Crystal Balls

Healing CRYSTALS cured my STAGE FRIGHT! The stars who can't sparkle without their crystals!

As far as celebrity trends go, healing crystals is certainly up there with the wackiest, but also one of the most reliable.

These are the stars who need to have their healing crystals to hand in order to deal with anything life throws at them...

Merely casual interest this, but a chap is bound to wonder if there is any overlap between celebrities who believe in magic crystals and those who preach at us about climate change. Possibly not, but it would be an odd mix, magic and atmospheric physics.

Imagine The View

Sarah was not a snob, but it was a time when the middle classes thought of the peasants as of another world from themselves, like dogs or cats or horses.

Hugh Walpole - Rogue Herries (1930)

Snobbery is an ancient aspect of social reality, but it is worth reminding ourselves that the establishment still looks down on ordinary folk. It is also inclined to view us in the main as somewhat deplorable.

It was a familiar enough attitude in the days of servants, silk hats and the local squire, but the outlook is still with us. Hillary Clinton gave the game away with her basket of deplorables comment, but it is an extremely old status game. The aristocracy and upper middle classes have always looked down on the peasants.

Yet Brexit plus the election of Donald Trump seem to have made the dislike and distrust between establishment and deplorables much sharper. So much so that it must be worth asking ourselves if woke political games are an attempt to counter what is seen as deplorable culture.

The establishment just doesn’t like us we might say. From what I see, this simple viewpoint has cropped up in a number places recently and it does seem to explain recent political insanities.

They don’t like us, they look down on the way we live and are entirely comfortable with policies which undermine everything from healthcare to education, from housing to transport, from the energy market to holiday destinations, from diets to hobbies.

It’s a long list, yet it is easy enough to see what may be going on. Take a walk around a shopping centre as the dire consumer frenzy we call Christmas looms large. Listen to the crappy music, do some cynical people-watching then imagine yourself wafted into a higher sphere where money and taste abound. 

This is not to say that political and social trends are rooted in snobbery and little else, but the contempt one social class may feel for another is not difficult to understand from either situation. I don’t occupy a higher sphere where money and taste abound, but it is easy enough to imagine the view.

More snow

 

This afternoon I took this photo of a new snowfall here in Derbyshire. To my mind it emphasises an important point about the climate emergency. 

Although our previous snowfall had almost completely melted by this morning, having more snow fall this afternoon merely highlights how relentless the warming is.

Totalitarian TV

James Bembridge has a TCW piece about The Jeremy Vine Show on Channel 5. Not on my radar at all, but for an outsider it makes interesting reading. I certainly hope the number of Channel 5 viewers is small and trending downwards.

EVERY day at 9:15am, an intense and unshakeable sense of doom begins to surge through me. It is, of course, the time at which The Jeremy Vine Show begins to air on Channel 5.

To give you a flavour of the show’s output, here are three questions it recently served up as points of national discussion: ‘Should we lock down the unvaccinated?’, ‘should pubs ban mobile phones?’, and ‘should we mandate vaccines?’ – In short, the show now caters for fools and fascists.

Worth reading as a reminder of just how ghastly people can be when offered the opportunity and a modicum of what could appear to be official approval. 

The things we miss by not watching television. 

Snow

Had a light covering of snow early this morning but it has virtually all gone now. The grandkids enjoyed the snowball fights though - it was damp enough to stick together easily. COP26 just missed it, although their version would have been due to the climate emergency or something.

Deeper forces are at work

This piece by David Starkey is well worth reading. It links woke politics with the historical rise of a complex interweaving of social class in an increasingly technical world.

...the web, which has imprisoned so much of humanity in an actual Plato’s Cave, has fatally eroded the distinction between truth and falsehood on which the intellectual revolution of the western mind was based in the half millennium since the Renaissance and Reformation.

The result is the Great Awokening, which echoes and combines the worst aspects of the Romantic Movement and the Religious Revival that were the nineteenth century’s reaction to the Age of Enlightenment.

But, I would argue, older, deeper forces are at work as well. Including one of the oldest and deepest: the idea of a “profession” as distinct from (and of course superior to) a mere trade.

If it looks like a duck…

Some government activities are so obviously loopy that a whiff of paranoia is not necessarily inappropriate. For example, it is obvious that the UK Net Zero policy is absurdly risky. Huge amounts of money could be pointlessly squandered and we could screw up the future of our children when supposedly that is what Net Zero protects.

Net Zero could be a colossal failure for at least two reasons.

1. If catastrophic global warming does not occur anyway.
2. If the UK Net Zero policy makes no difference to atmospheric CO2.

Yet effectively we have been told that there is zero probability of failure. We have been told this indirectly but very strongly in a There Is No Alternative sense. Yet to a very good approximation, outcome 2 is a stone cold certainty. UK emissions are far too small to make a difference and everyone knows it. Net Zero is certain to fail as a policy so we ask - who loses when Net Zero does fail?

Merely by asking the question we may as well accept that its backers do not care if Net Zero fails. They are not stupid, they know it will fail but consider themselves to be insulated from failure. Monumental stupidity is an alternative explanation, especially when we see people sitting on the M25, but the people behind Net Zero don’t do silly things like that. They make silly speeches which is far more comfortable.

To my mind there is an inescapable conclusion here. The bureaucrats and political classes promoting Net Zero know it will fail. They must know therefore they don’t care. As if one social class is determined to degrade the living standards of another. It is as it seems to be. Many things are.