The Yellow Jackets in France are protesting a 23% y-o-y increase in diesel fuel duty, according to Breitbart. Supposedly this is an element of President Macron's campaign to fight climate change.
France is a pygmy in the CO2 emission stakes - 19th in this list of countries (21st if you count international shipping and aviation). The elephant in the room is...
In fact, according to the same source, and as with the UK and Italy, France's emissions are less than half of Germany's.
But giant China is accelerating. Back in May this year the FT was saying that her emissions were set for "the fastest growth in 7 years", and it seems that in the first quarter of 2018 they were already up 4% on the same period in 2017.
2. On Brexit, why are the politicians so scared of 'no deal' why can they not walk away? If we had a Trump over here that is exactly what he would have done. I think the answer is that our politicians genuinely have no idea about the realities of commerce, about business but also they have no confidence in the British people's ability to resove problems or to come up with imaginative solutions, despite all the evidence. A recent example was Danny Boyle speaking on a TV programme about his 2012 Olympic show. He said they spent ages trying to get the lighting right and properly sequenced. All of his set designers and experts were stumped by it but when the lighting riggers and electricians worked it out and did it for him he was amazed: 'But they are just ignorant peasants with no education' - that was not what he said but it was clearly in his mind because he did not have the creative imagination to solve problems and they did. (I have seen that countless times with architects)
Any problems with 'climate change' or caused by Brexit can and will be overcome by the remnants of our industrial heritage and our make-do-and-mend approach. Unfortunately such things have been educated out of us over recent years. I have mentioned that before in a post but can't remember which one :)
"When thousands of masked protestors fought running battles with police in Paris on Saturday, torching cars and starting fires on some of Paris’s most expensive streets, the government called them extreme-right and far-left “professional rioters” who had infiltrated the peaceful protests by gilets jaunes." (1)
We're back with Tony Blair and his pretence that he was "somewhere in the middle":
"One of Tony Blair’s greatest political skills was what he called “triangulation”. The idea is to take up a position that seems equidistant between Left and Right, thus winning a majority and perplexing political opponents." (2)
Emmanuel Macron must be a truly radical centrist if he manages to get the whole population from left to right against him.
Politics is not one-dimensional. As l'Empereur himself observes: "A station, it is a place where one meets people who succeed and people who are nothing." (3)
If words fail, if you don't have facts and logic on your side, draw a picture.
Here's a nice example, from The Guardian as it happens, but similar treatments can be found elsewhere. It plays on the indignation felt by some - but skilfully encouraged among many more, by mainstream and social media propagandists - at President Trump's cancellation of his planned visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, 50 miles out of Paris:
If only the cartoon could use words to speak to you...
"Just look at him! Come on, you guys, Trump! Need I say more? Just look at his flabby orange face, his petulant expression, the ridiculous hair! (Don't I show all this so well! The man who drew me is an artist, no question!)
"Quite obviously he intended to insult and alienate millions of American voters by showing how little he cares for - whoever the hell it was. In France or Belgium? Don't ask me, I'm not a damn geeky historian and the place and victims aren't the point!
"The point is - Trump! And all because a little drop of rain might spoil his precious hairdo!
"Let's contrast him with Frau Merkel. She might be old, ugly and mad, with a mixing-bowl haircut, but she knows how to behave at a solemn public occasion, not like this preening chimp! I've sketched a look of disapproval on her map so you'll know just what to feel."
However, once you convert the pure emotionalism of a political cartoon into words, then the megaphone is laid down and dialogue has to begin. This is not the aim of the propagandist, who simply wishes to convince without getting into an argument - and in some cases, perhaps, is doing it not out of conviction but simply for pay.
But an argument is what he's going to get, for I've seen more than enough of this kind of nonsense about Trump, Brexit, drugs and so on. We have a young adult generation who have not put away childish things and need Skeletor to dance them into using Money Supermarket:
The flight from reason has gone on for too long. It is time to deconstruct and challenge. So, back to the obviously (to any right-thinking person) odious and contemptible Trump:
There is no room in the cartoon to explain that bad visibility meant that the helicopter flight wasn't judged safe to transport the most powerful person in the world to the cemetery. Helicopters don't glide out of trouble: British readers may remember the 30 October helicopter crash that killed Leicester City's club owner and his entourage. Those with longer memories may recall the June 1994 Mull of Kintyre crash that killed a bunch of intelligence experts coming back from Northern Ireland in thick fog.
And it would have taken hours to get there, do the honours and come back. The US President's time schedule is not like the ordinary person's - I've seen part of one for a previous incumbent, and the team plan to the minute.
Besides, imagine the motorcade making its way 80 kilometres into the countryside, not on home turf and not pre-checked by the Secret Service. Disruptor Trump probably has even more mortal enemies than JFK. All those hedges and grassy knolls...
Does anyone, when asked in so many words, seriously think the President would arrange an emotionally-loaded photo stunt to be seen by tens of millions of registered American voters, merely to cancel it on a whim and a flimsy excuse?
As for Macron himself (not featured in this drawing), he used the ceremony as a hook for a weird, word-twisting globalist speech in which he said patriotism was the opposite of nationalism. Humpty Dumpty might have been embarrassed if someone had replied that the French had been signally nationalistic when negotiating the Common Agricultural Policy heavily in favour of their farmers, or when developing France's independent nuclear weapons programme while the Community was trying to forge a common European defence policy.
Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words - precisely because it avoids them so you can't answer back.
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*A propos, see this short video by Irish MEP Luke "Ming" Flanagan, on a European Defence Association conference which was scheduled at about the same time as an EU Parliament plenary session so that MEPs were unlikely to be able to attend (and in any case, it was invitation-only.)
He went in for a short time - after difficulties in gaining entry - and was amused-shocked by the enthusiasm of a delegate "representative of civil society" there getting excited over the prospect of killer robots:
But seemingly, the satirists would rather have hypocritical gurning at the graveside of men many of whom would have thought like the last British survivor of that war, Harry Patch:
"Earlier this year, I went back to Ypres to shake the hand of Charles Kuentz, Germany's only surviving veteran from the war. It was emotional. He is 107. We've had 87 years to think what war is. To me, it's a licence to go out and murder."
So, dark clothes, sad face, dump the wreath and then on to the defence industry beanfeast.
A lot of Led Zeppelin fans worship Jimmy Page and regard him as a deity. On the other hand there are a great many people who think he is the devil incarnate. They are both wrong of course. Page was an excellent and very reliable session musician in the 1960s and subsequently joined The Yardbirds alongside Jeff Beck after Eric Clapton had departed. It is not mentioned in his Wiki entry but he knew that he needed to learn music notation which would help his songwriting, and so that is what he did but it also helped him to write music that has lasted to this day and a lot of his music lends itself very well to orchestration.
A lot of classical musicians could see how the songs were structured and how they could be transcribed for large or small ensembles. This is a selection from the many available on YouTube. I have included two versions of Kashmir to show how the same tune can be interpreted in very different ways; the first by Ghislaine Valdivia being very dramatic and rhythmic and the second being more lyrical.
RT.com tells us that a new port is to be built at a little settlement called Indiga, on the shores of the Barents Sea.
Adapted from Google Maps
The story is that it will be needed for exporting coal, and will need a rail link between there and Surgut in western Siberia:
"The annual cargo turnover is set to reach 70 million tons, 50 million tons of which will account for coal shipments, extracted from Russia’s biggest coal mining area in the Kuznetsk Basin, located in southwestern Siberia."
This begs the question, why put all that effort into new northbound rail and port construction, when the Trans-Siberian Railway runs in the area, connecting East to West?
In fact there are already discussions going on between Russia and Japan for using the Trans-Siberian route for freight transport, possibly all the way from Moscow to Vladivostock, saving up to 40% in costs compared with current sea and air routes (see RT story from 20 August this year.) The city of Leninsk-Kuznetsky is somewhere within striking distance of that railway.
Surgut is rather further north. But it is a leading oil and gas town and the first RT article says that Indiga was to have been used for exporting liquefied gas. Rosneft didn't get the permit - but is this a possible comeback, for them or some crony of the Red King?
Or is there a longer-term plan relating to the Eurasian Union (a sort of Eastern EU)? This has been cooking for five years. In which case the theme is not so much East-West trade as Russian-centred North-South trade:
Unlike our British Government, which appears to be unable to think further ahead than the next Party Conference, the Russians may have an Oriental capacity for playing the long game and covering their intentions.
So, coal to the Arctic? Doesn't quite seem to explain it all.
