesn’t work, which is why the slowly vanishing champions of the blank slate get so furious whenever someone like Arthur Jensen or Edward O. Wilson or Philippe Rushton or Herrnstein and Murray, et al. challenges their ideology. They know that if human nature is not perfectible, then not only is there no point in trying to perfect it but also there is every good reason not to try—just as there is every good reason for not trying to make an automobile function like a submarine or an airplane. They will claim that rejecting the blank slate will lead to “genocide” and “oppression,” and while it doesn’t, it certainly leads to the rejection of the universalism, egalitarianism, radicalism, and obsession with “rights,” and of the tyranny and genocide these have helped cause and justify.
If human beings are not blank slates and noble savages of liberal myth, then they are born with certain inherent traits that social reform and political power cannot alter, and at least a prudential ethic can be grounded on these ineradicable traits of human nature. Prof. Pinker is willing to admit that the more extreme versions of utopianism are not possible, but his catalogue of what he affirms as some of the most indelible and unmistakable traits of human nature suggests an entirely different ethic from that of Rousseau, Marx, and Boas. These traits, which he describes on p. 294, include:
The primacy of family ties in all human societies, which results in nepotism and inheritance.
The limited scope of communal sharing in human groups, which means people will loaf and will not contribute to public goods if reciprocity is not required.
The universality of dominance and violence across human societies and the genetic and neurological mechanisms that underlie it.
The universality of ethnocentrism and other forms of group-against-group hostility, and the ease with which such hostility can be aroused.
The partial heritability of intelligence, conscientiousness, and antisocial tendencies, implying that inequality will arise even in perfectly fair economic systems; that we therefore face an inherent trade-off between equality and freedom.
The prevalence of defense mechanisms, self-serving biases, and cognitive dissonance, by which people deceive themselves about their own autonomy, wisdom, and integrity.
A preference for kin and friends.
A susceptibility to a taboo mentality.
A tendency to confuse morality with conformity, rank, cleanliness, or beauty.
Blank slate-ism run amok.
Given that such traits are inherent in human nature and manifest in human behavior, nothing short of massive genetic engineering could create a species capable of realizing liberal ideals. Liberalism (whether the classical version of the 19th century or the modern, social-democratic variety) is characterized by such beliefs as the doctrine of progress (the idea that human nature changes or can change for the better over time), the capacity of human beings to mold their own nature and their societies to their preferences, the equality of human beings and the desirability of a more egalitarian society in power and property, the possibility and desirability of world peace and the end of war, the wickedness of any sexual or ethnic discrimination, the rationality and benevolence of basic human instincts, the illegitimacy of any social or political institutions not based on consent, the primacy of the individual and individual freedom over social obligation, and the universality of natural “rights” that belong to all human beings at all times. What we now know of the biological traits of human nature tells us that all these beliefs are false and that the morality that such traits suggest is not a liberal one.
Yet it is by no means clear what kind of morality or ethic Prof. Pinker, given his stated views, is capable of coming up with anyway. “The moral sense is a gadget,” he writes, “an assembly of neural circuits cobbled together from older parts of the primate brain and shaped by natural selection to do a job,” and moral convictions “issue instead from the neurobiological and evolutionary design of the organs we call moral emotions.” Since Prof. Pinker has already stated that what is moral (an “ought”) cannot validly be derived from what is natural (an “is”), his naturalistic explanation of the moral sense denies it any genuine authority. Why should we pay any more attention to the promptings of “neural circuits cobbled together from older parts of the primate brain” than to the unpleasant feelings of indigestion or headaches? If by surgery or genetic engineering we could eliminate the moral sense or alter it to suit our preferences—humanitarian or genocidal as the case may be—why shouldn’t we? Prof. Pinker’s naturalism as far as I can see offers no answer or grounds for an answer.
In fact, there seems to be no particular reason to think that the new scientific understanding of human nature leads to any new morality or ethic at all, but rather that it largely substantiates what virtually all cultures regard as “traditional morality”—a morality that assumes the legitimacy of traditional social, family, sex, and race relationships, a morality that evolved naturally because it was grounded in the nature of human beings and was conducive to their survival. The destruction of blank slate foolishness by science, if not by simple common sense, does not so much destroy all morality and ethics as open the door to restoring the old morality. The only “morality” the new science destroys is the false and vicious one concocted by those whose minds are enslaved by blank slate doctrine.
Prof. Pinker has written an outstanding account of why that doctrine leads to false and vicious consequences, but he remains too wedded to the mythological morality spawned by the very blank slate dogmas he refutes to be able to see that the new ethic that should emerge from the new science of man is very much like the old ethic by which a healthier Western man actually lived before the blank slate myth and its proponents seized power and began pouring their poison into our heads.
(Posted on February 16, 2005)
Banjo Feburary 17 1864 ----1941
Who was The Banjo?
ANDREW BARTON PATERSON was born on February 17, 1864, at Narambla, New South Wales, not far from Orange. He was the son of a Scottish immigrant from Lanarkshire, who had arrived in Australia in the early 1850s.
His early life was spent near Yass in NSW, and this is where he became acquainted with the colourful bush characters that he wrote about so vividly in his later life.
Much of his early life was spent around horses, and his life-long love of horse-racing and polo is reflected in many of his poems. He was a member of the first NSW polo team to play against the Victorians.
His schooling was at Sydney Grammar and when he left, at the age of 16, he became an articled clerk in a Sydney lawyer's office.
The first of many ballads he had published in The Bulletin (the top newspaper of the time, and still very influential) was El Mahdi to the Australian Troops, in February 1885. This was the beginning of a long and productive relationship with this newspaper. His pseudonym, "The Banjo", was the name of a racehorse his father had once owned. It was not until 1895, ten years later, on the publication of The Man from Snowy River and other verses, that the public finally discovered the name of the man behind these verses.
In 1892, he participated in the celebrated "Bush battle", locking horns with his friend and literary colleague Henry Lawson in a number of poems in the pages of The Bulletin.
For contemporary impressions of Paterson, it is worth looking at a short article written in 1895 by Annie Bright, the founding editor of the Sydney literary monthly, Cosmos.
Paterson on horseback, reading from The Bulletin, from the Christmas 1891 edition of that paper.
Even though he was a practicing lawyer in Sydney, he always had a hankering for the bush, and made numerous trips to remote areas in Queensland and the Northern Territory. His links with The Bulletin prompted the Sydney Morning Herald and The Argus to send him as a war correspondent to the Boer War in South Africa in 1900 and 1901. His vivid and exciting reports were well received.
In 1901, Paterson accepted another commission, to report the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion in China. He went from there to London, where he renewed his friendships with Rudyard Kipling and other people he had met in South Africa. Some of these experiences are remembered in his war memoirs, Happy Dispatches, published in 1934.
In 1902, his second collection was published, Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses.
In 1903, he became editor of the Sydney Evening News. In that year he also married Alice Walker, a grazier's daughter and, in 1906, he published the novel An Outback Marriage.
In early 1904, he showed a well-developed sense of humour in a series of satirical articles for The Evening News, where The Oracle pontificates on a number of subjects.
In 1908 he and his family left Sydney and ran a grazing property in the highlands near Yass in Southern NSW.
In 1914, with the outbreak of the First World War, Paterson joined the Australian Imperial Forces (AIF). He ended up as a major in the First Australian Remount Unit, a unit of horsemen from bush and racecourse whose task was to train mounts for the Australian Light Horse. This was done in Egypt. His skills with men and mounts gained him great respect.
In 1917, his third collection was published, Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses.
In 1919, after the cessation of hostilities, Paterson returned to Sydney as a freelance journalist. In 1922 he became editor of The Sydney Sportsman, a weekly sporting newspaper, to which he also contributed ballads and essays, and which became very popular under his direction.
In 1930 Paterson retired from full-time journalism, but remained a freelance sports reporter and feature writer. He also became a regular broadcaster for the Australian Broadcasting Commission.
In 1933 he published a delightful collection of children's poetry, The Animals Noah Forgot, illustrated by the popular (and controversial) artist, Norman Lindsay.
In these later years he also published Happy Dispatches, memoirs of his wartime experiences, and a novel The Shearer's Colt, which reflects his great love of horse-racing.
In 1939 Paterson was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) for his services to Australian literature.
Paterson died in 1941, just short of his 77th birthday.
The Banjo left a valuable heritage. His love for the bush and the colourful characters you met there meant that his writing was sympathetic to the landscape and its people. He created enduring myths, not least being Waltzing Matilda, which is one of the most recognisable Australian songs known world-wide. His depiction of the resourcefulness of the bushmen, is written with a true knowledge of the bush and its people, and with a real sense of the humour that permeated life in rural Australia and the racetracks.
I always think Paterson, working at the time in Sydney, spoke from the heart when he penned these lines --
And I somehow rather fancy that I'd like to change with Clancy,
Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,
While he faced the round eternal of the cash-book and the journal --
But I doubt he'd suit the office, Clancy, of The Overflow.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Note: some interesting insights into "The Banjo" can be found in his reminiscinces "Banjo Paterson Tells His Own Story", Sydney Morning Herald, 4 Feb - 4 Mar 1939 (Each Saturday issue, p.21 in each case)]
ANDREW BARTON PATERSON was born on February 17, 1864, at Narambla, New South Wales, not far from Orange. He was the son of a Scottish immigrant from Lanarkshire, who had arrived in Australia in the early 1850s.
His early life was spent near Yass in NSW, and this is where he became acquainted with the colourful bush characters that he wrote about so vividly in his later life.
Much of his early life was spent around horses, and his life-long love of horse-racing and polo is reflected in many of his poems. He was a member of the first NSW polo team to play against the Victorians.
His schooling was at Sydney Grammar and when he left, at the age of 16, he became an articled clerk in a Sydney lawyer's office.
The first of many ballads he had published in The Bulletin (the top newspaper of the time, and still very influential) was El Mahdi to the Australian Troops, in February 1885. This was the beginning of a long and productive relationship with this newspaper. His pseudonym, "The Banjo", was the name of a racehorse his father had once owned. It was not until 1895, ten years later, on the publication of The Man from Snowy River and other verses, that the public finally discovered the name of the man behind these verses.
In 1892, he participated in the celebrated "Bush battle", locking horns with his friend and literary colleague Henry Lawson in a number of poems in the pages of The Bulletin.
For contemporary impressions of Paterson, it is worth looking at a short article written in 1895 by Annie Bright, the founding editor of the Sydney literary monthly, Cosmos.
Paterson on horseback, reading from The Bulletin, from the Christmas 1891 edition of that paper.
Even though he was a practicing lawyer in Sydney, he always had a hankering for the bush, and made numerous trips to remote areas in Queensland and the Northern Territory. His links with The Bulletin prompted the Sydney Morning Herald and The Argus to send him as a war correspondent to the Boer War in South Africa in 1900 and 1901. His vivid and exciting reports were well received.
In 1901, Paterson accepted another commission, to report the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion in China. He went from there to London, where he renewed his friendships with Rudyard Kipling and other people he had met in South Africa. Some of these experiences are remembered in his war memoirs, Happy Dispatches, published in 1934.
In 1902, his second collection was published, Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses.
In 1903, he became editor of the Sydney Evening News. In that year he also married Alice Walker, a grazier's daughter and, in 1906, he published the novel An Outback Marriage.
In early 1904, he showed a well-developed sense of humour in a series of satirical articles for The Evening News, where The Oracle pontificates on a number of subjects.
In 1908 he and his family left Sydney and ran a grazing property in the highlands near Yass in Southern NSW.
In 1914, with the outbreak of the First World War, Paterson joined the Australian Imperial Forces (AIF). He ended up as a major in the First Australian Remount Unit, a unit of horsemen from bush and racecourse whose task was to train mounts for the Australian Light Horse. This was done in Egypt. His skills with men and mounts gained him great respect.
In 1917, his third collection was published, Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses.
In 1919, after the cessation of hostilities, Paterson returned to Sydney as a freelance journalist. In 1922 he became editor of The Sydney Sportsman, a weekly sporting newspaper, to which he also contributed ballads and essays, and which became very popular under his direction.
In 1930 Paterson retired from full-time journalism, but remained a freelance sports reporter and feature writer. He also became a regular broadcaster for the Australian Broadcasting Commission.
In 1933 he published a delightful collection of children's poetry, The Animals Noah Forgot, illustrated by the popular (and controversial) artist, Norman Lindsay.
In these later years he also published Happy Dispatches, memoirs of his wartime experiences, and a novel The Shearer's Colt, which reflects his great love of horse-racing.
In 1939 Paterson was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) for his services to Australian literature.
Paterson died in 1941, just short of his 77th birthday.
The Banjo left a valuable heritage. His love for the bush and the colourful characters you met there meant that his writing was sympathetic to the landscape and its people. He created enduring myths, not least being Waltzing Matilda, which is one of the most recognisable Australian songs known world-wide. His depiction of the resourcefulness of the bushmen, is written with a true knowledge of the bush and its people, and with a real sense of the humour that permeated life in rural Australia and the racetracks.
I always think Paterson, working at the time in Sydney, spoke from the heart when he penned these lines --
And I somehow rather fancy that I'd like to change with Clancy,
Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,
While he faced the round eternal of the cash-book and the journal --
But I doubt he'd suit the office, Clancy, of The Overflow.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Note: some interesting insights into "The Banjo" can be found in his reminiscinces "Banjo Paterson Tells His Own Story", Sydney Morning Herald, 4 Feb - 4 Mar 1939 (Each Saturday issue, p.21 in each case)]
I know that sooner or later I shall find my boy......
Lost
by A. B. "Banjo" Paterson
"He ought to be home," said the old man, "without there's something amiss. He only went to the Two-mile -- he ought to be back by this. He would ride the Reckless filly, he would have his wilful way; And, here, he's not back at sundown -- and what will his mother say?
"He was always his mother's idol, since ever his father died; And there isn't a horse on the station that he isn't game to ride. But that Reckless mare is vicious, and if once she gets away He hasn't got strength to hold her -- and what will his mother say?"
The old man walked to the sliprail, and peered up the dark'ning track, And looked and longed for the rider that would never more come back; And the mother came and clutched him, with sudden, spasmodic fright: "What has become of my Willie? Why isn't he home tonight?"
Away in the gloomy ranges, at the foot of an ironbark, The bonnie, winsome laddie was lying stiff and stark; For the Reckless mare had smashed him against a leaning limb, And his comely face was battered, and his merry eyes were dim.
And the thoroughbred chestnut filly, the saddle beneath her flanks, Was away like fire through the ranges to join the wild mob's ranks; And a broken-hearted woman and an old man worn and grey Were searching all night in the ranges till the sunrise brought the day.
And the mother kept feebly calling, with a hope that would not die, "Willie! where are you, Willie?" But how can the dead reply; And hope died out with the daylight, and the darkness brought despair, God pity the stricken mother, and answer the widow's prayer!
Though far and wide they sought him, they found not where he fell; For the ranges held him precious, and guarded their treasure well. The wattle blooms above him, and the bluebells blow close by, And the brown bees buzz the secret, and the wild birds sing reply.
But the mother pined and faded, and cried, and took no rest, And rode each day to the ranges on her hopeless, weary quest. Seeking her loved one ever, she faded and pined away, But with strength of her great affection she still sought every day.
"I know that sooner or later I shall find my boy," she said. But she came not home one evening, and they found her lying dead. And stamped on the poor pale features, as the spirit homeward pass'd, Was an angel smile of gladness -- she had found her boy at last.
The Sydney Mail, 19 March 1887
http://www.uq.edu.au/~mlwham/banjo/biography.html
by A. B. "Banjo" Paterson
"He ought to be home," said the old man, "without there's something amiss. He only went to the Two-mile -- he ought to be back by this. He would ride the Reckless filly, he would have his wilful way; And, here, he's not back at sundown -- and what will his mother say?
"He was always his mother's idol, since ever his father died; And there isn't a horse on the station that he isn't game to ride. But that Reckless mare is vicious, and if once she gets away He hasn't got strength to hold her -- and what will his mother say?"
The old man walked to the sliprail, and peered up the dark'ning track, And looked and longed for the rider that would never more come back; And the mother came and clutched him, with sudden, spasmodic fright: "What has become of my Willie? Why isn't he home tonight?"
Away in the gloomy ranges, at the foot of an ironbark, The bonnie, winsome laddie was lying stiff and stark; For the Reckless mare had smashed him against a leaning limb, And his comely face was battered, and his merry eyes were dim.
And the thoroughbred chestnut filly, the saddle beneath her flanks, Was away like fire through the ranges to join the wild mob's ranks; And a broken-hearted woman and an old man worn and grey Were searching all night in the ranges till the sunrise brought the day.
And the mother kept feebly calling, with a hope that would not die, "Willie! where are you, Willie?" But how can the dead reply; And hope died out with the daylight, and the darkness brought despair, God pity the stricken mother, and answer the widow's prayer!
Though far and wide they sought him, they found not where he fell; For the ranges held him precious, and guarded their treasure well. The wattle blooms above him, and the bluebells blow close by, And the brown bees buzz the secret, and the wild birds sing reply.
But the mother pined and faded, and cried, and took no rest, And rode each day to the ranges on her hopeless, weary quest. Seeking her loved one ever, she faded and pined away, But with strength of her great affection she still sought every day.
"I know that sooner or later I shall find my boy," she said. But she came not home one evening, and they found her lying dead. And stamped on the poor pale features, as the spirit homeward pass'd, Was an angel smile of gladness -- she had found her boy at last.
The Sydney Mail, 19 March 1887
http://www.uq.edu.au/~mlwham/banjo/biography.html
Goals
"The tragedy in life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal.The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach."
- Benjamin Mays
- Benjamin Mays
....inculcate mass terror
“ We must inculcate mass terror immediately. We do not have absolute values determined by eternal values as there are none."
Lenin, 1923. ( & ISLAM 2005 )
.....what ought to be done remains undone,
“If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant,
If what is said is not what Is meant , then what ought to be done remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate and justice will go astray.
If justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion.
Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said.
This matters above everything”
Confucius.
If what is said is not what Is meant , then what ought to be done remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate and justice will go astray.
If justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion.
Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said.
This matters above everything”
Confucius.
War is an ugly thing............
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse." --John Stuart Mill
Socialism............
SOCIALISM"Socialism means equality of income or nothing...........Under Socialism you would not be allowed to be poor.
You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught and employed whether you liked it or not.
If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but while you were permitted to live, you would have to live well."
Bernard Shaw.
The "Hell Makers" John .C Grover
First Communist Strip Club
This is a True Story
In the Soviet Union even prostitues and strip dancers were employed by the communist government. At one occasion, when the Soviet authorities decided to build the first strip joint, they built a beautiful new building in Moscow, hired the stuff and advertised it all over the country.
Comes first day the quee of people was meandering from the strip bar to all the way to the edge of the city. 100's of thousands of people tried to get in, but couldn't. But by the second day the line-up became smaller, and in less than 2 weeks only a few peasents came to see the show from some far away places.
Since this shocking development seriously undermined the success of the first Soviet Nudie Bar, the bar's manager (a member of the communist party himself) and the secretary of the local communist party (of the strip bar's employees) sat together to discuss the possible reasons behind this sudden disinterest. At first one of them thought that maybe the chair's were not comfortable enough. OK, so they changed them all. But it didn't help, so they changed the lamps. Still no one came to see the program. So they slowly changed tables, walls, ceiling.... all for no avail, still no one came.
Finally the manager of the bar asked the secretary of the party:- Sergey, tell me, isn't it possible that the striptease dancer woman is politically untrustworthy?- Ivan, come on! You know it's impossible! She is the member of the communist party now for 70 years!
In the Soviet Union even prostitues and strip dancers were employed by the communist government. At one occasion, when the Soviet authorities decided to build the first strip joint, they built a beautiful new building in Moscow, hired the stuff and advertised it all over the country.
Comes first day the quee of people was meandering from the strip bar to all the way to the edge of the city. 100's of thousands of people tried to get in, but couldn't. But by the second day the line-up became smaller, and in less than 2 weeks only a few peasents came to see the show from some far away places.
Since this shocking development seriously undermined the success of the first Soviet Nudie Bar, the bar's manager (a member of the communist party himself) and the secretary of the local communist party (of the strip bar's employees) sat together to discuss the possible reasons behind this sudden disinterest. At first one of them thought that maybe the chair's were not comfortable enough. OK, so they changed them all. But it didn't help, so they changed the lamps. Still no one came to see the program. So they slowly changed tables, walls, ceiling.... all for no avail, still no one came.
Finally the manager of the bar asked the secretary of the party:- Sergey, tell me, isn't it possible that the striptease dancer woman is politically untrustworthy?- Ivan, come on! You know it's impossible! She is the member of the communist party now for 70 years!
Kyoto Useless for Australia :Howard
Kyoto useless for Australia: Howard
By Orietta GuerreraFebruary 17, 2005
http://www.theage.com.au/news/National/Kyoto-useless-for-Australia-Howard/2005/02/16/1108500154770.html
The Kyoto Protocol would jeopardise Australian jobs and it was useless for Australia to join, Prime Minister John Howard said yesterday.
As the 141-nation agreement became international law - and in the face of intense pressure from environmentalists and the Opposition - Mr Howard told Parliament that it was not in Australia's interests to sign the treaty.
Until major emitters such as the US and China joined Kyoto - which aims to get the industrial world to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 5.2 per cent by 2012 - it would be harmful for Australia to do so, he said.
"We would create a situation where countries such as China, India and Indonesia would not be subject to the same penalties and restrictions as would Australia," Mr Howard said. "And as a result we would run the risk of losing both industry and jobs to countries in that situation."
Labor interrupted Parliament yesterdayseeking to suspend standing orders and urgently debate the issue but the Government used its numbers to defeat the motion.
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The issue dominated question time, with Opposition Leader Kim Beazley directing a question to his environment spokesman, Anthony Albanese.
Asked why Australia should ratify, Mr Albanese said climate change was the No. 1 environmental challenge facing the world. "We should prioritise it for the sake not just of ourselves but of our children and grandchildren."
Senior Government ministers including Environment Minister Ian Campbell and Treasurer Peter Costello backed the continual refusal to ratify. Senator Campbell said Australia was one of five countries likely to achieve its Kyoto targets - 8 per cent above 1990 levels by 2012. He said Australia was on track to reduce greenhouse emissions by 30 per cent by 2050.
Mr Costello said: "We will play our part, but we will not be part of a one-sided agreement which would handicap the Australian economy."
Green groups protested on the steps of Victorian Parliament yesterday, waving flags of the 141 countries that have signed.
Australian Conservation Foundation vice-president Peter Christoff said Australian businesses would miss out on clean energy investment markets established under the treaty. "We are also locked out of the international carbon trading market now coming into being," he said. "This will cost Australian industry over $1 billion per annum."
Australian Medical Association president Bill Glasson called on the Government to ratify in the interests of human health.
By Orietta GuerreraFebruary 17, 2005
http://www.theage.com.au/news/National/Kyoto-useless-for-Australia-Howard/2005/02/16/1108500154770.html
The Kyoto Protocol would jeopardise Australian jobs and it was useless for Australia to join, Prime Minister John Howard said yesterday.
As the 141-nation agreement became international law - and in the face of intense pressure from environmentalists and the Opposition - Mr Howard told Parliament that it was not in Australia's interests to sign the treaty.
Until major emitters such as the US and China joined Kyoto - which aims to get the industrial world to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 5.2 per cent by 2012 - it would be harmful for Australia to do so, he said.
"We would create a situation where countries such as China, India and Indonesia would not be subject to the same penalties and restrictions as would Australia," Mr Howard said. "And as a result we would run the risk of losing both industry and jobs to countries in that situation."
Labor interrupted Parliament yesterdayseeking to suspend standing orders and urgently debate the issue but the Government used its numbers to defeat the motion.
AdvertisementAdvertisement
The issue dominated question time, with Opposition Leader Kim Beazley directing a question to his environment spokesman, Anthony Albanese.
Asked why Australia should ratify, Mr Albanese said climate change was the No. 1 environmental challenge facing the world. "We should prioritise it for the sake not just of ourselves but of our children and grandchildren."
Senior Government ministers including Environment Minister Ian Campbell and Treasurer Peter Costello backed the continual refusal to ratify. Senator Campbell said Australia was one of five countries likely to achieve its Kyoto targets - 8 per cent above 1990 levels by 2012. He said Australia was on track to reduce greenhouse emissions by 30 per cent by 2050.
Mr Costello said: "We will play our part, but we will not be part of a one-sided agreement which would handicap the Australian economy."
Green groups protested on the steps of Victorian Parliament yesterday, waving flags of the 141 countries that have signed.
Australian Conservation Foundation vice-president Peter Christoff said Australian businesses would miss out on clean energy investment markets established under the treaty. "We are also locked out of the international carbon trading market now coming into being," he said. "This will cost Australian industry over $1 billion per annum."
Australian Medical Association president Bill Glasson called on the Government to ratify in the interests of human health.
........Human Life impossible
On Earth Day, Remember: If Environmentalism Succeeds, It Will Make Human Life Impossible
http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=8403&printer_friendly=1
Wednesday, April 14, 2004 By: Michael S. Berliner
To save mankind requires the wholesale rejection of environmentalism as hatred of science, technology, progress, and human life.
Earth Day approaches, and with it a grave danger faces mankind. The danger is not from acid rain, global warming, smog, or the logging of rain forests, as environmentalists would have us believe. The danger to mankind is from environmentalism.
The fundamental goal of environmentalism is not clean air and clean water; rather,
Nature, they insist, has "intrinsic value," to be revered for its own sake, irrespective of any benefit to man. As a consequence, man is to be prohibited from using nature for his own ends. Since nature supposedly has value and goodness in itself, any human action that changes the environment is necessarily immoral. Of course, environmentalists invoke the doctrine of intrinsic value not against wolves that eat sheep or beavers that gnaw trees; they invoke it only against man, only when man wants something.
The ideal world of environmentalism is not twenty-first-century Western civilization; it is the Garden of Eden, a world with no human intervention in nature, a world without innovation or change, a world without effort, a world where survival is somehow guaranteed, a world where man has mystically merged with the "environment." Had the environmentalist mentality prevailed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we would have had no Industrial Revolution, a situation that consistent environmentalists would cheer--at least those few who might have managed to survive without the life-saving benefits of modern science and technology.
The expressed goal of environmentalism is to prevent man from changing his environment, from intruding on nature. That is why environmentalism is fundamentally anti-man. Intrusion is necessary for human survival. Only by intrusion can man avoid pestilence and famine. Only by intrusion can man control his life and project long-range goals. Intrusion improves the environment, if by "environment" one means the surroundings of man--the external material conditions of human life. Intrusion is a requirement of human nature. But in the environmentalists' paean to "Nature," human nature is omitted. For environmentalism, the "natural" world is a world without man. Man has no legitimate needs, but trees, ponds, and bacteria somehow do.
They don't mean it? Heed the words of the consistent environmentalists. "The ending of the human epoch on Earth," writes philosopher Paul Taylor in Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics, "would most likely be greeted with a hearty 'Good riddance!'" In a glowing review of Bill McKibben's The End of Nature, biologist David M. Graber writes (Los Angeles Times, October 29, 1989): "Human happiness [is] not as important as a wild and healthy planet . . . . Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along." Such is the naked essence of environmentalism: it mourns the death of one whale or tree but actually welcomes the death of billions of people. A more malevolent, man-hating philosophy is unimaginable.
The guiding principle of environmentalism is self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of longer lives, healthier lives, more prosperous lives, more enjoyable lives, i.e., the sacrifice of human lives. But an individual is not born in servitude. He has a moral right to live his own life for his own sake. He has no duty to sacrifice it to the needs of others and certainly not to the "needs" of the nonhuman.
To save mankind from environmentalism, what's needed is not the appeasing, compromising approach of those who urge a "balance" between the needs of man and the "needs" of the environment. To save mankind requires the wholesale rejection of environmentalism as hatred of science, technology, progress, and human life. To save mankind requires the return to a philosophy of reason and individualism, a philosophy that makes life on earth possible. Michael S. Berliner is a member of the board of directors of the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.
http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=8403&printer_friendly=1
Wednesday, April 14, 2004 By: Michael S. Berliner
To save mankind requires the wholesale rejection of environmentalism as hatred of science, technology, progress, and human life.
Earth Day approaches, and with it a grave danger faces mankind. The danger is not from acid rain, global warming, smog, or the logging of rain forests, as environmentalists would have us believe. The danger to mankind is from environmentalism.
The fundamental goal of environmentalism is not clean air and clean water; rather,
In a nation founded on the pioneer spirit, environmentalists have made "development" an evil word. They inhibit or prohibit the development of Alaskan oil, offshore drilling, nuclear power--and every other practical form of energy. Housing, commerce, and jobs are sacrificed to spotted owls and snail darters. Medical research is sacrificed to the "rights" of mice. Logging is sacrificed to the "rights" of trees. No instance of the progress that brought man out of the cave is safe from the onslaught of those "protecting" the environment from man, whom they consider a rapist and despoiler by his very essence."it is the demolition of technological/industrial civilization.
Environmentalism's goal is not the advancement of human health, human happiness,
and human life; rather, it is a subhuman world where "nature" is worshipped like
the totem of some primitive religion."
Nature, they insist, has "intrinsic value," to be revered for its own sake, irrespective of any benefit to man. As a consequence, man is to be prohibited from using nature for his own ends. Since nature supposedly has value and goodness in itself, any human action that changes the environment is necessarily immoral. Of course, environmentalists invoke the doctrine of intrinsic value not against wolves that eat sheep or beavers that gnaw trees; they invoke it only against man, only when man wants something.
The ideal world of environmentalism is not twenty-first-century Western civilization; it is the Garden of Eden, a world with no human intervention in nature, a world without innovation or change, a world without effort, a world where survival is somehow guaranteed, a world where man has mystically merged with the "environment." Had the environmentalist mentality prevailed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we would have had no Industrial Revolution, a situation that consistent environmentalists would cheer--at least those few who might have managed to survive without the life-saving benefits of modern science and technology.
The expressed goal of environmentalism is to prevent man from changing his environment, from intruding on nature. That is why environmentalism is fundamentally anti-man. Intrusion is necessary for human survival. Only by intrusion can man avoid pestilence and famine. Only by intrusion can man control his life and project long-range goals. Intrusion improves the environment, if by "environment" one means the surroundings of man--the external material conditions of human life. Intrusion is a requirement of human nature. But in the environmentalists' paean to "Nature," human nature is omitted. For environmentalism, the "natural" world is a world without man. Man has no legitimate needs, but trees, ponds, and bacteria somehow do.
They don't mean it? Heed the words of the consistent environmentalists. "The ending of the human epoch on Earth," writes philosopher Paul Taylor in Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics, "would most likely be greeted with a hearty 'Good riddance!'" In a glowing review of Bill McKibben's The End of Nature, biologist David M. Graber writes (Los Angeles Times, October 29, 1989): "Human happiness [is] not as important as a wild and healthy planet . . . . Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along." Such is the naked essence of environmentalism: it mourns the death of one whale or tree but actually welcomes the death of billions of people. A more malevolent, man-hating philosophy is unimaginable.
The guiding principle of environmentalism is self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of longer lives, healthier lives, more prosperous lives, more enjoyable lives, i.e., the sacrifice of human lives. But an individual is not born in servitude. He has a moral right to live his own life for his own sake. He has no duty to sacrifice it to the needs of others and certainly not to the "needs" of the nonhuman.
To save mankind from environmentalism, what's needed is not the appeasing, compromising approach of those who urge a "balance" between the needs of man and the "needs" of the environment. To save mankind requires the wholesale rejection of environmentalism as hatred of science, technology, progress, and human life. To save mankind requires the return to a philosophy of reason and individualism, a philosophy that makes life on earth possible. Michael S. Berliner is a member of the board of directors of the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.
The truth about the environment
By invitation The truth about the environment
http://www.economist.com/opinion/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=718860
Aug 2nd 2001 From The Economist print edition
Panos
Environmentalists tend to believe that, ecologically speaking, things are getting worse and worse. Bjorn Lomborg, once deep green himself, argues that they are wrong in almost every particular
ECOLOGY and economics should push in the same direction. After all, the “eco” part of each word derives from the Greek word for “home”, and the protagonists of both claim to have humanity's welfare as their goal. Yet environmentalists and economists are often at loggerheads. For economists, the world seems to be getting better. For many environmentalists, it seems to be getting worse.
These environmentalists, led by such veterans as Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, and Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute, have developed a sort of “litany” of four big environmental fears:
• Natural resources are running out.
• The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat.
• Species are becoming extinct in vast numbers: forests are disappearing and fish stocks are collapsing.
• The planet's air and water are becoming ever more polluted.
Human activity is thus defiling the earth, and humanity may end up killing itself in the process.
The “litany” of environmental fears is not backed up by evidence
The trouble is, the evidence does not back up this litany. First, energy and other natural resources have become more abundant, not less so since the Club of Rome published “The Limits to Growth” in 1972. Second, more food is now produced per head of the world's population than at any time in history. Fewer people are starving. Third, although species are indeed becoming extinct, only about 0.7% of them are expected to disappear in the next 50 years, not 25-50%, as has so often been predicted. And finally, most forms of environmental pollution either appear to have been exaggerated, or are transient—associated with the early phases of industrialisation and therefore best cured not by restricting economic growth, but by accelerating it. One form of pollution—the release of greenhouse gases that causes global warming—does appear to be a long-term phenomenon, but its total impact is unlikely to pose a devastating problem for the future of humanity. A bigger problem may well turn out to be an inappropriate response to it.
Can things only get better?
Take these four points one by one. First, the exhaustion of natural resources. The early environmental movement worried that the mineral resources on which modern industry depends would run out. Clearly, there must be some limit to the amount of fossil fuels and metal ores that can be extracted from the earth: the planet, after all, has a finite mass. But that limit is far greater than many environmentalists would have people believe.
Reserves of natural resources have to be located, a process that costs money. That, not natural scarcity, is the main limit on their availability. However, known reserves of all fossil fuels, and of most commercially important metals, are now larger than they were when “The Limits to Growth” was published. In the case of oil, for example, reserves that could be extracted at reasonably competitive prices would keep the world economy running for about 150 years at present consumption rates. Add to that the fact that the price of solar energy has fallen by half in every decade for the past 30 years, and appears likely to continue to do so into the future, and energy shortages do not look like a serious threat either to the economy or to the environment.
The development for non-fuel resources has been similar. Cement, aluminium, iron, copper, gold, nitrogen and zinc account for more than 75% of global expenditure on raw materials. Despite an increase in consumption of these materials of between two- and ten-fold over the past 50 years, the number of years of available reserves has actually grown. Moreover, the increasing abundance is reflected in an ever-decreasing price: The Economist's index of prices of industrial raw materials has dropped some 80% in inflation-adjusted terms since 1845.
Next, the population explosion is also turning out to be a bugaboo. In 1968, Dr Ehrlich predicted in his best selling book, “The Population Bomb”, that “the battle to feed humanity is over. In the course of the 1970s the world will experience starvation of tragic proportions—hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.”
That did not happen. Instead, according to the United Nations, agricultural production in the developing world has increased by 52% per person since 1961. The daily food intake in poor countries has increased from 1,932 calories, barely enough for survival, in 1961 to 2,650 calories in 1998, and is expected to rise to 3,020 by 2030. Likewise, the proportion of people in developing countries who are starving has dropped from 45% in 1949 to 18% today, and is expected to decline even further to 12% in 2010 and just 6% in 2030. Food, in other words, is becoming not scarcer but ever more abundant. This is reflected in its price. Since 1800 food prices have decreased by more than 90%, and in 2000, according to the World Bank, prices were lower than ever before.
Modern Malthus
Malthus was wrong: population growth has not been exponential
Dr Ehrlich's prediction echoed that made 170 years earlier by Thomas Malthus. Malthus claimed that, if unchecked, human population would expand exponentially, while food production could increase only linearly, by bringing new land into cultivation. He was wrong. Population growth has turned out to have an internal check: as people grow richer and healthier, they have smaller families. Indeed, the growth rate of the human population reached its peak, of more than 2% a year, in the early 1960s. The rate of increase has been declining ever since. It is now 1.26%, and is expected to fall to 0.46% in 2050. The United Nations estimates that most of the world's population growth will be over by 2100, with the population stabilising at just below 11 billion (see chart 1).
Malthus also failed to take account of developments in agricultural technology. These have squeezed more and more food out of each hectare of land. It is this application of human ingenuity that has boosted food production, not merely in line with, but ahead of, population growth. It has also, incidentally, reduced the need to take new land into cultivation, thus reducing the pressure on biodiversity.
Third, that threat of biodiversity loss is real, but exaggerated. Most early estimates used simple island models that linked a loss in habitat with a loss of biodiversity. A rule-of-thumb indicated that loss of 90% of forest meant a 50% loss of species. As rainforests seemed to be cut at alarming rates, estimates of annual species loss of 20,000-100,000 abounded. Many people expected the number of species to fall by half globally within a generation or two.
However, the data simply does not bear out these predictions. In the eastern United States, forests were reduced over two centuries to fragments totalling just 1-2% of their original area, yet this resulted in the extinction of only one forest bird. In Puerto Rico, the primary forest area has been reduced over the past 400 years by 99%, yet “only” seven of 60 species of bird has become extinct. All but 12% of the Brazilian Atlantic rainforest was cleared in the 19th century, leaving only scattered fragments. According to the rule-of-thumb, half of all its species should have become extinct. Yet, when the World Conservation Union and the Brazilian Society of Zoology analysed all 291 known Atlantic forest animals, none could be declared extinct. Species, therefore, seem more resilient than expected. And tropical forests are not lost at annual rates of 2-4%, as many environmentalists have claimed: the latest UN figures indicate a loss of less than 0.5%.
In London, air pollution peaked around 1890
Fourth, pollution is also exaggerated. Many analyses show that air pollution diminishes when a society becomes rich enough to be able to afford to be concerned about the environment. For London, the city for which the best data are available, air pollution peaked around 1890 (see chart 2). Today, the air is cleaner than it has been since 1585. There is good reason to believe that this general picture holds true for all developed countries. And, although air pollution is increasing in many developing countries, they are merely replicating the development of the industrialised countries. When they grow sufficiently rich they, too, will start to reduce their air pollution.
All this contradicts the litany. Yet opinion polls suggest that many people, in the rich world, at least, nurture the belief that environmental standards are declining. Four factors cause this disjunction between perception and reality.
Always look on the dark side of life
One is the lopsidedness built into scientific research. Scientific funding goes mainly to areas with many problems. That may be wise policy, but it will also create an impression that many more potential problems exist than is the case.
Secondly, environmental groups need to be noticed by the mass media. They also need to keep the money rolling in. Understandably, perhaps, they sometimes exaggerate. In 1997, for example, the Worldwide Fund for Nature issued a press release entitled, “Two-thirds of the world's forests lost forever”. The truth turns out to be nearer 20%.
Environmental groups are much like other lobby groups, but are treated less sceptically
Though these groups are run overwhelmingly by selfless folk, they nevertheless share many of the characteristics of other lobby groups. That would matter less if people applied the same degree of scepticism to environmental lobbying as they do to lobby groups in other fields. A trade organisation arguing for, say, weaker pollution controls is instantly seen as self-interested. Yet a green organisation opposing such a weakening is seen as altruistic, even if a dispassionate view of the controls in question might suggest they are doing more harm than good.
A third source of confusion is the attitude of the media. People are clearly more curious about bad news than good. Newspapers and broadcasters are there to provide what the public wants. That, however, can lead to significant distortions of perception. An example was America's encounter with El Niño in 1997 and 1998. This climatic phenomenon was accused of wrecking tourism, causing allergies, melting the ski-slopes and causing 22 deaths by dumping snow in Ohio.
A more balanced view comes from a recent article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. This tries to count up both the problems and the benefits of the 1997-98 Niño. The damage it did was estimated at $4 billion. However, the benefits amounted to some $19 billion. These came from higher winter temperatures (which saved an estimated 850 lives, reduced heating costs and diminished spring floods caused by meltwaters), and from the well-documented connection between past Niños and fewer Atlantic hurricanes. In 1998, America experienced no big Atlantic hurricanes and thus avoided huge losses. These benefits were not reported as widely as the losses.
The fourth factor is poor individual perception. People worry that the endless rise in the amount of stuff everyone throws away will cause the world to run out of places to dispose of waste. Yet, even if America's trash output continues to rise as it has done in the past, and even if the American population doubles by 2100, all the rubbish America produces through the entire 21st century will still take up only the area of a square, each of whose sides measures 28km (18 miles). That is just one-12,000th of the area of the entire United States.
Ignorance matters only when it leads to faulty judgments. But fear of largely imaginary environmental problems can divert political energy from dealing with real ones. The table above, showing the cost in the United States of various measures to save a year of a person's life, illustrates the danger. Some environmental policies, such as reducing lead in petrol and sulphur-dioxide emissions from fuel oil, are very cost-effective. But many of these are already in place. Most environmental measures are less cost-effective than interventions aimed at improving safety (such as installing air-bags in cars) and those involving medical screening and vaccination. Some are absurdly expensive.
Radically cutting carbon-dioxide emissions will be far more expensive than adapting to higher temperatures
Yet a false perception of risk may be about to lead to errors more expensive even than controlling the emission of benzene at tyre plants. Carbon-dioxide emissions are causing the planet to warm. The best estimates are that the temperature will rise by some 2°-3°C in this century, causing considerable problems, almost exclusively in the developing world, at a total cost of $5,000 billion. Getting rid of global warming would thus seem to be a good idea. The question is whether the cure will actually be more costly than the ailment.
Despite the intuition that something drastic needs to be done about such a costly problem, economic analyses clearly show that it will be far more expensive to cut carbon-dioxide emissions radically than to pay the costs of adaptation to the increased temperatures. The effect of the Kyoto Protocol on the climate would be minuscule, even if it were implemented in full. A model by Tom Wigley, one of the main authors of the reports of the UN Climate Change Panel, shows how an expected temperature increase of 2.1°C in 2100 would be diminished by the treaty to an increase of 1.9°C instead. Or, to put it another way, the temperature increase that the planet would have experienced in 2094 would be postponed to 2100.
The Kyoto agreement merely buys the world six years
So the Kyoto agreement does not prevent global warming, but merely buys the world six years. Yet, the cost of Kyoto, for the United States alone, will be higher than the cost of solving the world's single most pressing health problem: providing universal access to clean drinking water and sanitation. Such measures would avoid 2m deaths every year, and prevent half a billion people from becoming seriously ill.
And that is the best case. If the treaty were implemented inefficiently, the cost of Kyoto could approach $1 trillion, or more than five times the cost of worldwide water and sanitation coverage. For comparison, the total global-aid budget today is about $50 billion a year.
To replace the litany with facts is crucial if people want to make the best possible decisions for the future. Of course, rational environmental management and environmental investment are good ideas—but the costs and benefits of such investments should be compared to those of similar investments in all the other important areas of human endeavour. It may be costly to be overly optimistic—but more costly still to be too pessimistic.
Bjorn Lomborg is a statistician at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, who once held what he calls “left-wing Greenpeace views”. In 1997, he set out to challenge Julian Simon, an economist who doubted environmentalist claims—and found that the data generally supported Simon. His book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist”, will be published in English by Cambridge University Press in a month's time.
http://www.economist.com/opinion/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=718860
Aug 2nd 2001 From The Economist print edition
Panos
Environmentalists tend to believe that, ecologically speaking, things are getting worse and worse. Bjorn Lomborg, once deep green himself, argues that they are wrong in almost every particular
ECOLOGY and economics should push in the same direction. After all, the “eco” part of each word derives from the Greek word for “home”, and the protagonists of both claim to have humanity's welfare as their goal. Yet environmentalists and economists are often at loggerheads. For economists, the world seems to be getting better. For many environmentalists, it seems to be getting worse.
These environmentalists, led by such veterans as Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, and Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute, have developed a sort of “litany” of four big environmental fears:
• Natural resources are running out.
• The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat.
• Species are becoming extinct in vast numbers: forests are disappearing and fish stocks are collapsing.
• The planet's air and water are becoming ever more polluted.
Human activity is thus defiling the earth, and humanity may end up killing itself in the process.
The “litany” of environmental fears is not backed up by evidence
The trouble is, the evidence does not back up this litany. First, energy and other natural resources have become more abundant, not less so since the Club of Rome published “The Limits to Growth” in 1972. Second, more food is now produced per head of the world's population than at any time in history. Fewer people are starving. Third, although species are indeed becoming extinct, only about 0.7% of them are expected to disappear in the next 50 years, not 25-50%, as has so often been predicted. And finally, most forms of environmental pollution either appear to have been exaggerated, or are transient—associated with the early phases of industrialisation and therefore best cured not by restricting economic growth, but by accelerating it. One form of pollution—the release of greenhouse gases that causes global warming—does appear to be a long-term phenomenon, but its total impact is unlikely to pose a devastating problem for the future of humanity. A bigger problem may well turn out to be an inappropriate response to it.
Can things only get better?
Take these four points one by one. First, the exhaustion of natural resources. The early environmental movement worried that the mineral resources on which modern industry depends would run out. Clearly, there must be some limit to the amount of fossil fuels and metal ores that can be extracted from the earth: the planet, after all, has a finite mass. But that limit is far greater than many environmentalists would have people believe.
Reserves of natural resources have to be located, a process that costs money. That, not natural scarcity, is the main limit on their availability. However, known reserves of all fossil fuels, and of most commercially important metals, are now larger than they were when “The Limits to Growth” was published. In the case of oil, for example, reserves that could be extracted at reasonably competitive prices would keep the world economy running for about 150 years at present consumption rates. Add to that the fact that the price of solar energy has fallen by half in every decade for the past 30 years, and appears likely to continue to do so into the future, and energy shortages do not look like a serious threat either to the economy or to the environment.
The development for non-fuel resources has been similar. Cement, aluminium, iron, copper, gold, nitrogen and zinc account for more than 75% of global expenditure on raw materials. Despite an increase in consumption of these materials of between two- and ten-fold over the past 50 years, the number of years of available reserves has actually grown. Moreover, the increasing abundance is reflected in an ever-decreasing price: The Economist's index of prices of industrial raw materials has dropped some 80% in inflation-adjusted terms since 1845.
Next, the population explosion is also turning out to be a bugaboo. In 1968, Dr Ehrlich predicted in his best selling book, “The Population Bomb”, that “the battle to feed humanity is over. In the course of the 1970s the world will experience starvation of tragic proportions—hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.”
That did not happen. Instead, according to the United Nations, agricultural production in the developing world has increased by 52% per person since 1961. The daily food intake in poor countries has increased from 1,932 calories, barely enough for survival, in 1961 to 2,650 calories in 1998, and is expected to rise to 3,020 by 2030. Likewise, the proportion of people in developing countries who are starving has dropped from 45% in 1949 to 18% today, and is expected to decline even further to 12% in 2010 and just 6% in 2030. Food, in other words, is becoming not scarcer but ever more abundant. This is reflected in its price. Since 1800 food prices have decreased by more than 90%, and in 2000, according to the World Bank, prices were lower than ever before.
Modern Malthus
Malthus was wrong: population growth has not been exponential
Dr Ehrlich's prediction echoed that made 170 years earlier by Thomas Malthus. Malthus claimed that, if unchecked, human population would expand exponentially, while food production could increase only linearly, by bringing new land into cultivation. He was wrong. Population growth has turned out to have an internal check: as people grow richer and healthier, they have smaller families. Indeed, the growth rate of the human population reached its peak, of more than 2% a year, in the early 1960s. The rate of increase has been declining ever since. It is now 1.26%, and is expected to fall to 0.46% in 2050. The United Nations estimates that most of the world's population growth will be over by 2100, with the population stabilising at just below 11 billion (see chart 1).
Malthus also failed to take account of developments in agricultural technology. These have squeezed more and more food out of each hectare of land. It is this application of human ingenuity that has boosted food production, not merely in line with, but ahead of, population growth. It has also, incidentally, reduced the need to take new land into cultivation, thus reducing the pressure on biodiversity.
Third, that threat of biodiversity loss is real, but exaggerated. Most early estimates used simple island models that linked a loss in habitat with a loss of biodiversity. A rule-of-thumb indicated that loss of 90% of forest meant a 50% loss of species. As rainforests seemed to be cut at alarming rates, estimates of annual species loss of 20,000-100,000 abounded. Many people expected the number of species to fall by half globally within a generation or two.
However, the data simply does not bear out these predictions. In the eastern United States, forests were reduced over two centuries to fragments totalling just 1-2% of their original area, yet this resulted in the extinction of only one forest bird. In Puerto Rico, the primary forest area has been reduced over the past 400 years by 99%, yet “only” seven of 60 species of bird has become extinct. All but 12% of the Brazilian Atlantic rainforest was cleared in the 19th century, leaving only scattered fragments. According to the rule-of-thumb, half of all its species should have become extinct. Yet, when the World Conservation Union and the Brazilian Society of Zoology analysed all 291 known Atlantic forest animals, none could be declared extinct. Species, therefore, seem more resilient than expected. And tropical forests are not lost at annual rates of 2-4%, as many environmentalists have claimed: the latest UN figures indicate a loss of less than 0.5%.
In London, air pollution peaked around 1890
Fourth, pollution is also exaggerated. Many analyses show that air pollution diminishes when a society becomes rich enough to be able to afford to be concerned about the environment. For London, the city for which the best data are available, air pollution peaked around 1890 (see chart 2). Today, the air is cleaner than it has been since 1585. There is good reason to believe that this general picture holds true for all developed countries. And, although air pollution is increasing in many developing countries, they are merely replicating the development of the industrialised countries. When they grow sufficiently rich they, too, will start to reduce their air pollution.
All this contradicts the litany. Yet opinion polls suggest that many people, in the rich world, at least, nurture the belief that environmental standards are declining. Four factors cause this disjunction between perception and reality.
Always look on the dark side of life
One is the lopsidedness built into scientific research. Scientific funding goes mainly to areas with many problems. That may be wise policy, but it will also create an impression that many more potential problems exist than is the case.
Secondly, environmental groups need to be noticed by the mass media. They also need to keep the money rolling in. Understandably, perhaps, they sometimes exaggerate. In 1997, for example, the Worldwide Fund for Nature issued a press release entitled, “Two-thirds of the world's forests lost forever”. The truth turns out to be nearer 20%.
Environmental groups are much like other lobby groups, but are treated less sceptically
Though these groups are run overwhelmingly by selfless folk, they nevertheless share many of the characteristics of other lobby groups. That would matter less if people applied the same degree of scepticism to environmental lobbying as they do to lobby groups in other fields. A trade organisation arguing for, say, weaker pollution controls is instantly seen as self-interested. Yet a green organisation opposing such a weakening is seen as altruistic, even if a dispassionate view of the controls in question might suggest they are doing more harm than good.
A third source of confusion is the attitude of the media. People are clearly more curious about bad news than good. Newspapers and broadcasters are there to provide what the public wants. That, however, can lead to significant distortions of perception. An example was America's encounter with El Niño in 1997 and 1998. This climatic phenomenon was accused of wrecking tourism, causing allergies, melting the ski-slopes and causing 22 deaths by dumping snow in Ohio.
A more balanced view comes from a recent article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. This tries to count up both the problems and the benefits of the 1997-98 Niño. The damage it did was estimated at $4 billion. However, the benefits amounted to some $19 billion. These came from higher winter temperatures (which saved an estimated 850 lives, reduced heating costs and diminished spring floods caused by meltwaters), and from the well-documented connection between past Niños and fewer Atlantic hurricanes. In 1998, America experienced no big Atlantic hurricanes and thus avoided huge losses. These benefits were not reported as widely as the losses.
The fourth factor is poor individual perception. People worry that the endless rise in the amount of stuff everyone throws away will cause the world to run out of places to dispose of waste. Yet, even if America's trash output continues to rise as it has done in the past, and even if the American population doubles by 2100, all the rubbish America produces through the entire 21st century will still take up only the area of a square, each of whose sides measures 28km (18 miles). That is just one-12,000th of the area of the entire United States.
Ignorance matters only when it leads to faulty judgments. But fear of largely imaginary environmental problems can divert political energy from dealing with real ones. The table above, showing the cost in the United States of various measures to save a year of a person's life, illustrates the danger. Some environmental policies, such as reducing lead in petrol and sulphur-dioxide emissions from fuel oil, are very cost-effective. But many of these are already in place. Most environmental measures are less cost-effective than interventions aimed at improving safety (such as installing air-bags in cars) and those involving medical screening and vaccination. Some are absurdly expensive.
Radically cutting carbon-dioxide emissions will be far more expensive than adapting to higher temperatures
Yet a false perception of risk may be about to lead to errors more expensive even than controlling the emission of benzene at tyre plants. Carbon-dioxide emissions are causing the planet to warm. The best estimates are that the temperature will rise by some 2°-3°C in this century, causing considerable problems, almost exclusively in the developing world, at a total cost of $5,000 billion. Getting rid of global warming would thus seem to be a good idea. The question is whether the cure will actually be more costly than the ailment.
Despite the intuition that something drastic needs to be done about such a costly problem, economic analyses clearly show that it will be far more expensive to cut carbon-dioxide emissions radically than to pay the costs of adaptation to the increased temperatures. The effect of the Kyoto Protocol on the climate would be minuscule, even if it were implemented in full. A model by Tom Wigley, one of the main authors of the reports of the UN Climate Change Panel, shows how an expected temperature increase of 2.1°C in 2100 would be diminished by the treaty to an increase of 1.9°C instead. Or, to put it another way, the temperature increase that the planet would have experienced in 2094 would be postponed to 2100.
The Kyoto agreement merely buys the world six years
So the Kyoto agreement does not prevent global warming, but merely buys the world six years. Yet, the cost of Kyoto, for the United States alone, will be higher than the cost of solving the world's single most pressing health problem: providing universal access to clean drinking water and sanitation. Such measures would avoid 2m deaths every year, and prevent half a billion people from becoming seriously ill.
And that is the best case. If the treaty were implemented inefficiently, the cost of Kyoto could approach $1 trillion, or more than five times the cost of worldwide water and sanitation coverage. For comparison, the total global-aid budget today is about $50 billion a year.
To replace the litany with facts is crucial if people want to make the best possible decisions for the future. Of course, rational environmental management and environmental investment are good ideas—but the costs and benefits of such investments should be compared to those of similar investments in all the other important areas of human endeavour. It may be costly to be overly optimistic—but more costly still to be too pessimistic.
Bjorn Lomborg is a statistician at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, who once held what he calls “left-wing Greenpeace views”. In 1997, he set out to challenge Julian Simon, an economist who doubted environmentalist claims—and found that the data generally supported Simon. His book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist”, will be published in English by Cambridge University Press in a month's time.
Eco Theology for Kids
This is a WorldNetDaily printer-friendly version of the article which follows. To view this item online, visit http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=23479
Tuesday, July 3, 2001
Eco-theology for kids
By Paul Sperry
© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com-->© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com
WASHINGTON – In last week's TV special about the government's eco-friendly brainwashing of our kids, ABC's John Stossel exposed probably the No. 1 reason for home-schooling. But he didn't go far enough.
The danger to our kids doesn't stop at misinformation about basic physical science. Greenpeace and other environmental activists who are writing classroom lesson plans these days have a bigger agenda than saving the Amazon or spotted owl.
They want global collectivism.
The hidden message in the environmental movement is anti-capitalism, anti-individualism, anti-God and, ultimately, anti-America, since it's upon all these things that this country was founded.
Anti-capitalism Global-warming alarmists have convinced kids (not to mention many gullible politicians and journalists) that CO2-spewing factories are causing a "greenhouse effect" that will overheat the planet and trigger a chain of disasters.
Who's the villain? Industry. Why does industry pollute? To make profits. You get the point.
Of course, volcanoes have been spewing heat-trapping greenhouse gases since the earth's mantle was formed. All the smokestacks and tailpipes in the world couldn't compete with Mount St. Helen's or Mount Pinatubo's carbon belches.
Fact is, 85 percent of the CO2 in our atmosphere comes from natural sources. Man's activities produce the rest.
But public-school teachers skip that chapter.
After school, children's minds are polluted with more industry-bashing green propaganda, thanks to Hollywood nature nuts like capitalist-turned-socialist Ted Turner.
In his TBS cartoon "Captain Planet and the Planeteers," industrialists aren't just greedy, they're downright evil, polluting just for the hell of it – until the teen-green superheroes rescue the planet from their dirty mitts.
Anti-individualism We're all together on the good ship Earth, or so goes the new classroom sermon. Share resources, don't waste. "Reduce, reuse, recycle." In some schools the pledge to recycle is recited more often than the Pledge of Allegiance.
But what kids aren't taught is that most recycling doesn't work and makes no economic sense at all. If you recycle, chances are you're wasting your time.
Because plastics are so hard to sort and separate, only about 2 percent of bottles and other plastics ever get recycled. Sorting costs can run as high as $1,500 a ton, far outstripping any revenue. Companies and cities just have no incentive to do it, so backlogs just grow higher and higher.
Some cities actually have to pay recyclers to take newspapers. Why? It's too costly to invest in the de-inking machines and other equipment used in recycling them. Recycling a newspaper is 10 times as expensive as dumping it in a landfill.
Only recycling aluminum cans makes sense. It's cheap, easy and saves huge energy costs.
Anti-God Environmental extremism is a perfect fit for the secular public-school system. It teaches kids that humans do not have dominion over animals, that our resources and lives are limited.
The green curriculum completely removes God from the picture. This world is all you've got, goes the message to kids, so better take care. Store up your treasures on earth, not Heaven, and worship Mother Nature.
It's eco-theology for kids. No wonder so many 20-somethings backpack in the Costa Rican rain forest between rounds of body-piercings, rather than pursue jobs in middle management.
Paul Sperry is Washington bureau chief for WorldNetDaily.com. He is author of "Crude Politics: How Bush's Oil Cronies Hijacked the War on Terrorism" (WND Books, an imprint of Thomas Nelson Publishers).
Tuesday, July 3, 2001
Eco-theology for kids
By Paul Sperry
© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com-->© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com
WASHINGTON – In last week's TV special about the government's eco-friendly brainwashing of our kids, ABC's John Stossel exposed probably the No. 1 reason for home-schooling. But he didn't go far enough.
The danger to our kids doesn't stop at misinformation about basic physical science. Greenpeace and other environmental activists who are writing classroom lesson plans these days have a bigger agenda than saving the Amazon or spotted owl.
They want global collectivism.
"The lies about the environment are merely a vehicle to move kids closer to.
accepting Marxism and atheism (or, its cousin, pantheism, in which all religions
are valued equally). Call it gateway propaganda"
The hidden message in the environmental movement is anti-capitalism, anti-individualism, anti-God and, ultimately, anti-America, since it's upon all these things that this country was founded.
Anti-capitalism Global-warming alarmists have convinced kids (not to mention many gullible politicians and journalists) that CO2-spewing factories are causing a "greenhouse effect" that will overheat the planet and trigger a chain of disasters.
Who's the villain? Industry. Why does industry pollute? To make profits. You get the point.
Of course, volcanoes have been spewing heat-trapping greenhouse gases since the earth's mantle was formed. All the smokestacks and tailpipes in the world couldn't compete with Mount St. Helen's or Mount Pinatubo's carbon belches.
Fact is, 85 percent of the CO2 in our atmosphere comes from natural sources. Man's activities produce the rest.
But public-school teachers skip that chapter.
After school, children's minds are polluted with more industry-bashing green propaganda, thanks to Hollywood nature nuts like capitalist-turned-socialist Ted Turner.
In his TBS cartoon "Captain Planet and the Planeteers," industrialists aren't just greedy, they're downright evil, polluting just for the hell of it – until the teen-green superheroes rescue the planet from their dirty mitts.
Anti-individualism We're all together on the good ship Earth, or so goes the new classroom sermon. Share resources, don't waste. "Reduce, reuse, recycle." In some schools the pledge to recycle is recited more often than the Pledge of Allegiance.
But what kids aren't taught is that most recycling doesn't work and makes no economic sense at all. If you recycle, chances are you're wasting your time.
Because plastics are so hard to sort and separate, only about 2 percent of bottles and other plastics ever get recycled. Sorting costs can run as high as $1,500 a ton, far outstripping any revenue. Companies and cities just have no incentive to do it, so backlogs just grow higher and higher.
Some cities actually have to pay recyclers to take newspapers. Why? It's too costly to invest in the de-inking machines and other equipment used in recycling them. Recycling a newspaper is 10 times as expensive as dumping it in a landfill.
Only recycling aluminum cans makes sense. It's cheap, easy and saves huge energy costs.
Anti-God Environmental extremism is a perfect fit for the secular public-school system. It teaches kids that humans do not have dominion over animals, that our resources and lives are limited.
The green curriculum completely removes God from the picture. This world is all you've got, goes the message to kids, so better take care. Store up your treasures on earth, not Heaven, and worship Mother Nature.
It's eco-theology for kids. No wonder so many 20-somethings backpack in the Costa Rican rain forest between rounds of body-piercings, rather than pursue jobs in middle management.
Paul Sperry is Washington bureau chief for WorldNetDaily.com. He is author of "Crude Politics: How Bush's Oil Cronies Hijacked the War on Terrorism" (WND Books, an imprint of Thomas Nelson Publishers).
Green Hoax
The Global Warming Hoax by James K. Glassman (December 15, 2003)
Summary: The delegation met Wednesday with counterparts from Europe, and Inhofe and many of his colleagues were shocked at the Europeans' refusal even to consider scientific research that casts doubt on predictions of cataclysmic warming. "They just don't want to talk about the science," said Inhofe.
[www.CapMag.com] MILAN, Italy -- On many of the walls here at the Feira Milano conference center, site of the giant United Nations meeting on climate change, Green activists have posted flamboyant posters showing a picture of Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla), with a quotation from him:
In fact, Inhofe is one of the best-informed Senators on the science and economics of global warming. And "global warming" -- as it's used by environmental extremists -- is indeed a hoax.
Yes, the Earth's surface has warmed a bit over the past century, but is that warming caused mainly by humans or by natural cycles? And can changes in human activity -- specifically reductions in carbon-dioxide emissions -- have anything more than a tiny effect on temperature? The answers to those questions, which are at the heart of the Kyoto Protocol and other attempts to force cuts in energy use, are simply unknown.
It is the claim of certainty that is a hoax. It's a dangerous one, too, since using global-warming theory as the basis for extreme policy mandates could plunge the world into a long-term recession or even a depression.
The quote on the poster comes from Inhofe's speech during debate over the McCain-Lieberman bill that would have curtailed greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States, a measure similar to the Kyoto Protocol, which President Bush rejected in 2001 as "fatally flawed" and which still lacks enough ratifying nations for implementation six years after it was signed. McCain-Lieberman was rejected, too -- in part because of Inhofe's strenuous efforts as chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee.
One of the themes being promoted by Greens at this conference is that the American people want Kyoto-style measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions and that the close vote on McCain-Lieberman proves it. Wednesday's issue of ECO, the daily conference newsletter backed by WWF International, Greenpeace and other environmental groups, refers to "mounting anger at home" to President Bush's stance on climate change. "The American public is catching on to this charade," claims ECO.
But several times this week, Inhofe has patiently explained the real arithmetic behind the Senate vote. First, it was 16 votes short of the 60 effectively needed for passage under Senate rules. Second, it was riddled with concessions to win votes. Without the amendments, Inhofe figures only 32 Senators would have backed it. Finally, the bill was sold under a claim that it would cost only $20 per household per year. A study commissioned by TechCentralStation and performed by Charles River Associates, the respected economic research firm, found that the costs would be at least 17 times that much.
Inhofe heads a congressional delegation of eight Republicans in Milan. The others are Sens. Larry Craig (Idaho), Craig Thomas (Wyo.) and Jeff Sessions (Ala.) and Reps. Chris Cannon (Utah), Fred Upton (Mich.), Chris Shays (Conn.) and Jim Greenwood (Pa). There are no Democratic members of Congress here but plenty of Democratic staffers.
I sat down with Inhofe at breakfast at his hotel in Milan Thursday morning. Considering the fact that nothing much has been happening at COP-9, the ninth United Nations conference of the parties to the 1992 Rio agreement on the environment, I started by asking why he was here.
"I'm here," he said, "to show that we are not going to ratify Kyoto."
That's Inhofe at his finest. Straight talk. No nonsense.
Unlike some other members of Congress, who accept the scientific basis for Kyoto but say that the treaty costs too much and exempts developing countries, Inhofe disputes the science. He knows the studies, and he recognizes that the tide has turned in the past few years.
"Virtually all of the research since 1999 has been refuting [the theory of human-caused global warming]. It is ludicrous that Kyoto can be as damaging economically as it is when there is no science to justify it."
New research, for example, has challenged Michael Mann's "hockey-stick" formula, which asserts that temperatures have risen sharply, in an unprecedented fashion. In fact, warming was worse centuries ago, before industrialization and automobiles.
The delegation met Wednesday with counterparts from Europe, and Inhofe and many of his colleagues were shocked at the Europeans' refusal even to consider scientific research that casts doubt on predictions of cataclysmic warming. "They just don't want to talk about the science," said Inhofe. "They don't want to listen. They were Zombies" -- unlike "real people in the U.S." Those Americans, said Inhofe, "we are turning around" with the recent research.
Some members of the delegation have been as forceful as Inhofe on the subject of climate-change science. For example, in 1998, with Bill Clinton in the White House, Sen. Larry Craig said, "As more and more American scientists review the available data on global warming, it is becoming increasingly clear that the vast majority believe the commitments for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions made by the administration in the Kyoto Protocol are an unnecessary response to an exaggerated threat the vice president himself [i.e., Al Gore] is caught up in making."
The talk of the conference has been Russia. Will the Russians ratify Kyoto? The treaty requires the votes of nations producing 55 percent of all emissions from developed countries. Currently, the tally is 44 percent, so the Russians, with 17 percent, hold the key.
Inhofe says that some Russians see negotiations on ratification "as a way to make some money. They want to see how big the bribe will be." But, in the end, he thinks the Russians will reject Kyoto, for reasons of science and economics, just as Bush rejected it as shortly after his inauguration.
"I'm proud of Putin for having the courage to look at the science," said Inhofe, referring to the Russian president. "In this environment, it takes courage."
Inhofe also agrees with the assessment that this has been a particularly depressing conference for the Greens. The plenary sessions are only about half-full, and "there was no enthusiasm in the room."
Meanwhile, Inhofe points out, the United States is shelling out $4.7 million, footing the bill for about one-fourth of the cost of the U.N.'s extravaganza. But the price may be worthwhile, if only because Inhofe is getting his message out. He's teaching the value of straight talking to the Europeans and the Green NGO officials who, for a long time now, have assumed they can set the world's agenda. This year, with Kyoto on its deathbed, they're learning otherwise. It's delightful to see.
About the Author: James K. Glassman is the host of TechCentralStation.com.
Summary: The delegation met Wednesday with counterparts from Europe, and Inhofe and many of his colleagues were shocked at the Europeans' refusal even to consider scientific research that casts doubt on predictions of cataclysmic warming. "They just don't want to talk about the science," said Inhofe.
[www.CapMag.com] MILAN, Italy -- On many of the walls here at the Feira Milano conference center, site of the giant United Nations meeting on climate change, Green activists have posted flamboyant posters showing a picture of Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla), with a quotation from him:
The idea being proffered by these sophisticates, of course, is that Inhofe is a typical American rube. Global warming a hoax! What a dope!"Global warming is 'the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.'"
In fact, Inhofe is one of the best-informed Senators on the science and economics of global warming. And "global warming" -- as it's used by environmental extremists -- is indeed a hoax.
Yes, the Earth's surface has warmed a bit over the past century, but is that warming caused mainly by humans or by natural cycles? And can changes in human activity -- specifically reductions in carbon-dioxide emissions -- have anything more than a tiny effect on temperature? The answers to those questions, which are at the heart of the Kyoto Protocol and other attempts to force cuts in energy use, are simply unknown.
It is the claim of certainty that is a hoax. It's a dangerous one, too, since using global-warming theory as the basis for extreme policy mandates could plunge the world into a long-term recession or even a depression.
The quote on the poster comes from Inhofe's speech during debate over the McCain-Lieberman bill that would have curtailed greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States, a measure similar to the Kyoto Protocol, which President Bush rejected in 2001 as "fatally flawed" and which still lacks enough ratifying nations for implementation six years after it was signed. McCain-Lieberman was rejected, too -- in part because of Inhofe's strenuous efforts as chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee.
One of the themes being promoted by Greens at this conference is that the American people want Kyoto-style measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions and that the close vote on McCain-Lieberman proves it. Wednesday's issue of ECO, the daily conference newsletter backed by WWF International, Greenpeace and other environmental groups, refers to "mounting anger at home" to President Bush's stance on climate change. "The American public is catching on to this charade," claims ECO.
But several times this week, Inhofe has patiently explained the real arithmetic behind the Senate vote. First, it was 16 votes short of the 60 effectively needed for passage under Senate rules. Second, it was riddled with concessions to win votes. Without the amendments, Inhofe figures only 32 Senators would have backed it. Finally, the bill was sold under a claim that it would cost only $20 per household per year. A study commissioned by TechCentralStation and performed by Charles River Associates, the respected economic research firm, found that the costs would be at least 17 times that much.
Inhofe heads a congressional delegation of eight Republicans in Milan. The others are Sens. Larry Craig (Idaho), Craig Thomas (Wyo.) and Jeff Sessions (Ala.) and Reps. Chris Cannon (Utah), Fred Upton (Mich.), Chris Shays (Conn.) and Jim Greenwood (Pa). There are no Democratic members of Congress here but plenty of Democratic staffers.
I sat down with Inhofe at breakfast at his hotel in Milan Thursday morning. Considering the fact that nothing much has been happening at COP-9, the ninth United Nations conference of the parties to the 1992 Rio agreement on the environment, I started by asking why he was here.
"I'm here," he said, "to show that we are not going to ratify Kyoto."
That's Inhofe at his finest. Straight talk. No nonsense.
Unlike some other members of Congress, who accept the scientific basis for Kyoto but say that the treaty costs too much and exempts developing countries, Inhofe disputes the science. He knows the studies, and he recognizes that the tide has turned in the past few years.
"Virtually all of the research since 1999 has been refuting [the theory of human-caused global warming]. It is ludicrous that Kyoto can be as damaging economically as it is when there is no science to justify it."
New research, for example, has challenged Michael Mann's "hockey-stick" formula, which asserts that temperatures have risen sharply, in an unprecedented fashion. In fact, warming was worse centuries ago, before industrialization and automobiles.
The delegation met Wednesday with counterparts from Europe, and Inhofe and many of his colleagues were shocked at the Europeans' refusal even to consider scientific research that casts doubt on predictions of cataclysmic warming. "They just don't want to talk about the science," said Inhofe. "They don't want to listen. They were Zombies" -- unlike "real people in the U.S." Those Americans, said Inhofe, "we are turning around" with the recent research.
Some members of the delegation have been as forceful as Inhofe on the subject of climate-change science. For example, in 1998, with Bill Clinton in the White House, Sen. Larry Craig said, "As more and more American scientists review the available data on global warming, it is becoming increasingly clear that the vast majority believe the commitments for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions made by the administration in the Kyoto Protocol are an unnecessary response to an exaggerated threat the vice president himself [i.e., Al Gore] is caught up in making."
The talk of the conference has been Russia. Will the Russians ratify Kyoto? The treaty requires the votes of nations producing 55 percent of all emissions from developed countries. Currently, the tally is 44 percent, so the Russians, with 17 percent, hold the key.
Inhofe says that some Russians see negotiations on ratification "as a way to make some money. They want to see how big the bribe will be." But, in the end, he thinks the Russians will reject Kyoto, for reasons of science and economics, just as Bush rejected it as shortly after his inauguration.
"I'm proud of Putin for having the courage to look at the science," said Inhofe, referring to the Russian president. "In this environment, it takes courage."
Inhofe also agrees with the assessment that this has been a particularly depressing conference for the Greens. The plenary sessions are only about half-full, and "there was no enthusiasm in the room."
Meanwhile, Inhofe points out, the United States is shelling out $4.7 million, footing the bill for about one-fourth of the cost of the U.N.'s extravaganza. But the price may be worthwhile, if only because Inhofe is getting his message out. He's teaching the value of straight talking to the Europeans and the Green NGO officials who, for a long time now, have assumed they can set the world's agenda. This year, with Kyoto on its deathbed, they're learning otherwise. It's delightful to see.
About the Author: James K. Glassman is the host of TechCentralStation.com.
Down Under doubts about Bush
washingtonpost.com
Down Under, Doubts About Bush
By David S. Broderhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17603-2005Feb11.html
Sunday, February 13, 2005; Page B07
SYDNEY -- "George Bush is not an easy export."
That judgment, expressed over lunch at a beautiful harborside restaurant by Allan Gyngell, executive director of the Lowy Institute, a year-old foreign policy research center, describes the only blemish on America's relations with this traditional ally in the South Pacific.
Gyngell, a longtime member of the Australian foreign service, is, like almost everyone one meets here, instinctively pro-American. He points out that ever since the British base at Singapore was captured by the Japanese in 1942, Australia has looked to the United States for protection. Supporting the alliance with the United States has been the consistent policy of both major parties, the Labor government that was in power during World War II, and the Liberal government of Prime Minister John Howard, who is in office now.
Australia has sent troops to support the Allies in the two world wars, the United Nations in Korea, the United States in Vietnam, and the coalition forces in Afghanistan and wars against Iraq. Public opinion polls showed majority opposition to the invasion of Iraq, but Howard's decision to contribute 2,000 troops was broadly accepted. Now that force has been substantially reduced. Only one Australian has died in Iraq, and there is little public pressure for an early pullout. A Labor Party challenger to Howard in last year's election was criticized for promising a quick return of Aussie troops and has been replaced as party leader by a man regarded as having strong credentials on national security issues.
All of which makes the cautious reaction to Bush here something of a puzzle. Gyngell and his colleagues suggest that it has to do with what they see as Bush's intense belief in the uniqueness of America. "All Americans feel that," Gyngell said, "but with Bush, it is so strong that it hardly allows room for others."
Gerard Henderson, executive director of the Sydney Institute, a think tank dealing with a broad spectrum of political and economic issues, commented that presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both were more popular in Australia than the current president appears to be. Henderson, who once served as Howard's chief of staff, said he recognizes the strength that both Howard and the current President Bush derive from their directness of expression and bluntness. But he said the style that works well for both men in solidifying their domestic constituencies is less amenable to winning friends overseas.
"It's not a question of changing policies," Gyngell said. "It's really a matter of style," and that means it hardly ranks high as a foreign policy challenge for Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -- an intriguing figure to Australians, who are working their way past an unhappy history of excluding immigrants of color and today are savoring the dynamics of an increasingly diverse population.
This is a happy country, with a booming economy, budget surpluses, quite generous social services and stable, consensus-minded government. "Because we are so isolated from the rest of the world," Henderson said, "we have no choice but to get along with each other. We are very pragmatic, not very ideological."
Being pragmatists, Australians are carefully watching the emergence of China as a potential superpower. Gyngell said there is no serious neoconservative faction arguing, as in the United States, that China could become a strategic or military threat. "We see nothing but opportunity in China, a major market for goods and services and an economy that complements rather than competes with ours. It is now our number two trading partner, after the United States, and the fastest-growing."
Of greater concern is the uncertainty about the future of U.S.-China relations. Australia does not want to have to choose between its basic political-military alliance with the United States and its growing economic ties with China. A flare-up of tension between the United States and China, over the future of Taiwan or some other issue, would be bad news for Australia. And an armed conflict between those two countries would test the U.S.-Australian ties like nothing else in modern history.
But all this is conjectural. For now, soft summer breezes blow here, and the magnificent harbor is filled with sailboats. The Queen Elizabeth 2 and other tourist ships are at the docks. And the only disturbing noises come from Canberra, where the Parliament has just resumed meeting and the Labor opposition is scrambling for issues to embarrass the government. The world should be so lucky!
davidbroder@washpost.com
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Down Under, Doubts About Bush
By David S. Broderhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17603-2005Feb11.html
Sunday, February 13, 2005; Page B07
SYDNEY -- "George Bush is not an easy export."
That judgment, expressed over lunch at a beautiful harborside restaurant by Allan Gyngell, executive director of the Lowy Institute, a year-old foreign policy research center, describes the only blemish on America's relations with this traditional ally in the South Pacific.
Gyngell, a longtime member of the Australian foreign service, is, like almost everyone one meets here, instinctively pro-American. He points out that ever since the British base at Singapore was captured by the Japanese in 1942, Australia has looked to the United States for protection. Supporting the alliance with the United States has been the consistent policy of both major parties, the Labor government that was in power during World War II, and the Liberal government of Prime Minister John Howard, who is in office now.
Australia has sent troops to support the Allies in the two world wars, the United Nations in Korea, the United States in Vietnam, and the coalition forces in Afghanistan and wars against Iraq. Public opinion polls showed majority opposition to the invasion of Iraq, but Howard's decision to contribute 2,000 troops was broadly accepted. Now that force has been substantially reduced. Only one Australian has died in Iraq, and there is little public pressure for an early pullout. A Labor Party challenger to Howard in last year's election was criticized for promising a quick return of Aussie troops and has been replaced as party leader by a man regarded as having strong credentials on national security issues.
All of which makes the cautious reaction to Bush here something of a puzzle. Gyngell and his colleagues suggest that it has to do with what they see as Bush's intense belief in the uniqueness of America. "All Americans feel that," Gyngell said, "but with Bush, it is so strong that it hardly allows room for others."
Gerard Henderson, executive director of the Sydney Institute, a think tank dealing with a broad spectrum of political and economic issues, commented that presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both were more popular in Australia than the current president appears to be. Henderson, who once served as Howard's chief of staff, said he recognizes the strength that both Howard and the current President Bush derive from their directness of expression and bluntness. But he said the style that works well for both men in solidifying their domestic constituencies is less amenable to winning friends overseas.
"It's not a question of changing policies," Gyngell said. "It's really a matter of style," and that means it hardly ranks high as a foreign policy challenge for Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -- an intriguing figure to Australians, who are working their way past an unhappy history of excluding immigrants of color and today are savoring the dynamics of an increasingly diverse population.
This is a happy country, with a booming economy, budget surpluses, quite generous social services and stable, consensus-minded government. "Because we are so isolated from the rest of the world," Henderson said, "we have no choice but to get along with each other. We are very pragmatic, not very ideological."
Being pragmatists, Australians are carefully watching the emergence of China as a potential superpower. Gyngell said there is no serious neoconservative faction arguing, as in the United States, that China could become a strategic or military threat. "We see nothing but opportunity in China, a major market for goods and services and an economy that complements rather than competes with ours. It is now our number two trading partner, after the United States, and the fastest-growing."
Of greater concern is the uncertainty about the future of U.S.-China relations. Australia does not want to have to choose between its basic political-military alliance with the United States and its growing economic ties with China. A flare-up of tension between the United States and China, over the future of Taiwan or some other issue, would be bad news for Australia. And an armed conflict between those two countries would test the U.S.-Australian ties like nothing else in modern history.
But all this is conjectural. For now, soft summer breezes blow here, and the magnificent harbor is filled with sailboats. The Queen Elizabeth 2 and other tourist ships are at the docks. And the only disturbing noises come from Canberra, where the Parliament has just resumed meeting and the Labor opposition is scrambling for issues to embarrass the government. The world should be so lucky!
davidbroder@washpost.com
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Science kept out by the green's dogma
Science kept out by the greens' dogma
February 16, 2005
http://www.smh.com.au/news/Opinion/Science-kept-out-by-the-greens-dogma/2005/02/15/1108230007423.html
To environmentalists data is an evil that demystifies the romance of nature, writes Ian Plimer.
I write from the Arkaroola Wilderness Resort in the far north Flinders Ranges of South Australia where I do geological field work in this mountainous and unforgiving wilderness in summer. This is a privilege. Field work is an attempt to understand nature and this intimacy with nature stimulates questioning.
Science is based on dominant paradigms that are open to change at any time. Our understanding of nature requires a depth and breadth of knowledge, a healthy uncertainty, a willingness to change and a measure of awe provoked by the complexity of nature.
Nature changes rapidly and continues to surprise. Climate, sea level, the atmosphere, life, landscapes and temperature all change rapidly by many mechanisms for a diversity of reasons. For millions of years hominids and other organisms have survived, adapted and become extinct as a result of these changes. Nature is not mysterious; it is quantifiable. Science is married to evidence and divorced from value judgement.
We scientists argue about the data, which may be from measurement, calculation, observation or experiment. The explanation of data - a theory - is the neatest way of explaining such data and this, too, provokes healthy argument. New data or a re-evaluation of old data commonly results in the abandonment of a treasured popular paradigm. This is the methodology of science.
Herein lies the problem with city-based greens and religious fundamentalists such as creationists. The idol for worship is a dogmatic ideology enshrined in value judgements that allows no change despite scientific data to the contrary.
Nature is made the mystery by greens in isolation from integrated interdisciplinary scientific knowledge, somewhat contrary to traditional Christian views where the mystery is the supernatural. It is for this reason that I argue that environmental groups are a modern urban religion, albeit terribly flawed. From Paul Tillich's theological perspective, the change from the dominant paradigm to dogma is a shift from preliminary to ultimate concerns resulting in evil.
Creationists have not evolved from the science and inexact literalist contradictory theology of the mid-17th century when the popular scientific paradigm was that the planet was 6000 years old and a mythical great flood shaped the planet's surface, deposited fossiliferous sediments and killed sinners.
The greens can not accept that the good old days were not good old days, that natural changes are far greater than even their worst case human-induced doomsday scenario and that we now live in a society blessed with saviours such as science, technology and industry. Our greens bathe in the benefits of an industrial society yet, for reasons of nefarious politics, hypocrisy and ignorance, decide to be both within and without our industrial society.
Many city folk have lost contact with nature and this can be deeply disturbing. Such disconnection produces a romantic yearning for that which never existed, a yearning to be at one with nature despite a lack of understanding of nature and a yearning to do something, whatever something might be.
This disconnection produces irrationality, contradictions and the creation of green fundamentalism as the new religion of urban environmentalists. Disconnection of city people from nature has only added to the frustration of depoliticised rural people, thereby creating political instability.
In the cities, this disconnection is exacerbated by the lack of connection between seasons and seasonal foods or killing and meat protein and an uncompromising dogma about those outside cities who take risks to produce the energy, water, food and mineral resources we so voraciously consume.
We watch asinine survival programs unaware that there are 20 film support crew out of shot. Such programs appeal to our primitive instincts yet show how disconnected from nature we really have become. We plant gardens comprising water-hungry northern European vegetation, consume more and more water, don't build new dams and don't collect roof rainwater. We buy a four-wheel-drive to use on highways in the wilderness or watch concocted nature programs on television. We feel good to see large green areas on maps called national parks and then promptly forget about these areas.
The ancient monastics were correct. An extended time in a desert wilderness allows the discarding of trivialities, an interaction and connection with nature and an understanding of our place in the world. And it is not really a very important place after all.
Ian Plimer is professor of geology at the University of Melbourne.
February 16, 2005
http://www.smh.com.au/news/Opinion/Science-kept-out-by-the-greens-dogma/2005/02/15/1108230007423.html
To environmentalists data is an evil that demystifies the romance of nature, writes Ian Plimer.
I write from the Arkaroola Wilderness Resort in the far north Flinders Ranges of South Australia where I do geological field work in this mountainous and unforgiving wilderness in summer. This is a privilege. Field work is an attempt to understand nature and this intimacy with nature stimulates questioning.
Science is based on dominant paradigms that are open to change at any time. Our understanding of nature requires a depth and breadth of knowledge, a healthy uncertainty, a willingness to change and a measure of awe provoked by the complexity of nature.
Nature changes rapidly and continues to surprise. Climate, sea level, the atmosphere, life, landscapes and temperature all change rapidly by many mechanisms for a diversity of reasons. For millions of years hominids and other organisms have survived, adapted and become extinct as a result of these changes. Nature is not mysterious; it is quantifiable. Science is married to evidence and divorced from value judgement.
We scientists argue about the data, which may be from measurement, calculation, observation or experiment. The explanation of data - a theory - is the neatest way of explaining such data and this, too, provokes healthy argument. New data or a re-evaluation of old data commonly results in the abandonment of a treasured popular paradigm. This is the methodology of science.
Herein lies the problem with city-based greens and religious fundamentalists such as creationists. The idol for worship is a dogmatic ideology enshrined in value judgements that allows no change despite scientific data to the contrary.
Nature is made the mystery by greens in isolation from integrated interdisciplinary scientific knowledge, somewhat contrary to traditional Christian views where the mystery is the supernatural. It is for this reason that I argue that environmental groups are a modern urban religion, albeit terribly flawed. From Paul Tillich's theological perspective, the change from the dominant paradigm to dogma is a shift from preliminary to ultimate concerns resulting in evil.
Creationists have not evolved from the science and inexact literalist contradictory theology of the mid-17th century when the popular scientific paradigm was that the planet was 6000 years old and a mythical great flood shaped the planet's surface, deposited fossiliferous sediments and killed sinners.
The greens can not accept that the good old days were not good old days, that natural changes are far greater than even their worst case human-induced doomsday scenario and that we now live in a society blessed with saviours such as science, technology and industry. Our greens bathe in the benefits of an industrial society yet, for reasons of nefarious politics, hypocrisy and ignorance, decide to be both within and without our industrial society.
Many city folk have lost contact with nature and this can be deeply disturbing. Such disconnection produces a romantic yearning for that which never existed, a yearning to be at one with nature despite a lack of understanding of nature and a yearning to do something, whatever something might be.
This disconnection produces irrationality, contradictions and the creation of green fundamentalism as the new religion of urban environmentalists. Disconnection of city people from nature has only added to the frustration of depoliticised rural people, thereby creating political instability.
In the cities, this disconnection is exacerbated by the lack of connection between seasons and seasonal foods or killing and meat protein and an uncompromising dogma about those outside cities who take risks to produce the energy, water, food and mineral resources we so voraciously consume.
We watch asinine survival programs unaware that there are 20 film support crew out of shot. Such programs appeal to our primitive instincts yet show how disconnected from nature we really have become. We plant gardens comprising water-hungry northern European vegetation, consume more and more water, don't build new dams and don't collect roof rainwater. We buy a four-wheel-drive to use on highways in the wilderness or watch concocted nature programs on television. We feel good to see large green areas on maps called national parks and then promptly forget about these areas.
The ancient monastics were correct. An extended time in a desert wilderness allows the discarding of trivialities, an interaction and connection with nature and an understanding of our place in the world. And it is not really a very important place after all.
Ian Plimer is professor of geology at the University of Melbourne.
See these sites :
The Australian: Australia tops world in fatal shark attacks [February 17, 2005]
The Australian: Australia tops world in fatal shark attacks [February 17, 2005]: "Australia tops world in fatal shark attacks
Ashleigh Wilson
February 17, 2005
AUSTRALIA ranked second behind the US for shark attacks last year, but led the world in fatalities.
A total of 61 shark attacks were recorded around the world in 2004 - four more than in 2003, but fewer than in the three previous years.
According to the International Shark Attack File, compiled by the Florida Museum of Natural History, the US had the highest number of attacks with 30, followed by Australia with 12 and Brazil and South Africa on five each.
Of the seven deaths last year, the ISAF said two people were killed in Australia and two in the US, and there were single fatalities in Brazil, Egypt and South Africa.
But the figures omitted one Australian death, as sharks killed three men in our waters last year.
In July, Bradley Smith, 29, died after he was attacked by a shark near Western Australia's Margaret River.
In December, Mark Thompson, 38, was killed by a shark while spear-fishing at Opal Reef off Cairns.
And a few days later, 18-year-old Nick Peterson was mauled to death by a great white while being towed behind a boat on a surfboard at Adelaide's West Beach. After his death, his father, Philip Peterson, came out against the culling of sharks, saying he and his son had always believed they were there to be 'admired, appreciated and respected'.
The chances of being attacked by a shark remain less than of being struck by lightning. CSIRO Marine Research team leader Barry Bruce said yesterday the deaths were tragic, but the figures showed shark attacks were uncommon and there was no need to over-react.
'There's no doubt it's a rare event compared with some o"
Ashleigh Wilson
February 17, 2005
AUSTRALIA ranked second behind the US for shark attacks last year, but led the world in fatalities.
A total of 61 shark attacks were recorded around the world in 2004 - four more than in 2003, but fewer than in the three previous years.
According to the International Shark Attack File, compiled by the Florida Museum of Natural History, the US had the highest number of attacks with 30, followed by Australia with 12 and Brazil and South Africa on five each.
Of the seven deaths last year, the ISAF said two people were killed in Australia and two in the US, and there were single fatalities in Brazil, Egypt and South Africa.
But the figures omitted one Australian death, as sharks killed three men in our waters last year.
In July, Bradley Smith, 29, died after he was attacked by a shark near Western Australia's Margaret River.
In December, Mark Thompson, 38, was killed by a shark while spear-fishing at Opal Reef off Cairns.
And a few days later, 18-year-old Nick Peterson was mauled to death by a great white while being towed behind a boat on a surfboard at Adelaide's West Beach. After his death, his father, Philip Peterson, came out against the culling of sharks, saying he and his son had always believed they were there to be 'admired, appreciated and respected'.
The chances of being attacked by a shark remain less than of being struck by lightning. CSIRO Marine Research team leader Barry Bruce said yesterday the deaths were tragic, but the figures showed shark attacks were uncommon and there was no need to over-react.
'There's no doubt it's a rare event compared with some o"
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