It would take a genius to invent a business that didn't involve blood, filth or heavy lifting; where any failure is down to the customer; and there is no end to the process, so the income stream is permanent. We should all salute Sigmund Freud's towering achievement.
But it has occurred to me that some of his theories are not about the indvidual's suffering; he may have been a crypto-revolutionary.
Ostensibly, according to his schematic below, humans go through five stages:
Psychosexual Stages of Development
Until I saw it, I thought it was just the first three. Something like, the infant eats for the first five years and then there is a cataclysmic poo, followed by discovering a form of amusement that lasts until retirement age or if lucky, even longer.
Apparently not.
Alternatively, the first three stages represent the three levels of society:
Oral: the lower orders suck on the welfare breast
Anal: the middle class worry about whether to put soft plastic in the recycle or the burnable trash; carbon dioxide; vitamins, etc.
Phallic: the elites f*** everybody else, especially the poor
- and the next two are the stages leading to revolution:
Latent: the people are oppressed and passive, unable to escape from the mire of debt, politically impotent, distracted by cheapjack entertainment, drugs and alcohol etc.
Genital: the greed and power-madness of the few finally f*** the whole system. A few survivors - unlikely to include the bunker billionaires, whose exits and air vents will have been concreted up by their vengeful victims - fossick through the wreckage for the means of survival.
Or maybe I've got all that wrong. That's the danger of the internet, it makes us all sciolists.
A little learning is a dangerous thing Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain And drinking largely sobers us again.
Funny how all good things are ‘despite Brexit’ but all bad ones ‘because Brexit.’ Is a shortage of HGV drivers making supply problems worse? Because Brexit. Job vacancies at an all-time high, especially in hotels, pubs and restaurants? Because Brexit. Not enough tradespeople? Because Brexit.
White-collar whingers don’t recognise success when it’s staring them in the face. That’s because it’s not their success.
At last, all the workers mentioned above are going to get a boost to their pay rates, after decades of being undermined by cheap foreign labour. Eventually we’ll get an equilibrium, once training and recruitment have filled the gaps, but it will be a balance at a permanently higher level. Just imagine: instead of touring drama groups nostalgically recreating the life of canalboat carriers, we’ll see lorry drivers earning a decent screw today!
Provided, that is, we understand the game the elites have been playing for so long, to the disadvantage of the British working class.
Free trade benefits the free trader, who will say that it benefits everybody, harking back just over 200 years to David Ricardo’s theory of ‘comparative advantage.’ His famous example compares the production of two goods, cloth and wine, in two countries, England and Portugal. The nations differ in how efficiently they can produce each type of item, and so by each putting more emphasis on what it does better there is an overall increase in productivity, the excess of which can be consumed or traded.
The flaw in the argument is that Ricardo expresses productivity in hours worked per unit of output. A balance can be reached if the two nations do not differ too widely. If…
Enter the Dragon. The average UK factory worker earns c. £11 per hour ; in China, c. £2.60, and that’s after huge improvements in wages in the Middle Kingdom as it has prospered through world trade since joining the WTO twenty years ago. The exchange rate between the renminbi and pound or dollar – long held down by the Chinese administration – means that while Chinese workers get a lot more locally for their overseas-earned money, it also means that many of our goods cannot possibly compete with theirs on price.
This structural imbalance has hollowed out UK/US industry and been paid for first by borrowing (in part from the Chinese themselves) but later also by the sale of assets to (among others) China: $120 billion-plus in the US, £143 billion-plus in the UK (representing a much bigger proportion of our GDP than in America’s case.)
One can entirely understand the hard-working Chinese seizing the opportunity to pull themselves out of the mire and join the advanced nations of the world; but one can deplore the failure of Western politicians to control the rate of change and its impact on our society and economy.
This may have something to do with our leaders’ education – in Britain we have suffered from a tradition of public school/Oxbridge types brought up to leave practical matters to ‘the little men’ while they rode the escalator to higher things. In France, though, they have the elitist governance-training Ecole Nationale d'Administration – ‘a degree from the ENA has been the passport to the upper echelons of French politics for generations,’ says the BBC. This could be why French negotiators have been running rings round ours before, during and after our membership of the EU. Presidents Macron, Hollande and Chirac all went to the ENA (and now M. Macron is to shut it down ‘to boost social mobility’! How weird; not pulling up the ladder after oneself, then?) In how many instances could ‘because Brexit’ be replaced by ‘because EU spite’ (think Ursula von der Leyen and weaponized vaccines) or ‘because British political incompetence’ (think Heath and now Johnson re the sell-out of the fishing industry?)
It’s not just China, of course – she’s not the only emerging market; and it’s not just the Far East, either. The EU was well aware of the implications of opening its borders in 2004 to new members such as Poland and imposed a seven-year moratorium on labour migration; but Mr Blair (Fettes and St. John’s) messed it up for the UK. Ten years earlier, French MEP Sir James Goldsmith was spelling out the socioeconomic consequences of GATT to PBS’s Charlie Rose:
and to Weekend World’s Brian Walden: Anyhow, we should welcome improved pay rates for workers here, because Brexit. It means they will spend more, so increasing the velocity of money in the economy and helping with the employment and profits of others; and pay more tax, so eventually the rates may come down and disposable income will 'fructify in the pockets of the people’ as Gladstone said.
Except… There’s not much point in letting the lower classes have more to spend if much of it goes back out on cellphones and plastic gewgaws from China, dinner sets from India, trainers from Vietnam and half our food from everywhere but Britain. Never mind smart cars, phones, meters and speakers; we need smart politicians to stop the sell-off of our businesses to, and negotiate fairer trade with, other nations.
It can’t be left to individual consumer initiative. We had ‘I’m Backing Britain’ in 1968, but that didn’t stop the rot. When real wage rates stalled and money got tight, the ordinary Brit bought the less expensive alternative; and unemployment, part-time and less-skilled and lower-paid work seeped in like a spring tide. It’s taken us goodness knows how long to get out of the clutches of the EU, and that’s only the start of the battle against supranational powers. We’ve done Brexit; now the little men, and little women, need to get together again.
The above is something many have hinted at over the last few years, and even I have suggested that the end times as we know them are approaching.
Never in my life has there been such a constant stream of news and predictions and statements that would have you believe the end is nigh.
My wife is not alone in that she will not view the news as it is so depressing on so many fronts. She also is not alone in blocking out the MSN who would appear to contrive to suggest every new item of bad news is also the end of civilisation, would have pooh-poohed such a notion not so long ago, and now? Not so sure.
If you can stand back and try to be objective over what is going on it is not easy to be an optimist. I am not far out if I state that the vast majority of leaders in the so called free world are an abject failure, who among those leading the countries that matter are worthy of the status conferred on them. This has little to do with political affiliation - that went out of the door long ago as they all slowly morphed into glutinous one size fits all outfits, designed to appeal to those who will remain loyal come what may and to hell with the majority.
Nowhere in the west is there any difference. You can put different labels on parties but in the vast majority we have a two party system pretending to be one thing but in fact only achieving to be two cheeks of the same arse. Virtually all countries are reduced to voting for the least worst option; what an appalling state of affairs.
We are told we live in a democratic state and to a degree we do, compared with others, but that democracy has been eroded at a steady rate for decades now. The fact is we have a lock out to any party wanting to achieve some power in the way things are run, being blocked ridiculed smeared and coalitions formed to stop them getting any foothold in the political process, so it is not exactly democratic. All western countries have virtually identical track records as the so-called ‘heritage’ parties all pile into whatever position is deemed to get the most votes; it is not a system any more for the people or country but a system to ensure remaining in power at all costs.
Anyone with an open mind must have doubts about what has recently happened in the USA. It beggars belief that a candidate who didn’t campaign and when he did drew derisory crowds polled more votes than anyone in history. If nothing else it drew attention to the use of postal voting which is open to fraud in elections world wide, even here we have had examples of increasing interference with postal voting and yet nothing is done. Why? It simply suits parties with certain demographics who will vote for them whatever the method chosen, be it fraudulent or otherwise. This is not democracy but an increasing spreading stain on our society.
The current investigation in the USA into alleged voting fraud is likely to go nowhere. They rarely do: too many vested interests, no different from here where a private prosecution was necessary to open the can of worms in Tower Hamlets and the drawn-out-to-infinity saga of Thanet where aside from the disappeared ballot boxes and dubious counting, there was also found to be illegal funds used to support the Conservative candidate, yet years later it all disappeared down the memory hole, how very convenient.
It is not that long ago that politicians would resign if caught with their fingers in the till or had compromised their position with items like conflict of interest. Not all, it is true, but there was an expectation this would happen and it often did. Not any more: examples abound of politicians with bank balances that would grace a third world country, presidents who have filched international aid for years and have bulging Swiss bank accounts. Nancy Pelosi in the States has allegedly benefited from insider trading; her net wealth with her husband is in the region of $160 million dollars; all is allegedly above board and it is her husband who has made the business deals... the smell remains, as it does with so many gains in wealth where politicians are involved. You don’t get that from the salary that is paid to politicians and far too many of them ignore protocols. The revolving door is used despite government limitations in place, lobbying is rife, our recent PM David Cameron has been seen to override lobbying laws in his favour, Christine Lagarde is made chief executor of the European bank despite fraudulently appropriating around 450 million euros... the list is endless as usual despite being found guilty; weasel words and smiles all round show how the two tier justice system works.
Here we currently have a minister who seems to have various conflicts of interest but is still in the job…
Zahawi also owns Yougov, the polling site. How can a politician own a political polling site and that site considered neutral while in office with a particular party?
And the expenses scandal might as well never have happened; most of what was considered illegal then pales into insignificance with that claimed today.
How does David Lammy explain his staffing claims alongside other MPs, plus consistently claiming the maximum available?
The never ending bad news or pessimistic offerings on the MSN hardly gives cause to rejoice. My good lady wife, like many others, refuses to listen or watch the news. Her reasoning is that with limited years left on this mortal coil why saddle oneself with daily misery, it will not change anything. This is the opposite to myself who gets enraged at the everyday nonsense that is spouted.
I have never been one to indulge in conspiracy theories, yet the basis of many has come to pass if not the origins. Climate change was presented as a way to save us from inevitable earthly doom, but virtually all predictions have proved totally false, yet this doesn't stop the drip drip nudge nudge towards an impossible net zero. Why the push? And it is world wide or certainly the western world that keeps pushing for this dubious aim. The flaws in the program are obvious but little is said in opposition; why?
Our own government has already pulled back on the time limit for gas boilers being unsaleable for reasons all could see, it was an impossible aim and still is with the extended time frame, not that the program has any merit apart from more costs many cannot afford.
The closing down of coal fired and gas power stations has had a jolt of realism as two coal fired plants had to be restarted because we suffered from no wind and no sun plus the French and Norwegians are cutting back on surplus power to sell abroad; that does not bode well for us and the winter has not arrived yet. The threat of black outs is ever closer, despite obvious shortfalls in coming energy needs, absolutely nothing has been done regards energy security and stability, both of which are essential to any change of supply type going forward.
European electricity prices are the highest for years as wind and sun disappear….
And already large increases in bills are planned for this autumn, the first of many we have been warned against. Yet we are told green energy will be cheaper; logic says the bills can never come down whilst we have to have a two tiered supply system with back up power plants on stand by for when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine, never mind the costs of the huge subsidies given. Surely those in charge of these projects know this, or are we being taken for a ride into a world depicted in Dr Zhivago…
The prospect of ever more elderly being given the choice of eat or heat does not become a nation that pretends it is in the forefront of social care. In fact social care is another area in which we should be ashamed of ourselves: we cater for those that arrive uninvited on our shores by giving them shelter and food, while our own in many cases are reduced to using charities, having paid into the system all their lives or if they are unfortunate to be allotted a place in one of our less ‘satisfactory’ care homes are treated for their £1000 a week like baggage in transit; 'God's waiting room' is the phrase that comes to mind and like British Rail the waiting rooms are not inviting.
Again no real provision is being made for this area in which we all end up in one way or the other. The retired are are a growing demographic, this has been known and forecast for decades yet again nothing is done.
This scene from the USA is hard to believe in our comfortable modern western society, yet it is one becoming ever more frequent. There was a time when those at the bottom of the pile would be moved on so as not despoil the street scene; the numbers now make that an impossibility. That the unfortunates on this scale should dumped, ignored and erased is a blight on modern society; we are not talking about a small minority that actually prefer a life on the road away from all today's society but those for what ever reason can no longer help themselves. Yes, drugs are the provider of this misery, though among the druggies is a large percentage of people who have genuinely fallen on hard times and have nowhere to turn. We have a smaller but growing problem here as does Europe in general, yet governments fall over themselves to help those who arrive illegally. There is something morally very wrong going on when your own are shunned.
Not all is the fault of governments. Those that believe the state should provide all are part of the problem; the number of people who cannot wait to dump their ageing parents in one of these places is now a commonplace trait and has been for years. You can lump it in with the ‘sooner they have gone the sooner we can divvy up the estate’ brigade. Think it doesn’t exist? I have seen it with my own eyes, even within my own family: the day you pop off is the day they look for the house keys, it is that blatant.
All this is an attitude prevalent in today's western society: nobody cares about anything until it affects them. Until that moment they are not interested; this is always too late. 'The long march through the institution's was a long standing joke, it was another conspiracy used as a distraction for adverse decisions coming from government organisations. It is not a joke now, it is happening: many of those who infiltrated are now either policy makers or have influence, not just here but in most of the western world. The current woke government in the USA is compliant in many cases with the genderisation of the military; the universities, schools, local authorities of pushing critical race theory into junior schools as part of the curriculum and in certain aspects creating apartheid in the prevention of crime and the appointment of employees.
Organisations such as the ominous WEF somehow get the ear of world governments despite no one voting for them and get a seat at the table of conferences on world governance. Why? Lobby yes and say no.
How on earth does someone like Susan Michie, a communist, get to have influence within SAGE on policy for all things Covid. She is a psychologist, but there she is telling everyone to lockdown and wear masks forever; just an infiltrator and an extension of the nudge unit.
The tearing down of statues to appease a small minority of activists shows how far it has infiltrated the institutions. We have trusts, committees, heads of departments, all progressives falling over themselves to accommodate all the ideals and perceived injustices that these small groups agitate for.
And it is happening here. That removing a statue of Rhodes should even be considered when the main protagonist for its removal was a black South African student who would not even be in a position to comment on it were it not for his Rhodes funded scholarship, shows how far we have sunk as a nation when the faculty officials give a platform to this nonsense.
Every where you look today there are aggrieved groups or individuals wanting change not for the better for the good of the majority but to polish their egos and their virtues.
Yet all this nonsense, and most of it is, has gained traction among those who rule us, and you have to ask why?
There is no better example of wokeness taking hold in a big way today than NZ. Ever since Jacinda Ardern scraped into power the country has has been involved in turning itself inside out to become the frontier of progressive thinking and action. It is now silently turning the country over to future Maori power and achieving this through separating items like health care, an apartheid state in the making. Who would have believed sleepy NZ would allow itself to go this way. The rulings over Covid are just about the most draconian in the western world with total shutdown over one new case; what they would do if the bubonic plague broke is hard to imagine.
They are talking about virtually cutting themselves off from the world till at least ‘22, so frightened are they there might be another death from the virus. This sort of governance - and we have seen many examples in the last eighteen months - verges on insanity; actually it is insanity.
Yet she is still put up as the poster child of the Left. Most of what she says is outside her remit but makes good sound bites in the lefty media and pleases her adoring fans, but means very little. Repeating the word 'kindness' in the UN doesn’t really change much and I don’t seriously believe as elsewhere in the world how far what are far-left and often communist policies have infiltrated under the guise of woke agendas.
Trudeau in Canada is another who who invokes nonsense policies on his country. At last it looks hopeful he has been found out but I wouldn’t bet on it; the public are the ones who have been found out all across the western world.
The virus if nothing else has shown those that govern just how far they can push their respective electorates in directions they want. The never ending ‘scientific’ advice that has come out during the virus is a classic example of government taking opaque positions on obscure issues that voters will scarcely notice, but at the same time re Covid frightening the life out of a percentage to make a difference in their favour.
Look at the last few days: 'lockdowns are not coming back' says Boris, and then today 'as a last resort we will invoke a lockdown'; just one of the endless about turns that are planned by nudge units. No individual could be that stupid to say these things on a regular basis and be believed, but all they need is a percentage.
Yet again they push on throwing obscene amounts of money in subsidies at wind power and alternative green projects, and at the same time announce their beloved EVs will have their charging times limited to off-peak periods - how is that supposed to pan out? And when we have enough of the EVs to make a difference and they all plug in at the same designated time will the grid cope? The answer is no, so what are they playing at? There never appears to be anyone with any common sense with their hands on the levers of power.
Of course it could be the conspiracy theorists are and have been correct in all this. The government is so entrapped in all this green thinking that they consider all private vehicles to be something we ‘have’ to do without to save the planet and this is just one of the measures to fulfil that aim; nothing it appears is impossible or what it seems any more.
The NHS has been discussed, again huge sums of money still no sign of any change forthcoming in infrastructure or planning.
Immigration continues in the west unabated. Why, when the social costs are so high? Continuous denials by government on a subject they don’t really want to talk about are in complete opposition to the facts; the selective vague justification 'they are a net gain for society’ flies in the face of what has been revealed elsewhere; the item I could not find previously on the statistics for the Dutch I have unearthed, it is worth reading.
Milton Friedman's oft-quoted "You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state." took a lot of stick from the progressive yet the facts stand up: there is a finite pot for welfare and unlimited numbers who have never contributed will eventually make welfare unsustainable. Yet the USA has let in two million this year and we have completely failed to patrol and seal our borders. Immigration per se is not a bad thing, we have always had immigration as the liberal left keep telling us; what they don’t tell you is the numbers compared with the past, which are now astronomical.
From a stand off viewpoint all these things have been with us awhile; what has changed is the scale of all and the simultaneous challenge to the way we live. Something has to give and I fear it is the west itself.
It has been said ‘When the Roman Empire broke up, new societies emerged, but their hierarchies, cultures and economies were less sophisticated, and people lived shorter, unhealthier lives.‘
It is also said this could not happen today. I am not so sure. The sheer numbers involved these days with burgeoning populations make change to a different society a long-drawn-out affair. No change without considerable harm physically and financially can be buffered against that sort of collapse. The west has had to bankrupt itself to shore up the financial collapse in 2008 and the effects of the virus. The virus and its handling is another story. All we have now is massive debts and the printing presses are running red hot, any other wordly event such as a war, another financial crisis, high inflation at a time of massive borrowing against low interest rates and the west will have problems I doubt it can handle without a cost to society on scale not seen since the Depression.
People of my age often say and have said, ‘I will not be around to see the shit hit the fan’; that is now becoming a likely scenario; those that follow in their naivety towards matters of the moment outside their texting are in for a very rude shock.
Of course I could be wrong. Someone on a white charger may appear take the west by the scruff of its neck and make the necessary changes. No sign of anything like that remotely happening at the moment, though.
There were some messages on my answering machine, so I set to answering the calls. I picked up the phone but it was dead.
Funnily, though, some new callers rang, but although I replied it was obvious that none of what I said was getting through to them; they just spoke and ended the call. I had wanted to share a joke in response, offer advice or praise or moral support, but no go.
The telephone company hasn't informed me of any glitsch in the system and I don't know who to speak to. Basically, I'm incommunicado, and I have no idea what caused it or how long this communication block will last.
Have you have a similar experience?
Perhaps you will recall that you or someone you know will have had, if I explain that it's not the telephone I'm talking about: it's Facebook.
Clearly I have sinned, Perhaps it was a joke definition I put on, saying 'dedication' meant 'drone strike'; it's a form of warfare I particualrly despise, especially since they've now developed a sort of multiple-knife-wielding version called the Hellfire AGM-114R9X or 'flying Ginsu' - less likely to cause 'collateral damage' and yet somehow more evil.
But I don't know if it was that. Someone in Mr Zuckerberg's organisation has taken it on themselves to censor me in this Kafkan way; someone who may have been to college but clearly wasted their time, having learned nothing about freedom of expression.
Well, I can do without the cod-philosophy posts and targeted ads, but I do like the animal videos, the beautiful photography from around the world, the news from friends and family... but should I mildly accept this anonymous, high-handed intercept-dictatorship?
Or should I (when I am permitted... if...) instead just contact those I wish to hear from again and ask them to use some other channel; scout my previous interactions for anything I want to copy and save; and simply leave Mr Zuckerberg and his creepy empire?
If you are allowed to speak, I look forward to your advice.
(Posted as a photo to FB 16:05 September 17, 2021. Again oddly, I cannot access my FB 'activity log'. Perhaps a technical error - perhaps not.)
Erika Lewis is the singer with New Orleans street band Tuba Skinny. She sings in other locations and with other musicians and a few years ago finally recorded her own first album. Not without difficulties along the way, as her Tuba Skinny colleague Shaye Cohn explains in a 'gofundme' page
"Recently she found out that she will need to have thyroid surgery which runs the risk of vocal chord damage, or rather, damage to the nerves controlling the vocal chords, and the ability to control pitch, etc, indefinitely. Of course, we are hoping for the best possible outcome. But, we are also here in hopes of supporting and encouraging her to make the album as originally planned in the event that she is unable to do so in the future."
The good news is that the surgery was successful and she recorded her album which features her own songs and as can be seen from the videos the live performances are helped along by Shaye Cohn.
13 September: the US contemplates 'Mutually Assured Destruction' vis-a-vis the |Soviet Union. Wikipedia recounts:
'SIOP-62, the American options for nuclear war, was presented to President Kennedy in a top secret briefing from General Lyman Lemnitzer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The operational plan, drawn up on April 15, provided 14 options for responding to a nuclear attack, and the 14th option, recommended by General Lemnitzer, was to explode 3,267 nuclear bombs on targets in the Soviet Union, as well as the Warsaw Pact nations and Communist China. Kennedy was reportedly furious about the lack of flexibility in the plan, which contemplated obliteration of the enemy with the expectation that the United States and its allies would sustain massive destruction as well.'
The homicidal lunacy of top-level military thinking is parodied in the 1964 movie 'Doctor Strangelove':
UK chart hits, week ending 16 September 1961 (tracks in italics have been played in earlier posts)
In June 1979, a man using the pseudonym R. C. Christian approached the Elberton Granite Finishing Company on behalf of "a small group of loyal Americans", and commissioned the structure now known as the Georgia Guidestones. Christian explained that the stones would function as a compass, calendar, and clock, and should be capable of "withstanding catastrophic events." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones
The Georgia Guidestones were unveiled to a crowd of 400 people on March 22, 1980. The main structure is composed of four massive granite monoliths, each weighing around 20 tons, and a 9-ton central pillar, all of which support the square 11-ton ‘capstone’. The completed monument stands some 19 feet high.
Perhaps taking a lesson from the discovery of the Rosetta Stone (an inscription in multiple languages which facilitated the decoding of the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs), the four Pyramid-Blue granite side-slabs are etched with 4000 individual characters, which present the ‘guide’ in eight different languages. In addition the capstone has the words “Let These Be Guidestones to an Age of Reason” inscribed upon it in four ancient scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Babylonian cuneiform, Classical Greek, and Sanskrit.
The public face of the monument's designers and builders later identified himself as - Robert C Christian (still the same pseudonym) and had this to say -
"Stonehenge and other vestiges of human thought arouse our curiosity but carry no message for our guidance. To convey our ideas across time to other human beings we want to erect a monument. A cluster of graven stones…which will silently display our ideas when we have gone. We hope they will merit increasing acceptance and that through their silent persistence they will hasten in a small degree the coming Age of Reason."
First thing to say is they do not look very impressive. The stone monuments of the past were more enigmatic, more awe inspiring, more elegant and artistic. This one is unimpressive, there is nothing significant about the geometry or the design or the dimensions.
Nor is the orientation a difficult thing to achieve. If it is trying to impress with its alignment then the sundial at Samrat Yantra Jaipur is more elegant and better in every way. http://users.hartwick.edu/hartleyc/jantar.htm
So why did they build these Guidestones? It appears to rely on words for its message, something none of the world's other stone monuments ever relied on. It is nothing more than speculation that the Giza Pyramids were once covered in hieroglyphic inscriptions. Indeed, the smallest of the three still carries a lot of the original granite casing and, from what I could see when I visited, there was just one single 'I built this' cartouche on the otherwise smooth unblemished face.
Only The Pharisees of Verbal Orthodoxy, to use Aldous Huxley's memorable phrase, would imagine that words are the best or only way to transmit wisdom and knowledge.
Reading the banal 'message' it strikes me there is too much emphasis on 'reason' as the basis for their proposed brave new world to come. That makes me suspicious....didn't the world try that once before? With rather dubious results.
I regard them as a Monument to Misanthropy and not, as they claim, "....guidestones to an Age of Reason." I have already had my say on 'the age of reason' and that is still valid because, as history has shown, the ideal of reason does not necessarily produce reasonable behaviour. https://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-cream-of-reason-revisited-by-jd.html
There are ten 'commandments' inscribed on the stones and these appear to be an inspiration to the current 'save the planet' movement which is the latest fashion among our political leaders.
The first inscription reads - "Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature." There is an unfounded assumption here that there are too many people in the world. Is that true? Many famous names have expressed that opinion, among them Bill Gates, Sir David Attenborough, Boris Johnson (in a Daily Telegraph article in 2007) as well as the PM's father, Stanley Johnson. The fact that Boris has seven children (or is it eight) and his father has six makes me question the sincerity of their belief.
If they ever bothered to look out of the aeroplane window while they are travelling they would see a lot of greenery and a lot of empty spaces in the world. Too many people? A doubtful assumption.
Another of the 'instructions' to humanity is to "Unite humanity with a living new language." I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean but wasn't there a failed attempt to invent a new language called Esperanto a few decades ago? How did that work out?
I find the tenth 'commandment' to be more sinister: "Be not a cancer on the Earth—Leave room for nature—Leave room for nature." Did the designers of the Guidestones really believe that humanity is a 'cancer'? Cancer is abnormal cell growth in the body. Is that an intelligent description of humanity? And 'leave room for nature' inscribed twice? In case they hadn't noticed, 'nature' already occupies 100% of the planet; we are, after all, part of nature i.e. a naturally indigenous species belonging to this planet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones#Inscriptions
A few years ago I saw Jay Lakhani on TV giving a lecture. What he was telling his audience was that the natural world wants to kill us. Mankind is vulnerable and basically defenceless against 'nature' - everything from the sabre toothed tiger to the eruption of mount Vesuvius and a multitude of perils in between. Lakhani was a theoretical physicist and, among other things, was a tutor at Eton. http://www.hinducounciluk.org/2020/12/07/tribute-to-a-great-hindu-leader-speaker-and-visionary-shri-jay-prakash-lakhani/
According to Genesis 1:26 mankind has 'dominion' over all living things as well as over the earth. We are obliged to adapt the earth to ensure survival and to feed ourselves and over the centuries we have been very good at it. But in making life comfortable we have perhaps made it too comfortable and produced the current breed of 'woke' wimps, frightened of their own shadows but, more importantly, with no faith in our ability to adapt to the changing climate, if indeed it is changing as dramatically as they think it is.
And why is the modern world now inhabited by a multitude of weak-minded woke wimps or more specifically the no longer Christian west? Two relevant quotes I have used before:
From Ernst Shumacher in his book "A Guide For The Perplexed":
'the modern experiment to live without religion has failed'
....and Ian MacDonald in his book "Revolution in the Head" wrote ':
'once the obsolete Christian compact had broken down, there was nothing -
apart from, in the last resort, money - holding Western civilisation together.'
It is not just the decline of religious faith which has produced this weak generation, there is also the lack of faith in humanity's ability to adapt as mentioned above. Practical skills have more or less disappeared in the West such that we have probably two or possibly three generations who have never done any real work so would not know where to start in the politically inspired drive to Build Back Better: a risible slogan if ever I saw one!
And do not assume that this weakness in western civilisation has not been noticed elsewhere.
This quote is attributed to the founder of Dubai, Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum; he was asked about the future of his country, and he replied:
"My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I ride a Mercedes, my son rides a Land Rover, and my grandson is going to ride a Land Rover…but my great-grandson is going to have to ride a camel again."
“Why is that?", he was asked.
And his reply was: “Hard times create strong men, strong men create easy times.Easy times create weak men, weak men create difficult times.Many will not understand it, but you have to raise warriors, not parasites."
And add to that the historical reality that all great empires...the Persians, the Trojans, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, and in later years, the British rose and perished within 240 years.They were not conquered by external enemies; they rotted from within.
The greatest generation consisted of 18 year old kids storming the beaches at Normandy. And now, two generations later, some 18 year old kids want to hide in safe rooms when they hear words that hurt their feelings.
They also want free stuff from the government because they think they are entitled to it.
The "camels are on the horizon"for sure.
Our society has indeed rotted from within and if the 'woke' continue to whine "I want the world and I want it now!" they are in for a very rude shock when they realise they will own nothing and they will not be happy!
I leave the final words to the late George Carlin because he was much more eloquent than I will ever be:
"The planet is fine! Compared to the people, THE PLANET IS DOING GREAT: Been here four and a half billion years! Do you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years, we’ve been here what? 100,000? Maybe 200,000? And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over 200 years. 200 years versus four and a half billion and we have the conceit to think that somehow, we’re a threat? That somehow, we’re going to put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a-floatin’ around the sun? The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us: been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drifts, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and aluminum cans are going to make a difference?" https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/comedy/george-carlin-saving-planet-transcript/
- The 'greens' often complain about the mess mankind has made but they forget, if they ever knew, that we created the so-called mess using 'stuff' which came out of the earth. Eventually all of that 'stuff' will be assimilated back into the Earth and will become once again invisible.
