...I have on my bookshelves a gift from a dear friend, now dead, the late William Manchester's book "A World Lit Only by Fire". It is a wonderful collection of fact and anecdote about medieval Europe; its cruelty, superstition, bigotry and its fear of heresy. Looking at this satellite image of the Korean peninsula is to look backwards and forwards at the same time. Backwards at the underdeveloped, fearful and idelogically constipated North Korea and forwards to what 50 years of capitalism have achieved for South Korea.If the green/left have their way, if, as Maurice Strong (founder of the UN Environment Programme) hopes; that the industrialised nations collapse, then the lights will go out again, and not just all over Europe and South Korea...more here...and here...
...and for a UK perspective...It is ironic that this week’s stories about the Government admitting that we face the possibility of blackouts should have originated with the Tory Party, whose own energy policy has long been indistinguishable from the Government’s — windmills, ‘carbon capture’, ‘smart meters’ and all. The truth is that, if David Cameron comes to power in nine months’ time, there will be no bigger headache confronting him than how to avoid precisely the disaster which his spokesman was yesterday warning about. If there is one issue to which he and his colleagues should now be giving their fullest attention it is how to keep Britain’s lights on without prices going through the roof. And that will mean abandoning a lot of that childish Milibandian make-believe which now threatens us with as great a crisis as any our politicians have ever landed us with...more from Christopher Booker, here...
...and the red/green church under the spotlight here...My desire to live a free, mundane life is a fundamental cog in our messy, glorious, capitalist democracy. It is built on millions of such small entrenched postitions. Red-filtered, my desires are despicable and bourgeois and must be beaten out of me with indoctrination or force. Green-filtered, my small desires are despicable acts of ecological vandalism. My house is a carbon factory. My desire to travel, to own stuff, to eat meat, to procreate, to heat my house, to shower for a really, really long time; all are evil. The word evil is used advisedly. Both the green and red positions are infused with overpowering religiosity. Dissenters from the consensus are shunned apostates. Professor Ian Pilmer, the Australian geologist and climate change sceptic, could not find a publisher for his book Heaven and Earth, which questions the orthodoxy about global warming. He is the subject of hate mail and demonstrations...Our intransigent refusal to choose green will be met by a new militancy from those who believe we must be saved from ourselves. Ultra-green states cannot arise without some form of forced switch to autocracy; the dictatorship of the environmentalists...more from Timesonline, here...
...and totally off topic, but extraordinary, Normandy 1944 then, and now...
