3 September: Richard Mason, a 26-year-old British explorer in the central Brazilian Amazon forest, is ambushed and killed by a hunting party of the Panará tribe, who have had no previous contact with the outside world. Contemporary newspaper report here:
The fierce Panará, once numerous, were decimated by diseases brought in by foreigners, and were forcibly shifted from their territory to make way for mineral extraction businesses. Since then, they have recovered some of their traditional lands.
Also 3 September: the UK and USA propose to the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev a ban on atmospheric testing of atom bombs; Khrushchev rejects the proposal and two days later President Kennedy announces that America will end its own moratorium on such tests. The three countries will come to agree the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in August 1963.
6 September: Afghanistan breaks off diplomatic relations with Pakistan. The USA has been selling arms to Pakistan since 1954 but not to the Afghans, for fear that arms would be used by the latter against Pakistan. The Afghans have been preparing to ship their two major export crops (grapes and pomegranates) through Pakistan to India but now cannot, so the Soviet Union offers to ship the perishables by air.
In 1962 China defeats India in a border war and forms an alliance with Pakistan; this has the effect of strengthening the relationship of Afghanistan with the Soviets and India.
Afghani-Pakistani diplomatic relations are restored in May 1963, but by then Afghanistan has become dependent on the Soviets for aid.
In 1978 there is a Communist takeover of Afghanistan, strongly resisted in traditional rural areas; in 1979 the Soviets invade in order to support the government, and instal a new pro-Soviet leader in Kabul; in 1980 there are international calls for the withdrawal of Soviet forces, and the US (via the CIA) and the UK are supporting the anti-communist Mujahideen rebels. And so on.
8 September: France's President Charles de Gaulle escapes one of numerous assassination attempts, this time a bomb placed on the road that he took from Paris to his home at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. An inflammable mixture exploded in flames as the car passed over, but the major element of the weapon (eight pounds of plastic explosive) failed to detonate.
The gang responsible is under the control of former general Raoul Salan, using terrorist acts to campaign for France's retention of its colony Algeria. Tried the next year, Salan is surprisingly spared the death sentence, the court citing undisclosed 'extenuating circumstances':
Another attempt by the OAS is made later, in August 1962, an ambush on the President's car using machine guns, as shown in the feature film 'The Day Of The Jackal'; the organiser in this case is tried and senteneced to death, but reprieved and eventually amnestied:
Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW): that A-word has a really
sciencey zing, doesn’t it? It sounds like the kind of jargon-terminology used
in many fields to exclude the laity from the discourse; and we seem to be in a
time when quibbles and nuance are systematically discouraged. It is a shame,
because if only one side is permitted to speak in any argument, we risk serious
error; enter groupthink.
The late Christopher Booker’s ‘Groupthink’ came out last
year (edited after his death by his distinguished collaborator Dr Richard North.)
This work builds on a 1972 study by Yale professor Irving Janis, using insights
about group psychology to explain how the US had stumbled into one foreign and
military policy disaster after another.
Groupthink has three stages: first, to become wedded to some
analysis whose foundations are inadequate; secondly, to bolster up one’s
confidence in this shaky premiss by getting others to agree and provide moral
support; thirdly, to round on dissenting voices, insult them, discredit them,
get them to shut up. Booker added another phase: the turning point when the collective
fantasy runs face first into unwelcome reality.
Chapter Seven deals with ‘Global Warming’ and discusses the
pieces that don’t fit the picture on that jigsaw’s box cover (I wish Booker had
lived to write another chapter on Covid-19!) As with other examples, enthusiasm
or fear must be ramped up and heretics silenced.
Unfortunately, social media such as Facebook and Twitter
have become important vectors in this process. They have a bias towards brevity
so that extended argument is cast aside in favour of bald assertions, slogans,
insults and very tendentious cartoons (you will recall that there was an
explosion of all these in the wake of the 2016 Brexit vote.) Site moderators
interfere by sometimes dubious ‘fact-checking’ or may censor dissenters or even
ban them altogether. At a higher level, the law can become involved: think of
the climatologist Michael Mann, who has pursued pundit and wit Mark Steyn for
years in the courts, alleging defamation because of the latter’s mockery of the
former’s ‘hockey stick’ global temperature forecast.
As an aside re Covid, it has got to the stage where the medical
expert Dr Malcolm Kendrick has recently decided to withdraw from the debate https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2021/09/03/i-have-not-been-silenced/
because ‘I am not sure I can find the truth. I do not know if it can be found
anymore. Today I am unsure what represents a fact, and what has simply been
made up.’
The theory of AGW says that the Earth’s climate is getting
warmer; that the most important factor is the proportion of carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere, acting as a ‘greenhouse gas’ to trap more solar energy; and
that it’s mostly the fault of us humans. Even the European Community admits https://ec.europa.eu/clima/change/causes_en
that there is more than one greenhouse gas, but still doubles down on the claim
that CO2 from human activities is the main culprit and so ‘the international community
has recognised the need to keep warming well below 2°C and pursue efforts to
limit it to 1.5°C.’
Global warming, even if we could stop it right now, is
hardly the only thing that matters. Are wild species being driven to extinction
simply by heat, or is not rather because we are destroying their habitats and
access to the food they need?
[Altered/added from here on as follows:]
Can we ‘save the world’ (defined how?) by focusing on a
single atmospheric gas? Step forward someone, anyone, with the capacity for more
nuanced analysis, please!
One such is former Chancellor Lord Lawson, who launched his
think-tank ‘The Global Warming Policy Foundation’ a dozen years ago. https://www.thegwpf.org/who-we-are/
This was set up to represent a range of views on AGW claims but also to try to
achieve some balance between competing aims and needs. A key principle is that
‘we regard observational evidence and understanding the present as more
important and more reliable than computer modelling or predicting the distant
future’; the hockey stick has been stowed away, for now.
Their latest report, by Professor Ole Humlum https://www.thegwpf.org/state-of-the-climate-2020/
, says that ‘based on observational data from 2020 [it] finds little evidence
to support the idea of a ‘climate emergency.’’ There is little that impassioned
believers hate more than a revisionist, and if you look him up on Wikipedia he
and his group are termed ‘climate change denialist’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ole_Humlum#Climate_change_views
; the connotations of that last word stink of the Holocaust-deniers.
It’s all there, isn’t it? The personalisation of issues, the
intemperate language, the desperate desire to silence opposition. Even to
listen to the heretic puts one in danger of sin, as with Saint Stephen’s
address to the Sanhedrin: ‘Then they cried out with a loud voice, stopped their
ears, and ran at him with one accord…’ https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%207%3A54-60&version=NKJV
The groupthink.
________________________________________
[Previous last section read:] We really don’t need quasi-religious millenarian catastrophising,
back-to-Eden magical thinking, simplistic government propaganda, world-rescuing
billionaires and ‘Chinese whispers’ on social media. Step forward someone,
anyone, with the capacity for complex analysis, please!
Well, my prediction that climate change was bubbling under nicely while we suffered the nonsense of a Covi- driven government has turned out even more extreme than expected. As Covid started to fade from the front pages climate change leapt into the gap with announcements of doom and calamity at a rate even the virus pronouncements would have been proud of.
So we have gone from millions dying from the virus to billions dying from climate change. This, remember, is the area of predictions that makes Professor Ferguson’s models seem almost believable, not a single prediction in the last sixty plus years has come to fruition.
The problem the climate change advocates have is showing how much man has contributed to any changes in the atmosphere. Merely saying it is so doesn’t cut the mustard, see the increase in CO2 emissions as an example:
“Over the last 250 years, the CO2 level in the atmosphere has risen from 280 to 411 ppm. It sounds like a big increase, but ppm stands for parts per million. In two and a half centuries, the amount of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere has thus risen 0.00013%”
I find it hard to accept this amount is really having an effect in the way it is promoted.
From the Daily Telegraph, 17 August:
“Billions of pounds of householders' money is to be funnelled into hydrogen production as Britain battles to create a market in the clean-burning gas.
Manufacturers are in line to be guaranteed a price for their hydrogen by the Government so they do not have to sell to consumers at a loss, under plans unveiled in consultation papers on Tuesday.
The subsidy is expected to be funded through either higher bills or with money from the public purse.”
James Max on TalkRadio, 10-Aug-21
Solar panels instead of coal:
Coal mine owner sounds alarm on Biden's latest 'devastating' policy
All of this is relentlessly being exploited and the MSN is more and more buying into the ‘settled science’ as with Covid; when the truth of the enormous scam being imposed on the population by government and the small but powerful lobby groups is exposed, it will be too late. Covid and the way it has been handled was untouchable when it came to debate, yet now we are in serious debt and the virus is no longer any more of a threat than any other of a myriad of diseases. The chinks in the argument are beginning to appear; for the first time that I can remember the BBC have actually questioned the need for teens to be jabbed - three months ago that would have been seen as heresy.
This piece is not about the whys and wherefores of Climate Change, you can fill pages every week with the latest information and rebuttals; this is about the ongoing hypocrisy of governments and individuals in positions of power and influence. The internet if nothing else shows them for what they are, charlatans of the first degree. Some are so brazen as to make us wonder why they bother to try and cover up their duplicity at all; maybe actually they don’t, as there are never any consequences for what they do.
One of those little tit-bits came to light last week when our waste of space Mayor of London whose little (or not so little) fiefdom grows like Topsy and who advocates banning anything on wheels powered by an internal combustion engine, was seen taking his dog for a walk four miles from his home and using a motorcade to get there.
He recently said this…
‘time is running out to stop a climate catastrophe – and London’s road to recovery from the pandemic cannot be clogged by cars’
This despite living within walking distance of Tooting Common!
A little known fact was revealed when the Speaker in the US Senate, one Nancy Pelosi was found to be commandeering a jet to take her home at weekends; naturally as with all such cases, they refuse to discuss these aberrations in this world of climate change measures, or wave the matter off on a technicality.
As with all these things it depends on the source as to how much or how little abuse there has been in her flight arrangements; either way it is not exactly running to a 'net zero' script.
John Kerry, that well known advocate of all things green and sanctimonious saviour of the planet, has a lot of baggage to answer for, but he doesn’t and never has; only the little people have to knuckle down to having their travel curtailed or remodelled to suit the current agenda.
Kerry, who attends climate conferences and spouts his learned thought on eco matters world-wide, has a very dubious background for one so eco-minded.
Naturally the defence for Kerry is that his wife, a member of the Heinz family, owns many of the vehicles etc., but as he uses them all he is still a hypocrite of the first degree and anyway if he believed in all he spouts he would have convinced his wife to ditch all the extra assets.
They are all the same; you either believe in all the guff you spout and act accordingly or you are a hypocrite; none of them suit their actions to their words.
Caroline Lucas leader of the Greens has compared those that fly to a holiday destination, as comparable to knife wielding criminals, yet of course when questioned on her flights to see family in the States, that is apart from other flights for conferences of dubious value, she back-tracks and claims we are not the problem but big corporations are!
She also hit out at ‘binge flying’ and people who have second homes abroad. LOL! She and her husband own five homes, two in Brussels which I am sure she does not cycle to.
Extinction Rebellion's co-founder Gail Bradbrook is another who preaches one thing and does the opposite. She drives a diesel car; when called out she said she could not afford an electric car - nor can most people but the irony would pass her by. She also claims an 11,000 mile trip for a holiday she took (obviously she can obviously afford that!) was for medical reasons; of course it was.
There are several ER activists who qualify for the top rung of hypocrisy. There's no better example of these middle class lefties who believe all they say is only for the little people and not themselves than Jem Bendell. His Tweet here tells it all, none of them can have any conscience about what they say:
Lewis Hamilton who seems to have lost the plot on many fronts is going vegan to save the planet. It is difficult not to laugh at someone who drives F1 cars for a living, has a private jet, numerous expensive gas-guzzling sports cars and flies all over the world to race.
He claims he will use electric vehicles to go to and from the airport and for personal transport from now on. All that was rather blown away as just a publicity stunt for Mercedes Benz who like all manufacturers are being forced to produce EV vehicles in the near future.
Going vegan and trying to convince everyone else to do the same to save the planet doesn’t really cut the mustard, does it?
There is a whole list of eco-luvvies who want everyone else to give up flying, driving, home-owning, farting, eating meat etc., who never abide by their utterings, e.g. Emma Thompson seen flying across the Atlantic to attend an ER rally. When approached she claimed, ‘It’s very difficult to do my job without occasionally flying.’ True but then that applies to millions of people; naturally though, that is different.
Prince Harry - yes, he is still a prince - attended a Google sponsored eco event held every year on the island of Sicily. Naturally he flew by private jet and helicopter to attend along with a total of 114 other private jets owned or hired by the likes of similarly-minded 'save the planet' advocates such as Leo DiCaprio, another total hypocrite. Harry delivered his speech barefoot; not sure how that affects global warming, but hey, each to his own. This was a true gathering of the believers in restrictions for everyone else but themselves, though I doubt bubble dwellers like that ever see it that way.
There has been much said also about the need to reduce population expansion worldwide as the ever burgeoning population needs ever increasing resources and the only way is to reduce those numbers by birth control restrictions. Our own Boris Johnson is a keen climate change advocate as is his latest partner, but the one thing you don’t hear from Bojo is anything about population control which is hardly surprising with at least seven kids accounted for.
Chris Boardman is, having been a racing cyclist albeit in another era, one of those great sportsmen that broke through when we won very little in the sport, certainly one of the greatest pursuit riders ever. He has been very successful off the bike and is outspoken in his belief that we should all use bikes if we can. He claims to have given up ICE cars and has a small EV and encourages his offspring to ride bikes as well as his wife; all very admirable and nothing wrong with that as far as it goes.
But when he talks about the emissions of cars and their impact on the planet in the way they are built he conveniently forgets about his carbon fibre bikes which are not recyclable, and when he does his TDF commentaries does he cycle to France and then to all the start and finish points? Somehow I doubt it. He claims not to be an evangelical over CC but will not hear anything to the contrary, which is typical of this viewpoint; and oh, he has six kids, which rather dampens his credentials. As with them all, you cannot be on both sides of the fence when you take such a rigid stance on the matter. In fairness to him, unlike many others he comes across well with his viewpoint despite the flaws.
One of the flaws being that cycling can be dangerous on today's roads. Well yes, but turning the roads over to cyclists won't change anything as they don’t pay any fuel tax or anything towards road upkeep so everyone would be loaded with extra taxes to take up the slack. His claim that car users are subsidised is totally disingenuous; and how would his bikes be delivered to his outlets? Ah, he has sold that business and now is a millionaire so problems with transport is now something again for the little people; and if you are old or infirm or both.. tough!
Stephen Fry announced his support for ER a couple of weeks back. This video is quite cringe-making, but much of what Fry says about a lot of things is cringe-making. Naturally he's fully on board with the CC agenda, and has no doubts as to our part in all this and the little people will be persuaded. Oh, Stephen has homes here and in Los Angeles, and to my knowledge he doesn’t ride a bike! So he must fly... sold your LA property yet, Stephen?
Chris Packham (for it is he, one of the most sanctimonious of the green movement and a perfect fit for the BBC) promotes ER and said this:
“need to act fast to prevent climate change causing irreversible damage”.
This same Mr Packham promotes and accompanies long haul holidays to places like Botswana, Peru, Papua New Guinea and the Falkland Islands; all out of range for cyclists I believe. To the company he promotes he is a ‘Travel Hero’; I would love to know how he explains this all away. I am sure he has a perfectly valid excuse lined up.
Harrison Ford: what can one say about someone who makes a Biden-like speech on saving rain forests and needs umpteen prompt cards to do it; an actor who cannot remember his lines. Don’t ever forget Ford is passionate about flying and owns numerous planes cars and motor cycles, and very nice too, but not exactly bankable when talking about what we must all do to save the planet; the hypocrisy runs deep with these people. His Bidenesque speech here:
Paul McCartney: some years ago he had a Lexus delivered, and when he found out that the hybrid limousine was delivered by air freight he was said to be ‘horrified’ as the emissions for that delivery were the equivalent of driving the car six times round the world. Paul, who is known for not splashing the cash was questioned as to why he would need such a big vehicle in the first place but it appears it was a gift from Lexus who also sponsored his world tour at the time; horrified, indeed!
He also owns so many houses I could not pin it down to a number; they are described here. Again if I had his money and wanted to escape taxes I would do the same, but with that sort of footprint I would not be ‘horrified’ about having a car delivered by air; visiting all those properties in the States must be more horrific on the carbon-emission scale.
Richard Branson has always been a hypocrite from the days when he said failing airlines should be allowed to collapse and then accepted a bail-out for his own airline.
But the brass neck of a man who slams Australia for using coal to produce energy while he flies to his island home, and owns an airline whilst launching a cruise ship line at the same time! It really takes the biscuit. Plus his space adventures use God knows how much fuel for what is just a bucket list item in his vainglorious life.
There are of course many others who qualify as hypocrites, including many politicians who are used to being two-faced about almost anything. Barack Obama is up there with the best but it would be unfair to single him out; or would it?
To finish, my favourite - or at least equal first because of her status on all things climate-related - is the doom goblin herself, Greta Thunberg. Her publicity-seeking jaunt across the Atlantic in a yacht to attend a climate conference really was in a class of its own, when it was discovered a crew had flown over to take the yacht back to Europe. She continued her journey to South America by train to prove how right on with it all she was but then to get home had to sneak onto an airliner, which in any sane person's mind defeated the whole point of the trip. It still ranks as one of the greatest acts of hypocrisy in the eco movement ever to be enacted.
Amazingly at the time the press and politicians were so enthralled with what they heard her say that it was hardly reported at the time, proving a good story should remain just that regardless of the truth; so they were all hypocrites too, which makes this still my number one act of eco lunacy.
Greta also managed to slip on a rather large banana skin, for at the same time that she tweeted this...
... she appeared on the cover of Vogue wearing high fashion.* As with so much today, you could not make it up:
"I contacted Vogue Scandinavia’s press office for more information, asking who made the clothes, and all that was shared was that ‘a Swedish and a Danish designer’ were involved. .."
More 'Americana', this time from The Staple Singers featuring Mavis Staples, the best soul/gospel singer since Mahalia Jackson.
"The Staple Singers’ place in music history was set in stone more than 40 years ago with two of soul’s greatest singles, “Respect Yourself” and the even more powerful, “I’ll Take You There.”But the family group – patriarch Roebuck “Pops” Staples, lead singer Mavis and siblings Pervis, Cleotha and Yvonne - had been, by then, a major force in American music, culture and politics for more than a decade. Their downhome Mississippi-rooted gospel helped put the cross in “crossover,” taking the group from success in the sacred field to headlining status at the Newport Folk Festival and a frontline position in the battle for civil rights alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King. Their rural roots even caught the ear of Roebuck’s fellow Mississippian, the self-styled King of Hillbilly Rock, Marty Stuart, who performed and recorded with the Staples and who, along with GRAMMY-winning producer/guitarists T-Bone Burnett and Buddy Miller, helps keep the Pops Staples guitar sound alive today as one of the keystones of Americana."
"Uncloudy Day" was an early influence on Bob Dylan, who said of it in 2015, "It was the most mysterious thing I'd ever heard... I'd think about them even at my school desk...Mavis looked to be about the same age as me in her picture (on the cover of "Uncloudy Day")...Her singing just knocked me out...And Mavis was a great singer—deep and mysterious. And even at the young age, I felt that life itself was a mystery."
29 August: Six people in an aerial tramway car in the Alps fall to their deaths when a jet fighter accidentally strikes and severs the cable. 81 other tourists are stranded for hours until rescued.
30 August: racial segregation in schools in Atlanta, Georgia ends with the admission of nine African-American to four formerly all-white Atlanta high schools.
31 August: amid rising tensions between the West and the USSR during the Berlin crisis, the Soviet Union announces the end of a three-year worldwide moratorium on nuclear testing, and begins by detonating an atom bomb the next day - a 16-kiloton airburst over Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan.
