The hidden truth

Some of Peter Smith's arguments are too materialistic for me to digest with ease.
having said that this article not only makes sense but should be a curriculum necessity for high school students, if for nothing else other than its (politically incorrect) observations about backward cultures. However, its main premise of the unfortunate (and growing) gap between the producers/transporters/risk-takers and implications of free trade/commerce and the person/consumer in the street is of vital importance and needs to be recognised before the disconnect become terminal.
This article is definitely one that I will introduce my youngest son too during the coming year.

A fast boat to enlightenment

That the Greens’ fanciful economic prescriptions are taken seriously by many voters and sections of the commentariat testifies to a lack of reflection on how economies really work. A huge container ship makes a splendid classroom

 

I recently finished a twenty-seven-day voyage, as the only passenger, on a not-so slow-boat from Hong Kong to Southampton. Magellan (left) is apparently the third largest container ship in the world; theoretically able to carry the equivalent of 13,800 (standard-sized) twenty-foot containers, each with a capacity of ≈1170 cu ft. Its engine is equalled in size by only one other conventional ship (unsurprisingly, by the largest container ship). For the mechanically minded; it is a marine diesel, fuel injected, internal combustion, two-stroke engine with fourteen ‘giant’ pistons, each almost a metre in diameter; generating 109,000 hp. I can personally vouchsafe that it is very large and loud.

On this voyage, the ship was carrying the equivalent of nearly 10,000 twenty-foot containers. Each container, which can be more than double the length and taller than standard-sized, can hold up to about 28 tonnes of cargo. Why mention any of this? Its relevance will become clear after a short digression on pirates; recently in the news again when HMAS Melbourne, as part of Combined Maritime Forces combating Somalian pirates, nabbed nine of them and destroyed their boats.
I was assured that our ship was too big and too fast to be boarded by Somalian pirates. Nevertheless we travelled in an internationally recommended two-mile-wide transit corridor when in ‘pirate territory’(within which naval and military protection might be more quickly afforded if needed); had a citadel (akin to a panic room) in the hull, helmets and flak jackets on the bridge, a list of duties in the event of pirate attack, hoses at the ready to flood ballast-tank water over the aft sides of the ship to impede scaling up boarding ladders; and the security level was lifted as we approached the Horn of Africa on the way to the Red Sea. And all of these precautions were in place on a ship that, apparently, “couldn’t be boarded”.

A landlubber like me could get alarmed. This was especially the case when I read, in the on-board booklet dedicated to the threat, that pirates commonly attacked the bridge with rocket propelled grenades. What, not just with swashbuckling swords? What has the world come to? Fortunately, we successfully ran the gauntlet and came out unscathed. But make sure, if you do the trip, that the ship is big and fast or has armed guards, as some more vulnerable ships do.
Anyway this business with pirates is by the way as is my own experiences on board. To the point; a container ship provides a practical and grounding lesson on the realities of modern economic life that school children might be taught, rather than being brainwashed with fairy tales about sustainable development and the achievements of primitive indigenous populations who remained at the same level of bare subsistence century in and century out.

Our very way of life, our prosperity, our ability to help those among us in need, are all critically dependent on making things and trading things across both small and vast distances; for which we need the application of business acumen, skill, hard work and, critically, cheap and plentiful supplies of propulsive energy. That is the way the lesson might begin. A series of questions would follow to generate discussion and insight in the modern interactive classroom.
One question might go like this. If it takes around 4,700 tonnes of marine diesel fuel at US600 per tonne to shift, say, in round numbers, one-hundred thousand tonnes of cargo from Hong Kong to Southampton, how many batteries charged by windmills and/or solar panels would it take and how much would it cost? For mathematics students this would be a valuable introduction to the law of large numbers and to equations incapable of solution.

Another question might go like this. Is it possible for us to enjoy the ownership of mobile phones, computers, flat-screen TVs, cars, and all of our other modern conveniences without the taxing business of their manufacture and shipment? For philosophy students this would be instructive on the concept of cause and effect. For physics students, it may take them on whimsical and entertaining flights of fancy to matter transmutation (alchemy) and transference (beam me up Scotty). For anthropological students, it may throw light on the development of cargo cults among primitive peoples.

And talking of backward people, adult classes might also be held for those who vote for the Greens or for anyone, for that matter, who is prone to thinking that goods simply appear out of thin air and/or that more of them can be made available than are produced. This is a relatively modern malady – akin to the rise of a new cargo cult – prevalent among the intellectual elite in the media and the universities, and among charity and church office holders, as well as among many common people who otherwise display no proclivity to believe in magic.

What has happened, quite apart from the drift of industry to Asia, is that manufacturing and transport industries have become so efficient that they are remote from the lives of most people living in the Western world. Far fewer people are now down the pit, or on the factory floor, or on the docks, or on oil tankers and container ships; or have close relationships with such people.
For example, increasingly those working at sea have experience of manning an entertainment ship than they have of a working ship. Queen Mary II and Magellan provide an instructive comparison. On the side of using up value is QMII, with 1250 officers and crew. On the side of making value is the slightly bigger Magellan, with just 28 officers and crew. Moreover, this manning level will undoubtedly continue to edge down in future as will all “coal-face” jobs across mining, manufacturing, and transport industries.

The increasing lack of close familiarity with what it takes to make and transport commodities has proved to be fertile ground for breeding a fast-spreading form of infantile mindset, which is as divorced from economic reality as the mindset of primitive cargo cultists. As experience is providing progressively less of a countervailing force, the remedy has to lie in public education.
Instead of vacuously and mindlessly teaching kids the virtues and moral equivalence of patently backward and inferior cultures, ancient and present-day, they should be given the opportunity to understand and appreciate what underpins our material prosperity; and what is required to maintain and increase this prosperity, if we are to live comfortable lives and also help those in need.
Time spent at mine sites; at manufacturing plants; at agricultural enterprises; at construction sites; at ship building plants; at docks and at transport hubs, would be as well spent as at museums and art galleries. They also need to understand that however rich we are, or we become, we can never be so rich that we can collectively spend more than we collectively earn. They need to be disabused of magic to prevent them from adding to the numbers of those with adult bodies yet with childish preconceptions.

When it comes to adults, instead of, or in addition to, spending money on dissuading people from smoking, or drinking too much, or eating fast food, governments might start informing people about what it has taken to give us our present standard of living (where, among other more beneficial things, we can smoke, drink and eat too excess) and what it will continue to take to allow us the luxury of taking care of the disabled and an aging population while maintaining our living standards.
We’ve arrived at the ridiculous situation where the Greens’ fanciful economic policy prescriptions are taken seriously by large numbers of voters and by sections of the intellectual commentariat. We even have, believe it or not (no, I don’t bel ieve it!), union bosses supporting a jobs-destroying carbon tax. Is there any more proof required that reason has given way to infantile posturing. “Let us all grow up”, would be fitting heading for an Abbott-inspired campaign to educate children and the childlike.

Peter Smith, a frequent Quadrant Online contributor, is the author of Bad Economics

Left-wing mendacity

I have included this large extract from David Thompson's blog because it gives a number of different (yet strangely consistent) perspectives from the leftist worldview of society. A worldview that is/has systematically and increasingly rapidly underminined reason, morality, law & order and sanity in the developed nations.

Tim Blair on the self-regarding eco-guru David Suzuki:

Self-importance comes with the territory when you’re a warmist. After all, you’re saving the planet. Who could be more important than you? This elevated sense of self manifests itself in curious ways, such as Tim Flannery’s prediction of a universal belief system or his insistence that everybody is always writing about him, or Will Steffen’s fear that a retired public servant wanted to shoot climate scientists and Michael Mann’s mistaken Nobel Prize claim. But those three are mere junior narcissists compared to David Suzuki, who is now starring as a global climate martyr in a “powerful live theatre and public engagement project” about himself.

Tim Worstall on the myths and omissions of the “gender pay gap”:

Women who work part time earn more than men who work part time. Women in their 20s earn more than men in their 20s. Women who don’t marry and don’t have children earn more than men. What kills the average wage of all women, in comparison to the wage of all men, is that women - and it’s important to note that this is on average - take career breaks to have children and often then either more time off or lighter workloads to raise them. We might want to say that this isn’t a good idea. We might think that it’s just fine that people who make different life decisions earn different amounts of money. But what this isn’t is a gender pay gap. And anyone who wants to change matters has to recognise that it isn’t a gender pay gap so it isn’t something that is going to be changed by blathering on about gender. It’s about children and the having of them. And, if we’re to be honest about it all, as long as more women than men decide that they want to take those breaks and changed workloads in order to raise their children, then we’re always going to have that motherhood pay gap. Whether it’s a good or bad thing is entirely reliant upon your personal definitions of good or bad.

Theodore Dalrymple on modern priorities:

The slowness [of the police] to react - infinite slowness, in fact, since they did not react at all - contrasted oddly with an experience I had the previous Sunday. A couple of American filmmakers came to Paris to interview me… and decided that the little park opposite my flat would be a good place to do so. They set up the camera, but a few seconds later, before they could ask me a single question, a municipal policeman arrived. They were not allowed to film here without a permit from the mairie of the arrondissement, he said. I explained that these were Americans, come all the way from Texas expressly to interview me. He, a very pleasant and polite man of African origin, phoned his chief to see whether an exception could be made. As I suspected, it could not. I told the film crew that we should make no fuss; the man was only doing his job, silly as that job might be. As it happens there were several drunks in another part of the park making aggressive-sounding noises and breaking bottles, but them he did not approach, perhaps wisely, as they were several and he was only one. He thought he would have more luck with someone wearing a tweed jacket and corduroy trousers as I was.

And Jack Dunphy on our student intelligentsia:

Only on a college campus, and nowhere more so than an Ivy League one, does it take a committee to figure out the obvious. Which in this case is that a group of coddled elitists, none of whom would dare set foot in the New York neighbourhoods that benefited most from the NYPD’s “stop-and-frisk” tactics, decided that their opinions… are the only ones deserving of a public airing, and that anyone whose opinion may differ is therefore worthy of mockery, shame, and contempt.

Marx = god

As a young poet Karl Marx was already exhibiting his God complex as well as a marked indifference towards human suffering. Onreflection it does sound awfully like something the god of this worldmight say:

..........

Then the gauntlet do I fling

Scornful in the World's wide open face.

Down the giant She-Dwarf, whimpering,

Plunges, cannot crush my happiness.

Like unto a God I dare
Through that ruined realm in triumph roam.
Every word is Deed and Fire,
And my bosom like the Maker's own.

 

Read the entire regurgitation @ http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1837-pre/verse/verse20.htm

 

UPDATE:

The historical 'fruits' of this 'god'.

Michael Moynihan on the reprehensible fantasist Eric Hobsbawm:

In a now infamous 1994 interview with journalist Michael Ignatieff, the historian was asked if the murder of “15, 20 million people might have been justified” in establishing a Marxist paradise. “Yes,” Mr. Hobsbawm replied. Asked the same question the following year, he reiterated his support for the “sacrifice of millions of lives” in pursuit of a vague egalitarianism. That such comments caused surprise is itself surprising; Mr. Hobsbawm’s lifelong commitment to the Party testified to his approval of the Soviet experience, whatever its crimes. It’s not that he didn’t know what was going on in the dank basements of the Lubyanka and on the frozen steppes of Siberia. It’s that he didn't much care.

Readers of How to Change the World will be treated to explications of synarchism, a dozen mentions of the Russian Narodniks, and countless digressions on justly forgotten Marxist thinkers and politicians. But there is remarkably little discussion of the way communist regimes actually governed. There is virtually nothing on the vast Soviet concentration-camp system, unless one counts a complaint that “Marx was typecast as the inspirer of terror and gulag, and communists as essentially defenders of, if not participators in, terror and the KGB.” Also missing is any mention of the more than 40 million Chinese murdered in Mao’s Great Leap Forward or the almost two million Cambodians murdered by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge.

Similar sleight-of-hand and attempts to isolate Marx from the practical fallout of his totalitarian blueprint can be found here. And for sheer tragicomic delusion, this is tough to beat. As is this.

Gloria in excelsis Deo

The older I get the more these wise words from Malcolm Muggeridge ring true:

“I feel so strongly at the end of my life that nothing can happen to us in any circumstances that is not part of God’s purpose for us. Therefore, we have nothing to fear, nothing to worry about, except that we should rebel against His purpose, that we should fail to detect it and fail to establish some sort of relationship with Him and His divine will. On that basis, there can be no black despair, no throwing in of our hand. We can watch the institutions and social structures of our time collapse – and I think you who are young are fated to watch them collapse – and we can reckon with what seems like an irresistibly growing power of materialism and materialist societies.

“But, it will not happen that that is the end of the story. As St. Augustine said – and I love to think of it when he received the news in Carthage that Rome had been sacked: Well, if that’s happened, it’s a great catastrophe, but we must never forget that the earthly cities that men build they destroy, but there is also the City of God which men didn’t build and can’t destroy. And he devoted the next seventeen years of his life to working out the relationship between the earthly city and the City of God – the earthly city where we live for a short time, and the City of God whose citizens we are for all eternity.

“You know, it’s a funny thing, but when you’re old, as I am, there are all sorts of extremely pleasant things that happen to you. One of them is, you realize that history is nonsense, but I won’t go into that now. The pleasantest thing of all is that you wake up in the night at about, say, three a.m., and you find that you are half in and half out of your battered old carcass. And it seems quite a toss-up whether you go back and resume full occupancy of your mortal body, or make off toward the bright glow you see in the sky, the lights of the City of God. In this limbo between life and death, you know beyond any shadow of doubt that, as an infinitesimal particle of God’s creation, you are a participant in God’s purpose for His creation, and that that purpose is loving and not hating, is creative and not destructive, is everlasting and not temporal, is universal and not particular. With this certainty comes an extraordinary sense of comfort and joy.

“Nothing that happens in this world need shake that feeling; all the happenings in this world, including the most terrible disasters and suffering, will be seen in eternity as in some mysterious way a blessing, as a part of God’s love. We ourselves are part of that love, we belong to that scene, and only in so far as we belong to that scene does our existence here have any reality or any worth. All the rest is fantasy – whether the fantasy of power which we see in the authoritarian states around us, or the fantasy of the great liberal death wish in terms of affluence and self-indulgence. The essential feature, and necessity of life is to know reality, which means knowing God. Otherwise our mortal existence is, as Saint Teresa of Avila said, no more than a night in a second-class hotel.”

And I am so thankful to the 'lover of my soul' for this truth and hope.

Cultural dynamics

Wise words from retired judge R Bork:

“The enemy within is modern liberalism, a corrosive agent carrying a very different mood and agenda than that of classical or traditional liberalism. That the modern variety is intellectually bankrupt diminishes neither its vitality nor the danger it poses. A bankrupt philosophy can reign for centuries and, when its bankruptcy becomes apparent, may well be succeeded by an even less coherent outlook.

“That is what is happening to us now. Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason. The response of liberalism was not to turn to religion, which modernity had seemingly made irrelevant, but to abandon reason.”

“Modern liberalism is powerful because it has enlisted our cultural elites, those who man the institutions that manufacture, manipulate, and disseminate ideas, attitudes and symbols – universities, churches, Hollywood, the national press (print and electronic), foundation staffs, the ‘public interest’ organizations, much of the congressional Democratic Party and some congressional Republicans as well, and large sections of the judiciary, including, all too often, a majority of the Supreme Court.

“This, it must be stressed, is not a conspiracy but a syndrome. These are institutions controlled by people who view the world from a common perspective, a perspective not generally shared by the public at large. But so pervasive is the influence of those who occupy the commanding heights of our culture that it is important to understand what modern liberalism is and what its ascendancy means.”

Shock/horror

The most persecuted people on Earth at the moment and it is only going to get worse.
http://www.watoday.com.au/comment/age-of-intolerance-the-war-on-religion-20131101-2ws4o.html

Institutions captured

An excerpt from David Thompson:

The issue of classroom political advocacy crops up here quite often and Evan Maloney’s documentary, Indoctrinate U, illustrates just how far advocacy can go, and how corrosive to probity it can be. A key scene in Maloney’s film concerns psychology professor Laura Freberg, who faced a campaign of harassment by left-leaning colleagues and was told, “We never would have hired you if we knew you were a Republican.” Freberg’s students later admitted they’d known she was a “closet Republican” precisely because she didn’t use the classroom to air her political views.
 

Try getting a lecturing job in the 'Fine arts' if you are a Christian!

....some educators make great efforts to justify telling students how they should vote and seem untroubled by the implications of growing political uniformity across much of the humanities, where bias is most common and has the greatest scope. A view made explicit by Grover Furr of Monclair State’s English department:

[C]olleges and universities do not need a single additional “conservative”… What they do need, and would much benefit from, is more Marxists, radicals, leftists – all terms conventionally applied to those who fight against exploitation, racism, sexism, and capitalism. We can never have too many of these, just as we can never have too few “conservatives”.
 

......The problem is that adversarial role-play, like that of Furr and Garelick, has little to do with reason, refutation or how the world actually is. It does, however, have a great deal to do with how those concerned wish to seem. In order to maintain a self-image of heroic radicalism - and in order to justify funding, influence and status - great leaps of imagination, or paranoia, may be required. Hence the goal posts of persecution tend to move and new and rarer forms of exploitation and injustice have to be discovered, many of which are curiously invisible to the untutored eye. Thus, the rebel academic tends towards extremism, intolerance and absurdity, not because the mainstream of society is becoming more racist, prejudiced, patriarchal or oppressive – but precisely because it isn’t.