JohnnyDoglands wrote:bishopdante wrote:Of course seems very plausible that where it comes to scheduling an interview, or writing a good speech, Greta isn't working totally alone, and that it might be best to think of the phenomenon as "the Thunbergs Inc".
You might have some more info to back this up, but I'm curious as to why you think Greta Thunberg doesn't write her own speeches. I'm willing to bet a 16 year old Bishop D could have written the kind of speech that would make the adults pay attention.
I'll have you know that I've had generations of people behind and around me, and I consider myself genuinely fortunate in that respect, and that this is the process that very much deserves credit for whatever I'm capable of.
But also bear in mind that despite my considerably above-average contacts with media people, having grown up in the area of central London where the international media are based, and that my godfather was one of the founding members of Greenpeace etc... at 16 I'd have needed fairly significant support, resources and help to be doing a major media campaign.
At *any* age you need professional-grade putting-the-hours in backup to be even halfway succesful at penetrating and sustaining a media spotlight presence of the sort Thunberg is creditably operating, and when graduating to being the focus of a global publicity campaign it simply creates that much work, and there are only so many hours in the day. You need to know how to organise an operation, and that's when experienced production management people in your family, tribe or community makes a big difference.
Sure I can write... no coincidence that's what my mum did for a living for decades, and to this day if I need something read over and given an honest critique she's one of the best and most reliable people I know, regardless of whether she happens to be my mum - she did years as a professional publishers' reader fixing everybody's stuff, long before she had her own work published.
Ask anybody who has done an international TV interview tour if you need help, even a national book-signing tour could put a person in hospital with acute exhaustion, and nobody does that job alone.
Please note that I was *not* doing any of that public-facing limitlessly-time-consuming stuff at 16, I'm a studio guy for a reason. Do also bear in mind that at 15 I was already working at a big graphics firm, and that we dealt with a lot of messaging, campaigns and typesetting - not that I pulled family strings to get the job. I couldn't tell you how many keyboards I've worn the paint off then knackered the domes on by this point.
It's great if you already know networks of people in your immediate family and tribe who you can trust and don't suck when it comes to information work, because in truth "you can't get the staff", and a lot of the media publicity PR area is corrupt as hell, with a thousand and one sharks and charlatans, with various mercenary pump-and-dump aspirations.
It'd be absurd to suggest that it's anything other than a serious effort to enter into international political campaigning, and that it's in my opinion a sign of quality that her whole family understand touring, publishing, broadcast etc. She'll have been around it her whole life, soaking up the working process of preparing and presenting in all sorts of domains.
I'm not remotely against the idea of people doing what she's doing, and I respect the professionalism - I fully expect that she'll have a lifelong career as a professional and fully legitimate environmentalism campaigner and publicist, and if her influence results in anything getting done of any note to avert mass-pollution and mass-extinction, she will deserve the (significantly Swedish) Nobel Prize that she is likely to be given for such work.
It's long overdue that the attention is brought back to the serious environmental degradation that is visiable worldwide, particularly thanks to two decades of aggressive post-9/11 power transfer towards corrupt petrochemical military-industrial interests, with petrochemical stooges like Rex Tillerson now graduating from middle eastern neo-colonialism to occupying one of the most senior positions in USA politics... then being fired for patently not knowing very much about how government procedures actually work.
I'm also suggesting that delivering a front-cover-of-time-magazine media presence of the sort that she's delivering is a big, stressful, time-devouring problem, and requires a level of professionalism and resourcing which is not available to, for example, the interior tribes of the amazon such as the huaorani dying of various crude oil related diseases and running complicated and somewhat successful legal campaigns in emergency conditions against highly corrupt petrochemical corporations and the government bodies which constitute corporate puppet regimes, employing military and police forces to suppress journalists and civil activists.
Certainly I have no doubt that her various inboxes are busier than one person can handle, and that as one of the most visible environmentalism campaigners pretty much any and all of the leaders of activist groups around the world confronting issues all around the world will be sending their information in, and asking for help to shine a light on the situation. If I for one minute thought she didn't have an ever-expanding team to handle the flood of information, then I'd be rather worried. As it is burn-out is a risk, and that's a lot for anybody to handle regardless of age.
The link between the work of Thunberg and some of the more directly-experienced environmental activists who come from acute pollution areas exists, and there is a whole generation of internet-connected people who are getting together and deciding what action they're going to take.
The environmentalism movement is made up of many movements, and as Thunberg's celebrity exposes her to the whole gamut, there is no doubt that she'll end up as fully informed as anybody over the coming decades... (if nobody bumps her off, y'know, very easy to have a yachting accident...)
In the words of Tokata Iron Eyes (just imagine how that introduction might pan out on Fox News), a native american environmental activist whose invitation to visit their ruined-reservation disaster-zone Thunberg accepted:
https://earther.gizmodo.com/greta-thunb ... 1838873376“I think it’s a problem of the U.S. media, especially, wanting to only cover a white narrative. It’s not somebody’s personal fault for being valued more in a system that values only [people like] them.”
...
“We have to realize that we’re all on the same team, and we’re all fighting for the same thing, so no matter who is in the spotlight, no matter who is getting the most camera time, we have to be able to come together under the same set of values and be able to speak to each other on the level of [being a] human being”
Of course it isn't totally OK that there is a closely auto-agreeable bias and alignment of culture and ethnicity between certain sorts of not-so-native americans and protestant swedes, meaning that Thunberg has been propelled to instant stardom whereas others have not - the idea of a swedish schoolgirl organising a don't-go-to-school strike is pretty much one of the lightest-hearted ways to present suburban america with a subject as grievous as irreversible global biblical-scale catastrophe. That's OK, if not completely admirable, nor is it completely honest about the nature of the problem, or what it'll actually take to reform global industrialism into something more generally responsible.
Problem is, the old media made Greta famous, and she might well develop sharper internet-type teeth than expected as the global environmental campaign community coughs up the damning evidence in 4k definition, and as various invitations to meet communities suffering from acute pollution are pursued - However, would certainly suggest that extreme caution is advised when visiting any sorts of chemical or nuclear hazard sites, even a small exposure to that stuff can put you in your grave, and I really wouldn't recommend doing the world tour of contaminated areas, even using the most expensive space-spec PPE.
It seems that for the US establishment the Swedes are allowed to comment on a number of subjects from economics to environmentalism, and are made exempt from certain sorts of anti-academic, anti-communist and anti-government default knee-jerk US media cliché criticisms when a swedish institution or personality is presenting human rights campaign issues of a left wing or egalitarian nature
Scandinavian nations are often upheld as the paragon of modern industrial wellbeing and a highly functional society, and it's not surprising that their institutions and scientists are often found expressing ideas which are typically in stark contrast to the more gangster and profitable aspects of global capitalist heavy industry - Sweden has been neutral since the Napoleonic Wars, and thus not only has escaped the destruction of WW1 and WW2... but also made a shedload of money doing heavy industry for both sides, operating companies such as Bofors, the world's premier manufacturer of large scale gun barrels, descended from the Royal Swedish Armoury, and owned by Alfred Nobel during the late 19th century. This is serious giga-skeleton in the closet war business, and those export shows have had some truly scary people turning up since the era of sails - but the nation was also a significant refuge for antifascist refugees and holocaust-escapees during WW2.
The problem is that Sweden is ostensibly displayed in the media as rare in its "idealistic and progressive" views, despite addressing subjects which if presented by an african, a chilean, or an australian aboriginal academic, and articulated through the terminology of their authentic cultural canons chronicling their societies' destructive contact with the expanding european-led technological society, the tone of that content would be interpreted as being confrontational and hostile. Alien, strange, and incomprehensible. All sorts of prejudices would eclipse direct experience of those cultures messages and increasingly-ruined environments... because in the general population of comfortable modern urbanised consumer privilege, there isn't much of an overlap with the grotesqueness and violation of acute environmental-disaster situations, and that's the problem~ some people are being asked to adjust their lifestyle... others are facing desperate and lethal circumstances.
The fact is that the cultural scope of the issues of industrial abuse and the rapidly-widening poverty gap are profound and global, and the level of conflict and lack of scientific and governmental co-operation happening post-9/11 is not seen as being central to the international development and environmental destruction issue, and the fact that it is the pressure for survival in the face of lethal poverty and rapid urbanisation which largely drives low-tech and highly polluting antisocial industrial (or post-industrial) development pathways, and sows the seeds for environmental and political disaster.
... while internet-era agit-prop disinformation campaigns rocket around the underbelly of cyberspace and popular culture, persuading the mentally vulnerable that the answers are to be found in neo-fascist ideology, triangles with eyes in, that the Illuminati (ie jewish banking cabal) are behind simply everything including barney the dinosaur (who is a pan dimensional alien brainwashing entity), that the UN is akin to the globalist mafia, and that vaccines or 5G internet will turn everybody into tumour-infested zombies... and *millions* of people are taken in by this Alex Jones / David Icke netherworld of neo-nazi cult belief...
... while investigative journalists on the payroll of professional newspapers with published names and addresses and retained legal defense present damning evidence that quite a few of the famous al quaeda terrorist-recruitment VCDs were actually made by a british PR firm Bell Pottinger to order by the USA's DoD under the direction of General Petraeus, also producing huge amounts of "fake news" for Iraqi news stations.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 48371.html Conspiracy is any deal made behind closed doors which would be publicly denied, and it's not particularly rare in business or military affairs.
I don't give much credibility to the idea of centrally-organised grand conspiracy, or plans that execute flawlessly leaving no footprints. From what I have learned so far about gangsters and criminals, the problems is that they tend to opportunistically screw each other and everybody available, regularly, so the thought that any sort of organised deception has been consistent or emanates from one particular cause or group seems extremely implausible. A high-deception environment is typically unpredictable, chaotic and messy.
_____________
That's the basic success and basic problem with XR - it's a single-issue statement which addresses something profoundly global and corrupt, violent and complicated, underpinning the wholescale contamination and destruction of the commons to the extent that we might lose half of all the species of everything on the planet within our lifetimes - and that quite a few of the people who are directing this show are... from the perspective of objectivity-oriented science and how that applies to decision making... basically mad. Trump as president says it all.
The "energy business", which replaced slavery as the world's premier exploitation industry, frankly has a record that makes "big tobacco" look like a charity.
"declare climate emergency [
and presumably start solving problems by implementing radically austere and strict governmental policies, with an amnesty on corporate and governmental debt for half a century thanks to the IMF creating vast new loans]" is arguably not a diagnosis based upon a well-rounded political stance on how to tackle the causes of explosive manmade pollution as a result of industrial globalisation, a process primarily driven by the war industry, nor is it particularly raising awareness of the actual facts and datasets seeking to rationally penetrate the matter, a matter which is soberingly complex for scientists and engineers to even quantify. This global scale impact stuff is waaay bigger than whatever tape measure is in the janitor's toolbox.
The problem of the *politics* of it, and how unmanageable global industry is, it is incredibly complex, in truth, and the results we are getting are the results of a blllion and one layers of compromise and dilemma.
__________
It seem like too often in modern politics there's a prescriptive automatic solution to any problem which is an echo of an old quaker-type ideology, behind that an echo of the heroism and apocalyptic fever of the crusades and dark ages, and the justified conquest and "civilising force" of Rome led by Caesar - the belief in the virtue of narcissistic organisations with narcissistic leaders.
If anything is going to be done about the post-industrialisation mess, we no doubt need a few more hands on deck, and for the general level of competence and co-operation to improve quickly.
__________
Even more troubling as a notion, if you look at the type of widespread awareness found in metal or punk counterculture in the '80s, with the emphasis on toxic gasmask aesthetics and consciousness of the harshness of industrialised planetary genocide, the issues we are getting today are no different. They have the same "extreme" quality 40 years later.
It isn't a new story, and certainly it's about time these issues were properly addressed by the mainstream of society. It's gasmasks, machineguns, nuclear-chemical-biological warfare as standard commercial practise, that's the supermarket. WW1 with all the upgrades as a way of doing business.
As an NB of "old-news gasmask metal", or the scary brainwashed reality where everything is karaoke disposable and "fast fashion" and nobody can remember what was going on culturally before 9/11 and selfie-space at all, I would note that '80s NYC gasmask metal outfit biohazard, who were fairly mainstream in a sense, did some of their best work in 2003, as middle aged metalheads, looking at the corner that global politics was turning and the run-up to the Iraq invasion.
https://youtu.be/gNP4P9ZOS8A They knew perfectly well what was going on, never really had to change perception, direction or message. Some of Greta's fellow school-strike people were precisely not born then, and have never known a world before the war on terror and the derealised mememedia products of the fog-of-war troll-farm clickbait blogosphere "Internet 2.0."
__________
XR deserve credit, being a refreshing and reawakening of a long-overdue and now-immediate concern, making the message simple, accessible, and internet-viral. The new feature is that they've built a movement which isn't run largely by angry young men, it's got a different mixture.
I love that they forcibly car-free bits of central London, proving that it's actually much nicer with kids skipping about drawing with chalk on the floor, and being able to hear the wind in the trees, and to be able to smell something that isn't diesel exhaust while whizzing about on my bike. This is a great result, and personal car-use is one of the more frightful privileges of being part of the industrial elite. The idea that people might be scandalised by temporarily not being able to drive in an inner city belies the real nature of the inconvenience of industrial pollution, and the sort of disorder that occurs downstream.
We have plenty cars on sale that do less than 25 miles per gallon, the comically bloated porsche 4x4s being a prime example, and some of the hyper-sports-cars now cost sums like five million pounds. The hypercar and megayacht industries are booming. Who do you suppose is buying all this stuff? Does it matter that such items are profoundly gratuitous and often in practise utterly pointless? Are they their emissions the problem? They've got very expensive platinum catalytic converters... they wouldn't want to smog up the monaco marina...
How's about considering that each 2 megawatt piston engined diesel genset chews approximately $2m in diesel per annum? How many towns in the developing world do you think run a small army of poorly maintained diesel generators with broken exhausts, rather than any sort of grid at all? These are usually the same places and the same generators powering some aggressive corporate mineral extraction operation. $2m in diesel is more than a house-full. Shipping-type diesel engines are the size of apartment buildings.
The people who buy the hypercars trade in chunks of the companies that make the oil drilling gear, the mines and refineries for all the equipment... and it isn't the lambourghini's exhaust that's the problem per se, it really isn't, it's just representative of a certain sort of mania.
9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis both changed the focus of western society, and a lot of the environmentalism and international aid and development work, particularly the anti-war stuff, fell by the wayside. Money was made in vast quantities, and the ultra-luxury industries have boomed like never before, with grotesque overpriced products for the new generation of 21st century aspiring bond-villains to put on their private island.
The regulated journalism industry's dubious ability to inform the public largely fell apart as the internet turned ostensibly into a bizarre marketing kaleidoscope of "there's no such thing as a free lunch, and it's *all* free lunch here", but corporate cyberspace has become an active psychological warfare frontier, with billions of dollars in cashflow and assets daily at stake, the world's media consumption under realtime surveillance, and where small teams of spin doctors on the corporate payroll routinely corrupt or completely overthrow governments simply by pushing buttons on computers, having administrative level access to the digital media systems that people carry around in their pockets 24/7, packed with more instrumentation than a 1960s weather balloon, and a trade account with several "discrete private military contractors".
__________
In terms of XR asking the UK government to "tell the truth"...
Most people are not aware that behind the scenes the UK government started the funding process of research into geo-engineering as an emergency measure to deal with unstoppable emissions and impending catastrophic climate change ten years ago, in 2009.
https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk ... OST-PN-327There is evidence that efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases may be insufficient to avert unacceptable levels of climate change; global emission levels are currently higher than even the highest scenario produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2001). Geo-engineering seeks to use global scale engineering to offset the effects of greenhouse gas emissions. This POSTnote summarises the arguments relating to research funding for geoengineering.
Jump to full report >>
Obviously the climate scientists have a very serious point at this stage about the government publicly downplaying the severity of the issue, and that the public need to start demanding they "tell the truth".
________
@FM Grant McNeilly
+plenty!
I'm glad you see it! Some might call these foundational cultural issues religion, or race. Others might call these ideological features.
It's hard for those who inhabit the reagan mirage conservative suburban-television-american-normal ideological monoculture to see the size of the elephant herd in the room, or contemplate what environmental disaster smells like, and what sort of skin conditions and breathing problems you get from even a day's exposure to the conditions some people walk to primary school in.
It's also very scary when you realise that comfortable acceptance of the hegemony is a transmissible ideology by going to somewhere where ethnicity has no connection to participation in the ideology, such as the WTO shopping mall in Hong Kong, the one with the outdoor air conditioning units cooling the area outside the windows displaying diamond-encrusted jewellery, and you see global suburban normal blinkers in full effect, as a pure industrial consumer ideology, being blithely practised by affluent consumer-cantonese people dressed in tommy hilfigger and new york yankees trucker caps, taking selfies with their iPhones, in stark contrast to other more aggravatedly traditional cantonese people who push barrows of anything from fresh fish to brass doorknobs by hand down the street in flip flops and shorts, these groupings treat each other as utterly foreign cultures, and they are. Global modern normal vs indigenous.
_______________
Caesar's all-conquering Rome made a lasting impact on the franco-germanic tribespeople. In the beginning, christianity was the best way to rebel against roman authority. Later it became the de-facto imperial religion.
The vast majority of post-rome post-christianity European people have no direct knowledge of their pre roman or pre christian or pre industrial tribal ancestry or culture, in contrast to pretty much everybody else on the planet. That's how serious this Christendom ideology has been, and it shortens people's concept of history, with modern science-arguing american creationists being the most historically-amputated and maladaptively indoctrinated, insisting on only a few thousand years of history, and all the animals somehow transcendentally-designed and pre-moulded by the celestial designer and manufacturer - it's a form of neurotic amnesia resulting from an extreme "stage four infection" form of religious dogma.
The scandinavians and northern germany were never a classical roman territory, and schoolchildren regularly attend museums full of thousand-year-old norse artefacts, mammoth skeletons, and ancient bits of stone axe, so the sense of time is quite different, and rationally-speaking the past 150 years of global industrialisation and modernisation have had very positive and obvious benefits, lifting the vast majority of people out of very harsh and impoverished conditions into technological comfort and a high level of education and welfare, as well as having to consider very significant risks in the future.
Hence it's unsurprising that the ideally-radical message for mass-uptake is a non-threatening Swede, still in education, who is approaching the subject as an unfolding tragedy, or an emergency, rather than the complex and hard to remedy result of something far more vicious, corrupt and politically toxic, and taking a very confrontational and punitive stance about the social injustice of rural pollution, race-to-the-bottom offshoring of industry, the neglect of worker welfare and education, and the resulting crooked constituting the basic profile of industrial and scientific malpractise and criminal negligence which are central to the majority of large industrial accidents and major environmental disasters.
One fine example of just how complicated it can get is the Italian mafia flytipping nuclear and chemically hazardous waste all around Naples
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/mafia ... aradise-t/ this was done to avoid payments associated with strict environmental policies! If you criminalise pollution... sadly organised criminals oblige and deliver black market pollution!
CBS would rather you didn't talk about the financial industries all being high on cocaine, and running cultures of trained/conditioned psychopathy and machiavellianism, with companies like Glencore being notorious examples, and that it's a pandemic culture of entitled privilege and exploitative aggression, a sort of raw materials gangsterism hidden behind the engineered packaging of consumerism which is at the root of all the disasters they leave in their wake.
https://newint.org/blog/2012/11/20/xstr ... e-takeover
20 November 2012
Indigenous Peoples
United Kingdom
Environment
Human Rights
Mining
Glencore’s takeover of Xstrata will make a monster company. Photo: Hasselback, under a CC License.
On Tuesday 20 November, mining and trading transnational corporation Glencore succeeded in its takeover bid for Xstrata, another massive mining company.
But, why should we care?
As we at the London Mining Network pointed out in our February 2012 report, UK-listed mining companies and the case for stricter regulation, even London’s conservative newspaper The Times took a dim view of Glencore when it floated on the London Stock Exchange in May 2011. Business editor Ian King damned Glencore as: ‘a business with dubious morals. It trades grain amid food riots and has been accused of profiteering and environmental offences in numerous poor and war-torn countries.’ He noted that few traditional City of London institutions would purchase the company’s shares.i
The activities of Glencore and its subsidiaries in Bolivia, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Peru, the US and Zambia have been criticized for association with paramilitary land-grabbing and military repression of protest, air and water pollution, avoiding taxes, destroying agricultural livelihoods and an appalling worker safety record.
But Xstrata’s record is nothing to be proud of either. It has been involved in violent conflict in Peru and the Philippines. It is accused of toxic spills in Peru and of benefiting from unjust removals of agricultural communities in Colombia. Xstrata is also a major shareholder in Lonmin, which hit the headlines in August for the killing of striking workers at its Marikana platinum mine in South Africa.
Then there are the climate impacts of both companies’ massive investment in coal
The issue with coal is that anybody is building more. It's crazy. Coal power installations of even moderate toxic output (it isn't the CO2 that's the primary pollution risk) cost around 4x pretty much everything else, including wind and solar per megawatt, in terms of installation and longterm operation.
That's bonkers, right. In 2020 seriously F** coal as a power source, why are we burning contaminated mineral carbon?! It doesn't even make financial sense! It's the *worst*.
Surely we should complain! March on Parliament!!... These government people should...
...actually...
in May 2019 the UK went its first full week without any coal power. As of 2018, the use of coal power is decreasing to historic lows not seen since before the Industrial Revolution.
Why would anybody use it? Because there's loads. We have yet to reach "peak coal". A whole bunch of people already own it, in the ground, and where it gets burned, and they *insist*. Like you'd better do what we tell you OK... or you could have a bit of a nasty accident...
____________
A lot of power industry people will tell you that we can't store power, and that batteries and supercapacitors are useless.
In the 19th century water towers were the industrial kinetic energy battery technology of choice for heavy industry
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_accumulator, and high pressure water can be piped around. The first power networks were hydraulic.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_power_networkYou don't have to use water, any liquid would do. Maple syrup, presumably. Even sand, or a block of concrete on a rope.
I mean who are these captains of industry who don't even understand wood-era clockwork mechanical engineering principals?
Obviously it's not impossible to build an electromagnetic-kinetic transducer that uses mass and magnetism to store large amounts of power in an industrial environment.
Kinetic energy systems are already in existence:
https://energystorage.org/why-energy-st ... y-storage/Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES)
Compressed air energy storage (CAES) is a way to store energy generated at one time for use at another time. At utility scale, energy generated during periods of low energy demand (off-peak) can be released to meet higher demand (peak load) periods.
Since the 1870’s, CAES systems have been deployed to provide effective, on-demand energy for cities and industries. While many smaller applications exist, the first utility-scale CAES system was put in place in the 1970’s with over 290 MW nameplate capacity. CAES offers the potential for small-scale, on-site energy storage solutions as well as larger installations that can provide immense energy reserves for the grid.
I would assume that appropriate sized air-tools plugged into a 290 megawatt "utility scale" compressed air tank would probably have some... torque. (Don't tell those mining corporations.)
Air springs and pneumatic power distribution systems are not a particularly rare technology, and the material to build them is considerably more available than the lithium salts dug out of Bolivia's salt flats. Or lead-sulfuric-acid batteries, which aren't exactly food-grade.
Know what I mean? Sometimes it's about the miners, not the particular sorts of minerals.
Care for another one of those undersea-mined-tellerium photovoltaic panels... ?
by Me Again on Mon Sep 30, 2019 8:38 am 
I'm going to have to take the environmental message of Greta Thunberg at face value for now, until I see concrete evidence of ulterior motives.