With a General Election looming in the UK, any Party that stood on a ticket to stop the nut-zero nonsense would win a landslide. We have a huge surcharge on our electricity and gas bills that funds subsidies to build wind and solar (at our latitude!) farms, we pay huge tax rates on vehicle fuel and we’re being penalised for not changing our perfectly efficient gas fired boilers to heat pumps, which don’t really work in a lot of our housing stock because of insulation levels. Car manufacturers will soon be being fined for not selling more EVs, yet the manufacturers are responding to the lack of interest in EVs by cutting back their investment in them: VW, Peugeot, Volvo have all been pulling back.
For some time I have considered our Truckers' protest (I am Canadian) to be class conflict - but no-one in the media here - even the conservative right have noticed this. So, thanks for your article!
I'm sorry to say that this article falls well beneath the usual quality. The subject is good, but it's way too verbose, a lot of blah blah blah in there. Slogging through the many words to get to a point is tedious. I guess the author is paid by the word....
It would be nice if news articles reported the whole truth. The author mentions “ forced the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau to invoke a state of emergency to disperse the protesters in their vehicles.”, but fails to mention that trudeau’s invocation was unlawful. Maybe the article was written prior to last week? Either way, lazy reporting.
I don’t think the author gets it. The government keeps nudging, over stepping its bounds and spending money it doesn’t have. Sensible people are fed up and pissed off. That’s what this is about. The lunatics are running the asylum.
No, the Freedom Convoy didn't "force" Trudeau to declare a state of emergency. It gave him the excuse to declare a state of emergency that was eventually declared unreasonable and illegal, but not before he got to exercise his inner authoritarian, including the extraordinary act of shutting off banking services to anyone who gave financial support to the truckers.
Even though Trudeau's use of the Emergencies Act was found to be illegal, he'll never pay a price for his authoritarianism unless Canadians wake up and vote him out at the next election.
Gee. What a conundrum. Do we stand with those who allow, condone and gin up terrorist sympathizing Jew hating protestors, who want us to live like sardines and eat bugs or with the riff raff ruralites who, she sniffed, have no educational credentials and, gasp, work with dirt and fertilizer.
Notre fin sera votre faim. -- Our end will be your hunger is the slogan of the French farmers' current protest. They are tired of cheap foreign imports which do not have meet the same standards of animal welfare, particularly Ukrainian chicken. The French farmers have always been known for their protests. And the French government is making concessions including a new 2 billion euro fund for farmers. The protests have spread to Greece, Belgian and Germany.
If you want to know about the problems farmers face watch the Amazon Prime Jeremy Clarkson's Farm. Red tape. Bureaucracy. A drive towards net zero in some countries which make products uncompetitive. And huge multi national supermarkets like Aldi and Lidl who drive hard bargains.
Because of Just in Time stocking of shelves (Paris only has enough food for 3 days apparently), the French farmers felt they can do something.
I second the “Clarkson’s Farm” recommendation. Season 1 really highlights how the vagaries of the weather can make or break a year for a farm; and season 2 shows the absurd bureaucracy that gets in farmers’ way when they try to feed the people. There will be no season 3 because Clarkson wrote a humourous op-Ed a year or so ago about Megan Markle, and he was cancelled for “racism” (even though the piece contained no actual racism). IMHO, “Clarkson’s Farm” was more interesting and useful to society than the blighted Ms. Markle could ever be…
The release date for series 3 of Clarkson's Farm is 3 May 2024. They are currently filming series 4. Amazon Prime is driven by numbers of eyeballs watching and it is a huge hit.
GREAT news! I never heard this update…the last I heard was Amazon’s statement that they were not renewing it because of his “racism” towards Markle. This is one case where I’m thrilled to hear that capitalism won out over wokeism!
Even the Ukrainian chickens are being mistreated? Quick! Send them a few billion$$. Ukrainian chickens need and deserve our support, no matter how long it takes
Personally I'd rather have the Ukrainians fighting the Russians than NATO. If you want to see the missteps of the West (including Biden and Obama) watch the BBC series Putin v the West. The second series has just dropped. But the mistakes which have been made including Obama's little red lines...are jaw-dropping. The former French President Hollande is a stand out in the early episodes, explaining his dismay at some of the things. The other thing is how old Biden looked back in 2011.
It is good that Ukraine is starting to export again though as that was part of the reason for the huge Cost of Living increases in 2022. It is just that they don't have the same animal welfare standards (supposedly).
It pleases me that the slogan sounds much better in French.
And they're right, of course. Too many people don't think any further than the grocery store, which has always had food for them to buy. They don't realize what is involved in getting that food to the grocery store:
- the land that must be kept clear and fertile (which involves equipment being manufactured, maintained, and fueled, and fertilizers being made and transported)
- the seeds that must be grown the previous year so they can be planted
- the tending of crops to protect them from failure (and then the weather may not cooperate)
- the harvesting (again involving equipment and all that comes with that)
- the transportation to processing plants (which involves vehicle upkeep and fuel)
- the processing (which involves maintaining equipment and getting packaging supplies, which also have to be manufactured and transported to the location)
- transportation to stores (more vehicle upkeep and fuel)
Urbanites are much closer to starving than they realize. When they attack the chain of production and transport (by voting for policies that damage it), they are pressing a razor to their own throats.
"To all you hunters who kill animals for food, shame on you! You ought to go to the store and buy the meat that was made there, where no animals were harmed."
So I've had a lot of very left friends in my day - and I have never heard any one of them say something like that. Maybe it's their kids you're referring to..
Actually, some of the hunting groups such as Ducks Unlimited have been instrumental in conservation. And right now in the UK, it should be eat more Bambi because for a variety of reasons, there is an overpopulation of deer which is causing ecological harm to the Highlands.
Deer are very prone to overpopulation (and ultimately starvation) when they have no natural predators. It causes significant problems here in the Midwest.
It’s out of hand in VA. I’ve alone had multiple deer accidents. They’ll run right into your car door, not to mention running in front of you. Bring back wolves and mountain lions to the Blue Ridge Mountains! Of course I’m kidding, mostly…
That’s why it’s important to incorporate and hire yourself out as a compa b to protect yourself from this legislation. A simple s-corp will do the trick.
Leftists have, for the most part, never been hungry. The elites have multiple fridges and freezers (full of, for example, ice cream), so they are not worried about starving if supply lines are broken. The types that riot think they will just go steal food if they ever need it. The idea that food could run out doesn't enter any of these people's minds.
I feel blessed that I know the growing, harvesting and storing of food. And even more blessed to have the space (land) to maintain, at least, my household.
We store food, in accordance with what our church has been recommending for over 70 years. Last year we were finally able to get chickens. We live on a half acre, and although our garden is currently small, if we had to put more land under cultivation, we could.
Personally, at this point, I am more likely to die when I can no longer get insulin (I have type 1 diabetes) than to starve to death.
I believe we won't get to that point. I think the pushback against the elites is growing, they are going to lose their control of the people. Great that you have a garden and chickens. Nothing tastes better and is more nutritious than home grown food.
The elites and their hypocrisy are becoming more and more apparent. The farms of France as you ride the train through the countryside are Beautiful.
The food even in the small corner grocery stores always tastes trash - never a bitter cucumber, plastic tomato, and mounds of cheese. If you come to Paris or anywhere in France is EASY to go back and think wow they have good food for everyone and it’s cheap.
And now we know. The food is cheap and the land is beautiful because the government mandates the farmer let the land lay fallow and then barely pay them a living wage! So from my perspective it’s all a shame. Just like the “amazing healthcare” - people have no idea the hypocrisy that exists in Europe- the green energy policies while the 140 yo buildings have windows that leak air and use OLD water radiators to heat a 2000 sq ft apt; stores that leave their doors open all the time whether hot or cold; zero insulation to speak of; homeless abound (due to drugs but also the class based society that tells you the type of job you may or may not have and if your an immigrant forget about upward mobility or starting a business). It’s all a sham and the regular people need to understand that those who flocked to Davos ( including our own Blinken and surely Gates) to examine how to tell the billions of us how to eat or drive and live .
The dispersal of similar constituencies in the U.S. throughout the vast expanse of the country makes it more difficult for such protests to take place here.
Green policies will see their demise or drastic scaling back when the professional class experiences hardships brought on by the inability of wind & solar to respond to harsh weather conditions thus affecting their normal, everyday activities, such as staying warm in subzero conditions.
The great “unwashed” that keep this country housed & fed will have their day of reckoning when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.
With a General Election looming in the UK, any Party that stood on a ticket to stop the nut-zero nonsense would win a landslide. We have a huge surcharge on our electricity and gas bills that funds subsidies to build wind and solar (at our latitude!) farms, we pay huge tax rates on vehicle fuel and we’re being penalised for not changing our perfectly efficient gas fired boilers to heat pumps, which don’t really work in a lot of our housing stock because of insulation levels. Car manufacturers will soon be being fined for not selling more EVs, yet the manufacturers are responding to the lack of interest in EVs by cutting back their investment in them: VW, Peugeot, Volvo have all been pulling back.
For some time I have considered our Truckers' protest (I am Canadian) to be class conflict - but no-one in the media here - even the conservative right have noticed this. So, thanks for your article!
Just so everyone knows, scientists agree that:
CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is 412 ppm. That's 0.04%
Then there's nitrogen:
Methane concentration in the atmosphere is 2 ppm. That's 0.0002%
Nitrogen Dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is 0.05 ppm. That's 0.000005%
Nitrogen concentration in the atmosphere is 780000 ppm. That's 78%
How dare those farmers contribute to that 0.0002% level of methane with their cows.
Deer are rife so that makes sense.
I'm sorry to say that this article falls well beneath the usual quality. The subject is good, but it's way too verbose, a lot of blah blah blah in there. Slogging through the many words to get to a point is tedious. I guess the author is paid by the word....
Yep - it could have been distilled to if you're a farmer, a transport truck driver or a port worker, you've got the economy by the balls..
It would be nice if news articles reported the whole truth. The author mentions “ forced the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau to invoke a state of emergency to disperse the protesters in their vehicles.”, but fails to mention that trudeau’s invocation was unlawful. Maybe the article was written prior to last week? Either way, lazy reporting.
I don’t think the author gets it. The government keeps nudging, over stepping its bounds and spending money it doesn’t have. Sensible people are fed up and pissed off. That’s what this is about. The lunatics are running the asylum.
From the new statesman, what do you expect?
No, the Freedom Convoy didn't "force" Trudeau to declare a state of emergency. It gave him the excuse to declare a state of emergency that was eventually declared unreasonable and illegal, but not before he got to exercise his inner authoritarian, including the extraordinary act of shutting off banking services to anyone who gave financial support to the truckers.
Even though Trudeau's use of the Emergencies Act was found to be illegal, he'll never pay a price for his authoritarianism unless Canadians wake up and vote him out at the next election.
Gee. What a conundrum. Do we stand with those who allow, condone and gin up terrorist sympathizing Jew hating protestors, who want us to live like sardines and eat bugs or with the riff raff ruralites who, she sniffed, have no educational credentials and, gasp, work with dirt and fertilizer.
Hmmm.
Je suis la France profonde.
Notre fin sera votre faim. -- Our end will be your hunger is the slogan of the French farmers' current protest. They are tired of cheap foreign imports which do not have meet the same standards of animal welfare, particularly Ukrainian chicken. The French farmers have always been known for their protests. And the French government is making concessions including a new 2 billion euro fund for farmers. The protests have spread to Greece, Belgian and Germany.
If you want to know about the problems farmers face watch the Amazon Prime Jeremy Clarkson's Farm. Red tape. Bureaucracy. A drive towards net zero in some countries which make products uncompetitive. And huge multi national supermarkets like Aldi and Lidl who drive hard bargains.
Because of Just in Time stocking of shelves (Paris only has enough food for 3 days apparently), the French farmers felt they can do something.
I second the “Clarkson’s Farm” recommendation. Season 1 really highlights how the vagaries of the weather can make or break a year for a farm; and season 2 shows the absurd bureaucracy that gets in farmers’ way when they try to feed the people. There will be no season 3 because Clarkson wrote a humourous op-Ed a year or so ago about Megan Markle, and he was cancelled for “racism” (even though the piece contained no actual racism). IMHO, “Clarkson’s Farm” was more interesting and useful to society than the blighted Ms. Markle could ever be…
The release date for series 3 of Clarkson's Farm is 3 May 2024. They are currently filming series 4. Amazon Prime is driven by numbers of eyeballs watching and it is a huge hit.
https://www.whattowatch.com/watching-guides/clarksons-farm-season-3-everything-we-know
GREAT news! I never heard this update…the last I heard was Amazon’s statement that they were not renewing it because of his “racism” towards Markle. This is one case where I’m thrilled to hear that capitalism won out over wokeism!
Loved Jeremy clarkson’s farm show! Potatoes were his best crop.
OTOH the French are revolting. As always.
Maybe if they'd start using deodorant??
He is filming a new series -- his 4th? Anyway it is a huge hit over here. And hugely enjoyable. He does a good job of showing the madness.
He has sent a message f support to the French farmers.
And of course the French are manning the barricades, it is a national pastime.
Actually people forget how rural France is. One of the biggest farming sectors in France is of course wine.
Even the Ukrainian chickens are being mistreated? Quick! Send them a few billion$$. Ukrainian chickens need and deserve our support, no matter how long it takes
Personally I'd rather have the Ukrainians fighting the Russians than NATO. If you want to see the missteps of the West (including Biden and Obama) watch the BBC series Putin v the West. The second series has just dropped. But the mistakes which have been made including Obama's little red lines...are jaw-dropping. The former French President Hollande is a stand out in the early episodes, explaining his dismay at some of the things. The other thing is how old Biden looked back in 2011.
It is good that Ukraine is starting to export again though as that was part of the reason for the huge Cost of Living increases in 2022. It is just that they don't have the same animal welfare standards (supposedly).
It pleases me that the slogan sounds much better in French.
And they're right, of course. Too many people don't think any further than the grocery store, which has always had food for them to buy. They don't realize what is involved in getting that food to the grocery store:
- the land that must be kept clear and fertile (which involves equipment being manufactured, maintained, and fueled, and fertilizers being made and transported)
- the seeds that must be grown the previous year so they can be planted
- the tending of crops to protect them from failure (and then the weather may not cooperate)
- the harvesting (again involving equipment and all that comes with that)
- the transportation to processing plants (which involves vehicle upkeep and fuel)
- the processing (which involves maintaining equipment and getting packaging supplies, which also have to be manufactured and transported to the location)
- transportation to stores (more vehicle upkeep and fuel)
Urbanites are much closer to starving than they realize. When they attack the chain of production and transport (by voting for policies that damage it), they are pressing a razor to their own throats.
But isn’t the grocery store where food comes from?
And electricity comes from that little socket on the wall.
My favorite Lefties-have-shit-for-brains example:
"To all you hunters who kill animals for food, shame on you! You ought to go to the store and buy the meat that was made there, where no animals were harmed."
So I've had a lot of very left friends in my day - and I have never heard any one of them say something like that. Maybe it's their kids you're referring to..
:)
Head in hands.
Actually, some of the hunting groups such as Ducks Unlimited have been instrumental in conservation. And right now in the UK, it should be eat more Bambi because for a variety of reasons, there is an overpopulation of deer which is causing ecological harm to the Highlands.
Deer are very prone to overpopulation (and ultimately starvation) when they have no natural predators. It causes significant problems here in the Midwest.
It’s out of hand in VA. I’ve alone had multiple deer accidents. They’ll run right into your car door, not to mention running in front of you. Bring back wolves and mountain lions to the Blue Ridge Mountains! Of course I’m kidding, mostly…
Wolves to the rescue!
That’s why it’s important to incorporate and hire yourself out as a compa b to protect yourself from this legislation. A simple s-corp will do the trick.
Let them starve
They won't simply starve. They will riot and rampage and kill looking for food to steal.
Build "the" wall? 😂
Michael Lind is one of the best thinkers for a deeper grasp on the forces constructing our times.
I stand with the farmers.
Leftists have, for the most part, never been hungry. The elites have multiple fridges and freezers (full of, for example, ice cream), so they are not worried about starving if supply lines are broken. The types that riot think they will just go steal food if they ever need it. The idea that food could run out doesn't enter any of these people's minds.
Not to mention clean drinking water.
We had a friend who figured that if things got bad, he could always take one of his multiple guns and go rob his Mormon neighbors. Makes sense.
His Mormon neighbors will shoot back if he tries to rob them. Asking nicely is a better approach.
Well he’s no longer with us, and it depends on the Mormon.
I feel blessed that I know the growing, harvesting and storing of food. And even more blessed to have the space (land) to maintain, at least, my household.
We store food, in accordance with what our church has been recommending for over 70 years. Last year we were finally able to get chickens. We live on a half acre, and although our garden is currently small, if we had to put more land under cultivation, we could.
Personally, at this point, I am more likely to die when I can no longer get insulin (I have type 1 diabetes) than to starve to death.
I believe we won't get to that point. I think the pushback against the elites is growing, they are going to lose their control of the people. Great that you have a garden and chickens. Nothing tastes better and is more nutritious than home grown food.
Losing control isn't such a great thing either. Riots and roving mobs?
The elites and their hypocrisy are becoming more and more apparent. The farms of France as you ride the train through the countryside are Beautiful.
The food even in the small corner grocery stores always tastes trash - never a bitter cucumber, plastic tomato, and mounds of cheese. If you come to Paris or anywhere in France is EASY to go back and think wow they have good food for everyone and it’s cheap.
And now we know. The food is cheap and the land is beautiful because the government mandates the farmer let the land lay fallow and then barely pay them a living wage! So from my perspective it’s all a shame. Just like the “amazing healthcare” - people have no idea the hypocrisy that exists in Europe- the green energy policies while the 140 yo buildings have windows that leak air and use OLD water radiators to heat a 2000 sq ft apt; stores that leave their doors open all the time whether hot or cold; zero insulation to speak of; homeless abound (due to drugs but also the class based society that tells you the type of job you may or may not have and if your an immigrant forget about upward mobility or starting a business). It’s all a sham and the regular people need to understand that those who flocked to Davos ( including our own Blinken and surely Gates) to examine how to tell the billions of us how to eat or drive and live .
The dispersal of similar constituencies in the U.S. throughout the vast expanse of the country makes it more difficult for such protests to take place here.
Green policies will see their demise or drastic scaling back when the professional class experiences hardships brought on by the inability of wind & solar to respond to harsh weather conditions thus affecting their normal, everyday activities, such as staying warm in subzero conditions.
The great “unwashed” that keep this country housed & fed will have their day of reckoning when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.