Category Archives: Culture

Net Zero Will Lead to the End of Modern Civilisation, Says Top Scientist

Article in The Daily Sceptic.

Excerpt:

In Manheimer’s view, the partnership among self-interested businesses, grandstanding politicians and alarmist campaigners, “truly is an unholy alliance”. The climate industrial complex does not promote discussion on how to overcome this challenge in a way that will be best for everyone. “We should not be surprised or impressed that those who stand to make a profit are among the loudest calling for politicians to act,” he added.

Perhaps one of the best voices to cast doubt on an approaching climate crisis, suggests the author, is Professor Emeritus Richard Lindzen of MIT, one of the world’s leading authorities on geological fluid motions:

What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that CO2 from human industry was a dangerous planet-destroying toxin. It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world – that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison.

Paul Johnson, 1928 – 2023

The journalist and 'amateur' historian was a 'true giant', writes Tom Woods

Only a couple of weeks ago I finished reading Paul Johnson‘s monumental book “Modern Times“, on the history of post-WW1 20th century. A true eye-opener. Tom Woods recommended it to his readers about two years ago. Gary North does the same at the end of his last book, “Biblical Historiography”. Johnson died yesterday.

Writes Tom Woods:

What an odd and most unfortunate coincidence.

Just yesterday I wrote to you about the academic snobs who look down on amateur historians who dare to write works of history without being “trained.”

And trust me, as someone who would know: the difference in “training” between a university-educated historian and you is precisely zero. You are capable of reading, and being discriminating with sources, just as much as any of them are, and there are no secret “techniques” they teach us that separate us from you.

But on to the coincidence: today we lost a great historian, Paul Johnson, whose books taught me so much, and who, while not always right, understood the central drama of the age.

Johnson, who was 94, would be considered an “amateur” historian.

But unlike so many of our official historians, Johnson challenged sacred cows, was enormously prolific, and wrote in a way that kept you engaged rather than putting you to sleep.

In the 1970s Johnson had an ideological conversion away from the left, and he stayed converted for the rest of his life.

My favorite of his many published works is Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Eighties (since expanded into a larger edition that includes the nineties, but in that section you have to endure Johnson’s disappointing and misplaced foreign-policy views).

I’ve told the story before, but I found out about this book as a college freshman, when a fellow student, sensing a kindred spirit, urged me to read it. I would discover, he said, that the historians’ heroes were generally creeps. I was not disappointed.

Another great one, and a book hated by all the right people, is Intellectuals. There Johnson examined some of the key thinkers of our time, who had a habit of devising, from their armchairs, grandiose plans for the human race that could be implemented only by violence. (Not to mention, most of these people turn out to have been scumbags in their personal lives, as Johnson amply documents.)

Johnson was also an artist and art aficionado, and his Art: A New History is a massive volume filled with the kind of surprising and controversial judgments we find in the rest of his works.

Any of these three books will fascinate you. They’re brimming with anecdotes and quotations you’ve never heard, idiosyncratic tangents you’ll consistently enjoy, and fearless dissent from the standard narrative.

Paul Johnson, requiescat in pace.

What Does the Science Say?

On climate change. And why it is so corrupted.

Jordan Peterson talks with Dr. Richard Lindzen.

This interview with Michael Crichton is also interesting. (There’s no date to it but from what he says I guess it was done in 2007. He died in November 2008.) Crichton makes the point that from all his research on the matter, looking into scientific papers etc., he can surmise that CO2 is likely causing some warming, but not catastrophically so. Nevertheless, we should be reducing our CO2 output. However, he emphasises: This is happening anyway and will continue happening as technology progresses. Trying to crowbar and accelerate this process with government force is unlikely to improve things and likely to cause huge amounts of harm elsewhere.

Shocking Lab Investigation of Covid Vaccines

The real science is catching up with corrupt scientists, evil officials and naïve clergy

Dr. Mercola writes:

December 12, 2022, The Highwire posted a fascinating and shocking lab investigation of the COVID shots. Del Bigtree begins by reviewing some of the many alleged findings by organizations looking at the shots using various technologies.

Continue reading here.

Also, watch the 1 hour video at the top of the linked page. It is posted on Bitchute here as well.

At the 11:50 minute mark, the interviewed medical scientist, Dr. Ryan Cole, states: “Real science should always involve humility and the willingness to say: ‘It’s not about my ego, it’s about the issue and we’re trying to get to the best scientific truth we can with the methods we have now.'”

Contrast that with the infamous statement by the hugely (worldwide) influential and powerful US (now ex-)chief medical advisor to the president Dr. Anthony Fauci who said in an interview, when asked about people critical of his Covid policies: “I represent science”. In other words: “La science, c’est moi.”

Fauci was one of the many scientists on government payrolls around the world who kept repeating the “safe and effective” mantra about the still only experimental injections against Covid. Dr. Ryan Cole was never one of them.

I know who I trust more.

Contrast that also with the statement of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who, on 21st December 2021, said, without knowing the science:

“It’s not about me and my rights to choose, it’s about how I love my neighbour. Vaccination reduces my chances — doesn’t eliminate — but it reduces my chances of getting ill and reducing my chances of getting ill, reduces my chances of infecting others,” Welby told ITV news on Tuesday evening.

“It’s very simple, so I would say yes, to love one another as Jesus said, get vaccinated, get boosted,” he added.

Welby needs to repent.

For vaccine-hesitant people, it was never about “my right to choose”, at least not primarily. It was primarily about trust. How can one trust scientists in the pay of government, when same scientists propagate a policy that gives governments what they have craved down the ages: More power for themselves. They might be right in this case, but, because there are massive conflicts of interests involved, the circumstances demanded more proof than was available or provided.

The same vaccine-hesitant people observed how real debate and discussion about the safety and efficacy of the Covid injections was massively suppressed by the media. This behaviour raised suspicions. That is something the Archbishop has not addressed.

Ever since the beginning of Christianity, Christian clergy were the most important people standing between governments and their access to total, tyrannical worldly power in the style of Ancient Egypt or Rome. For they understood the dangers of worldly power. They understood the ungodly path any worldly power is in danger of treading. Worldly power is one of the three things Satan attempted to tempt Christ with in the desert. However, most of the clergy don’t even seem to know that any more. Worse: Even if they did, it seems most of them wouldn’t care anymore.

It’s one reason among many why Christianity is ripe for a complete reconstruction. Even more so now that, as the blogger Eugyppius writes, the “pre-pandemic world is gone forever“:

Mass containment has permanently transformed our societies and our cultures. It has cemented the cooperative relationship between the regime and the press, and it has changed the content and the tenor of our media. Drama and panic have always sold newspapers, but our new era is characterised by an unending self-reinforcing cyclone of hyperventilation journalism, the likes of which we’ve never seen before. For the foreseeable future, I think, we will careen from one crisis to the next.

The pandemic has also changed politics. We have all learned that our alleged liberal rights and freedoms are quaint fictions, which will evaporate in the face of any false emergency. This is one reason that the unceasing hysteria of the press is so ominous, for it represents a continual attempt to restore those extraordinary conditions in which the managers wield absolute power. Under the pretense of emergency, everything is permitted. The government can seal you inside your home, forbid you from seeing friends, and outlaw all protest. It can banish all criticism from the media, and with a bit more hyperventilation, it can probably even force-medicate you. In the pre-2020 world, of course, our governments could do all of these things as well. What is different now, is merely that many more people know that they can, and approve nevertheless.

P.S.: If you have read the above links, or have watched the video, and you have received one or more injection against Covid, you may be starting to worry. If so, please go to the bottom of the page of the Mercola text linked here and above and read the section titled “What to Do if You Got the Jab”. Of course, not being a medical expert myself, I cannot recommend any of the advice there personally. As stated before, it’s all a matter of trust.

Pope Benedict vs the calculating elites

O'Neill defends the late Pontiff

In this interesting obituary of (ex-)Pope Benedict XVI, Brendan O’Neill, a self-proclaimed atheist, castigates “preening macho rationalists of the New Atheist set”, who, as humanists, were, according to O’Neill, more anti-enlightenment than the Pope himself:

There was also a profound irony in this Benedict-bashing spectacle. Because this man they loved to hate, ‘Pope Ratzinger’, as they demeaned him, was a far keener defender of reason than they were. He was a more rigorous student of Enlightenment, too. And he did more than they ever will to challenge the real menace to truth in the 21st century – not religion but the ‘dictatorship of relativism’, as Benedict called it. There was more humanism in Benedict’s brave, often lonely battle against today’s tyranny of nothingness than there is in the New Atheists’ snotty rage against religion.

The obituarist gets to the point:

In short, absent any notion of universal truth, devoid of social standards we might define ourselves by (or against), we’re left with just the individual, playing around in his own prison of identity.

[…]

Indeed, Benedict held that Christianity was a ‘religion according to reason’. He argued, rightly, that the Enlightenment sprung from the traditions and tensions within Christianity itself – ‘the Enlightenment is of Christian origin’, he said. One of his most striking utterances was to say that the Enlightenment had ‘given back reason its own voice’. That is, it took ideas of reason from Christianity and expressed those ideas in the voice of reason alone. 

O’Neill hints at the fundamental problem the enlightenment has, without discussing it:

Benedict’s beef was not with reason, then, as his ill-read critics would have us believe, but with what he referred to as ‘purely functional rationality’. Or scientism, as others call it: the modern creed of evidence-based politics that judges everything by experiment rather than morality.

Here’s the fundamental problem: Without morality, rationality will become ‘scientism’, the consequences of which we were able to observe since WWI in the liberal use of weapons of mass destruction, genocides and lately the Covid tyranny, environmental tyranny and other attempts at building a Tower of Babel 2.0.

O’Neill is right to defend the late Pope against the “New Atheist” set, but he does not touch the question that begs: How do we arrive at morality, without God? Rationality alone doesn’t seem to suffice.

Radical Leftist Turned Conservative Activist

Jordan Peterson talks with Amala Ekpunobi

Video here.

At one point, JP says something like: “I was capitalising on my intelligence. Until I realised that being prideful in that manner means participating in a process that leads to totalitarian atrocities.”

Contents:

Dr Jordan B Peterson and Amala Ekpunobi discuss her early life being raised in a far left household, the instances that caused her to question the all-encompassing ideology she had been fed, and her rise to providence as an internet and podcast personality, advocating for the truth across party lines.

Raised in a far-left activist household, twenty-two-year-old Amala Ekpunobi was once a student organizer for the left. Unanswered questions–and a search for the truth–led her to a complete ideological transformation. Passionately sharing her new conservative values online, Amala became a viral social media sensation. Now the host of PragerU’s popular show “Unapologetic with Amala,” she inspires millions of young people every day to discover the truth, defend their values, and lead better lives.

Birmingham City Council believes in the power of even silent prayer, apparently

And they don't like it, apparently

I wonder what the A of C or the C of E have to say about this. Nothing, as far as I can see. At least, not yet. And I’m not holding my breath.

Excerpts:

Earlier this month, Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was standing silently in a public street. She was doing, saying and displaying absolutely nothing, apparently lost in thought. A policeman approached her. He asked if she was inwardly praying. When she said she might have been, he immediately arrested her, took her to a police station and searched her. Last week, Vaughan-Spruce was told she faces prosecution.

Whatever your view on abortion, even if you are strongly pro-choice, this whole episode should worry you immensely. The implications for personal liberty are terrifying. If an arrest for silent prayer is not an instance of Orwellian ‘thoughtcrime’, then I don’t know what is.

This whole affair highlights how our leaders are becoming increasingly authoritarian. Their rules and restrictions on what we can say or think are casting an ever wider net. Concerns for individual freedom are frequently sidelined.

The World is Not Ending

Jordan Peterson discusses with Bjorn Lomborg how to make the world a better place

Fitting perhaps for this time of year (Christmas) is this discussion between psychologist Jordan Peterson and statistician Bjorn Lomborg.

Here‘s the beginning of a 5-minute summary, mainly by JP, of the whole previous discussion.

Here are some snippets of ideas from this conversation:

Making climate change the only problem to focus on, and making it look apocalyptic, drives us to make poor decisions in this regard.

Enticing young people to stick themselves to roads and chucking food at beautiful pictures [signs of infantilization and narcissism] makes them believe they are messianic saviours of the world and provides them with feelings of unearned moral virtue.

They are made to believe that they are heroes defending the benevolent virginal earth from rapacious patriarchal human culture.

While there is some truth in that view, psychologically it’s only half the story. On the feminine side, there is also a negative aspect: the rapacious, overprotective mother. And on the masculine side there is a positive aspect: the provider and explorer.

Lomborg stresses that there are many solutions for many problems available, technology has provided us with them.

Peterson stresses the importance of free speech to the finding and implementation of solutions to problems. He quotes Alfred North Whitehead: “The reason humans think is so that our ideas can die instead of us.”

One of the ideas being implemented, reports Lomborg, is self-learning programs in cheap tablets given to children in the developing world, e.g. Malawi.

Another is giving nutritional supplements to pregnant women, to prevent the babies from being stunted and enabling them to develop their full potential.

It’s only in the last century or so that we have learnt to love nature. Before we mostly feared it, for it was likely to kill us. A richer humanity will feel better protected from the dangerous aspects of nature and will be much more willing to protect the environment.