A reader raised the following issue: for the human caused climate change to be valid there must be a strong correlation with CO2 leading, although as we know correlation is not proof of causation. I do not understand why the correlation analysis has not been done because it will stop the nonsense immediately.
So, let’s try to answer this:
A tale of two theories
As all readers hopefully know, there are two main theories about the role CO2 plays or doesn’t play in the Earth’s climate.
The climate catastrophists
The climate catastrophist, net-zero fanatics believe that CO2 is a greenhouse gas which traps heat. Therefore the more CO2 there is in the Earth’s atmosphere, the hotter the Earth will become. As CO2 has risen from 0.03% (300 parts per million) of the Earth’s atmosphere to just over 0.04% (420 parts per million) of the Earth’s atmosphere since the start of the industrial age, the catastrophists believe that the rise on CO2 from a tiny 0.03% to 0.042% of the Earth’s atmosphere is causing unstoppable global warming.
This slightly ignores the fact that CO2 has been much higher in the past (the black line on the chart and left-hand scale):
Yet even when atmospheric CO2 levels were over 4,000 parts per million – ten times today’s levels – the Earth didn’t overheat then. Moreover, CO2 is an essential plant food. Many agriculturalists install CO2 generators in their greenhouses to promote plant growth and the ideal atmospheric CO2 level is probably around 0.1% (1,000 parts per million). Moreover, were CO2 levels to drop below 0.02% (200 parts per million) most plant life on Earth would die and humans would become extinct.
Though it would be rather amusing if, in their attempts to ‘save the planet, the crazed greenies invented a machine which could extract CO2 from the atmosphere and managed to bring CO2 levels below 0.02% accidentally wiping out plant life and the human race.
The climate realists
The climate realists (or ‘science deniers’ according to the climate catastrophists) believe that CO2 levels are largely a result of the Earth’s temperature. They propose that the Earth goes through regular cycles of warming and cooling:
As the Earth warms, more CO2 is released from the oceans into the atmosphere and, as the Earth cools, more CO2 is absorbed by the oceans.
Why have there not been any definitive studies?
Given how important it is to establish whether rising atmospheric CO2 causes warming or is a result of warming, the question then arises – why have there not been any definitive studies to settle this once and for all?
The answer is that I think this study has been done. It was based on ice cores taken at the Vostok Antarctic research station analysing temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels for the last 420,000 years:
The results were written up in a 2019 paper published in the Periodicals of Engineering and Natural Sciences. The paper was titled Time and frequency analysis of Vostok ice core climate data (note 29 in my book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS)
The paper found that in 3 out of 4 time periods “CO2 lags temperature”. The data from the fourth period wasn’t so clear. The study concluded:“Although originally thought that the CO2 data might be considered as proof of its causal role in global warming, it is now widely considered that CO2 lags temperature change and its lower rate of solution in and release from sea water is more likely the cause of the relationship”.
Given that the West is committing social and economic suicide in the belief that CO2 is causing temperature change, you might have thought that the conclusion of the Vostok ice cores study would have been widely reported and would even have caused our political rulers to rethink their lunatic obsession with totally pointless economically-destructive net zero.
Why have there not been any further studies?
Then the question arises – why have there not been any further studies to confirm or refute the conclusions of the Time and frequency analysis of Vostok ice core climate data paper detailed above.
I’ll propose three reasons:
no climate scientist would ever get a grant to analyse whether the theory of CO2-caused climate change is the greatest scientific mistake/ fraud in human history since the time that we were all assured that the Earth was flat and that the Sun orbited around the Earth
if a climate scientist were to begin such a study, he or she would immediately be harassed and excoriated by mobs of woke students claiming that the scientist was being paid by ‘Big Oil’ and demanding a halt to the research and that the scientist be fired and never allowed to work ever again
even if a scientist did the research and managed to keep their job, no publication would accept their paper and the results would either be ignored by the mainstream media or else the mainstream media would launch a vituperative ad hominem campaign to discredit the scientist and hound them out of their job
Mass murderer or convenient pretext?
That brings us back to the question in the headline of this blog:
Are atmospheric CO2 levels really responsible for the deaths of thousands in climate-related disasters and could rising atmospheric CO2 levels really lead to the extinction of the human race?
Or is the CO2 climate-catastrophist movement a massive scientific blunder/fraud which is being used by luddite, West-loathing, progress-hating fools and knaves looking for a purpose in their empty lives and cynical globalist politicians using it as a means of increasing their control over us by impoverishing us and imposing ever more restrictions on our freedoms?
You’ll all have seen the reports from the latest Pakistan floods. And you’ll all have heard the repeated claims that these floods are “unprecedented” and the “worst in history”:
And we’re told again and again and again that the floods are so devastating because of man-made climate change.
I am not denying that the Pakistan floods are terrible and I’m not denying that they have caused misery and death. But I do feel it’s worth testing the claim that these floods are “unprecedented” and the “worst in history“.
What does “worst” mean?
What do the media mean when they claim these floods are “unprecedented” and the “worst in history”?
I imagine there could be three explanations of “unprecedented” and the “worst in history”:
most people killed by floods
highest percentage of the population affected
largest area of the country affected
I have only managed to find data on the numbers of people killed in Pakistan in floods for the last 72 years:
Numbers of people killed
Just in the last 72 years Pakistan has seen many floods. These include:
the flood of 1950, which killed 2,910 people
on 1 July 1977 heavy rains and flooding in Karachi, killed 248 people, according to Pakistan meteorological department 207 millimetres (8.1 in) of rain fell in 24 hours.[6]
in 1992 flooding during the Monsoon season killed1,834people across the country,
in 1993 flooding during Monsoon rains killed 3,084 people,
in 2003 Sindh province was badly affected due to monsoon rains causing damages in billions, killed 178 people,
in 2007 Cyclone Yemyin submerged lower part of Balochistan Province in sea water killing 380 people. Before that it killed 213 people in Karachi on its way to Balochistan.
in 2010, almost all of Pakistan was affected when massive flooding, caused by record breaking rains, hit Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab. At least 2,000 people died in the flood and almost 20 million people were affected by it
The death toll from the current floods is estimated at just over 1,000 people. The two minutes research I did (see above) found four Pakistan floods – 1950, 1992, 1993 and 2010 – which killed more than that. So “unprecedented” and the “worst in history” cannot mean that this year’s floods have killed more people than previous floods.
That leaves three possible explanations of “unprecedented” and the “worst in history”: either this year’s floods have affected highest percentage of the population or they have affected the largest area of the country or else the claim that this year’s floods are “unprecedented” and the “worst in history” is just the usual nonsense spouted by our climate-catastrophist journalists in order to advance their own careers and to terrify us into obedience to the next series of restrictions which will be imposed on us in order to supposedly ‘save the planet’.
I’ll leave it up to you to choose which of these three possibilities is the most likely.
What about the trees?
One issue none of the climate catastrophists have mentioned is the massive scale of deforestation in Pakistan largely due to the country’s rapidly-expanding population. Trees are obviously important in countries which have seasons with heavy rainfall as they help absorb the rain so it doesn’t result in landslides and floods.
The population of Pakistan is increasing at an astonishing rate:
At the time of the 2010 floods, which killed around 2,000 people, the population of Pakistan was about 180 million. By 2022, this had reached 230 million – a rise of 50 million in just 12 years.
Probably linked to the rise in population is the rate of deforestation. Just between 2013 and 2020 Pakistan’s tree coverage fell from 5.2% to 4.8%:
To put this into context, the world average in 2020 based on 193 countries is 32.2%. Pakistan comes in at 164 out of 193 countries in levels of tree cover. Pakistan’s neighbour, India, has 24.3% tree cover – almost six times as much as Pakistan. According to the World Wildlife Fund, Pakistan had the second fastest rate of deforestation in Asia (Afghanistan was worse). And the WWF recommends a country has around 35% forest cover. So, it’s hardly surprising that, with so little tree cover, when the monsoons hit Pakistan, the result is inevitably rushing torrents of water, floods and destruction of property and agricultural land.
Pakistan’s corrupt elites much be slavering over the money they can steal
While we may dispute whether these floods really are “unprecedented” and the “worst in history” and we may argue about whether a massive increase in population and an alarming level of deforestation have contributed to the amount of damage caused by Pakistan’s monsoon rains, there is at least one certainty – these floods will provide a wonderful opportunity for Pakistan’s utterly corrupt elites to enrich themselves by looting the foreign aid that will pour into the country.
On Transparency International’s Corruption Index, Pakistan comes in at number 140 of 180 countries rated according to their levels of corruption – just above such earthly paradises as Zimbabwe, Eritrea and Uzbekistan.
I’ve no idea how much of the hundreds of millions of flood aid will be stolen by Pakistan’s political and bureaucratic elites. I suspect the looting will be somewhere between 60% and 70%. But I would need to do a bit more research to justify these figures.
A comment from a reader
As many people don’t click on the blog headline to look at readers’ comments, I’ll just add this one a reader has just made:
I quote from a 2012 US Kent State University study of flooding in Pakistan – ‘’Pakistan is a developing nation that has historically been subjected to high flooding fatality events due to its socioeconomic characteristics, population geography, and landscape attributes.’’
‘’Since 1950, floods have been historically the second deadliest natural disaster to affect Pakistan, behind only earthquakes. Recent disasters continue to expose Pakistan’s great vulnerability to natural hazards, as the nation remains highly susceptible to large losses of human life that may transpire from a single event.’’
But according to all the media, the current floods are ”Unprecedented’‘. And, with leaden inevitability, all the result of Climate Change
I read somewhere recently about the idea of the ‘de-democratisation’ of the West. Having the attention span of an on-heat newt, I didn’t read the article. But I imagine the thesis may have been something like this:
Let’s assume for the sake of simplicity that the first advanced human civilisation emerged about 12,000 years ago. Let’s further assume that any semblance of what we would recognise as representative democracy started in the West about 1900. This would mean that only about 10% of the world’s population (the West) have had anything like democracy for just about 1% of the time we lived in civilisations. Even today, most of the world’s population live in brutal, oppressive, corrupt dictatorships and/or kleptocracies.
So, most of us have lived in what could be seen as an historical aberration – relatively free, democratic societies. Curiously, we take these for granted when, in fact, they are the exception as most of human life throughout history in most countries has been nasty, brutal, short and oppressed.
The start of de-democratisation
Now let’s look at Western democracy – Europe, the USA, Australia and New Zealand.
But how do you measure the degree of democracy? I have taken as a proxy the distribution of wealth. I have assumed (you may or may not agree with this) that the greater the share of national wealth owned by the wealthiest, the lower is the level of wealth distribution and thus the level of effective democracy and the higher the amount of wealth owned by the lowest 90% of families, the higher is the level of effective democracy. I’ve used the charts below as a basis for my assumption. The first one shows the share of the US’s wealth owned by the top 0.1% (the light blue line) and the bottom 90% (the dark blue line) of families:
The picture for the UK is fairly similar:
What you’ll see is that the share of wealth owned by the richest in society declined from around 1900 till the 1980s. After that, the rich have been getting much richer at the expense of the rest of us.
There are obviously many reasons for the 1900 to 1980s more equitable distribution of wealth. I suspect this was partly driven by the two world wars. After the sacrifices made by ordinary people in the unnecessary and avoidable slaughter of WWI, the elites were so terrified of the Bolshevik communist revolution spreading throughout Europe that they conceded a limited amount of their power and wealth to us lesser mortals – in the UK we were promised “a land fit for heroes”. Similarly, after WW2 our rulers wanted to enrol us in the fight against communism, so they again allowed ordinary people a slightly larger share of the wealth our countries produced. In the UK, for example, the post-WW2 period gave us the NHS and the state pension
The rise of the internationalists
But over the last half century we ‘ve seen the rise of transnational organisations. Here’s someone much smarter than myself explaining what happens when transnational organisations subvert nation states:
Joining the EU transforms a nation-state into a member state. Whereas a nation state is a vertical unit, with elites gaining legitimacy through representing the citizens (and enjoying a social connection with a wider section of society that is much deeper and richer than mere electoral superiority), a member state is a horizontal unit, in which elites seek legitimacy and policy direction from their interactions with the elites of other member states and officials in international institutions. This transformation involves a move to post-political, technocratic forms of governance.
There is no denying that this project has been a success, resulting in a near-complete curtailment of democratic participation — understood, in most basic terms, as the ability of citizens to have a collective say on the direction of society.
However, as economic policies have become tailored to the interests of a handful of immensely powerful mega-corporations, any sense of the collective or national interest was lost. A small elite was allowed to accrue immense wealth and power, while laying waste to our societies’ workforce, industrial capacity, public services and vital infrastructures, leaving our countries poorer, weaker and dependent on foreign (and increasingly hostile) nations for the supply of everything from energy to food to basic medical supplies.
The interests of this small financial-corporate elite were always at odds with those of the rest of us. And we have now reached the point where they have become so divorced from the latter that they threaten the very survival of society itself
The power grab by the elites
It seems that by the 1980s, the elites saw no need for further sharing of wealth and power. So they began the process of accumulating more power and wealth for themselves while gradually impoverishing us in the process. As George Orwell wrote:
“They (the Proles)… had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern…Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”
-George Orwell, 1984
The lockdowns were partly about fighting a previously-unknown disease. But they were also about the consolidation of control – and thus power and wealth – by the elites:
Similarly all the nonsense about supposed catastrophic man-made climate change is actually a power- and wealth-grab by the ruling elites at our expense – increasing energy prices and restrictions on our freedom to choose what we want to eat, were we want to travel, how we heat our homes, the kind of cars we are allowed to drive etc etc.
It’s true that the lockdowns and vaxx mandates got the richest people and industries richer. But what they really did, in the final analysis, was further transfer power out of the hands of the dwindling middle class and of the increasing impoverished classes and into those of the elites:
The elites already have more money than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes. But what they really crave is power – absolute power over us. Power begets power. Once they’ve a taste, people tend to crave more power. Given the opportunity, they’ll go to great, and often immoral, lengths to acquire and stockpile it.
Will we revolt?
The big question facing us is whether ordinary people will compliantly accept their reduced lifestyles while the elites ridicule our obsequious stupidity or whether, like the Dutch farmers and Canadian truckers, we will revolt at the new oppression. Personally, I’m beginning to believe that a general strike in the UK against our economic and spiritual immiseration might be the only way to stymie the elites’ latest power grab.
Every week seems to bring a new crisis. There’s the energy crisis, the cost-of-living crisis, the ambulance crisis, the NHS crisis, the excess deaths crisis, the housing crisis, the illegal immigration crisis, the education crisis, the social care crisis, the water crisis and no doubt there are a few more crises I can’t remember for the moment.
In today’s blog, I’m going to propose that most (if not all) of these crises are self-inflicted – caused by the incompetence, stupidity, short-sightedness, mendacity, greed and treachery of our rulers.
The ambulance crisis
We’re told that thousands will die because it’s taking ambulances hours, rather than minutes, to reach people with serious health problems. So, just in case there are a few of our worthless, expenses-fiddling politicians or useless, over-paid, over-pensioned NHS bosses reading, I’ll make this very simple by answering a series of basic questions:
Q1: Why are ambulances taking so long to reach health emergencies?
A1: Because they spend hours waiting at hospitals before they can get patients into A&E
Q2: Why can’t ambulances get patients into A&E?
A2: Because there are insufficient hospital beds available
Q3: Why are there insufficient hospital beds available?
A3: Because 10% of hospital beds are occupied by people who should have been discharged
Q4: Why haven’t those people been discharged?
A4: Because there aren’t enough carers available to look after them either in care homes or their own homes
Q5: Why aren’t there enough carers available?
A5: Because our useless Government forced care companies and care homes to fire around 40,000 experienced carers who sensibly refused to get the potentially dangerous fake vaccines
Q6: But now care workers don’t need the fake vaccines, why haven’t care workers gone back to work?
A6: Because they’ve found other jobs which are less stressful and more pleasant than cleaning granny’s ass all day
Of course, there are other contributory reasons for the ambulance crisis – the NHS wasting billions employing ever more managers and Diversity, Inclusion and Equality specialists while continually cutting the number of hospital beds; fewer doctors being available as many are forced to retire early due to tax rules or else many are not willing to work full-time as half of doctors are now female and want to balance looking after their children with their work.
Why is ‘Root Cause Analysis’ so rare?
What I have done above is apply what’s called ‘Root Cause Analysis’. This is a way of exploring an issue so that you logically find the basic causes rather than just panicking over the easily-observable symptoms. In any field, if you just try to deal with the symptoms of a problem, rather than its root cause, you’ll never solve the real problem.
Car manufacturer Toyota are credited with using Root Cause Analysis – what the company called “The 5 Why’s” – to build cars whose quality was vastly superior to Toyota’s western competitors:
Most journalists never bother with Root Cause Analysis. Instead they just hyperventilate about the ambulance crisis or the cost-of-living crisis or the energy crisis or whatever other crisis without ever looking for the real cause. Or, if journalists do mention a supposed cause, it’s usually that the Government should spend billions more on whatever problem they are blethering on about. This can be because journalists are lazy or ignorant or because the underlying cause is something which is politically-incorrect and so mentioning it would be career-destroying.
Let’s do one more – the cost-of-living crisis
Q1: Why are fuel costs shooting up and pushing millions into fuel poverty?
A1: Because nasty Mr Putin invaded Ukraine. (Today, while announcing the new energy price cap, the Ofgem top panjandrum joined the ever-lengthening queue of people blaming Putin)
Q2: Why didn’t we have plenty of fuel so we could have ignored Putin’s invasion?
A2: Because energy companies have been limiting investments in exploration and refining
Q3: Why have energy companies have been limiting investments in exploration and refining?
A3: Because for thirty years or more our rulers have told energy companies that they are destroying the planet, that governments might take legal action against energy companies demanding compensation and governments have advised pension funds and others not to invest in energy companies
Q4: Why have Governments been waging war on energy companies?
A4: Because our politicians have bought into the climate-catastrophist, man-made Global Warming nonsense
Q5: Why have politicians believed the climate-catastrophist nonsense?
A5: Sorry – I have absolutely no idea how anyone could be so stupid!!!!!
A few other crises
I won’t go through the same process with all the other crises. But I’ll give a few examples of the root causes of some of these crises and why these causes are never mentioned by journalists and the usual talking heads and other supposed ‘experts’
The Housing Crisis
Between 170,000 and 180,000 new homes are built in the UK each year. Most journalists blame the Government for not building sufficient homes. But net migration to the UK is probably over 400,000 each year (around 1,100,000 visas were issued for people to come and live in Britain last year!). How many journalists dare mention that it’s physically impossible to find the land and the workforce to build over 400,000 new homes each year and that the real cause of the housing crisis is far too many migrants?
The food crisis
Food prices are shooting up forcing ever more people to rely on food banks. For decades our rulers have been deliberately restricting the amount of food our farmers could produce. First they forced crops to be diverted from food production to making useless, inefficient biofuels. Then they paid huge subsidies to farmers to transfer farmland from food production to hosting wind-farms and solar farms. Then they paid more subsidies to farmers to ‘rewild’ parts of their land further reducing food production. And now our rulers are restricting fertiliser use which will lead to a 20% to 30% drop in agricultural productivity and the bankruptcy of many farmers.
So, what’s really causing the food crisis? Our rulers’ ludicrous climate-catastrophist, net-zero policies. But no journalist or expert dares say this as criticising the climate change cult is career suicide.
Meanwhile, back in Africa
This year, as every year, we’re being told by our rulers and the mainstream media that there will be famine in Africa and that the only solution is that we pour ever more billions in foreign aid into that bottomless pit – Africa.
If you were to apply ‘The Five Whys’ to why Africa has needed so much foreign aid every single year for the last 60-70 years and still needs billions more, you might find out the real reasons why every single African country is a poverty-stricken, excrement-covered, over-crowded, corruption-riddled, backwards, conflict-addled, basket-case hell-hole, But you might not like the answer you reach. So, it’s always easier to claim that all Africa needs is more of our money.
I was going to write about something else today. But then I came across this very short (2 minutes) video from the wonderful Sky News Australia.
If you follow British mainstream media, you’d possibly get the impression that US president, Joe Biden, was doing a reasonable job getting his supposed Inflation Reduction Act passed and due to his military support for Ukraine. Whereas we’re constantly being told that Trump is an absolute swine who has been hiding America’s most secret documents in the fridge (or something like that) at his Mar-A-Lago estate.
No British media would dare do what Sky News Australia has done – expose the true extent of Biden’s increasingly embarrassing senility. Making Joe Biden president is a clear case of elder abuse.
I don’t know who is actually running America, but it certainly isn’t Joe ‘Why am I here?’ Biden.
If I were to suggest that Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum envisage a future where we all have microchips implanted in our bodies, you’d probably conclude that I had transitioned into a crazed conspiracy theorist.
So here’s a link to the article on the World Economic Forum’s website proposing precisely that:
You don’t need to read the whole article to get the gist of Klaus’s latest great idea. I’m giving the link mainly to prove that I’m not trying to hawk some new deranged conspiracy theory.
Here’s our friend Klaus – a man who, like several previous great Teutonic leaders, always has your best interests at heart.
The article admits that the concept might at first appear slightly controversial and even problematic. But it goes on to explain: “As scary as chip implants may sound, they form part of a natural evolution that wearables once underwent. Hearing aids or glasses no longer carry a stigma.”
Klaus’s World Economic Forum article then continues by claiming: “They (hearing aids and glasses) are accessories and are even considered a fashion item. Likewise, implants will evolve into a commodity,” writes scientist Kathleen Philips, suggesting that mainstream culture and influencers will be tapped to promote implantable chips as a trendy status symbol.
In a previous blog, I featured a short video clip from this year’s World Economic Forum meeting in Davos where Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla explained to Schwab how soon there would be “ingestible pills” – a pill with a tiny microchip chip that would send a wireless signal to relevant authorities when the pharmaceutical has been consumed. “Imagine the compliance,” said Bourla.
So, imagine our compliance to our rulers’ control if we were all microchipped.
Here’s a quote I made up all by myself:
“Yesterday’s conspiracy theory is today’s reality and today’s conspiracy theory will be tomorrow’s reality”.
I don’t often have deep thoughts about the human condition. But this weekend, while sampling a new case of wine I had just received, I gained an astonishing (for me) new insight into what’s happening in our world.
Ever onwards and upwards?
There have been many civilisations in the past:
And they have all risen, flourished, collapsed and then disappeared leaving only minimal traces of their existence:
Apparently, the average duration of previous civilisations has been around 336 years.
There are obviously different reasons for these different civilisations collapsing – wars, changes in climate, incompetent rulers, greed and indolence. But I suspect that pretty much every one of these civilisations made the same fundamental mistake – they viewed their particular civilisation as being on an upwards trajectory in which wealth and power and economic well-being would continue to increase:
They were unable to conceive of their civilisation disintegrating into catastrophe and ruin even though this had happened to all previous civilisations. Perhaps this is bit like any 20- or 30-year-old nowadays being unable to conceive of themselves ageing – becoming decrepit, dementia-afflicted, doubly-incontinent and dying – even though they see this happening to their elderly relatives?
Civilisations as a life cycle
We now know that civilisations don’t follow an upwards trajectory. Instead, like human beings, they follow a lifecycle – birth, growth, maturity, decay and death. There are plenty of models describing the lifecycle of a civilisation. Here’s just one:
Of all the things our education system could teach but doesn’t, the rise and fall of civilisations is possibly the most important.
Can we save Western civilisation?
We are in a unique situation compared to previous civilisations. We are probably the first civilisation to understand the lifecycle of previous civilisations and what caused those civilisations to implode. This perspective gives us the opportunity to identify the symptoms and causes of civilisational collapse and potentially avoid these.
Sir John Glubb warned us
I’m now going to repeat the description of civilisational collapse I used in a blog in February. Our challenge is to ditch the claims of our useless politicians that under their ‘wise’ stewardship Western civilisation is on an upwards trajectory. Instead we need to admit that our incompetent rulers are wrecking everything good about Western civilisation and impoverishing us all. So we need to recognise that our civilisation is following the description Sir John Glubb gives of civilisational collapse and to change course before it is too late.
Here’s what I wrote in February:
In his analysis of past civilisations, Sir John Glubb described the final phase of each civilisation as follows:
“Frivolity, aestheticism, hedonism, cynicism, pessimism, narcissism, consumerism, materialism, nihilism, fatalism, fanatics and other negative behaviours and attitudes suffuse the population. Politics is increasingly corrupt, life increasingly unjust. A cabal of insiders accrues wealth and power at the expense of the citizens, fostering a fatal opposition of interests between haves and have-nots. The majority lives for bread and circuses (panem et circusem); they worship celebrities instead of divinities…. throw off social and moral restraints — especially sexuality; shirk duties but insist on entitlements.”
Although this was written almost fifty years ago, I think you’ll agree that every single word of the above accurately describes the West today:
Point 1: “Frivolity, aestheticism, hedonism, cynicism, pessimism, narcissism, consumerism, materialism, nihilism, fatalism, fanatics and other negative behaviours and attitudes suffuse the population
Absolutely correct. Of the above list, I’d like to highlight ‘narcissism’ as I suggest that the whole woke nonsense of climate-catastrophism and multiple genders and micro-aggressions and much else, which is tearing our countries apart, is just a form of fanatical, virtue-signalling, nihilistic narcissism.
Point 2: Politics is increasingly corrupt, life increasingly unjust.
Absolutely correct – just look at the bunch of lying, incompetent, scheming, self-enriching cowards running the UK. Or the senile basket-case of a US president. Or the rotten corrupt, self-serving EU. Or the totally corrupt international organisations like the United Nations or the World Health Organisation.
Point 3: A cabal of insiders accrues wealth and power at the expense of the citizens, fostering a fatal opposition of interests between haves and have-nots.
During Covid, the world’s billionaires have become massively richer while the rest of us have been burdened with huge rises in national debts the repayment of which we and our children and their children will be taxed for generations to come. Moreover, the elites are forcing their ludicrous ‘net zero’ greeny agenda on the rest of us, impoverishing our lives while they enjoy the privilege of jetting around the world to lecture on us on why we should be happy giving up many of those very things which make life worth living
Point 4: The majority lives for bread and circuses (panem et circusem); they worship celebrities instead of divinities
You only need to look at the endless stream of z-list supposed celebs on cooking or dancing or reality TV shows and see how many millions follow the inane twitterings of their social media heroes.
Point 5: The majority shirk duties but insist on entitlements.
With one in five Brits claiming they are disabled, with hundreds of thousands of Third-Worlders flooding into European countries with the most generous welfare systems and over two million crossing into the US since cognitively-challenged Joe Biden was wheeled into the White House unaware of where he was, why he was there and what day of the week it was, I hardly need to comment on this. Though I’ll mention Milton Friedman who famously once said something like, “you cannot simultaneously have open borders and a welfare state” (1999). This is something our rulers don’t seem to understand.
This weekend’s blog is based on this week’s news stories and my book THE GREAT UNIVERSITY CON:
Predictable media fake drama?
Just as predictable as Christmas, this week we had all the mainstream media interviewing A-level schoolchildren (mainly girls in slightly revealing clothes) while they nervously opened their exam results and then leapt about in joy hugging each other and screaming stuff like “OMG! OMG! OMG!”. Quite why these kids were nervous is a bit of a mystery. After all, the pass rate was an astonishing 98.4%. Though this was a drop from an even more astonishing 99.5% last year.
I seem to remember that, back in prehistoric times when I took my A-levels, there was a genuine possibility of some people failing. Now that seems to be impossible providing you just manage to turn up for the exams on the right day and write your name in the correct place on the exam paper.
Will I get to uni?
Then there was the big question of whether the kids’ grades would be sufficiently high for them to go to uni (what we used to call ‘university’ in the days when young people could spell words of more than a couple of syllables).
Again, here there shouldn’t have been too much worry. After all, over a third of students (36%-37%) got A* or A grades:
There’s no way so many got A grades when I did my A-levels.
Our economic competitors – China, India, Japan, South Korea, the EU, the US etc – must be terrified to see so many highly-intelligent, highly-qualified young people being produced by our world-class education system.
As to whether the students would be accepted by their university of choice. Again there shouldn’t have been too much worry. Here are the grades of students accepted by universities in 2010:
An astounding 51% of A-level students got to university with below three grade Ds. I doubt things have changed much since then.
Will I get a good degree?
Then we have the question of how many of these obviously brilliant young people will achieve a top-level degree at uni. Once again, no need to worry. The percentage getting a first shot up from just 7% in 1994 to a wondrous 21% by 2015:
It’s probably even higher now.
Our degree factories
Our universities have become a massive scam on and betrayal of our young people. Our universities will take pretty much anyone just to increase their own profitability and the salaries of their supposed academics even though our cynical, money-grabbing universities know full well that many of their students will leave university with debts of £50,000 or more and no chance of ever repaying those debts. Partly this is because many students will be on Mickey-Mouse courses like Gender Studies and Creative Dance and suchlike where there is no possibility of getting a well-paid job. But even in a supposedly ‘serious’ subject like Law, our universities are cynically churning out far more graduates than there are jobs available:
Over the last couple of years, I have found several law graduates working in call centres as there was never any chance of them getting a training contract.
A glimmer of sanity?
However, this week I noticed the first sign of some sanity. This came from an institution called Roehampton University. I’m not sure if Roehampton University is a real university or just a jumped-up poly pretending to be a university. I’ve never studied there. But I know it as it’s only 100 metres or so from a block of flats called Fairacres on Roehampton Lane were my mother used to live.
Anyway, there has apparently been fury and outrage at this great, admired centre of learning. Roehampton University’s senior management have just announced their plans to put 226 members of staff at risk of redundancy, and close down and make cuts to multiple programmes. These programmes include, but are not limited to: Anthropology, Classical Civilisation, Creative Writing, Philosophy, Dance, and Play Therapy. The university’s management justified this by stating their commitment to graduate prospects in regards to employability. Basically, the university’s management seem to have realised the questionable morality of encouraging students to rack up massive debts studying worthless pretend subjects.
The as ever furious and outraged students claim “Closing down these courses would be a great loss of access to education, and so we call on the Senior Management of the university to reconsider these plans and allow our lecturers to continue educating students in these fields.”
Closing down these useless courses seems like a good idea to me.
Let’s hope other unis have the courage to follow Roehampton University’s example. Then we could get rid of thousands of fake academics and stop conning and exploiting tens of thousands of young people with worthless degrees in non-subjects with absolutely no job prospects. After all, not everyone with a worthless degree in total nonsense from a poly pretending to be a university can get a job as a Diversity, Inclusion and Equality Manager in the NHS, RAF or BBC.
Attached below is a link to my latest short (3 minutes) YouTube video:
“THE CLIMATE – THEY SAY IT’S CHANGING”
I hope you enjoy it and send the link to a lot of other people as we all need to spread the message about the economic and societal catastrophe our deluded, scientifically-ignorant, virtue-signalling rulers are pointlessly inflicting on us.
If you watch the video on YouTube, you’ll notice that YouTube ‘helpfully’ explains that climate change is due to us evil, selfish, planet-destroying humans burning fossil fuels.
Across the supposedly ‘advanced’ West our rulers can’t protect our borders, can’t supply electricity, can’t supply water, can’t control rising crime and can’t educate our children.
In Britain, in spite of the number of managers in the civil service rising by 56% in the last six years, our rulers can’t supply passports or driving licences. And, in spite of the number of managers in the NHS shooting up from 25,000 in 1979 to around 40,000 today, our health service is collapsing and many thousands of people will die prematurely due to lack of timely access to treatment.
But the one thing our rulers haven’t yet wrecked is our food supply. Our supermarkets are bulging with food and, in spite of rising prices, most people can afford to feed themselves and their families. In fact, we have so much food that about a third of it – 88 million tons per year across Europe (174 kg per person per year) – is thrown away. In the West, obesity is a bigger problem than starvation.
But it seems that now even our food supply is being put into danger by our bungling/mendacious politicians.
Nobody ever mentioned fertilisers
As you probably know, the governments of the Netherlands, Germany, Canada and New Zealand have pledged to reduce the use of nitrogen-based fertilisers. The Australian government is also reported to be considering this as well:
I don’t claim to be a expert in anything. But when I did research for my recent book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS, I read twelve books and probably over 100 articles about supposed ‘Climate Change’. Yet not once in my research did I come across anyone mentioning nitrogen-based fertilisers as a contributor to supposed man-made global warming. In fact, I’ve just checked the indexes of all twelve books and not a single one of them includes any reference to nitrogen-based fertilisers.
Do you believe nitrous oxide will kill us all?
The logic for cutting the use of nitrogen-based fertilisers is apparently that the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide comes from the denitrification of nitrates in soils, and the pollutant ammonia comes the volatilisation of nitrogen fertilisers. And we’re told that ‘nitrous oxide is almost 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide’.
If we look at the standard analysis of our atmosphere’s composition, we see that nitrogen makes up over 70% of the atmosphere:
CO2 is usually featured, but only accounts for 0.04% (400 parts per million) of the atmosphere. However, there is no mention of the supposedly deadly nitrous oxide.
If we move into a more detailed view of just those gases considered to be ‘greenhouse gases’, we do find nitrous oxide:
There is less than a tenth the amount of nitrous oxide than CO2. So I suppose nitrous oxide must constitute about 0.003% of our atmosphere – say 30 parts per million. Though, if nitrous oxide really is ‘300 times more potent than CO2’ as a greenhouse gas, I guess that would outweigh the fact that there is vanishingly little of it.
It’s very strange that up till now the supposedly ‘deadly’ nitrous oxide hasn’t featured more prominently in the rantings and ravings of the climate catastrophists. After all, if we are to believe nitrous oxide is ‘300 times more potent than CO2’ as a greenhouse gas, then it’s nitrous oxide rather than CO2 which the Extinction Rebellion narcissists should be protesting about.
Why now? Why all acting together?
But possibly even more strange is why suddenly several major western countries – Netherlands, Germany, Canada and New Zealand and possibly soon Australia – have all decided together that nitrous oxide will wipe out mankind. A conspiracy theorist might be tempted to suggest that this is some new wheeze thought up by the World Economic Forum Davos elites to push up food prices driving us proles into poverty and subservience. As Kissinger once warned:
We’ve seen the disaster in Sri Lanka when the country’s utterly incompetent and utterly corrupt government banned fertiliser use. Crop yields fell by 20% to 50% (depending on the type of crop), food prices more than doubled and the economy collapsed. Though perhaps the $20bn reportedly looted by the ruling Rajapaksa family and their cronies also played a not unimportant part in that unfortunate country’s implosion. As for the Rajapaksas, they’ve managed to ensure that the country is still run by their venal cronies, so there is no risk for them of prosecution and imprisonment.
Bankrupting farmers?
Farming is an industry with mainly fixed costs. Depending on the acreage farmed you will need a certain number of things like tractors, combine harvesters and much else. Should your fertiliser use be constrained by your political overlords and your crop yields fall by say 10% or 20%, you still have the costs of your equipment while your earnings drop. Thus reduction in fertiliser use will probably bankrupt many farmers.
Why are our rulers knowingly doing this?
Cutting our food supply?
This is not the first attack on our food supply by our rulers.
First came the mandated use of inefficient biofuels which reduced the acreage available for food production. Then came the huge subsidies paid to farmers to move land from producing food to being used for solar farms and windfarms. Then came the subsidies paid to farmers to further reduce food production by rewilding their land. And now farmers will be crushed by legal restrictions on fertiliser use.
Meanwhile environmental groups funded by billionaires have bought up over 3.5 million acres of the USA’s 915 million acres of agricultural land and our favourite computer systems salesman, ‘Farmer’ Bill Gates, has spent about $690 million buying up around 169,000 acres of farmland. The billionaire media mogul Ted Turner is reported to own 2 million acres. It’s not clear why billionaires are snapping up America’s farmland. Do they want to produce food? Or produce more organic food? Or restrict the amount of food being produced? Or harvest generous taxpayer subsidies by either producing crops for biofuels or by rewilding their land?
Who knows?
But whatever their plans, they’re unlikely to be in our best interests.
Meanwhile, there seem to be increasing numbers of articles in the mainstream media about how insects and seaweed and jellyfish and much else can soon be used as food replacing things like meat and fish. Why is this happening?
David Craig, on September 2nd, 2022
