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Insights from Quadrant
The crusade du jour
“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable,” said Oscar Wilde, “we have to alter it every six months.” Let us hope the latest fashion in media-feted grievance — alleged Aboriginal disquiet about singing Advance Australia Fair — doesn’t survive even that long, although you wouldn’t want to bet on it in light of the New Establishment’s promotion of the notion that we simply must change the date of Australia Day.
As with so many of the faux moral outrages that sustain the whining-industrial complex, this disavowal of a shared past and heritage appears to have arisen in the United States before being echoed on our fair shores. Roger Kimball writes:
The recent news that the University of Notre Dame, responding to complaints by some students, would “shroud” its twelve 134-year-old murals depicting Christopher Columbus was disappointing. It was not surprising, however, to anyone who has been paying attention to the widespread attack on America’s past wherever social justice warriors congregate.
Notre Dame may not be particularly friendly to its Catholic heritage, but its president, the Rev. John Jenkins, demonstrated that it remains true to its jesuitical (if not, quite, its Jesuit) inheritance. Queried about the censorship, he said, apparently without irony, that his decision to cover the murals was not intended to conceal anything, but rather to tell “the full story” of Columbus’s activities.
Welcome to the new Orwellian world where censorship is free speech and we respect the past by attempting to elide it.
Insights from Quadrant
Whose strings?
In a long but entirely readable piece replete with supporting links, The Federalist notes that peddlers of the Russiagate fantasy are now back-pedalling as the release of the Mueller report draws near. Some, anyway:
Most recently, the Senate Judiciary Committee announced that after almost two years of investigation, it has uncovered no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Attorneys assigned to the Mueller team have quietly begun to slip away before the outcome of the investigation is made public (here, here, and here).
This is unsurprising. The Russia hoax is crumbling and people can’t run away fast enough. We’ve seen signs from the very beginning that many of the people who promoted the Trump-Russia collusion smear have always known it was a hoax. These signs have been in plain sight. Here is an incomplete list….
Insights from Quadrant
In a hole and digging
UPDATE: Watts Up With That in 2015 looked at the utility of compressed-air storage as an antidote to global warming. The comments make interesting reading.
The Energy Source & Distribution website carried a recent report of the latest advance in renewable energy, a remarkable $30 million undertaking in South Australia to, well, best let ES&D explain
The technology works by using electricity from the grid to produce compressed air, which is stored in a purpose-built underground cavern kept at constant pressure using hydrostatic head from a water column.
During charging, heat from the compressed air is collected and stored before the cooled air displaces water out of the cavern up to a water reservoir on the surface. To discharge, water flows back into the cavern forcing air to the surface under pressure where it is heated with the stored thermal energy and drives a turbine to generate electricity.
Some might think it quite mad to blow up a traditional power station, as South Australia did several green years ago, in order to replace it with hot air stuffed down a cave — hot air and a $6 million taxpayer subsidy for good company. But all things are relative. Rita Panahi summed up the day in Canberra
Meanwhile, in the Australian parliament…male senator accuses female senator of sexually harassing him. She says she “wouldn’t go near him with a barge pole”. He gets in to a fight with her staffer & smears his blood on her office door. Not making this up. Straya!
For those interested in what is basically a pneumatic Snowy 3.0 without the mountains and water, this video is instructive.
Insights from Quadrant
‘Power structure’ biffo
Uninvited burden on the Australian taxpayer Behrouz Beshani recently was gifted $125,000 by the woke judges of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, who decided the entry condition that specifies contestants be legally resident in Australia didn’t count if they didn’t want it to. With authors of the four spurned and entirely legal entries unlikely to protest the decision, as that would mean no more invitations to writers festivals and “peers” looking askance during the next round of Australia Council handouts, they probably will not wish to dwell on a recent example of Mr Beshani’s command of tweeted English. Here it is:
We are not embarrassed of our bare bodies. Our flesh and bones are our political and philosophical manifesto. Our bare bodies have been the subject of your political games for years. Soon these bare lives will shatter your power structures by exposing your violence.
Mr Beshani, who has lately embraced the Christlike ideal in personal grooming, also shared a selfie of just such a hunk of power-structure-shattering man flesh. Luckily, with that prize money on the way, his tobacco habit won’t need further taxpayer support.
Worth noting is that while Premier Dan Andrews’ judges ignored both the residency condition and the stipulation that works be written in English, rather than professionally translated from Farsi, the Walkley Awards book judges couldn’t quite bring themselves to break their own rules, as the AFR‘s Mariam Robin reports.
When even the Walkleys can shame your own standards of conduct, you probably don’t have any at all.
Insights from Quadrant
The crusade du jour
“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable,” said Oscar Wilde, “we have to alter it every six months.” Let us hope the latest fashion in media-feted grievance — alleged Aboriginal disquiet about singing Advance Australia Fair — doesn’t survive even that long, although you wouldn’t want to bet on it in light of the New Establishment’s promotion of the notion that we simply must change the date of Australia Day.
As with so many of the faux moral outrages that sustain the whining-industrial complex, this disavowal of a shared past and heritage appears to have arisen in the United States before being echoed on our fair shores. Roger Kimball writes:
The recent news that the University of Notre Dame, responding to complaints by some students, would “shroud” its twelve 134-year-old murals depicting Christopher Columbus was disappointing. It was not surprising, however, to anyone who has been paying attention to the widespread attack on America’s past wherever social justice warriors congregate.
Notre Dame may not be particularly friendly to its Catholic heritage, but its president, the Rev. John Jenkins, demonstrated that it remains true to its jesuitical (if not, quite, its Jesuit) inheritance. Queried about the censorship, he said, apparently without irony, that his decision to cover the murals was not intended to conceal anything, but rather to tell “the full story” of Columbus’s activities.
Welcome to the new Orwellian world where censorship is free speech and we respect the past by attempting to elide it.
Insights from Quadrant
Whose strings?
In a long but entirely readable piece replete with supporting links, The Federalist notes that peddlers of the Russiagate fantasy are now back-pedalling as the release of the Mueller report draws near. Some, anyway:
Most recently, the Senate Judiciary Committee announced that after almost two years of investigation, it has uncovered no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Attorneys assigned to the Mueller team have quietly begun to slip away before the outcome of the investigation is made public (here, here, and here).
This is unsurprising. The Russia hoax is crumbling and people can’t run away fast enough. We’ve seen signs from the very beginning that many of the people who promoted the Trump-Russia collusion smear have always known it was a hoax. These signs have been in plain sight. Here is an incomplete list….
Insights from Quadrant
In a hole and digging
UPDATE: Watts Up With That in 2015 looked at the utility of compressed-air storage as an antidote to global warming. The comments make interesting reading.
The Energy Source & Distribution website carried a recent report of the latest advance in renewable energy, a remarkable $30 million undertaking in South Australia to, well, best let ES&D explain
The technology works by using electricity from the grid to produce compressed air, which is stored in a purpose-built underground cavern kept at constant pressure using hydrostatic head from a water column.
During charging, heat from the compressed air is collected and stored before the cooled air displaces water out of the cavern up to a water reservoir on the surface. To discharge, water flows back into the cavern forcing air to the surface under pressure where it is heated with the stored thermal energy and drives a turbine to generate electricity.
Some might think it quite mad to blow up a traditional power station, as South Australia did several green years ago, in order to replace it with hot air stuffed down a cave — hot air and a $6 million taxpayer subsidy for good company. But all things are relative. Rita Panahi summed up the day in Canberra
Meanwhile, in the Australian parliament…male senator accuses female senator of sexually harassing him. She says she “wouldn’t go near him with a barge pole”. He gets in to a fight with her staffer & smears his blood on her office door. Not making this up. Straya!
For those interested in what is basically a pneumatic Snowy 3.0 without the mountains and water, this video is instructive.
Insights from Quadrant
‘Power structure’ biffo
Uninvited burden on the Australian taxpayer Behrouz Beshani recently was gifted $125,000 by the woke judges of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, who decided the entry condition that specifies contestants be legally resident in Australia didn’t count if they didn’t want it to. With authors of the four spurned and entirely legal entries unlikely to protest the decision, as that would mean no more invitations to writers festivals and “peers” looking askance during the next round of Australia Council handouts, they probably will not wish to dwell on a recent example of Mr Beshani’s command of tweeted English. Here it is:
We are not embarrassed of our bare bodies. Our flesh and bones are our political and philosophical manifesto. Our bare bodies have been the subject of your political games for years. Soon these bare lives will shatter your power structures by exposing your violence.
Mr Beshani, who has lately embraced the Christlike ideal in personal grooming, also shared a selfie of just such a hunk of power-structure-shattering man flesh. Luckily, with that prize money on the way, his tobacco habit won’t need further taxpayer support.
Worth noting is that while Premier Dan Andrews’ judges ignored both the residency condition and the stipulation that works be written in English, rather than professionally translated from Farsi, the Walkley Awards book judges couldn’t quite bring themselves to break their own rules, as the AFR‘s Mariam Robin reports.
When even the Walkleys can shame your own standards of conduct, you probably don’t have any at all.
