And they did! But not that night – and not because of computer confusion.

Rather, the financial collapse happened seven years later, after US President Bill Clinton, with typically naive optimism, thought that removing restrictions on mortgages for poor people would increase home ownership.

MELTDOWN

Instead, as it turned out, it created a pandemic of high-risk loans that would cause the greatest financial meltdown since the depression.

The planes started falling from the sky in 2018, after Boeing adopted the same DEI policies that had become fashionable in the sort of companies where mistakes could be hidden in financial reports rather than, as in Boeing’s case, measured in death tolls splashed across news websites.

So yes, the catastrophes we were warned about 25 years ago came true, but not when or in the way we were told they would.

They happened because aviation and finance were two of the burgeoning phenomena of the new century, which our elites, being compelled to impose their stupidity on everything new, would eventually transform into disasters.

As usual, in both cases, it was ordinary people who paid the price. The elites never pay, nor do they learn.

Although Boeing has been thrown under the bus for conforming to the anti-white-privilege fashion that had bedazzled every other major corporation and government in the world, there are few signs that anybody in power is aware of the perils of DEI, let along winding it back.

As for the finance industry, the union-affiliated directors of the Australian superannuation industry, are merely the latest example of malfeasance with impunity.

They oversee funds collected compulsorily from all Australian workers with a moral certitude only slightly above that of Nazi concentration camp commandants hoarding bits of gold prised from the teeth of Jews bound for gas chambers.

So if there is anything to celebrate as we shift forlornly from the first quarter of the century to the second, it is that confused computers are no longer a threat to our wellbeing, if they ever were.

This time, to add to the litany of incompetence that is already plunging us towards social and financial collapse, our elites are preoccupied with something even more omnipresent, albeit less tangible.

CULTURE

The question on the lips of every politician and oligarch is: Does culture matter?

More rides on the answer to this question than ever rode on the Millennium Bug. We are witnessing the greatest and most unregulated migration of people in world history, almost all of it going from the poorest countries to the richest.

The elites can afford to enable and even encourage this migration because they are immune from any consequences.

There will never be a mosque waking infidels at dawn at the end of the $100 million road where Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s mansion awaits his (possibly imminent) retirement from politics.

Punters in less exclusive neighbourhoods are not so lucky. And Islamic migration, for all its terrorism and theo-colonialism, might not even be the worst kind.

International investment consultant Jayant Bhandari this month posted a description of Indian culture that will cause you more intestinal trauma than a vindaloo bought from a street vendor outside the Mumbai sewerage works.

Read the whole thing yourself if you have the stomach for it, but here are just two gut-wrenching quotes:

“You cannot teach people anything good until they have the foundations of morality, rationality, causality and other Western values.

“Without these foundations, the fruits of Western civilisation serve only to turn people’s often-hidden hedonic tendencies into something more malevolent.

“Every civilisational fruit – education, Western clothing, prosperity, Western institutions — has been perverted in India.”

And, regarding Indian migrants in Manchester, UK:

“My fellow immigrants and I often wondered if the British were so naïve as to trust us so readily. What was to stop us from stealing everything in sight?

“Most immigrants never truly grasp the significance of ‘trust’ and ‘gratitude’. Worse, they discover that complaining often leads to benefits – the only thing they genuinely care about in the multicultural West.

“Humanistic, civilisational values never touch their hearts.”

I say “gut-wrenching” because Albanese, like many western leaders, has virtually thrown the door open to unlimited migration from India.

But it’s not just Leftist political elites who can afford to dismiss culture as fundamental to the quality of life.

DISMISSIVE

Even the Right’s golden child, Elon Musk, is dismissive of the importance culture plays in fomenting happiness and, dare I say it, spiritual wellbeing.

He made this clear in his contribution to an online debate about H-1B (which, for those arriving late, is a visa to the US that allows corporations to sponsor highly talented migrants).

Musk wrote: “The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” he said.

“Take a big step back and F#CK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”

Veteran Canadian sceptic and demographic prophet Mark Steyn says an executive at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp offered to arrange him an H-1B years ago but he turned it down because it was more akin to corporate servitude than citizenship.

The visas help “well-connected corporations in advantaging themselves at the cost of the citizenry among whom they nominally live,” he says.

The H-1B visa is the embodiment of our post-religious, post-cultural world: the perfect example of everyone being an economic unit and the most valuable people therefore being those who provide the most economic output.

This is true, but only to a point, Lord Copper. Our fragmenting societies are testament to the flaws of this hypothesis.