Terry Gilliam has weighed in on the debate over whether Monty Python’s comedy is too white, male, and elitist.
“I tell the world now I’m a black lesbian.”
The American-born Python was speaking at the Karlovy Vary film festival in the Czech Republic at a screening of his movie The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.
Gilliam was responding to remarks by the BBC’s Head of Comedy that Monty Python were insufficiently “diverse” to “reflect the modern world”.
BBC's Head of Comedy puts Monty Python's lack of originality down to a surfeit of education and racist bias
Unfair ! We were remarkably diverse FOR OUR TIME
We had three grammar-school boys, one a poof, and Gilliam, though not actually black, was a Yank. And NO slave-owners
The Competitive Enterprise Institute has released a video urging President Trump to keep his campaign promise and withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement.
It features a speech President Trump gave in May 2016 explaining exactly why he wanted to pull out:
“This agreement gives foreign bureaucrats control over our energy and how much we use right here in America. No way!”
He adds:
“We’re going to cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of the United States’ tax dollars to UN global warming programs”.
The video concludes:
Mr President. Don’t listen to the Swamp. Keep your promise. Withdraw from the Paris climate treaty. Send it to the Senate.
Now, however, he appears to be having second thoughts. His administration is reportedly divided on the issue, with White House insiders including Jared Kushner and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson arguing for the U.S. to remain inside the UN Paris agreement, supposedly in order to keep a “seat at the table.”
That would make it more expensive than a solid gold, diamond-encrusted seat at the table of King Croesus then. In fact, it would make it – at $65 trillion – the most expensive seat at the table in the history of the world.
And the $65 trillion, by the way, is a conservative estimate. This – according to calculations by Bjorn Lomborg – is the lower end estimate of how much it would cost the world if all the signatories of the Paris climate agreement stuck to their CO2 reduction commitments.
First, Bjorn Lomborg, accepting climate-change advocates’ assumptions about how much warming comes from carbon dioxide, showed in a peer-reviewed study that implementing all provisions of all signers to Paris would prevent only 0.306 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming by 2100.
What would it cost? Unofficial estimates by the United States, European Union, Mexico and China amount to $739-$757 billion per year.
Those parties account for about 80 percent of signatories’ emissions reduction pledges. Other pledges would have similar costs per unit, implying something in the range of $185-$189 billion.
All told, $924-$946 billion. Per year. Every year from 2030 to the end of the century. “And that’s if the politicians do everything right. If not, the real cost could double,” Mr. Lomborg said.
So, for $65-$132 trillion, we might — if the alarmists are right — reduce global average temperature by a third of one degree by 2100. That’s $212-$431 billion per thousandth of a degree of cooling.
But if you think things just couldn’t any more stupid, wait till you hear what the effect of pouring all that money down the drain on futile carbon-dioxide reductions schemes will have on the state of the Earth’s climate.
Here is what a peer-reviewed study by Bjorn Lomborg says.
It will, by 2030, reduce “global warming” by the almost immeasurable 0.048 degrees C.
And by the end of the century, it will reduce “global warming” by 0.17 degrees C.
Speaking on the BBC’s Daily Politics, Breitbart London’s James Delingpole said that there are historical analogies that can be made to Nazism, and that is the liberal left’s war on free speech.
“I would defend the use of Nazi analogies under certain circumstances,” said Mr. Delingpole, and referred to Leave campaigner Michael Gove comparing pro-Remain economic experts to Nazi propagandists in the run-up to the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union (EU).
“He was making a very intelligent point. He was talking about the paper Hitler commissioned called ‘The Hundred Authors Against Einstein’ so that was a specific historical analogy.”
But in reference to former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown tweeting a comparison of the 17.5 million people who voted for Brexit as “brownshirts” – who were the precursor to the Nazi SS – said “I don’t think that quite works. That was the democratic will.”
“There are occasions when the Nazi analogy is used, particularly by the left, to slag off people they don’t like.
“Anyone mildly to the right of centre they call Nazis.”
“I think actually the interesting thing about Nazi Germany is that it happened in a country that invented Beethoven and Schubert. These were civilised people.
If you’ve got 17 minutes to spare I urge you to watch thisvideo (currently being circulated on Twitter).
And if you haven’t got 17 minutes to spare, then make some spare. It will infuriate, enlighten, delight and terrify you all at the same time.
It’s an interview given by the great English cricketer Ian Botham to a bunch of Scottish schoolkids in 1986 for a BBC TV programme called Open To Question.
Here they are, teenage kids, with a rare opportunity to ask a genuine sporting legend any question they want.
But all they want to do is harangue him earnestly about his male chauvinist attitudes to domestic chores and his apparently unhealthy love of “blood” sports like shooting and deer-stalking and his support of Margaret Thatcher.
An Eighties-permed missy opens the batting by asking:
“You only do the clean jobs when bringing up a baby. Changing the nappy – why not?”
Then comes the next question:
“If it’s only you that doesn’t change nappies why do you classify this as women’s work?”
Then the next:
“Is your wife satisfied with your attitude to child-rearing or do you think she resents your apparent immersion in your own sport?”
and, later:
“Do you not think it would be so much better if Mrs Thatcher would put some of the money she uses in defence into research and therefore help us out before she destroys the world?”
The assault never stops. It’s like Children of the Corn meets the Korean War. The questioning has the relentlessness and doctrinaire zeal of Red Army soldiers swarming across the Imjin River.
An Arctic expedition designed to raise awareness of the perils of man-made climate change is being frustrated by unexpectedly large quantities of ice.
The Polar Ocean Challenge, whose aim is to circumnavigate the Arctic in a sailing boat while the summer ice-melt allows, is being led by veteran explorer David Hempleman-Adams. He justifies the expedition thus:
Permanent irreversible change in the sea ice landscape of the Arctic seems inevitable. This will / is already having global economic political, social and environmental implications. A significant change in my lifetime.
I see this possibility to circumnavigate the Arctic as one I wanted to take despite the risks associated with it in order to increase the worlds attention on the effects of Arctic climate change. There may be a possibility still to curb this progressive warming and melting in the Arctic. But even if this is not possible the next most important thing is to at the very least highlight the need to ‘Navigate the Future of the Arctic responsibly’.
Well, yes, of course, David. That’s just the kind of eco-friendly blah which will have landed your expedition sponsorship from a City of London finance firm. But what if, as the real world evidence increasingly suggests, your prognostications of climate doom are flat out wrong?
Already the expedition is around 4 to 6 weeks behind schedule having been held up in the Laptev Sea by the kind of ice which experts like Cambridge University’s Peter Wadhams – of whom more in a moment – assure us will soon disappear permanently from the Arctic in summer.
Well I came up on watch this morning at 0800. ice, ice and more b****t ice.
and here
A Stamukha is an iceberg that is touching the bottom.
We had to turn round from the ice by the coast last night and find somewhere safe to moor/anchor. There were strong winds so we needed to find somewhere else to sit them out, and the answer was a stamukha.
We knew it might drift, and it did, so when it had drifted into a more dangerous situation, Ben (who was on anchor watch) woke Nikolay and we’ve moved off it to go and have a look at the ice situation just up ahead again
and here’s one from crew member Ben Edwards, who is 14 years old…
