THE ARGUMENT AGAINST CENSORSHIP

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This is not the article I set out to write this week but I believe it is the one that must be written.

Here I will put to you the argument against censorship while I am still able to make it in all its uncomfortable, contentious and truthful self. You can decide at the end if there is a case worth considering or a moment’s pause to be had before we gleefully unravel the fabric of our society to the cheers of the political class.

We are a week out from another of humanity’s tragedies, this time perpetrated on the shores of our Pacific neighbour. The city of Christchurch which is settled on New Zealand’s volcanic South Island, has had a run of misfortune. First, an earthquake in 2011 killed 185 people and liquefied the ground beneath portions of the CBD rendering them worthless. This was a social and economic disaster from which the city was only just recovering when in March 2019 a lone gunman besieged the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre murdering 50 people in broad daylight livestreamed over Facebook.

This horrific slaughter of innocent people is not the first mass killing of the year – nor even the month. Terrorist events have been on a steep rise since the 70’s across the world and have, until recently, reached for an endless ceiling of violence. There are different political and religious motivations behind these actions but taking Wikipedia’s figures between 1970 and 2017 there have been 182,437 separate terror events resulting in 414,533 deaths and 529,476 injuries – that we know of. I stress this point because the majority of terror is perpetrated in countries with poor reporting and so we can assume the numbers are even worse than those quoted. Probably much worse.

There is no question that at this point in history, the largest recorded cause of terror and death in the world belongs to the Islamic Caliphate and its affiliates – lone wolves or recognised groups – operating in a wide range of countries. They are an organised, well funded movement of mixed religious and political motivation both seeking conquest and subjugation of foreign States while its members engage privately in unspeakable crimes against humanity. Inside its loose organisation wage several civil wars and a separate Islamic faith conflict that has been going on for over a thousand years. This terrifying force is backed by powerful countries who either allow terror to exist or openly fund their efforts for various reasons. According to the Global Terrorism Index 2016, 74% of all terror could be attributed to ISIL, Boko Haram, the Taliban and al-Qa’lda.

Add to this other forms of extremists who have committed acts of terror in recent memory: Sikh Extremism (Ireland), Christian Extremism (Indonesia), Separatism (Angola, Chechen, Romania), Communism (Bulgaria, India, Malaysia), 19th of April Movement (Columbia), Palestinian Nationalism (UAE), White Nationalism (NZ) state-sponsored violence and whatever it is that China, Russia and Venezuela put their people through.

Then we must note the unaffiliated – the random acts more commonly referred to as, ‘mass murder’ because they have no specific ideology apart from their own wickedness.

Enough with the statistics. You take my point. Terror is not a single event, it is a complex sequence of violence transcending race, religion, culture and law. Skip a hundred or a thousand years backwards in time and the names will change but not the pattern of violence.

There are a few additional remarks required before I make my point.

Terror is overwhelmingly conducted in poor countries run by dictators, religious law or entirely failed states. These countries almost exclusively survive with serious government or cultural impediments to freedom, education and prosperity. Terror groups promising the world are able to take root among the youth using money and power as a primary drive. The dynamic is different in wealthy Western countries where terror tends to be run like an arm of a warring state against the native population who, unlike historic terror in these countries, are very unlikely to incubate the terror from within the population. There is an ongoing debate about whether the Islamic branch of this violence is actually a resurrection of ‘Holy War’ – self identified by those who wage it, bragged about by the leaders of countries who support it but uncomfortable for Western nations to hear who have left religion out of their politics for a long time.

Alright.

The abhorrent Australian mass murderer in Christchurch went to the trouble of writing a detailed manifesto which he intended to be found to explain his actions. This has been censored from the public arena with astounding fines and threats against anyone who not only disseminates the text but reads it.

This is a mistake. Let me tell you why.

Western Civilisation, particularly those with historical English roots, came to the conclusion after thousands of years of bloodshed that the key to peace is freedom. This is remarkable. A revelation – if you will.

At first it is not entirely obvious why this holds true.

Freedom of speech, association and expression has not been the norm of our species. Not today, not yesterday. We are predominately a tribal group ruled over by kings, dictators or rigid political and religious systems that keep a strangle hold of the collective through strict coercion and violence. Freedom has long been seen as the enemy of those at the top of these hierarchies. Because they gain their power by force these civilisations must exert an enormous amount of energy to strengthen the bars to maintain it. They have to do this diligently because, like the second law of thermodynamics, all things tend toward chaos. This includes human civilisation.

The tighter you try to hold human beings, the more they fight. The system wants to break. It is the reason populations overthrow their leaders in violent revolution. It is the cause of war the world over. With every layer of censorship and every onerous punishment, the probability of revolution grows. Of course this is deceptive. Before the catastrophic conclusion, these tyrannical entities can appear stable and uniform – much more so than an open democracy. There’s no dissent. No outrage. No deviation. This is kept in the shadows, festering resentment and hatred. Take North Korea as your example of stable hell brewing a future conflict.

What started in the forums of ancient Greece and Rome and finished off by Europe is the concept of democracy – a population who chooses their leaders, not on a one-off bloody coup but in a stable cycle that continuously dethrones those who would rule. This was not bestowed upon the people as a gift, it was the product of a very complex historical struggle between successive monarchs, religious authorities and the people working out how best to survive free of slaughter.

Contrary to all logic, it turns out that the best way to keep the peace is to have the incontrovertible freedom to insult each other.

This doesn’t apply simply between individuals, it is replicated to religious institutions, government leaders and the monarchy itself. Ideas were given value and debate birthed as the mechanism to test them. What we might call the second revelation is the well known reality that bad ideas die in the light.

The wonderful thing about a society constructed this way is that it self regulates. Insult is a necessary path to truth for how often are horrific ideas kept safe by the fragile feelings of monsters? How many millions have died while causing offence to right an immoral idea protected by the powerful?

It works the other way as well. Consider that only one person has a good idea – let us say, a scientific observation that flies in the face of all accepted culture and understanding. Even if enormous financial institutions stand at risk from this idea and even if the very moral underpinning society could be torn apart by its uttering – the idea is allowed to survive. In the end, society is the better for the upheaval, however painful. Take Charles Darwin’s work in evolutionary biology. There could not have been a more unimaginable crime of thought – even to himself, a devout man and yet without the veil of tears and screams set through the world we would not have discovered even a fragment or our medical industry.

The truth is that no one is qualified to know if ideas have worth before they are voiced. That is the purpose of the system but it only works without chains. If you start giving freedom of speech handicaps by roping off corners with ‘handle with care’ tape it will stop working – and quite quickly.

Fair enough, you may say, when we speak of ideas of science but this is a matter of hate.

There is no difference.

Hate speech is an idea unfit for those of moral standing. It is a sinister creation that originates in an infinite myriad of thought and circumstance. You can no sooner chase it with duct tape than prevent it from arising via AI algorithms. Like every bad idea before it, the fastest way to tear it to shreds is to submit it to the sunlight and allow the ruthless crowd to have-at the filth. This is what we should have done in the years after WWII instead of allowing the creep of ‘hate speech’ laws to muddy a well functioning system. It is worth noting here that Holocaust Denial laws did absolutely nothing to quash the movement but almost certainly made it worse by giving perceived victimhood credit to a fringe idea that would have withered away into obscurity. Bring them out onto the stage, I say and publicly drown them under the weight of visual evidence. You may never convert the tiny few zealots but you will thin the herd of conspiracy.

Today these hate speech laws are ever expanding beyond their solitary purpose to now infringe upon common offence and soon, terrifyingly, branch back into blasphemy law – the most heinous and bloody stain on our past that should never be given a foothold again. The threat they cause to our future is far greater than the offence they claim to protect against.

The next time a sympathetic leader or news reporter makes the argument for protecting religion from offence, make sure you remember those who are tortured and killed every day for defying the state-sponsored gods and consider what might happen to you…

Here I will come to my point.

The only way to mediate hate is to understand it. If its cause remains a mystery, so too will the solution. It is not good enough for a self-appointed government censor to wave a hashtag over an unseen idea. No person has the qualification to read for another and decide what they may hear. Even on its own that action solves nothing but more disturbingly there is a good deal of evidence to show that the manifesto of this particular tragedy is being misreported not just by the New Zealand government but also political parties at home and abroad. The motivational inaccuracies of the killer are then being used as an excuse to proliferate mass censorship in an unprecedented fashion against the rest of society – who had nothing to do with it…

If you were listening, you’ll know what my concern is regarding the spread of censorship through Western democracy.

To that end, I feel that it is safer for the public to be allowed the opportunity to make up their own minds about the document instead of diverting to manipulative, second hand reporting currently being used to sway debate. From the little we have been able to see of the source material – before reading was turned into a crime – it was looking more and more like the document in question was a deliberate mess created to start unrest. There was no committed single thought but rather a name-drop nightmare perfect if given to a government already chomping at the bit to silence perfectly legitimate and entirely unrelated unrest.

Indeed, the most dangerous hands to place this manifesto in are those who can use it without scrutiny.

I am aware of the counter argument. Should a document designed to create chaos be allowed to circulate? On face value you might say no and I understand that position but make sure you ask the follow up – how…? How does the killer imagine that his manifesto will do as he claims? If the purpose is to divide society and create civil unrest, the circulating of a cumbersome, nonsensical piece of garbage will not achieve it. For one humans are lazy and the grand majority won’t read more than a few pages before losing interest. Secondly, of those that do it is highly unlikely that they’ll be swayed by ideas that lack coherency. Third, like-minded individuals are already across the mantra and so the document neither changes their position nor makes them any more dangerous. Lastly, when enough people have read the drivel society will be able to dismiss it as worthless.

If we come to the conclusion collectively that this person is a maniac who tried to use a false political document – society holds onto its freedom and an evil man spends his life in jail. By all means the gun laws that he exploited should be addressed but in truth, that should have been done long ago by a neglectful government now embarrassed and trying to deflect their very real policy culpability by clinging to smoke and mirrors.

Remember, anyone can purchase and read Mein Kampf. You can do it in broad daylight sitting in a café. The detailed manifesto of Communism and Socialism’s heroes are only a Google search away even though combined they slaughtered more people than any other ideology. Religious texts sit in our schools, churches, libraries and airports despite their blood-stained history and present. Or perhaps you want to delve into the true crime genre and immerse yourself in criminology. Forget about us writers – our search histories will land us in jail one day.

Why then do we allow this? To learn from our mistakes.

…and the practical reality that if we banned everything used as justification for murder we’d be living in an empty cave real quick.

There are larger questions. How do we stop the next Hitler if, as a society, we never understood the first? Reading his work is common place in academia and yet we don’t have a tide of devout followers walking the hallways of our universities. It is patently false to say that reading a bad idea propagates it. Leaving it unchallenged has that honour. Would any world leader suggest that we should censor the events leading up to WWI and WWII because the ideas are simply too dangerous to risk circulating in general knowledge?

Worse, do we allow acts of violence by a deluded individual to unpick our laws? What would be the response if a killer named dropped Climate Change before a crime – do you throw a towel over the entire industry? Does that even seem logical… If we know one thing for certain it is that the murderer claimed himself an eco-fascist. (He claimed many competing affiliations, including a love of China’s Communism).

Look to the rise of Socialism among our youth. This generation doesn’t warm to Socialism because they understand it. They gravitate into the darkness because we have not done our due diligence as a civilisation and dragged the failed ideology through the fire for our children to fairly judge it. I’ve not met a single ‘Socialist’ who could define their own movement or even one that knew a grain of its history. We censored it from our culture and allowed its ghost to go unchallenged.

This is exactly what New Zealand has done with the killer’s manifesto. Authorities are turning it into a thing of rumour to be re-written and quoted without any mechanism to fact check. From this any claim can be made about its content and from those claims any law can be justified.

Re-read that.

You definitely have not read closely enough.

If a manifesto of ideas is going to be used to trigger a global love affair with censorial doctrine in the West the very least we are owed is the opportunity to decide for ourselves if such an action is justified.

We are not being asked if we wish to cede our freedom – world leaders are competing deliriously with each other to do something they’ve always wanted but never dared. While we are vulnerable in grief we must not let the rare and precious birthright our ancestors purchased be bargained away without so much as a sound.

The Nanny-state doctrine of censorship politics will stir violence in our society. Tearing apart the only true mechanism for freedom – the internet – will create a wave of anger from people who never before felt the need to express it.

I understand the temptation to exert control on the world is strong and that leaders who wish to distance themselves from blame are looking for life rafts in the storm but do not come for freedom. It is not yours to take.

As for Facebook and its livestreaming – it doesn’t take a genius to build a special function that can be activated by any user on pain of punishment if misused to alert a social media company of serious incident. We already have versions of these on other platforms to deal with cases of self-harm or active crime. What we are witnessing is a reaction of convenience, capitalising on tragedy – and I reject it.

 

-ellymelly

Posted on by ellymelly 1

IN TOO DEEP

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If you’re after the face of savagery, look no further than the cracks that run between our rustling tectonic plates, drowned in a league of salt water and kept in perfect pitch. This is the freezing darkness home to humanity’s wrecks of war and exploration – the true deep in which time lags, dragging creatures from our evolutionary twilight out from fragile pockets of refuge in all their awkward horror.

In the black, an orb of light is dangled. It bobs temptingly – Lucifer’s light bulb in what may as well be the void between stars.

Like all false hope it wavers, flickering strangely as naive prey approach. What remains unseen are the thousands of thin razors protruding from a jaw that’s all awkward angles and hard lines of bone. Translucent fins loiter as threads set adrift, waiting for a tremble in the water. This is the ambush predator lying in wait with its mouth open. It’s heard the tiny fish coming across the darkness and kept very still. For hours, they duck and weave between its rows of fangs. When the jaws close, the lights go out and the trap closes with barely a ripple.

Beneath – deeper still – the gashes that cross the ocean floor smoulder. Columns of scorching water claw up through the cold leaving semi-precious metals glinting on the seabed produced by an infinite tectonic factory where brimstone breeds treasure.

Let’s talk about deadlines…

For better or worse, our civilisation has latched its survival to the ‘Rare Earth’ industry. A somewhat unexpected creation, the roots of this monstrosity run right to the core of our technological empire, wrapping themselves around sunken coffers while anchoring onto trade portfolios like the Face-Huggers of Alien.

To imagine a world without Rare Earth operations is to envisage the Dark Ages from the deck of a ship adrift without a sail.

We are Rare Earth dependants. ‘Rare Earth’ refers to the mining and production of seventeen chemical elements essential to our technological revolution. The culprits are:

Cerium(Ce), Dysprosium(Dy), Erbium(Er), Europium(Eu), Gadolinium(Gd), Holmium(Ho), Lanthanum(La), Lutetium(Lu), Neodymium(Nd), Praseodymium(Pr), Promethium(Pm), Samarium(Sm), Scandium(Sc), Terbium(Tb), Thulium(Tm), Ytterbium(Yb), Yttrium(Y).

Paradoxically, excusing our radioactive friend Promethium, none of these elements are rare. Instead they are diffuse meaning that although ore deposits are widespread their low concentrations require intensive mining to extract meaningful quantities. So, whilst you can hoe down into a nice solid vein gold and call it a day, if you want to get your hands on some of the 100 tonnes of Dysprosium extracted every year for computers, wind turbines, electric vehicles and batteries, you’ll have to carve out a sizable slice of Southern China.

Not only are these things a bit on the sparse side, they’re also weak-minded. You’ll find Rare Earth elements in compound packs or hanging with their phosphate buddies. Expect to spend the rest of your natural life tearing these bastards away from tight chemical embraces at great expense, tedium and unsavoury environmental practices.

This is why they have a bad reputation.

If you plug it in or slap a #renewables sticker on the side, chances are it began its life in the filthy open-cut mines sprawling across the East. That is the reality of electronics. That is the truth of our marriage to renewable technology.

All you need to understand about Rare Earth elements inside the world economy is that they are essential, irreplaceable and finite.

The last part of this trio caused a stir twenty years ago when concerns surfaced that mining operations would fail to meet demand on several fronts. What had quietly started as a fringe, expensive luxury industry exploded across the globe as TVs, computers, military weapons, white goods and music devices went mainstream. This fear of the empty mine scraping the bedrock gave rise to the electronic recycling craze that has now been largely forgotten. While yes, it’s best that these items don’t find their way into landfill (even though they do) the idea behind the push was not to save the environment but to salvage material.

It soon became obvious that even if recycling recovered all elements from discarded products, the electrical industry was growing exponentially and their addition to the pool of resources barely moved the metaphoric cliff edge two fifths of bugger all. Simply put – it was cheaper to go digging for more.

No matter how you cut it, China produces upwards of 90% of all Rare Earth materials. This is not because they are in possession of the world’s coveted stockpile – it is because they are prepared to decimate their landscape with cheap labour and rampant destruction that would cause the environmentalists of the West to breakdown in fits of hysteria. There are no endangered frog ‘GoFundMe’s or activists chaining themselves to finches – only an authoritarian regime arriving with a DA and a bulldozer. Local resistance and tragedy count for little in a dictatorship and virtue signalling companies of the West purchasing the end product aren’t often caught shedding a tear over the birth of their solar panels at the expense of an ancient fishing village.

The industry did not start in China.

Europe, the United States, South America, India and Australia have all toyed around with Rare Earth mining to varying degrees but China’s dubious practices have allowed it to severely undercut the market. However, China’s monopoly over this critical industry is tenuous.

Unlike high quality Uranium which exists in very few ancient geological landscapes, Rare Earth elements are everywhere. Mining them is a pain in the arse, not a logistical impossibility and so in 2010 when China attempted to use their market dominance as a political rifle over a territorial scuffle in the South China Sea, the world heard the first irritating shrieks of a doomsday alarm. Learning that an allegedly friendly totalitarian State was not above using market supremacy as blackmail took a bit of getting used to.

With a lot of very worried eyes looking on, Chinese trawler captain Zhan Qixion of the Minjinya 5179 sparked a major dispute when he had a careless head-on collision with the Japanese Coast Guard in the waters around the Senkaku Islands (claimed by Japan, Taiwan and China). Like everything in the South China Sea, it’s a diplomatic mess of ancient claims mixed with post-war surrenders and a whole lot of underwater oil.

Things went about as well as you’d expect.

The Japanese detained Zhan. China demanded he be released. Japan added ten days to the man’s detention and the reports began that China had halted Rare Earth exports to Japan and rounded up some Japanese employees as insurance. Although everyone eventually decided to back down and call it a day, at the conclusion to this enlightening confrontation, Representative Donald Manzullo said:

“China’s action against Japan fundamentally transformed the Rare Earths market for the worse. As a result, manufacturers can no longer expect a steady supply of these elements, and the pricing uncertainty created by this action threatens tens of thousands of American jobs.”

This little flourish of power ultimately did not work in China’s favour. Properly alarmed, manufacturers pressed ‘snooze’ on the global financial apocalypse then carefully assessed their economic situation over a stiff coffee. Many realised that they were using Rare Earth materials because they were cheap and readily available but not indispensable. They changed to synthetic alternatives or significantly reduced their use. Japan learned the harshest lesson, immediately setting aside 53.3 billion yen and doubled down by investing heavily in alternate sources of Rare Earth exploration including deep sea deposits.

Call it a rustling of the predator’s fins, if you will, and a fleeting retreat by a few baby fish.

Nothing dramatically changed.

The technology boom created a spectacular plume into the fledgling century. Environmental scrutiny from the United Nations ensured that Western countries stayed well away from the dirty Rare Earth industry, shoring up China’s position who had also forcibly amalgamated its mining companies into a fleet of six so that should it choose to waggle its eyebrows, no one could slide anything precious under the table.

Well, admittedly there was an organised crime problem. As Rare Earth prices soared due to China’s restriction on exports, illegal mines (imagine the horror from Australian activists) started popping up all over the place selling to the West on the cheap. At one point they represented a third of the market.

Meanwhile the world’s parent, ‘America’ had a hard think back to why it left the industry in the first place.

California’s Mountain Pass premier Rare Earth Mine was at capacity operations throughout the 1990’s producing 850 gallons of salt-infused, Thorium and Uranium tainted radioactive waste water every single minute. During operations it suffered a catastrophic leak and eventually closed in 2002, unable to handle its toxic output. China was more than happy to exploit Western distaste for mining operations but given the Pacific problem, America thought to hell with it and had another go, ordering its reopening.

Why? Here’s the rub…

America realised that as a nation it was facing a future in which the beacon of freedom on the world stage would be 100% reliable on China for military components for defence. It didn’t take a genius to work out that something had to change. Rare Earth had become a national interest and a serious security risk. China knows this but many climate enthralled activists do not.

America understood the climate for re-opening a Rare Earth enterprise had worsened but did it anyway. Most countries ignored the problem, including Australia.

The ‘Green’ revolution was well on its way and mandated via treaties from the United Nations. At the same time, politicians scrounging for the ‘youth vote’ pulled a swifty on doe-eyed Millennials, leading them to believe in a China-owned renewable energy future, adding another hook to the problem. So far, only India had raised its hand, shifting about 5% of the market balance away from the East but they have their own market risk, playing Cold War with Pakistan every other week.

Like most valuable geological shit, Australia has more than her fair share. If we really wanted to, we could start a Rare Earth revolution in our own backyard to match the Uranium Age (which we should be having). Of course, considering the trouble caused trying to build a small coal mine, the chances of a Labor or Labor-lite Conservative governments chasing the international golden egg is about as good as Theresa May’s political future.

If anything, Australia is rolling backwards off the civilisation table, putting as many of our eggs in China’s basket as possible despite the clear and present danger our expansionist neighbour poses. Suppose the Greens got their way (as they are likely to do) and drove Australia to 100% renewable energy reality – our basic service would then be 100% tied to China. Without power, you don’t have a nation – or the ability to defend one. I’ll leave you to ponder what a smart, ruthless nation looking for a bit of extra real estate might do with that information.

In relation to China, the globe really was in deep shit without a snorkel.

What to do? The competing ideologies of the age make for devastating bedfellows and a political minefield.

Today’s world is obsessed with ‘environmentalism’ at the expense of survival. A generation of inner-city reality-virgins believe bustling modern metropolises can exist with zero impact to the planet and thus, oddly, do everything they can to destroy the demon-farmers that provide them with food. This is joined by the contradictory ‘renewable energy’ obsession thrust upon us by the United Nations – who coincidentally have the South-South redistribution of wealth from the West to the Socialist Empire as one of their pet projects championed by luvvies like Gaddafi and Chavez.

The regress of Western Civilisation appears to be led by a tiny pack of elites making money off the back of conflict like modern arms dealers but these ambitions cannot co-exist forever.

Overall, the United Nation agenda has been successful. The West is getting poorer but the third world is not creating significant wealth beyond that which is gifted to them. By driving ourselves into the economic ground whilst laying seeds for a terrible technical stagnation in our immediate future, as a general trend we will slow down our purchasing of products from China. As the pool of money dries up and with an enormous domestic market to satisfy, China will eye off our resources. It’s not all about mining opportunities for them – food and space are always high on the agenda when you have over a billion people to look after.

‘Open borders’ as a misguided philosophy exasperates the problem. Raising welfare to support ill-settled refugees drains the temple chests while putting additional stress on infrastructure not to mention fostering a population loyal to other nations – as has proved disastrous for Germany and the recent trend for Erdogan’s 1.4 million strong supporter base inside Germany to meddle in German politics while still propping up the AKP in Turkish elections.

As the ancient world knows, countries who do not dream of their future won’t have one. A nation who fails to recognise their own value voluntarily places themselves on the global auction heap at a discount.

This is the fracturing world being laid down as we watch.

The natural progression is a period of upheaval, a global re-shuffling of borders through opportunistic conquest and the collapse of the modern Roman Empire aka The West, folded in to the dictatorial superpowers. If you don’t think the winds of war have started to creep in over the seas, you haven’t been paying attention.

‘Peace’ is not our default setting.

As the generation who exchanged their horses for cars begins to dwindle so too do those who remember what it is to watch the pieces of the world knock up against each other in moments of violence. When they pass over the horizon, it will be left to our wide-eyed youth to stumble into the open seas without a map, let alone a GPS.

In this global skirmish over natural resources, countries like Australia have our throats held tight and our Western arses ransomed beyond our means. There is no running from the storm so we may as well hold our ground and take a closer look at the flickers of light branching across its girth. Every now and then a few gnarled economic rocks breach in the trough of a wave – perhaps scuff the side and take a bit of paint off in the form of political squabble.

…and so on to the alluring deposits of Rare Earth loot hiding under the waves.

This ‘Fool’s Gold’ is forged in the mantle, dragged through the crust like veins from the Earth’s heart before exploding from hydrothermal vents. These towering creations that dwarf buildings sit there ready for the plunder of deep sea mining operations who see this as their solution to the unpopular open-cut mines.

Plans are well under way to harvest tens of thousands of square kilometres of the ocean floor for the express purpose of stabilising the Green-Renewable industry, circumnavigating China entirely. They are coming for the sulphides in the thermal stacks, the manganese littered over the Abyssal Plains and the cobalt crusts running down the flanks of submerged mountains.

Unfortunately this underwater world is not a barren wasteland of volcanic activity – it is a delicate ecosystem for our most precious and rare extremophiles – the creatures we barely understand who may hold secrets we haven’t dreamt of.

So I wonder if the children protesting in the streets for our Green revolution – if the academics on the public payroll killing any hope of our nation’s energy future and if the politicians waving their virtue-drenched placards around can square the fact that their obsession with Climate Change dogma is driving the mechanism of environmental destruction whilst stretching out the fragile threads that hold our international peace to breaking point?

Do not bother looking for the surface.

Australia is in too deep.

 

– ellymelly

Posted on by ellymelly 0

THE CRYING OF THE WOLVES

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Honesty is a difficult scrap of ground on which to make your political stand.

Naturally apathetic, Australia’s political culture has been one of tolerance driven overwhelmingly by laziness. This is not necessarily a criticism. What better defence against tyranny than a landmass incapable of being whipped into an idealogical frenzy? After all, you can’t start a revolution if there’s no one to drag out the guillotine or storm the doors of parliament. Good luck tearing down flags when half your rabble is fishing beer out of an esky or negotiating overtime rates.

Every now and then one group or another gives rebellion a ‘right ol’ go’ but Australia’s stamina for political radicals has trouble outlasting the opening refrain of the campaign. Unlike our patriotic friend across the pond, it’s not controversy that kills off dictatorial hopefuls in this land – it’s tedium.

Indeed, Australians would much prefer their politicians subscribe to the Victorian approach to children – be rarely seen and never heard. So long as they perform their basic task when in government most people couldn’t give a toss what sort of waggery they got up to. I have a theory that scandal only undoes a minister because the public object to endless coverage of their existence. In short, they annoy themselves out of office. Nothing exemplifies this point quite like ex-PM (still self-appointed lord and saviour) Malcolm Turnbull banning sexual relations between staff in his party to band-aid then Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce’s uninteresting affair. To be frank, there’s not going to be a lot left for the public servants to do if they’re not shagging each other in the stationery cupboard.

Joking… but it is true that we have and do let our elected officials get away with all manner of mischief.

Democracy is a chore and most decent people expect the bare minimum of those that get paid by the public purse. The standard M.O. as far as I can determine is, ‘don’t bugger it up’ more eloquently phrased, ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ which is why voters are beginning to lose patience with the endless re-re-re-restructuring of mindless enterprises instead of embarking on much needed infrastructure works.

Before going on, I will admit this:

Australia has a very strange political quirk. You would (sensibly) imagine that to truly motivate a voting base against an incumbent party – to create an honest political movement in his country – you’d have to put in a dire performance. Oppositions are not voted in while governing parties are almost always voted out. Labor in particular has a rather theatrical record of being smacked on the arse by the slamming door of general elections after forgetting to carry a few ‘ones’ on the national balance sheet.

However…

The voting public also have a Russian Roulette approach to politics. If things are going really well with the nation and they’ve spun the barrel three or four times on a good party – we paradoxically load the pistol with a terrible set of ideas and give it a tug on election day. And so the great Australian dilemma of well-performing parties meeting their untimely demise becomes standard practice. Locals know this as, ‘Liberals fixing things and Labor routinely screwing them up.’

What is my point? The mechanisms that drive Australian politics are bizarre but predictable. We are creatures of habit uncomfortable with tectonic change who occasionally set fire to the sprawling forests of logic.

2019’s Federal election will be a war between disaffected Conservatives tired of the tide forever receding into Labor’s lap, the Millennial generation fresh out of university keen to try out a bit of Socialism like voluntarily strapping themselves to a Breaking Wheel, and the terrified minority who remain confused about the barren political landscape offering them very little tangible hope.

Who plans to walk away as Prime Minister? That all depends on which leader self-combusts first. To date, this election has been a comedy of errors with Bill Shorten floating sinister ideas like mandating your body be used for spare parts and a resurrection of the deeply hated ‘death taxes’ to compliment his pickpocketing of franking credits while Scott Morrison’s flanks squabble over how green to make their energy policy, ignoring screeches of dismay from their base.

The blue ribbon is unravelling while the red sword swings within a hair of its own neck.

If minor parties are Australia’s protest, it’s going to be one hell of a year. With both major parties dragging their feet through disastrous news polls, all eyes are on the solitary voices shouting out through the thrall of bickering politicians. In this compliment I do not include breakaway independents who have hastily re-branded. Any ex-Liberal who hides under the shadow of a Getup! campaign is not worthy of the title. To paraphrase the Princess Bride, ‘independent – you keep using that word, I don’t think you know what it means…’

None of this soul searching is remarkable.

The curious thing about the 2019 election is the sudden vigour for dogmatic apocalypse mongering. There have always been crazies wandering the streets, hands raised to the heavens declaring the end to be nigh. They are a statistical certainty and usually dismissed as delusional. How strange then it is to watch the state of Australian politics descend into a sea of poorly spelled placards proclaiming the planet’s demise as the linchpin for both Federal and State elections. How aptly timed is the student’s ‘Strike4Climate’ in this thinly disguised attempt by activists to use our children as political interference. Teachers are paid by our taxes to educate our children, not turn them into mindless tools of the State.

It is reasonably easy to hoodwink the very young. Indoctrination starts in school because students lack the worldly experience required to spot a used car salesman flogging a wreck. Surrounded by half-wit rhetoric, paid hysteria and manipulated ‘science’ our educational institutions fail to leave our children with the one protection they need against dogma – the ability to question…

For a zealous group of self-made messiahs, the Climate Alarmists have made an interesting oversight. You see, there is a massive expiration date branded onto their pseudo religion and instead of the usual, vague Hellfire that can be trotted out over the aeons, these geniuses have learned nothing and given themselves a meagre 12 years.

A decade comes around soon enough. So soon, in fact that I do not have to win this debate today because there is a tsunami of reality creeping forward towards us – like the silent wave racing across the ocean after a seismic event.

Herein lies the warning: when your apocalypse deadline comes and goes and starts to fade – another committee of ‘experts’ will attempt to push out the bar for 5 – 10 – or even 12 years as they have done repeatedly through the last century.

But… Eventually… Those children that you indoctrinated are going to wake up, dare I say they’ll get woke and realise that ‘Climate Change’ is simply another one of their childhood myths. Like its predecessors Global Warming and Global Cooling, it’ll lay on the floor in bits at their feet with a price tag amassing interest that they now have to pay. Having destroyed their faith in reason and undermined the scientific establishment, those children now adults will turn and look you lot of charlatans in the eye and ask:

“Did you do it on purpose? Did you do it for profit? Or did you do it for power…?”

Labor, Greens, Getup! Independents and misguided Liberals who tried to drag this out for political gain – good luck spinning another doomsday fantasy. As the old fable goes, the village never comes to the defence of those who cry wolf.

-ellymelly

Posted on by ellymelly 0

SOLD SHORT

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Can someone pass me a shovel? I need to dig up the last of Bill Shorten’s conscience…

Well, I can either do that or continue hoeing out this trench that Labor and the Coalition have dug from the coffers of Getup! straight to the entrance of the polling booths. I wonder if they realise that for a supposedly benevolent entity a cursory glance at their website reveals ground zero for a Labor policy post-it note apocalypse… At this point they are more-or-less a slipway made from decomposing fliers and coconut oil. Not that anyone is bothering to question how much wasteful paraphernalia accumulates during an election campaign – we’re simply offering the odd lofted eyebrow in the direction of hypocrisy while side-eyeing the current definition of ‘independent’.

To borrow an overused metaphor from a naked, raving Remainer and employ it properly – as a voter, it is a tad nauseating to watch Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten lock arms and stroll a unity ticket along the Yellow Brick Road, leading Australia through the gates of the Emerald City in which every citizen is commanded to wear green-tinted glasses to perpetrate the fallacy that the walls are ‘renewable’. At the end of the day, this morally vacuous civilisation created from Labor’s utopia is a sad melee of smoke and mirrors – if only we had Julie Bishop’s glittering red shoes to tap together and takes us back to reality. I’m kidding. We’re well rid of the shoes. No seriously – enough about the shoes. They’re safely in a museum which is exactly where shallow politicking should be laid to rest.

The truth is, if you resort to motivating the voting base with a manufactured apocalypse – if you have to employ baseless fear as currency – then the moral bankruptcy of Australian politics has well and truly fallen off the ledge. That roar from Twitter is the wind in our hair as we hurtle toward the ocean of Social Justice, Union thuggery, the erosion of civil liberty and theft of private enterprise. Here we are, base jumping without a parachute.

Certainly, the percentages of ‘crazy’ shift a little between Labor and the LNP. While the small print of their policies aren’t quite carbon copies (give me some credit for that pun) their souls are weighed equal on the metaphoric scales of misery. Poverty. Exorbitant electricity prices. Woeful unreliability. Big renewable share portfolio returns. Foreign ownership of Australian power. Most terrifyingly, we’re being offered an energy solution whose net impact from birth to grave on the environment is worse than any ailing coal fired plant.

The simple truth is that we have entered an age where our leaders actively sabotage the environment to sell the lie of ‘virtue’ in order to earn power while the actual power we require is stuttering towards catastrophic failure. These are the last days of Rome…

Here lies the real problem.

Scientists on the renewables payroll do everything they can to disguise the hefty environmental cost of their money-making pets Solar and Wind energy while blindfolding the public to Nuclear’s graces. Debates about the tumultuous state of the climate are irrelevant when the reality of these ‘clean’ industries is that they are filthy ventures with all unpalatable ecological damage kept away from scrutiny. They exist, almost solely, for share portfolio gain but when the time comes and they are challenged to stand and deliver their energy mandate we’re going to find a rudely empty stage and a few crumpled campaign fliers.

For the unaware, these idolised technologies Solar and Wind require China’s sprawl of toxic rare earth mines to trash swathes of land – ruining rural communities and their surrounding areas with radioactive sludge all in search of a finite resource desperately needed for more important technologies.

The mining and transport is fossil fuel intensive whilst the steel has to be smelted with the use of good old coal furnaces. Rare earth materials vacuumed up by solar panels and wind turbines aren’t geologically rare – they are ‘diffuse’ simply meaning that you have to dig up an awful lot of dirt to get something useful. Enormous – open – pit – mines. Neodymium, Indium, Tellurium, Dysprosium – China uses them all as a stick to smack Western markets across the face with whenever it suits them. That is the risk of doing business with a Communist dictatorship. China’s rare earth companies were forcibly amalgamated into six government owned bodies which, somewhat foolishly, Western leaders have decided to bank their entire energy security futures on.

Even without the brewing geopolitical climate ramping up a few degrees, per kilowatt of power eventually produced by renewables, they stockpile orders of magnitude more waste than a Nuclear plant. Uncomfortably for the greener members of the audience, the only power generation technology whose waste is entirely self contained for proper disposal is Nuclear which also has the highest level of scrutiny and law. Indeed, if your serious intention is to the save the environment, on paper Solar and Wind would be your last choice for net devastation vs return. Only an individual blinded by prejudice could review the studies sighted at the European Union and write Nuclear off.

The only question left for Australia is whether or not our economy will survive the renewables social experiment.

Whether the alarmist, apocalypse profiteering mongers like it or not, Nuclear and exciting fusion-based power generators are our future. The energy negative systems of Solar and Wind, with their impossible land footprints required to meet demand (consuming entire countries) are a dead end vanity street. Necessity will eventually outweigh our virtue. Sure – but at present we are the foolish explorer wandering the desert, dropping our water supply on the promise of a mirage.

For maximum irritation to our fragile friends in generation #metoo I shall use a gender-analogy to explain the concept of a ‘net energy negative system’. It is important to understand the severity of the flaw renewables present to the world because it is insurmountable.

Let’s pretend that Coal Fired, Natural Gas, Hydro and Nuclear power generation stations are country towns. Contained within these communities are men and women. If left to their own devices over the next fifty years their net population will increase as they have lots of babies. Great. Civilisation 1.01.

Nearby towns Solar and Wind have only men. They can make some buildings – they’ve got a half decent street and one or two e-cars but no matter how long you leave them their net population will degrade until eventually they die out entirely. If they want to maintain their civilisation, they have to travel to our big towns Coal, Gas, Hydro or Nuclear to make families.

In other words, Solar and Wind consume more energy than they ever create.

And so the reality is that in a world with only renewable technologies on offer they do not meet the base requirement to be self perpetuating which is exactly why they were always envisioned as situation specific, supplementary energy sources. No one is saying a solar panel on a farm gate is a crime or that a windmill in a remote area thousands of miles from the grid can’t be of use – we’re saying you can’t power cities and civilisations with them.

Kindly described as ‘difficult’ to recycle – ‘impossible’ is a closer approximation. In the case of wind turbines, the thermosetting matrix and glass fibre composition of their blades can never be remoulded into other products. The damages of wear and critical failure fatigue to its components almost exclusively make them unsuitable for reuse meaning that when one piece of the wind turbine breaks or something smashes your solar panel you are usually forced to replace the entire installation. If you’re wondering why we can’t melt the components down and start again, it is because the heat required irrecoverably destroys the quality of the material. Of course, the biggest problem is the price tag. Think Trump’s wall hurts the budget? You should see what the bill is to recycle a few ‘renewables’.

We haven’t even spoken of the concrete and steel required for these playgrounds of noise. In case you were wondering – no – it’s not a ‘carbon neutral’ activity.

5% of global carbon dioxide emissions originate during the production of cement while 7% comes from manufacturing steel. Renewables are quickly adding themselves to the count. In short, fossil fuels are required to build these renewable technologies even if the brochure doesn’t show the coal stack. Infinitely worse we are wasting the resource to construct power-weak technologies that need constant replacing. It is like spending 5 billion dollars to print 500 dollar notes. In short, it’s a bad return on investment.

Summary figures suggest that 1MW of wind capacity requires 103 tonnes of stainless steel, 402 tonnes of concrete, 6.8 tonnes of fibreglass, 3 tonnes of copper and 20 tonnes of cast iron. To replace global power with wind would require 10TW (terrawatts) of wind capacity. Now run those numbers again…

Okay – so we can agree that sucks but I’m on the Solar-Train! (You declare). I hate to break it to you but the production, lifespan and grave of photovoltaic panels leave some pretty nasty piles of liquid and gas waste running into the waterways. Everything from the extraction of the raw materials to the additives and furnaces needed to turn them into benign looking solar panels would make even the most moderate Green twitch. Indeed, China is dealing with a mounting waste problem and protests such as those Haining in Zhejia (a village surrounding Zhejiang Jink Solar Co. Ltd.). As villagers riot the careless destruction of their rivers they are beaten into silence by the regime struggling to keep their contracts with the virtuous West.

“The factory has been polluting us all this while and now that we make some noise, the government shuts us up. They are all in this together, now we just have to die here silently. You can see all these riot police here, we are just helpless villagers.” – A quote from one of the village elders, taken from Reuters.com

While there are emerging technologies available to reduce (but not mitigate) the destructive force of this process, the majority of renewables are produced in China at the cheapest possible production cost. A generous estimate is that it takes a year for a solar panel to cancel out its production emission but come the end of its life (listed as 30 years but the reality is far shorter particularly in the face of hail storms), it must be classified as ‘special waste’. Like wind turbines, solar panels are full of material considered hazardous and economically un-viable to recycle.

What we are doing is creating a future landfill of toxic material that – unlike Nuclear waste – won’t breakdown on its own to something innocuous. Heavy metals are stable and for all the fuss made over our plastic shopping bags we’re happy to put the worst of the worst into the ground. At the end of the day, less than 11% of the solar panel is recyclable and there’s no money to be made in doing it – in fact, it costs money.

We haven’t even crossed the bridge over the quagmire of batteries and transformers or the bat and bird slaughtering wind turbines somehow exempt from legislation designed to protect rare predatory birds. Actually, these two particular renewables require a remarkable ‘scorched earth’ approach to the landscape. We live with the irony that you can’t temporarily clear land for a mine but you can tear it up for a solar farm. I’m not sure if the Black-Throated Finches can tell the difference.

Sunlight might appear to be ‘free’ but let’s not forget that we’re in orbit around a very efficient nuclear fusion reactor – the holy grail of power generation. It’s having a grand old time transforming 620 million metric tons of Hydrogen into 606 million metric tones of Helium every single second. The result is light, viciously charged winds that buffet the Earth and the supposed, ‘free energy’ of immense heat hitting the solar panels on your roof. Remember, budding Socialists, just because you didn’t pay for it, doesn’t mean it was ‘free’.

The simple, uncomfortable fact is that the only mass-producing, cheap and efficient renewable technologies within our immediate reach are Geothermal and Hydro. No, not the imitation Snowy-Hydro scheme 2.0 pumping water up and down at a net loss, proper old school Hydro like the station at Niagara Falls that churns out power day and night. We should remind ourselves of Nikola Tesla’s words upon the opening of Niagara Falls’ Hydro Electric Power Station.

“We have many a monument of past ages; we have the palaces and pyramids, the temples of the Greeks and the cathedrals of Christendom. In them is exemplified the power of men, the greatness of nations, the love of art and religious devotion. But the monument at Niagara has something of its own, more in accord with our present thoughts and tendencies. It is a monument worthy of our scientific age, a true monument of enlightenment and of peace. It signifies the subjugation of natural forces to the service of man, the discontinuance of barbarous methods, the relieving of millions from want and suffering.” – Nikola Tesla

Where are the giants of our age? Where are the ambitious, brilliant minds wading into the world to build great things? They are dead. The regressive hearts of the Left have killed them and cast mediocrity and absurdity in their wake.

Harnessing Niagara was never about playing politics, it was an opportunity to fill a desperate need of the growing population by taming a powerful natural force.

Unfortunately Australia is at a disadvantage for the realistic renewable energy market. We don’t have a handy fault line to latch a Geothermal powerhouse onto meanwhile Hydro, whether you like it or not, requires a fair bit of environmental interruption to river systems which isn’t a brilliant idea in a flood and drought ravaged landmass like Australia – unless you count Tasmania, which we mainlanders try not to.

We have got a blindingly obvious answer glowing in the deserts every night but no one wants to talk about Nuclear because we like to give ourselves handicaps for no good reason. While the kids over at ITER play at making miniature stars, the rest of us heathens have some workable alternatives.

With evidence mounting that renewables are the worst fit for our energy environment, presumptive heir Bill Shorten and terrified king Scott Morrison print the treacherous slogans of the Paris Agreement across their chests and scream from the flanks of parliament, begging for money – always more money – to prop up the UN’s paper castle.

The proverbial shit is headed toward the fan.

As we’ve long been told by angry Climate Alarmists, Nuclear reactors take time to build (as if this in itself is a failing). Indeed, useful things often take time to construct. So, as the Green’s march to close our existing Coal Fired plants, the burden of baseload has started to exasperate the grid into alarming palpitations. Eventually, during one of these blackouts, an engineer will whisper to the surviving politician that a First World country is about to face a sudden regression into the Dark Ages. Queensland and Tasmania will be the only states with 21st century lights while the rest of us stare down the barrel of a very real, very serious logistical disaster.

Without power a civilisation is nothing. We’re only ever a light switch away from the caves. Living on a farm, we’re often left with week long stretches carting water from the paddock, living by candlelight, cooking with gas and charging our phones in our diesel car. I’m not sure Sydney would take kindly to the same experience.

Now, with bags of gold changing hands beneath the table and shallow ideology driving our politics, I can’t help but wonder if the Australian people are being sold short.

In the mean time, while we await our epoch downgrade, I have set calendar reminders for every new climate change hoax that comes across my desk in what should amount to half a century of gloating. At least I resisted the urge to turn it into a drinking game. Cheers!

-ellymelly

Posted on by ellymelly 1