Oh, poor little rich girl! 84

Posted under Africa, Asia, Climate, Environmentalism by Jillian Becker on Saturday, April 17, 2021

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Cold comfort 19

… and validation for “catastrophic climate change deniers”:

Posted under Climate by Jillian Becker on Saturday, April 10, 2021

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It’s all nonsense 43

Thomas Sowell on “global warming”, its prophets and their profits:

Posted under Climate by Jillian Becker on Saturday, April 10, 2021

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Advertisement for totalitarian communism 177

By Ida Auken, Member of the Danish Parliament, from the World Economic Forum (“Davos”) – an annual meeting of billionaires and other members of Big Virtue:

Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city – or should I say, “our city”. I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes.

It might seem odd to you, but it makes perfect sense for us in this city. Everything you considered a product, has now become a service. We have access to transportation, accommodation, food and all the things we need in our daily lives. One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.

First communication became digitized and free to everyone. Then, when clean energy became free, things started to move quickly. Transportation dropped dramatically in price. It made no sense for us to own cars anymore, because we could call a driverless vehicle or a flying car for longer journeys within minutes. We started transporting ourselves in a much more organized and coordinated way when public transport became easier, quicker and more convenient than the car. Now I can hardly believe that we accepted congestion and traffic jams, not to mention the air pollution from combustion engines. What were we thinking?

Sometimes I use my bike when I go to see some of my friends. I enjoy the exercise and the ride. It kind of gets the soul to come along on the journey. Funny how some things never seem to lose their excitement: walking, biking, cooking, drawing and growing plants. It makes perfect sense and reminds us of how our culture emerged out of a close relationship with nature.

“Environmental problems seem far away”

In our city we don’t pay any rent, because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it. My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there.

Once in awhile, I will choose to cook for myself. It is easy – the necessary kitchen equipment is delivered at my door within minutes. Since transport became free, we stopped having all those things stuffed into our home. Why keep a pasta-maker and a crepe cooker crammed into our cupboards? We can just order them when we need them.

This also made the breakthrough of the circular economy easier. When products are turned into services, no one has an interest in things with a short life span. Everything is designed for durability, repairability and recyclability. The materials are flowing more quickly in our economy and can be transformed to new products pretty easily. Environmental problems seem far away, since we only use clean energy and clean production methods. The air is clean, the water is clean and nobody would dare to touch the protected areas of nature because they constitute such value to our well being. In the cities we have plenty of green space and plants and trees all over. I still do not understand why in the past we filled all free spots in the city with concrete.

The death of shopping

Shopping? I can’t really remember what that is. For most of us, it has been turned into choosing things to use. Sometimes I find this fun, and sometimes I just want the algorithm to do it for me. It knows my taste better than I do by now.

When AI and robots took over so much of our work, we suddenly had time to eat well, sleep well and spend time with other people. The concept of rush hour makes no sense anymore, since the work that we do can be done at any time. I don’t really know if I would call it work anymore. It is more like thinking-time, creation-time and development-time.

For a while, everything was turned into entertainment and people did not want to bother themselves with difficult issues. It was only at the last minute that we found out how to use all these new technologies for better purposes than just killing time.

“They live different kinds of lives outside of the city”

My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.

Once in awhile I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.

All in all, it is a good life. Much better than the path we were on, where it became so clear that we could not continue with the same model of growth. We had all these terrible things happening: lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment. We lost way too many people before we realized that we could do things differently.

What President Trump is protecting us from 107

James Delingpole writes at Breitbart:

#WhyAreTheyDoingThis has become a popular hashtag on Twitter for the increasing number of people concerned at the extraordinarily draconian and often scientifically inexplicable policies being adopted by governments the world over to deal with Coronavirus.

The Great Reset may be the answer.

And if it is the answer — and so if so many world leaders are on board — then my view is that there is only one man in the world who can save us from it.

That man is Donald Trump.

It’s why, in my view, this presidential election is probably the most important political event anyone alive will live through.

On the outcome depend our liberty, our prosperity, our civilization.

Also at Breitbart, Delingpole tells us what The Great Reset is:

The Great Reset is not a conspiracy theory. But lots of useful idiots want you to believe that it is.

Here’s an example [from The Spectator (UK)]:

The phrase has shot throughout the fringes of Right-Wing Twitter like a virus through a karaoke bar. According to Pauline Hanson of the Australian party One Nation it is an attempt to establish a ‘socialist left Marxist view of the world’. James Delingpole describes it as a ‘global communist takeover plan’.

You get the idea. Anyone who imagines that the Great Reset is a serious threat belongs on the crackpot fringe. I hear this a lot and it’s a point that needs addressing because if we’re not careful the bastards will get away with it.

Just as the devil’s greatest trick was to persuade the world he didn’t exist, so it suits promoters of the Great Reset for people to believe they’re not serious about their plan — even despite the fact that every last detail is spelled out on the World Economic Forum’s website.

And in its tweets (unless, like me, you’re blocked).

And on the cover of Time magazine.

And in books like the one WEF founder Klaus Schwab published this year titled COVID-19: the Great Reset.

So why, given the weight of evidence, do so many wiseacres think they know better?

The first reason is cowardice — or squeamishness if you prefer. No-one wants to believe that totalitarian rule is just around the corner (as it will be if the Great Reset is allowed to happen) because that’s a scary thought which many people would prefer not to entertain. It’s the equivalent of burying your head underneath the pillow to make the monsters go away — and lots of people do it long after childhood.

In the late ’20s, for example, lots of supposedly intelligent and informed commentators pooh-poohed the notion that the funny little man with the moustache building a power base in Germany presented any kind of genuine threat. Sure he’d spelled out exactly what he planned in a 1925 manifesto called Mein Kampf. But c’mon — those Lederhosen, that hysterical oratory — no way was he going to lead a level-headed, war-chastened people like the Germans into another insane global conflict…

The second reason is tone policing. Tone policing is a game played mostly by the left but which has been unthinkingly copied by the squishier sort of conservative. It’s a way of closing down arguments you disagree with or which make you uncomfortable. Instead of actually addressing the argument itself, you focus on a rhetorical flourish you consider to be overly dramatic or a word you find inapt — and use that to imply that this invalidates your opponent’s case.

So, in the piece mentioned above, the author invokes the word “conspiracy” to imply that the whole notion is a bit tinfoil hat; and the word “communist” in order argue that the Great Reset is actually more of a “capitalist” endeavour — as if somehow these nitpicking debating points suddenly make the Great Reset OK.

But the Great Reset is not OK. It really doesn’t matter whether you want to cast its masterplan — which remember, ultimately includes the abolition of private property — as communist or fascist or technocratic. The much more important point is that it represents a totalitarian takeover by a small, powerful, oppressive, unelected elite which will leave the rest of us impoverished, immiserated, and deprived of our liberty. …

These people and their ideological confreres have been talking about it for decades. Sometimes it comes under the United Nations codename Agenda 21 (or LA 21), which has now been updated as Agenda 2030. Sometimes it comes under the catch-all phrase — at once vague and extremely dangerous — “sustainability”. Sometimes it’s known as the “fourth industrial revolution” (though “deindustrial apocalypse” would be more accurate).

It’s a plan whose blueprint you’ll find embedded everywhere — in local government policy plans, in speeches by prime ministers, at UN conferences like the annual COP events such as the one at Paris whose Paris Accord President Trump sensibly pulled out of because he knows a rat when he smells one

The reason it has become so pressing and urgent and frightening and newsworthy now is simply that the pandemic of 2020 has been seized, Rahm Emmanuel style, as the crisis the globalists won’t let go to waste

And again he writes:

“Build Back Better” is the slogan of the Great Reset and the man who invented it, Klaus Schwab. Schwab is a bald German in his early Eighties with a strong accent and the sinister air of a James Bond villain who in the 1970s founded what is now known as the World Economic Forum. The WEF holds the annual summit at Davos in Switzerland where, it has been said, ‘billionaires go to lecture millionaires on how ordinary people live.’

Up until recently, Davos has probably seemed like a harmless event: a sort of annual joke in which we all get to laugh at the absurd spectacle of the one percent of the one percent turning up in their private jets and their limousines to expound on the importance of sustainability and saving the planet.

But the events of 2020 have changed all that because COVID-19 has provided the perfect pretext for the kind of co-ordinated globalist takeover which might previously have been little more than an evil glint in Klaus Schwab’s eyes.

By Schwab’s own admission, the world must “act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies” — in short, he says, ever industry must “be transformed… we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism”.

In a warning of the rollercoaster of change we can expect if this plan goes ahead, Schwab continues: “The level of cooperation and ambition this implies is unprecedented. But it is not some impossible dream. In fact, one silver lining of the pandemic is that it has shown how quickly we can make radical changes to our lifestyles. Almost instantly, the crisis forced businesses and individuals to abandon practices long claimed to be essential, from frequent air travel to working in an office.”

As the WEF puts it of the coming technocracy that would rule our lives: “Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.” [See the post above, Advertisement for totalitarian communism.]

There is nothing new about the Great Reset. Schwab and his acolytes have been talking about it for years. Chinese Coronavirus – or rather the draconian, liberty-sapping measures taken by governments in order to combat it – has merely accelerated the process.

As I reported in an earlier piece, Schwab has written several books about his masterplan:

His latest, called Covid-19: The Great Reset, makes no bones about the fact that the chaos of the Coronavirus pandemic represents the perfect opportunity to accelerate the entire world towards a “new normal”. …

That’s why Joe Biden used “Build Back Better” as his campaign slogan. It’s why the UK Conservatives feature the website on their Twitter page. And why UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson inserts the phrase into his speeches.

How many of those who, by their own choice, voted for Joe Biden had the least idea of what they were voting for? Perhaps only those who are themselves members of Big Virtue – the billionaires, the princes, the technology giants. And the decision-makers of the Democratic Party – a cabal that may include Pelosi, Schumer, Schiff, Obama, Bannen, Clapper, Sulzberger, Soros. (But almost certainly not Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.)

All free men and women who want to remain free are in debt to James Delingpole for informing us of this. Though what we can do about it remains to be thought.

We would argue with only one thing Delingpole says, not because we think it is wrong, but because we think it is understated.  He says: “This presidential election is probably the most important political event anyone alive will live through.” We would go much further and say that this is the most important presidential election since the Enlightenment freed the Western world from the tyranny of the Roman Catholic Church and inspired the founding of the free American republic.

The case could not be put more succinctly and accurately than Delingpole puts it when he says of this election:

On the outcome depend our liberty, our prosperity, our civilization.

A climate alarmist confesses: we lied 159

The earth is NOT warming dangerously, says the “climate activist” Michael Shellenberger.

Thrilling news – not that the earth is not warming dangerously, which we already knew, but that a former alarmist is admitting that the earth is not warming dangerously.

It is thrilling too that Michael Shellenberger’s confession will no doubt infuriate all climate alarmists everywhere.

Here’s the full text of Michael Shellenberger’s apologetic confession:

The following is the full text of an opinion piece written by climate activist and energy expert Michael Shellenberger which was originally published by Forbes but pulled a few hours laterShellenberger, a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” and Green Book Award Winner, told The Daily Wire in a statement hours after Forbes deactivated the piece, “I am grateful that Forbes has been so committed to publishing a range of viewpoints, including ones that challenge the conventional wisdom, and was thus disappointed my editors removed my piece from the web site. I believe Forbes is an important outlet for broadening environmental journalism beyond the overwhelmingly  alarmist approach taken by most reporters, and look forward to contributing heterodoxical pieces on energy and the environment in the future.” 

***

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.

I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.

But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know:

    • Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”
    • The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”
    • Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
    • Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
    • The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska
    • The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California
    • Carbon emissions have been declining in rich nations including Britain, Germany and France since the mid-seventies
    • Adapting to life below sea level made the Netherlands rich not poor
    • We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter
    • Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change
    • Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
    • Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture

I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism.

In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies.

Some people will, when they read this imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women’s cooperatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.

I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California.

In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them. Over the last few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions.

Until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an “existential” threat to human civilization, and called it a “crisis”.

But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.

I even stood by as people in the White House and many in the news media tried to destroy the reputation and career of an outstanding scientist, good man, and friend of mine, Roger Pielke, Jr., a lifelong progressive Democrat and environmentalist who testified in favor of carbon regulations. Why did they do that? Because his research proves natural disasters aren’t getting worse.

But then, last year, things spiraled out of control.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said “The world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “Climate Change Kills Children.”

The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would “wipe out civilizations”.

Mainstream journalists reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of the world”, and that deforestation was like a nuclear bomb going off.

As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change.

Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened.

I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough. I needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence.

And so my formal apology for our fear-mongering comes in the form of my new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.

It is based on two decades of research and three decades of environmental activism. At 400 pages, with 100 of them endnotes, Apocalypse Never covers climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, species extinction, industrialization, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.

Some highlights from the book:

    • Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress
    • The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land
    • The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium
    • 100% renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5% to 50%
    • We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities
    • Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4%
    • Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did
    • “Free-range” beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300% more emissions
    • Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon
    • The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants

Why were we all so misled?

In the final three chapters of Apocalypse Never I expose the financial, political, and ideological motivations. Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist beliefs forced the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make poverty “sustainable”.  And status anxiety, depression, and hostility to modern civilization are behind much of the alarmism.

Once you realize just how badly misinformed we have been, often by people with plainly unsavory or unhealthy motivations, it is hard not to feel duped.

Will Apocalypse Never make any difference? There are certainly reasons to doubt it.

The news media have been making apocalyptic pronouncements about climate change since the late 1980s, and do not seem disposed to stop.

The ideology behind environmental alarmism — Malthusianism — has been repeatedly debunked for 200 years and yet is more powerful than ever.

But there are also reasons to believe that environmental alarmism will, if not come to an end, have diminishing cultural power.

The coronavirus pandemic is an actual crisis that puts the climate “crisis” into perspective. Even if you think we have overreacted, Covid-19 has killed nearly 500,000 people and shattered economies around the globe.

Scientific institutions including WHO and IPCC have undermined their credibility through the repeated politicization of science. Their future existence and relevance depends on new leadership and serious reform.

Facts still matter, and social media is allowing for a wider range of new and independent voices to outcompete alarmist environmental journalists at legacy publications.

Nations are reorienting toward the national interest and away from Malthusianism and neoliberalism, which is good for nuclear and bad for renewables.

The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilization is better for people and nature than the low-energy civilization that climate alarmists would return us to.

And the invitations I received from IPCC and Congress late last year, after I published a series of criticisms of climate alarmism, are signs of a growing openness to new thinking about climate change and the environment.

Another sign is the response to my book from climate scientists, conservationists, and environmental scholars. “Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book,” writes Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. “This may be the most important book on the environment ever written,” says one of the fathers of modern climate science Tom Wigley.

“We environmentalists condemn those with antithetical views of being ignorant of science and susceptible to confirmation bias,” wrote the former head of The Nature Conservancy, Steve McCormick. “But too often we are guilty of the same. Shellenberger offers ‘tough love’: a challenge to entrenched orthodoxies and rigid, self-defeating mindsets. Apocalypse Never serves up occasionally stinging, but always well-crafted, evidence-based points of view that will help develop the ‘mental muscle’ we need to envision and design not only a hopeful, but an attainable, future.”

That is all I that I had hoped for in writing it. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll agree that it’s perhaps not as strange as it seems that a lifelong environmentalist, progressive, and climate activist felt the need to speak out against the alarmism.

I further hope that you’ll accept my apology.

No, Michael Shellenberger, happy though we are to have your confession, we do not accept your apology. We will not forgive you. But we might if you confess that all the rest of your Leftist views are also wrong.

Two American nations 20

Millions who want to live in freedom with limited government cannot compromise with millions of big-government collectivists.

Those to whom an individual’s race is of no consequence cannot endure race quotas (euphemized now as “diversity”).

Those who want secure borders cannot share territory with those who want “open” borders (effectively no borders at all).

Those who want impartial justice and equality under the law cannot co-exist with those who want judicial discrimination on grounds of race, class, sex, or history.

Those who know that only free market capitalism makes for prosperity and wish to pursue their own economic goals unhampered by regulation will not tolerate “redistribution” of wealth,  whether by means of high taxation, state-run health care, nationalization of industries or any other government-imposed impoverishing devices on which collectivists insist.

Those who know that slight changes in climate will not endanger human life cannot endure being bludgeoned by global warming mythologists into accepting a poorer way of life “to save the planet”.

Those who want one (hospitable and expanding) culture with one official language, cannot accept multiculturalism and multilingualism being imposed on them by the others.

These are two different nations.

There is nothing to be gained for either of them by alternating administrations, each undoing what the other has done – a fruitless, weakening, wasteful procedure.

Two incompatible nations are sharing one country. Territorial division is not possible.

What can be done?

Posted under America, Climate, Collectivism, Economics, Law, liberty, nationalism, Race, Socialism, tyranny, United States by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, June 2, 2020

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Progress to extinction continued 115

We ended the post immediately below with this: 

It is not only “hard to imagine where universities go after peak progressivism”, or where the networks can “go after that”; it is impossible to see a destination for the Left itself, in America or anywhere else in the world.

Except to extinction.

Seems there is at least a section of Left opinion in academia, among the climate alarmists, that sets extinction as its goal; not just the extinction of the Left itself, and certainly not the extinction of the planet, but the total extinction of the human race.

Breitbart reports:

Giving birth to a child is “the worst thing you can do” to the climate, says philosophy professor Patricia MacCormack of Anglia Ruskin University.

The professor, author of The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene who describes herself as an “old school goth,” says that the only way to save the planet is to stop having children and allow humans to become extinct. …

Due to global overpopulation, giving birth is the worst thing you can do to the planet, MacCormack [maintains], while insisting that she is not advocating wiping out the existing population but rather letting it die off.

“Far from advocating mass death, genocide or eugenics, my manifesto is antinatalist,” says MacCormack. “It boycotts human reproduction due to the damage humans have perpetrated on the Earth and its other inhabitants.”

“The manifesto simply asks that humans no longer reproduce – no life is lost, no being is mourned,” she states. “If we no longer reproduce, we can care for all inhabitants already here, human and non-human, as well as care for the Earth itself by mitigating the damage already caused. It’s an activism of care.”

Care for all those other inhabitants? They need us for that? Are you sure, Madam Professor? I mean – in that case, won’t they miss us when we’re gone?

A native Australian, MacCormack says her opinions have been manipulated and misunderstood.

“I simply propose people not reproduce, and it automatically translated into acts of violence,” she has said.

“So, somehow, I want to kill children, which is ridiculous. Somehow, I’m proposing eugenics or some kind of ethnic population control,” she declares, “and I think that what that shows is there is an anthropocentric — or a human — impulse to read acts of grace as, automatically, acts of violence.” …

So she visualizes the human species going very gently into obliteration.

Along with her opinions regarding the human population, MacCormack advocates overcoming “human privilege” through what she calls “abolitionist veganism,” or the notion that no sentient being should be treated as property of another.

Her prescription for stopping lions, tigers, crocodiles, snakes, eagles, bears, wolves, sharks treating their prey as their property to kill and eat, is not reported.

According to MacCormack, her manifesto “questions the value of human exceptionalism, asking are humans really the ‘best’ forms of life, or should we dismantle our understanding of life as a hierarchy for a more ecological, interconnected scheme of living things?”

In no way are we human beings superior to any other form of life! What arrogance to suppose we are!

Among other climate action groups, MacCormack says that those like the protest group Extinction Rebellion have the right idea but are not going far enough.

“Even Extinction Rebellion only focus on the effect this will have on human life, when climate change is something that will affect every living being on the planet,” she states.

Anglia Ruskin University holds up MacCormack’s ideas on climate, but also underscores her expertise in feminism, queer theory, posthuman ethics, animal studies, and horror films.

Posthuman ethics.

Now there’s something to think about – while there’s anybody left to think at all.

Feminist Witch/University Professor Patricia MacCormack

Posted under Climate, Demography, education, Environmentalism, Feminism, genocide, Leftism, Philosophy, Progressivism by Jillian Becker on Wednesday, February 19, 2020

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Revolution? 176

Is America in the throes of a revolution? Are we sliding unstoppably into totalitarian communism?

Angelo Codevilla writes at American Greatness:

Some conservatives, rejoicing that impeachment turned into yet another of #TheResistance’s political train wrecks and that President Trump is likely to be reelected by a bigger margin than in 2016, expect that a chastened ruling class will return to respecting the rest of us. They are mistaken.

Trump’s reelection, by itself, cannot protect us. The ruling class’s intolerance of the 2016 election’s results was intolerance of us.

Nor was their intolerance so much a choice as it was the expression of its growing sense of its own separate identity, of power and of entitlement to power. The halfhearted defenses with which the offensives of the ruling class have been met already advertise the fact that it need not and will not accept the outcome of any presidential election it does not win. Trump notwithstanding, this class will rule henceforth as it has in the past three years. So long as its hold on American institutions continues to grow, and they retain millions of clients, elections won’t really matter.

Our country is in a state of revolution, irreversibly, because society’s most influential people have retreated into moral autarchy, …

Autarchy, or autocracy, is rule by a dictator. Has any Democrat proclaimed a desire for a dictator, or to be a dictator? If so, we missed it. The Democrats want absolute power in their own hands, but have’t yet wished up a Stalin or a Mao. It’s highly likely that Bernie Sanders would like to be an American Stalin, but has he admitted it?

Besides which, there is not a single Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States who could run a poll in Iowa, let alone the country. 

Moral autarchy? Not sure what that means. But okay, let’s accept the term in order to follow the writer’s argument.

… have seceded from America’s constitutional order, and because they browbeat their socio-political adversaries instead of trying to persuade them. Theirs is not a choice that can be reversed. It is a change in the character of millions of people.

Does character change? Does the character of a people – a nation – change? What characterizes any nation must by definition be what does not change about it. For a country to change its character it would have to have its population replaced by a different population – as is happening rapidly in Sweden, France, Spain, and Germany.  The Democrats seem to like the idea of America becoming more “Hispanic” than “Anglo”, but it hasn’t happened yet, and might never happen.

There has been a change in America over the last 70 years or so. It is not a change of character. In all their variety, Americans are recognizably the same as they were 100 years ago. What has changed in America are ideas about values and morals, about what matters and what doesn’t.

And that is what the article under discussion is really about.

The sooner conservatives realize that the Republic established between 1776 and 1789—the America we knew and loved—cannot return, the more fruitfully we will be able to manage the revolution’s clear and present challenges to ourselves. How are we to deal with a ruling class that insists on ruling—elections and generally applicable rules notwithstanding—because it regards us as lesser beings?

The resistance that reached its public peaks in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and the impeachment imbroglio should have left no doubt about the socio-political arbitrariness that flows from the ruling class’s moral autarchy, about the socio-political power of the ruling class we’re forced to confront, or of its immediate threat to our freedom of speech.

Chief Justice John Roberts, presiding over the Senate’s impeachment trial, was as clear an example as any of that moral autarchy and its grip on institutions.

Pursuant to Senate rules, Senator Rand Paul sent a written question through Roberts to House Manager Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) regarding the extent of collaboration between Schiff’s staffer Sean Misko and his longtime fellow partisan, CIA officer Eric Ciaramella in starting the charges that led to impeachment. Roberts, having read the question to himself, declared: “The presiding officer declines to read the question as submitted.”

The chief justice of the United States, freedom of speech’s guardian-in-chief, gave no reason for declining to read Paul’s question. The question was relevant to the proceedings. It violated no laws, no regulations. The names of the two persons were known to every member of the House and Senate, as well as to everyone around the globe who had followed news reports over the previous months. But the Democratic Party had been campaigning to drive from public discussion that this impeachment stemmed from the partisan collaboration between a CIA officer and a Democratic staffer.

“Collaboration” is the polite term for it; “conspiracy” the more accurate one.

Accordingly, the mainstream media had informally but totally banned discussion of this fact, supremely relevant but supremely embarrassing to Schiff in particular and to Democrats in general. Now, Paul was asking Schiff officially to comment on the relationship. Schiff could have explained it, or refused to explain it. But Roberts saved him the embarrassment and trouble—and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) spared senators the problem of voting on a challenge to Roberts’s  ruling. The curtain of official concealment, what the Mafia calls the omertà, remained intact. Why no reason?

Just as no dog wags his tail without a reason, neither did Roberts wag his without reason. Neither the laws of the United States nor the rules of the Senate told the presiding officer to suppress the senator’s question. Why was Roberts pleased to please those he pleased and to displease those he displeased? In short, why did this impartial presiding officer act as a man partial to one side against the other?

This professional judge could hardly have been impressed by the ruling class’s chosen instrument, Adam Schiff, or by Schiff’s superior regard for legal procedure. Since Schiff’s prosecution featured hiding the identity of the original accuser—after promising to feature his testimony—and since it featured secret depositions, blocked any cross-examination of its own witnesses, and prevented the defense from calling any of their own, it would have been strange if Chief Justice Roberts’s bias was a professional one.

Is it possible that Roberts favored the substance of the ruling class claim that neither President Trump nor any of his defenders have any right to focus public attention on the Biden family’s use of public office to obtain money in exchange for influence? That, after all, is what Washington is largely about. Could Roberts also love corruption so much as to help conceal it? No.

Roberts’s professional and ethical instincts incline him the other way. Nevertheless, he sustained the ruling class’s arbitrariness. Whose side did he take? His dinner companions’ side? The media’s? His wife’s? Roberts’s behavior—contrary as it was to his profession, to his morals, and to his political provenance—shows how great is the ruling class’s centripetal force.

The sad but inescapable consequence of this force is that conservatives have no choice but to follow the partisan logic of revolution—fully conscious of the danger that partisanship can make us as ridiculously dishonest as Adam Schiff or CNN’s talking heads, into rank-pullers like John Roberts, and into profiteers as much as any member of the Biden family.

Do conservatives have no choice but to go along with “the revolution”, with the abandonment of the values that inspired the Constitution, with corruption as a matter of indisputable but unchangeable fact?

The writer then seems to change his mind. He suggests there is a choice:

And yet, revolution is war, the proximate objective of which is to hurt the other side until it loses the capacity and the will to do us harm. That means treating institutions and people from the standpoint of our own adversarial interest: controlling what we can either for our own use or for bargaining purposes, discrediting and abandoning what we cannot take from our enemies.

Opposing them by the means they choose, the weapons they use? That – so the writer suggests – is our best recourse?

Unlike our enemies, our ultimate objective is, as Lincoln said, “peace among ourselves and with all nations”. But what kind of peace we may get depends on the extent to which we may compel our enemies to leave us in peace. And for that, we must do unto them more and before they do unto us.

Which is true? Do we have no choice but to join “the revolution” – a change from a free open society of self-reliant individuals into a government-controlled, race and sex obsessed, doom prophesying, totally organized community? Or are we still in control of our destiny? And if we fight our revolutionary enemy, must it be with their weapons, or ours? On their terms, or ours?

We do not see that there has been a revolution – though the Obama administration tried to make one. We do not think the only way to save America from totalitarian one-party rule is by following the rules laid down by the Gramsci-Alinsky school of sedition and the Cloward-Piven blueprint for chaos. (See here and here and here and here.)

By great good luck we have President Trump leading us in another direction, showing us another way, prioritizing better (characteristic) values: freedom, individual enterprise, innovation, industry, competence, patriotism, strength, ambition, self-confidence, prosperity. For a few more years at least. During which the Left revolutionaries may, in the fury of their frustration, stamp themselves into the ground.

Earth’s savior wears Antifa 87

Keean Bexte of Rebel News travels to Stockholm to investigate Greta Thunberg.

https://youtu.be/TTXdhTwO320 

“In 2019, Greta Thunberg [wearing an Antifa T-shirt] contributed a voiceover for a release of “The 1975”, a song by the English band of the same name. She finishes by urging: ‘So, everyone out there, it is now time for civil disobedience. It is time to rebel.’ Proceeds will go to Extinction Rebellion at Thunberg’s request.” – Wikipedia.

In the video, Swedish journalist Annike Rothstein talks about Greta Thunberg’s connection to Extinction Rebellion, and a picture of her wearing the Antifa shirt is shown, between 12 and 13.40 minutes.

Related image

An Extinction Rebellion climate alarm demonstration in London

Posted under Climate, Environmentalism, Leftism, Sweden by Jillian Becker on Friday, January 24, 2020

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