Category: Current Affairs (Page 4 of 79)

If you have half an hour to spare, or even if you don’t, watch this video. It answers a whole range of questions about the Middle East, including why Israel cannot stop its response to Hamas’ horror attacks until Hamas is completely defeated.

There is one section of the video where Douglas and his crew have to stop because of an incoming rocket. Douglas comments “It’s been happening all day.” These are rockets fired from Gaza at random or at civilian targets. This has been happening almost every day since since Gaza was handed to the Palestinians on the promise of peace in 2005. Israel has been under constant attack by Gaza for nearly twenty years.

There is a massive contrast between this ongoing, deliberate, brutal attack on homes, schools, hospitals, and shopping centres by Hamas, and Israel’s leaflet drops, door-knocks and putting its own servicemen and women at risk to avoid civilian casualties. See my earlier article on the recent history of Israel here. But first, watch the video.

This not only sounds nasty, it really could be. A man on an international flight dies from what sounds like some form of hemorrhagic fever. Blood droplets circulate throughout the cabin. Passengers on the same flight then proceed to travel to their destinations around the world… What could go wrong?

If you are sceptical or concerned about the positive value of vaccines, and COVID vaccines in particular, read this article from wng.org. It is not too long, and effectively counters some of the most common misinformation that is passed around social media.

You are never alone when you pray.

A little harsh maybe, but I still laughed.

Like catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, fusion as a viable commercial source of energy has been just ten years away for the last fifty years. But this article from phys.org about research at the JET gives reason to hope commercial fusion really is getting closer. I would be pleased to see it in my lifetime.

Climate scientist Dr Judith Curry has published an analysis of the extraordinary judgement against Mark Steyn, who described MIchael Mann’s fraudulent hockey stick as fraudulent. The court ordered Steyn to pay $1 million in punitive damages.

I have followed this discussion and the court case for years. When you are a major public figure and media influencer, as Steyn is, you really do need to be careful in the language you use. It is fine to crtiticise ideas and theories, and fine to ask where people got their data, and how the data was interpreted. It is fine to come to a different conclusion. Describing something as fraudulent, however, implies dishonesty – misrepresentation of data and deliberate deception.

In this case, though, it is clear there really was misrepresentation of data and deliberate deception. Read Dr Curry’s article and see what you think.

How is it that the current president of the United States has been found incompetent to stand trial because of memory and cognitive issues, but is absolutely 100% fine to run the most powerful country on the planet?

Brian Wilson posted this on Instagram about four hours ago. I am sad to hear this news. If you haven’t seen the movie Love and Mercy, take the time to watch it. It has music and drama, and is a moving true-life (and lasting) romance.

“My heart is broken. Melinda, my beloved wife of 28 years, passed away this morning.

Our five children and I are just in tears.

We are lost.

Melinda was more than my wife. She was my savior.

She gave me the emotional security I needed to have a career.

She encouraged me to make the music that was closest to my heart.

She was my anchor. She was everything for us. Please say a prayer for her.

Love and Mercy

Brian”

Bad news overwhelms us, the future looks grim. The media tells us “Be worried. Be scared.”

In reality, most people are safer, healthier, and better off than at any previous time in Earth’s history.

“Have we just lived through one of the best years in human history? As we look at 2023 through the rearview mirror, I think that’s a defensible claim. In fact, the same thing could have been said at the end of pretty much every year since the beginning of the millennium (with the exception of the disastrous pandemic years of 2020 and 2021). Never before have so many people lived in affluence, safety, and good health.

And yet, it doesn’t feel that way. There’s so much horror and misery in the world—look at the situations in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and Yemen alone—that it is hard to believe that, on average, this past year was probably the best year ever. So, if life is better than ever before, why does the world seem so depressing?

One culprit is the media. Every good editor knows that “if it bleeds, it leads.” If the newspapers only focus on awful things and ignore all the good stuff, is it any wonder that people end up believing that the world is going down the drain?”

Read more at Quillette. The Seven Laws of Pessimism.

I have had a long-standing interest in justice and criminology. This has been expressed in reading and conversation, and in my roles as a police and emergency services chaplain, and as a prison visitor. I am also fortunate to have a spectacularly brainy sister who is a research psychologist, and whose area of interest is the prompting/motivating/enabling factors for criminal behaviour, and the prediction and prevention of recidivism.

This year I begin formal studies in criminology at Griffith University, Australia’s most highly rated university for criminology and justice studies.

I have done some preliminary reading: a popular Australian textbook – Crime and Criminology (White, Haines, Asquith 7th Ed 2023), Realist Criminology (Matthews, 2014), Rehabilitation (Ward and Maruna 2007), Selected articles from the Handbook of Crime Prevention and Community Safety (ed Nick Tilley 2005), Conservative Criminology (Wright and DeLisi 2016), More God, Less Crime (Johnson 2011), Criminology: A Very Short Introduction (Newburn 2018), and multiple articles on the causes of crime, as well as rehabilitation, victim impact, and recidivism. I am currently working through the Palgrave Handbook of Australian and New Zealand Criminology, Crime and Justice (Deckert and Sarre, eds, 2017). Except for the first and last, possibly none of these would be chosen as suitable texts by academic criminologists in Australia, but I have tried to give myself a balanced range of viewpoints.

Criminology is not a discipline in its own right. There is no specific and definable body of knowledge, as there is in medicine or geology. Nor is there a set of finely honed skills, as there is in physiotherapy or welding. Instead, criminology is a multi-disciplinary investigation of a fairly narrow group of questions and issues. These include:

• What is crime?
• What causes crime?
• Who commits crime and why?
• What is the impact of crime on victims?
• What is the impact of crime on communities?
• How should society respond to crime?
• an crime be prevented? How?
• Can incarcerated offenders be rehabilitated? If so, what works?

These are worthwhile questions. The cost of crime in Australia is horrendous. Taking into account direct loss of property through theft or damage, the cost of policing, the judiciary, corrections, the cost of security and insurance, and loss of time at work, the financial cost is about $5,000 per year for every man, woman and child in Australia. That is a huge brake on the economy. In addition, and just as importantly, there is the personal and emotional impact of crime on victims, families and communities.

By providing clear, evidence-based answers to the questions above, criminologists could make a significant contribution to building a safer and more prosperous society. There is certainly some interesting research and reporting going on. See, for example, this list of featured articles from the British Journal of Criminology, all of which are free to read: https://academic.oup.com/bjc/pages/featured

The Journal of Criminology, which, while international in scope, focuses on Australian and New Zealand research, features some similarly useful work: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/anj

However, while some worthwhile studies are being done, criminologists in these journals are mostly talking to each other. That is the case for most professional journals. The difference in criminology is that there does not seem to be a lot of listening.

Where criminologists respond to books or papers, they frequently seem to do so by creating a parody version of views they do not hold, and then demolishing the parody they have created. This may be easy and amusing, but it does not contribute to the growth of knowledge, and encourages others; policy-makers and corrective services workers, for example, and perhaps more critical new students like myself, to doubt the practical value of academic criminology.

As an example, the first book I mentioned, Crime and Criminology, takes a dim view of anything that could be called a conservative outlook. Conservatives, we are told, believe the function of law and politics to be the preservation of the status quo (pg 10), divide society into them – bad people, and us – virtuous people (pg 136), believe humans are inherently evil, or at least irreparably flawed, justifying severe punishments on those who misbehave, stir people into a “moral panic” in order to implement stricter punishment of offenders (pg 91),  and pay little or no attention to social causes of crime and differences in background or ability of offenders.

Gosh, what a scurrilous bunch those conservatives are. Not to mention holding views like climate change denial, which should be made a crime (pg 109). I will forego discussing the nature of societies which criminalise opinions they do not like.

Perhaps this is an opportune moment to mention that the only political party I have ever belonged to was the Socialist Workers’ Party, a Trotskyite group whose values I shared quite fervently when at university in my early twenties. Since then I have had friends in every major political party, and in every major religion represented in Australia. I have shaken hands with Peter Lewis, whom I considered a good friend, with Meg Lees, Alexander Downer, Peter Beatty and with Andrew Bolt, and had conversations with all of them and many others. I know a lot of conservatives. I know nobody who holds the beliefs ascribed to them by White, Haines and Asquith.

Conservatives do not believe the function of law and politics to be the maintenance of the status quo. Many of them, as I do, have friends or family members who have been imprisoned, and do not remotely divide the world into good people like us, and criminals who deserve what they get. They do not believe legitimate concern about crime, especially in poorer, higher crime areas, should simply written off as “moral panic.” While holding firmly to the view that people are responsible for their own moral choices, they also take seriously the role of financial hardship, poor parenting, resentment, unemployment, drug abuse, and other factors which increase the likelihood of crime, try to understand and ameliorate them, and maintain the right of the judiciary to take circumstances and personal differences into account in sentencing.

Conservatives, of course, are not immune from mistakes, in criminology or any other policy area. GK Chesterton, one of my favourite authors, wrote (Illustrated London News, 19 April 1924): “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”

I have pointed out in other circumstances that if you need to misrepresent your opponents’ beliefs in order to make your point, this is a clear indicator that you don’t have a point to make. The purpose of debate and discussion, whether at home, in Parliament, or in academia, should always be to find the truth, and having found it, or as close an approximation as we can humanly obtain, to use that truth as the basis for policy. This means genuinely listening, stating your opponents’ views clearly and fairly, and having positive regard even for people with whom you disagree vehemently.

Criminology is about real life, real people, real costs, and real harm. With fair and open discussion, it can also be about real hope.

Nicholas J. Cepeda, who calls himself Melody Wiseheart and is a York University professor of behavioral science, identifies as a teen girl, and competes against 13 and 14 year old girls.

“Girls from age eight to 16 in a Swimming Canada-sanctioned swim meet in Barrie last week not only found themselves in the same pool as a transgender female swimmer but in the same changeroom, too,” the paper reported on Dec. 7th.

“Parents confirmed that the person in question changed in and out of a swimsuit in the women’s locker room at the East Bayfield Community Centre during the Dec. 1 Trojan Cup,” the reporting continued.

That “person” was Nicholas Cepeda.

“The girls were terrified,” one parent recalled.

“It’s all so confusing for the kids,” another parent added. “No one is comfortable. Everybody is accepting of all people but them swimming against our kids and being in the locker room with them is not appropriate.”

“We have no idea why it is allowed,” a third parent said. “We know it’s not fair to the girls who are training at their sport and some of whom are hoping for scholarships.”

“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late.” Jonathan Swift, 1710

If you care about the truth, check everything.

It is almost ten years since this incisive, but little-read essay appeared on the Imaginative Conservative website:

One of the most heinous crimes against humanity that modernity has perpetrated is its war on the humanities. And let’s not forget that the humanities are thus called because they teach us about our own humanity. A failure to appreciate the humanities must inevitably lead to the dehumanizing of culture and a disastrous loss of the ability to see ourselves truthfully and objectively.

The follies and fallacies of modernity and their dehumanizing consequences have been critiqued by some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. T. S. Eliot’s Modern Education and the Classics, published in 1934, complements C. S. Lewis’s own ‘Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English’ which was the sub-title of Lewis’s book, The Abolition of Man. Both works insist that education cannot be divorced from morality and that the latter must inform the former. Similarly Eliot’s The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) dovetail with Lewis’s position as regards the necessity of Christianity to any genuine restoration of European culture. Most notably, Eliot’s depiction of ‘The Hollow Men’ in his poem of that title, published in 1925, prefigures Lewis’s ‘Men without Chests’ in The Abolition of Man who are fictionalized to great satirical effect in Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, the latter of which contains a delightful parody of the disintegration and dumbing-down of the modern academy.

Now go read the rest…

Yes, it looks good, but…

Interesting. The same questions could be asked of both Australian and US armed forces. New Zealand, a former worthy ally, now has armed forces that might be useful for an afternoon of picking mushrooms, but not much more. From the valuable Conservative Woman website:

LAST week, while our only two aircraft carriers were moored in Portsmouth, the RAF sent four aging Typhoons via Cyprus to bomb Houthis in the hope of giving HMS Diamond a break from shooting down Iranian-made drones. They attacked in conjunction with the US Navy and, while they probably gave the Houthis a bit of a headache, they inadvertently revealed the appalling state of the armed forces.

The Red Sea is a vital shipping lane with some 10 to 15 per cent of world trade passing through it. The west has long had forces in the area and the nearby Persian Gulf to ensure freedom of the seas and the ready availability of hydrocarbons. Every once in a while those who hate the west, or Israel, or both, seek to interdict such trade. The producer states do it via OPEC and pricing, Iran with missiles and guns. Iran in the Houthis now has a proxy that can threaten a wider range of goods – most oil tankers don’t fit into the Suez Canal. Most liquid natural gas carriers and container ships do. The UK has had ships stationed in and about the area throughout my lifetime.

The Red Sea threat is such that Maersk, Hapag Lloyd and now Qatar Energy are routing vessels via Cape Good Hope. That adds about nine days to the journey time and thus costs will rise as more vessels are at sea for longer. According to Reuters traffic through the canal is down 30 per cent. 

That’s why some 20 countries have joined the United States in Operation Prosperity Guardian. The name says it all really; even the EU is muttering about sending support despite having no military organisation. Of course the UK could opt out, but we need the LNG for energy security and we have to justify our seat on the security council. Fortunately for the UK we have just the sort of ship needed and it happens to be there. Diamond is a Type 45 anti-air destroyer capable of shooting down all the missiles in the Houthi arsenal.

Those missiles range from indigenously produced Samad drones (also being used by Russia in Ukraine) through to Chinese copies of the Exocet (the missile that sank HMS Sheffield in the Falklands war) to simple ballistic missiles. At around 8,500 tons HMS Diamond and similar warships are much smaller than the 160,000 ships which  transit the Suez Canal, and might well survive a hit – unless they are an LNG carrier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNG_carrier Diamond and the other warships also protect against Houthi gunboats as they have anti-ship weaponry too. If they withdrew the Houthis would have free range.

The problem however is the logistics and expense of shooting $1.5million Sea Viper missiles at $20,000 drones. The availability of these missiles is constrained – Diamond carries 48. Some time soon they’ll need replenishment. Thus it becomes sensible to destroy the launchers, hence the air strikes.

The US can recruit sailors, and thus used its carrier in the Indian Ocean. The RAF sent four of its older Typhoons from (or via) Cyprus. They had to rely heavily on the US for airborne early warning and control (AWACS) because the RAF got rid of its AWACS in 2021 and the replacement hasn’t turned up yet. £20billion or so of combat aircraft are pretty much useless for anything more than airshows unless we are working in a coalition with someone who does have AWACS. Add that to the £10billion of uncrewed carriers and it’s hard not to conclude that the MoD is in disarray. 

For once this is not a money problem – since 2019 the defence budget has increased 20 per cent in real terms, thanks largely to the previous Defence Secretary Ben Wallace. Unfortunately, as Grant Shapps is finding, spending may have gone up but capability has diminished. We’re throwing good money after bad.

The Navy can’t crew its warships, or even find a retired admiral. The Army has the same number of soldiers as the Cold War British Army of the Rhine yet delivers just 20 per cent of the combat power. As I’ve said, the RAF has no AWACS and even the Red Arrows struggle to field sufficient aircraft to put on a show.

Worse, recruitment has collapsed and indiscipline is rife. Even the famed SAS have problems with some of their number moving into the drugs trade. All this is a sign of failed leadership. 

How to fix it? Good question. Firstly all parties need to accept that there is a problem and that it is their fault because it happened on their watch. Then we must find the people to fix it, which is unlikely to include many in the upper echelons of the Armed Forces.  Who is going to drive reform through?

Can it be done? The British Armed Forces are not yet in the desperate state that the Americans were after Vietnam. They recovered from a drug-ridden laughing stock to a formidable fighting machine in a little over a decade. But the challenge to rearm physically and morally is still formidable.