Across Britain brainwashed kids are bunking off school today, because climate change.
Naturally, CNN is right behind them. This is what we learned from a hard-hitting interview conducted by Christiane Amanpour;
From 16-year old Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz lookalike Greta Thunberg:
“We children we understand this in a way that adults don’t.”
From 17-year old climate activist Anna Taylor:
“My head teacher was very supportive and she said actually after thinking about it she does think this cause is really relevant to my generation.”
Aren’t teenage kids just amazing? They know so much and see things so much more clearly that it’s a wonder we don’t put them in charge of the world and let them make all our decisions for us.
“When I saw my first severed head it didn’t faze me at all,” says Shamima Begum, the ISIS jihadi bride who just wants to come home to Britain so she can have her baby and live there happily ever after.
Yay! You go, girl! Some women would have screamed; some would have started plotting their escape; but all bold, empowered, post #MeToo heroine Miss Begum could think about was the potential rapist/murderer once attached to that severed head.
Or, as she charmingly puts it in her interview with the Times‘s Anthony Loyd:
“It was from a captured fighter seized on the battlefield, an enemy of Islam. I thought only of what he would have done to a Muslim woman if he had the chance.”
And this is the kind of person we’re now preparing to welcome back into the British welfare system? Really??
Where you stand on this issue, of course, will depend on whether or not you are an Islamist and/or a member of Britain’s liberal Establishment.
One of the reasons I’m resigned to never getting a column in a national newspaper is that even if you paid me loads I could never churn out commentary as lame as this:
If you have read or listened to some of the teenage campaigners this week or you have some of your own at home, it is clear that the slushy, drippy, apathetic “snowflakes” whom adults love to deride are more impressive, articulate and engaged than many MPs. They are also passionate about their causes rather than their future careers, unlike most of the cabinet.
One of their leaders, Anna Taylor, 17, is sensible rather than sensitive. She has done her homework, engaging with the facts of climate change rather than dismissing them as ‘project fear’ and unlike some of her elders, she doesn’t mock the notion of experts.
I shan’t embarrass the columnist by mentioning his or her name. Suffice to say that I find it difficult to conceive of a notion more air-headed, glib or culturally suicidal than this idea that there’s something admirable, noble or desirable about kids skiving off school to go on climate protests.
This is what thousands of schoolchildren across Britain will be doing this Friday as part of something called Youth Strike 4 Climate. (It was inspired by a pig-tailed Swedish child called Greta Thunberg, of whom more in a moment. Similar protests are being planned from Australia to the U.S.)
If any of my kids attended such an event I wouldn’t find my eyes misting over with pride like that silly columnist. I’d be absolutely bloody furious with them, even more so with their teachers.
If you believe the Guardian and the BBC, the world is on the brink of Insectapocalypse: A mass extinction of creepy crawlies that threatens the “collapse of nature.”
But if I were you, I’d take these claims with a big pinch of salt, especially if they include the words “climate change.” That is because the most dramatic, oft-quoted study that links insect loss with climate change turns out to be flawed to the point of uselessness. It is so bad that the Global Warming Policy Foundation has sent a formal complaint to its publishers calling for its withdrawal.
The study by Brad Lister and Andres Garcia was published last year by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). Titled Climate-driven declines in arthropod abundance restructure a rainforest food web, it appeared to tell a very worrying story about a precipitous decline in the number of insects in Puerto Rico’s Luquillo rainforest.
According to the study’s abstract, climate change is to blame:
Theresa May and her Remainer civil servants secretly sabotaged an offer made by the EU Council President Donald Tusk of a free trade deal exit from the EU because all they ever really wanted was Brexit In Name Only.
Of the many things I’ve heard about the Establishment’s outrageous scheming to scupper Brexit this is by far the most damning – and it deserves much wider coverage.
It was Martin Durkin (director of Brexit: the Movie) who drew my attention to it.
It beggars belief that May and her snake-like Remainer civil servants are still in power after Steve Baker’s revelation that they secretly turned down an EU offer of a free trade deal.
Steve Baker MP is a member of the (ardently pro-Brexit) European Research Group. He was also – till he resigned in protest at Mrs May’s handling of the Brexit negotiations – a minister in the government’s Department for Exiting the European Union (DEXU). Baker made his revelation at the end of last month while appearing before an MP committee, in which he criticised the “governing class” for its deliberate attempts to thwart Brexit in defiance of the Referendum vote.
I was beginning to worry that there would be no fallout whatsoever from David Rose’s Mail on Sunday scoop last week about Lord Deben’s involvement in a £600,000 conflict of interest scandal. Indeed the silence from the rest of the media – mysteriously, it went unreported in the Guardian, in the Daily Telegraph and at the BBC – was so deafening that I began to suspect there might be some kind of Establishment cover up going on.
Happily, five MPs have kept the story alive by complaining to the Standards Commissioner Lucy Scott-Moncrieff, who has now announced an inquiry into allegations that Lord Gummer may have breached code of conduct rules.
Also, Christopher Booker has followed up with a piece of his own in the Sunday Telegraph, reminding us why this story is important.
For the latest grisly example of hypocrisy, “progressive” cronyism, feminist cry-bullying, and Deep State entrenchment, look no further than Britain’s Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies.
Davies is the embodiment of Nanny State meddling. So much so that only last December, she proudly referred to herself — for these jumped up bureaucrats have no shame — as the nation’s “chief nanny.”
This was in the context of swingeing demands she’d made — perfectly timed to ruin everyone’s Christmas — for more taxes on sugary soft drinks, on milky drinks, and on foods high in salt. The Nanny State in excelsis, waging war on people’s private pleasures and freedoms.
The “chief nanny” has form. In 2016, she declared that there is no safe limit on the amount of alcohol that can be drunk. She urged women “to do as I do and think about the risk of cancer before having a glass of wine.”
So how bizarre it was to hear this same woman on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this week berating her interviewer Nick Robinson for “sexism” because he had used the word “nannying” to describe what she does.
The planet is cooling. Clearly this isn’t something the alarmists want you to hear, especially when they’ve got a shiny, expensive, new bridge to sell you with Green New Deal stamped on the side.
So to help out, the Climate Industrial Complex has played its usual trick of ramping up the climate scaremongering.
Here’s NASA (your tax dollar at work, funding greenie propaganda):
Global temperatures in 2018 were 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit (0.83 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 1951 to 1980 mean, according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. Globally, 2018’s temperatures rank behind those of 2016, 2017 and 2015. The past five years are, collectively, the warmest years in the modern record.
“2018 is yet again an extremely warm year on top of a long-term global warming trend,” said GISS Director Gavin Schmidt.
Since the 1880s, the average global surface temperature has risen about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius). This warming has been driven in large part by increased emissions into the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases caused by human activities, according to Schmidt.
A few years ago at the height of the global warming scare I wrote a book which set out to answer one of the key questions of our time: if climate change isn’t really a problem why do so many people act as though it is?
The answer, I discovered, is that environmentalism is just a fashionable mask for the usual leftist obsessions with state control and wealth redistribution.
That’s why I called the book Watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside.
Not everyone who believes in man-made climate change is a full on Commie. Some are merely useful idiots. But whatever reason people may have for supporting the scam – greed, stupidity, virtue-signalling, idiot leftist teachers – the net result is the same: bigger government, higher taxes, more regulation, lower standards of living. Exactly like you’d get under communism, in fact.
So color me completely unshocked by the Green New Deal. It looks like a revamped Communist Manifesto because that’s exactly what it is.
Michael Gove is dead to me. As a friend I will always love and cherish him. But as a politician, he has lost every last scintilla of my respect.
Yes, he was a brave and committed Education Secretary; yes, he is probably the most literate, charming, polite, well-read, thoughtful, and eloquent senior members of Theresa May’s generally rubbish Government; but in his current role as Secretary of State for the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) his performance has been utterly shaming. And cowardly. And dangerous.
Of all the forces seeking to undermine Britain right now — its economic growth, its liberties, its intellectual and moral probity, its traditions of responsible limited government, its conservative values — the Green Blob is one of the deadliest.