Green Myths and Hard Realities: Sri Lanka as a Warning

What you get when you mindlessly hand over power to distant technocrats

Article by Joseph Solis-Mullen.

Excerpts:

With Sri Lanka’s short-lived green revolution of 2021 having quickly devolved into a real revolution just one year later, complete with the ouster of former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s incompetent and authoritarian government this past week, now is a good time to hammer home not only why the effort failed, but why so-called ESG (environmental, social, and governance) policies and the green energy movement more generally are hopeless and destructive wastes of time.

That modern life is totally reliant on carbon-emitting fossil fuels is no reason to lose one’s head. And even though human-caused climate change is a virtual certainty, that is no reason to mindlessly hand over power to distant technocrats who promise to fix anything if only given the authority to engage in their dubious to morally outrageous social-engineering projects. Nor is it any reason to plow money into so-called ESG funds, which are thinly veiled shams, featuring virtually the same equities as most general S&P index funds but with substantially higher fees.

[…]

Demand reliably produces supply. Already many entrepreneurs and corporations are pioneering devices that will help to mitigate or even reverse the effects of climate change. Things may get worse before they get better. I don’t know what the future holds, and neither does anyone else. Respecting the limitations of knowledge and of the human ability to control things is central to allowing free exchange, the foundation of the capitalism that has made us all richer and better off than we would otherwise have been. The alternative is looking like Sri Lanka.

Meghan Markle and the aristocracy of victimhood

How Meghan became the Princess of Postmodernism.

Article by Brendan O’Neill, in which he reviews Tom Bower’s new book, Revenge: Meghan, Harry and the War Between the Windsors.

Excerpts:

Isn’t it striking that the Trump administration was continually slammed by liberals for its promotion of ‘alternative facts’, whereas Meghan is loved by liberals despite also seeming to deal in ‘alternative facts’? The Trumpite Orwellian category of ‘alternative facts’ really means pushing ‘claims that do not conform to objective reality’, raged USA Today. ‘Traditionally known as false or misleading claims; also, lies’, it continued. Does that apply to the Duchess of Sussex, too? Are her claims about being an only child and getting married three days before she actually got married also ‘alternative facts’, false claims, misinformation?

[…]

This is not to say Meghan Markle is a liar. It is more complicated than that, and in a sense more sinister. She appears to be a product of the end of truth. She seems symbolic of a postmodern culture in which self-definition now takes precedence over objective reality. In which our narcissistic description of ourselves carries more weight than any anchored, measurable facts about ourselves. In which one can ‘identify’ as anything one chooses, however estranged your identification might be from material reality. A man can be a woman, despite having a penis, and Meghan Markle can be an only child, despite having siblings. That’s their truth, man.

[…]

Together Meghan and Harry have become globe-trotting moral reprimanders, with often unwittingly hilarious results. Meghan guest-edited Vogue, using it as a pulpit to preach about the evils of climate change. Yet she takes private jets the way the rest of us order Ubers, says Bower. Harry flew in a private jet to a Google camp in Sicily to speak about climate change. ‘His plane was just one of the 114 private jets, as well as a fleet of super yachts, that had ferried billionaires and celebrities to the festival.’ Later, at a press conference in Amsterdam to promote an eco-travel campaign (!), Harry is outraged when a journalist asks him about his private jet-setting. Ninety-nine per cent of my flights are commercial, he says. Actually, at least 60 per cent of your flights are private, he is informed. ‘No one is perfect’, he replies. A few days later the pair flew by private jet to attend the wedding of a close friend who was getting hitched to the son of an oil billionaire.

[…]

We may never know all the facts about some of these stories. But we should bear in mind a point Bower makes well – that in the woke ‘religion’ of Hollywood celebrities, ‘the concept of “universal truth” [is] false’. Indeed, Meghan herself has said that ‘life is about storytelling, about the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we’re told, what we buy into’. We all have the right to ‘create our own truth about the world’, she says. Behold the Princess of Postmodernism, for whom truth is whatever she says it is. I am the Truth – the final rallying cry of the narcissistic new aristocracy.

“The successful reliance on voluntary activity”

What collectivism is destroying

In his “The Road to Serfdom”, the Austrian economist Friedrich August von Hayek (1899 – 1992) described the many virtues that the burgeoning collectivism was destroying:

“There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought. It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, non-interference with one’s neighbour and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.”

What he doesn’t mention is that it was mainly churches that carried the voluntary activities.

Our woke civil service is frustrating democracy

A "regime of managers" is taking hold

In 1941, an American author called James Burnham wrote a very perceptive book called “The Managerial Revolution”. Basically, he said that “regime of managers” was taking over the world. Meaning, in government, civil servants and, in business, the managers in the classical sense.

They were taking away power from the politicians (the representatives of the people) and from the business owners.

The result is a self-centred short-termism. This is on full display in the examples described by Ian Acheson here. He mentions the scandal of the Tavistock Centre for gender-identity services.

During her time as equalities minister, Badenoch was assured by senior officials that everything was just fine at the clinic and that there was more than a hint of ‘transphobia’ in the many concerning reports that were leaking out. She writes that she was advised ‘repeatedly’ that meeting Keira Bell, one of the victims of this state-funded ideology, would be ‘inappropriate’.

This is a familiar theme from my years as a senior government official. Civil servants will sometimes do everything possible to stop or at least slow the designs of the elected politicians who are supposed to be running their departments.

[…]

This Whitehall groupthink will be a problem for the new administration when we get our next prime minister. Many senior public-sector leaders now take their instructions on policy from internal networks of activists. This is not endemic, but it is entrenched. Myriad publicly funded pressure groups, like Stonewall, are now a part of the policymaking machine. But even the current government’s efforts to divest from them will not be enough. Officials that don’t agree are still held in thrall to these groups through fear of career-cancelling allegations of anything ending in ‘phobia’.

Fmr. Greenpeace President Dr. Patrick Moore Says the Elites Have a ‘Suicide Pact’ to Reduce the World’s Population

He's "right on the money"

5 minute video here. He says the politicians give money via bureaucrats to the scientists. The scientists then tell the politicians what they (the politicians) want to hear.

Moore says he grew up in a logging/fishing community, so he knows that we have to extract stuff from nature to survive. However, Greenpeace now considers humans as an evil species.

It is this anti-human and anti-biblical attitude that Christians should be contending without compromise.

Apocalypse from now on?

How the climate of fear turned a heatwave into a catastrophe.

Article by Tim Black.

Excerpts:

Take the rising temperatures in Britain over the past two decades, which culminated in a record 40 degree Celsius at Coningsby in Lincolnshire. It is undoubtedly true that all of the UK’s 10 warmest years on record have happened in the past 20 years. But what is striking is that during this period there has been no accompanying increase in the kind of fires we saw in Wennington – even in Greater London, which is the hottest, most populous area in the UK.

Quite the opposite. As the Spectator notes, between 1966 and 2008 there were more than 30,000 fires in Greater London, peaking in 1976 when there were nearly 64,000 fires. Since 2008, the number of fires recorded in London has fallen dramatically, with just 15,000 in 2021.

Even grass fires, which one would expect to be on the rise given the hotter, drier climate of the past two decades, have actually been in decline in Greater London. As the London Fire Brigade puts it, the number of grass fires in Greater London is ‘significantly lower [today] than a decade ago’. Indeed, grass fires peaked in 2003 and have fallen 83 per cent since then. Which is hardly a sign that we are heading towards a future of annual wildfires and burnt-out houses.

[…]

This contrast between the catastrophising of our cultural and political elites and a rather more mundane reality is borne out globally. We hear constantly about ‘extreme’ weather events. We hear endless talk of the rise in natural disasters caused by manmade climate change. Our house is on fire, says Greta Thunberg relentlessly. It certainly feels as if the world has entered a period of ever-more dangerous natural instability.

Yet the statistics tell a very different story. As Michael Shellenberger noted in his 2020 book Apocalypse Never, there has been ‘a 92 per cent decline in the decadal death toll from natural disasters since its peak in the 1920s’. Back then, 5.4million people died from natural disasters. In the 2010s, just 400,000 did.

[…]

Sontag’s analysis of the apocalyptic imagination, which she witnessed emerge during her own lifetime, is as invaluable now as it was then. She didn’t dismiss or ‘deny’ the facts from which the apocalyptic visions drew their dark inspiration. AIDS really was a terrible disease. Heavy industry really could cause instances of environmental degradation. And no doubt the climate could be warming.

What she critiqued was the apocalyptic extrapolation. This means that any challenge or problem we face, when refracted through the apocalyptic imagination, is presented in terms of the catastrophe to come. Every scientifically observable change in nature is, via ever more sophisticated modelling, transformed into a future end-of-days event. This is less a scientific procedure than a creative, metaphorical one, transforming one thing into something else. As she put it: ‘Every process is a prospect, and invites a prediction bolstered by statistics. Say: the number now… in three years, in five years, in 10 years; and, of course, at the end of the century. Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.’

[…]

Think of anti-pollution measures introduced in Western societies over the past couple of centuries. Excessive smoke and smog wasn’t in the past treated as a symbol for something else – as a warning sign or punishment or the occasion for a Just Stop Burning Things protest. It was simply treated as a practical problem to be solved. Which it was.

So it is with a potentially warmer climate. Whatever problems it throws up, there is a sober, resilient approach we can take. This is no easy task, of course. It requires us, as societies, to re-orient ourselves in relation to the future, and also in relation to the past. It requires recovering and revitalising the Enlightenment ideals we have repudiated, too often in the name of environmentalism. Only by re-embracing reason, science and progress will we have the wherewithal to face the uncertainty of the future with a degree of confidence. Perhaps then we can finally stop catastrophising about climate change and start treating it as a challenge we can overcome.

Waking Up in a Nightmare

Due to our loss of a connection to God

Article by Todd Hayen

Excerpts (my emphases):

This topic is complicated. Of course the powers that be want us all to think that if it weren’t for the WHO, doctors, vaccines, and medical science, half the world would be dead by now.

That may actually be true, but what exactly would be killing us?—the natural world?—or the man-made world? It would be difficult to make this assessment, due, obviously, to the fact that there is no place on earth not infected by the greedy, and often evil, hand of man.

Other than medical issues, how else has technology diminished our lives? From a very broad perspective, what has gone down hill as technology has advanced up hill? Violence? Disease? Depression? Suicide? Anxiety? A feeling of meaninglessness? Less true happiness (being high with adrenalin and other ingested drugs doesn’t count), Loss of family values? Child abuse? Drug abuse? Alcoholism? Pedophilia? Isolation and abandonment?

[…]

Technology has attributed, maybe more indirectly, to gun violence in all the fundamental ways this article suggests: the degradation of the culture, the focus on consumerism and materialism rather than human values and character, the isolation and abandonment of the young (particularly young males) the loss of soul and spirit, and thus the loss of human morals, i.e. the loss of love.

[…]

Can we train ourselves to not be so obsessed with consumerism? Or not be so obsessed with living forever (our relentless pursuit to perfect the human body with technology), or avoiding the commonly experienced pains and sufferings of the body? What is it from the past that we had that we no longer have that kept all of this in some sort of sublime order?

I believe we had more of an understanding of our spirit and soul than we do now. Yes, a lot of that awareness was brought to us through religion, but unfortunately as the materialist paradigm descended upon us religion lost its stature. We need to come back to a deep awareness of nature, and our part in it, to understand that we were designed to live and subsequently die a particular way (in harmony with nature and with an acute awareness of the mystery of creation surrounding us). We must learn to love again.

[…]

Not many people seem to be concerned about our loss of soul, our loss of humanity, our loss of being human, and our loss of a connection to God. Yes, I said it, the “God” word. I mean it too.

That, to me, is the real threat, and if not addressed properly, it will be responsible for our eventual demise.

The churches, at least those in the West, are failing to see this or, if they do, are failing to act on it. They will have to change course, and soon.

Jordan Peterson’s message to CEOs

Ditch the evil, satanic "woke" stuff, the DIE and the ESG

He rains down fire, brimstone and pro-free market slaps in the face. He quotes Jesus to them: “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked” (but then mistakenly seems to say that this is from the Sermon on the Mount – it’s not, it’s from Luke 12:48, but that’s just a minor quibble).

Here it is, the full 25 minutes in all their glory.

When you remove the sovereignty of God

you transfer this sovereignty to a totalitarian state

James Delingpole interviews Reverend Jamie Franklin about “Lessons On Freedom From [Fyodor] Dostoyevsky “.

At the 1:50 minute mark, Franklin summarises the insight of the Russian thinker and author with regard to the episode “The Grand Inquisitor” from “The Brothers Karamazov” thus:

Dostoyevsky realised that when you remove the sovereignty of God from a nation, a civilisation, you inevitably transfer this sovereignty to a totalitarian state . . . It’s what’s happening now in our country [the United Kingdom].

How to combat this? Near the end of the 9 minute video, Franklin explains:

Dostoyevsky says that you will often encounter objectionable thoughts [of others]. You will be tempted to take them by force. Jesus teaches us to take them by humble love.