"It's time for votes at 16" - Labour Party (UK) - oh, really?

The latest Labour Party proposal is to add 1.5 million 16- and 17-year-olds to the British electorate, presumably gambling that they are more than averagely ignorant, gullible and excitable and so will vote for the cost- and trouble-free Utopian visions given them by the backroom people who steer the "narrative." https://labour.org.uk/latest/stories/time-votes-16/

Dropping the voting age didn't work for Harold Wilson and wisely, many young people refrain from balloting on issues and parties about which they know next to nothing.

But some can be wound up to a pitch of melancholy hysteria and used as disposable spokespersons. Their 15 minutes of fame may cost them dear personally in the long run, but they will have served their purpose as far as the political chessplayers are concerned.

Here's 16-year-old Greta Thunberg at the UN Climate Action Summit, 23 September 2019:
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/23/763452863/transcript-greta-thunbergs-speech-at-the-u-n-climate-action-summit?t=1570181143532

"My message is that we'll be watching you.

"This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!

"You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

"For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.

"You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.

"The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.

"Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.

"So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences.

"To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise – the best odds given by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.

"How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just 'business as usual' and some technical solutions? With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years.

"There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

"You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.

"We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.

"Thank you."

If we take protesters like this seriously then we need to get down to the Chinese embassy and tell their government to shut off all China's coal-fired power stations.

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement 196 nations made a collective undertaking to reduce global warming to "1.5 to 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels" and each country is to do its part - known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).
https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/nationally-determined-contributions-ndcs

But China, trying to raise its people's standard of living above the mire in which it was stuck for thousands of years, is determined to continue with its industrial development and it sits on a vast coalfield. Accordingly, its CO2 output is assessed as consistent with global warming in the 3-4% bracket - a "highly insufficient" commitment, according to climateactiontracker.org.
https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/

Of course China is aware of problems connected with burning fossil fuels. It is concerned to reduce the atmospheric pollution that concentrates in the geological basin containing Beijing, for a start. But it won't commit to rigid targets that entail an economic crash. Still, they have a strong incentive to act, in their own way and on their own timescale, without a tearful lecture from a child/woman with Asperger's, OCD and selective mutism.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-pollution-beijing/chinas-capital-beijing-vows-air-quality-improvement-but-gives-no-target-idUSKCN1Q90TU

As to the underlying science of "climate change", despite the threats to their careers and reputations some scientists are beginning to poke their heads above the parapet and call into question the facts as well as the pros and cons:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/09/28/global-climate-intelligence-group-founded/

It is always good not to be wasteful and messy. There's a lot we can and should do to manage our material needs in a more efficient and less unsightly way. Just don't ask the poor to stay poor to suit our Marie Antoinette toy-farm fantasies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hameau_de_la_Reine

But we should deplore the use of youngsters for propaganda purposes who have limited understanding of the issues and are encouraged to make emotional rants. Or allowing (accompanying, leading!) placard-wielding, slogan-chanting children to take time off school to tell us simplistic nonsense, as I saw in Oxford a few months ago.* If their political education is "gob open, ears shut" then we need to raise the voting age to allow them time to outgrow the indoctrination of their stupid teachers...

... some of whom may have learned all the wrong lessons themselves. I remember the sit-in at Oxford's Examination Schools in 1973, and the marches ("Thatcher! Thatcher! Milk-snatcher!"). Not being a natural joiner, I just watched as nondescript men halfway up lampposts took telephoto shots of the ninnies for the Press and/or the Home Office. What the crowds didn't realise is they were just being used by the self-selected leaders of tomorrow, as sheepdogs practise penning flocks. Then the few worked their way into organisations so they could take charge of the many, for real.

There's much to do; and much to undo.
________________________________

By the way, one of the the slogans I saw there, "There is no Planet B," is plain wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri_b

______________________________________________________________________________
UPDATE: originally, after the "Marie Antoinette reference", I wrote the following, which Sobers' comment below informs me was a subversive stunt to upset AOC's meeting:

And we can do without insane certainty and crazy, desperate proposals like this one from a young town hall meeting attendee who wore a T-shirt with the slogan "Save the planet, eat the children."

[video was embedded here]

She is well-informed in the modern sense, i.e. knows everything she wants to know. For she is right up-to-date in referring to a Swedish professor (Magnus Soderlund) who recommends cannibalism as a greener form of nutrition.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7443707/Swedish-scientist-says-humans-cannibals-fight-climate-change.html

Since that intensely embarrassing outburst, Democratic Party Congresswoman  Ms Alexandia Ocasio-Cortez correctly tweeted, "This person may have been suffering from a mental condition and it's not okay that the right-wing is mocking her and potentially make her condition or crisis worse. Be a decent human being and knock it off."

But in that case, we should also deplore the use of other youngsters for propaganda purposes who, like this one, have limited understanding of the issues and are encouraged to make emotional rants...

FRIDAY MUSIC: Frank Zappa, by JD

Watching the Proms this year they featured something written 100 years ago which was dire, it was very loud and percussive and tiresome. The presenter Suzy Klein enthused at the end but it was obvious she didn't like it but the Beeb pay her so she had to be polite.

They have over the years been trying to broaden the scope of music. Big band jazz has become more or less a regular feature and there have been Proms devoted to the music of Motown with Sam Moore and William Bell among others. Musical theatre such as West Side Story (with all those 'evil' triads!) has become a staple also and I have already covered the first ever Tango Prom.

But sometimes the choice seems bizarre. If it is good music it is welcome but if it is for 'diversity' they shouldn't bother. (I am too polite to mention the guilty parties.)

My ever fertile brain thought - when will they have the nerve to devote a Prom to the music of Frank Zappa! He recorded with the LSO many years ago and I have been listening to his music recently. He is seriously underrated, he is not a rock musician he is a jazzer who uses rock instruments. Wiggia has already posted FZ's version of Ravel's Bolero so........... are your readers ready for a Zappa musical post? Ready to be Zapped?

(This was a comment on the Bolero video - "Interesting that Ravel was very taken by jazz and became one of the few composers to incorporate sax into his works, Bolero being a prime example. Here we see the four major saxes interpreting his work with great feeling. Classics meets jazz meets pop?")









This final video is his last professional public appearance, as the cancer was spreading to such an extent that he was in too much pain to enjoy an event that he otherwise found "exhilarating". Recordings from the concerts appeared on The Yellow Shark, Zappa's last release during his lifetime.

Brexit and the Remain backlash: the reactionary use of language

"ELITE" vs "POPULISM"

Look at the use of these two terms - as they appeared in UK news - and note how the word "populism" spiked around the time of the Referendum, and then got going again in the autumn of 2016 as the propaganda campaign to negate the result got underway:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?cat=16&date=today%205-y&geo=GB&q=populism,elite

Child abuse: breaking the chain

When I worked with Looked After Children there was a saying - apparently an old saw in this field: "All abusers have been abused, but not all who have been abused go on to become abusers."

Once you are tuned in to looking for it you'll find it's more common than you really wanted to know. It's even in what used to be a standard schoolroom read: "Quiet incest flourished where the roads were bad..." Laurie Lee, "Cider with Rosie" (1959).

What I didn't know until today is that Sigmund Freud addressed this issue in a lecture to colleagues in 1896 (1) and instead of acclaim "the donkeys gave it an icy reception." It was news they didn't want to hear.

Like metal-detector-wielding treasure hunters, those who look for truth sometimes have to wash off a lot of muck before they can examine their finds. In this case, I've learned a bit of the history of abuse denial by reading a Frenchman who seems to have it in for Jews - but unlike naive SJWs I don't expect to get all my information from completely untainted sources: Laurent Guyénot's "current research focuses on the religious and civilizational backgrounds of Zionist geostrategy" (2). Still, a fact is a fact and it appears from his article today in The Unz Review (3) that Freud's own father sexually abused his children, as Freud told a colleague:

"On February 11, 1897 (4), after mentioning that forced oral sex on children can result in neurotic symptoms, he adds: “Unfortunately, my own father was one of these perverts and is responsible for the hysteria of my brother (all of whose symptoms are identifications) and those of several younger sisters. The frequency of this circumstance often makes me wonder.” "

But, says Guyénot, Freud then backtracked and transformed the issue into one of childhood fantasy instead: hence the Oedipus Complex.

In 1932 one of Freud's followers, Sandor Ferenczi also postulated the reality of child sexual exploitation but when he presented his paper (5) to the 12th International Psycho-Analytic Congress in Wiesbaden he got the same cold treatment as his master: "Ferenczi was ostracized by Freud and his sectarian disciples, and his paper was never translated in English for the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, as was customary. He died a few years later, a broken man."

Now our French intellectual spins all this into a rococo condemnation of Jews and Jewishness and works it into a pseudo-psychological explanation of Israel's relations with its Middle Eastern neghbours and the USA.

But Laurie Lee's neighbours weren't Jewish, so far as I know; nor are all child abusers men, as we see in the UK's 2009 Plymouth child abuse case (6) [I wonder what had happened in the perpetrators' own childhoods?]

It's a horribly vexed issue, and of its nature hard to prove - especially if accusations are directed against the rich and powerful, as we have seen.

And abuse doesn't have to be physical to be harmful and long-lasting. Merely withholding affection from a child and constantly criticising it builds up a debt that the child will eventually seek to have repaid, if not by the parent (and how?) then by 'revenge' on innocent third parties (including their partners and offspring) and/or by self-hatred and various forms of self-harm.

Yet the worst, most systematic abuse case I encountered didn't drive the victim screaming mad. She was able to give evidence against her father that got him jailed; to normalise relations with her mother, who accepted her own complicity; and when asked to do her bit for a Christmas concert at the children's home, stood up and recited the Nicene Creed.

I felt like cheering.
__________________________________

(1) "The Aetiology Of Hysteria" https://www.freud2lacan.com/docs/The_Aetiology_of_Hysteria.pdf
(2) https://www.greanvillepost.com/2019/06/05/9-11-was-an-israeli-job/
(3) http://www.unz.com/article/freud-sexual-abuse-and-cover-up/
(4) Letter to Wilhelm Fliess, also quoted by PBS here: https://www.pbs.org/youngdrfreud/pages/analysis_doubts.htm
(5) "Confusion of the Tongues Between the Adults and the Child" http://icpla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Ferenczi-S-Confusion-of-Tongues-Intl-J-Psychoa.-vol.30-p.225-1949.pdf
(6) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Plymouth_child_abuse_case

FRIDAY MUSIC: Ian Anderson, by JD

By RicHard-59 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

In the late sixties and early seventies pop groups become more and more hirsute. Among contenders for the longest and straggliest hair were Jethro Tull. Just another rock and roll band you might think.

But no, because, led by vocalist and songwriter and flautist extraordinaire Ian Anderson, they shot to the upper reaches of the 'hit parade' with a lyrical song in 5/4 time. That was unheard of, most R/R music is 4/4 with occasional waltz time (3/4) and the raw stuff in 2/4.

But it was no fluke because Anderson has subsequently enjoyed an illustrious career and proved his musicianship with jazz and classical as well as performing an interstellar duet with an astronaut! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Anderson

 



 

 



  

 

 



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A late addition (second above) was Boris Dancing! Too good to resist even if it is about Boris Yeltzin and not 'our' Boris.

Brexit: Patriot Games

"He has put himself at the service of Britain. By proroguing Parliament he has appealed to democracy. He remains virtually the only dictator of modern times who, in the last resort, uses his power to defend democratic principles. Britain will undoubtedly go through great turmoil. In the end the will of the people will prevail. Those who had faith in Britain even during the dark days of the war can have faith now."

Of course, the quotation above is not about Boris Johnson - not de Pfeffel but de Gaulle; and it's not from now, but from the Paris rioting of 1968 (1). All I've done is alter a couple of terms.

In the same article, the writer - eminent historian AJP Taylor - says:

"I once heard a French historian say: "When English people are discontented they form a committee. When French people are discontented they make a revolution." I thought this rather exaggerated, but he turns out to have been right."

And so the piqued Top People have resorted to getting an opinion - a ruling on policy, not on law - from the "Supreme Court" as part of their subversive campaign. Committees, Parliamentary motions, legal rulings, appeals - as in "The African Queen", the very deckboards of the Constitution can be torn up and fed into the flames in the reckless dash towards antidemocratic servitude. The People must be kept down, at all costs.

Again and again, I read - and hear from friends - that releasing us from the EU is somehow a Conservative plot. Yet ten years before we finally entered the EEC (having been held off by de Gaulle while he nailed down the Common Agricultural Policy in favour of French farmers so that it would be unavailable to British ones as well), Professor Taylor clearly understood that getting us in was a Tory policy:

"The Common Market is, for the Government, an end in itself, which will automatically provide a solution for all ills. Conservative economic policy has been a failure. Instead of prosperity and expansion, there has been stagnation and the pay pause. [...]

"Once we are inside, Dr. Adenauer and President de Gaulle will reveal, in a kindly way, the secret of expansion. This is the height of absurdity as well as of evasion. For, just as the Government nerve themselves to take the plunge, expansion is ending in the Common Market countries.

"The move into the Common Market has been, from first to last, a confession by British Ministers that they did not know what to do. Originally it was a scheme for smuggling through devaluation of the pound, and hence reduction of wages, without anyone noticing. Now it is not even that. Entry into the Common Market is not a policy. It is a substitute for a policy. Its consequences, its implications, are never explained. [...]

"What else can a puzzled voter do except doubt and turn his back? He receives no guidance and much confusion from the Government. He receives equal equivocation from the Labour Party. Here too the same refusal to decide. The same refusal to state clearly the issues involved for and against. The failure of the Labour leadership to come out clearly against the Common Market has been the greatest lost opportunity of our time. It is this failure more than anything else which keeps the Government of Mr. Macmillan in office." (2) (emphases mine.)

As to the "Supreme Court", that child of Blair's constitutional vandalism - it should go, and the Law Lords return.

________________________________________

(1) AJP Taylor: "Will Germany be the Next to Explode?" The Sunday Express, London, June 2 1968
(2) "Macmillan Has Not Found The Answer Yet", The Sunday Express, London, July 15 1962

Climate crisis? by JD

At the weekend the Mail Online had a headline about Greta Thunberg receiving a 'rock star' reception at the UN. Today (monday 23rd) the same Mail Online had two very different headlines: one was how Soros and all his money was supporting the 'climate crisis' hysteria and the other was about how Dinesh D'Souza compares Greta Thunberg to an Aryan poster girl used by the NAZIS (The story linking Soros to Thunberg has been removed since this morning)

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7489121/Greta-Thunberg-receives-rock-star-reception-New-York.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7492489/Dinesh-DSouza-compares-teen-eco-warrior-Greta-Thunberg-Aryan-poster-girl-used-NAZIS.html

But is there now a realisation that the relentless and fact free propaganda is nothing more than a 'sky is falling' scare story. A lot of stories and comments are emerging criticising the hidden agenda in all this. This video is just one of them-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hofAsL8q4A&feature=youtu.be

At the end I laughed out loud, spluttering my tea all over....... Greta's middle name is Tintin! What!! What on earth possessed her parents to call her Tintin. I know there is a current fashion for daft names but...... Tintin?

But to be serious, as noted in the video, Greta's grandfather is Olof Thunberg. His Wiki entry says that he is related to the Swedish Nobel Prize winner Svante Aarhenius, possibly his uncle for Aarhenius' mother is a Thunberg.

Svante Aarhenius is well known as the 'father' of global warming far he first established how CO2 could combine with H2O to form carbonic acid in the atmosphere and it was this which retained the heat; thus global warming. 

https://prabook.com/web/svante.arrhenius/3721469

But he did not think that this was necessarily a bad thing and was probably beneficial and provided an opportunity to increase crop yields and bring agricultural production to areas of the world which are currently dormant.

"We often hear lamentations that the coal stored up in the earth is wasted by the present generation without any thought of the future, and we are terrified by the awful destruction of life and property which has followed the volcanic eruptions of our days. We may find a kind of consolation in the consideration that here, as in every other case, there is good mixed with the evil. By the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth, ages when the earth will bring forth much more abundant crops than at present, for the benefit of rapidly propagating mankind." (p63)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14370181-worlds-in-the-making-the-evolution-of-the-universe

Other sources are also asking pertinent questions or maybe impertinent questions, depends on your point of view.

"A workplace strike shows company owners and management that workers are able to harm them economically. A school strike, on the other hand, constitutes a form of self-harm, undertaken to attract adult attention. And the global school strike for climate is led by a girl with a long and tragic history of self-harm to her own body.
(Greta does not skip classes from just any school, but one for children with special needs. Many other Swedish families fight hard to get their children into such schools, because places are rare.)

https://quillette.com/2019/04/23/self-harm-versus-the-greater-good-greta-thunberg-and-child-activism/

And other sources are highlighting that the 'climate crisis' is just another way to increase the tax burdon on us all as well as being another part of the political desire to keep us all poor and stupid. (see links at end) The 'climate crisis' is also a good business opportunity for 'green entrepreneurs' to make a great deal of money. Who is Ingmar Rentzhog for example and what is his connection to Greta Thunberg?

“How is it possible for you to be so easily tricked by something so simple as a story, because you are tricked? Well, it all comes down to one core thing and that is emotional investment. The more emotionally invested you are in anything in your life, the less critical and the less objectively observant you become.” — David JP Phillips, We Don’t Have Time board of directors, “The Magical Science of Storytelling”

http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2019/01/17/the-manufacturing-of-greta-thunberg-for-consent-the-political-economy-of-the-non-profit-industrial-complex/

So in all this fog of misinformation who is right; the 16 year old school girl with Asperger's or her Nobel Prize winning great uncle?

=======================================================================
'poor and stupid' -
https://vikingpundit.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-conspiracy-to-keep-you-poor-and.html
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?101232-The-conspiracy-to-keep-you-poor-and-stupid
https://muskegonpundit.blogspot.com/2008/03/conspiracy-to-keep-you-poor-and.html

The various links to http://www.poorandstupid.com/ all say - Not Found.

Looking at the products of our education system it is clear that the 'stupid' target has already been met; school leavers and college graduates have been taught to obey the system and not to think. That leaves the 'poor' target and that is getting ever closer!