The Simple Truths

The dash to go Green (capital G) as espoused by Biden and now most significant leaders is being fuelled by those who can profit from it.... and there is no profit in encouraging individual green actions such as reducing one’s energy needs. If the objective really is to save the planet, then using fewer of the planet’s resources and seeking to use ever less energy is the way. But that is no recipe for money-hungry exploiters of faddish thinking.

Wear an extra layer, beef up your thermal insulation at home, work from home or live nearer to work to reduce transport emissions, drive economically, reduce the number of shopping trips by more careful planning. We could all of us, every one, reduce our overall consumption of bought energy and hence carbon emissions by, I imagine, around ten per-cent. But that just isn’t sexy.

In contrast the industrialisation of ‘green solutions’ is a rapacious endeavour, consuming more resources in the short term – extraction, transport, manufacture, transport, implementation, transport and maintenance… which will involve transport. And all that has to be paid for in both financial, environmental and human terms; money spent by governments to line the coffers of the Big Green Machine isn’t being spent elsewhere, where it could arguably do more immediate good.

To take just one example of the absurdity of trying to move so quickly, the suppose electric car revolution will demand ever more electricity generated from fossil fuel sources because renewable generation is simply not reliable enough. The UK National Grid has estimated a doubling of generation demand in the next ten years, but optimistically places faith in the twin miracles of wind and light to provide this.

The big, national conversation has not been had. Despite tsunamis of environmental programming – green this, green that, everywhere you tune in – it is almost all polemic. Persuasive talking heads telling us all to follow where they lead. But whenever I personally try to get to the truth I discover wildly optimistic evangelists, wide-eyed with wonder. Or else I stumble upon cynical climate deniers and anti-Green movements. I just want the truth; this is supposedly science, so why is the truth so hard to find?

It depends, of course, on what kind of truth we want to hear. The obfuscating truth that expects you to sign up on the basis of woolly sentiment or the fuzzy logic of ideologues? The warped truths presented by extremes on either side of the green divide? The partial truth which paints a shiny, beautifully crafted icon, just so long as you don’t pull focus and see the chaos in the background? Or the downright untruths dressed as virtue or shame which are used to alternately entice or punish us into compliance?

I see no sinister hand of conspiracy, but I do see why so many observers imagine collusion between government and business. And it isn’t so hard to see a causal chain. Politicians are not well paid in the scheme of things, so politics simply does not attract brilliant minds and the days of honest service of one’s country are, for the most part, in the past. So national leaders must surround themselves with others who are similarly limited in intellect and depth of knowledge. They need to get their push to action from somewhere.

Protesters are no source of action, so disunified and shambolic are their demands. And this is usually the only thing protesters always come armed with; demand, without concrete solutions. A business, however, which can profit mightily from the construction of windfarms, will spend a fortune on creating an argument which then becomes pervasive as it is spread across society. Flood the airwaves with that message and suddenly it appears to come from the people. What would you, as the Minister of Decisions, do?

I have always been an advocate of the principle that if we want to see change we have to be the change, that charity begins at home and that if you look after the pennies the pounds will look after themselves. In short, don’t look to politics or big business to bring about your green revolution, look to yourselves. Ask not how the country can spend all your money but how you can keep more of it for yourselves! Make it a quiet revolution; it will drive them crazy!  

Rule and Divide

And so, it begins. Biden is issuing executive orders on racial equality, left, right and Chelsea, in the fervid hope that playing the race game will gain him his legacy. This is an already forgotten president who has learned nothing whatsoever from the last four years, or, indeed, his last 47 years in Washington. Trump was necessary and in many instincts was dead right, but the left of western politics was never going to give him a chance, sticking the knife in and twisting it over and over again, instead of listening.

One thing Trump was dead right about was that the swamp needed – and still needs – draining. Another was his clear love for his country, however clumsily he expressed it at times, and the need for all Americans to share that love and join in a common endeavour to heal the rifts. He saw, even though his intellect and oratory was unable to analyse or disseminate it, that the politics of race division would never solve the massive societal problems throughout the disunited states. And his supporters followed him because they saw a faint glimmer of swamp gas leading the way.

Trump isn’t coming back; he will find no support where it matters and although the frantic and frankly hysterical show trial of a second impeachment hearing is merely an act of impotent revenge, it will deny him future funding. So that fox has been shot, but Biden has fish to fry for which he has no skillet anywhere near big enough, nor competent chefs to oversee the process. He is taking his advice – and this is in plain view – from the very people who foment the unrest in the first place.

There was a time when the USA would not negotiate with terrorists, but now they are openly invited to the White House to discuss the supper menu. And throughout the once civilised world the subject of the big carve up is poor white men. White supremacy? Tell that to the unemployed of the rust belt and dust bowls who just want a chance. Black oppression? Tell that to the neighbourhoods terrorised by the rioting and looting and direct threats to life.

Emboldening organisations like Black Lives Matter and their many hangers on will only perpetuate the imagined oppression and with every inch of ground gained they will demand more. In the UK, the Liberal Democrat MP, Wera Hobhouse tabled an early day motion on, of all things ‘hair discrimination’. Give me strength...

Where does this end? It is pretty clear that in the race to ‘level up’, which is an impossible feat to achieve, the left will always begin by hobbling those with perceived advantages. When your passport to a better life is to identify as a victim, the disadvantage is conferred to those who have already suffered at the hands of anti-discrimination legislation. It’s fun being labelled as a Nazi just for striving for success and paying more taxes, isn’t it?

The persistent lies which obscure the inconvenient truths.

The left will never challenge this perception.

The soft bigotry of low expectations  is an overused phrase, but it haunts every move the left makes. When you demand special considerations for every group except whites you reveal yourself as nothing other than an anti-white racist. Or, as in Biden’s case (his nest being already well feathered, thank you very much) a useful idiot for that cause. So, no, his presidency will not be marked by peace and harmony and loving equality, but by the furtherance of resentment and exclusion. Just wait and see.

Say what, now?

When I started this blog, way back in, er… oh, it doesn’t matter, I thought my intention was to put the world to rights. Hence the self-aggrandising title. It all started off as intended but I quickly strayed from my original thesis and began commenting on matters about which I admittedly knew little, yet still had opinions. Over the years I think I have become more open to challenge, but less tolerant of those who cleave to what I consider superstitions, folklore or the blind following of memetic themes.

Some of my earlier efforts – and they are all there, untouched, archived – involved fanciful parodies and reductio ad absurdum skits on the lines of you-couldn’t-make-this-up-but-imagine-if-you-did… Taking a ridiculous notion a stage too far used to be an easy way of getting a laugh, raising an eyebrow or further infuriating the perpetually offended. But now? Now it is almost impossible to tell what is fact and what is fiction.

Donald Trump popularised and possibly weaponised the upsurge of fake news (or as he pronounced it, to a British ear, ‘fake doos’) but he certainly did not originate it. When a story emerges showing your side in a bad light the drill is now to immediately dismiss it as an outright fake, an exaggeration, a misreading of the facts, or simply unproveable. And then you counter with some equally unsubstantiable trash talk of our own.

Or you downplay events. You lied to a select committee? So what, everybody lies, select committee panel members lie. Keith Vaz chaired one, for heaven’s sake, so how can a select committee hold somebody up to standards they can’t meet themselves? The focus switches to digging up the past misdemeanours of the select committee which is then, itself discredited and the original charge gets buried. Politicians and public figures are repeatedly let off from indiscretions and improprieties which would get most of us sacked. (Dare I even mention Max Moseley?)

So, I have long since lost become immune to gaping, wide-eyed, at the bizarre proclamations of academics. From a position of unimpeachable integrity, the world of higher education has fallen to the status of mildly amusing freak show, without a shred of credibility. Even so, the latest drama-crisis from the University of York absolutely beggars belief. They have decreed that the three wise monkeys are racist. And they say this because of something you or I would be excoriated for saying.

When I hear about calls to stop using words like ‘blacklist’ or phrase such as ‘black arts’ even my sub Neanderthal brain can understand where they are coming from. Associating bad things with words which are also used to describe certain ethnicities can bring about some negative correlations. I see that. But deciding that the depiction of monkeys – wise monkeys, who advise us against intemperate actions – is tantamount to depicting those ethnicities as simian. Isn’t that… racist? One would have thought that academics would be able to think at least a layer deeper than that.

D'oh!

But hey, that brings me right back to one of my regular trains of thought; we are none of us as clever as we think we are. Few of us possess the self-awareness to both examine our inner souls and DIY a bit of improvement. And this effort by the Dudes of York shows that a shallow attempt to appear woke simply uncovers a deep inability to deploy simple common sense. It strikes me that this was a topic to leave well alone. In fact, the ideal aphorism of reflection here is; see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Hoist, I’d say.

Regime Change

So the baton has been passed, the pie-in-the-sky speeches intoned and the purge of the ‘far right’ has begun. It is imperative, they believe, that the Democrat administration roots out the evil people who 'Stormed the Capitol' by strolling up the hill on 6^th January, and after being aggressively admitted were allowed to roam through the building, mostly aimlessly. Yes there was a bit of shouting and yes, some people had heart attacks in all the excitement... and this is why these treacherous dogs must be brought to heel.

Sleepy Joe’s favoured vibrant and far more worthy rioters celebrated the inauguration in time-honoured fashion, by setting light to businesses and offices, screaming obscenities and demanding more. That, of course, is the price of identity politics; give an inch on the gender front and you are surrendering yards and yards of hard won civilisation on every other fringe because, of course, Antifa, it turns out, are NOT your friends or allies. Damn, and you thought it would all be over by issuing a few executive orders to reinstate some of the policies which, in part were the reasons Trump was elected in the first place.

I watched The Comey Rule on Sky Atlantic over the last few nights and while it is a sympathetic telling of the former FBI Director’s story, Trump’s portrayal by Brendan Gleeson was the stuff of nightmares. I didn’t detect a single point in the whole dramatisation where any trace of humanity was shown. Trump was a one-dimensional manipulative monster and all his staff were fatuous and unsuited to their office. As drama it was clever and gripping; as polemic it was, frankly, rather full-on.

That such an excoriation of a sitting president was actually aired in the run up to the election would be astonishing if you had not been paying attention to the partisan nature of mainstream broadcast media. But in dismissing the entire Trump legacy in such a facile fashion you also condemn all those who voted for him as simply biddable. The new administration has been happy to talk about healing and unity while at the same time dismissing over 70 million voters as dangerously deluded, easily led or just downright stupid.

Lessons have been learned? Not about people, they haven’t. When the Biden edicts do nothing to improve the lives of those who denied the last Democrat candidate a spell in the White House where will they turn? They have been shown that their politics are not wanted here; they have been insulted and ignored, vilified and sidelined. What choice do some of the most passionate have other than to take up arms and become the revolutionary nightmare of the Dems worst imaginings, as the constitution demands?

If the exaggerated show of state military force on display for the lacklustre inauguration of a man who has made little memorable impact in politics over half a century is anything to go by, this president and his team will not hesitate to impose their will by any means necessary. And does this not go against every instinct of the Land of the Free? Oh, say, does the star-spangled banner yet wave? We’ll see.

We Need to Talk About Democracy

We all think we know what a democracy is, don’t we? Growing up, the common retort to somebody poking their nose into your business was “It’s a free country!” and we all instinctively knew what we meant. Had we been asked to expand on our assertion we would no doubt have deployed the D word as ultimate proof that as long as we weren’t hurting anybody else we could do or say pretty much what we liked. That’s democracy, we assured ourselves.

Turns out that’s more like anarchy, although until the Sex Pistols came along with their half-baked take on the national character few had any notion of what anarchy really meant. But as the years rolled by we began to invoke democracy more and more whenever we wished to justify a life of peaceful hedonism, bankrolled by the ambitious pursuit of gainful employment. It’s a free country… democracy, innit?

It turns out that despite what we might think we know, democracy doesn’t work the way we always assumed it did. For a start, the popular definition of democracy – governance according to the wishes of the majority – is only one possible interpretation. And these days that version is called ‘populism’ and derided as a far right, mob rule irrelevance. And given that ‘the far right’ is now everybody who voted for Brexit and Boris, this type of democracy is now a horrible distortion of the original intention.

No, no; what we have is ‘representative democracy’, which is little removed from an autocracy – governance by a single person who holds all the power – when all the representatives seek election via a supposed democratic process of one man, one vote, only to then conform to a hive mentality in office. The whole of the western world appears to have a political class which is broadly in agreement with itself, and broadly out of synch with its electorate.

It’s a good trick if you can pull it off and they have been doing it for years. Telling themselves that letting the population at large make important decisions about which they understand little, the elected representatives (who themselves barely know more) make decisions guided by a political staff class who appear to overwhelmingly hold one set of values. We see it in the broadcast media, the civil service, the education system and even in the lawyers. We are actually governed by bureaucracy, while the bureaucrats themselves claim to be mere functionaries.

But if they are simply the pen pushers, who pulls their strings? There has long been plenty of evidence for a form of plutocracy, whereby the real power lies with those who have all the money. But ask yourself this; if you already have all the money the existing system obviously works in your favour, so why would you risk upsetting the apple cart by taking control? Nope, I don’t buy the New World Order theories at all; people who are that successful are often incapable of the kind of cooperation that would require. Competitive, suspicious, prone to paranoia; I think they would quickly fall out and break any such consensus.

Government... it's simple

All of which leads me back to the same conclusions I’ve been arriving at every time I look at this. For all the good intention to govern by common consent the best system we can devise is one in which nearly everybody is regularly disappointed. But just as with any set of rules, some can find a way to turn them to their advantage. In an atmosphere of mutual suspicion, when governance is more by trial and error, there is one group who rarely suffer, no matter how incompetent or venal they are; we call this group 'politicians'. Democracy? No. If anything, we are governed by a Mediocracy.