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The most maddening thing about the whole climate nonsense is the complete lack of evidence that net zero, windmills, solar farms, or any other technological “solutions” are going to make a dent in what must be huge geological processes well under way. The hubris of this thinking, combined with the disrespect shown to ancient monuments part of the heritage commons of the British people points right back to the “lords of creation” attitude that these entitled little monsters act out. The illogic would be stunning, but logic being something white men made up they don’t have to worry about that.

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Another maddening thing about the "green" economy is that it is not possible to build windmills, solar farms, or the rest of it without heavy use of fossil fuels, nor could it be maintained without those. How can you have a green energy policy if you need fossil fuels to build and maintain it? The question is seldom asked, let alone answered.

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Exactly! Solar panels rely on heavy extraction, have a relatively short working life, and are hideous. Last year’s once in a lifetime trip to Shetland included the sight of enormous turbines spoiling one of the most beautiful coastlines in the world. We spent the afternoon talking with a Shetland couple about our age (62) that we met outside the bookstore. We discussed our fears for our children annd grandchildren and how unaffordable housing has become. We were angry but not surprised to learn that they pay MORE for electricity while having to live with these eyesores. It’s all window dressing without any numbers as to the cost of production vs. the return on these performative props.

If you ask questions you’re just a dinosaur that wants white men to rule over a dead planet while they run rampant misusing the hell out of the word “sustainable” which really means we get private jets and you get an endless supply of unnecessary and cheap consumer goods and degraded foodstuffs.

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Similar arguments can be made regarding electric cars. It's just such a childish attitude towards life. What goes into the manufacture of the vehicle? What goes into the seats, dials, interior trim, tires, floor mats, hoses, cabling, etc. What powers the trucks that deliver the vehicle to the lot? What generates the electricity that charges the batteries? It's all so-called fossil fuels. All of it. It's either petrochemicals or coal. Even a child can understand that you're still powering your car from fossil fuels, the only difference is where the energy is produced. In my V6 Toyota, the energy is produced under the hood. In a Tesla or Prius, it's being produced in a power plant amd transferred to you (via power lines manufactured with, naturally, petrochemicals).

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Even the electricity is probably generated by fossil fuels. Nuclear power is certainly an option in this case, but the greens don't like that either .

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Thanks for your thoughtful words. The "pile of rocks" dismissal is very similar to the "just a clump of cells" airy shoulder shrug when they discuss abortion.

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Or the "so what?" rebuttal from some diversity hire when taking about whytes becoming a minority in an English town.

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Exactly. Totally agree. Their dismissal tactic is always the same.

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I’ve been having treatment for glioblastoma over the past few months and I’ve spent a lot of time staring at some paintings we have on the wall here at home - ‘The Course of Empire’ by Thomas Cole. Painted between 1833 and 1836, this series of five paintings charts the rise and fall of civilisation by depicting the growth and fall of an imaginary city. The first painting depicts the ideal state of the natural world, the next the hopeful beginnings of civilisation, the next the ‘Consummation of Empire’.

Inevitably, I’m drawn to stare most at the final two paintings ‘Destruction’ and ‘Desolation’. I guess because I never really had the time before, I never really looked at these terrifying paintings in detail. ‘Destruction’ looks like the Vandal Sack of Rome but it could as easily be Berlin in May 1945, or Dresden. A colossal statue of a hero striding forth is now headless. Lots of rape and murder, women being dragged down steps by the hair. ‘Desolation’, the final painting, revisits the scene decades later and the little is left of the Empire, and nature is reclaiming the land in the remains of the day. All the people have gone.

It’s hard not to think that we’re in some slow-motion version of this. ‘It’s Just Rocks’ - sure it is. If the foundations of our civilisation don’t mean anything then what the hell is the point of us? And what will become of us?

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Hope your doing well Lady. The deconstructivist movement in art and architecture to my mind was the lefts poisonous seed; bearing fruit today in education and politics. The ugliness has been creeping on us for nearly 50 years.

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My prayers are with you. My advice would be to totally cut out sugar (cancer lives on sugar) and get onto Keto and intermittent fasting.

Dr. Berg on YouTube is the best for that.

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Thank you. GBM is a cancer of the central nervous system but doesn’t respond in the way other bodily cancers might. Diet is important but, in my long experience of brain tumours, I am sceptical of radical dietary changes. There’s a doctor here in Australia, Dr Chaffee (he also has a huge YouTube following), who is vehemently pro-meat and anti-vegetables. I’ve known brain tumour patients who placed huge hope in his theories only to pass away at the time their neurosurgeon had predicted, some even sooner.

Honestly, I think all this stuff is pretty random. I used to wonder why the hell I got these cancers growing in my head. I’ve never smoked, never did drugs, don’t drink and was a gymnast then a competitive runner for years, always at the gym. None of that was worth tuppence in the end.

My advice would be to live your life to the full, try not to hurt others on the way and don’t do anything you’d be ashamed to tell your granny about.

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Lovely to hear from you. I’ve completed a long round of treatment and now have a short break to allow it to work/not work. Then I’ll have some MRI’s to see how things stand. Hopefully it will have bought me some more time which is the best you can realistically hope for with GBM.

Totally agree with you about the poison of deconstructivist ideas seeping into our culture. The late Sir Roger Scruton knew it, so did Jonathan Bowden. Although Bowden’s own art was often classified as modernist, as he himself points out ‘modernism’ was already well over a century old when he was painting. He wanted a new form of art, free from deconstructivist ideas. Deconstructivism lacks the symmetry of nature, harmony and warmth. It is cold and elitist. I used to go past the Imperial War Museum North at Trafford regularly, when I worked in Manchester. I always felt that building was talking down to me and telling me how seriously I should be taking it. The principles behind it are now instilled in every institution.

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It breaks my heart to hear of your predicament. There's so many people I know at the moment who have relatives going through similar situations. I hope you're able to make the most of everyday with your family and friends. ❤️

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Thank you. My husband and children are very supportive. My own family are back in the UK and Ireland. When you get seriously ill, you find out how few friends you really have. You’ll be lucky if you can count the number of people you can rely on, on the fingers of one hand. A lot of people just ignore you, most people just ignore me. I think this stuff is just too hard for some people. They don’t know what to say, so they say nothing.

I’m a weird autist anyways, so that stuff doesn’t remotely bother me but I’ve seen it deeply hurt other folks with brain tumours. I think we all like to assume, and society tells us, that ‘Friends’ will be there for you, so it can be gutting to discover the reverse is true.

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Yes it seems that when you're going through a bereavement or illness, it confronts people with their own mortality and this can make them very uncomfortable. Stay strong and positive Lady. 🙏

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God bless you… I hope things go well.

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Thank you for thinking of me 🙏🙏

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I moved into a studio flat in the West Country some few months prior to the first lockdown and, at the time, I was frantically trying to figure out which painting to purchase (on a very tight budget) for decor - frantic, because the window in which to do so was rapidly closing and I really didn't want to spend my indefinite, solitary confinement staring at a blank wall.

It was a toss-up between Cole's "Destruction" scene and an amateur watercolour of something far less spectacular. In spite of my own better judgement, I went for the latter and instantly regretted the decision, vowing to replace it with the former when the restrictions finally lifted.

Didn't happen.

The imposter stayed on the wall to serve as a reminder of how little value I place on my own instincts, and to pay them more heed.

Fat lot of good that did.

Years later and a fresh set of blank walls staring back at me, but I still think about the Cole-that-almost-was; still think how much I wish - in darker moments - I'd been able to look up and pick out that lone, hooded figure sitting in quiet repose as civilization comes crashing down around him: a singular, stoic point of calm in the swirling madness of it all.

Poor comfort, given your condition (for which you have whatever sympathy can pass between two strangers on the internet), but I'll get that Cole at long last.

And when I find that sitting stoic, I'll think of you.

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What a wonderful comment, thank you so, so much for thinking of me. Choosing pieces of art to hang on our walls is a dilemma. I used to be torn between what I liked (endless Pre-Raphaelites, Romantics and kitsch art like Tretchikoff (a print of his ‘Chinese Girll’ adorned the wall of my auntie’s front room, I now have it hanging here) and what I thought might impress others. As you say, it is always best to trust your own instincts.

For those of us awake to what is going on, Cole’s series ‘The Course of Empire’ has taken on a far deeper meaning in the past few years. I always thought it was a powerful series of paintings but I never really understood the terrifying darkness of these images before. Perhaps you have to be a bit older and more world weary to really connect with it. If you look closely at ‘Destruction’ there’s a woman sitting in mute despair over the body of a dead boy, presumably her son. When I first saw this painting, as a teenager, I didn’t notice these details. Now, as a mother, I notice all the carnage. Cole painted these works from 1833-36, a time we would look back on now as a ‘golden age’. The artist was acutely aware that all empires fall. I learnt a short poem at school, written by the Irish nationalist Padraig Pearse - Pearse was one of the Rebels of the 1916 Easter Rising, and was executed by the British. ‘Tara is Grass’ really says it all about empires, and how, perhaps, this fall will come to us all https://youtu.be/g3tZnDxeg_U?si=hCyT2HErywtxcVGZ

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The barbarians are well past the gate...Capital punishment is obviously underused in the West...

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What strikes me about this liberal, scientism attitude of the lowest common denominator (it's just stuff!) is how hypocritical and contradictory it is. Are the megalithic structures of Great Zimbabwe just a pile of rocks, too? Something tells me that vandalism there would not be taken so lightly; it's only Western monuments that get this treatment. More than that, is Ukraine just a bunch of dirt? Are racial slurs just vowels and consonants? Is online "disinformation" and "harassment" a bunch of 1's and 0's? Is democracy a meaningless social construct? Is slavery just another form of labor, rape another kind of sex? We're just animals, right? Or are we just carbon and water? If so, does that include BIPOC & LGBTQWERTY?

You get the idea. Only the wrong kinds of people and their belief systems get their values downgraded to molecules and constructs -- this deconstruction is never applied to the sacred cows of Progressive Liberalism itself.

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We know it's a specious argument because we grew up hearing about how horrid it was when old-fashioned Christians went around knocking over standing stones and covering up nude statues. For some strange reason, it's terrible to knock down a statue or deface a monument if you believe it to be pagan, but it's protected speech if you're angry about the weather. To call it a double standard misses the point; the very fact that they hold themselves to a different standard than they do us is precisely the point. We are a conquered people.

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Reminds me of the idiots that invaded the Peruvian Nazca Plain at night to carve their climate protest nonsense into the earth and in their clumbsiness ended up damaging the famous ancient animals and lines the natives had created so long ago. It was quickly hushed up, in contrast to January 6 and Charlottesville. Who/whom.

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I don’t know about the Stonehenge attack specifically. But in many of the art gallery attacks, the attackers have managed to walk into the exhibition rooms carrying duffel bags full of equipment, cameras, tripods etc, while wearing face masks. This makes no sense to me at all. I visit art galleries as often as I can, and there’s no way I could get through security looking like that or carrying gear like that - especially if I was in an organised group. This can only be happening with the prior approval of the curators, who have clearly told security to let these people through.

This is an aspect of the story which needs to be looked into more. The “long march through the institutions” means that the current custodians of our art heritage often seem to actively despise the very artworks they’re supposed to protect. One such hater is Maria Balshaw, curator of Tate Britain. In 2022 I went to her Hogarth exhibition. Every drawing, print and painting included a commentary by a BLM activist or “xxx studies” academic, explaining why you absolutely mustn’t enjoy it.

The picture “Marriage A-la-Mode: 2. The Tête à Tête”, included the following remarks by Chinese American academic Chi-ming Yang: ”“Dissolute White people correspond with shiny white objects in this scene of domestic disarray… overall, a picture of White degeneracy.”

It made me nostalgic for old-fashioned traitors like Anthony Blunt. He secretly worked for the KGB against the UK for over 50 years. Yet, as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, Blunt loved and cherished the art heritage in his care as surely as Maria Balshaw despises that in hers. Personally, I would far rather have the evil Bolshevik betrayer Blunt in charge of Tate Britain than “cool Britannia” Balshaw.

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Life can be divided into Quality and Quantity. At the expense of plumbing the depths of quantity (metres, miles, kilograms, calories, profit etc.) we've lost quality: love, honesty, compassion, patriotism, beauty etc.

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I heard that my local library doesn't charge library fines for late books because it makes soo much money processing immigrants....like morgoth says, this takes "managerial expertise"

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How does it make money doing that?

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Whitehall/central govt. pays them. I assume there's so many to process that they had to outsource the caseload to local authorities.

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Go throw paint on a mosque and declare that "it's done to draw attention to the fact that immigration only further co2 emissions and consumption of energy and resources on Biritish soil, and that it's all nothing but a bunch of bricks anyway and insignificant compared to climate change" - and see how the Left and media will do everything but saying it matters little in the big scheme of things.

A lovely Sunday to You and everyone else happening upon this comment. Looking forward to sit down and listen to the cast You're partaking in. All my best.

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So about reform. I think I heard Scrump or someone talking about this - about how it might be all be a ruse to attract conservative voters and then just merge back in with the Conservatives.

Also "Thinking Coalition" / aka "Thinking Slow" aka "Alex Kriel" had a piece yesterday.

https://thinkingcoalition.substack.com/p/reform-uk-another-trojan-horse

Interesting you, and both mentioned, I've all learnt of via the Delingpod.

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''Generally, a more jingoistic atmosphere making is easier for the state to drum up support for and recruits for pointless proxy wars designed to maintain a crumbling hegemony. In that context there are clear signs that anti-Iranian and anti-Chinese feelings are also being manufactured, along with anti-Muslim sentiment.''

This is the scenario that I've been considering the most.

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When order does return to the land, and all this folly is over, as it will happen as per Evolian Cyclical History you seem to be subscribed to, the ones that restore order need to be of an entirely different stock from the modern progressive elites. I feel like if blogging on the culture war achieves something, it is the chance that someone reading will be in a position of power when the time comes, or to be more clear, to form a better elite who understands perennial truths and respects not just the people they rule, but the reality the universe operates under. The phonies we have in power today are clueless idiots whose entire worldview is shaped by presentism and the 1960's cultural INVOLUTION. As for the masses being this retarded into buying climate change apocalyptic b.s, i can only say what i wrote in my most recent article, that "The flock will follow its Sheppard". If you fix the elite class you can fix the population. Too many a right wing blogger thinks his duty is to raise awareness among the masses. That is the logic of the revolutionary. The true change will come in a replacement of elites, as per elite theory.

Thanks for the eloquent piece, that is precisely why i'm a paid sub. Every post is delightful, even if many are more on the short side lately.

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I'd support the death penalty for people who deface ancient monuments like Stonehenge.

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I'm not sure modern liberals are a death cult, I think they are victims of ennui, and as such they target symbols of achievement. Whether it’s a business, a private jet, or stones which stand on a site which was already ancient when they were erected, the climate cultists always lash out at that which reminds them of their own insignificance.

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Why not both?

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A bored death cult, yikes!

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Fascinating comment, definitely deserves some serious thought. Might also examine their hatred of beauty in general.

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They wish to destroy the source of their ennui.

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A Death Cult indeed!

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