I will not cease from mental fright
Nor shall my word be Facebook banned
Till we have built these towers of Ba’al
In England’s green & peasant Land
When I saw this picture (I added the words) I was instantly reminded of The War of the Worlds; not just because of the imagery, but also the infamous radio broadcast of it by Orson Welles in 1938 that was said to have caused a mini-panic. The viral pandemic climate change alien invasion was thought to be real1 and not fictional and people freaked out.
As with covid, there exists only one OfficiallyApproved™ Narrative when it comes to the climate and what is, or isn’t, happening to it.
Way back when, back in the days when science didn’t exist, before we recognised the almost extra-terrestrial superiority and wisdom of The Expert™, sometime around 2020 it was, I also thought we might have a problem with regards to the climate and man’s activities.
Then the little Chinese Chunk of Chuckles escaped from Wuhan (aided by bats, pangolins, raccoon dogs, and whatever else is being served in Wuhan restaurants these days) and the government misinformation machine went into operation.
I’ve remarked upon it before, I will remark upon it again, and doubtless I will not stop remarking upon it; I can’t think of a single thing the UK government got right about the supposed pandemic2.
It is inconceivable that anyone, even UK politicians who would, in general, lose a game of Jeopardy to a plate of blancmange, could be this dumb, this incorrect, about so many things. But they weren’t mistaken - they deliberately misled the British public, as can be seen from the released WhatsApp messages of our ministers and their advisors.
It dawned on me over the next couple of years that the government were entirely prepared to Ferguson3 the British people, British businesses, British schoolkids, the British elderly and unwell, the British economy, British mental health, and other things, in pursuit of some fictional Canute-like vision of holding back the alleged viral tide.
I’d never fully trusted politicians before, putting them on the social scale somewhere between pimps, drug pushers, second-hand car salesmen and journalists4, but the scale of their evident duplicity and untrustworthiness that was made manifest during the covid era was a real eye-opener.
If they could lie and bluster and mislead on this scale, and cause more misery and suffering than the Chinese Chunk of Chuckles ever did, how could I possibly trust them about something like climate change? If the Experts™ could be as compromised and fallible as they turned out to be, how could I trust them either?
I don’t think we should automatically distrust people who have genuine expertise. Genuine expertise is hard-won, and valuable. But now that we have seen how much scientists and the scientific process can be compromised and corrupted, we should be much more ready to question the basis upon which certain pronouncements of “authority” are made.
The basic assumed pattern is the following :
We have problem X
Here are the proposed solutions A, B, and C
I think we have this the wrong way round when it comes to governments. The pattern is really this
We’d like to implement A, B and C
We need there to be some problem X that is serious enough to be able to do it
It was only by hyping up the threat of covid beyond any sane and rational assessment could they implement the various ‘measures’ 5.
It is only by hyping up the threat of climate change beyond any sane and rational assessment can they implement the ‘solutions’ they desire.
It is (very) local government election time here in my county in the UK. I had the conservative candidate turn up on my doorstep. I think it’s the lowest ‘tier’ of government that is being contested. Don’t know. Don’t care.
I had a really great long chat with the young lady who was hoping to be elected and, despite me telling her right off the bat that I wasn’t going to be voting, she stood and chatted for a good half hour. We talked about whether season 3 of The Mandalorian was worth watching, how poor Amazon’s The Rings of Power was, and Bernard Hill’s great performance in Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogy.
We did manage to get some politics in there - she was no fan of the ‘woke’ crap - but I did ask some pointed questions about the conservative big nobs; the likes of the Hancocks and Sunaks, the Hunts and Javids. She remarked (but not in these terms) that Johnson’s Johnson was too small and he was unable to penetrate the fog of hysteria surrounding covid.
She had no answer to the question of which conservative MP demonstrated any real intellectual integrity during covid. Ignore lockdowns, ignore all the pseudo-scientific talismans of masking, the science fiction ripping yarn of asymptomatic transmission, and focus on the absurd. Park benches taped off, all benches in public areas taped off, plastic screens at checkouts, one-way systems, putting your mask on to go for a pee, fining people for walking (alone) in the open countryside etc.
Even if they broadly supported the panic, had fallen prey to the hysteria, not one MP had either the moral or intellectual courage to stand up and say “hey, guys, I know there’s this nasty virus about, but these particular things are really, really dumb. These are Dianne Abbott levels of crazy”.
Even if they really believed the OfficiallyApproved™ Narrative on covid, the tacit support of the absurd measures was indefensible. None of these measures made any sense even within the context of the government/expert™ misinformation bullshit.
I still haven’t come to any conclusion I’d (provisionally) trust when it comes to climate change and whether it’s all man made, whether it’s serious, and how fast it is supposed to be worsening. I am very sceptical indeed, at the moment, that carbon dioxide acts like some climate volume control knob, that the small degree of warming predicted (via models) is actually a bad thing for the planet, or that we need to panic.
I am, however, as certain as I can be that many of the proposed ‘solutions’ are just fucking deranged.
They make almost no scientific or technical sense.
They make even less sense when viewed in the context of their impact on people’s lives. I don’t think most people fully understand the impact these measures will have on their quality of life. We’re being herded, on the basis of what seems to me to be uncertain science, towards a bleak and constricted future. Vast swathes of humanity will no longer be able to properly feed themselves, or cool themselves, or heat themselves. Or travel. Some have even said6 we need to get “used” to only having access to electricity as and when it is available.
And even if we’re allowed outdoors to get some of that sunshine7 8 we might find a much-changed environment.
Blake’s famous poem, set so memorably to music by Sir Hubert Parry, talks of England’s “green and pleasant” land.
If the savage and regressive eco-freaks get their way it will be neither green nor pleasant - and we’re heading for peasantship worthy of those brutal feudal times we thought had long since gone.
OK so, in my view, there was a virus and the climate is changing (how much of that is the fault of carbon dioxide is very debatable) - but neither of these things is/was sufficiently apocalyptic to warrant the extreme measures and fear that have been generated as a result of the skewed and propagandistic rhetoric that has been brought to bear.
I can think of lots of things (most of them, in fact) that the so-called fringe, loony, anti-science, conspiracy crowd got right.
To Ferguson, or to Hancock - the act of malicious shafting.
The old joke comes to mind here : What do you have if you have a politician buried up to their necks in sand? Not enough sand.
It is not clear what ‘they’ hoped to gain from the measures, but I’d look to Pharma bounties, digital control (via ‘health’ passports and digital ID’s) and a tighter control infrastructure, and more control of the flow and spread of information, as being potential prime candidates.
I need to check this, but apparently this was a remark made by Steve Holliday, the ex CEO of the UK’s National Grid.
Provided the weather map isn’t red - then we’ll probably have to stay indoors to avoid the risk of climate-induced spontaneous combustion
It should be noted that any external foray, away from the Netflix and Pizza, is not about improving vitamin D levels because, as the Experts™ have told us, thinking it might have some benefit to our immune system is just conspiracy theory anti-science nonsense.
Once again, you’ve nailed it and I’m not going to pass a wind “farm” again without my inner voice murmuring “dark satanic mills.” The dirty green revolution is going to make the Industrial Revolution look positively eco-friendly. I remember the classic “peppered moth” example of evolution from ninth grade biology, but even modern Revisionist Biology can’t claim that birds evolve to survive collision with wind turbines or incineration by solar array. We need a Silent Spring updated for our times.
Professor Rigger
“I still haven’t come to any conclusion I’d (provisionally) trust when it comes to climate change and whether it’s all man made, whether it’s serious, and how fast it is supposed to be worsening.”
………………..
If you haven read his book Heaven and Earth, Australian geologist Ian Plimer has a new book coming out which may be of assistance. Geologists are the true experts when it comes to Climate. And please vote for that nice young conservative lady and wear a tee shirt to the polling station which states CLIMATE ALARMISM IS BS MIND CONTROL.