Kelli Buzzard writes Climate Imperialismat American Mind to explain how climatist overlords are oppressing the lives of ordinary people who live in places like the nation of Hungary. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
E.U. energy mandates impose needless suffering in the name of elite fantasy.
The American intellectual Rob Henderson coined the term “luxury beliefs” to describe the status-conferring ideas and opinions of wealthy elites. Examples of these beliefs include “defund the police,” “dismantle the patriarchy,” and “net zero carbon now.”
Luxury beliefs have the attractive quality that those most likely to promote them rarely face their consequences. For example, the “defund the police” crowd tends not to live in crime-ridden inner-city neighborhoods that count on the police to maintain order. Statistically, those who rage against the patriarchy and traditional marriage eventually marry but divorce at much lower rates than other Americans.
Nowhere is this trend more clear than in the disastrous realm of climate policy.
Climate activists who call for a ban on fossil fuel consumption and a phase-out of the combustion engine almost always live in metro areas where they don’t need a car.If they drive, they can afford $5-a-gallon gasoline or can buy a $66,000 electric vehicle.
Meanwhile, their luxury beliefs become public policy and hurt the rest of us.
In recent months, for example, the U.S. government passed a climate change bill masquerading as a measure to reduce inflation. In Europe, the E.U. has committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2050. The uber-elite internationalist group, the World Economic Forum, linked arms with the Chinese Communist Party in a bid to “radically transform” the world economy and stave off “climate catastrophe,” which amounts to the “real battle of our time.”
The premises of climate alarmism are almost all entirely untrue. Natural disaster-related deaths have declined, not increased, and plastic waste danger is overblown. While the world’s capacity to produce more food has skyrocketed, climate change has contributed minimally to the world’s wars, and the destruction of rainforests has little to do with changes in the climate.
But the fantasies of climate hysteria prompt hasty, radical action, resulting in developing nations being denied the cheap energy sources they need–coal, wood, dung, fossil fuels—to grow wealth, rise out of abject poverty, and enjoy the option of developing green policies in the future.
Hungary and Cold
The case of Hungary, where I work and write, is not as dire as in impoverished places like rural Asia or Sub-saharan Africa. Nonetheless, the carbon-neutral policies from Brussels, London, and Washington have affected every aspect of Hungarian society.
Hungary is a small, landlocked former Soviet-bloc nation located in the heart of Europe. As a member of the European Union, Hungary must adopt European Green Deal policies, which seek to “decarbonize” the continent by 2050. This has resulted in a push to diversify the nation’s energy supply by building solar farms, embarking on new nuclear energy plant projects, and installing solar panels on government and residential buildings. But green energy sources are not only insufficient to meet the nation’s energy demands. They are also unreliable depending on the weather.
So Hungarians, ever-realistic people, rely on fossil fuel sources in the interim.
More than half of Hungary’s energy comes from imported fossil fuels. Like Germany and other Western European nations, Hungary has gotten most of its natural gas and oil supplies from Russia in the past. But Hungary has long sought to diversify its energy sources. Toward that end, during the Trump Administration, the Hungarian government inked a deal to import natural gas from America through a Croatian port. The agreement was promising, as America was an energy-surplus country and a willing trade partner. The deal fell apart, however; the United States canceled the contract on day one of the Biden Administration.
Hungary has also sought to offset its fossil fuel consumption by adding nuclear power to its mix, thus promoting greater energy security by relying less on Russian oil. The nation currently operates four nuclear power plants and is looking for an international partner to build two more. But, ironically, the only company to offer a bid on the project was Russian nuclear power giant Rosatom.
In the wake of the war in Ukraine, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is routinely called “Putin’s Puppet” or similar derogations. Central to the name-calling is Prime Minister Orbán’s realism. While he supports efforts to reduce carbon emissions and plans to generate up to 90% of his country’s energy from nuclear and solar sources by 2030, Orbán’s more significant concern is how to preserve his nation’s way of life now. The truth is that Hungary needs oil and gas to survive. As a result, the Hungarian Prime Minister roundly rejects calls to cut off those sources, regardless of internationalist green energy policies or Russian aggression in the neighborhood.
At present, the war next door in Ukraine rages on and shows no signs of stopping, NATO sanctions notwithstanding. Russia shopped for new buyers and created new oil trade relationships with countries like China and India. Putin, his coffers burgeoning, recently turned off Europe’s gas supply, promising not to turn it back on until western sanctions are lifted. The action, of course, resulted in skyrocketing fuel costs across the continent, including here in Hungary. Like it or not, Europe, which has allowed itself to be captured by climate extremism, cannot at present survive on green energy sources alone. The continent relies on Russian gas and will for quite some time to come.
Climate Lemmings
Despite the prime minister’s resolve, Hungarians are facing the facts:heating prices are projected to increase at least 6-fold during the winter; a local university is considering closing its dorms; Budapest bridges and public buildings are shutting lights off two hours early every night; Budapest’s trams, trolleys, and escalators may shut down; sharp increases in freight rates threaten to spike the costs of household goods and food; a Hungarian energy company just went bust; the national opera reduced its performance line-up by half; and the tourist sector in Budapest may collapse altogether.
I recently celebrated my first anniversary of living in Hungary by moving into a smaller, more energy-efficient apartment and purchasing the warmest winter comforter money could buy. Because by all accounts, without drastic reductions in use, my energy costs will increase six-fold in the coming months. No luxury belief will change that.
The true divide in our ongoing civil war is not geographical but political. It is between those who covet the power to control others and those who want to be left alone. Within this context, the geography comes into view: it is a conflict between metropolitan Washington, D.C. and the whole rest of the country. And it had already been started some years ago during the Obama presidency.
The battles are being fought in the media, the courts, and legislative chambers and occasionally boiling over into the streets.
Agents of the state are becoming increasingly more obvious in their efforts to suppress dissent.Political crimes have emerged as an ostensible new class of offense…where nothing is stolen and no one is actually harmed, but resistance to authoritarian control threatens the well-being of those who covet power.
How can such a small area dominate so vast a continent? They have the power, or at least they think so. When the eleven Confederate states seceded, 70% of the officers of the U.S. Army joined them. For a while then, the tail managed to wag the dog. Then the larger picture began to take shape.
It was into today’s milieu that emerged one Donald J. Trump as a perceived reckless iconoclast — smashing the idols of authority regardless of the consequences. After all, apple carts were meant to be upset. And while the authoritarians have used every weapon in their arsenal, Trump’s stature has grown. Thus, the shoddy tactics being used against him have morphed into clichés, losing much of their effectiveness. Even fear, the most reliable tool in the box, is no longer getting the job done.
First, we were endlessly harangued about how we’re to blame for subtle trends in the weather.Then a strange virus of possible man-made origin is portrayed as an emergency requiring significantly more authority on the part of obviously fallible officials. Statistical deception was employed to the point of reductio ad absurdum.
Add to this the attrition of key members of the media. Bari Weiss, formerly of the N.Y. Times; Matt Taibbi, formerly of Rolling Stone; and Sharyl Attkisson, formerly of CBS, are three of the more notable defectors away from the Orwellian nightmare of modern journalism. There are pro-state authoritarians scattered throughout the nation — just as the Confederacy had supporters in the Union, though they were mostly along the border regions. The difference is that today’s statists have typically been trained by a corrupt education establishment. Over time, some will realize how they’ve been misled.
This conflict is hardly contained within the United States. But socially stratified Europe and Asia were especially more vulnerable to the dogma of Marxist class struggle than the bourgeois paradise we call America. And thus, Americans are more familiar with freedom and are hence more hostile to tyranny. The complaint and the alarm are that the forces of authoritarianism have succeeded as much as they have in the last few decades. Systematic indoctrination in the class rooms accounts for much of this; and from there, it has spilled out through the media.
Ideas and information are the true weapons in this struggle. This explains why the other side is so hell-bent on manipulating the language. Yeah, and we’re wise to that, too. They are so superficial that they actually believe that such nonsense as banning gendered pronouns will be taken seriously.
One question destroys the liberal/conservative narrative fiction:
Were Stalin, Mao, and Hitler “ultra-liberal”?
Because if this is supposed to be the political spectrum model for the world — and logic presupposes that must be the case — then having it range from ultra-liberal to ultra-conservative poses a big problem: where do the “baddies” belong?
Consider all of this in the context of the political spectrum as the logical arrangement of ideologies based on their level of governmental control, with maximum and minimum levels at each end. It stands to reason that since socialism is the standard leftist ideology, with forced wealth redistribution and a centrally controlled economy, these would require the government to be at a maximum level; thus, this would be the left side of the spectrum. Also consider that it’s going to take the maximum government to take “from each according to his ability.”
Does the authoritarianism of the anti-liberty left along with the negation of property rights and the economic slavery of socialism seem amenable to liberalism?
Contrast that with the fact that the precepts of the pro-freedom right with an emphasis on liberty and limited government would mean minimal control. In fact, with the term “liberal” closely associated with liberty and minimal government, the logical conclusion is that all of these terms belong on the pro-freedom right.
A left-right political spectrum with maximum governmental control on the left and minimal governmental control on the right, easily accommodates these questions. That is not the case with the liberal/conservative canard, since maximum government would not seem to be amenable to an ideology closely associated with liberty.
Finally, consider this from author and engineer Robert A. Heinlein, encapsulating the whole issue with one test:
Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.
It does seem as though most people fall into one of two distinct groups. The first are control-obsessed collectivists who demand that we place the public good ahead of the good of the individual. Then there are those individualists who just want to be left alone.
Footnote: Jordan Peterson has some advice for the elites pushing this mad dash for Net Zero.
Transcript of Peterson’s concluding comments:
A better way forward would be to prioritize the problems that beset all of us on this still green, functional and increasingly abundant planet. With the requisite focus and attention demanded of a true political class elected by the people, capable of and willing to look at everything: Trying to fix where necessary; trying to maintain as much freedom and autonomy as possible. And stop simply capitalizing narcissistically on the mere appearance of action, knowledge and virtue.
We should obtain true cooperative consent from those affected: farmers, truckers, working-class people who have turned an irritated desperation to figures such as Trump. And work with them rather than forbidding them with your power or improving them so they will be finally worthy of your time and attention.
Help replace dirty energy with clean, if you must. But do it on your own dime and make sure that the results are cheap and plentiful, if you want to help the poor and the planet.
The warning bells are ringing. Listen to them before they turn into sirens. We will not advance without resistance through the straits of your enforced privation. We will not allow you to steal and destroy the energy that makes our lives bearable, and that produces our food and shelter and housing and the sporadic delights of modern life, just to address your existential terror. Particularly when it will fail to do so in any case.
We will not allow our children to be criticized, first for having the temerity to merely exist, and then to be deprived of the prosperous and opportunity-rich future we strived so hard to prepare for them.
We remain unconvinced by your frightened and self-congratulatory moralizing and intellectual pretension, ignorance of the limits of statistics and misuse of arithmetic. We do not believe finally and most absolutely that your declared emergency, and the panic you sow because of it, means that you should now be ceded all necessary authority.
So leave us alone: you centralizers of power, you worshipers of Gaia, you sacrificers of the wealth and property of others. You would be planetary saviors, you machiavellian pretenders and virtue signalers, objecting to power all the while you gather it around you madly.
Leave us alone, to prosper or not as a result of our own choices, as a result of our own actions, in the exercise of our own requisite and irreducible responsibility. Leave us alone or reap the whirlwind, and watch in consequence the terrible destruction of what you purport to save.
This election season candidates are getting lots of energy-related questions. Here are pro-freedom, pro-human answers to some of the most popular ones. Alex Epstein
♦ What’s your policy on energy, environment, and climate?
I believe in energy freedom: the freedom to use all forms of energy, with laws against emissions and practices that are significantly harmful and reasonably preventable.
5 key energy freedom policies are:
1. Liberate responsible development
2. End preferences for unreliable electricity
3. Reform air and water emissions standards to incorporate cost-benefit analysis
4. Reduce long-term CO2 emissions via liberating innovation
5. Decriminalize nuclear¹
♦ Do you believe in climate change?
I believe in climate change, not climate catastrophe.
The world has warmed ~1° C in the last 170 years. Humans have some influence. But because we are so good at mastering climate, climate disaster deaths fell 98% over the last century.²
♦ Are you a “climate denier”?
I’m a climate thinker.
I recognize that climate is ever-changing, that humans have some influence, and that humans with plentiful energy can master virtually any climate. That’s why, as CO2 levels have gone up, climate disaster deaths have plummeted.
♦ What’s your plan to deal with CO2 emissions?
My plan is:
1. Recognize that CO2 emissions reduction can only be achieved humanely and practically a) long-term and b) through developing globally cost-competitive alternatives.
2. Liberate nuclear and other promising alternatives.
♦ Why did gasoline prices get so high this year?
While multiple factors, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, played a role, the fundamental cause is US and international anti-oil policies that prevent supply from rapidly increasing to meet demand.³
♦ Why don’t oil and gas companies drill more despite record profits?
Oil and gas would like to profit much more from currently high prices but it is difficult to increase drilling short-term under the present regulatory regime and investors are scared about more government punishment.⁴
♦ Why is Europe in a far worse energy crisis than we are?
Europe has taken anti-fossil-fuel policies further. For example, while we have allowed fracking to produce abundant energy Europe has largely banned it.
With the “Inflation Reduction Act” we are getting closer to Europe.⁵
♦ Do you believe in “all of the above?”
No, I believe in “always the best.”
We should always use the best form of energy for the job. E.g., we don’t use animal dung for energy in the US, even though it’s “one of the above.”
The best source of energy in any situation is what business and consumers choose as best on a free market with reasonable anti-pollution laws.
If something can’t compete on these terms then we shouldn’t use it—whether it’s animal dung, solar, or wind.
♦ What’s your position on solar and wind?
Solar and wind should be required to compete on a real market. In the context of electricity that means generators using solar and wind should be held to the same reliability standards as everyone else. Currently they’re not—which is disastrous.⁶
The root cause of our grid’s reliability problems is simple: America is shutting down too many reliable power plants—plants that can be controlled to produce electricity when needed in the exact quantity needed. And it is attempting to replace them with unreliable solar and wind.
♦ What’s your position on nuclear power?
Nuclear power is an extremely promising technology that is uniquely safe and clean, and has the potential to be cost-effective.
Tragically, nuclear has been nearly criminalized by governments. We need radical reform to decriminalize it.⁷
♦ What’s your position on electric vehicles?
Electric vehicles are a valuable product for certain people but not yet cost-effective for the vast majority of us. Let electric vehicles compete on a free market; don’t in any way pressure anyone to use them before 1) they can afford them and 2) the grid can handle them.⁸
♦ What’s your position on the “Inflation Reduction Act”?
It’s a 4-step recipe for ruining US energy:
1. Make us more dependent on unreliable electricity
2. Impose new oil and gas taxes during an energy crisis
3. Give EPA more power to restrict fossil fuels
4. Give more power to anti-fossil-fuel activists⁹
♦ How does the Inflation Reduction Act affect my state?
The Inflation Reduction Act got passed in large part by offering various payoffs to various states. Whatever benefit you get from those payoffs pales in comparison to higher energy costs, an unreliable grid, and a worse economy.¹⁰
♦ Do you believe in taking money from fossil fuel companies?
I believe candidates should proudly take money from fossil fuel companies if they and the company support energy freedom policies.
Fossil fuel companies are essential to the survival of 8 billion people for the foreseeable future.
For More on this from Alex Epstein
EnergyTalkingPoints.com: Hundreds of concise, powerful, well-referenced talking points on energy, environmental, and climate issues.
George Neumayer explains at the American Spectator The European Death Wish. Excerpts in italics with my bolds
It is seen in the boring hysteria about Giorgia Meloni.
The European elite’s sour reaction to the rise of Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s next prime minister, reveals less about her politics than its own. It harbors a death wish for Europe — a willfulness passed off as a “progressive” ideology that has led to a culture of death, demographic implosion, a floundering economy, and the prospect of a Eurabian future. Consequently, any European politician with even a modicum of common sense poses a grave threat to the elite. Its description of Meloni as a “fascist” is gaslighting of the first order — a lame projection of its own desire to build a coercive one-party state.
Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini was obviously an ideologue of the left, not the right — a socialist and atheist enamored by “progressive” schemes popular in the early 20th century. The unremarkable conservative and Christian views of Meloni bear no trace of that monstrous ideology of “human improvement.” It is the European Left, not the Right, that pushes eugenics against the disabled and elderly and that seeks to suppress freedom in the name of statism.
What European liberals call “progress” is just old barbarism and ancient tyranny
— the exploitation of the weak by the powerful — under a modern guise.
A crackpot devotee of the nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche, Mussolini recognized no power above the state. He treated God as dead, much like today’s secularists who declare any deviation from their edicts evidence of bad citizenship. (In America, this now takes the form of a politicized FBI that treats pro-lifers and conscientious parents like criminals.) While not as overtly brutal as Mussolini, today’s progressives echo his eugenic intolerance and statist scheming. Their whole cult of abortion is based on a might-makes-right ethos that gives off a strong whiff of fascism.
In the mouths of progressives, “democracy” is nothing more than a euphemism for regnant and unchallenged progressivism.
Whenever woke hysterical bores pronounce someone a “danger to democracy,” what they are really saying is that that figure impedes their Nietzschean will to power. Even the tiniest steps away from the grave they are digging for Europe cause them apoplectic consternation. Recall the European Left’s bashing of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI for gingerly suggesting that Europeans procreate and stop poisoning the continent’s Christian roots.
Only in an age as unbalanced as this one would an Italian politician who quotes G.K. Chesterton and reads J.R.R. Tolkien be considered a threat to Western Europe. That Italian bishops are joining in these denunciations is another measure of our absurd times.
In other words, the Church in Italy is going to undercut one of the few politicians willing to support the revival of Christianity in Europe. Nothing that Meloni has proposed undermines Catholic social teaching. On the contrary, she pays homage to the central teaching underpinning it: The common good and the natural moral law are inseparable. Leave it to today’s hierarchy to treat the Church’s friends as enemies while protecting her foes. The progressives for whom Zuppi and company run interference abhor Catholic culture and seek to turn Europe into a relativistic wasteland ripe for an Islamic takeover.
If Meloni forestalls this future, that is all for the good. That future is a bleak one. She is right to say that the European Left wants to erase man’s God-given identity so that he becomes putty in the hands of the state. That was the ambition of Mussolini, and it remains the ambition of the godless progressives. The whole thrust of their thought is to deny God’s role in determining the good. With Nietzsche, they say that man, not God, is the measure of all things. Out of this subjectivism has come the torrent of transgenderism and all the other malign causes destroying the West.
Meloni simply recognizes the insanity of this subjectivism, which strips from man any identity rooted in God’s order and turns him into a slave of the state.
In truth, her espousal of Christianity is pretty mild, and she is hardly an old-fashioned traditionalist. According to the Italian press, she is not even married. She has a “partner.” But it doesn’t matter. The European Left will bay about her “theocracy” and “fascism” all while propping up politicians who actually subscribe to the statism of Mussolini. This is the European death wish — to kill its prophets and lionize its fools and enemies.
Background Post: Common Sense from Italy’s New Leader
The speech was delivered by Giorgia Meloni in 2020 introducing us to her worldview, values and purpose.. For those prefering to read her remarks, I provide a transcript lightly edited from the closed captions. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Giorgia Meloni Winner of Sunday’s Italian Election
Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, I wish to thank you – thank you to our friends of the Edmund Burke foundation for inviting me to open this important event, for choosing Rome in Italy as a venue for this second edition of the National Conservative conference.
I entirely, entirely agree with your views on the need to put conservatism back into its traditional sphere of national identity. The great challenge facing us today is defending national identity and the very existence of the nation-states as a sole means of safeguarding people’s sovereignty and freedom.
This is why I find the title of Yoram Hazony’s latest book, The Virtue of Nationalism, effective. Because in a few words it clearly sums up the fact that our worldview is the exact opposite to what they would like to force on us. Yoram, your book will scandalize Italy. And I will gladly make my part on this effect because I intend to quote it frequently.
Our main enemy today is the globalist drift of those who view identity in all its forms to be an evil to be overcome and constantly acts to shift real power away from the people to supranational entities headed by supposedly enlightened elites.
Let us be clear, let us bear this clearly in our mind because we did not fight against and defeat communism in order to replace it with a new internationalist regime, but to permit independent nation states once again to defend the freedom identity and sovereignty of their peoples.
It is in this same spirit that today Fratelli d’Italia is fighting for a Europe of free and sovereign nations as a serious alternative to the bureaucratic super state that has been gradually foisted on us since the Maastricht Treaty, following the rationale of the external constraint whereby there is always someone who claims the right to take decisions in place of the sovereign peoples and the national governments.
And although that someone in Brussels or Frankfurt, Davos or the City of London lacks democratic legitimacy, every day it conditions the economic choices and the political decisions of those who have been vested with that legitimacy by the popular vote. It means that whether the false democrats like it or not, national conservatives in every latitude are actually the only real democrats. Because it is only by defending the nation state that we defend the political sovereignty that belongs to the citizens of that state.
But of course a national conservative cannot be content with claiming to be a democrat. Democracy without values becomes demagoguery, and can itself heighten decadence. I believe that it is not difficult for the conservative world to identify the substance with which we want to fill our democracies. We do not need the ideological indoctrination manuals that are so dear to the left.
Our vision of values and our worldview is actually quite simple as a great philosopher that Francesco mentioned who died a few days ago. Roger Scruton pointed out the real reason people are conservatives is that they are attached to the things they love. And another great father of conservative thought, John Tolkien, wrote a similar thing in one of the characters of his Lord of the Rings:
“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
This was Faramir’s worldview ; this worldview is embodied every day by millions of ordinary men and women and sometimes even by some of the great men of history. Throughout this history, where John Paul II and Ronald Reagan to whom today’s meeting is dedicated. John Paul II was a patriot who knew perfectly well that nations and the fact of belonging to a people sharing the same historical memory were the bedrock of the freedom of every man. He never tired of repeating that there is no Europe without Christianity, a teaching which is more topical than than ever today when the Christian identity of Europe is under attack by a distorted secularism that even attacks the symbol of the Christian tradition while throwing open the gates to the most intransigent form of Islam that wants to apply Sharia law in our European homelands. In which lies at the heart of the Islamic terrorism that has caused caused bloodshed in Europe and in the United States.
John Paul II’s patriotism also enabled him to view today’s historical events in the light of a Christian realism shorn of all rhetoric, as in the case of immigration. He considered that the right to emigrate had to be preceded first and foremost by a right not to emigrate, to live in peace and dignity in one’s homeland. Christian Petra was also critic of mass immigration when you think about that.
Today John Paul II would be on the European Union’s blacklist as a dangerous subversive; but not for us. Neither would Ronald Reagan have faired any better. More than any President of the United States, Reagan stood for the American “We the People” of that preamble to the Constitution that based national democracy on the principle of popular sovereignty, another great enemy of the globalist league.
I was very impressed by the metaphor Reagan used to describe the conservative movement as a three-legged stool. Without any one of these three legs, the stool will collapse. In the three legs of our defense, fiscal and social, defense– the first leg is a patriotic soul, which today would be called sovereignist. It means the defense of nation and interest in popular sovereignty.
The second leg is economic freedom, which means also a just relationship between government and taxpayers. A great lesson of conservative thought is that an oppressive tax system not only limits free enterprise, production and consumption, but it also destroys the commonality between the state and citizens. Because over taxation enforces the state to build up a system of controls similar to that of the totalitarian regimes, restricting individual freedoms.
Awakening the economy as a free enterprise, lower taxes, less bureaucracy, public investment in infrastructure and the defense of national interests this is the recipe with which President Trump today is making the American economy Strong. And it is the recipe that we would we would like to bring to Italy, to Europe as an an alternative to the blind austerity Germany wanted. which so far has only benefited Germany and the big financial speculators.
And the third leg is the social soul to protect religious and moral values, the noblest purpose of all political action. These values and principles are found in the three concepts of today’s meeting: God, Freedom and Nation. Or in the Italian formula to which I am very attached: God, Homeland and Family.
One of the founding values of conservative movements is the defense of the natural family. They would like us to give up defending the family, considering it to be an archaic and backward concept to be superseded. They would like to convince us that a family is any emotional bond between sentient beings; that it is a sign of great civil and moral progress to pay a poor mother to keep her child in her womb for nine months and then snatch it from the her arms to give it away to whoever has bought it.
We reject all this without a moment’s hesitation even though today it is considered highly scandalous and even revolutionary to say that a family is made up of a man and a woman and any children they may have, They are creating a world of alleged individual rights and formal freedom. In theory we are free or almost free to do anything we like: free to take drugs , free to have an abortion , to take the lives of human beings suffering from serious illnesses and therefore defenseless. Only rights and few if at all do this
Free indeed, but never free for the sake of something, for fulfilling a life project. Free indeed, but fenced in within a predetermined enclosure, because if you dare try to climb to clamber over it, you are censored by the new Menlo Park high priests of the only school of thought allowed.
So our task is to counter this drift and to reaffirm that the nation is the place where our values are safeguarded and transmitted, renewed every day as the common sense of the people forging an identity that is the greatest treasure in the world. Our opponents paint us as obtuse nationalists in love with old verities, rejecting any dialogue, ready to wage war on the slightest pretext.
But that is not the case. The sovereignty of nations is not out to destroy Europe, it wants the true real Europe of peoples and identities, not the abstract Europe decided in back rooms by technocrats. It does not want to impose its own interests at the expense of other nation states. When Trump says America first or we say Italy first, it certainly means defending the national economic interests of those countries.
But as conservatives I think we have to focus above all on the world of high finance and the great economic powers that are imposing their will on the nation-states. As I say it the message our homeland first means reaffirming the primacy of the real economy over the financial economy; of popular sovereignty over supranational entities with no democratic legitimacy. Modern national conservatism defends the identities of nations as the basis for the new forms of cooperation.
That is why while defending the Italian sovereignty, we cannot forget to defend Viktor Orbán’s Hungary or Kachinsky’s Poland, once again under attack from the European progressive mainstream. That is why, without the shameful ambiguity typical of the left, we defend the right of the State of Israel to its security and future peace and prosperity. Our patriotism is the will to defend our homelands from the great challenges of our age; challenges that will mark the future and the very survival of our civilization. We have to face together the division between extreme nationalism which is as bad as the weakness of ill-defined supranational entities such as the European Union.
The only possible answer must be the alliance of homelands that believe in a common destiny. It is this vision that has led us to join the great family of the European conservatives: the idea of a new Europe as a confederation of sovereign nation-states capable of cooperating on important matters while remaining free to take decisions regarding matters affecting our daily lives. It is much more than a choice of political positioning. It is taking up a firm stand and choosing sides.
I have an image in mind of President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II walking in the gardens of the president residence in Florida back in 1987. It is the image of two great men walking together alone along the paths of history in that brief period in the 20th century that was to change the world very shortly thereafter with the collapse of communism thanks also to them.
Remembering them here today it is not simply to pay them tribute. It is a warning, a commitment not to betray their dream of freedom, which is our dream of freedom too. Thank you.
Footnote: Confirmation that Media Pushing Left Wing Propaganda
USA Today: Giorgia Meloni: Who is Italy’s most far-right leader since Mussolini?
NY Post: Far-right pol Giorgia Meloni poised to become Italy’s first female PM
BBC: Far-right pol Giorgia Meloni poised to become Italy’s first female PM
The Guardian: Giorgia Meloni is a danger to Italy and the rest of Europe
CNN: Giorgia Meloni claims victory to become Italy’s most far-right government since the fascist era of Benito Mussolini
NY Times: Some Women Fear Giorgia Meloni’s Far-Right Agenda Will Set Italy Back
The Conversation: Giorgia Meloni and the return of fascism: how Italy got here
Summary: A person claims to be a proud mother, Italian and Christian. For this she is labeled: Far-right. Which tells you she is mainstream and the labelers are far-left.
Carson Holloway writes at American MInd Actual Malice. Excepts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Constitutional government demands a free but responsible media.
America’s corporate press is out of control. It claims to be an institution essential to successful self-government—and it would in fact be so, if it did its job responsibly. But all too often the American press seeks not to facilitate democratic deliberation by informing the voters but instead to shape political outcomes by dealing in hysteria and misinformation. More specifically, the corporate media routinely seeks to pull the nation’s politics leftward by using defamation to render prominent figures on the right odious to the public.
The case of Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz is only the most recent example. For much of the last two years, Gaetz has been the target of “news” stories, based on anonymous sources, that he was under investigation by the Department of Justice for sex trafficking. Now, we are told, career prosecutors are recommending against charges because of concerns about the credibility of the witnesses. This is another version of the same treatment given to Donald Trump before and during his presidency. For years Trump was subjected to innumerable breathless stories that he had “colluded” with Russia to steal the presidency. But when the investigation was over it turned out that Trump was guilty of no such thing.
These stories did not pan out, in the sense that they never led to legal charges, much less convictions. But they succeeded in what was no doubt their primary purpose. They were used to harass important figures on the American right, to hinder their political careers, and to prevent them, as much as possible, from engaging with voters on important issues.
As I argue in a new Provocations essay published by the Claremont Institute’s Washington Center for the American Way of Life, our press and our politics need not be this corrupt. Our present media culture of character assassination is not the necessary result of a free press.
It is instead the result of a licentious press, which is in turn the creation of a licentious Supreme Court.
In the English and American legal tradition, the time-honored remedy for false and defamatory publication is the libel suit. For most of our history, the real possibility that victims of defamation—including politicians—might sue for damages and succeed imposed a salutary check on the press. Simple prudence then required reporters and editors to make sure that allegations were true before publishing them. That wholesome discipline tended both to protect the reputations of individual Americans and, at the same time, to support the truthfulness of the nation’s political discourse.
This changed, however, in 1964, when the Supreme Court issued its opinion in New York Times v. Sullivan—a decision that revised American libel law and ushered in our present era of press licentiousness. Writing for his colleagues, Justice William Brennan used the Court’s ruling in the New York Times case to impose a novel First Amendment doctrine on the country. The original and traditional understanding of the First Amendment had held that libel was unprotected by the Constitution, that it was outside the scope of the “freedom of the press” enshrined in the First Amendment. The New York Times Court departed from that older understanding by holding that, henceforward, “public officials” would be held to a different standard than ordinary citizens when they sued for libel. Subsequent rulings expanded the new requirements to the more expansive category of “public figures.” The result: under the now prevailing standards, public figures must demonstrate “actual malice” in order to sue successfully for libel. That is, they must show not only that they have been defamed by false publication, but also that the publisher acted with knowledge that the published material was false, or at least acted with reckless disregard for its truth or falsity.
The ruling resulted in a kind of revolution in American libel law. Prior to it, public figures could and did sue successfully for damages when they had been the victims of false, defamatory reporting.Today, thanks to the actual malice standard, it is practically impossible to do so—even when the press has admittedly publicized falsehood. Thus, most recently, Sarah Palin’s lawsuit against the New York Times failed, even though the Times conceded that it had erred in its claims about Palin, because the court held that Palin could not demonstrate “actual malice” on the part of the Times.
Contrary to Justice Brennan’s claims, the “actual malice” standard is not required by the First Amendment. The Founding generation did not understand the “freedom of the press” to include a license to libel. They held that libel was wrong, was outside the scope of the freedom of the press, and gave no thought to special standards, applied selectively to different classes of citizens, that would permit the press to get away with libel in some cases.
By imposing the “actual malice” standard, the New York Times Court not only erred in its interpretation of the First Amendment. It did serious damage to our nation’s political way of life, by undermining several key goals of our form of government. Americans are rightly taught that the core function of their government is to secure the rights of the people. But the New York Times doctrine actually erodes protection for a valuable right—the right to one’s reputation. Our country is also premised on the idea of equality. The New York Times doctrine, however, creates inequality among various classes of Americans—most obviously between ordinary citizens and public figures, whose right to reputation is less protected. Finally, America was founded to be a self-governing nation.
But self-government is made into a charade when a pervasive culture of press dishonesty prevents the people from making rational and informed judgments about those contending for public office.
The Supreme Court helped to create these problems, and the Supreme Court can do a good deal to correct them. There are signs that some justices, such as Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, are interested in doing so. Their colleagues should join with them and reverse New York Times v. Sullivan at the earliest suitable opportunity.
The speech was delivered by Giorgia Meloni in 2020 introducing us to her worldview, values and purpose.. For those prefering to read her remarks, I provide a transcript lightly edited from the closed captions. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Giorgia Meloni Winner of Sunday’s Italian Election
Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, I wish to thank you – thank you to our friends of the Edmund Burke foundation for inviting me to open this important event, for choosing Rome in Italy as a venue for this second edition of the National Conservative conference.
I entirely, entirely agree with your views on the need to put conservatism back into its traditional sphere of national identity. The great challenge facing us today is defending national identity and the very existence of the nation-states as a sole means of safeguarding people’s sovereignty and freedom.
This is why I find the title of Yoram Hazony’s latest book, The Virtue of Nationalism, effective. Because in a few words it clearly sums up the fact that our worldview is the exact opposite to what they would like to force on us. Yoram, your book will scandalize Italy. And I will gladly make my part on this effect because I intend to quote it frequently.
Our main enemy today is the globalist drift of those who view identity in all its forms to be an evil to be overcome and constantly acts to shift real power away from the people to supranational entities headed by supposedly enlightened elites.
Let us be clear, let us bear this clearly in our mind because we did not fight against and defeat communism in order to replace it with a new internationalist regime, but to permit independent nation states once again to defend the freedom identity and sovereignty of their peoples.
It is in this same spirit that today Fratelli d’Italia is fighting for a Europe of free and sovereign nations as a serious alternative to the bureaucratic super state that has been gradually foisted on us since the Maastricht Treaty, following the rationale of the external constraint whereby there is always someone who claims the right to take decisions in place of the sovereign peoples and the national governments.
And although that someone in Brussels or Frankfurt, Davos or the City of London lacks democratic legitimacy, every day it conditions the economic choices and the political decisions of those who have been vested with that legitimacy by the popular vote. It means that whether the false democrats like it or not, national conservatives in every latitude are actually the only real democrats. Because it is only by defending the nation state that we defend the political sovereignty that belongs to the citizens of that state.
But of course a national conservative cannot be content with claiming to be a democrat. Democracy without values becomes demagoguery, and can itself heighten decadence. I believe that it is not difficult for the conservative world to identify the substance with which we want to fill our democracies. We do not need the ideological indoctrination manuals that are so dear to the left.
Our vision of values and our worldview is actually quite simple as a great philosopher that Francesco mentioned who died a few days ago. Roger Scruton pointed out the real reason people are conservatives is that they are attached to the things they love. And another great father of conservative thought, John Tolkien, wrote a similar thing in one of the characters of his Lord of the Rings:
“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
This was Faramir’s worldview ; this worldview is embodied every day by millions of ordinary men and women and sometimes even by some of the great men of history. Throughout this history, where John Paul II and Ronald Reagan to whom today’s meeting is dedicated. John Paul II was a patriot who knew perfectly well that nations and the fact of belonging to a people sharing the same historical memory were the bedrock of the freedom of every man. He never tired of repeating that there is no Europe without Christianity, a teaching which is more topical than than ever today when the Christian identity of Europe is under attack by a distorted secularism that even attacks the symbol of the Christian tradition while throwing open the gates to the most intransigent form of Islam that wants to apply Sharia law in our European homelands. In which lies at the heart of the Islamic terrorism that has caused caused bloodshed in Europe and in the United States.
John Paul II’s patriotism also enabled him to view today’s historical events in the light of a Christian realism shorn of all rhetoric, as in the case of immigration. He considered that the right to emigrate had to be preceded first and foremost by a right not to emigrate, to live in peace and dignity in one’s homeland. Christian Petra was also critic of mass immigration when you think about that.
Today John Paul II would be on the European Union’s blacklist as a dangerous subversive; but not for us. Neither would Ronald Reagan have faired any better. More than any President of the United States, Reagan stood for the American “We the People” of that preamble to the Constitution that based national democracy on the principle of popular sovereignty, another great enemy of the globalist league.
I was very impressed by the metaphor Reagan used to describe the conservative movement as a three-legged stool. Without any one of these three legs, the stool will collapse. In the three legs of our defense, fiscal and social, defense– the first leg is a patriotic soul, which today would be called sovereignist. It means the defense of nation and interest in popular sovereignty.
The second leg is economic freedom, which means also a just relationship between government and taxpayers. A great lesson of conservative thought is that an oppressive tax system not only limits free enterprise, production and consumption, but it also destroys the commonality between the state and citizens. Because over taxation enforces the state to build up a system of controls similar to that of the totalitarian regimes, restricting individual freedoms.
Awakening the economy as a free enterprise, lower taxes, less bureaucracy, public investment in infrastructure and the defense of national interests this is the recipe with which President Trump today is making the American economy Strong. And it is the recipe that we would we would like to bring to Italy, to Europe as an an alternative to the blind austerity Germany wanted. which so far has only benefited Germany and the big financial speculators.
And the third leg is the social soul to protect religious and moral values, the noblest purpose of all political action. These values and principles are found in the three concepts of today’s meeting: God, Freedom and Nation. Or in the Italian formula to which I am very attached: God, Homeland and Family.
One of the founding values of conservative movements is the defense of the natural family. They would like us to give up defending the family, considering it to be an archaic and backward concept to be superseded. They would like to convince us that a family is any emotional bond between sentient beings; that it is a sign of great civil and moral progress to pay a poor mother to keep her child in her womb for nine months and then snatch it from the her arms to give it away to whoever has bought it.
We reject all this without a moment’s hesitation even though today it is considered highly scandalous and even revolutionary to say that a family is made up of a man and a woman and any children they may have, They are creating a world of alleged individual rights and formal freedom. In theory we are free or almost free to do anything we like: free to take drugs , free to have an abortion , to take the lives of human beings suffering from serious illnesses and therefore defenseless. Only rights and few if at all do this
Free indeed, but never free for the sake of something, for fulfilling a life project. Free indeed, but fenced in within a predetermined enclosure, because if you dare try to climb to clamber over it, you are censored by the new Menlo Park high priests of the only school of thought allowed.
So our task is to counter this drift and to reaffirm that the nation is the place where our values are safeguarded and transmitted, renewed every day as the common sense of the people forging an identity that is the greatest treasure in the world. Our opponents paint us as obtuse nationalists in love with old verities, rejecting any dialogue, ready to wage war on the slightest pretext.
But that is not the case. The sovereignty of nations is not out to destroy Europe, it wants the true real Europe of peoples and identities, not the abstract Europe decided in back rooms by technocrats. It does not want to impose its own interests at the expense of other nation states. When Trump says America first or we say Italy first, it certainly means defending the national economic interests of those countries.
But as conservatives I think we have to focus above all on the world of high finance and the great economic powers that are imposing their will on the nation-states. As I say it the message our homeland first means reaffirming the primacy of the real economy over the financial economy; of popular sovereignty over supranational entities with no democratic legitimacy. Modern national conservatism defends the identities of nations as the basis for the new forms of cooperation.
That is why while defending the Italian sovereignty, we cannot forget to defend Viktor Orbán’s Hungary or Kachinsky’s Poland, once again under attack from the European progressive mainstream. That is why, without the shameful ambiguity typical of the left, we defend the right of the State of Israel to its security and future peace and prosperity. Our patriotism is the will to defend our homelands from the great challenges of our age; challenges that will mark the future and the very survival of our civilization. We have to face together the division between extreme nationalism which is as bad as the weakness of ill-defined supranational entities such as the European Union.
The only possible answer must be the alliance of homelands that believe in a common destiny. It is this vision that has led us to join the great family of the European conservatives: the idea of a new Europe as a confederation of sovereign nation-states capable of cooperating on important matters while remaining free to take decisions regarding matters affecting our daily lives. It is much more than a choice of political positioning. It is taking up a firm stand and choosing sides.
I have an image in mind of President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II walking in the gardens of the president residence in Florida back in 1987. It is the image of two great men walking together alone along the paths of history in that brief period in the 20th century that was to change the world very shortly thereafter with the collapse of communism thanks also to them.
Remembering them here today it is not simply to pay them tribute. It is a warning, a commitment not to betray their dream of freedom, which is our dream of freedom too. Thank you.
Footnote: Confirmation that Media Pushing Left Wing Propaganda
USA Today: Giorgia Meloni: Who is Italy’s most far-right leader since Mussolini?
NY Post: Far-right pol Giorgia Meloni poised to become Italy’s first female PM
BBC: Far-right pol Giorgia Meloni poised to become Italy’s first female PM
The Guardian: Giorgia Meloni is a danger to Italy and the rest of Europe
CNN: Giorgia Meloni claims victory to become Italy’s most far-right government since the fascist era of Benito Mussolini
NY Times: Some Women Fear Giorgia Meloni’s Far-Right Agenda Will Set Italy Back
The Conversation: Giorgia Meloni and the return of fascism: how Italy got here
Summary: A person claims to be a proud mother, Italian and Christian. For this she is labeled: Far-right. Which tells you she is mainstream and the labelers are far-left.
There wasn’t much drama to the event. Ever since the Conservative leadership race was announced, it was clear from the crowds that showed up at Pierre Poilievre’s rallies that he was the enthusiastic favourite, and by a long shot. He did not merely win. He was a rocket. The rest were Volkswagens.
Secondly, he also demonstrated from the first he was serious, by which I mean the tone and substance of his speeches gave indication this was a guy ready and eager to take on the current leader. He found both a theme and manner that kept the crowds swelling till the very end. Turnout had the excitement level of a general election, and there is no reason whenever the next election occurs—if and when Jagmeet Singh uncouples his diminished NDP from the Liberals—that excitement will abate. In fact, it will be greater.
Justin Trudeau, should he hang on, will go into it as the underdog, and should he drop out before the challenge, Chrystia Freeland will not be the challenger so many in the media have been pretending or building her up to be. Ms. Freeland will be carrying Mr. Trudeau’s baggage, and the only good thing about that is that it won’t be at Pearson Airport.
The Liberals, after their long and dreary tenure, are at present a roaring catastrophe.
They are stumbling in every conceivable direction. They cannot maintain even the most basic and routine of government functions. They have made a mess of issuing Canadian passports—the passport being the most significant and symbolical instruments of citizenship. At the same time, their precious monomania about “systemically racist” Canada has Heritage Canada and the CRTC blindly doling out over half a million dollars to a certified antisemite (not even resident in Canada) to teach “anti-racism”!
They were a mess at the beginning of COVID, maintaining—as always with the Liberals—that it would be “racist” to ban flights. Now at its end or expiry they impose the wantonly useless arriveCAN app and are still uselessly forcing passengers on flights to mask up (between meals) to add two more miseries to the nightmare that is getting in or out of major Canadian airports.
A great country in Europe, under an energy siege from Vladimir Putin, comes to Canada to see if our country can help with its extensive supplies of oil and gas, and is turned away empty handed.
Because Canada under Green Justin has done everything but declare the the oil and gas industry a criminal activity. Instead, that German chancellor is given the promise of a “hydrogen facility” in Stephenville, Newfoundland, which if it ever should develop, which if it ever should develop will come at least a decade past the current crisis.
Trudeau gave Greta Thunberg, the teen scold, a better welcome.
We haven’t had a real Parliament in nearly three years, and the promise is that when it resumes fairly soon, this too will be a “Zoom” production. Every other public event, from concerts to sports shows to conferences, are back to normal, but the Liberal-NDP absentee parliamentarians insist face-to-face House of Commons sittings are a health hazard. No one believes this, but the NDP and the Liberals shamelessly insist on it anyway.
Still, full cabinets can fly to B.C. for special meetings. Do you think that when the PM and the cabinet fly they are wearing masks? Were they wearing masks when they convened for lunch and dinner in B.C.? Does Trudeau wear masks on his many foreign jaunts? Parliament is not functioning as it should and must when members are virtual ghosts, when the whole of Parliament, physically, does not meet. This “health-risk” is just opposition avoidance. The Ottawa press gallery should be pushing this point with force and relentlessly, but alas, no.
Finally, the whole style of this government—apart from its incompetence, its aimlessness, its evolution into nasty and divisive rhetoric, and its resort to “wedge” issues (Trudeau’s cant against the unvaccinated in last summer’s election)—has an even bigger problem.
It has become annoying.
The virtue-speak, the always cloying telling Canadians what they are thinking, the endless moralizing homilies always reflecting self-congratulatory lights back on the speaker, whether the PM, the environment minister, or heritage or diversity. A little smug glow on first entering office is a forgivable folly. But it wears thin in seven years after a trail of ethics breaches, grossly gaudy foreign adventures (the Great Costume Tour of India), numerous still-unfinished inquiries, and above all the Liberals’ manic absorption with global warming.
The government is tired. And it is annoying. It would not take a campaigner of Pierre Poilievre’s now-proven skills to take it down.
It is an old and true maxim in politics that opposition parties do not win, governments defeat themselves. And this one over the last year in particular has an unwonted keenness in preparing for its own departure.
Poilievre will be attacked remorselessly. The larger part of the media will not make it easy for him. But his leadership campaign displayed both focus and energy. Whenever the contest comes he will enter it with eagerness, facing a defensive and exhausted opponent.
When H. William Dettmer started working with Dr. Eli Goldratt’s Thinking Process framework for solving profound problems in the 1990s, he soon realised how very often people focused on the wrong problems, and then spent their time and effort on figuring out root causes behind often trivial issues.
Dettmer’s solution to this was based on a simple, yet profound insight: A problem is not really a problem unless it prevents us from reaching our goal. The first step in problem-solving should therefore be to define the goal, and in Dettmer’s amended framework not only a goal but also the factors critical to achieve it. This way, focus on what actually mattered would be ensured; the problem solver could rest assured he was not wasting his time on trivialities.
Source: Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning
What we perceive as important problems are often things that annoy us, but which really do not matter in the bigger context. I might perceive a cluttered inbox or a broken coffee machine in the office as a major problem, while those are totally unimportant to the long-term success of the company.
As long as I realise such issues are important only to me personally, no harm is done. But as soon as my focus shifts to the trivial problems and I become obsessed with them, I may be headed for wrong decisions, a situation exemplified by Eric Sevareid’s insight:
Eli Goldratt’s book, The Goal, is one of the most influential management books of all time and his ideas have had a profound impact, especially in production and project management. Goldratt’s first axiom is that every decision must aim at furthering the company’s overall goal. Self-evident as it may sound, all senior managers know the constant effort it takes to maintain this focus.
What happens if we have no clear goal? In that case any undesired change may come to be perceived as an important problem. The more sudden or unexpected the change, the more likely this is.
If there is no goal, we have no way to judge the importance.
Source: Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning
What Goals Directed Covid Responses?
In the summer of 2020 I had a long discussion with a consultant friend in Paris, another of Goldratt’s disciples, on the situation and outlook after the Covid-19 crisis struck. Our first instinct was of course to try and define a goal. We agreed that when it comes to public health the goal should always be to minimise the loss of life-years, or rather quality-adjusted life-years, both now and in the future.
This was shortly after the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo had claimed that any severity of measures against the coronavirus was worth it, if they saved just one life. Across the world, national leaders constantly repeated the mantra of “following the science,” meaning the whole of society should be managed based on the advice of experts in a narrow field of medical science, focusing on suppressing or even eradicating a single disease. An ethics professor I interviewed in late 2020 said it was morally right to brush aside all concerns of collateral damage because we were “in a pandemic.”
Maximising the number of life-years might well be a proper goal for healthcare. It calls for both short and long-term strategies, including prevention, treatment, even nutritional policies and many other strategies. But when we look at society as a whole, the maximum number of life-years, even when “quality-adjusted,” is hardly a proper overall goal; it focuses on physical existence only, ignoring all the other complex factors which make life worth living.
What then about the goal of “following the science” or of preventing even just one death from a coronavirus at all costs? It should be obvious how absurd it is to view those as true goals when it comes to governing a society. But for some reason, over the past 30 months, those and other similar extremely narrow objectives became the chief goals of public health authorities and governments in almost the whole world.
There is little doubt that the phenomenon of mass formation described by Mattias Desmet has played a role here. I clearly remember how many people had convinced themselves that nothing mattered except to stop the virus in its tracks, to delay infections. And when I say nothing I mean nothing. “The only thing that matters is preventing infections,” someone told me back in 2020. And when I pressed him, asking if he meant the only thing that mattered in the whole wide world was slowing the spread of the virus, if everything else was really of no consequence, education, the economy, poverty, mental health; everything else, the answer was a resounding “Yes!”
Escaping the Problem Obsession Trap
What those cases have in common is how, in the absence of a goal, our focus is diverted towards a problem, otherwise insignificant, or at least not the only problem in the world, and eliminating the problem becomes the goal.
This is why the key to successful problem-solving is to first agree on a common goal, otherwise we may end up solving the wrong problems.
The loss of focus we have experienced during the past 30 months rests on two pillars. One is the power of mass formation. But the other one, no less important, is the loss of leadership. In both Sweden and the Faroe Islands the leadership, epidemiologist Anders Tegnell in the case of Sweden, and the government in the case of the Faroe Islands, never succumbed to irrational fear. If they had, it would surely have taken over in both countries.
The chief reason it didn’t was the stance taken by the leaders who, guided by common sense. never lost sight of the goal of government; ensuring the well-being of society as a whole, or, at the individual level, ensuring man’s possibility to live a full life, as Eli Goldratt once put it. Neither is clear-cut of course, but however fuzzy and imperfect the goal statement may be, once we lose sight of it, we are in grave danger of succumbing to mass formation. It only takes a sudden change or an unforeseen threat, blown out of proportion, unrestrained by the common goal.
When almost the whole world loses sight of the common goal of human society, and the elimination of a single problem, in the end a rather unimportant one, takes precedence over everything else, thus becoming the goal – a distorted and absurd one, a disastrous and ruinous one for sure – this is an indication of a fundamental loss of common sense.
A healthy society does not succumb to mass formation. The reason this can happen is that we have no common goal any more, no common sense. To get out of this situation and to avoid it in the future, we must find our goal again, we must reestablish our focus, we must regain our common sense.
Footnote: Preface to The Goal by Eli Goldratt
I view science as nothing more than an understanding of the way the world is and why it is that way. At any given time our scientific knowledge is simply the current state of the art of our understanding. I do not believe in absolute truths. I fear such beliefs because they block the search for better understanding. Whenever we think we have final answers progress, science, and better understanding ceases. Understanding of our world is not something to be pursued for its own sake, however. Knowledge should be pursued, I believe, to make our world better—to make life more fulfilling.
There are several reasons I chose a novel to explain my understanding of manufacturing—how it works (reality) and why it works that way.First, I want to make these principles more understandable and show how they can bring order to the chaos that so often exists in our plants. Second, I wanted to illustrate the power of this understanding and the benefits it can bring. The results achieved are not fantasy; they have been, and are being, achieved in real plants. The western world does not have to become a second or third rate manufacturing power. If we just understand and apply the correct principles, we can compete with anyone. I also hope that readers would see the validity and value of these principles in other organizations such as banks, hospitals, insurance companies and our families. Maybe the same potential for growth and improvement exists in all organizations.
Finally, and most importantly, I wanted to show that we can all be outstanding scientists. The secret of being a good scientist, I believe, lies not in our brain power. We have enough. We simply need to look at reality and think logically and precisely about what we see. The key ingredient is to have the courage to face inconsistencies between what we see and deduce and the way things are done. This challenging of basic assumptions is essential to breakthroughs. Almost everyone who has worked in a plant is at least uneasy about the use of cost accounting efficiencies to control our actions. Yet few have challenged this sacred cow directly. Progress in understanding requires that we challenge basic assumptions about how the world is and why it is that way. If we can better understand our world and the principles that govern it, I suspect all our lives will be better.
Good luck in your search for these principles and for your own understanding of “The Goal.”
We have long awaited hearing from governmental insiders regarding the swamp creatures embedded inside various federal agencies and now directing policies dangerous and destructive to the republic. For example, FBI professional agents are coming out to congress representatives about partisan and illegal behavior by their superiors. This post concerns a similar outing of Anthony Fauci regarding the origins of the Covid plandemic pandemic.
“Nothing’s going to happen as long as the Biden administration is here,” Robert Redfield says, citing threats on his life for promoting the lab-leak theory.
The former Center for Disease Control and Prevention director who was cast as a conspiracy theorist for saying the evidence supported the lab-leak explanation for COVID-19 – allegedly provoking death threats – claims that the real “conspiracy is Collins, Fauci, and the established scientific community.”
Robert Redfield told former Senate Finance Committee investigator Paul Thacker that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci “knew” he funded gain-of-function research that makes viruses more dangerous, and “misled Congress” when he denied it,” but “[n]othing’s going to happen as long as the Biden administration is here.”
“Tony and I are friends, but we don’t agree on this at all,” Redfield said in an interview published in Thacker’s Disinformation Chronicle newsletter.
“Everyone had to agree to the narrative” pushed by Fauci and then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a “wet market” in Wuhan, not the Fauci-funded Wuhan Institute of Virology miles away, to avoid becoming a public target of the two officials, he said.
The virologist Redfield told the immunologist Fauci from the “second or third week in January” 2020 that “I’m very concerned that he was championing this theory that it came from animals.”
The particulars of the novel coronavirus, such as the furin cleavage site and the “human” sequence in it, make clear that it’s not from bats, he said. “This thing was manipulated, orchestrated. That cleavage site was created.”
Transmission doesn’t make sense under natural evolution, according to Redfield. “You have a virus that is one of the most infectious viruses in the history of humanity, and yet that virus no longer can infect the bat? … No, this is highly abnormal.”
Redfield said he believes The Lancet spring 2020 letter that lumped in the lab-leak hypothesis with “conspiracy theories” was “orchestrated … under direction of Fauci and Collins, trying to nip any attempt to have an honest investigation of the pandemic’s origin.”
“There was nothing scientific about that letter.
It was just an attempt to intimidate people,” he also said.
“Tony had over a year looking for an intermediate host” to explain the natural-evolution theory of COVID-19 “and still hadn’t found one” when Redfield went on CNN in 2021 to defend the lab-leak hypothesis, Redfield continued.
Scientific American accused Redfield of promoting a conspiracy theory based on “xenophobia,” which Redfield suspects was due to Fauci’s influence at that publication.
“I was threatened, my life was threatened,” he said. “I have letters I got from prominent scientists, that previously gave me awards, telling me that the best thing I could do for the world was to shoot myself because of what I said.”
He believes that “Fauci and Collins were behind a lot of” the conspiracy and “anti-Asian hate” claims about the lab-leak theory, and plans to elaborate in a book once Chinese Communist Party leadership changes. Redfield said “big publishers” frowned on his book proposal because it promotes the lab-leak theory.
Thacker noted that newly released emails show January 2020 discussions within NIH about Fauci’s funding of the EcoHealth Alliance and a 2015 paper in Nature about the Wuhan lab manipulating coronaviruses.
“Yeah, I think Tony tried to kill” the inquiries into the Wuhan funding and lab experiments, Redfield said, while clarifying that “I don’t believe there was any intent to harm people” through suppression. NIAID didn’t immediately respond to a request for Fauci’s response. Neither did Collins, who remains at NIH as head of the molecular genetics section.
“The whole thing is scientific arrogance. There was an arrogance that they could contain this, that it wouldn’t escape it,” he said. “I worked with the Chinese CDC for many years while in the military and while at the University of Maryland. And viruses get out of labs. That’s just the nature of the beast.”
We reject all this without a moment’s hesitation even though today it is considered highly scandalous and even revolutionary to say that a family is made up of a man and a woman and any children they may have, They are creating a world of alleged individual rights and formal freedom. In theory we are free or almost free to do anything we like: free to take drugs , free to have an abortion , to take the lives of human beings suffering from serious illnesses and therefore defenseless. Only rights and few if at all do this
Carson Holloway writes at American MInd
The case of Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz is only the most recent example. For much of the last two years, Gaetz has been the target of “news” stories, based on anonymous sources, that he was under investigation by the Department of Justice for sex trafficking. Now, we are told, career prosecutors are recommending against charges because of concerns about the credibility of the witnesses. This is another version of the same treatment given to Donald Trump before and during his presidency. For years Trump was subjected to innumerable breathless stories that he had “colluded” with Russia to steal the presidency. But when the investigation was over it turned out that Trump was guilty of no such thing.
Science Matters 