I imagine many people who live outside Northern Ireland are looking at the recent outbreaks of violence and wondering what on earth the Northern Irish are fighting about now – so many years after the supposed Peace Process.
I came across a blog I wrote a couple of years ago highlighting the low levels of educational achievement of the Northern Irish compared to the Republic of Ireland. Here’s abit of it:
Modern emigration – Southern vs Northern Ireland
Southern Ireland – In the last 30 years, Southern Ireland was known as the “Celtic Tiger” as huge cuts to corporate tax rates encouraged many international companies to set up operations there. This had a knock-on effect on education leading to the development of a young, well-qualified workforce. Migration fell and many Southern Irish actually moved back to Ireland to take advantage of increasing job opportunities. An impressive 64% of those Irish immigrating back to the Republic of Ireland during the Irish economic boom had post-secondary-school education – much higher than in any part of the UK
Northern Ireland – During the Troubles (1968 to 1998) and even after, there was a massive brain drain from Northern Ireland as many of those with education or specialist skills fled abroad to avoid the violence, bigotry, stupidity and hatred.
Now, before anyone starts accusing me of being a bigot, let me quote from a newspaper report from Northern Ireland comparing the results of recent emigration from the North vs the South.
The result of differential emigration is that, in the North, only a third of those in their early 30s are graduates, compared to 43 per cent in the Republic and a similar figure for mainland Britain. In addition, Northern Ireland also has a significantly higher proportion of the population in their 30s who did not complete second level.
Western economies today depend on high-skilled, especially graduate labour, for economic success. Many low-skill jobs have migrated to developing countries. The Republic’s economic success story is largely built on a well-educated workforce attracting high-skilled, high-paid jobs, in technology, financial services and similar sectors.
The lower level of education in Northern Ireland, compounded by permanent outward migration of Northern-born graduates, has had a serious negative impact on that economy.
It has also contributed to a society, which is now marked by political stagnation and violence.
More evidence of Northern Ireland’s low educational levels?
This morning I came across a report about the failure of Northern Ireland’s educational system, particularly with young males – those causing most of the recent violence:
In regard to gender and educational attainment, a key finding was the persistent attainment gap between males and females, and the fact that this gap consistently increased, to the detriment of males, after leaving primary school: there was an increase in the gap between Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3, and it widened as the school years progressed up to A Level
Moreover, a study done in 1979, when such studies weren’t banned by the political correctness mob, found that while the average IQ in the UK was 100, it was 96.7 in Northern Ireland. This suggests, as one might expect, that the best and brightest and most educated and most skilled often emigrated during the Troubles. This left behind the more intellectually- and educationally-challenged.
That brings us to the question – does the fact that the average educational level and the average IQ level in Northern Ireland are probably much lower than in either Southern Ireland or the rest of the UK have any influence on the province’s apparent inability to create peace and prosperity?
You decide. As usual, I have no opinions about anything!!!!!!
Honest, PC Plod. I am opinion-free otherwise I might be accused of ‘thought crime’.
(Readers – Irish or not – are welcome to leave politically-correct comments by clicking on the headline)
Well, well, who would have thunk it? It seems that the crap Made in China vaccine doesn’t work.
Chile has probably the leading level of vaccination of any South American country and is close to the levels of Israel and the UK and above the US level:
(to see the charts more clearly, left-click on them once, then left-click again and larger, more readable versions will appear)
Chile’s rapid vaccination campaign has been attributed to early negotiations that saw the country secure tens of millions of doses of various coronavirus vaccines. The resulting jabs rollout has been “faster than any other country in the Americas”, triggering hopes of Chile becoming “among the first in the world to reach herd immunity”, reports The New York Times
But while Chile is leading South America and even most of the rest of the world in terms of per cent of the population vaccinated, the number of new cases of Xi Pingpong’s WuFlu infections in Chile is shooting up to a new record high for the country:
And, of course, what passes for Chile’s health service is collapsing under the tsunami of new serious Chinese WuFlu cases leading to lots more dead people.
How can this be?
China’s useful idiots in the World Health Organisation and in the western mainstream media – the West-hating ‘progressives’ who won’t let us refer to Covid-19 as “the Chinese flu” even though they’re happy to talk about “the Kent variant” and “the Brazilian variant” and “the South African variant” – are claiming that this is because Chile opened up too early.
But there could be another reason for Chile’s problems. Chile has mainly used the Chinese-made CoronaVac vaccine which even the lying, corrupt, disease-spreading Chinese admit is only 50% effective. From what little I understand, a vaccine has to be 50% or more effective to be approved by regulatory authorities. Happily (for the lying, corrupt, disease-spreading Chinese) the two Chinese vaccines, CoronaVac and Sinovac, just manage (say the lying, corrupt, disease-spreading Chinese) to pass this 50% hurdle. However, Chile’s experience seems to indicate that it would not be a great idea to believe anything claimed by the lying, corrupt, disease-spreading Chinese.
There’s a book titled Badly Made in China written by an American who spent over 20 years working in China as a go-between between US companies and Chinese manufacturers. In it he explains how the Chinese will always try to cheat US companies. Typical methods include substituting cheaper raw materials than those agreed, lowering quality standards below those agreed and often just replacing vital ingredients or parts with total crap in order to boost the Chinese manufacturers’ profits.
Looking at what is happening in Chile, I suspect that neither Chinese vaccine gives anywhere near the claimed 50% protection. Moreover it’s possible, or even likely, that the Chinese are sending over some crap that hardly contains any of the real active vaccine at all.
Who knows? But other countries should look carefully at what’s happening in Chile before buying millions of doses of supposed vaccine from the lying, corrupt, disease-spreading Chinese.
And here, for anyone who hasn’t seen it, is a Youtube video about Xi Pingpong’s WuFlu plague that I made over a year ago:
The last couple of weeks have yet again have demonstrated the familiar wonderful degree of tolerance from the world’s most tolerant people.
A weekend of slaughter in Iraq
On Sunday afternoon, twelve people were killed when a bomb attack targeted Shia pilgrims in Baghdad’s northern neighborhood of Waziriyah as they were heading to a shrine to mark the martyrdom anniversary of Imam Mohammed Javad (PBUH), the ninth Imam of Shia Muslims.
Earlier in the day, at least 15 people, most of them children, were killed and about 90 others wounded when attackers set off explosives-laden vehicles next to an elementary school and a police station in Iraq’s northern village of Qabak.
On Saturday, 78 people were killed in a day of bombing attacks across Iraq, including one against Shia pilgrims in northern Baghdad. The north Baghdad attack claimed the lives of 51 people, leaving 107 others injured
Blowing up baby
In Tunisia, a lady killed herself and her baby by activating a suicide belt when her husband was killed by anti-terrorism forces
Those pesky cartoons
In the UK, over 130 imams and Islamic scholars have written to the Prime Minister urging him to condemn the showing of blasphemous cartoons to Muslim children at Batley Grammar School. In an open letter to Boris Johnson, the imams and scholars say the incident was an attempt to incite hatred and Islamophobia whilst pushing forward extremist white supremacist ideology. A cynic (not me) might be tempted to wonder why the world’s most tolerant people stay in the UK when they seem to hate us and our freedoms.
A dangerous Nissan
In the US, a member of the Nation of Izl*m, Noah Green, allegedly killed Capitol Police Officer Billy Evans, an 18-year veteran of the force, after mowing him and another unidentified officer down with his blue Nissan Altima.
Teacher – leave our kids alone
The Court of Appeal of Tangier, Morocco sentenced an imam on Thursday to 30 years in jail for sexual assault of minors.
Chop, chop
In the UK a failed Iraqi asylum seeker had sex with a white woman and then killed her and cut her into seven pieces.
Training in Germany
In Germany, two Syrian refugees pushed a 54-year-old German man in front of a train and then punched and kicked him to prevent him getting out of the way of the train.
Africa – ISIS’s new target
Izlumist attacks on Christians in Africa have risen by over 33% in the last year.
The Islamist armed group Boko Haram has stepped up attacks on civilians in towns and villages in the Far North region of Cameroon since December 2020, killing at least 80 civilians, Human Rights Watch said today
Suspected Islamist militants killed at least 23 civilians in an overnight raid on a village near Beni in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the provincial governor’s office said on Wednesday.
In Nigeria a Catholic priest and six others were murdered by some chaps from the world’s most tolerant religion and then a whole lot of houses near the church were set on fire.
In Mozambique, ISIS has alleged that 55 people have been killed in an attack on the town of Palma where there’s a major gas plant. A South African private security firm has been hired by the government to battle the militants and search for survivors of the brutal assault, which has left streets and beaches strewn with decapitated bodies.
Also in Mozambique, Save the Children staff report being “sickened to our core” while listening to mothers recall stories of their children, as young as 11 years old, being beheaded by insurgents in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province
Tolerance in Afkrapistan
KABUL, Afghanistan — (AP) — Attackers on Tuesday gunned down three women working to administer polio vaccine in eastern Afghanistan, officials said, a day after authorities launched a new campaign against the crippling children’s disease. The women were killed in two separate attacks in Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar province. Fared Khan, spokesman for Nangarhar police, said two were shot and killed in police District 7 and the third in District 4
Tolerance in India
About 50 to 60 fanatics from the Religion of Tolerance barged into the ancient temple of Machhindranath perched atop the Malang Gad fort and chanted “Allahu Akbar” slogans to disrupt the ongoing aarti performed by Hindu devotees, a report published in Shiv Sena mouthpiece Saamana said.
Elsewhere in India, Taqi Shah, a religious scholar from the Shia community man was axed to death on Wednesday over allegations of blasphemy in Punjab’s Jhang district.
Also in India, the Uttar Pradesh Police on high alert in Bulandshahr after a priest of a temple was found dead with stab wounds in his neck. Oh well, at least he wasn’t beheaded.
Tolerance in Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan
Azeris (from the religion of tolerance, of course) have been destroying Armenian Christian churches in the territories that were conquered by the Turkish-backed peace-loving Azeris in 2020.
It’s almost certain that the Chinese Covid-19 plague was accidentally leaked from one of the two research institutes in Wuhan – either the biosafety level-4 Wuhan Institute of Virology(WIV) or else the biosafety level-2 Wuhan Centre for Disease Control (Wuhan CDC).
Dr Peng Zhou’s research on bats
Readers will hopefully know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) is where bat virus expert Dr Peng Zhou was researching how bats could carry Ebola, SARS and Coronavirus without becoming ill themselves. Here’s Dr Peng Zhou describing his own work from the Wuhan Institute of Virology website:
“Taking bats as the research object, I will answer the molecular mechanism that can coexist with Ebola and SARS- associated coronavirus for a long time without causing disease, and its relationship with flight and longevity.”
As for the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control – that’s the place that produced a short documentary film in 2019 boasting about how they had managed to collect over 2,000 different viruses from bats to study in their research.
US officials shocked by poor hygiene control at the WIV
The name of the WIV laboratory was familiar to US officials. Its research on bat viruses had already drawn the attention of U.S. diplomats and officials at the Beijing Embassy.
Knowing that the WIV’s top-level biosafety laboratory (BSL-4) was relatively new, the U.S. Embassy health and science officials in Beijing decided to go to Wuhan and check it out. In total, the embassy sent three teams of experts in late 2017 and early 2018 to meet with the WIV scientists, among them Shi Zhengli, often referred to as the “bat woman” because of her extensive experience studying coronaviruses found in bats.
When they sat down with the scientists at the WIV, the American diplomats were shocked by what they heard. The Chinese researchers told them they didn’t have enough properly trained technicians to safely operate their BSL-4 lab. The Wuhan scientists were asking for more support to get the lab up to top standards.
The diplomats wrote two cables to Washington reporting on their visits to the Wuhan lab. More should be done to help the lab meet top safety standards, they said, and they urged Washington to get on it. They also warned that the WIV researchers had found new bat coronaviruses could easily infect human cells, and which used the same cellular route that had been used by the original SARS coronavirus.
But their cables to Washington were ignored.
Sky News Australia goes where no UK mainstream would ever go (yet again)
As Western governments and media shy away from any mention of the Chinese plague having being accidentally leaked from a Wuhan lab, Sky News Australia yet again goes where no other media dares to go.
I thought readers might be interested/amused/disgusted (delete as appropriate) by a job ad that somehow appeared in my email inbox. The job was for a Marketing and Public Relations Officer for St Edwards School. This is a state school run by Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council (BCP Council).
If St Edwards was a private school needing to attract fee-paying students, I could understand that the school would need to market itself. But this is a state school. If it’s any good, parents will want to send their brats there. If it’s a disaster, parents will want to avoid it. There is plenty of information on schools’ performance and ratings available free on the Internet. So WTF does St Edwards School need a Marketing and Public Relations Officer?
I realise the role is only part time. But it’s paying up to £27,000 a year. I guess I must be old-fashioned as I believe that is money that could be better spent on the children’s education.
I’ve just looked at Education Vacancies on the Grauniad website and I suspect that our state schools are wasting tens of millions a year on useless, bureaucratic non-jobs like Environment Officers, and Equality Officers, and Diversity Advisors, and Marketing Managers, and Student Services and Attendance Managers, and Account Relationship Managers, and Public Relations Officers and School Business Managers and loads of other such non-jobs in bureaucratic Britain.
Maybe that’s why there’s not much money left to employ people who will actually teach something or to buy books?
Marketing and Public Relations Officer – St Edward’s School
BCP Council Bournemouth, England, United Kingdom 3 days ago 5 applicants
About the job
This is an exciting opportunity for an enthusiastic, pro-active and imaginative PR and/or Marketing person wanting to work in a happy, caring and successful environment, helping us to make a difference in the lives of young people by ensuring that our communication, and celebration of our work as a school is outstanding.
The role will be responsible for developing, organising and managing the school’s PR and Marketing activities. You will have proven experience of working with Microsoft Office Suite and Social Media platforms at a high level, together with experience of managing communication across a range of media.
The role is part time Term time, including INSET, plus 20 – 25 hours in school holidays. The actual hours and pattern of working will be agreed with the successful candidate. Some home-working, may be a possibility.
For a person bringing significant skills and experience to the role, we could consider offering an enhanced salary at Grade G SCP 18 – 23 £24,982 – £27,741 pro rata.
Benefits include an environment where staff and students enjoy working together and are supported to excel; great facilities, excellent CPD and a caring, encouraging and supportive staff community.
Please read through the job description, person specification and general information prior to applying and ensure that you show how you meet the criteria in the relevant experience section.
Please visit our website at st-edwards.poole.sch.uk for further information about our school. If you would like to visit us, or have a conversation before making an application, subject to schools being open under the present COVID 19 situation, we’d love to hear from you.
Interviews will be held in accordance with current coronavirus guidelines.
St Edward’s School is committed to safeguarding & promoting the welfare of children & young people. All appointments made are subject to an enhanced DBS check.
Closing date is: Sunday 11 April 2021
Interviews will be held on: Wednesday 21 April 2021
I’m currently doing the research for my next book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS:
I hope to finish my research by the end of April and finish the book by the end of June.
I assume no publisher will dare take my book as they’ll be terrified of the cyber-pitchfork wielding Twitter mob attacking them for publishing anything that goes against the woke narrative that global temperatures are shooting up because of CO2 emitted by human activities – mainly burning fossil fuels. So I’ll probably end up publishing my book myself.
In my research I’ve found that the best way to show that the whole idea of CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming) is based on a misunderstanding of science, data manipulation, and outright lies is to compare what the CAGW alarmists claim now with newspaper articles and official reports written during the last 150 years.
For example, here’s the (in)famous Hockey Stick graph which multi-millionaire (fortune estimated at $300m) climate activist Al Gore and the alarmist mob use to justify their predictions/prophesies of the end of the human race as we all fry in a burning hell that we will have created:
The graph supposedly shows global temperature (the red line) and atmospheric CO2 levels (the blue line) for the last 1,000 years. Looking at the graph it’s supposedly clear that there is a direct relationship between temperature and Co2 levels. I won’t spend time here explaining why the graph is more than misleading as it’s based on just one type of tree rings in just one small location and is contradicted by almost every other study and by historical records.
But here is a report about global food production from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) from 1974:
In the report it says:
Most forecasts of worldwide food production have been based on the assumption that global weather will stay:
“Many climatologists have associated this drought and other recent weather anomalies with a global cooling trend and changes in atmospheric circulation which, if prolonged, pose serious threats to major food-producing regions of the world”
“In India, for example, before the global warming trend of 1890-1940. severe drought struck about once every four years. With the warming, however, and more abundant monsoon rains, drought came only once every 18 years or so, greatly increasing India’s grain production.” Annual average temperatures over the Northern Hemisphere increased rather dramatically from about 1890 through 1940, but have been falling ever since. The total change has averaged about one-half degree Centigrade”
“A study of the past reveals that the Earth’s climate is highly variable—indeed, that variability is one of its fundamental characteristics
Now let’s look at human CO2 emissions:
You’ll see that human CO2 emissions did start rising sharply around 1900, but really started hitting eye-wateringly high levels after the 1940s in the great industrialisation that followed World War 2. Yet, as the 1974 NOAA report confirmed, temperatures started falling from the 1940s till 1974 just as anthropogenic CO2 emissions were shooting up.
If man-made CO2 is really causing catastrophic global warming, then it’s odd that global temperatures can fall for around 30 years while CO2 emissions are increasing so rapidly.
I don’t have room here to debunk the whole CAGW scare. This is just a tiny foretaste of what I’ll be exposing in my next book – THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS
There are so many examples of the mindboggling stupidity of the global warming alarmists’ and politicians’ rush into supposed ‘clean, CO2-free, renewable energy’ that it’s difficult to choose which is the most ludicrous. But today I’ll just pick one that I haven’t seen covered in any media – the amount of land that will be needed for all the windfarms and solar farms. I’ll use some figures from the USA. But you can apply the same principles to any Western country committing energy suicide.
Total energy use
The USA has about 7,700 power plants each having at least 1,000 megawatts of usable capacity. If it was to ban petrol and diesel cars by 2050, then it would need to increase electricity production by around 80% – that’s about 14,000 of these power plants in total
Renewable energy
Under Joe ‘China’ Biden and the ignorant bouffant climate czar John Kerry the USA plans to get 42% of its energy from renewables – mostly wind and solar – by 2050. The most efficient clean energy, of course, comes from nuclear. But the greenies don’t like nuclear.
Land use
A typical gas or coal power plant occupies about 900 acres. To generate about 1,000 megawatts from solar power would need about 51 square miles and from wind would need about 550 square miles. So, let’s take 42% of the 14,000 power plants the USA will be replacing by renewables. That’s 5,880 power plants.
And let’s assume that half of the renewables would come from solar and half from wind. The solar farms would use 150,000 square miles (2,940 x 51 square miles) and the windfarms would need about 1,617,00 square miles (2,940 x 450 square miles). That’s a total of 1,767,000 square miles of solar farms and windfarms needed to provide 42% of the USA’s power needs by 2050.
The total land area of the USA is around 3,800,000 square miles. So, to get 42% of its power from wind and solar, almost half (47%) of the USA’s territory would have to be used for solar panels and windfarms. That’s not going to leave much room for homes and food production.
Given that the UK (275 people per square kilometre) has a much higher population density than the USA (only 36 people per square kilometre), I suspect that if the UK was to try to get 42% of its energy from renewables (solar and wind) there wouldn’t be enough land for all the solar panels and windfarms so our rulers would have to demolish most of our homes in order to build solar farms and windfarms to power the homes they are demolishing.
Duh!!!!
I wonder if any of the geniuses planning the USA’s and the UK’s supposedly carbon-neutral clean energy future or any of the global-warming alarmists at the BBC and C4 News have thought about this?
(you can leave comments by clicking on the headline)
I hadn’t intended to write a blog today. But I changed my mind when I found out the name of the man who has been charged with shooting 10 people at a Colorado shopping mall.
Had the shooter been a white supremacist or even just a white Trump supporter, the UK mainstream media would have told us everything about him – his name, his background, his criminal record etc etc. In fact we would have been bombarded for hour after hour with ever more lurid claims that the shooting was racist and was all Trump’s fault for encouraging social division and violence.
But we haven’t had the usual anti-Trump storm of abuse and outrage from the lefty scum at the BBC and the self-righteous ignorant propagandists at C4 News. Why not? Why the silence about the shooter’s name and background?
Here are just a couple of many Tweets immediately after the shooting blaming white men as usual:
But now we learn that the shooter was called Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, of Arvada, near Denver, but originally from Syria. Could the BBC’s and C4 News’s silence about the identity of the killer possibly be because Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa is a member of our favourite and most peaceful religion? So, instead of naming him, they just refer to him as a “21-year-old” man. Could the BBC’s and C4 News’s silence about the identity of the killer possibly be because our rulers don’t want us to realise how much the members of our favourite and most peaceful religion hate us and want to kill us? After all, we’re constantly being assured by our rulers and top cops like Cressida Dickless Dick and some guy called Basu that the greatest danger to us comes from supposed ‘right-wing’ terrorists even though a cynic might look at all the evidence and come to the conclusion that Dickless and Basu are being more than economical with the truth.
I don’t know what colour the 10 Colorado shooting victims were. But even if there were some African Americans among them, I rather doubt we’ll be seeing any Black Lives Matter protests as black lives only seem to matter when a black is killed by a whitey.
I believe this is Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa from Syria who has been charged with 10 counts of murder in Colorado:
Last week the glorious People’s Undemocratic Republic of the European Union (aka the EUSSR) confirmed its plan to cut CO2 emissions by 55% (compared to their 1990 levels) by 2030.
“Hooray!” I hear you all shout, “Well done EU! Well done Ursula Fond of Lying! Yipee, the wonderful EU is going to save the world from catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW)”
What about the cost?
I’m sorry to dampen your EU-nthusiasm on a rather miserable Monday morning, but what we’re seeing is total madness – economic and societal suicide.
Let’s take Germany, for example. Within the EU, Germany plans to be a leader in the use of supposedly ‘renewable’ energy and will produce 80% of its energy from renewable sources by 2050. “Hooray for Germany!”
At $0.38 per kwh (kilowatt hour) Germany has probably the highest energy cost in the developed world. To put this into context the UK price is over 30% lower at $0.26 per kwh and the USA is around 60% lower at $0.15 per kwh. Even in Germany’s neighbour, unfortunate Poland which tends to get invaded by the Krauts every now and then, energy costs are much lower than Krautland. Energy costs in Poland are $0.19 per kwh – half the cost paid by Merkel’s planet-saving citizens.
But the situation is even worse when we look at two of Germany’s main industrial competitors – China and India. The cost of energy in China and India is $0.08 per kwh – 80% below the cost in Germany.
Why is Germany’s energy cost so high? Firstly because after the Fukishima tsunami disaster, Merkel took the decision to close down German’s nuclear industry. I guess Merkel forgot to look at a map. If she had, she would have noticed that Japan consists of islands while Germany is mostly land-locked. Moreover, Japan is sitting on top of a seismically active part of the Earth while Germany is seismically rather stable and probably hasn’t had a tsunami in the last 500 million years.
But the main reason that Germany’s energy costs are so high is Germany’s rush into using much more expensive supposedly ‘renewable’ energy sources. Solar and wind-farm energy is about 7 to 10 times as expensive as a fossil fuel source such as natural gas. And, of course, as the wind and sun are unreliable, you also need to pay for back-up fossil fuel energy production for days when there’s too little or too much wind or when there’s insufficient sun
Where are the jobs?
What does all this mean? It means that energy-intensive industries will continue to flood out of high energy cost countries as they increase their use of ludicrously expensive but unreliable supposedly ‘renewable’ energy and hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost.
But its not only energy-intensive jobs that will be lost. I’ve just bought a ‘German’ running treadmill. The basic parts are made in Germany, then packaged up and sent to Taiwan for assembly, then shipped back to Europe. And the Italian motorbike manufacturer Ducatti makes kits for its motorbikes in Italy (I believe), then ships these to its factory in Rayong (Thailand) where they’re assembled into motorbikes and then sent to Europe, the US and Asia. There are probably thousands more companies with similar energy-guzzling supply chains destroying EU jobs.
The greeny activists and politicians will claim that their policies have created hundreds of thousands of so-called ‘green jobs’. But an analysis of renewable energy production in Spain showed that for every ‘green job’ created by the rush into renewables, 2.2 jobs were lost elsewhere in the economy due to higher energy costs.
Ooops. I doubt our rulers or the mainstream media will mention that.
Moreover, each ‘green job’ created in Spain cost taxpayers about $720,000 for solar energy jobs and around $1,250,000 for each wind energy job.
Reducing CO2 emissions?
As Western companies move ever more jobs to low energy cost countries, the West will de-industrialise further, CO2 emissions in the West will fall and ecoloon activists, self-righteous politicians and obsequious journalists will declare their policies of CO2 reduction a huge success and that they’ve saved the world. Nobody, especially not the mainstream media, will mention that all that has happened is that CO2 emissions have been moved out of the EU and NOT reduced and that millions of jobs in the West have been lost.
Time to tell the truth?
The West’s economic and societal suicide might be worth it if there really was a ‘climate crisis’. But the climate is doing just fine in spite of what the BBC and climate activists and mainstream media and politicians claim, the polar bears are thriving in spite of what the BBC and climate activists and mainstream media and politicians claim and CO2 emissions are at a 500 million year low point and have absolutely no influence on the climate at all in spite of what the BBC and climate activists and mainstream media and politicians claim.
Somebody ought to write a book about this farce/tragedy (delete as appropriate).
Oh, wait a minute, there is somebody writing a book about this. It’s me!
A few months ago, I introduced readers to a word they might not have known – “Kakistocracy”. A kakistocracy is a system of government that is run by the worst, least qualified, and/or most unscrupulous citizens. Every time I see hopeless Matt Hancock, gormless Gavin Williamson, grasping Grant Shapps, pretty useless Priti Patel or bumbling Boris, for some reason I think of the word “kakistocracy”.
Today I’d like to introduce another word with which you might not be familiar – “Oikophobia”. And no, it doesn’t mean a loathing of oiks.
Oikophobia is the hatred or dislike of one’s own cultural home.
The simplest way of defining oikophobia is as the opposite extreme of xenophobia. As xenophobia means the fear or hatred of strangers or foreigners, so oikophobia means the fear or hatred of home or one’s own society or civilization, oikos being the ancient Greek word for home, house, household. The term was coined in this sense by British philosopher Roger Scruton in 2004, in his book England and the Need for Nations. He calls oikophobia “the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours.’”
Oikophobia is not unique to Western civilisation today. Instead it is a natural outgrowth of the way cultures develop. It occurred in ancient Greece, in Rome, in the French and British empires, and now in the West.
In the beginning, a people relatively uncivilized and uncultured, but possessed of great mobility and untested strength, awakens and, as it were, goes to war in service of its deities. Initial successes against surrounding peoples lead to greater wealth and prestige, and a national identity is forged, accompanied by literary epics and other accoutrements of culture. Eventually, the people reaches its pinnacle of success, with so much wealth that a broad and permanent leisure class can be established, and this era of greatest political power will generally coincide, more or less, with the pinnacle of the nation’s cultural and scientific achievements.
This is where oikophobia sets in. Diverse interests are created that view each other as greater enemies than they do foreign threats. Since the common civilizational enemy has been successfully repulsed, it can no longer serve as an effective target for and outlet of people’s sense of superiority, and human psychology generally requires an adversary for the purpose of self-identification, and so a new adversary is crafted: other people in the same civilization. Since this condition of leisure and empowerment, as well as a perception of external threats as non-existential, are the results of a society’s success, success is, ironically, a prerequisite for a society’s self-hatred. What Freud has called the “narcissism of small differences” (in Civilization and Its Discontents)—the urge to compete against others even through minor distinctions like a virtuous action or the newest gadget—becomes one motivation through which a particular interest expresses its superiority over others.
We see daily examples of oikophobia – the desecration of statues, the mudslinging at historical figures, the loathing of our own history, the ridiculing of concepts like patriotism and pride in one’s country, the abject surrender to invading cultures that are clearly inferior to and often totally opposed to our culture. The mainstream media – the BBC, C4 News etc – are active promoters of oikophobia as they sh*t on everything that has made Britain and the West great. And our schools indoctrinate our children with their oikophobic, West-hating, UK-loathing propaganda.
Oikophobia reveals a civilization that has stopped believing in itself, that hates itself, and that is therefore unwilling to defend the values of individual freedom, democracy, and scientific and scholarly skepticism that have been handed down to us since antiquity. How can it have come to such cultural self-hatred? The answer lies in an oft-repeated historical process that takes a society from naïve and self-promoting beginnings to self-contempt and decline.
In the West we have created the most enlightened and advanced civilisation in history. So, pride in our civilisation is entirely justified—which does not negate an awareness of its shortcomings and of past crimes. To defend what we have achieved we must understand the phenomenon of oikophobia, since by understanding it we can finally hope to combat it. We need to realize that oikophobia is a sort of pathology that develops under distinct socio-historical circumstances and does not involve any particularly interesting independent thought. Once we understand this, we are better equipped to face it in our everyday lives.
As the West tears itself apart with its internal culture and identity wars, a rising, increasingly self-confident and aggressive China must view the West’s self-destructive oikophobia with delight.
David Craig, on April 12th, 2021
