iowaclimatescienceeducation--2020-04-28--The Asylum Atop Their Ivory Tower

The Asylum Atop Their Ivory Tower

PLEASE CLICK THE ABOVE LINK FOR THE ORIGINAL STORY TO HELP MY EDITOR KEEP HIS JOB .
PART TWO OF THIS STORY PUBLISHING SHORTLY .
All right , all right !
I ’ ve been wrong all along .
My bad .
Sorry .
Get over it .
Don ’ t beat a dead horse .
I ’ ve long suggested that Melbourne University in Premier Dan Andrews ’ People ’ s Republic of Victoria [ 1 ] is the epicentre of Green-Left climate idiocy .
I ’ ve suggested the affliction peaked at the university ’ s jellified brain @ @ @ @ @ @ @ doom-crying shameless huckster Al Gore , probably a captain ’ s pick by then-vice-chancellor Glyn Davis , whose personal carbon footprint was embigged by his $ 1.6m salary package , three times that of the Prime Minister .
The Melbourne University ’ s green affliction meanders down to its Sustainable Society Institute , representing the haemorrhoid on the Carlton campus corpus .
For example , the Institute seed-funded a green symposium last July featuring an imported NZ authority on “ tree-humping ” .
Part 2 : The Most Disgusting Climate Cult of All @ @ @ @ @ @ @ co-authored a book with Extinction Rebellion guru Rupert Read .
[ 2 ] who writes , It is just-about conceivable that this civilisation might survive by adopting an extremely disciplined eco-fascism .
[ 3 ] They ’ d also like to return Western civilisation to horseback .
Incidentally , in these straitened times , the Carlton academics and administrators will enjoy a 2.2 per cent pay rise from May 1 , and 9 per cent total rise from 2018 to 2021 .
Suck that up , private-sector helots .
1/ Does Melbourne University @ @ @ @ @ @ @ academics and administrators 2.2 per cent pay rises at a time when the private sector is enduring its worst conditions since the 1930s depression ?
2/ Has Melbourne University since Feb. 2020 made any attempt to re-negotiate its Enterprise Bargain concerning the 2.2 per cent pay rise next week ?
3/ Are Melbourne University spokespeople themselves eligible for the 2.2 per cent pay rise from next week ?
I got the following reply from PR Emma Sun , senior media advisor to Vice-Chancellor Professor Duncan Maskell Thanks for your query .
We won @ @ @ @ @ @ @ your story .
A bit odd , not to mention rude , for an institution founded for free inquiry .
Melbourne Uni rates as top Australian university , which isn ’ t saying much .
They ’ ve all gone downhill since the late Australian war hero and Quadrant columnist Peter Ryan , for 26 years director of Melbourne University Press , described them as “ money-grubbing academic slums ” .
Melbourne Uni rated 32nd in Times Higher Education world rankings this year .
Whoever does these rankings ought to be taken outside @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , my bad is that all along I overlooked the mightier green lunacy at RMIT University , which is Melbourne Uni ’ s southern neighbour by a kilometre or so .
I ’ m a data-driven person and there ’ s an index of the relative sanity of Melbourne ’ s two education icons .
RMIT academics , by the way , are getting a 2 per cent pay rise from June 1 and 8 per cent for the four years to 2021 .
[ 4 ] An RMIT spokesperson says , “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Enterprise Agreement , the salary increases set out in the agreement occur automatically .
Any changes would require our employees to approve a variation to the agreement.
” At Melbourne University only 18 academics signed the manifesto of Extinction Rebellion last September , including six at professor/associate rank .
But RMIT academics eclipsed that effort thrice over with a thumping 63 signatories , including 15 professors and associate professors .
RMIT ’ s Dr Peta Malins and Professor Rob Watts were the two lead signatories , among about 275 signers .
( More @ @ @ @ @ @ @ national roll-call of the XR-petitioning professorial ranks – and remember this is just the tip of the iceberg of top-tier academic green-lefties — is about 70 .
Extinction Rebellion , as will be documented in Part Two , is a vicious upper-middle-class death cult .
Monash academics came second with 44 XR acolytes ( 11 at professor levels ) , and even little Deakin equalled Melbourne with 18 ( three professors ) .
[ 5 ] The Guardian lied that signatories were “ leading academics ” although heaps were mere post-grad students , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ self-described “ comedian ” and mattress salesman Rod Quantock .
His academic qualification is having failed Melbourne ’ s Bachelor of Architecture degree after spending five years getting to Year 3 of the six-year course .
Melbourne University seems to set a low bar for activists .
( “ You ’ ve done the Al Gore climate course ?
Great , drop by and the VC will fit you with your bonnet and stripey gown for an honourary doctorate.
” ) [ 6 ] You may be wondering what XR ’ s university @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their institution shaking down international students .
At Melbourne University a ‘ Level E ’ professor from May ’ s pay rise will be on a base pay of $ 199,992 plus heaven-knows-what perks , starting with 17 per cent employer-paid super ( RMIT from June : $ 187,148 ) .
[ 7 ] A Level D or Associate Professor at the top of the range at Melbourne U will be on $ 170,993 plus perks .
( RMIT : $ 160,059 ) .
The Guardian headlined the XR petition , “ Leading @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is their moral duty to rebel to ‘ defend life itself ’ ” .
The petition for “ rapid total decarbonisation of the economy ” itself deserves a prize for bombast by pathetically vain academics .
Here ’ s a sample : It is unconscionable that we , our children and grandchildren should have to bear the terrifying brunt of this unprecedented [ climate ] disaster … The ‘ social contract ’ has been broken , and it is therefore not only our right , but our moral duty , to rebel to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have been so brave .
The science is clear , the facts are incontrovertible .
We are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction , with about 200 species becoming extinct each day .
If you check the “ 200 species ” links and look past the hand-waving of “ scientists say ” and “ say many biologists ” ( exact quotes ) , you wind up with a ten-year-old Guardian article citing a UN biodiversity chief Ahmed Djoghlaf .
UN biodiversity reports are political documents , with 100 or more UN @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with the text , as occurred last year .
[ 8 ] The extinction claims were debunked in Djoghlaf ’ s time by actual peer-reviewed work .
[ 9 ] Life is too short to fact-check for Quadrant Online readers all the absurd apocalypticism in the XR petition , which ends , strangely but dutifully , with a call “ for the urgent establishment of a treaty with First Nation Australians.
” Why do XR acolytes seem so scarce at UniMelb ?
In recent months I ’ ve been to their basements and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a great many looking like time- and space-wasting faculty members or unemployable green-minded post-grads , and all worshipping a projected image of Greta Thunberg .
[ 10 ] The Top Four universities were certainly all Victorian ; my state ’ s barmy academic army trounced NSW and all other States on fealty to Extinction Rebellion .
The academics say they signed in their personal capacity , yet they proudly cite their universities and titles .
Their campus controllers are fine with them signing on to what British counter-terrorism police last November labelled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to counter-terror officials .
The Guardian reported that XR featured alongside threats such as neo-Nazis and a pro-terrorist Islamist group .
“ The guide , aimed at police officers , government organisations and teachers who by law have to report concerns about radicalisation , was dated last November , ” said The Guardian .
Within days Britain ’ s top cops insisted their labelling of XR was an unfortunate mistake , but as Queen Gertrude put it , the lady doth protest too much .
I want to congratulate you on your courage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Rebellion petition for official action to ensure the survival of ourselves and the planet ’ s manifold species by emissions reduction .
I am of an academic background ( retired ) , MA ( UWA , 1969 ) and B.Ec ( ANU , 1974 ) and am still involved in educating young people .
I am checking how and whether I can add my name to the petition which clearly failed to comprehensively show the support for XR in academia .
My question is how best to promote XR to students and pupils @ @ @ @ @ @ @ required parameter in all high school courses , which is a good start .
Are you personally able to integrate the message of climate crisis into your pedagogy and , if so , can you please advise me on useful techniques and links ?
Yours sincerely , Some might claim I ’ ve crapped all over the journo union ’ s Code of Ethics .
[ 11 ] But XR enthusiasts love breaking laws and up-ending civil conventions in the cause of saving the planet .
I ’ m just doing it in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and informing Quadrant readers .
I was disappointed to get only a handful of responses .
But my prize exhibit is Professor Rob Watts , second lead signatory and a founding member of the Greens Party in Victoria .
[ 12 ] He replied ( emphasis added ) , Dear Anthony , Very good to hear from you … I have a simple view : the question of global warming and the associated issues ( like species extinction ) are fundamentally and simultaneously ethical and political in nature ( because they go to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the good life and justice ) and so should be central to contemporary curriculum in both our schools and universities … I am currently teaching a first year first semester politics subject in which we spend the last third of the first semester addressing the politics of global warming .
It worked well last year … ” ( My emphases ) .
He attached a submission he drafted for the Unemployed Workers Union [ 13 ] to the Senate last year about a “ Green Jobs Guarantee ” , and said , “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what you think .
Meanwhile we need lots more conversation and engagement wherever it can happen .
Stay in touch .
Best wishes , Bob.
” Global warming poses a global existential threat and the Australian government needs to move away from the use of fossil fuels as fast as possible to avert a planetary disaster triggered by uncontrolled global warming .
It features a nice proposal to solve the housing-affordability problem “ by using social infrastructure financing to build a million new social houses ” ( p4-5 ) .
In Watts ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s World , “ not only can governments ensure that workers who depend on renting can reduce their exposure to rapacious property markets , they can also stimulate a construction boom that would generate thousands of direct and indirect construction jobs.
” Let me see , one million houses at , say , $ 500,000 a pop , that ’ s half a trillion dollars if I ’ ve got all the zeroes lined up .
That ’ s about a quarter of last year ’ s GDP – and a million new @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Watts ’ formulae to build a better , fairer , greener Australia , as he sees it .
His Green Jobs Guarantee involves the federal government as “ employer of last resort ” handing out a “ well-funded ” guarantee of regional jobs for all , not just any old jobs but jobs to hasten us to his zero-carbon nirvana .
There would be vast pay rises to health workers , badly needed “ to provide for the care and regenerative work necessary to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
” Watt ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ effects from 1degC of warming in the past century is none other than that Chinese satrapy known as the World Health Organisation .
Watts says WHO “ has declared that climate change is the greatest threat to global health in the twenty first century.
” [ 14 ] Other Watts brainwaves are “ flexible public service employment ” to smooth the variability of seasonal agricultural work , and fancy government borrowing programs to prop up hopelessly inefficient wind and solar industries .
I don ’ t know how much more of this RMIT @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Watts ’ effusions extend to a forecast 41-49 per cent drop in WA wheat yields in 2090 ( that ’ s right , 70 years from now ) because of global warming .
Back in the real world , the CSIRO has just forecast WA yields this year to be significantly above the long-term WA average , 1.78 tonnes per hectare vs 1.66 average , the past century ’ s global warming notwithstanding .
So , since you ask my opinion , Professor , your submission reads like undergraduate green-left tosh and I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the recycling bin .
Good luck with Extinction Rebellion .
And congrats on your 2 per cent pay hike .
The XR signatories at RMIT were concentrated in the Global , Urban and Social Studies Department , with 40-plus sign-ons .
Maybe failure to sign was a career hazard , given the solid group-think there .
Within the department , the Design & Social Context unit had about 20 sign-ons , particularly those of criminology types involved in “ climate justice ” and virulent feminist wankery .
Science was represented only by about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ This involves remote sensing and ties in closely with climate work and , need it be said , grants .
The petition was master-minded ( or mistress-minded ) by lead signatory and lecturer Dr Peta Malins , a criminologist working on reasonable topics like drugs policing , sniffer dogs and adverse impacts of strip searches .
However , try this among her publications : “ An Ethico-Aesthetics of Heroin Chic : Art , Cliché and Capitalism.
” I assume she gets brownie points from peer-reviewers , the dean and grant selectors for slagging @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mindsets of such university gatekeepers .
As a journalist , I have been a communications professional for more than 60 years , but I have no idea what Dr Malins ’ paper is trying to say , e.g .
Such becomings and deterritorialisations , however , can not be separated from the movements of reterritorialisation , which are also an essential part of the operation of capital .
As Patton suggests , ‘ capitalist societies simultaneously reterritorialise what they deterritorialise , producing all manner of “ neoterritorialities ” ’ But there ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Malins ’ opus , as seen in bits like this : In many ‘ producing ’ nations , for example , workers protesting their conditions are often violently crushed by a totalitarian State acting in the direct interests of – and with the cooperation and support of – large multinational corporations… The extent of these violences , which includes violence against all sorts of minoritarian bodies ( third-world producers , ethnic minorities , Indigenous bodies , women , children , animals , forests ) is also often obscured by the ‘ freedoms ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ consumer capitalism , at least for those who have the capacity to consume… Bennett ’ s argument that an ethics can – perhaps even must – emerge from a kind of joyous deterritorialisation or ‘ enchantment ’ is an important one .
It is from such an ethico-aesthetics , rather than from ethical or moral imperatives , that it becomes possible to bring forth a ‘ people to come ’ .
Do you get that ?
Me neither .
In the XR petition ’ s zoo-like catalogue of scholars and scholarship ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , is just a few minutes ’ stroll away ) , I have settled on Dr Blanche Verlie as the Lion ( ess ) King .
[ 15 ] In the anti-free-speech academic junk blog The Conversation a year ago , funded by taxpayers , Dr Verlie penned a paean to school strikers and their anger-and-grief state of “ existential whiplash ” caused by the “ Sixth Mass Extinction ” .
Her tribute is illustrated with a boy of about 12 holding a sign , “ We are frying and dying .
Earth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ students ’ signs proclaim ‘ no graduation on a dead planet ’ and ‘ we won ’ t die of old age , we will die from climate change ’ .
This is not hyperbole but a genuine engagement with what climate change means for their lives , as well as their deaths .
The hyperbolic signage was of course mostly cooked up and disseminated by the cynics of the ( adult ) Youth Climate Coalition who ghost-ran the kids ’ strikes .
Quoting troubled teen Greta Thunberg saying , “ I want @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , The school strikers , and those who support them , are deeply anguished about what a business-as-usual future might hold for them and others [ and many further deeply-anguished by their parents ’ reluctance to upgrade them to the latest $ 1500 iPhone -TT ] .
As adults , we would do well to recognise the necessity of facing up to the most grotesque elements of climate change .
Perhaps then we too may step up to the challenge of cultural transformation .
RMIT University administrators were so impressed with Dr Verlie @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
I did find joy perusing Dr Verlie ’ s co-paper on “ Becoming Researchers : Making Academic Kin in the Chthulucene ” .
The Chthulucene , since you asked , is a new epoch , “ where refugees from environmental disaster ( both human and non-human ) will come together .
This is a time when humans will try to live in balance and harmony with nature ( or what ’ s left of it ) in ‘ mixed assemblages ’ .
” That ’ s the definition provided by some entity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ We learn via Verlie ’ s peer-reviewed scholarship that researchers covet “ a form of refuge from academic stressors , creating spaces for ‘ composting together ’ [ no misprint ] through processes of ‘ decomposing ’ and ‘ recomposing ’ .
Our rejection of neoliberal norms has gifted us experiences of joyful collective pleasures.
” [ 16 ] I , too , felt joy perusing the works of XR petitioner Dr Anitra Nelson , who departed RMIT recently after 21 years ’ lecturing there for “ Pastures new ” ( see Milton @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Melbourne University ’ s spectacularly eccentric Sustainable Society Institute .
She touts herself as an “ activist-scholar ” , a plus in academia these Leftist days , but once a logical dead-end .
I felt further joy that Dr Nelson ’ s edited works includes a real cracker : Life Without Money : Building Fair and Sustainable Economies .
The book “ is a collection explaining both why the institutions of money and the state prevent us from achieving socialism ” , she explains .
I last came across a no-money advocate in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at ANU in late 1974 , when the deputy prime minister rabbitted about substituting money with kindly love , while his swami-clad office manager sat at his feet , the pair forming a living tableau .
Money was good enough for the Mesopotamians and ever since , but Drs Cairns and Nelson know better .
Nelson ’ s book announces , The money-based global economy is failing while market-led attempts to combat climate change are fought tooth and nail by business as environmental crises continue .
Crucially , [ the book ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ undercutting capitalism by refusing to deal in money , and offer [ s ] money-free models of governance and collective sufficiency .
Life Without Money is written by high-profile activist scholars making it an excellent text for political economy and environmental courses , as well as an inspiring manifesto for those who want to take action .
My emphases above .
She certainly lets the cat out of the academic bag .
Another of her co-edited collections is Housing for Degrowth ( 2018 , $ 59.17 even as e-book ) .
A whole @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Values and Relations .
She says Firstly , serious degrowth needs to take place in the global north to tackle overconsumption and conspicuous consumption , ” she ’ s quoted from her academic comfort zone .
Her base pay as RMIT associate professor would be $ 160,000 plus perks .
“ The [ degrowthed ] home is a much richer kind of an environment then what it has become under capitalism – a mere resting place between work.
” Dr Nelson cites a half-dozen awards and honors , so well is her work @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Nelson will forgo her 2.2 per cent Melbourne University pay rise from May 1 .
More money would make her spiritually worse off .
Researching these researchers ’ climate/leftist obsessions is like prospecting with a detector and discovering a Welcome Stranger , a Hand of Faith , and a Normandy Nugget all in a morning .
They signed the XR petition to get noticed and that made my job a lot easier .
All that remains now is to demonstrate the true and evil nature of Extinction Rebellion and this I ’ ll @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ The most disgusting climate cult of all ” .
Tony Thomas ’ s new book , Come to think of it – essays to tickle the brain , is available as book ( $ 34.95 ) or e-book ( $ 14.95 ) here .
[ 1 ] Currently organising a “ Treaty ” with alleged descendants of Aborigines at the time of settlement qua “ invasion ” .
[ 2 ] The book is cheerily titled This Civilisation is Finished .
Simplicity Institute , Melbourne 2019 [ 3 ] Currently , Read @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ‘ there is a huge opportunity for XR … It is essential that we do not let this crisis go to waste.
’ [ 4 ] An RMIT spokesperson says , “ For employees covered by the current RMIT Enterprise Agreement , the salary increases set out in the agreement occur automatically .
Any changes would require our employees to approve a variation to the agreement.
” Melbourne University ’ s flaks have not responded to Quadrant ’ s query on April 20 about their 9 % four-year pay rise .
[ 5 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ margin for ambiguous cases [ 6 ] Quantock does have an OAM in sustainability and conservation .
[ 7 ] MU Enterprise Bargain : “ A Level E Academic will have attained recognition as an eminent authority in their discipline , will have achieved distinction at the national level and may be required to have achieved distinction at the international level .
.. ” “ The research work of a Level D Academic will make a major original and innovative contribution to their field of study or research , and be recognised as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ] “ Conservation scientists convened in Paris to issue the report , which exceeded 1,000 pages .
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services ( IPBES ) included more than 450 researchers who used 15,000 scientific and government reports .
The report ’ s summary had to be approved by representatives of all 109 nations .
Some nations hit harder by the losses , like small island countries , wanted more in the report .
Others , such as the United States , were cautious in the language they sought… ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Neil Stork in Biodiversity and Conservation , February 2010 .
Open copy .
He cites the overwhelming peer-reviewed research evidence that claims of mass extinctions occurring today are exaggerated or false , and explains the reasons for these errors .
Conclusions … “ So what can we conclude about extinction rates ?
First , less than 1 % of all organisms are recorded to have become extinct in the last few centuries and there are almost no empirical data to support estimates of current extinctions of 100 or even one species a day.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ rates from habitat loss ” by Fangliang He and Stephen P. Hubbell in Nature , 19 May 2011 .
“ Extinction from habitat loss is the signature conservation problem of the twenty-first century .
Despite its importance , estimating extinction rates is still highly uncertain because no proven direct methods or reliable data exist for verifying extinctions.
” John C. Briggs ( Prof Marine Science , USouthFL ) in Science ,  14 November 2014.- “ Most extinctions have occurred on oceanic islands or in restricted freshwater locations , with very few occurring @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the oceans.
” [ 10 ] Except by academia , and any such slots will be evaporating along with universities ’ lucrative Chinese students , many of whom were barely able to speak or write English but have gone home flaunting their Australian degree certificates .
[ 11 ] Ethics code : “ Use fair , responsible and honest means to obtain material .
Identify yourself and your employer before obtaining any interview for publication or broadcast .
Never exploit a person ’ s vulnerability or ignorance of media practice.
” [ 12 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ preamble to his book , Criminalising Dissent .
In this 284-page excoriation of Western awfulness , he manages to refer to China only three or four times .
[ 14 ] UN secretary-general António Guterres who runs WHO was making the same claim but has now substituted the ChiCom virus as the threat .
[ 15 ] Verlie has inhabited both RMIT and Sydney University .
[ 16 ] I wrote about Verlie last week , by coincidence , musing about “ educating ” our youth : “ …what are the strategies we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ such as ( but not limited to ) climate change , the ongoing colonisation of Indigenous peoples , xenophobia or homophobia , or mass extinction ?
What are the specific characteristics of how such issues play out in classrooms ( or other spaces ) ?
”

PLEASE CLICK THE ABOVE LINK FOR THE ORIGINAL STORY TO HELP MY EDITOR KEEP HIS JOB. PART TWO OF THIS STORY PUBLISHING SHORTLY.
All right, all right! I’ve been wrong all along. My bad. Sorry. Get over it. Don’t beat a dead horse.
I’ve long suggested that Melbourne University in Premier Dan Andrews’ People’s Republic of Victoria[1] is the epicentre of Green-Left climate idiocy. I’ve suggested the affliction peaked at the university’s jellified brain with an Honorary Doctor of Laws to doom-crying shameless huckster Al Gore, probably a captain’s pick by then-vice-chancellor Glyn Davis, whose personal carbon footprint was embigged by his $1.6m salary package, three times that of the Prime Minister. The Melbourne University’s green affliction meanders down to its Sustainable Society Institute, representing the haemorrhoid on the Carlton campus corpus. For example, the Institute seed-funded a green symposium last July featuring an imported NZ authority on “tree-humping”.
Part 2: The Most Disgusting Climate Cult of All
The Institute’s Dr Sam Alexander co-authored a book with Extinction Rebellion guru Rupert Read.[2] who writes,
It is just-about conceivable that this civilisation might survive by adopting an extremely disciplined eco-fascism.[3]
They’d also like to return Western civilisation to horseback. Incidentally, in these straitened times, the Carlton academics and administrators will enjoy a 2.2 per cent pay rise from May 1, and 9 per cent total rise from 2018 to 2021. Suck that up, private-sector helots.
I emailed UniMelb press office:
1/ Does Melbourne University consider it appropriate to be handing its academics and administrators 2.2 per cent pay rises at a time when the private sector is enduring its worst conditions since the 1930s depression?
2/ Has Melbourne University since Feb. 2020 made any attempt to re-negotiate its Enterprise Bargain concerning the 2.2 per cent pay rise next week?
3/ Are Melbourne University spokespeople themselves eligible for the 2.2 per cent pay rise from next week?
I got the following reply from PR Emma Sun, senior media advisor to Vice-Chancellor Professor Duncan Maskell
Thanks for your query. We won’t be providing a response for your story.
A bit odd, not to mention rude, for an institution founded for free inquiry.
Melbourne Uni rates as top Australian university, which isn’t saying much. They’ve all gone downhill since the late Australian war hero and Quadrant columnist Peter Ryan, for 26 years director of Melbourne University Press, described them as “money-grubbing academic slums”. Melbourne Uni rated 32nd in Times Higher Education world rankings this year. Whoever does these rankings ought to be taken outside and, er, counselled.
Anyway, my bad is that all along I overlooked the mightier green lunacy at RMIT University, which is Melbourne Uni’s southern neighbour by a kilometre or so. I’m a data-driven person and there’s an index of the relative sanity of Melbourne’s two education icons. RMIT academics, by the way, are getting a 2 per cent pay rise from June 1 and 8 per cent for the four years to 2021.[4]
An RMIT spokesperson says, “For employees covered by the current RMIT Enterprise Agreement, the salary increases set out in the agreement occur automatically. Any changes would require our employees to approve a variation to the agreement.”
At Melbourne University only 18 academics signed the manifesto of Extinction Rebellion last September, including six at professor/associate rank. But RMIT academics eclipsed that effort thrice over with a thumping 63 signatories, including 15 professors and associate professors. RMIT’s Dr Peta Malins and Professor Rob Watts were the two lead signatories, among about 275 signers. (More about Watts to come). The national roll-call of the XR-petitioning professorial ranks – and remember this is just the tip of the iceberg of top-tier academic green-lefties — is about 70.
Extinction Rebellion, as will be documented in Part Two, is a vicious upper-middle-class death cult.
Monash academics came second with 44 XR acolytes (11 at professor levels), and even little Deakin equalled Melbourne with 18 (three professors).[5] The Guardian lied that signatories were “leading academics” although heaps were mere post-grad students, and Melbourne University’s list included self-described “comedian” and mattress salesman Rod Quantock. His academic qualification is having failed Melbourne’s Bachelor of Architecture degree after spending five years getting to Year 3 of the six-year course. Melbourne University seems to set a low bar for activists. (“You’ve done the Al Gore climate course? Great, drop by and the VC will fit you with your bonnet and stripey gown for an honourary doctorate.”) [6]
You may be wondering what XR’s university professors get paid via taxpayers and via their institution shaking down international students. At Melbourne University a ‘Level E’ professor from May’s pay rise will be on a base pay of $199,992 plus heaven-knows-what perks, starting with 17 per cent employer-paid super (RMIT from June: $187,148).[7] A Level D or Associate Professor at the top of the range at Melbourne U will be on $170,993 plus perks. (RMIT: $160,059).
The Guardian headlined the XR petition, “Leading academics from around the country say it is their moral duty to rebel to ‘defend life itself’”. The petition for “rapid total decarbonisation of the economy” itself deserves a prize for bombast by pathetically vain academics. Here’s a sample:
It is unconscionable that we, our children and grandchildren should have to bear the terrifying brunt of this unprecedented [climate] disaster … The ‘social contract’ has been broken, and it is therefore not only our right, but our moral duty, to rebel to defend life itself.
Jan Palach should have been so brave.
The petition starts off:
The science is clear, the facts are incontrovertible. We are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, with about 200 species becoming extinct each day.
If you check the “200 species” links and look past the hand-waving of “scientists say” and “say many biologists” (exact quotes), you wind up with a ten-year-old Guardian article citing a UN biodiversity chief Ahmed Djoghlaf. UN biodiversity reports are political documents, with 100 or more UN national delegates having carte blanche to tinker with the text, as occurred last year.[8] The extinction claims were debunked in Djoghlaf’s time by actual peer-reviewed work.[9] Life is too short to fact-check for Quadrant Online readers all the absurd apocalypticism in the XR petition, which ends, strangely but dutifully, with a call “for the urgent establishment of a treaty with First Nation Australians.”
Why do XR acolytes seem so scarce at UniMelb? In recent months I’ve been to their basements and halls packed with hundreds of XR fans, a great many looking like time- and space-wasting faculty members or unemployable green-minded post-grads, and all worshipping a projected image of Greta Thunberg.[10] The Top Four universities were certainly all Victorian; my state’s barmy academic army trounced NSW and all other States on fealty to Extinction Rebellion.
About the signatories
The academics say they signed in their personal capacity, yet they proudly cite their universities and titles. Their campus controllers are fine with them signing on to what British counter-terrorism police last November labelled an extremist ideology that should be reported to counter-terror officials. The Guardian reported that XR featured alongside threats such as neo-Nazis and a pro-terrorist Islamist group. “The guide, aimed at police officers, government organisations and teachers who by law have to report concerns about radicalisation, was dated last November,” said The Guardian. Within days Britain’s top cops insisted their labelling of XR was an unfortunate mistake, but as Queen Gertrude put it, the lady doth protest too much.
I sent 60 RMIT signatories this insincere email:
Dear Professor/Dr X,
I want to congratulate you on your courage and ethical leadership in signing the Extinction Rebellion petition for official action to ensure the survival of ourselves and the planet’s manifold species by emissions reduction. I am of an academic background (retired), MA (UWA, 1969) and B.Ec (ANU, 1974) and am still involved in educating young people. I am checking how and whether I can add my name to the petition which clearly failed to comprehensively show the support for XR in academia.
My question is how best to promote XR to students and pupils? I note that Sustainability is a required parameter in all high school courses, which is a good start. Are you personally able to integrate the message of climate crisis into your pedagogy and, if so, can you please advise me on useful techniques and links? Yours sincerely,
Anthony Thomas
Some might claim I’ve crapped all over the journo union’s Code of Ethics.[11] But XR enthusiasts love breaking laws and up-ending civil conventions in the cause of saving the planet. I’m just doing it in reverse, in the cause of amusing and informing Quadrant readers.
I was disappointed to get only a handful of responses. But my prize exhibit is Professor Rob Watts, second lead signatory and a founding member of the Greens Party in Victoria.[12] He replied (emphasis added),
RMIT Classification: Trusted.
Dear Anthony,
Very good to hear from you … I have a simple view: the question of global warming and the associated issues (like species extinction) are fundamentally and simultaneously ethical and political in nature (because they go to basic questions about the good society, the good life and justice) and so should be central to contemporary curriculum in both our schools and universities …
I am currently teaching a first year first semester politics subject in which we spend the last third of the first semester addressing the politics of global warming. It worked well last year …” (My emphases).
He attached a submission he drafted for the Unemployed Workers Union[13] to the Senate last year about a “Green Jobs Guarantee”, and said, “I’d be interested to hear what you think. Meanwhile we need lots more conversation and engagement wherever it can happen. Stay in touch. Best wishes, Bob.”
The submission he mentions chants
Global warming poses a global existential threat and the Australian government needs to move away from the use of fossil fuels as fast as possible to avert a planetary disaster triggered by uncontrolled global warming.
It features a nice proposal to solve the housing-affordability problem “by using social infrastructure financing to build a million new social houses” (p4-5). In Watts’ world, as distinct from Wayne’s World, “not only can governments ensure that workers who depend on renting can reduce their exposure to rapacious property markets, they can also stimulate a construction boom that would generate thousands of direct and indirect construction jobs.” Let me see, one million houses at, say, $500,000 a pop, that’s half a trillion dollars if I’ve got all the zeroes lined up. That’s about a quarter of last year’s GDP – and a million new government houses is just the start of Watts’ formulae to build a better, fairer, greener Australia, as he sees it.
His Green Jobs Guarantee involves the federal government as “employer of last resort” handing out a “well-funded” guarantee of regional jobs for all, not just any old jobs but jobs to hasten us to his zero-carbon nirvana. There would be vast pay rises to health workers, badly needed “to provide for the care and regenerative work necessary to mitigate and adapt to climate change.” Watt’s evidence for climate’s ill-health effects from 1degC of warming in the past century is none other than that Chinese satrapy known as the World Health Organisation. Watts says WHO “has declared that climate change is the greatest threat to global health in the twenty first century.”[14]
Other Watts brainwaves are “flexible public service employment” to smooth the variability of seasonal agricultural work, and fancy government borrowing programs to prop up hopelessly inefficient wind and solar industries.
I don’t know how much more of this RMIT brain flatulence your nose can absorb but Watts’ effusions extend to a forecast 41-49 per cent drop in WA wheat yields in 2090 (that’s right, 70 years from now) because of global warming. Back in the real world, the CSIRO has just forecast WA yields this year to be significantly above the long-term WA average, 1.78 tonnes per hectare vs 1.66 average, the past century’s global warming notwithstanding.
So, since you ask my opinion, Professor, your submission reads like undergraduate green-left tosh and I hope the sensible senators threw it in the recycling bin. Good luck with Extinction Rebellion. And congrats on your 2 per cent pay hike.
The XR signatories at RMIT were concentrated in the Global, Urban and Social Studies Department, with 40-plus sign-ons. Maybe failure to sign was a career hazard, given the solid group-think there. Within the department, the Design & Social Context unit had about 20 sign-ons, particularly those of criminology types involved in “climate justice” and virulent feminist wankery. Science was represented only by about six signatories engaged in geospatial work. This involves remote sensing and ties in closely with climate work and, need it be said, grants.
The petition was master-minded (or mistress-minded) by lead signatory and lecturer Dr Peta Malins, a criminologist working on reasonable topics like drugs policing, sniffer dogs and adverse impacts of strip searches. However, try this among her publications: “An Ethico-Aesthetics of Heroin Chic: Art, Cliché and Capitalism.” I assume she gets brownie points from peer-reviewers, the dean and grant selectors for slagging “capitalism”, given the Green-left mindsets of such university gatekeepers.
As a journalist, I have been a communications professional for more than 60 years, but I have no idea what Dr Malins’ paper is trying to say, e.g.
Such becomings and deterritorialisations, however, cannot be separated from the movements of reterritorialisation, which are also an essential part of the operation of capital. As Patton suggests, ‘capitalist societies simultaneously reterritorialise what they deterritorialise, producing all manner of “neoterritorialities”’
But there’s no mistaking the Politburo flavor of Dr Malins’ opus, as seen in bits like this:
In many ‘producing’ nations, for example, workers protesting their conditions are often violently crushed by a totalitarian State acting in the direct interests of – and with the cooperation and support of – large multinational corporations… The extent of these violences, which includes violence against all sorts of minoritarian bodies (third-world producers, ethnic minorities, Indigenous bodies, women, children, animals, forests) is also often obscured by the ‘freedoms’ offered within spaces of ‘first world’ consumer capitalism, at least for those who have the capacity to consume…
She continues,
Bennett’s argument that an ethics can – perhaps even must – emerge from a kind of joyous deterritorialisation or ‘enchantment’ is an important one. It is from such an ethico-aesthetics, rather than from ethical or moral imperatives, that it becomes possible to bring forth a ‘people to come’.
Do you get that? Me neither.
In the XR petition’s zoo-like catalogue of scholars and scholarship (the real zoo, in Royal Park, is just a few minutes’ stroll away), I have settled on Dr Blanche Verlie as the Lion(ess) King.[15] In the anti-free-speech academic junk blog The Conversation a year ago, funded by taxpayers, Dr Verlie penned a paean to school strikers and their anger-and-grief state of “existential whiplash” caused by the “Sixth Mass Extinction”. Her tribute is illustrated with a boy of about 12 holding a sign, “We are frying and dying. Earth is crying.” Verlie writes,
Striking students’ signs proclaim ‘no graduation on a dead planet’ and ‘we won’t die of old age, we will die from climate change’. This is not hyperbole but a genuine engagement with what climate change means for their lives, as well as their deaths.
The hyperbolic signage was of course mostly cooked up and disseminated by the cynics of the (adult) Youth Climate Coalition who ghost-ran the kids’ strikes.
Quoting troubled teen Greta Thunberg saying, “I want you to panic”, Verlie continues,
The school strikers, and those who support them, are deeply anguished about what a business-as-usual future might hold for them and others [and many further deeply-anguished by their parents’ reluctance to upgrade them to the latest $1500 iPhone -TT]. As adults, we would do well to recognise the necessity of facing up to the most grotesque elements of climate change. Perhaps then we too may step up to the challenge of cultural transformation.
RMIT University administrators were so impressed with Dr Verlie’s word-salad they republished it officially.
I did find joy perusing Dr Verlie’s co-paper on “Becoming Researchers: Making Academic Kin in the Chthulucene”. The Chthulucene, since you asked, is a new epoch, “where refugees from environmental disaster (both human and non-human) will come together. This is a time when humans will try to live in balance and harmony with nature (or what’s left of it) in ‘mixed assemblages’.” That’s the definition provided by some entity called “Southern Fried Science”. We learn via Verlie’s peer-reviewed scholarship that researchers covet “a form of refuge from academic stressors, creating spaces for ‘composting together’ [no misprint] through processes of ‘decomposing’ and ‘recomposing’. Our rejection of neoliberal norms has gifted us experiences of joyful collective pleasures.”[16]
I, too, felt joy perusing the works of XR petitioner Dr Anitra Nelson, who departed RMIT recently after 21 years’ lecturing there for “Pastures new” (see Milton’s Lycidas of 1637) at Melbourne University’s spectacularly eccentric Sustainable Society Institute. She touts herself as an “activist-scholar”, a plus in academia these Leftist days, but once a logical dead-end.
I felt further joy that Dr Nelson’s edited works includes a real cracker: Life Without Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies. The book “is a collection explaining both why the institutions of money and the state prevent us from achieving socialism”, she explains. I last came across a no-money advocate in the person of Dr Jim Cairns lecturing at ANU in late 1974, when the deputy prime minister rabbitted about substituting money with kindly love, while his swami-clad office manager sat at his feet, the pair forming a living tableau. Money was good enough for the Mesopotamians and ever since, but Drs Cairns and Nelson know better. Nelson’s book announces,
The money-based global economy is failing while market-led attempts to combat climate change are fought tooth and nail by business as environmental crises continue. Crucially, [the book’s contributors provide] a direct strategy for undercutting capitalism by refusing to deal in money, and offer[s] money-free models of governance and collective sufficiency. Life Without Money is written by high-profile activist scholars making it an excellent text for political economy and environmental courses, as well as an inspiring manifesto for those who want to take action.
My emphases above. She certainly lets the cat out of the academic bag.
Another of her co-edited collections is Housing for Degrowth (2018, $59.17 even as e-book). A whole section of the book is under Anti-Capitalist Values and Relations. She says
Firstly, serious degrowth needs to take place in the global north to tackle overconsumption and conspicuous consumption,” she’s quoted from her academic comfort zone. Her base pay as RMIT associate professor would be $160,000 plus perks. “The [degrowthed] home is a much richer kind of an environment then what it has become under capitalism – a mere resting place between work.”
Dr Nelson cites a half-dozen awards and honors, so well is her work prized in academia. I assume Dr Nelson will forgo her 2.2 per cent Melbourne University pay rise from May 1. More money would make her spiritually worse off.
Researching these researchers’ climate/leftist obsessions is like prospecting with a detector and discovering a Welcome Stranger, a Hand of Faith, and a Normandy Nugget all in a morning. They signed the XR petition to get noticed and that made my job a lot easier.
All that remains now is to demonstrate the true and evil nature of Extinction Rebellion and this I’ll do in the forthcoming Part II: “The most disgusting climate cult of all”.
Tony Thomas’s new book, Come to think of it – essays to tickle the brain, is available as book ($34.95) or e-book ($14.95) here.
[1] Currently organising a “Treaty” with alleged descendants of Aborigines at the time of settlement qua “invasion”.
[2] The book is cheerily titled This Civilisation is Finished. Simplicity Institute, Melbourne 2019
[3] Currently, Read says of the ChiCom Flu pandemic, ‘there is a huge opportunity for XR … It is essential that we do not let this crisis go to waste.’
[4] An RMIT spokesperson says, “For employees covered by the current RMIT Enterprise Agreement, the salary increases set out in the agreement occur automatically. Any changes would require our employees to approve a variation to the agreement.” Melbourne University’s flaks have not responded to Quadrant’s query on April 20 about their 9% four-year pay rise.
[5] Allow a 3 per cent error margin for ambiguous cases
[6] Quantock does have an OAM in sustainability and conservation.
[7] MU Enterprise Bargain: “A Level E Academic will have attained recognition as an eminent authority in their discipline, will have achieved distinction at the national level and may be required to have achieved distinction at the international level. ..”
“The research work of a Level D Academic will make a major original and innovative contribution to their field of study or research, and be recognised as outstanding nationally or internationally.”
[8] “Conservation scientists convened in Paris to issue the report, which exceeded 1,000 pages. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) included more than 450 researchers who used 15,000 scientific and government reports. The report’s summary had to be approved by representatives of all 109 nations. Some nations hit harder by the losses, like small island countries, wanted more in the report. Others, such as the United States, were cautious in the language they sought…”
[9] Contrary contemporaneous scientific studies abound:
“Re-assessing current extinction rates” by Neil Stork in Biodiversity and Conservation, February 2010. Open copy. He cites the overwhelming peer-reviewed research evidence that claims of mass extinctions occurring today are exaggerated or false, and explains the reasons for these errors. Conclusions … “So what can we conclude about extinction rates? First, less than 1% of all organisms are recorded to have become extinct in the last few centuries and there are almost no empirical data to support estimates of current extinctions of 100 or even one species a day.”
“Species–area relationships always overestimate extinction rates from habitat loss” by Fangliang He and Stephen P. Hubbell in Nature, 19 May 2011. “Extinction from habitat loss is the signature conservation problem of the twenty-first century. Despite its importance, estimating extinction rates is still highly uncertain because no proven direct methods or reliable data exist for verifying extinctions.”
John C. Briggs (Prof Marine Science,USouthFL) in Science, 14 November 2014.- “Most extinctions have occurred on oceanic islands or in restricted freshwater locations, with very few occurring on Earth’s continents or in the oceans.”
[10] Except by academia, and any such slots will be evaporating along with universities’ lucrative Chinese students, many of whom were barely able to speak or write English but have gone home flaunting their Australian degree certificates.
[11] Ethics code: “Use fair, responsible and honest means to obtain material. Identify yourself and your employer before obtaining any interview for publication or broadcast. Never exploit a person’s vulnerability or ignorance of media practice.”
[12] He admits this role in the preamble to his book, Criminalising Dissent. In this 284-page excoriation of Western awfulness, he manages to refer to China only three or four times.
[13] Assisted by post-grad Connor Jolley
[14] UN secretary-general António Guterres who runs WHO was making the same claim but has now substituted the ChiCom virus as the threat.
[15] Verlie has inhabited both RMIT and Sydney University.
[16] I wrote about Verlie last week, by coincidence, musing about “educating” our youth: “…what are the strategies we are using to engage people with issues such as (but not limited to) climate change, the ongoing colonisation of Indigenous peoples, xenophobia or homophobia, or mass extinction? What are the specific characteristics of how such issues play out in classrooms (or other spaces)?”


iowaclimatescienceeducation--2020-04-28--Bad Idea: Politicians Decide Essential Business

Right now in the midst of governmental lockdowns and closedowns , political officials are deciding who shall earn and therefore eat , and who is not “ essential ” and must stay home .
As Leon Trotsky saw in the soviet system , when the state takes over enterprises it gains the power to starve those who won ’ t obey .
How the US is presently veering in that direction is described by Manhattan Contrarian Frances Menton New York Progressives Officially Determine That All Wealth Comes From The Tooth Fairy Excerpts in italics with my bolds .
Despite having @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the country , New York has ended up as the epicenter of the disease .
With about 6 % of the nation ’ s population , New York has more than 40 % of the deaths ( 22,275 of 55,341 as of this evening ) .
Let ’ s look at a couple of New York ’ s policies in detail .
When it came time to forcibly shut things down , what exactly got deemed to be “ nonessential ” ( and therefore shuttered ) versus “ essential ” ( and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , as an example , the construction industry .
Which category does that industry fall under — essential , or non-essential ?
Or Is some of it essential and the rest not ?
At first , it looked like all construction was going to be deemed “ non-essential.
” But then on March 27 , a week after the initial lockdown order , a publication called The Real Deal reported that , after getting “ pressure ” from “ city officials and workers , ” the State had decided to make exceptions for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , healthcare facilities , and affordable housing ” .
I don ’ t know of any basis to say that there is any less risk of spread of the infection among workers on , say , a public housing project versus those on a new market-rate condo building .
So the obvious line between “ non-essential ” and “ essential ” is that those things that are non-subsidized and fully-taxpaying are “ non-essential , ” while those things that are tax-exempt and/or publicly subsidized are “ essential.
” And we have made this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” from “ city officials and workers , ” who clearly have political clout , whereas workers and developers in the private unsubsidized construction industry clearly do not have clout .
Fortunately , here in New York , the things that pay the bills can be deemed “ non-essential , ” because the bills will just then be paid by the tooth fairy .
Then there is this report from NY Post NYC tailor defies state order : ‘ I ’ m opening my doors come hell or high water ’ .
Excerpts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Rabin , whose Upper East Side boutique , Peter Elliot , is known for high-end men ’ s and boys apparel , refuses to follow a state order closing retail business not considered essential .
He insists that his $ 85 pocket squares and $ 15,000 suits are part of the fabric of New York City : “ Why is a liquor store essential and I ’ m not ?
” Rabin told The Post .
Though he ’ s not worried about catching the coronavirus , Rabin , who first opened his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s taking precautions .
“ We ’ ll never put anyone in danger , ever.
” He added that he ’ s not worried about the consequences of being open , only the consequences for staying shut .
“ I ’ m fighting for the soul of my company and my people .
I ’ m doing what I think is right to protect my business and employees from this disaster , ” Rabin said , noting that the long-time shoe repair shop across the street from his store packed up for good @ @ @ @ @ @ @ comes back , but I know they won ’ t .
I ’ m doing the common sense thing to protect my business.
” The Deeper Issue : Only Two Ways to Organize a Society–Jungle or Market Bruce Pardy belongs to the Faculty of Law , Queen ’ s College , Kingston , Ontario .
This post will provide excerpts from several of Pardy ’ s writings to give readers access to his worldview and its usefulness making sense of current socio-political actions .
In 2009 Pardy wrote Climate Change Charades : False @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Abstract : Climate change is a poor justification for energy statism , which consists of centralized government administration of energy supplies , sources , prices , generating facilities , production and conservation .
Statist energy governance produces climate change charades : government actions taken in the name of climate change that bear little relationship to the nature of the problem .
Such actions include incremental , unilateral steps to reduce domestic carbon emissions to arbitrary levels , and attempts to choose winners and losers in future technology , using public money to subsidize @ @ @ @ @ @ @ counter-productive .
Governments abdicate their responsibility to govern energy in a manner that is consistent with domestic legal norms and competitive markets , and make the development of environmental solutions less likely rather than more so .
Pardy also spoke out in support of Peterson and against the Canadian government legislation proscribing private speech between individuals .
His article in National Post was Meet the new ‘ human rights ’ — where you are forced by law to use ‘ reasonable ’ pronouns Human rights were conceived to liberate .
They protected people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was to prevent arbitrary arrest and detention , torture , and censorship , by placing restraints on government .
The state ’ s capacity to accommodate these “ negative rights ” was unlimited , since they required only that people be left alone .
But freedom from interference is so 20th century .
Modern human rights entitle .
We are in the middle of a culture war , and human rights have become a weapon to normalize social justice values and to delegitimize competing beliefs .
These rights are applied against other people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ expression is a traditional , negative human right .
When the state manages expression , it threatens to control what we think .
Forced speech is the most extreme infringement of free speech .
It puts words in the mouths of citizens and threatens to punish them if they do not comply .
When speech is merely restricted , you can at least keep your thoughts to yourself .
Compelled speech makes people say things with which they disagree .
Some senators expressed the view that forcing the use of non-gendered pronouns was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pronoun is a reasonable thing to do .
That position reflects a profound misunderstanding of the role of expression in a free society .
The question is not whether required speech is “ reasonable ” speech .
If a statute required people to say “ hello , ” “ please ” and “ thank you , ” that statute would be tyrannical , not because “ hello , ” “ please ” and “ thank you ” aren ’ t reasonable things to say , but because the state has dictated the content @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rights give people the freedom to portray themselves as they wish without fearing violence or retribution from others .
Everyone can exercise such rights without limiting the rights of others .
Not so the new human rights .
Did you expect to decide your own words and attitudes ?
If so , human rights are not your friend .
These positions derive from bedrock reasoning by Pardy on the foundations of law and legitimacy .
An insight into his thinking is his rebuttal of a critic The Only Legitimate Rule : A Reply @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Dalhousie Law Journal , Spring 2017 Ecosystem as One model of Society An ecosystem is not a thing .
It does not exist as a concrete entity .
“ Ecosystem ” is a label for the dynamics that result when organisms interact with each other and their environment .
Those dynamics occur in infinite variation , but always reflect the same logic : Competition for scarce resources leads to natural selection , where those organisms better adapted to ecosystem conditions survive and reproduce , leading to evolutionary change .
All participants are equally @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not play favourites .
In ecosystems , the use of the word “ autonomy ” does not mean legally enforced liberty but the reverse : no externally imposed rules govern behaviour .
In ecosystems unmanaged by people , organisms can succeed or fail , live or die , as their genetically determined physiology and behaviour allow .
Every life feeds on the death of others , whether animal or plant , and those better adapted to their circumstances survive to reproduce .
Organisms can do anything that their genes dictate , and their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fuels evolution .
When an antelope is chased by a lion and plunges into a river to escape , that action allows the antelope to survive and thus to reproduce .
The offspring may carry a genetic disposition to run into water when chased by predators .
There are no committees of either antelopes or humans deciding how antelopes will behave .
Autonomy in ecosystems is not a human creation .
It is not based upon human history or culture and is not a human preference .
Market as a Different Model of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ either .
Nor is it a place .
Markets , like ecosystems , do not exist as concrete entities .
“ Market ” is a label for the dynamics that result when people exchange with each other .
Bargains may be commercial in nature , where things are bought and sold , but they also occur in other facets of life .
For example , in Ecolawgic I suggested that marriage is a kind of exchange that is made when people perceive themselves better off to enter into the bargain than not to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Laws and governments can make markets more stable and efficient , such as by enforcing contracts and creating a supply of money , but they create neither the activity of trading nor the market dynamics that the transactions create.
” A market is not a place or a legal structure but the dynamics of a collection of transactions .
It does not exist before or independently of the transactions within it .
The transactions make the market .
Transactions are not created by governments but by the parties who enter into them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by governments or not .
The evidence is everywhere .
If it were not so , human beings would not have bartered long before there were governments to create money and enforce contracts .
During Prohibition , no alcohol would have been produced and sold .
Citizens of the Soviet Union would not have exchanged goods .
Today there would be no drug trade , no black market and no smuggling .
Cigarettes would not be used as currency inside jails .
People would not date , hold garage sales or trade hockey @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or barter .
Try prohibiting people from transacting and see that they will transact anyway .
They will do so because they perceive themselves as better off .
Sometimes the benefit is concrete and sometimes it is ethereal .
The perception of benefit is personal and subjective .
Ecosystems and markets share many features but they differ in one important respect .
Violence plays an important role in ecosystems but is not a part of voluntary market exchange .
Ecosystems are arenas for mortal combat .
Lions eat antelopes if they can catch @ @ @ @ @ @ @ antelope from a lion except the lion ’ s response .
There are no restrictions on survival strategies , and organisms do not respect the interests , habitats or lives of other organisms .
Markets , in contrast , proceed upon the judgment of the transacting parties that they are better off to trade than to fight .
The hunter did not shoot the woodworker to get chairs , and the woodworker traded for meat instead of stealing it .
They chose to trade because it made them better off than fighting .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ they were friends , colleagues or allies .
Perhaps they believed that harming other people is wrong .
Perhaps they hoped to have an ongoing trading relationship .
Perhaps fighting carried risks that were too high and they feared injury or retribution .
Perhaps trading was less work than fighting .
For whatever reason , they chose to trade .
This choice is not universal .
People have traded throughout human history , but they have also fought .
I do not maintain that trading is any more “ natural ” or inbred @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is less so .
When people choose to fight , they are no longer part of a market .
Markets are like ecosystems with the violence removed .
They are the kinder , gentler version of ecosystems .
There are only two models for legal governance and only one legitimate rule .
The logic is as follows : 1 .
In the wild , organisms compete for scarce resources .
Those organisms better adapted to conditions survive and reproduce .
Their interactions constitute ecosystems .
No legal rules govern behaviour and might is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spontaneously .
Parties enter into transactions when they perceive themselves as better off to trade than to fight .
Their transactions constitute markets .
3 .
Moral values and policy goals are preferences whose inherent validity can not be established .
They are turtles all the way down .
Therefore laws based upon those preferences lack legitimacy .
4 .
When governments use might to impose laws and policies that are illegitimate , they unintentionally imitate ecosystems , where might is right .
Political constituencies use whatever means necessary to impose their preferences @ @ @ @ @ @ @ necessary to resist .
They are “ autonomous ” in the ecosystem sense : there are no inherently valid restrictions on behaviour .
The result is a social order of division and conflict .
5 .
The alternative is to model human governance on the other system that exists independently of state preference : markets .
If the model for human governance is markets , interactions between people are voluntary .
People are “ autonomous ” in the market sense : they may pursue their own interests without coercion .
Instead of imposing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ uses force only to prohibit people from imposing force on each other .
A plethora of sub-rules follow as corollaries of the rule against coercion : property , consent , criminal offences that punish violence and so on .
6 .
There is no third choice .
Coercion is not right or wrong depending upon the goals being pursued since those goals are merely preferences .
Their advocates can not establish that their goals have inherent validity to those who do not agree .
Therefore , giving priority to those objectives is to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ might is right , we are back to ecosystems , where any and all actions are legitimate .
7 .
If might is right , anything goes , and the model is ecosystems .
If might is not right , force is prohibited , and the model is markets .
Choose one and all else follows .
When I claim that a prohibition on force is the only legitimate rule , I mean the only substantive rule to govern relations between competent adults .
No doubt the administration of a legal system , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ other kinds of laws to function .
Constitutional rules , court administration , the conduct of elections and procedures to bring legal proceedings are a few of the other categories that would be necessary in order to give effect to the general rule .
But the existence of property rights must follow from a general rule prohibiting coercion .
If it does not , the general rule is not what it purports to be .
When people trade , they recognize the property interest held by the other party .
It is that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ When the woodworker trades chairs for the hunter ’ s meat , she trades “ her ” chairs for “ his ” meat .
The trade would not occur without a mutual understanding of the possession that both hold over their respective stuff .
Sometimes those interests are recognized and protected by the law , which according to Bentham created the property .
However , since markets arise even where no property is legally recognized , the notion of property must be prior to the law .
Above I gave examples of markets @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has protected property rights : prehistorical trade , alcohol sales during Prohibition , black markets in the Soviet Union , the modern day drug trade , smuggling of illicit goods , and the internal markets of prisons .
Since trading occurs even in the absence of an approving legal regime , the notion of property must exist independently as well .
Autonomy in the market sense means to be able to pursue your own interests and control your own choices without coercion .
Consent is part and parcel of autonomy .
Without the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be made .
Without trades , no markets exist .
If one can not consent to be touched , to give up property , to make bargains , to mate , to arm wrestle , to trade chairs for meat , to sell labour for money , and so on , then one is not autonomous .
If force is prohibited , then corollaries are laws that protect people from having force imposed upon them .
Laws apply the force of the state to prevent or punish the application of force .
A @ @ @ @ @ @ @ extension of the general rule .
A tax to finance the police department is legitimate if its purpose is to investigate and prosecute violent crimes .
Traffic laws prevent people from running each other over .
Civil liability compensates for physical injuries caused by the force of others .
Illegitimate laws use state coercion to seek other ends such as enforcing moral standards , pursuing social goals or saving people from themselves .
A criminal law that prohibits the use of drugs uses state force to prevent an activity in which there is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the armed forces to protect the peace may be legitimate , but one to take wealth from Peter to give to Paul is not .
The legal regimes of modern administrative states consist largely of instrumentalist laws and policies that are inconsistent with the general rule , including tax laws , economic development programs , bankruptcy , patent regimes , mandatory government-run pension plans and MacLean ’ s version of environmental regulation , in which each decision turns on a political determination of the values to be applied .
It is either ecosystems @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or it is not .
If it is , then human society is subject to the law of the jungle where people are at liberty to fight like animals if they choose to do so .
If it is not , then human society is a marketplace where people may enter into transactions voluntarily and the state may justifiably use force only to prevent or punish the application of force .
There is no third choice .
Some might insist that coercion is not categorically wrong but that it can be right or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be pursued .
Those goals are merely preferences .
They are turtles all the way down .
I do not maintain that other rules will not be passed and enforced using the established machinery of government but only that they have no claim to legitimacy , any more than other rules that might have been chosen instead .
If force is used to pursue those preferences , why would others not use force to resist ?
Such a choice results in a free-for-all .
If state force is right only because it can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ might is right .
The administrative welfare state prevails not because it is justified morally or socially but because it has managed to secure a monopoly on violence .
The imposition of government preferences is an invitation to those opposed to an arbitrary policy agenda to take up force against it .
In a way , Pardy is warning us not to take for granted the free market social democracies to which we were accustomed .
Post modern progressive social justice warriors have decided that society is essentially an endless power struggle , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gained only at the expense of another group .
In other words , it ’ s a dog-eat-dog , might makes right ecosystem .
Pardy says there is another way , which has been the basis for the rise of civilization , but can be reversed by governance that destroys the free market of ideas and efforts by imposing values favored by the rich and powerful .
In Rapanos v. United States , Justice Antonin Scalia offered a version of the traditional tale of how the Earth is carried on the backs of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ story , an Eastern guru affirms that the earth is supported on the back of a tiger .
When asked what supports the tiger , he says it stands upon an elephant ; and when asked what supports the elephant he says it is a giant turtle .
When asked , finally , what supports the giant turtle , he is briefly taken aback , but quickly replies “ Ah , after that it is turtles all the way down .
”

Right now in the midst of governmental lockdowns and closedowns, political officials are deciding who shall earn and therefore eat, and who is not “essential” and must stay home. As Leon Trotsky saw in the soviet system, when the state takes over enterprises it gains the power to starve those who won’t obey.
How the US is presently veering in that direction is described by Manhattan Contrarian Frances Menton New York Progressives Officially Determine That All Wealth Comes From The Tooth Fairy Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
Despite having one of the most draconian lockdown orders in the country, New York has ended up as the epicenter of the disease. With about 6% of the nation’s population, New York has more than 40% of the deaths (22,275 of 55,341 as of this evening).
Let’s look at a couple of New York’s policies in detail. When it came time to forcibly shut things down, what exactly got deemed to be “nonessential” (and therefore shuttered) versus “essential” (and therefore able to continue)?
Consider, as an example, the construction industry. Which category does that industry fall under — essential, or non-essential? Or Is some of it essential and the rest not? At first, it looked like all construction was going to be deemed “non-essential.” But then on March 27, a week after the initial lockdown order, a publication called The Real Deal reported that, after getting “pressure” from “city officials and workers,” the State had decided to make exceptions for projects in the areas of “infrastructure, healthcare facilities, and affordable housing”.
I don’t know of any basis to say that there is any less risk of spread of the infection among workers on, say, a public housing project versus those on a new market-rate condo building. So the obvious line between “non-essential” and “essential” is that those things that are non-subsidized and fully-taxpaying are “non-essential,” while those things that are tax-exempt and/or publicly subsidized are “essential.” And we have made this decision as a result of “pressure” from “city officials and workers,” who clearly have political clout, whereas workers and developers in the private unsubsidized construction industry clearly do not have clout. Fortunately, here in New York, the things that pay the bills can be deemed “non-essential,” because the bills will just then be paid by the tooth fairy.
Then there is this report from NY Post NYC tailor defies state order: ‘I’m opening my doors come hell or high water’. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
Eliot Rabin, whose Upper East Side boutique, Peter Elliot, is known for high-end men’s and boys apparel, refuses to follow a state order closing retail business not considered essential. He insists that his $85 pocket squares and $15,000 suits are part of the fabric of New York City: “Why is a liquor store essential and I’m not?” Rabin told The Post.
Though he’s not worried about catching the coronavirus, Rabin, who first opened his doors in 1977, said he’s taking precautions. “We’ll never put anyone in danger, ever.” He added that he’s not worried about the consequences of being open, only the consequences for staying shut.
“I’m fighting for the soul of my company and my people. I’m doing what I think is right to protect my business and employees from this disaster,” Rabin said, noting that the long-time shoe repair shop across the street from his store packed up for good last month. “I hope everyone comes back, but I know they won’t. I’m doing the common sense thing to protect my business.”
The Deeper Issue: Only Two Ways to Organize a Society–Jungle or Market
Bruce Pardy belongs to the Faculty of Law, Queen’s College, Kingston, Ontario. This post will provide excerpts from several of Pardy’s writings to give readers access to his worldview and its usefulness making sense of current socio-political actions.
In 2009 Pardy wrote Climate Change Charades: False Environmental Pretences of Statist Energy Governance The Abstract:
Climate change is a poor justification for energy statism, which consists of centralized government administration of energy supplies, sources, prices, generating facilities, production and conservation. Statist energy governance produces climate change charades: government actions taken in the name of climate change that bear little relationship to the nature of the problem. Such actions include incremental, unilateral steps to reduce domestic carbon emissions to arbitrary levels, and attempts to choose winners and losers in future technology, using public money to subsidize ineffective investments. These proffered solutions are counter-productive. Governments abdicate their responsibility to govern energy in a manner that is consistent with domestic legal norms and competitive markets, and make the development of environmental solutions less likely rather than more so.
Pardy also spoke out in support of Peterson and against the Canadian government legislation proscribing private speech between individuals. His article in National Post was Meet the new ‘human rights’ — where you are forced by law to use ‘reasonable’ pronouns
Human rights were conceived to liberate. They protected people from an oppressive state. Their purpose was to prevent arbitrary arrest and detention, torture, and censorship, by placing restraints on government. The state’s capacity to accommodate these “negative rights” was unlimited, since they required only that people be left alone.
But freedom from interference is so 20th century. Modern human rights entitle. We are in the middle of a culture war, and human rights have become a weapon to normalize social justice values and to delegitimize competing beliefs. These rights are applied against other people to limit their liberties.
Freedom of expression is a traditional, negative human right. When the state manages expression, it threatens to control what we think. Forced speech is the most extreme infringement of free speech. It puts words in the mouths of citizens and threatens to punish them if they do not comply. When speech is merely restricted, you can at least keep your thoughts to yourself. Compelled speech makes people say things with which they disagree.
Some senators expressed the view that forcing the use of non-gendered pronouns was reasonable because calling someone by their preferred pronoun is a reasonable thing to do. That position reflects a profound misunderstanding of the role of expression in a free society. The question is not whether required speech is “reasonable” speech. If a statute required people to say “hello,” “please” and “thank you,” that statute would be tyrannical, not because “hello,” “please” and “thank you” aren’t reasonable things to say, but because the state has dictated the content of private conversation.
Traditional negative human rights give people the freedom to portray themselves as they wish without fearing violence or retribution from others. Everyone can exercise such rights without limiting the rights of others. Not so the new human rights. Did you expect to decide your own words and attitudes? If so, human rights are not your friend.
These positions derive from bedrock reasoning by Pardy on the foundations of law and legitimacy. An insight into his thinking is his rebuttal of a critic The Only Legitimate Rule: A Reply to MacLean’s Critique of Ecolawgic Dalhousie Law Journal, Spring 2017
Ecosystem as One model of Society
An ecosystem is not a thing. It does not exist as a concrete entity. “Ecosystem” is a label for the dynamics that result when organisms interact with each other and their environment. Those dynamics occur in infinite variation, but always reflect the same logic: Competition for scarce resources leads to natural selection, where those organisms better adapted to ecosystem conditions survive and reproduce, leading to evolutionary change. All participants are equally subject to their forces; systems do not play favourites.
In ecosystems, the use of the word “autonomy” does not mean legally enforced liberty but the reverse: no externally imposed rules govern behaviour. In ecosystems unmanaged by people, organisms can succeed or fail, live or die, as their genetically determined physiology and behaviour allow. Every life feeds on the death of others, whether animal or plant, and those better adapted to their circumstances survive to reproduce. Organisms can do anything that their genes dictate, and their success or failure is the consequence that fuels evolution.
When an antelope is chased by a lion and plunges into a river to escape, that action allows the antelope to survive and thus to reproduce. The offspring may carry a genetic disposition to run into water when chased by predators. There are no committees of either antelopes or humans deciding how antelopes will behave. Autonomy in ecosystems is not a human creation. It is not based upon human history or culture and is not a human preference.
Market as a Different Model of Society
A market is not a thing either. Nor is it a place. Markets, like ecosystems, do not exist as concrete entities. “Market” is a label for the dynamics that result when people exchange with each other. Bargains may be commercial in nature, where things are bought and sold, but they also occur in other facets of life. For example, in Ecolawgic I suggested that marriage is a kind of exchange that is made when people perceive themselves better off to enter into the bargain than not to.
As I said in Ecolawgic, “Laws and governments can make markets more stable and efficient, such as by enforcing contracts and creating a supply of money, but they create neither the activity of trading nor the market dynamics that the transactions create.” A market is not a place or a legal structure but the dynamics of a collection of transactions. It does not exist before or independently of the transactions within it. The transactions make the market. Transactions are not created by governments but by the parties who enter into them.
People transact whether they are facilitated by governments or not. The evidence is everywhere. If it were not so, human beings would not have bartered long before there were governments to create money and enforce contracts. During Prohibition, no alcohol would have been produced and sold. Citizens of the Soviet Union would not have exchanged goods. Today there would be no drug trade, no black market and no smuggling. Cigarettes would not be used as currency inside jails. People would not date, hold garage sales or trade hockey cards. There would be no Bitcoin or barter. Try prohibiting people from transacting and see that they will transact anyway. They will do so because they perceive themselves as better off. Sometimes the benefit is concrete and sometimes it is ethereal. The perception of benefit is personal and subjective.
Ecosystems are Coercive, Markets are Voluntary
Ecosystems and markets share many features but they differ in one important respect. Violence plays an important role in ecosystems but is not a part of voluntary market exchange. Ecosystems are arenas for mortal combat. Lions eat antelopes if they can catch them. Nothing prevents taking a dead antelope from a lion except the lion’s response. There are no restrictions on survival strategies, and organisms do not respect the interests, habitats or lives of other organisms.
Markets, in contrast, proceed upon the judgment of the transacting parties that they are better off to trade than to fight. The hunter did not shoot the woodworker to get chairs, and the woodworker traded for meat instead of stealing it. They chose to trade because it made them better off than fighting. The reasons are their own. Perhaps they were friends, colleagues or allies. Perhaps they believed that harming other people is wrong. Perhaps they hoped to have an ongoing trading relationship. Perhaps fighting carried risks that were too high and they feared injury or retribution. Perhaps trading was less work than fighting.
For whatever reason, they chose to trade. This choice is not universal. People have traded throughout human history, but they have also fought. I do not maintain that trading is any more “natural” or inbred than fighting, but neither is it is less so. When people choose to fight, they are no longer part of a market. Markets are like ecosystems with the violence removed. They are the kinder, gentler version of ecosystems.
There are only two models for legal governance and only one legitimate rule.
The logic is as follows:
1. In the wild, organisms compete for scarce resources. Those organisms better adapted to conditions survive and reproduce. Their interactions constitute ecosystems. No legal rules govern behaviour and might is right.
2. Human beings trade spontaneously. Parties enter into transactions when they perceive themselves as better off to trade than to fight. Their transactions constitute markets.
3. Moral values and policy goals are preferences whose inherent validity cannot be established. They are turtles all the way down. Therefore laws based upon those preferences lack legitimacy.
4. When governments use might to impose laws and policies that are illegitimate, they unintentionally imitate ecosystems, where might is right. Political constituencies use whatever means necessary to impose their preferences, and their opponents use whatever means necessary to resist. They are “autonomous” in the ecosystem sense: there are no inherently valid restrictions on behaviour. The result is a social order of division and conflict.
5. The alternative is to model human governance on the other system that exists independently of state preference: markets. If the model for human governance is markets, interactions between people are voluntary. People are “autonomous” in the market sense: they may pursue their own interests without coercion. Instead of imposing illegitimate rules and policies, the state uses force only to prohibit people from imposing force on each other. A plethora of sub-rules follow as corollaries of the rule against coercion: property, consent, criminal offences that punish violence and so on.
6. There is no third choice. Coercion is not right or wrong depending upon the goals being pursued since those goals are merely preferences. Their advocates cannot establish that their goals have inherent validity to those who do not agree. Therefore, giving priority to those objectives is to assert that might is right. If might is right, we are back to ecosystems, where any and all actions are legitimate.
7. If might is right, anything goes, and the model is ecosystems. If might is not right, force is prohibited, and the model is markets. Choose one and all else follows.
When I claim that a prohibition on force is the only legitimate rule, I mean the only substantive rule to govern relations between competent adults. No doubt the administration of a legal system, even a minimalist one, would require other kinds of laws to function. Constitutional rules, court administration, the conduct of elections and procedures to bring legal proceedings are a few of the other categories that would be necessary in order to give effect to the general rule.
No Property, No Market
But the existence of property rights must follow from a general rule prohibiting coercion. If it does not, the general rule is not what it purports to be. When people trade, they recognize the property interest held by the other party. It is that interest that they wish to obtain. When the woodworker trades chairs for the hunter’s meat, she trades “her” chairs for “his” meat. The trade would not occur without a mutual understanding of the possession that both hold over their respective stuff.
Sometimes those interests are recognized and protected by the law, which according to Bentham created the property. However, since markets arise even where no property is legally recognized, the notion of property must be prior to the law. Above I gave examples of markets that have arisen where no legal regime has protected property rights: prehistorical trade, alcohol sales during Prohibition, black markets in the Soviet Union, the modern day drug trade, smuggling of illicit goods, and the internal markets of prisons. Since trading occurs even in the absence of an approving legal regime, the notion of property must exist independently as well.
No Consent, No Market
Autonomy in the market sense means to be able to pursue your own interests and control your own choices without coercion. Consent is part and parcel of autonomy. Without the ability to consent, no trades can be made. Without trades, no markets exist. If one cannot consent to be touched, to give up property, to make bargains, to mate, to arm wrestle, to trade chairs for meat, to sell labour for money, and so on, then one is not autonomous.
If force is prohibited, then corollaries are laws that protect people from having force imposed upon them. Laws apply the force of the state to prevent or punish the application of force. A criminal law that prohibits assault is an extension of the general rule. A tax to finance the police department is legitimate if its purpose is to investigate and prosecute violent crimes. Traffic laws prevent people from running each other over. Civil liability compensates for physical injuries caused by the force of others.
Illegitimate Laws, No Market
Illegitimate laws use state coercion to seek other ends such as enforcing moral standards, pursuing social goals or saving people from themselves. A criminal law that prohibits the use of drugs uses state force to prevent an activity in which there is no coercion. A tax to fund the armed forces to protect the peace may be legitimate, but one to take wealth from Peter to give to Paul is not. The legal regimes of modern administrative states consist largely of instrumentalist laws and policies that are inconsistent with the general rule, including tax laws, economic development programs, bankruptcy, patent regimes, mandatory government-run pension plans and MacLean’s version of environmental regulation, in which each decision turns on a political determination of the values to be applied.
It is either ecosystems or markets. Either might is right or it is not. If it is, then human society is subject to the law of the jungle where people are at liberty to fight like animals if they choose to do so. If it is not, then human society is a marketplace where people may enter into transactions voluntarily and the state may justifiably use force only to prevent or punish the application of force.
There is no third choice. Some might insist that coercion is not categorically wrong but that it can be right or wrong depending upon the other goals to be pursued. Those goals are merely preferences. They are
turtles all the way down. I do not maintain that other rules will not be passed and enforced using the established machinery of government but only that they have no claim to legitimacy, any more than other rules that might have been chosen instead. If force is used to pursue those preferences, why would others not use force to resist? Such a choice results in a free-for-all. If state force is right only because it cannot be resisted, that means that might is right. The administrative welfare state prevails not because it is justified morally or socially but because it has managed to secure a monopoly on violence. The imposition of government preferences is an invitation to those opposed to an arbitrary policy agenda to take up force against it.
Summary
In a way, Pardy is warning us not to take for granted the free market social democracies to which we were accustomed. Post modern progressive social justice warriors have decided that society is essentially an endless power struggle, that one group’s rights are gained only at the expense of another group. In other words, it’s a dog-eat-dog, might makes right ecosystem. Pardy says there is another way, which has been the basis for the rise of civilization, but can be reversed by governance that destroys the free market of ideas and efforts by imposing values favored by the rich and powerful.
Footnote about Turtles. Pardy explains the metaphor:
In Rapanos v. United States, Justice Antonin Scalia offered a version of the traditional tale of how the Earth is carried on the backs of animals. In this version of the story, an Eastern guru affirms that the earth is supported on the back of a tiger. When asked what supports the tiger, he says it stands upon an elephant; and when asked what supports the elephant he says it is a giant turtle. When asked, finally, what supports the giant turtle, he is briefly taken aback, but quickly replies “Ah, after that it is turtles all the way down.”
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April 28, 2020 at 02:05PM


iowaclimatescienceeducation--2020-04-28--China has nothing to hide — but don’t investigate Coronavirus or 1 billion people will unfriend you

China has nothing to hide — but don’t investigate Coronavirus or 1 billion people will unfriend you Australia

To show what a good global citizen it is , the CCP in China could have welcomed a multinational independent investigation into the origins of the Flu from the Bat-Fish markets .
Instead , the Chinese Ambassador of the CCP threatens to throw its ( huge ) weight around : In reported comments , Mr Cheng described the Morrison government ’ s proposal for an inquiry as “ dangerous ” and accused Canberra of pandering to US instructions .
He said Chinese people were upset with Australia and if the trend continued they could decide not to come as tourists @ @ @ @ @ @ @ beef or drink Australian wine .
Fortunately the Australian Government was not impressed : [ Australian Foreign Minister ] Senator Payne doubled down on her call for an independent inquiry into the pandemic ’ s outbreak , saying it had produced “ an unprecedented global crisis with severe health , economic and social impacts ” .
… The Coronavirus is an extraordinary threat to communist China .
It ’ s almost the only thing that could coordinate so many factions against China .
In a normal world China could use this kind of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ country at a time , because there would be major economic pain .
But this time , all the other major trading nations [ … ]

To show what a good global citizen it is, the CCP in China could have welcomed a multinational independent investigation into the origins of the Flu from the Bat-Fish markets.
Instead, the Chinese Ambassador of the CCP threatens to throw its (huge) weight around:
In reported comments, Mr Cheng described the Morrison government’s proposal for an inquiry as “dangerous” and accused Canberra of pandering to US instructions. He said Chinese people were upset with Australia and if the trend continued they could decide not to come as tourists or students, and not eat Australian beef or drink Australian wine.
Fortunately the Australian Government was not impressed:
[Australian Foreign Minister] Senator Payne doubled down on her call for an independent inquiry into the pandemic’s outbreak, saying it had produced “an unprecedented global crisis with severe health, economic and social impacts”. …
The Coronavirus is an extraordinary threat to communist China. It’s almost the only thing that could coordinate so many factions against China. In a normal world China could use this kind of economic bullying China to pick off one country at a time, because there would be major economic pain. But this time, all the other major trading nations […]
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April 28, 2020 at 01:54PM


iowaclimatescienceeducation--2020-04-28--Listen To The Nurses

Listen To The Nurses

I spent a few weeks in Nebraska during March living in the home of an ICU nurse .
While I @ @ @ @ @ number of other nurses , who told me they believed COVID-19 came through during December @ @ @ @ @ large number of people came down with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 , but failed all @ @ @ @ @ now this story out of New York – they had COVID is December and January @ @ @ @ @ Coronavirus Case On Long Island As Early As Feb. 7 , A Month Before First @ @ @ @ @ New York That community in Nebraska has not been hit hard since then , indicating @ @ @ @ @ immunity early .

I spent a few weeks in Nebraska during March living in the home of an ICU nurse. While I was there I met a number of other nurses, who told me they believed COVID-19 came through during December and January, when a large number of people came down with symptoms consistent with COVID-19, but failed all known virus screens.
And now this story out of New York – they had COVID is December and January.
“We were beginning to hear about these cases in December and January,” said Dr. Adam J. Singer of Stony Brook University Hospital.
Doctor Believes There Was Coronavirus Case On Long Island As Early As Feb. 7, A Month Before First Official Case Reported – CBS New York
That community in Nebraska has not been hit hard since then, indicating they may have obtained herd immunity early.