QED

The Latest Quadrant Now On Sale

quad logo small sept 14In September’s Quadrant, now on sale, a feast of lively writing and incisive commentary, plus fiction, poetry and, as always, the wisdom of Peter Ryan.

The contents of September’s issue will be time-realeased from behind the subscriber paywall over the course of the next four weeks. But why wait? Take out a subscription today or pick up your copy today from the newsagent.

Here is a taste of what $10 buys:

Keith Windschuttle on the myth of America’s decline:

“In all probability, by mid-century China will be a major economy and a major power that might eclipse its old enemy Japan. But there is little chance of it becoming the great superpower its enthusiasts are predicting, let alone the world number one that dwarfs the USA. It is most unlikely that the rise of China will make this the ‘Asian Century’.”

Roger Franklin on Israel and the Gaza war:

“Masada is modern Israel’s mythology and shrine, a place as sacred in imagination as in stone, where Israelis take vows that Jews will never be driven from their homeland. “Masada will not fall again,” they pledge. Down south, the armoured columns were pushing deeper into Gaza. You could hear only the wind and the crows in the ruins of the fortress Herod built and see no further than Jordan’s hills beyond the Dead Sea’s shimmer, but it was the sound and spectre of tanks and gunships down south that clattered in the imagination.”

Patrick Morgan addresses Putin’s adventurism in the Ukraine:

“The big change since the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner has been in plausible deniability. Previously Russia had been committing two linked outrages: fomenting insurrection in eastern Ukraine, and then disguising it by always having a plausible anti-Ukrainian counter-narrative. Some disinformation story was essential for the actual operation to succeed. But the missile that blew up the Malaysian airliner also blew up the Russian cover story. The links with Russian commanders, the transfer of equipment, the perpetrators controlling the crime scene, the absence of Ukrainian involvement and so on were all exposed naked for the world to see.”

Peter Smith on the latest rationale for punishing success:

“…sooner or later most confected narratives lose their puff, and so it was with “the end of capitalism as we know it”. Fortunately for those perennially piqued by capitalism’s resilience there was an old standby—inequality—which has now become the great moral crisis of our time.”

Steve Kates contemplates the very real possibility that, rather than warming, our planet is slipping into another period of cold, as it has done many times before:

“Suppose the planet is not warming, but cooling. Suppose we are in the midst of a major change in climate, one not caused by human interaction with the ecosphere, but instead the result of age-old natural processes. Suppose instead of the planet heating, we are on the cusp of another minor ice age similar to the cooling that occurred during separate episodes between 1550 and 1850. Suppose this prospect is about to face us, in a world that has added something like five billion to our numbers over the last hundred years.”

Plus, Peter Ryan, tributes to Ray Evans and David Armstrong, the view from the stalls by theatre critic Michael Connor and much, much more.

Click here for September’s table of contents. Go here to subscribe.

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