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southeastasianists · 3 years

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Since the Board of the Substation’s official announcement of the closure of the premise, in July 2021, countless tributes from Singaporeans from diverse artistic backgrounds have poured across social media, describing how they have benefited from the premise and its programs for the past three decades.

For me, the Substation filled the indescribable intellectual and cultural void of my late teens, and its relevance became strong during my years in military conscription. Gigs at the venue were also a critical site for a more meaningful multicultural encounters and interactions, particularly with the Malay-Muslim dominated punk-rock community. Subsequently these experiences became integral to my scholarly research. Relevant publications I have based on this foundation over the past two decades include topics on Singapore’s youth subcultures, alternative music scenes and more recently the Substation’s role in exhibiting Singapore’s punk heritage.

My Subs-rhythmic journeys

The Year 1991. The “Evil Empire” of the Soviet Union became history. In the General Paper of my “A” (Advanced) Levels examinations, I mistakenly attributed Deng Xiaoping’s “To be rich is to be glorious” quote to Margaret Thatcher (probably the reason for my “C” grade). For Singaporean teenagers like me, the “kinder and gentler” nation envisioned by the new Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong meant Hong Kong’s “Category III” soft-porn movies in local cinemas. The year was supposed to end well with a slow dance in a Junior College prom-night over Bryan Adam’s “Everything I do, I do it for you” the theme song of Robin Hood (1991) broadcasted ad-nauseum over the radio.

Everything seemed fine. That was until I was introduced by my friend Harold Seah to the Substation. Entering the “Garden”, my senses were immediately overwhelmed by the chaos of growling vocals, thumping drums and swirling guitars on the stage, with audiences diving from the stage into a maddening prancing human crowd. Stagediving, slam-dancing and mosh pits were actually banned by the Singapore authorities in 1993. Ten minutes into the gig, I handed my friend my house keys, spectacles and wallet for safekeeping and I melted into the mosh pit.

Established in 1990 with the playwright Kuo Pao Kun (1939-2002) as its first Artistic Director, the Substation took its name from the venerable colonial era electrical facility at 45 Armenia Street, located within the officially zoned as “Civic District” of museums, galleries and cultural institutions in downtown Singapore. I was not aware of the dynamics then, but it was only at Substation that a former political detainee, playwright, the first Artistic Director of the venue, Kuo Pao Kun met and created artistic possibilities with a new generation of ethnic Malay working class youths. Recalling Kuo’s approachability, band member of Stompin’ Ground, Suhaimi Subandie said, “You have long hair, short hair or no hair, he talked to you the same. ”I have never met Kuo Pao Kun in person. But through the Substation, he gave me new possibilities and connections.

My experience is probably not isolated. As a converging and germinating site for otherwise fringe artistic and creative activities, the Substation has presented an intellectually fertile ground, especially for Singaporean academia, to find critically meaningful narratives and engagements with artists and social activities. As a platform for countless avant-garde exhibitions, performances and screenings, it has provided a poignant alternative narrative to the scholarly literature on themes relating to Singapore culture and society.

Until the 1990s, mainstream academic perspectives on Singapore society reflected on the postcolonial port-city’s rapid economic development as part of the “Asian economic miracle,” under the premiership of Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew from 1959 to 1990. This triumphant sentiment was encapsulated in the collection of more than fifty chapters in Management of Success: The Moulding of Modern Singapore, published in 1989 under the editorship of Kernial Shandu Singh and Paul Wheatley (Singh & Wheatley 1989). Responding to this discourse from a different perspective are non-Singapore based scholars are “soft authoritarian” portraits of Singapore’s as the party state.

It was the Substation and its accompanying activities that another generation of scholars, raised in post-independent Singapore like myself, found possibilities of transcending existing scholarly binaries, critical cultural nuances and resilient communities.

Like the arts, this “Third Space” for Singapore academia can perhaps be attributed to the momentum set out by the vision of Kuo Pao Kun. After his release from political detention, Kuo moved from pursuing direct political criticism to fostering creative diversity. Such possibilities evident in the three decades of the Substation, which started from the age of the fax machine to that of the internet and smartphone.

The incubatory, experimental and liberal spaces that the Substation has provided a multitude of fringe artistic and aesthetic activities, alongside the communities that grew from them, has also been actively mirrored in academic writing. The Substation is relevant to academic enquiry on a wide multidisciplinary spectrum. From semiotics and performance to politics and society, individual creative works and cultural scenes that have occupied the venue inform theoretical discourse and critique across scholarly fields.

Central to academic interest in the Substation are the artistic autonomies and possibilities that it has created within postcolonial Singapore’s highly interventionist, soft authoritarian political climate. Alongside this political juxtaposition, on the academic radar are the stark contrasts between the cultural autonomy emanating from the non-descript former colonial power-station and architectural showcases like the Esplanade in 2000 and the National Art Gallery in 2015.

Scholarly attention to the Substation is both archival and current, capturing interviews with Kuo Pao Kun in 1993, and memorializing his legacy; reaffirming the site’s uniqueness in the new terminology “Affective Paragrounds”. In addition, several academics have also been actively involved with the establishment and governance of the Substation, most prominent amongst them Professor Tommy Koh, Singapore’s Ambassador-at-large who is the venue’s Patron. The venue’s Artistic Directors like Audrey Wong, Lee Weng Choy, Woon Tien Wei, have either held doctorates in the Arts, been engaged as educators in tertiary institutions or contribute actively to academic publications. Over the decades, in various capacities as speakers and discussants at its public events, the local academic community has also made active intellectual contributions to the Substation.

Although there are investments in arts centres, schools and initiatives in existing universities, their significance to Singapore arts and culture is evidently dwarfed by that of the Substation. Unlike the former, which are often inconveniently located on university campuses and cater for confined audiences of student communities, the Substation has greater artistic autonomy to serve a more diverse public. As such, especially for the locally based academic community, the Substation provides more exciting platforms for broader public engagement, social interaction and scholarly collaboration and research.

Punk rock gigs have been staged in campuses of universities sporadically over the decades, but organisers, performers and audiences there will always be a place for them at the Substation. The Singaporean artiste Loo Zihan may be familiar with arts institutions and centres in Singapore. But, it is perhaps only in the Substation that he could comfortably stage the mixed media performance Cane (2012), a re-enactment of the controversial 1994 event in which Joseph Ng in openly cut his pubic hair in a mall, as a symbolic protest against police entrapment of gay men in Singapore. Like the annual Substation Conferences held in the 1990s, the Substation has encouraged substantially critical dialogues involving academics and the arts community.

The Substation’s artistic leaders recognised the value of connecting with the scholarly community. Artistic Director Alan Oei (2015-2020) actively sought closer academic-artistic collaborations. For example, I collaborated with Oei in integrating the Visual Methods Conference held in Singapore in 2017 with a parallel Substation exhibition, Discipline in the City.

As a moderator to the panel “Great Expectations: What Does It Mean To Make and Hold Space for the Arts In Singapore?” in “Space, Spaces, Spacing 2020” (Substation 2020), I had the honour to meet one of the speakers Subhas Nair and his sister Preetips Nair (within the audience). The Nairs were given a police warning several months ago for an “offensive rap video”, in response to a Brownface public advertisement. Unfortunately, that may just be my last academic service to the Substation as it plans to close by July 2021.

Among the local academic community. I am confident that those who have committed to Substation have done so purely as a labour of love, with no expectations of institutional acknowledgment from their universities and schools. On the contrary, some of us ponder what repercussions might follow our commitment to a venue that is associated more with critique than cheerleading.

Jason Lugur included the Substation as one of the few “Spaces of Hope” in his study of Singapore’s cultural landscape. The Substation gave me my foundations as a scholar in Cultural Studies and it has only been right for me to reciprocate in keeping this space of hope alive in my own small ways. The Substation as we know it may be history. But, in fostering a unique relationship between independent arts and critical scholarship for the past three decades, its significance should not be written as an obituary. It should remind the academic community, particularly in the Humanities, of its public commitments to arts and culture in Singapore. Through generating critical knowledge from its research, documentation as well as other forms of collaborations with the arts communities, I hope that the academic community will continue its affective missions in finding and serving in new spaces of hope in Singapore.

#Southeast Asia #Singapore #The Substation #Culture #Academia #Arts

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carcino-generic · 5 years

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HOW HUMANS ARE HAVING THEIR LIVES RUINED BY KARKAT VANTAS

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ALRIGHT, HERE’S THE BASICS OF CAPITALISM FROM A WORKING CLASS AMERICAN. I WANT TO START OUT BY SAYING I DON’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT EUROPE, CANADA, AUSTRALIA, OR ANY OTHER “FIRST-WORLD” COUNTRIES. I DON’T KNOW WHO TORIES ARE AND I DON’T CARE ABOUT EMMANUEL MACRON. FOREIGN AFFAIRS ARE NOT MY CUP OF TEA THANKS. I HAVE ENOUGH PROBLEMS WITH DOMESTIC POLITICS. ALSO DON’T GET ON MY ASS ABOUT CALLING IT AMERICA INSTEAD OF THE U.S.A., CANADIANS DON’T ACTUALLY WANT TO BE AMERICANS AND IF THEY DO THEY’RE MORONS FOR REASONS THAT WILL BECOME CLEAR AS YOU READ ON.

YOU KNOW HOW IN A NORMAL SOCIETY, TRADE IS DRIVEN BY RESOURCES AND PRICES ARE DETERMINED BY THE AVAILABILITY, COMPLEXITY, AND DIFFICULTY IN PRODUCTION OF A PRODUCT? SO IMAGINE YOUR COUNTRY GETS ENOUGH MONEY, POWER, AND SHEER BLIND DEVOTION FROM ITS CITIZENS TO THROW ALL THAT IN THE GARBAGE, AND THEN IMAGINE THAT EVERYONE CAPABLE OF MAKING MEANINGFUL CHANGES AT A FUNDAMENTAL LEVEL, WHILE REMAINING WITHIN THE CURRENT SYSTEM, IS OWNED BY SOMEONE WHO BENEFITS EGREGIOUSLY FROM EVERYTHING STAYING THE SAME, AND EVEN MORE EGREGIOUSLY FROM THINGS BECOMING WORSE. NOW IMAGINE THAT WHEN I SAID “SOMEONE” I MEANT “ONE OF MAYBE FIFTEEN MEGA-CORPORATIONS THAT OWNS EVERY OTHER BUSINESS IN THE COUNTRY,” AND WHEN I SAY “EVERYONE CAPABLE OF MAKING MEANINGFUL CHANGES...” I MEAN POLITICIANS WE ELECT TO PRETEND TO REPRESENT OUR INTERESTS WHO HAVE IN REALITY BEEN BOUGHT OUT BY CORPORATE INTERESTS AND RISK LOSING THEIR JOBS IF THEY MAKE LAWS THAT THREATEN THOSE CORPORATE INTERESTS’ BOTTOM LINES. BASICALLY, WE INVESTED ALL OUR POWER INTO PRIVATELY OWNED MONEY SINKS AND FORGOT TO CARE ABOUT THE THINGS THAT MATTER, LIKE THE ACTUAL CITIZENS? OKAY THIS IS GETTING AWAY FROM ME, WE MIGHT HAVE TO START FROM THE BASICS.

I DON’T KNOW HOW YOUR SOCIETY WORKS, BUT IN OURS, YOU START OUT AS A LITTLE BABY. AS SOON AS YOU’RE PHYSIOLOGICALLY CAPABLE OF EXISTING FOR CONSECUTIVE HOURS WITHOUT THE PEOPLE WHO RAISED YOU, THEY SHOVE YOU IN A CLASSROOM AND START FEEDING YOU A MIXTURE OF COLONIAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL, PHILOSOPHICAL, AND POLITICAL PROPAGANDA. THAT’S ALSO WHERE THEY TEACH YOU HOW TO SOCIALIZE WITH KIDS YOUR AGE AND SHIT. FOR SOME KIDS IT’S THE *ONLY* PLACE THEY CAN LEARN TO SOCIALIZE, BECAUSE THEIR PARENTS ARE TOO BUSY, ABSENT, OR PROTECTIVE TO BRING YOU OUT TO INTERACT WITH PEERS. EITHER WAY, THIS IS WHERE KIDS FORM THEIR CONCEPTS OF BOTH PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS AND SOCIAL CONTRACTS. THE TRAUMA OF RACIAL AND GENDER PROFILING IS NASCENT HERE, BUT OH BOY IT INTERNALIZES QUICKLY. (MORE ON HOW PEOPLE OF COLOR, THE WAR ON DRUGS, AND PROFIT ARE ALL LINKED LATER ON, OR MAYBE JUST LOOK UP A VIDEO ESSAY ON IT IDK.)

IT’S PRETTY MUCH THIRTEEN YEARS OF THIS SAME SHIT, ESPECIALLY THE PROPAGANDA BIT. KIDS GROW UP BEING INDOCTRINATED WITH THIS COMPLETELY WHITEWASHED VERSION OF REALITY, BELIEVING CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS* IS THE SHIT AND CAPITALISM IS THE ONLY EFFICIENT MODEL FOR MODERN SOCIETY. THEY’RE USUALLY TAUGHT ALL ABOUT WORLD WARS I AND II, THE VIETNAM WAR, THE COLD WAR, AND THE SPACE RACE, WHICH (BY UNEQUIVOCALLY POSING AMERICANS AS THE GOOD GUYS AND THE SOVIETS AND CHINESE AS THE BAD GUYS, CEMENTS THE CONCEPT THAT CAPITALISM INHERENTLY RULES AND COMMUNISM INHERENTLY FAILS) FURTHER INDOCTRINATES KIDS. IF YOU’RE REALLY AN ALIEN I DOUBT YOU’VE SEEN THIS IMAGE, BUT EVERY SINGLE AMERICAN EARTHLING HAS:

THIS GUY IS NAMED UNCLE SAM, HE’S BASICALLY AMERICA’S FURSONA. HE EXISTS TO PRESSURE YOU INTO SIGNING UP TO FIGHT IN A WAR. HE WAS USED A LOT IN THOSE WARS I TALKED ABOUT UP THERE, ESPECIALLY THE FIRST THREE. HE’S NOT AROUND SO MUCH ANY MORE BUT THE GENERAL SENTIMENT IS. HERE’S HOW.

WHEN YOU GRADUATE FROM HIGH SCHOOL, THE LAST “REQUIRED” STAGE OF SCHOOL, YOU ARE EXPECTED TO MOVE OUT AND GET A JOB TO SUPPORT YOURSELF. BUT NOWADAYS, IF YOU WANT A JOB THAT PAYS FOR YOUR HEALTH CARE, LETS YOU STAY HOME WHEN YOU GET SICK, GIVES YOU DAYS OFF TO GO TO FAMILY EVENTS SUCH AS WEDDINGS, FUNERALS, THE BIRTH OF YOUR CHILDREN, AND OTHER UNIMPORTANT DRIVEL THAT DOESN’T MAKE CEOS MONEY, YOU BET YOUR ASS YOU’D BETTER GET A COLLEGE DEGREE. HAVING A DEGREE IS THE NUMBER ONE WAY YOU CAN GUARANTEE THAT YOU MAKE MORE MONEY. THAT ALL SOUNDS FINE AND DANDY, EXCEPT NOW YOU HAVE TO PAY SOME INDUSTRIAL-SCALE LOAN SHARK MORE THAN YOU’LL EVER HAVE IN YOUR 401(K) TO LET YOU GET YOUR HIGHER EDUCATION. A LOT OF PEOPLE END UP OWING UPWARDS OF FIFTY GRAND TO A PRIVATELY OWNED LOAN AGENCY BY THE TIME THEY’RE TWENTY-ONE, BECAUSE AS FRESH ADULTS THEY WERE TOLD THEY WOULDN’T GET A WORTHWHILE JOB UNLESS THEY HAD A DEGREE. BUT HERE’S THE THING: A LOT OF TIMES, JOBS LIKE THAT WON’T EVEN HIRE YOU UNLESS YOU HAVE A MASTER’S DEGREE NOW! THAT’S ANOTHER TWO YEARS OF CLASSES AND ANOTHER HUGE CHUNK OF MONEY YOU NEVER HAD TO BEGIN WITH.

OF COURSE THERE ARE LESS EXPENSIVE OPTIONS, LIKE TRADE SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY COLLEGE. BUT REMEMBER THE PROPAGANDA I MENTIONED? IT’S SO PERVASIVE, A LOT OF YOUNG PEOPLE DON’T EVEN CONSIDER TRADE SCHOOL AN OPTION NOW, BECAUSE WE CULTURALLY VALUE THE “INTELLECTUAL” JOBS—DOCTOR, LAWYER, ENGINEER, ACCOUNTANT, BUSINESSMAN—WHICH ARE STRANGELY ALSO THE CAREER PATHS THAT REQUIRE THE MOST INVESTMENT OF TIME AND MONEY! NOW IF YOU DECIDE TO BE LIKE ME AND GET A JOB RIGHT OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL BECAUSE THE EDUCATION INDUSTRY IS A PUTRID WASTELAND, YOU’RE AUTOMATICALLY LOOKED DOWN UPON. A LOT OF TIMES PEOPLE WHO ARE PURSUING LESS LUCRATIVE CAREERS THAT INTEREST THEM***, INSTEAD OF THE BIG MONEY JOBS, ARE DISPARAGINGLY ASKED IF THEY WANT TO “END UP WORKING AT MCDONALDS.” I DON’T PERSONALLY WORK AT MCDONALDS BUT THIS SHIT STILL OFFENDS ME. BUT THEN AGAIN I’M A MILLENNIAL SNOWFLAKE SO WHAT DO I KNOW.

ACADEMIA HAS A LOT OF ITS OWN PROBLEMS BUT I’VE ONLY HEARD THOSE SECONDHAND, SO LET’S LEAVE THAT HELLSCAPE TO ITS ELITISM AND STAY WITHIN THE BLUE-COLLAR SUBCLASS. COMMON PARLANCE WILL REFER TO THREE MAJOR CLASSES: THE LOWER CLASS (DIPLOMATICALLY CALLED THE “WORKING CLASS”, HA FUCKING HA!), THE MIDDLE CLASS (WHICH THEORETICALLY MAKES UP THE MAJORITY OF THE POPULATION), AND THE UPPER CLASS (FUCK THOSE GUYS BUT WE’LL GET AROUND TO THAT LATER.) THIS MODEL IS PRETTY MUCH JUST DESIGNED TO CREATE TENSION WITHIN THE PROLETARIAT, BUT HANG ON A SECOND, I JUST REMEMBERED YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT THE PROLETARIAT IS YET.

SO BASICALLY, THERE’S NOT THAT MUCH DEFINABLE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE “MIDDLE CLASS” AND THE “WORKING CLASS.” WHEN YOU THINK OF WORKING CLASS, COLLOQUIALLY, YOU THINK OF THOSE LOSERS THAT WORK IN THE SERVICE INDUSTRY OR DRIVE TAXIS OR (AND THIS IS INCOMPREHENSIBLE TO SOME PEOPLE) HAVE NO JOB AT ALL. THE MIDDLE CLASS IS MORE LIKE TEACHERS AND MIDDLE MANAGERS AND GUYS THAT BUILD SOFTWARE REMOTELY FOR MICROSOFT. REALLY THOUGH, THERE’S NO WAY TO DRAW A DEFINITIVE LINE BETWEEN THESE PEOPLE. THE BEST WAY TO DEFINE CLASS IN AMERICA, (AND ALSO APPARENTLY GERMANY, AT LEAST IN THE 19TH CENTURY,) IS TO SEPARATE THOSE WHO PRODUCE GOODS AND THOSE WHO OWN THE GOODS THAT ARE PRODUCED. THERE IS NO “MIDDLE CLASS”, THAT’S JUST A MEANINGLESS THING TO STRIVE FOR BASED ON WHAT WHITE FAMILIES IN SITCOMS LOOK AND ACT LIKE.

WORKERS WHO PRODUCE GOODS AND SERVICES ARE THE BACKBONE OF SOCIETY AND THEY’RE CALLED THE PROLETARIAT. THEY ARE SERVICE WORKERS AND JANITORS AND TAXI DRIVERS AND HOTEL VALETS, BUT THEY ARE ALSO ELECTRICIANS AND PLUMBERS AND MECHANICS, AND THEY ARE LAWYERS AND DOCTORS AND PROFESSORS, AND THEY ARE YOUTUBERS AND INFLUENCERS AND SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGERS. THE PROLETARIAT IS ANYONE WHO MAKES MONEY BY SELLING THEIR LABOR. THEY CAN BE CONTRACTORS SELLING THEIR LABOR TO INDEPENDENT BUYERS, OR FREELANCERS SELLING THEIR LABOR TO MULTIPLE LARGER BUSINESSES, BUT MOST OF THE PROLETARIAT IS DIRECTLY EMPLOYED BY SOME KIND OF COMPANY OWNED BY A MEMBER OF THE BOURGEOISIE.

THE BOURGEOISIE IS KIND OF A MEME AT THIS POINT BUT THEIR IMPACT ON THE WAY WE LIVE IS FUCKING INESCAPABLE. THEY’RE PEOPLE WHO *BUY* OUR LABOR, ACCRUE CAPITAL BY SITTING ON THEIR (SOMETIMES LITERAL!!!) THRONES, OWNING COMPANIES AND PEOPLE, SOMETIMES BEING A PUBLIC FIGURE (LIKE ELON MUSK) WHO RAKES IN ADORATION FROM HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF MINDLESS TWITTER DRONES WHO STILL BELIEVE IN CLASS MOBILITY****, OR SOMETIMES BEING A SHADOWY FIGURE IN THE BACKGROUND (LIKE THE KOCH BROTHERS) WHO JUST PASSIVELY RAKE IN THE BENEFITS OF OUR HARD WORK AND CAN’T BE ASSASSINATED BECAUSE NO ONE WOULD RECOGNIZE THEM IF THEY WERE SEEN AT KROGER. THEY ARE USUALLY BORN WEALTHY, BUT VERY RARELY THEY CAN USE THEIR CHARISMA, INTELLIGENCE, SOCIAL CONNECTIONS, AND INTRINSIC PRIVILEGE AS A WHITE PERSON TO YANK THEMSELVES UP FROM THE PROLETARIAT (READ MY CLASS MOBILITY NOTE FOR MORE!!!)

SO THE RESULT OF THIS CLASS DIVISION IS AS FOLLOWS:

THE PROLETARIAT NEVER EARNS THE ACTUAL VALUE OF THEIR LABOR. A “SMALL” CHUNK IS ALWAYS TAKEN OUT FOR THE PEOPLE AT THE TOP, WHO “RUN” THE COMPANY (BUT REALLY THEIR JOB IS USUALLY TO EAT FANCY LUNCH AND TELL RACIST GOLF JOKES TO RICH INVESTORS). IN FACT, WAGES ARE USUALLY ENTIRELY DISSOCIATED FROM THE ACTUAL PROFIT THE COMPANY MAKES. FOR A BUSINESS TO BE PROFITABLE, IT HAS TO PAY THE EMPLOYEES IT RELIES ON LESS THAN WHAT THEY BRING TO THE TABLE, WHICH MEANS MOST COMPANIES ESTABLISH A BASE WAGE THAT’S EITHER EXACTLY THE STATE’S MINIMUM WAGE OR A COUPLE CENTS HIGHER TO COMPETE. THEY LITERALLY PAY THE LEAST THEY LEGALLY CAN. SOMETIMES *LESS*.

YOUR JOB IS EXPECTED TO BE THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN YOUR LIFE. EXHAUSTED AFTER YOUR FORTY, FIFTY, OR SIXTY HOUR WORK WEEK? THAT’S JUST NORMAL, THEY’RE NOT SQUEEZING THE MAXIMUM AMOUNT OF LABOR OUT OF YOU THAT THEY CAN WITHOUT KILLING YOU! WANT TO TAKE A FEW DAYS OFF TO SPEND TIME WITH YOUR WIFE AFTER SHE GAVE BIRTH TO YOUR INFANT CHILD? SORRY, YOU’RE OUT OF SICK DAYS. MISSED THE BUS AND THERE’S NOT ANOTHER ONE FOR AN HOUR? IT’S YOUR FAULT FOR NOT HAVING A CAR OR SPENDING FIFTY BUCKS ON AN UBER. TRYING TO GO TO YOUR FIFTH FAMILY FUNERAL BECAUSE ALL YOUR RELATIVES ARE DROPPING LIKE FLIES AFTER A HARD SIXTY YEARS OF LABOR? OOH, SORRY, YOU ONLY GET FOUR FUNERAL DAYS A YEAR! NEED TO GET ANOTHER JOB BECAUSE YOUR CURRENT ONE DOESN’T PAY ENOUGH? WELL, YOU FORGOT TO DISCLOSE IT TO YOUR BOSS AND THEY FIRED YOU FOR TWO-TIMING THEM! A JOB IS MORE OF A COMMITMENT THAN A SPOUSE, AND IF YOU HAVE OTHER PRIORITIES, YOU WON’T LAST LONG.

BECAUSE THE BOURGEOISIE OWNS SERVICES THAT SHOULD BE PROVIDED BY THE GOVERNMENT, LIKE HEALTHCARE, HOME AND AUTO INSURANCE, A LOT OF HIGHER EDUCATION ESTABLISHMENTS, CREDIT BUREAUS, LOAN COMPANIES, AND HOSPITALS, PROFIT IS THE MOTIVE THERE TOO! WHICH MEANS IF YOU HAVE ANY KIND OF INSURANCE, NEED TO BUY A HOUSE OR A CAR, WANT OR NEED AN EDUCATION, ARE CHRONICALLY ILL, OR JUST EXIST ON A GENERAL BASIS, COMPANIES ARE RIPPING YOU OFF. YOU ARE BASICALLY PAYING THOUSANDS A MONTH FOR THE CHANCE TO GET *SOME* OF YOUR MASSIVE HOSPITAL BILL COVERED IF YOU GET IN AN ACCIDENT. THIS ONE IS NEAR AND DEAR TO ME. FOR UNIMPORTANT REASONS, I MANAGE TO RACK UP A LOT OF DEBT EVERY YEAR GOING TO HOSPITALS AND URGENT CARE, CALLING AMBULANCES, PAYING FOR MEDICATION THAT DOESN’T WORK. DID YOU KNOW YOU’RE CHARGED NIGHTLY TO STAY IN HOSPITALS LIKE THEY’RE GODDAMN HOTELS? LIKE IT’S A FUCKING VACATION? AND DID YOU KNOW THE BILLING DEPARTMENTS OF EACH OF THESE PRIVATELY OWNED ESTABLISHMENTS IS MADE UP OF UNDERPAID, OVERSTRESSED MEMBERS OF THE PROLETARIAT WHOSE JOB IS TO FUCK UP YOUR BILL SO YOU OWE MORE THAN YOUR VISIT ACTUALLY COST?

MEDICAL FACILITIES ARE ALSO PUSHED TO SELL OVERPRICED DRUGS THAT DON’T WORK TO PEOPLE. HEADS UP, GUYS, BUT ANTIBIOTICS DON’T WORK AGAINST VIRAL INFECTIONS, AND YET THEY’RE PRESCRIBED FOR THE FLU AND COMMON COLD EVERY DAY. AND SOMETIMES THE DRUGS DO WORK, BUT THEY’RE STILL OVERPRICED! IF YOU’VE BEEN ON THE INTERNET AT ALL THIS YEAR YOU’LL KNOW ALL ABOUT THE INSULIN CRISIS, WHICH WAS CREATED ARTIFICIALLY. BASICALLY THE PEOPLE WHO OWN INSULIN (YEAH, *OWN* A LIFE-SAVING MEDICATION) RACKED UP THE PRICE SO MUCH THAT PEOPLE COULDN’T FUCKING AFFORD IT ANYMORE, DESPITE A NORMAL DOSE OF INSULIN COSTING LIKE FIFTY CENTS TO MAKE?? OR, HOW ABOUT THIS—THEY INVENTED THIS COOL NEW CHEAP PAIN-RELIEVING DRUG CALLED FENTANYL AND DISCOVERED THEY COULD MAKE A SHIT TON OF MONEY OFF IT, SO DOCTORS PRESCRIBED THE HELL OUT OF IT UNTIL PEOPLE GOT SO ADDICTED TO IT THAT TENS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE DIED OF OVERDOSES. OH, DID I SAY “PRESCRIBED” IN THE PAST TENSE? MY BAD, THEY CONTINUE TO PRESCRIBE IT EVERY SINGLE DAY. IF YOU HAVE CHRONIC PAIN AND ASK DOCTORS NOT TO PUT YOU ON PAIN MEDICATION, A LOT OF TIMES THEY WILL STILL PUT YOU ON PAIN MEDICATION. IF YOU EXPLAIN TO YOUR DOCTOR THAT YOU KICKED A HEROIN ADDICTION AND YOU REALLY WOULD NOT LIKE TO HAVE OPIOIDS PUT IN YOUR BODY, THEY WILL PROBABLY STILL BE LIKE, HUH, SUCKS FOR YOU, AND PUT OPIOIDS IN YOUR BODY.

DO YOU WANT TO CHANGE ANY OF THIS? PERHAPS PETITION YOUR LOCAL POLITICIAN, OR GOD FORBID, STATE CONGRESSMAN, TO PASS A LAW THAT YOU THINK MIGHT IMPROVE YOUR LIFE? WELL, IT TURNS OUT YOU NEED A LOT OF MONEY TO RUN A CAMPAIGN NOWADAYS, AND POLITICIANS ARE ALLOWED TO BE SPONSORED BY BIG BUSINESSES, BECAUSE BUSINESSES ARE PEOPLE. SO IF YOU’RE THE SENATOR OF NEW JERSEY OR WHATEVER, AND YOUR CONSTITUENTS WANT YOU TO VOTE TO RAISE THE MINIMUM WAGE, BUT YOUR CAMPAIGN IS OWNED BY WALMART, WHO WANTS TO KEEP PAYING ITS WORKERS ELEVEN BUCKS AN HOUR, YOU HAVE THE CHOICE BETWEEN MAKING A COUPLE LITTLE WORKING CLASS IDIOTS ANGRY OR GETTING ALL YOUR FUNDING FROM WALMART PULLED BECAUSE YOU THREATENED THEIR PROFIT MARGINS.

NOT ACTIVELY DYING FROM A TREATABLE ILLNESS, WASTING AWAY FROM DRUG ADDICTION, OR ENTRENCHED IN SLAVERY TO A CORPORATION WHOSE PRODUCT YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN? GREAT! DID YOU KNOW THE PLANET WILL BE ON FIRE IN LIKE A FEW DECADES? OIL AND GAS COMPANIES HAVE SO MUCH INFLUENCE OVER THE LAWMAKERS THAT ARE SUPPOSED TO PROHIBIT THEM FROM RUINING THE PLANET, THEY’VE PUT THE ONUS OF SAVING IT ON INDIVIDUALS’ SHOULDERS. REDUCE YOUR CARBON EMISSIONS BY TAKING THAT HOURLY BUS (YOU’LL EITHER BE FIFTY MINUTES EARLY TO WORK OR TEN MINUTES LATE!) OR RECYCLING YOUR SHIT (BUT IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOUR MUNICIPALITY CAN’T RECYCLE, THEY’LL THROW THE WHOLE BATCH OUT WHEN YOU PUT TRASH IN) OR TURNING THE LIGHTS OFF IN YOUR HOUSE (JUST EAT DINNER IN THE DARK YOU PIECE OF SHIT) OR INSTALLING SOLAR PANELS ON YOUR HOUSE (FUCK ME FOR RENTING I GUESS?) THERE IS SO MUCH WE CAN DO JUST WHENEVER TO SWITCH TO SUSTAINABLE ENERGY, BUT EXXON AND BP AND SHELL OWN SO MUCH INFLUENCE THAT WE’RE JUST *NOT*, AND LEAVING THIS WASTELAND OF A HOME PLANET TO OUR FUTURE GENERATIONS. BUT AT LEAST ELON MUSK BUILT THIS REALLY COOL LOW-POLY BETHESDA LOOKING PIECE OF SHIT FOR US TO MAKE MEMES ABOUT

HERE’S THE SKINNY OF IT, PEOPLE. THERE’S NO OUT WITHIN OUR CURRENT SYSTEM. EVEN IF YOU DID THE MAGIC AND PULLED YOURSELF UP BY YOUR BOOTSTRAPS AND NOW YOU’RE A BIG BOY WHO OWNS HIS OWN COMPANY, YOU LEFT BEHIND A BUNCH OF PEOPLE WHO DIDN’T WIN THE BIRTH LOTTERY LIKE YOU DID. INNOCENT FOLKS ARE DYING OF HUNGER OR ILLNESS THEY CAN’T AFFORD TO TREAT, CRASHING CARS THEY CAN’T AFFORD TO FIX, WORKING THEMSELVES LITERALLY TO DEATH TO SUPPORT THEMSELVES OR THEIR FAMILIES, AND SCRAPING BY WITH A MEASLY ALLOWANCE OF FREE TIME WITH WHICH TO UNWIND AND CATCH UP WITH OTHER PEOPLE. THEY DON’T HAVE TIME TO WATCH THE NEWS, THINK CRITICALLY ABOUT THE SOCIETY THEY LIVE IN, CONCEPTUALIZE UNIONIZING OR REVOLTING OR BUILDING GUILLOTINES. THEY WANT TO KEEP US EXHAUSTED AND STRUGGLING BECAUSE IT’S WHAT KEEPS THEM COMFORTABLE UP THERE, KNOWING NO ONE HAS THE ENERGY OR THE GALL TO TOUCH THEM. THE ONLY FUCKING WAY TO ESCAPE THIS HELL WE’VE CREATED IS THROUGH REVOLUTION. WE NEED TO SCRAP THIS WHOLE THING AND START OVER. BUT I THINK THAT’S ANOTHER ESSAY. ANYWAY I HOPE THIS WAS THOROUGH ENOUGH FOR A LITERAL ALIEN SOCIETY.

TL;DR: WE ARE ALL FUCKED IF WE DON’T OVERTHROW THE RICH.

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*CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS IS SOME EUROPEAN WHO SAILED THE WRONG WAY AND ENDED UP IN THE AMERICAS. HE AND HIS BUDDIES RAPED AND PILLAGED THEIR WAY THROUGH A BUNCH OF INDIGINOUS COMMUNITIES AND DECIDED THIS COUNTRY WAS “FREE REIGN” TO SETTLE IN. HE IS HAILED AS THE AMERICAN ODYSSEUS AND CREDITED WITH THE “DISCOVERY” OF AMERICA BECAUSE OF COURSE ALL THOSE PEOPLE WHO LIVED HERE FIRST DON’T COUNT??

**I DON’T KNOW SHIT ABOUT WARS EITHER BUT LET’S GET INTO IT FROM THE POV OF A GUY WHO PASSED HIS WORLD HISTORY CLASS WITH A STRAIGHT B MINUS.

THE FIRST WORLD WAR: I DON’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT THIS ONE.

THE SECOND WORLD WAR: THE ONE WHERE A BUNCH OF SCIENTISTS AND GOVERNMENT OFFICERS BOMBED A COUPLE OF CIVILIAN SETTLEMENTS IN JAPAN AND I’M PRETTY SURE AN *ENTIRE HAWAIIAN ISLAND* JUST TO SEE WHAT HAPPENED. TURNS OUT IT KILLED A BUNCH OF CIVILIANS. HUH! WHO’D HAVE EXPECTED THAT! OH IT ALSO TURNED AN ENTIRE GENERATION OF OTHERWISE DECENT FOLKS INTO RABIDLY PATRIOTIC IDIOTS, BECAUSE THE PACE AT WHICH THIS COUNTRY CHURNS OUT PROPAGANDA DURING A WAR IS FASTER THAN THE SPEEDING RUBBER BAND I SHOT WITH MY FINGERS AT THE TEACHER WHO WAS EXPLAINING WHY EVERY OTHER COUNTRY WAS IN THE ABSOLUTE WRONG DURING THIS CATASTROPHE.

VIETNAM: OKAY SO BASICALLY PEOPLE HATED THIS ONE BECAUSE THEY REALIZED SOLDIERS WERE GOING ALL CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS ON THE COUNTRIES WHERE THEY WERE STATIONED. ENOUGH SAID.

COLD WAR: THIS IS NOMINALLY A WAR BECAUSE THE GOOD OLD U.S.A. AND ITS HATEFUCKBUDDY THE U.S.S.R.† DID THIS WITH WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

(EVENTUALLY THEY DECIDED TO PUT THE FINGER GUNS AWAY. I’M GONNA LET YOU TRY TO PUZZLE OUT ON YOUR OWN HOW COUNTRIES “PUT AWAY” NUCLEAR WEAPONS CAPABLE OF ENDING ALL LIFE ON EARTH.)

SPACE RACE: THE U.S. AND THE U.S.S.R. HAD A FUN COMPETITION TO SEE WHOSE DICK WAS BIG ENOUGH TO GET TO THE MOON. SCIENCE IS RUINED.

***ARTISTS, WRITERS, JOURNALISTS, VIDEO ESSAYISTS, AND ANYONE ELSE WHO ISN’T EITHER OWNED OR SPONSORED (THAT’S A FANCY WORD FOR “OWNED”) BY BIG BUSINESS TEND TO BE THREATENED BY POVERTY. PRETTY MUCH ANYONE WHO CAN FREELANCE ACTUALLY, BECAUSE WORKING FOR A CORPORATION PROVIDES THE SAFETY NET THAT SOCIAL PROGRAMS WOULD OTHERWISE TAKE CARE OF IF SOCIAL PROGRAMS WERE FUNDED EVER.

****ALSO KNOWN AS THE AMERICAN DREAM, IN WHICH *ANYBODY* CAN MAKE IT IN THIS COUNTRY IF THEY TRY HARD ENOUGH! UNFORTUNATELY THIS IS A MYTH, AS YOU CAN SEE BY THE FACT THAT I AM STILL REALLY POOR, AS IS LIKE 90% OF THE COUNTRY. PLUS CLASS MOBILITY WORKS REALLY HARD TO KEEP MINORITIES IN EXTREME POVERTY, BECAUSE IT DOESN’T EXIST AS AN ISOLATED SYSTEM AND ANYONE WHO THINKS IT DOES IS A DUMBSHIT WHO’S BOUGHT INTO THIS EVEN MORE THAN THE AVERAGE DUMBSHIT.

†RUSSIA’S COOL NEW NAME WHEN IT TRIED OUT SOCIALISM

#HERE YOU FUCKING GO ALIENS.#I WOULD HAVE GOTTEN A D MINUS FOR THIS IN SCHOOL.#FOR REASONS THAT ARE ESTABLISHED UNDER THE CUT.#{{i typed this in google docs? its uhhh 8 pages long #addiction/#drugs/#war/#uncle sam/#tesla truck/#watch as it fucks up the formatting and kills me instantly

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houseki-no-suffering · 6 years

Note

First of all,,,,how dare you hurt the children *whispers* but tell me your headcanons p w e a s e

adgfh thanks for the interest nonnie. The post i made was about some Antarc hcs from the fic i’m writing so here it is i guess, my

HnK 1960s AU:

(more under the cut cause it gets super long)

- the fic is an historical AU set in the 1960s and 70s in italy, but since most characters are older than that many HCs date back to the 40s and wwii as well

- (most of) the gems live in an Institute that Sensei founded during the last years of the war by using a big building that was built during Fascism and then abandoned/destroyed by the war. Think of the gems as orphans/ppl who found themselves alone after the war or something

- the institute started off as a small thing but then more and more gems came around and it got its own elementary school and even middle school (thanks to Alex), there are dorms, a gym, a big canteen etc.

- the city is super small, it doesn’t even have a train station so the school was a huge help especially cause the place was heavily bombarded cause it’s close to a larger city

- most of the gems that died before the beginning of the series died because of wwii (like Chrysoberyl, Morga and Goshe). Yellow lost most of their friends and Papda got badly injured

- the school is more or less ran by Alex at this point cause Sensei is old and Alex and Chryso moved to this city after the war broke out, cause that’s the city Chryso where was born (and that’s why they knew sensei), also they thought the place would be safer but they were very wrong

- Alex is in their mid forties, around the same age as Padpa, a tiny, bitter academician who had once been famous for their work and that traveled around Europe with Chryso to attend conferences and stuff, and then the war happened and Chryso was snatched away from them in a very tragic way

- after Chryso died, Alex stopped caring about their career and basically resigned. They buried themselves in personal work as a big middle finger to the system and to distract themselves,they fell into severe depression and became completely disillusioned with life, they still have self-destroying outbursts from time to time, Red Beryl usually helps them but if those happen when Alex’s with Yellow then things kind of go for a tangent

- when Alex abandoned academia altogether they became somewhat of an anarchist, they don’t believe in the system anymoreand after battling to get an official high-school for the city and failing, they started teaching evening courses, which are kind of clandestine and very much unrecognized by the state, but fuck the state, let’s teach ppl how to think for themselves and let’s teach people just how much the state sucks

- also they *loved* to hear about 1968 and the cultural revolution and it will be very awkward when they find out Phos was basically in the midst of the storm

- Alex is basically the pillar upon which the whole institute is founded but they are not the headmaster, that role is Euclase’s who is also the treasurer, because Alex can’t deal with bureaucratic stuff for the life of them: they’d bankrupt the school in a fortnight

- Euclase is the second oldest after Yellow, they own the only car of the group and they let everyone borrow it. They walk around with a shawl over their head (because reasons) and a huge bunch of keys: they open and close all of the doors in the institute and when the younger gems are too loud and/or it’s too late in the night they tell them to go to sleep. They always check on everyone, included the gems who no longer sleep in the dorms (like Antarc, Phos, Bort and Cinnabar)

- along with Alex, they are the only other ‘old’ gem who went to uni and they graduated in Statistics or Economics (still haven’t decided), their official job is being a shopkeeper though, they own a small grocery shop near the institute

- Euclase also owns a small radio, the only radio of the group. The first tv arrives when Cinnabar is like 15 and Phos’ 12 and everyone is super excited about it, they place it in the common living room, in the dorms

- speaking of media, Jade runs a newspaper. They are not a journalist, nothing’s really official, but no one cares and they have an excuse to go about town and speak with people. They love the general aesthetic and the smell of ink too but they always wear dark pants to hide the stains.

- Jade is a ‘rolled up sleeves and very long hair in a bun or ponytail’ kind of person. They’re 5-7 years Euclase’s junior and genuinely like Euclase, they spend a lot of time with them. They probably had a crush on them at some point but got over it. Euc is also their main source of information, along with Dia

About the age thing:

- Yellow, Padpa, Euc and Alex (and Chryso) are the oldies, in their mid-forties to early fifties when the story starts and mid-thirties in the flashbacks.

- Jade, Red Beryl, Antarc, Peri and Sphene and Melon are the ‘middle generation,’ they’re up to 10 years younger than the old ppl

- Shinsha, Dia, Nepchi, Benito, the Amethysts, Lapis, Cairn and Ghost are the young ppl, 20 years or so younger than the old ppl

- Phos, Bort, Zircon, new Goshe and new Morga are the actual bbys cause they’re even younger than that. Please handle with care

I DIDNT EVEN START TO SPEAK ABOUT THE MAIN CHARACTERS OR THE ANGST BUT THIS IS ALREADY SUPER LONG SO HERE’S SOME RANDOM STUFF INSTEAD

- Shinsha and Diamond share a birthday, that’s one of the reasons why Shinsha doesn’t celebrate their own bday cause they didnt wanna steal Dia’s spotlight but then they became kind of bitter/passive-aggressive about it

- Zircon is just 6 months Phos’ senior but since Phos is an actual dumbass they are actually 100 years more mature than them

- Dia works at a flower shop, they still live in the dorms tho and so do most of the gems

- except for Bort, who settled in a place of their own and then left to study in a marine military academy cause they are a battle maniac, they left the place to Cinnabar

- Cinnabar has a weird history with school and education but at 19 they decided they actually wanted a diploma and they wanted to get their life together and now they’re in uni and they teach at the institute to earn some money, they’re 26 at the beginning of the story

- Phos went away as well, they tagged along Antarc one time that Antarc came to town cause Phos was quite literally struck by them and would not let them go without them. They were just 16 and a big idiot

- Antarc was Chrysoberyl’s cousin, that’s how they know sensei

- they always dressed in suits and light colors, also they had a thing for keeping their place clean which they passed onto Phos

- Padpa used to be the cool uncle that every kid loved before they could no longer leave the bed, now they’re more or less in a coma and only wake up sporadically

- Yellow and Padpa used to be a couple before Rutile came around, then it became a weird triangle, then a messy polygon, then a very, very weird obsession that eventually led to Rutile studying medicine just so they could obsess over Padpa more

- Yellow decided they were fed up with the world at that point, so they opened a kennel and more or less started spending their days with more puppies and less people or dying lovers

- Bort does help at the kennel whenever they can, yes, Zircon loves to tag along too, they’re good friends

- Dia stopped going with them cause they have a very bad middle-child case

- Zircon can bake

- Cinnabar is studying mathematics

- Phos is 23 when the fic starts and they don’t even have a diploma yet

- oh the town is by the sea and there’s an abandoned lighthouse too because that’s cool

- there is literally 100000 more things i wanna say about Antarc and Phos and Shinsha and all those characters I havent named yet but this is indeed super long and I’m afraid i must end it here for now, maybe I should make a new post for each character

thank you again if you had the patience to go through all of this!

#houseki no kuni #fic tag #1960s au #gosh this is huge #pls ignore any mistakes #theres just so much stuff going on i hope it makes sense somehow #also i love alex can you tell #and i didnt even get to talk about antarc #im verbose im sorry #im a simple nerd #nonnie asks for hcs #i start to ramble

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green-violin-bow · 7 years

Text

Hawksmoor, BBC Sherlock and historiographic metafiction

First:

This piece is not of academic quality or rigour. I left university eight years ago; I studied literature in two languages and did well at it. Nevertheless I am no longer in academia and have not written an essay since then. My sources are partial, dependent on what I can get access to through my local library, through academic friends, or what I choose to pay for on JSTOR. I work full-time and have put no time into e.g. referencing (always my least favourite part of essays).

Although I personally hold out hope for unambiguous Johnlock still, I would not class this as a ‘meta’ arguing that it will certainly happen. This is a reading, undertaken for my own satisfaction and interest, jumping off from the inclusion of ‘Hawksmoor’ as a password in one scene of The Six Thatchers. I do not particularly mean to suggest that Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat are deliberately playing with/off literary criticism. They may well be holding two (or more) time periods in tension, however, in a way that I choose to explore through the lens of the literary tools described here. I do not seek to challenge or disprove other fan theories.

I am no television/film studies scholar. There are probably layers and layers of nuance and meaning that I’m missing because I simply have no frame of theoretical reference in that field (and one of the primary ‘texts’ we are talking about here is, after all, a television show). The abundance of television and film references discovered by Sherlock fans have made it clear that the show’s creators deliberately allude to other visual media within modern Sherlock all the time. I believe my approach here is valid because Hawksmoor, a literary text, is pointed to in the show, and because ACD canon itself was a literary text. But I want to flag up this important way in which my analysis is deficient.

I tagged a few people in this but I’m aware this is more of a musing/essay than a traditional ‘meta’ so don’t worry about reading/responding if it’s not your thing!

The Six Thatchers

In The Six Thatchers, Sherlock visits Craig the hacker, to borrow his dog Toby. On the left of our screen (taking up an entire wall of Craig’s house, realistically enough…) are lines of code, in the centre of which is written ‘Hawksmoor17’.

I was interested in finding out more about this. I decided my first port of call would be the ‘detective novel’ Hawksmoor, by Peter Ackroyd.

Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd is a historian and author, who has written a huge array of fiction and non-fiction, including:

London: The Biography (non-fiction)

Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day (non-fiction)

The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (an imagining of the diary Oscar Wilde might have written in exile in Paris)

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (novel, presenting the diary of a murderer)

Hawksmoor (novel)

In his work London is present, constantly, a character in itself, woven into the very fabric of the story as irrevocably as it is into the mythos of Sherlock Holmes.

Hawksmoor

In brief, Hawksmoor is a postmodern detective story, running in two timelines. Each timeline focuses on a main character: in 1711, the London architect Nicholas Dyer; two hundred and fifty years later, in the 1980s, Nicholas Hawksmoor, a detective, responsible for investigating a series of murders carried out near the churches built by Dyer.

Ackroyd plays with the ‘real history’ of London throughout, muddling and confusing the past with fictional events, with conspiracy and rumour.

There was a real London architect named Nicholas Hawksmoor who worked alongside Christopher Wren in eighteenth-century London to design some of its most famous buildings. He also designed six churches. Ackroyd chooses to change the eighteenth-century architect’s name to Nicholas Dyer, and to make Nicholas Hawksmoor the twentieth-century fictional detective instead – a deliberate muddling together of timelines and of ‘facts’.

Ackroyd had drawn inspiration for Hawksmoor from Iain Sinclair’s poem, ‘Nicholas Hawksmoor: His Churches’ (Lud Heat, 1975). This poem suggests that the architectural design of Hawksmoor’s churches is consistent with him having been a Satanist.

As well as changing the historical figure Hawksmoor’s last name to Dyer, Ackroyd adds a church, ‘Little St Hugh’. Seven, in total.

The architect Dyer writes his own story, in the first person and in eighteenth-century style.

Only in Part Two of the novel does Nicholas Hawksmoor – a fictional detective with a real man’s name – appear, to investigate the three murders that have so far happened in 1980s London. Written in the third person, the reader is nonetheless invited into Hawksmoor’s thoughts, his point of view.

As the novel proceeds, Ackroyd employs literary devices so that the stories – separated, apparently, by so much time – begin to blur. In particular, the architect Dyer and the detective Hawksmoor are linked. For instance, both men experience a kind of loss of self, a “dislocation of identity”, upon staring into a convex mirror (Ahearn, 2000, DOI: 10.1215/0041462X-2000-1001).

The cumulative effect of all the parallels is that the reader starts to lose any sense of temporal separation between the time periods; starts to see Dyer and Hawksmoor as almost the same person; to suspect each of them of being the murderer and the detective at the same time. The parallels between the time periods “escape any effort at organization and create a mental fusion between past and present” so that “fiction and history fuse so thoroughly that an abolition of time, space, and person is […] inflicted on the reader” (Ahearn, 2000).

Importantly, I believe, Hawksmoor again and again “tries to reconstruct the timing of the crimes, but this is from the start impossible” (Ahearn, 2000). This is a rather familiar feeling to Sherlock Holmes fans.

At the end of the book, Dyer and Hawksmoor come together in the church, take hands across time, or perhaps out of time. They become aware of one another. Their perspectives dissolve and seem to merge into one person, into a new style of narration not like either of them: “when he put out his hand and touched him he shuddered. But do not say that he touched him, say that they touched him. And when they looked at the space between them, they wept” (Ackroyd, 1985).

Historiographic metafiction

Hawksmoor is a postmodern detective story. It has been classified by critics as a work of ‘historiographic metafiction’. As a detective story, it lacks the most familiar feature – a detective who is able to sort and order the events and facts, before finally drawing together all the threads to present a coherent, satisfying and plot-hole-free conclusion. In other words, a solution to the mystery.

So what is ‘metafiction’? Waugh defines it as “a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (1984).

In Hawksmoor, Ackroyd uses a popular literary form (the detective story) to unsettle our understanding of fiction, reality and history. An Agatha Christie detective novel (for example) relies on an accepted, understood structure, where the reader has definite expectations of what the outcome will be; as such, Christie’s novels “provide collective pleasure and release of tension through the comforting total affirmation of accepted stereotypes” (Waugh, 1984). In metafiction, however, there is often no traditionally predictable, neat, satisfying ending: accepted stereotypes are disturbed rather than affirmed. The application of rationality and logic to the clues gets the detective no closer to solving the crime. Readerly expectation (“the triumph of justice and the restoration of order” [Waugh, 1984]) is thwarted.

Hutcheon coined the term ‘historiographic metafiction’, fiction where “narrative representation – fictive and historical – comes under […] subversive scrutiny […] by having its historical and socio-political grounding sit uneasily alongside its self-reflexivity” (Hutcheon, 2002). It is a kind of fiction that explicitly points out the text-dependent nature of what we know as ‘history’: “How do we know the past today? Through its discourses, through its texts – that is, through the traces of its historical events: the archival materials, the documents, the narratives of witnesses…and historians” (Hutcheon, 2002).

Whereas a ‘historical novel’ will present an account of the past which purports to be true, a ‘historiographic metafiction’ has a combination of:

deliberate, self-reflexive foregrounding of the difficulty of telling ‘the whole story’ or ‘the whole truth’ especially due to the limitations of the narrative voice;

internal metadiscourse about language revealing the fictional nature of the text;

an attempt to explain the present by way of the past, simultaneously giving a (partial) account of both;

disturbed chronology in the narrative structure, representing the determining presence of the past in the present;

‘connection’ of the historical period structurally to the novel’s present;

a self-consciously incomplete and provisional account of ‘what really happened’ e.g. via ‘holes’ in the [hi]story which cannot be resolved by either narrator or reader (Widdowson, 2006, DOI: 10.1080/09502360600828984).

The above points are certainly true of Hawksmoor. The reader of Sherlock Holmes will find some of them very familiar – for example, Watson’s self-conscious in-world changing of dates, names and places; and the impossible-to-resolve timeline. The audience of BBC Sherlock will also find these features very recognisable, especially from Series 4 of the programme.

I’d like to examine BBC Sherlock itself as a ‘historiographic metafiction’: a ‘text’ which self-consciously holds the past and present fictional events of Sherlock Holmes’ life in tension, not merely as another adaptation of the source text, but as a way of destabilising the accepted ‘[hi]story’ and mythos of Sherlock Holmes.

The Great Game

The Sherlockian fandom is well-known for its practice of ‘The Great Game’:

“Holmesian Speculation (also known as The Sherlockian game, the Holmesian game, the Great Game or simply the Game) is the practice of expanding upon the original Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by imagining a backstory, history, family or other information for Holmes and Watson, often attempting to resolve anomalies and clarify implied details about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. It treats Holmes and Watson as real people and uses aspects of the canonical stories combined with the history of the era of the tales' composition to construct fanciful biographies of the pair.” [x]

There are a number of interesting features about the Great Game. It:

pretends that Sherlock Holmes and John Watson were real people;

ignores or explains away the real author Arthur Conan Doyle’s existence;

attempts to use ‘real’ historical facts (texts…) to resolve gaps in a fictional text;

in turn, produces additional (meta)fictional texts, often presented as ‘fact’ in journals set up for the purpose;

in so doing, adds constantly to the (meta)fictional destabilisation of chronology and holes in the story, as different, competing ‘versions’ are added by a multitude of authors.

The Sherlock Holmes fandom, as it attempts to elucidate ‘what really happened’, only destabilises the original (hi)story further – drawing attention, over and over again, to the gaps and inconsistencies in the original canon tales.

I would argue that the Sherlock fandom has been engaged, for over a century, in an act of collective historiographic metafiction.

The writers of BBC Sherlock are aware of themselves as fans, and of the wider Sherlockian fandom. They paid tribute to Holmesian Speculation in the episode title of Series 1 Episode 3. The title – ‘The Great Game’ – is a signal, an early marker of postmodernity in BBC Sherlock, a sign that the Sherlockian fandom will not be absent from this metafiction.

Implicating the reader/audience

There is an interesting moment in Hawksmoor where Detective Chief Superintendent Nicholas Hawksmoor goes to investigate the murder of a young boy near the church of St-George’s-in-the-East. The body is beside “a partly ruined building which had the words M SE M OF still visible above its entrance” (Ackroyd, 1985).

As Lee says, the “missing letter is "U," ("you") the reader” (1990).

Elsewhere in the book, Hawksmoor receives a note instructing him “DON’T FORGET … THE UNIVERSAL ARCHITECT” alongside a “sketch of a man kneeling with a white disc placed against his right eye” (Ackroyd, 1985).

Lee suggests that this drawing refers to “detective fiction’s transcendental signifier” Sherlock Holmes, and that the “Universal Architect, here, can only be the reader, since it is he or she who is in possession of all the histories: the historically verifiable past, the eighteenth-century text and the text accumulated through reading”. Thus, the reader is “doubly implicated not only as a repository of the past, but also as a co-creator of artifact and artifice” (Lee, 1990). In the Sherlock Holmes fandom, this is more true than in almost any other; co-creators indeed.

The missing ‘U’ in Hawksmoor can be clearly linked to the daubed ‘YOU’ in ‘The Abominable Bride’, a sign that, from that point on, BBC Sherlock will be clearly and mercilessly implicating its audience; putting the Sherlockian fandom back in the story, where it has always belonged. This includes the writers and creators of BBC Sherlock.

I also think there is reason to link the ‘YOU’ daubed on the wall to another piece of graffiti in BBC Sherlock – the yellow smiley face in 221b. An all-seeing, ever-present audience within Sherlock and John’s very home.

It is often repeated that Arthur Conan Doyle only continued to write Sherlock Holmes stories out of financial necessity and due to public demand; that he was bored and exasperated by his creation. The Sherlock Holmes fandom is (possibly apocryphally) known as having worn black armbands in the street in mourning for the fictional detective when Conan Doyle attempted to kill him off in The Final Problem.

The Sherlock Holmes fandom has long been considered importunate and unruly. As Stephen Fry puts it in his foreword to The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes: “Holmes has been bent and twisted into every genre imaginable and unimaginable: graphic novels, manga, science fiction, time travel, erotica, literary novels, animation, horror stories, comic books, gaming and more. Junior Sherlocks, animal Sherlocks, spoofs called Sheer Luck and Schlock; you think it up, and you’ll find it’s been done before. There is no indignity that has not been heaped upon the sage and super-sleuth of Baker Street” (2017).

And yet, with every new adaptation, there is a tendency to regard it as a blank slate, in direct conversation with the canon of Arthur Conan Doyle. There is a tendency to forget the changes that fandom itself has wrought on the figure of Sherlock Holmes – a weight of stereotype and expectation which warps the character to a pre-fit mould in every incarnation. As Fry says, Holmes:

“rises up, higher and higher with each passing decade, untarnished and unequalled. Because, I suppose, we need him, more and more, a figure of authority that is benign, rational, soothing, omniscient, capable and insightful. In a world, and in daily lives, so patently devoid of almost all those marvellous qualities, how welcome that is, and how grateful we are, for its presence in our lives. So grateful, that we won’t really accept that Sherlock Holmes could ever be classed as ‘make believe’. Between fact and fiction is a space where legend dwells. It is where Holmes and Watson will always live” (2017).

This is the traditional understanding of Sherlock Holmes and its fandom, and is highly reminiscent of the voiceover by Mary Morstan in Series 4 Episode 3, ‘The Final Problem’: “I know who you really are. A junkie who solves crimes to get high, and the doctor who never came home from the war. Well, you listen to me: who you really are, it doesn’t matter. It’s all about the legend, the stories, the adventures. There is a last refuge for the desperate, the unloved, the persecuted. There is a final court of appeal for everyone. When life gets too strange, too impossible, too frightening, there is always one last hope. When all else fails, there are two men sitting arguing in a scruffy flat like they’ve always been there, and they always will. The best and wisest men I have ever known – Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson.” [transcript by Ariane Devere]

The conception of Sherlock Holmes as “a figure of authority that is benign, rational, soothing, omniscient, capable and insightful” shows what we, the reader, want: a traditional detective story, with an all-knowing detective, who uses rationality and logic to assess the clues and brings us smoothly, at last, to a solution which reasserts the order of things; where justice is done and society is made safe once again.

BBC Sherlock, however, resists these comforting fictions. The detective unravels, becoming more emotional, more human as the story progresses. Mysteries go unsolved. The narrator gets more unreliable with every episode. Characters inhabit strange states, seemingly alive or dead as the story demands. The ‘rules’ of traditional detective fiction are flouted left, right and centre.

Viewed as a historiographic metafiction, BBC Sherlock aims to hold up the historical text (ACD canon) against the modern one (BBC Sherlock) in such a way as to slough away a century of extra-canonical fan speculation and addition, and give a new reading to canon.

‘Writing back’: re-visionary fiction

I would now like to look at Peter Widdowson’s journal article, ‘Writing back’: Contemporary re-visionary fiction’ (DOI: 10.1080/09502360600828984). He argues that there is a “radically subversive sub-set of contemporary ‘historiographic metafiction’” which, while being “acutely self-conscious about their metafictional intertextuality and dialectical connection with the past”, ‘write back’ to “formative narratives that have been central to the textual construction of dominant historical worldviews”.

Widdowson explains that his term ‘re-visionary’: “deploys a tactical slippage between the verb to revise (from the Latin ‘revisere’: ‘to look at again’) – ‘to examine and correct; to make a new, improved version of; to study anew’; and the verb to re-vision – to see in another light; to re-envision or perceive differently; and thus potentially to recast and re-evaluate (‘the original’)” (2006). He points out that this is closest to Rich’s approach to feminist criticism: “We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us” (Rich, 1975).

This act of ‘knowing it differently’ can also be achieved by “the creative act of ‘re-writing’ past fictional texts in order to defamiliarize them and the ways in which they have been conventionally read within the cultural structures of patriarchal and imperial/colonial dominance” (Widdowson, 2006).

Widdowson lays out what he regards as the defining characteristics of re-visionary fiction, first negatively by what it is not:

Re-visionary fiction does not simply take an earlier work as its source for writing;

It is not simply modern adaptation – instead it challenges the source text;

It is not parody – whereas parody takes a pre-existing work and reveals its particular stylistic traits and ideological premises by exaggerating them in order to render it absurd or to satirise the ‘follies of its time’, a re-visionary work seeks to bring into view “those discourses in [the source text] suppressed or obscured by historically naturalising readings. The contemporary version attempts, as it were, to replace the pre-text with itself, at once to negate the pre-text’s cultural power and to ‘correct’ the way we read it in the present” (Widdowson, 2006).

As to what re-visionary fiction is:

First, it challenges the accepted authority of the original. “[S]uch novels invariably ‘write back’ to canonic texts of the English tradition – those classics that retain a high profile of admiration and popularity in our literary heritage – and re-write them ‘against the grain’ (that is, in defamiliarising, and hence unsettling, ways)”. This means that “a hitherto one-way form of written exchange, where the reader could only passively receive the message handed down by a classic text, has now become a two-way correspondence in which the recipient answers or replies to – even answers back to – the version of things as originally delineated. In other words, it represents a challenge to any writing that purports to be ‘telling things as they really are’, and which has been believed and admired over time for doing exactly that.”

Second, it keeps a constant tension between the source and the new text. A re-visionary fiction will “keep the pre-text in clear view, so that the original is not just the invisible ‘source’ of a new modern version but is a constantly invoked intertext for it and is constantly in dialogue with it: the reader, in other words, is forced at all points to recall how the pre-text had it and how the re-vision reinflects this.”

Third, it enables us to read the source text with new eyes, free of established preconceptions. Re-visionary fictions “not only produce a different, autonomous new work by rewriting the original, but also denaturalise that original by exposing the discourses in it which we no longer see because we have perhaps learnt to read it in restricted and conventional ways. That is, they recast the pre-text as itself a ‘new’ text to be read newly – enabling us to ‘see’ a different one to the one we thought we knew as [Sherlock Holmes] – thus arguably releasing them from one type of reading and repossessing them in another.” The new text ‘speaks’ “the unspeakable of the pre-text by very exactly invoking the original and hinting at its silences or fabrications.”

Fourth, it forces the reader to consider the two texts together at all times: “our very consciousness of reading a contemporary version of a past work ensures that such an oscillation takes place, with the reader, as it were, holding the two texts simultaneously in mind. This may cause us to see parallels and contrasts, continuities and discontinuities, between the period of the original text’s production and that of the modern work.”

Fifth, they “alert the reader to the ways past fiction writes its view of things into history, and how unstable such apparently truthful accounts from the past may be”, making clear that the original text, though canon, was also just a text and should not necessarily govern our perceptions and understanding forever.

Sixth, “re-visionary novels almost invariably have a clear cultural-political thrust. That is why the majority of them align themselves with feminist and/or postcolonialist criticism in demanding that past texts’ complicity in oppression – either as subliminally inscribed within them or as an effect of their place and function as canonic icons in cultural politics – be revised and re-visioned as part of the process of restoring a voice, a history and an identity to those hitherto exploited, marginalized and silenced by dominant interests and ideologies.”

That last point, I think, should also apply to queer re-visionings of source texts (and indeed, Widdowson uses the example of Will Self’s Dorian: An Imitation re-visioning Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in his article).

We can view BBC Sherlock as a re-visionary fiction which aims to ‘speak’ “the unspeakable of the pre-text by […] hinting at its silences or fabrications.”

BBC Sherlock as re-visionary fiction

Not only does BBC Sherlock have to hold itself up against the original canon of Arthur Conan Doyle; there is also a century of accumulated speculation and creation by an extremely active and resourceful fandom to contend with.

I think that BBC Sherlock asks us to re-vision ACD canon, but has a few sly jabs at the Sherlock Holmes fandom (including the writers themselves) along the way. Let’s look at some concrete examples:

John Watson’s wife:

In BBC Sherlock, the woman we know as Mary Morstan has no fixed identity. Her name is taken from a dead baby; she is not originally British; she is an ex-mercenary and killer; she is variously motherly, friendly and threatening; she shoots Sherlock in the heart – or does she save his life? In Series 4, her characterisation is more unstable than ever. She is a romantic heroine, a ruthless killer, a selfless mother, a consummate actress, a wronged woman, a martyr, an ever-present ghost, and the embodiment of John’s conscience. She is also the manifestation of the Sherlock Holmes fandom’s speculation about John Watson’s wife: did he have one wife, or six? Was she an orphan, or was she at her mother’s? When did she die? How did she die?

Ultimately, however, if you hold BBC Sherlock up against ACD canon, it highlights the fact that so many Sherlockians have tried to compensate for: in order to reconcile the irregularities in Mrs Watson’s story as narrated by Watson, she would need to be a secret agent actively hiding her identity. Examining BBC Sherlock against ACD canon makes us apply Occam’s Razor – the idea that the simplest explanation will always be best. John Watson’s wife was only written into the story because homophobia was so pervasive at the time that ACD was writing that his characters – and by extension he himself – would have been suspected of ‘deviance’ if there had not been a layer of plausible deniability in the shape of a wife.

And there you have it: the central problem of Mary Morstan/Watson, in both ACD canon and BBC Sherlock – she shoots Sherlock in the heart – or does she save his life? Look at ACD canon again. Does Mary Morstan’s engagement to John Watson hurt Sherlock Holmes, to the point that he replies, at the end of SIGN, “For me, …there still remains the cocaine-bottle”? Or does Mary Watson save his life? In the nineteenth century, suspicion of a romance between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson could have meant imprisonment or even hanging; many men suspected or accused of same-sex relationships chose suicide rather than total disgrace. Mary Watson’s presence provides Holmes and Watson with a lifesaving alibi.

Let’s have a look at this against the criteria for a ‘re-visionary fiction’:

Challenges the idea that Watson ‘told things as they really were’ – instead, it introduces the idea that Watson deliberately obscured the facts of his and Holmes’ partnership

Keeps the pre-text Mary Morstan constantly in view – a startling contrast, which rather effectively comments on the position of both women and queer people in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries

Enables us to abandon our “restricted and conventional ways” of reading the original – if it makes no sense for Mrs Watson to have existed in ACD canon, then the reader must radically reconsider Holmes and Watson’s relationship; no longer ‘just’ a friendship, but a lifetime’s commitment, as close and loving as a marriage. BBC Sherlock encourages this re-visioning by setting Mary up as a rival to Sherlock; by having her attempt to get rid of him; by highlighting that she both kills and saves him. It re-casts Sherlock Holmes as the dominant romance of John Watson’s life, in every version.

It causes us to see parallels and contrasts between the two time periods: the societal homophobia that made Mrs Watson a necessity in ACD canon has largely gone in modern Britain. But BBC Sherlock hints at a profoundly closeted bisexual John Watson who strives after a ‘normal’ wife who “wasn’t meant to be like that”. The continued presence of a Mrs Watson very effectively shows us that societal attitudes are not as profoundly different as we may think.

BBC Sherlock shows us how the existence of a Mrs Watson has been written not only into the [hi]story of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, but into the fabric of society: Sherlock Holmes is a great man, but God forbid he should also be a happy, human man, in a loving relationship with another man. The cultural script has been written: the great figures are either straight, or they are nothing. There is always a wife.

As discussed above, the presence of Mrs Watson is also important politically and culturally. It draws attention to the total lack of agency for nineteenth-century women, and to the restrictive narratives imposed on female characters in today’s culture. It makes terribly clear the extent and dangerousness of the homophobia in nineteenth-century Britain. It highlights the fact that there are still countries today where people are forced to hide their sexualities for fear of being imprisoned or killed.

The Watson baby:

In BBC Sherlock, the woman we know as Mary Morstan is revealed to be pregnant on the Watsons’ wedding day. In ACD canon, Watson never mentions a child from his marriage. In Holmesian speculation, plenty of children have been suggested for Watson, especially since it is often posited that he must have had more than one marriage (that Watson might be infertile is not something the proponents of the ‘Three Continents Watson’ school of thought often like to suggest).

As a re-visionary fiction, then, BBC Sherlock forces us to examine the source text: in a time when reliable contraceptive methods were virtually non-existent, why did John Watson and his wife never have a child?

The options, broadly, are:

Mrs Watson was infertile (if Watson only had one wife)

Watson was infertile (if he had more than one wife)

They didn’t have sex, either due to ignorance (but Watson was a doctor…) or reluctance

Mrs Watson only ‘existed’ because societal homophobia made her a necessity (see above).

John Watson:

In Series 4 of BBC Sherlock, John behaves in an unrecognisable manner: he beats Sherlock bloody, so that his eye is still bloodshot some little time later. This is said to be due to the pain of losing his wife, and the fact that her death is Sherlock’s ‘fault’.

Viewed as re-visionary fiction, as metafiction, BBC Sherlock here satirises the idea of the ‘deutero-Watson’ which has existed since Ronald Knox wrote his Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes. It also, however, critically examines the fact that, in ACD canon, there are (at least) ‘two Watsons’: one, the narrator, seemingly the most reliable and loyal of fellows, straight (in all senses) and true, good in a fight; and a second, the ‘true’ John Watson behind the narration, the man we discern when we look beyond the surface of the tales. A man who is devoted, above all, to Holmes; prepared to adopt Holmes’ habit of ‘compounding a felony’ to follow the idea of justice as opposed to law; prepared, in fact, to break the law if Holmes thinks it right; prepared to abandon his wife at a moment’s notice, when Holmes calls; prepared to alter all kinds of details in his stories to protect their participants. (Also, presumably, a bit of a joke about the accidental ‘dual personality’ that ACD gave his Watson by naming him James and John on different occasions.)

Looking at ACD canon through the lens of BBC Sherlock, the entirely unreliable nature of Watson as a narrator comes to light, but the enduring feature of his stories – his love for, and loyalty to Holmes – provides the obvious answer to why he should be so unreliable. Watson may be ‘two people’, but he lies, he breaks the law, he abandons his wife and his patients for only one person: Holmes.

Ultimately, the reader understands that they have been lied to, because the truth would have been impossible to tell at the time ACD was writing. Famously, the final story in the Sherlock Holmes canon, The Adventure of the Retired Colourman, ends with the words, “some day the true story may be told.”

If BBC Sherlock is seen as re-visionary fiction, Series 4 of the programme becomes a representation of the artificiality of the construct that we think of as BBC Sherlock and – viewed through its lens – ACD canon becomes visible as an equally artificial construct, filtered through the writings of an unreliable narrator and governed by the societal and cultural imperatives and prejudices of its time.

Every trick has been employed in Series 4 to highlight its artificiality: lack of coherent structure, temporal uncertainty, incoherent character arcs, introduction of a deus ex machina character, fluctuations of genre, and members of the crew actually appearing on screen. Just as in Hawksmoor, the ‘case’ of Series 4 defies solution. BBC Sherlock and Hawksmoor are both postmodern detective fictions. We have been told that this is ‘a show about a detective, not a detective show’. The form of the show, like the form of the traditional detective novel, leads us to expect a neat, tidy ending, explained carefully by an all-knowing figure of authority. The makers of BBC Sherlock, however, have done everything they can to pantomime a lack of care for, or understanding of, their own show. They have simultaneously inserted themselves into the story (Mark/Mycroft; giving varying accounts of when/how Series 4 was written; lying and saying that they lie) and withdrawn the ‘grand narrative’, the fiction of the omniscient narrator.

Why?

For over a century, ACD canon has been read in the same way: as the most archetypally logical detective story available to us. The fact that the canon is a huge mess of inconsistencies, requiring the collective effort of thousands of people to pick away at, is typically explained by the idea of an omniscient but uncaring storyteller: Arthur Conan Doyle.

This is particularly ironic for a fandom which supposedly wishes to disavow the existence of an author at all.

And yet, the problem is, if you don’t slip into extra-universe speculations on ACD’s attitude to Sherlock Holmes, you have to face head-on the conclusion that Watson is a very, very unreliable narrator indeed.

And you have to face why.

@devoursjohnlock @garkgatiss @221bloodnun @tjlcisthenewsexy @may-shepard

#sherlock meta #hawksmoor #bbc sherlock #acd canon #historiographic metafiction #postmodern detective fiction #hawksmoor17

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rulystuff · 3 years

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https://servicemeltdown.com/climate-change-science-or-propaganda/

New Post has been published on https://servicemeltdown.com/climate-change-science-or-propaganda/

CLIMATE CHANGE: SCIENCE OR PROPAGANDA?

The fear being stoked by the power elites in academia, business, government, and the media that climate change poses, as the current cliché has it, an “existential” threat to the planet is a threat alright but one that seeks to undermine a sovereign nation’s interests and priorities.

The self-absorbed elites around the world and in the United States now believe that they have found the boogeyman they have long sought to scare the public into accepting a construct of governance that would supplant the will of individual citizens with the whims of unelected, globalist technocrats accountable to no one but themselves. That boogeyman, of course, is climate change and it renders the mission of climate change proponents – presumably to save the world from extinction – little more than an anti-democratic power grab.

No more prominent a supranational organization than the United Nations, through its International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has sounded the alarm that unless urgent measures are enacted to limit global-warming we will have been responsible for a planetary crisis that will likely trigger severe storms, wildfires, pestilence, droughts, flooding, starvation, and death. The IPCC’s position is clear: the carbon dioxide emitted by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, natural gas, and oil is the principal cause behind the Earth’s rise in temperature. But the facts don’t square with the IPCC’s position: The main driver of greenhouse gases is not carbon dioxide but water vapor according to geologist Gregory Wrightstone author of the climate myth-busting book, Inconvenient Facts. It turns out that the atmospheric composition of water vapor is fifteen times that of carbon dioxide.

As evidence mounts that there is no global-warming calamity in the offing or that global-warming has its roots in mostly anthropogenic causes, climate change advocates have become more and more reliant on propaganda and disinformation to deliver their message of fear. Major media outlets, for their part, are complicit in parroting the latest shrill accounts of impending climate disaster without pushback or a critical analysis of the facts. One journalist in a Midwest newspaper, for example, recently stated that “The weather machine… is starting to act erratically…”, and that “The flood of immigrants around the world has been set in motion…principally by unbearable temperatures and loss of water and arable land.” No mention is made in the writer’s column of the fact that millions of people have been displaced by war, persecution, land exploitation, and overpopulation. The Biden Administration now blames global warming for the unprecedented surge of illegal immigrants coming across the southern border of the United States. “We are looking at extensive storm damage because of extreme climate.” So says Vice President Kamala Harris. Never mind that the average temperature across the country of Mexico, a key source of illegal immigration, has been on the order of .2 degrees Celsius or about one-third of one degree Fahrenheit for the years that span 1950 to 2009.

Not to be outdone, Nobel Laureate in Economics, Joseph Stiglitz, tells the New York Times that “Wall Street could be underwater by the year 2100.” One can only assume that Dr. Stiglitz was not forecasting a stock market crash.

But what could top the Associated Press story of June 29, 1989, when it reported that a senior U.N. environmental official had stated that “entire nations could be wiped out off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if global warming trends are not reversed by the year 2000.” We are now well into the year 2021 and as far as we know no nations have been wiped off the face of the Earth!

THE THEOLOGY OF CLIMATE CHANGE BLINDS OBJECTIVITY

The IPCC, which should stand as a paragon of scientific objectivity, and impartiality, is far from it. Emblematic of the agency’s bias, the IPCC has published a “manifesto” to guide authors in writing reports. Members of the IPCC are obligated to uphold the strictures contained in the manifesto. As such, authors are urged to parse their otherwise negative findings and to state questionable points of view without qualification. Certain word choices are prohibited and expressions which would cast doubt on an author’s expertise in a certain area are to be avoided. Members are in effect censored as they must not express opinions beyond the scope of published reports. Finally, minority opinions expressed in the body of an IPCC report rarely get mentioned in the Policymakers’ Summary. Journalists, and other non-experts unable or unwilling to wade through several hundred pages of technical data presumably read only the Summary. So much for scientific objectivity and impartiality.

The Earth’s temperature has been exceptionally stable for a very long time. For five thousand years global temperatures have been within the range of plus or minus one-half of one degree Celsius, or nine-tenths of one degree Fahrenheit, from average. And, according to astrophysicist S. Fred Singer “While it is true that global temperatures have risen about one-half of one degree Celsius in the last century, most of this warming occurred before 1940, while most of the human-caused carbon dioxide emissions occurred after 1940.” Recent global temperature readings come as a surprise to many.For example, scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space report that the average global temperature for 2019 was unchanged from 2016 with two dips – global cooling, in effect – in 2017 and 2018.

The connection between carbon dioxide emissions and global temperature remains flimsy at best. A study in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate shows computer models exaggerated global warming temperatures from carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 45%. Professor of Geosystem Science at Oxford University, Myles Allen, explains that “…we haven’t seen the rapid acceleration in warming after the year 2000 that we see in models.”

And, while there has been much said in the media about how global-warminghas been responsible for a surge in major hurricane activity the data proves otherwise.The fact is thatthe number of severe hurricanes has not measurably increased during the last fifty years. According to the Stormfax Weather Almanac, the average annual number of Category 3,4, or 5 hurricanes in the Atlantic from the year 1970 to 2017 is 2.5. If we look at more recent data say from the year 2000 to 2017, the average annual number of major hurricanes shows a slight and inconsequential uptick to 3.2 or slightly more than one-half of one storm per year.The long-term trend is even more dramatic if disconcerting to climate alarmists as researchers at the National University of Mexicofound that, “from 1749 to 2012 the linear trend in the number of hurricanes is decreasing.”

Tornadicactivity, too, has been on the decline for the last sixty years. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) the number of F3+ (≥ 158 miles per hour) tornadoes in 2016 was the lowest on record. Scant notice of any of these findings have been seen in media reports. All of which goes to say that the apocalyptic data usually reported by the media is anti-empirical as it is not backed up by actual observation.

Climate change has been found to be the result of hugely complex phenomena such as oceanic tides, solar radiation, volcanic activity, tectonic plate movements, magnetic field variations, winds, the earth’s orbit and tilt, and ocean current fluctuations that are far beyond the scope of existing computer models to accurately simulate. It is no wonder then that computer modeling predictions fail to line up with observable data and for any government to rely on them as a guide in reordering a nation’s economic priorities is sheer folly and does a serious disservice to its citizenry.

The United Nations Paris Climate Accord, as a case in point, requires the United States to reduce its greenhouse emissions by the year 2025 to between 26 and 28 percent below its 2005 levels. Compliance with the dictates of the accord will cost the nation 2.7 million jobs, by 2025, according to the National Economic Research Associates and cause a sizeable contraction in GDP. Our arch-enemy Communist China, the world’s biggest polluter, was given a pass in the Paris Accord and by the terms of the agreement was allowed to continue increasing its carbon emissions until 2030. In any event, according to an article published in the Global Policy Journal on November 2015, Danish Statistician, Dr. Bjorn Lomborg wrote, “Even if all nations keep their promises under the agreement, temperatures will be cut by just one-half of one degree Celsius by 2100.”

In the end, the Paris Climate Accord amounts to a huge redistribution of wealth at the expense of the United States taxpayer. Seeing the writing on the wall, President Trump wisely withdrew the United States from the accord in 2019 before the Biden Administration genuflected before globalists and the Left in his own party and agreed to re-enter the accord.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

Climate change proponents are undeterred by the facts. As MichaelCrichton, author of Jurassic Park, once said, “Increasingly, it seems facts aren’t necessary because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief.” In other words, belief trumps facts.

Generally, it is not possible to disprove an ideological construct simply with facts. More to the point, no amount of evidence can ever be brought to bear to counter the theology of those who believe in the urgent crisis that is posed by climate change. Environmental historian, William Cronon, calls environmentalism a new religion because it offers “a complex series of moral imperatives for ethical action and judges human conduct accordingly.”

A counter narrative to deal with the potentially destructive economic and political consequences of an unbridled and imperialistic climate change agenda must therefore go beyond a reliance on scientific arguments alone. Deep-seated doctrinaire beliefs cannot be overcome through logic and reason. A more effective counter narrative must have citizens demand of their government officials that the potentially coercive practices of supranational organizations like the United Nation’s IPCC will not be tolerated.

If we cherish the freedoms we have come to enjoy as citizens of an independent sovereign state we have little choice but to forcefully resist institutional and government intimidation whether foreign or domestic. When it comes to climate science, free-thinking citizens must remain skeptical and engage in greater self-study and research. Citizens must also take to the public square and hold policymakers accountable if they seek to embark on hastily thought out policies that will result in harsh economic consequences. Keep in mind that the Left in the United States is proposing a net-zero emissions standard by the year 2050 which would cost the nation on the order of $5 trillion per year. Worse, even global warming zealots need to heed Gregory Wrightstone’s admonition that carbon dioxide is not the devil it has been made out to be but a gas that is essential for life – all life. The current concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of 400 parts per million should be viewed as a blessing as plant life cannot survive without at least 150 parts per million.

In the end, concerned citizens must demand more science and less propaganda especially from those with the power to affect our lives and livelihoods. A failure to do so will bring about an earthly catastrophe never imagined by the global-warming alarmists.

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theliterateape · 4 years

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Is the Cancel Culture Racist or a Response to Bigotry?

by Don Hall

Morgan Wallen is a country singer who was recently caught on camera using the word that cannot be uttered by a white person, let alone a white guy who sings country music.

On one side, he was canceled. Suspended record deals, dropped from radio stations, streaming services taking down his music, and an automatic disqualification from this year’s Academy of Country Music awards. On the other side, Wallen’s latest album Dangerous became the the longest running number one album for a male artist since 2016, largely out of protest for his being canceled.

Aside from the fact that I wouldn’t likely buy his album in the first place as my musical tastes were frozen in the 1980’s, I can’t say that I disagree with the canceling. In this day and age, uttering the n-word while white is always with intent. It isn’t an accidental utterance. The intent most assumed is that dude is a fucking racist and leave it at that. Those who then purchase his music in record numbers must also be racists. Five years from now, if someone notices a copy of Dangerous on your record or CD stack, you’re going to have to issue an apology for owning the work of a racist.

In our current cultural civil war the lines are clearly drawn but the motivations for being one side or the other are less clear, less evident. Like the term ‘fake news’ the GOP loves to take that issue taken with their practice (originally utilized to describe Trump’s routine bag of horseshit trotted out daily) and turn it around on the rest of us (it was quickly re-branded as the enemy of Trump). ‘Cancel culture’ has undergone the same transformation.

There is a problem—in accountability, in due process, in general fairness—with the practice of mobs not merely boycotting individuals for what is deemed egregious behavior and language but harassing people into joining the boycott on moral grounds. These problems are not quite the same as what is meant by ‘cancel culture’ when uttered by Ted Cruz.

The new esoteric social media thing is called Clubhouse. Essentially an audio Zoom call for hundreds of people to have ‘rooms’ designed for conversations about agreed upon topics, one must be invited to join and then either listen in or join the discussion. You can even hit the “Leave Quietly” button if all you’re doing is listening in. You can ‘raise your hand’ to let the moderator know you want to pipe up as well.

As much as I despise social media, Himmel sent me an invite, so I joined just to see what this might be.

A few weeks ago, Michael Tracey started a room entitled “Is Clubhouse Obsessed with Wokeism?” He hosted the conversation as moderator with a few other moderators until around two hours in he allowed a woman whose handle was “Brooklyn” (IRL Amanda ‘Brooklyn’ Toussaint) to co-moderate. She immediately exiled him and took over the room.

Toussaint is the founder of PROVX, or Progressive Reform Overrides Violence. Her agenda was simple: take over the conversation because she felt it was white people talking around the issue. She made comments early on that the term "woke" should not be used by white people because it is inherently black vernacular and began "stacking" a list of people allowed to speak in the room. The ensuing discussion took an additional three hours.

A few selected quotes after listening to almost the entire thing:

“I just turned off the hand raising. White people put your fucking hands down…”

“As a queer black polyamorous woman I have been checked by trans people because of my internalized transphobia. Violence is not just physical. Your whiteness is violence.”

“By having rooms like this you commit violence to black bodies, violence on marginalized bodies.”

“Why would ya’ll let white people on any stage to talk about anything…?”

“My n****s, you don’t gotta be kind. Let these white motherfuckers choke on it.”

“It’s black history month. Fuck you. Fuck you. Pay me to listen to us, internalize our truth. On Venmo. Right now.”

“White people don’t think of themselves as being white. That’s supremacy.”

“Science was built on transphobia and anti-blackness.”

“How can you say that something is not racist when people are literally telling you it is?”

“I do want white people to reject whiteness. I want them to be anti-white.”

“I value the lives of animals over the lives of white people.”

If you switch out “white” for “black” it is obvious how completely bigoted this nonsense is. “I value the lives of animals over the lives of black people.” WTF? “I just turned off the hand raising. Black people put your fucking hands down…” If it looks like bigotry and smells like bigotry, it’s bigotry. I don’t blame them for being bigots but it’s still bigotry, no matter how you justify it.

Now, the likelihood that most Americans in the rural parts of the country give two shits for Clubhouse, it is not realistic to assume they hear this sort of hateful rhetoric on the regular. They do, however, read The Atlantic. They do read Newsweek. Many of them have some sort of social media and certainly most are in tune with the Trumpish perspective, the FOX News take, on social justice.

You wanna know what social justice looks like to them?

No. This is not what the preponderance of social justice seeks to accomplish yet it is what some might suggest it should. For the exact same reason one would shy away from a white nationalist promoting faux identitarianism, books on black racism, or the cancelling of the beloved writings of, say, August Wilson, we should openly refute this nonsense as well.

Most (as in the vast majority) of the country’s population recognize that anti-black racism is and has been a major issue we need to address. Most (as in the vast majority) are decidedly not bigots. The loudest of both the extreme right and left, however, are really fucking loud and incredibly bigoted.

We know what white supremicist rhetoric and iconography looks like and we should. We should also recognize the same dogma in different skin.

During the summer of unrest last year, as campus activists were tearing down statues of Confederate generals, I saw Ken Burns on some channel talking about the collegiate cleansing.

His perspective was that, of course, in the pursuit of justice there will be over correction. How else to explain the damning of Abraham Lincoln with Robert E. Lee? Over correction is an expected result when attempting a huge fix societally. So is a backlash in response.

Perhaps I simply cannot damn 75 million Americans as racist dipshits for voting for Trump over Biden. Perhaps I believe there are a lot of issues at play and race is only one of many. Hard to say but I do not believe that bigotry—which is present in every human in every country in every century—is the moral evil those seeking power using it as a bludgeon against the Others want us to believe.

I don’t buy Wallen’s music because I’m not a country fan. I don’t buy anything by Ted Nugent anymore despite my love of “Cat Scratch Fever” because he’s a rightwing loon. Road Dahl was a Nazi-sympathizer but I still watch Gene Wilder as Willis Wonka every time I see that it’s on somewhere and I love me some Thomas Jefferson while still recognizing he owned slaves.

Some in America are lashing back from the extreme rhetoric of activists like ‘Brooklyn’ Toussaint. This is an expected result.

The more history I read, the more I am hit in the jaw with a simple fact: there is nothing new about this. In 1918 there were anti-maskers and protests about government babysitting us. In the fifties, people who were even adjacent to Communists in almost any form were “held accountable” and lost careers over it. And for the entirety of time, there have been asshats who use race to divide us into camps, pitted against each other like teams in a campground battle, like high school jocks versus nerds versus that one badass kid who made a bong in shop class.

We tend to buy this hook every time. Why? Because, like the center of a Tootsie Pop, it only takes the owl three licks to get to our judgmental, self-interested, terrified centers. It is the very core of the Republican (and now Progressive) strategy of population management: tap into that completely normal if not wholly insulated fear of one another and milk the bovine teats of rage spawned from the recipe of terror and impotence.

Perhaps it is due to my ascendence in the (problematic) 1980’s—pre-smartphone, pre-internet, pre-social media, pre-surveillance state—that allows me to fully decide to listen to the race grifters on both sides of the rabid canines of ideology and take no moral offense. Perhaps it is my very GenXness that chooses to engage but on my solid color-blind, MLK inspired path.

Or maybe, like the cancelling of a country music guy, the coup over a social media discussion, or the attack upon Dr. Seuss, I realize that these issues only really matter to people with plenty of food and places to sleep. As in academia, the drama is so high because the stakes are so low.

#cancel culture

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arthurzdrinc · 6 years

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Here is a shorterrr sort of shorter exerpt. If you are interested in reading the whole thing you can on my facebook, or wordpress blog, whichever social media network you prefer. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/notes/arthur-zdrinc/lets-stop-hating-lets-not-repeat-history/1733719220006923/?comment_id=10155263523591022&notif_id=1525917213802086&notif_t=comment_mention&ref=notif Wordpress: https://wordpress.com/post/arthurzdrinc.wordpress.com/121 FINALLY!! For over a year now I've binge watched debates, documentaries, and binge read History books at about 7 different libraries. I'm not proud of the fact that my late fees are exponentially increasing... Why? Because learning should never stop, and quite frankly I miss academia, I miss the environment of bright intellectual people on their quests for knowledge, and the smell of old books with yellowed pages. I began an intense research project on my own time. The list of sources is excruciatingly extensive so I have listed it on the bottom for anyone and everyone interested in History who wants to read up. Death toll statistics during a secular century: First World War (1914–18): 15 million Russian Civil War (1917–22): 9 million Soviet Union, Stalin’s regime (1924–53): 20 million Second World War (1937–45): 55 million Chinese Civil War (1945–49): 2.5 million People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong’s regime (1949–75): 40 million Tibet (1950 et seq.): 600,000 Congo Free State (1886–1908): 8 million Mexico (1910–20): 1 million Turkish massacres of Armenians (1915–23): 1.5 million China (1917–28): 800,000 China, Nationalist era (1928–37): 3.1 million Korean War (1950–53): 2.8 million North Korea (1948 et seq.): 2 million Rwanda and Burundi (1959–95): 1.35 million Second Indochina War (1960–75): 3.5 million Ethiopia (1962–92): 400,000 Nigeria (1966–70): 1 million Bangladesh (1971): 1.25 million Cambodia, Khmer Rouge (1975–78): 1.65 million Mozambique (1975–92): 1 million [I was here one of the highest amputee rates in the world because floods washed all the land mines around and no one know where they are. The orphanage I served at had 175 children many of whom have lost their parents to mines, an echo of human ingenuity mixed with equal parts hatred, selfishness, pride, stupity, and technological advancements] Afghanistan (1979–2001): 1.8 million Iran–Iraq War (1980–88): 1 million Sudan (1983 et seq.): 1.9 million Kinshasa, Congo (1998 et seq.): 3.8 million Philippines Insurgency (1899–1902): 220,000 Brazil (1900 et seq. 500,000 Amazonia (1900–1912): 250,000 Portuguese colonies (1900–1925): 325,000 French colonies (1900–1940): 200,000 Japanese War (1904–5): 130,000 German East Africa (1905–7): 175,000 Libya (1911–31): 125,000 Balkan Wars (1912–13): 140,000 [My Grandmother on my Dad's side was born into this... this isn't usually taught in your typical American history class] Greco–Turkish War (1919–22): 250,000 Spanish Civil War (1936–39): 365,000 Franco Regime (1939–75): 100,000 Abyssinian Conquest (1935–41): 400,000 Finnish War (1939–40): 150,000 Greek Civil War (1943–49): 158,000 Yugoslavia, Tito’s regime (1944–80): 200,000 First Indochina War (1945–54): 400,000 Colombia (1946–58): 200,000 India (1947): 500,000 Romania (1948–89): 150,000 [my parents grew up under the oppression of one of the stupidest dictators, Nicolae Ceausescu. So I listen to them when they say socialism/communism will NEVER work... it hasn't for 100 years and won't until the great heat death of the Universe] Burma/ Myanmar (1948 et seq.): 130,000 Algeria (1954–62): 537,000 Sudan (1955–72): 500,000 Guatemala (1960–96): 200,000 Indonesia (1965–66): 400,000 Uganda, Idi Amin’s regime (1972–79): 300,000 Vietnam, postwar Communist regime (1975 et seq.): 430,000 Angola (1975–2002): 550,000 East Timor, conquest by Indonesia (1975–99): 200,000 Lebanon (1975–90): 150,000 Cambodian Civil War (1978–91): 225,000 Iraq, Saddam Hussein (1979–2003): 300,000 [most millennials at least know about this guy] Uganda (1979–86): 300,000 Kurdistan (1980s, 1990s): 300,000 Liberia (1989–97): 150,000 Iraq (1990–): 350,000 Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–95): 175,000 Somalia (1991 et seq.): 400,000 --------------- Works Cited "B&J": Jacob Bercovitch and Richard Jackson, International Conflict : A Chronological Encyclopedia of Conflicts and Their Management 1945-1995 (1997) Berlinski, David, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its scientific pretensions (2009) Bodart, Gaston, Losses of Life in Modern Wars (1916) Britannica, 15th edition, 1992 printing Brzezinski, Zbigniew, Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-first Century (1993). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Africa(1981) The Cambridge History of Africa(1986), ed. J. D. Fage and R. Oliver CDI: The Center for Defense Information, The Defense Monitor, "The World At War: January 1, 1998". Chirot, Daniel: Modern Tyrants : the power and prevalence of evil in our age(1994) Chomsky, Noam, The Chomsky Reader(1987); Deterring Democracy (1991) Clodfelter, Michael, Warfare and Armed Conflict: A Statistical Reference to Casualty and Other Figures, 1618-1991 Compton's Encyclopedia Online v.2.0(1997) COWP: Correlates of War Project at the University of Michigan [http://www.correlatesofwar.org/] Courtois, Stephane, The Black Book of Communism, 1997 Davies, Norman, Europe A History (1998) Dictionary of Twentieth Century World History, by Jan Palmowski (Oxford, 1997) Dictionary of Wars, by George Childs Kohn (Facts on File, 1999) DoD: United States Department of Defense [http://web1.whs.osd.mil/mmid/m01/SMS223R.HTM] Dumas, Samuel, and K.O. Vedel-Petersen, Losses of Life Caused By War(1923) Eckhardt, William, in World Military and Social Expenditures 1987-88 (12th ed., 1987) by Ruth Leger Sivard. Edgerton, Robert B, Africa's armies: from honor to infamy: a history from 1791 to the present (2002) FAS 2000: Federation of American Scientists, The World at War (2000) Gibbon, Edward, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Gilbert, Martin, A History of the Twentieth Century (1997) Global Security: The World At War [http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/index.html] Grenville, J. A. S., A History of the World in the Twentieth Century (1994) Hammond Atlas of the 20th Century(1996) Harff, Barbara & Gurr, Ted Robert: "Toward an Empirical Theory of Genocides and Politicides", 32 International Studies Quarterly 359 (1988). Hartman, T., A World Atlas of Military History 1945-1984 (1984) Henige, David, Numbers From Nowhere, (1998) Johnson, Paul, Modern Times (1983); A History of the Jews (1987) Kuper, Leo, Genocide: its political uses in the Twentieth Century (1981) Levy, Jack, War in the Modern Great Power System (1983) Marley, David, Wars of the Americas(1998) Obermeyer, Ziad. "Fifty Years of Violent War Deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia." British Medical Journal (2008) Our Times: The Illustrated History of the 20th Century (Turner Publishing 1995) Porter, Jack Nusan, Genocide and Human Rights (1982) Prinzing, Friedrich, Epidemics Resulting from Wars (Oxford: Clarendon, 1916) Rosenbaum, Alan S., Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on comparative genocide (1996) Rummel, Rudolph J.: China's Bloody Century : Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (1991); Lethal Politics : Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917 (1990); Democide : Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder (1992); Death By Government (1994), http://www2.hawaii.edu/~rummel/welcome.html. Sheina, Robert L., Latin America's Wars: The Age of the Caudillo, 1791-1899 (2003) "S&S": Small, Melvin & Joel David Singer, Resort to Arms : International and Civil Wars 1816-1980 (1982) Singer, Joel David, The Wages of War. 1816-1965 (1972) SIPRI Yearbook: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Skidmore, Thomas E. (and Peter H. Smith), Modern Latin America, 4th ed., 1997 Smith, Dan: The State of War and Peace Atlas (1997); The New State of War and Peace (1991); The War Atlas(1983) with Michael Kidron Sorokin, Pitirim, Social and Cultural Dynamics, vol.3 (1937, 1962) Timeframe AD 1900-1925 The World In Arms (Time-Life) Timeframe AD 1925-1950 Shadow of the Dictators (Time-Life) Timeframe AD 1950-1990 Nuclear Age(Time-Life) Totten, Samuel, ed., Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views (1997) Urlanis, Boris, Wars and Population(1971) Wallechinsky: David Wallechinsky's Twentieth Century : History With the Boring Parts Left Out (1995). War Annual: The World in Conflict [year] War Annual [number]. Wertham, Fredric, A Sign For Cain : An Exploration of Human Violence (1966) White, Matthew, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (W. W. Norton, 2012) http://necrometrics.com/pre1700a.htm#Total (1999-2010 with last update Jan. 2012) "WPA3": World Political Almanac, 3rd Ed. (Facts on File: 1995) by Chris Cook. --------------- Hashtags #Hate #War #Love #Peace #Atheism #Religion #God #DeathTolls #Murder #Science #Socialism #Communism #Secularism #Naturalism #Materialism #Nihilism #YHWH #Yeshua #Christianity #Islam #Judaism #IgnoranceisBliss #History

#Hate #neoatheism #richard dawkins #Apologetics #History #secularism #socialism #communism #religion

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afreshword · 7 years

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Pastor Tony Preaches at MOBC Pre-Dedication Services

Instead of sharing a typical blog, we share a recent revival that God had Pastor Tony preach at and his sermon notes below.

Disclaimer: Sermon Notes are just that, NOTES. So they will not match the editorial standards of our standard blog.

Background of Acts

written by Luke

book of history

-At our place in the text, Jesus has already ascended.

-The Day of Pentecost has occurred.

-Massive growth has occurred.

-As the numbers of the church begin to swell, what we come to know as deacons are called to serve.

-Stephen is among them and is recorded as being full of faith, power and the HolySpirit. He is also recorded as performing miracles.

-Stephen is also a master debater who could not be refuted in open dialogue.

- He is so good that he angers the Jews of his time and they begin bearing false witness against him. As a result, Stephen is carried in front of the religious tribunal called the Sanhedrin Council.

- Stephen is charged with four counts of blasphemy: God, Moses, Temple and the Law.

- In Acts Chapter 7 Stephen lays out his defense.

Acts Chapter 7 becomes a beautiful survey of the Old Testament. He traces how Abram was called out by God, how Israel came to live in Egypt, how they were delivered from Egypt by Moses and how David desired to build God a temple.

In the midst of the Old Testament survey, Stephen begins to answers their charges.

- In verse 2, He calls God by an exhaled title, “God of Glory”, making clear that he is not a blasphemer of Yahweh.

- In verse 35, he honors Moses as a ruler and judge.

- In verse 38, he pronounces the law received from Moses as the lively oracles, making clear his reverence for God’s Law.

All the while though, while defending his love of God, God’s Law and Moses, Stephen boldly indicts the Jewish people.

His basic thesis is,

“What your people did to Joseph and Moses….you did to our Messiah!”

But the climax of his speech is when he refutes the fourth charge of blasphemy: When he clarifies his beliefs about the Temple. That defense gets him murdered.

We pick up in verse 44. Now it is important to note, that for a large part of this speech that we are reading, Stephen is actually reciting a conversation that was recorded from 2 Samuel Chapter 7, 1 Chronicles 17 and Isaiah Chapter 66. This was a conversation between David the King, Nathan the Prophet and God. Along with some words from Soloman and Isaiah.

As a side note: In our King James the Jesus that Stephen references is actually Joshua.

“Our fathers had the tabernacle of witness in the wilderness, as he had appointed, speaking unto Moses, that he should make it according to the fashion that he had seen. Which also our fathers that came after brought in with Jesus into the possession of the Gentiles, whom God drave out before the face of our fathers, unto the days of David; Who found favour before God, and desired to find a tabernacle for the God of Jacob. But Solomon built him an house. Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; as saith the prophet, Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool: what house will ye build me? saith the Lord: or what is the place of my rest? Hath not my hand made all these things?” (Acts 7:44-50 KJV)

The fourth charge against Stephen now is turned around against the council. He is charged with blaspheming the temple by allegedly saying that the temple would be destroyed and new ordinances would be implemented. Stephen does not fully refute this charge however he does take the words of Soloman, Nathan and Isaiah to challenge their faith in the temple. He basically reminds them that God and His will is bigger than their temple.

Before we MOBC and The Hill Ministry judge the 1st century Jews too harshly though, we need to understand how this particular bit of truth would have been hard to swallow.

As Chris Rock use to say, “it don’t make it right but I understand!”

After God initially chided David for wanting to build him a house, God then gets directly involved in its construction. In 1 Chronicles 28, David passes down specific detailed instructions on how the temple would be constructed. 1 Kings 6:38 it is recorded taking 7 years to build that temple.

Now all of the Bible scholars know that the first temple was destroyed. The second temple while nowhere near as glorious constructed by Zerrubbabel, is still clearly sanctioned by God. The Lord clearly sends his prophets Haggai and Zechariah to motivate God’s people toward its completion. It took blood, sweat and tears to establish even a glimmer of glory of the old temple.

This does not even speak of the Holy consecrations and prayers that took place in this temple. How dare Jesus or Stephen ever say that it be in God’s will for it to come down?

Their fathers had invested their legacies into these buildings and priestly practices and now these jokers are coming talking about change.

How dare they?

Don’t they know what it took to build all of this?

I am not saying the Jews were right my brothers and sisters, all I am saying is that I understand.

The theme for this dedication week is “We have come this far by faith”.

Faith is a journey.

Faith is a process.

Along the way of faith God gives us many signs, references, peekaboos and endeavors.

Before we look down our noses at the Sanhedrin Council….shouldn’t we look at ourselves.

Aren’t we all guilty of pretending second base is home plate?

Isn’t academia more focused on degrees and diplomas than knowledge, understanding and wisdom.

My educators out there, isn’t the system more focused on SOL’s than child development?

It has become cliche in society to make fun of participation trophies. Men beat their chest and say you should only get a trophy if you win. But let me push back on that. At age 7 and 8 and 9…..don’t some of us men forget that it’s more important that they learn the fundamentals than just win a trophy.

Tell the story of Phyllis and Tony.

I am not a hardcore fan of any sports team but I know this: The Wizards, the Knicks and the Redskins have all stunk for a generation. and why do they stink?

They are always trying to win now and they never build for long term greatness.

Why did the Samaritan have to pick up the Jewish man on the Jericho Road? Answer: The Levite was late to his Steering Council meeting.

As a parent, I am guilty of this, aren’t we so focused on capturing the perfect picture for social media that we miss the moment with our kids? I warn you today, don’t miss their entire childhood.

Faith is a great highway.

“Don’t make sanctuaries out of visitor centers!”

Don’t confuse a soft taco with the whole enchilada.

The Second point that I feel led to make for you today is an observance.

While the Jews were building Soloman’s Temple….what was God building? While Zerubbabel and the Babylonian survivors were building what would be called Herods temple…..what was God’s building? While you were gathering your resources to build this marvelous symbol of faith….what was God building?

Use Karate Kid story.

A poet named Markham wrote one of my favorite poems and it goes like this:

We are all blind until we see

—That in the human plan

Nothing is worth the making if

—It does not make the man.

Why build these buildings glorious

—If man unbuilded goes?

In vain we build the world, unless

—The builder also grows.

The last MOBC edifice lasted a little over hundred years.

This building may not make it that long.

No matter what happens with this building, The true work is alive within you!

MOBC for the fifty or sixty people that carried the weight and made this building happen, you have built a building but God on the inside of you has been making something that will last for an eternity!

MOBC I bring you good news!

God has built a building that is even greater than this one. It will last forever. Instead of bricks, it is made with the mortar of souls. Those souls have been a work in progress while you were working on this building, He was working on you.

“And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”

Luke 17:20-21 KJV

For more musings like this please subscribe to my blog AFreshWord.org at

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tangible-innovation · 8 years

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The 54th R&D 100 Awards & 2nd Annual Technology Conference

The 54th R&D 100 Awards & 2nd Annual Technology Conference was held on November 2-4, 2016 at the Gaylord National Convention Center, just south of Washington, DC, in Oxon, Maryland.

R&D 100 Awards

The R&D 100 Awards are considered the most globally prestigious awards for invention and innovation. Each year, for the past 54 years, people arrive to the awards ceremony from all over the world in hopes of winning an "Oscar of Invention."

The leaders of R&D Magazine, the flagship publication of Advantage Business Media's 10-magazine Science Group, coordinate the Awards contest and dinner each year. This year, 52 judges from industry, academia, and government reviewed a gazillion submissions and determined there were 275 Finalists. Then, they culled-out the 100 Winners. Plus, 15 Special Recognition Awards are part of the ceremony each year. In all, some one-hundred fifteen winners are presented awards at an engaging black tie dinner event. Every innovation professional should witness this at least once in their career.

There are six categories: Analytical/Test, IT/Electrical, Mechanical/Materials, Process/Prototyping, Software/Services, and Special Recognition.

Examples of Special Recognition Awards include: Corporate Social Responsibility, Green Tech, and Market Disruptor.

54th R&D 100 Awards Winners

The full list of 2016 R&D 100 Award Winners is available here: www.rd100conference.com/awards/winners-finalists/year/2016/.

It is hard to keep track of it all during the dinner. The individual inventions are fascinating and fully captivate your attention, one after the other, and all of a sudden the evening is over. So, here are some observations at fifty-thousand feet from putting the table from the URL in the preceding paragraph into Excel.

1) Several organizations won four or more awards. The following entities may be strong sources of global innovation: Taiwan's ITRI, MIT Lincoln Labs, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and "the Dow companies."

2) Other than Dow, the only other industrial or high-tech company to win more than one award was PPG Industries which won two.

3) USA's National Laboratories also deserve comment. Approximately 30 of the awards went to one of the National Labs or to a dedicated USA government lab.

4) Not enough industry and high-tech companies are competing. I've recommended to our clients over the years that it is really inexpensive to compete in this contest and one can't beat the visibility, free marketing, and brand value. If you are a big company, there is real bang for the buck to be a Finalist - never mind winning. If you are a start-up, the visibility could accelerate the company by 3-5 years.

Innovator Of The Year Award

The Innovator Of The Year Award, this particular year, recognizes a technology that might benefit us all. Dr. Anthony Atala, Director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and his team are making great progress on growing human organs that work.

The more vessels and "piping" that is in an organ, the harder it is to grow. But, some major organs (such as the liver) have large areas of very similar cells that perform the function of the organ. Dr. Atala is now within sight of being able to consistently grow the "mass areas" of several organs, possibly within this decade.

The Global R&D Funding Forecast - The Year Ahead

The 2017 Global Funding Forecast was presented in DRAFT form after the Awards Dinner concluded. Only the DRAFT form is currently available. The final version should be out later this month or in early February.

R&D Magazine is one of the best sources of R&D Spending information presented in a global business context. Each year, a preview of the coming year is presented. Historically, this was developed by R&D Magazine in conjunction with Battelle Laboratories. As of last year, this is now developed in conjunction with the Industrial Research Institute [IRI]. This was a natural alliance as the IRI has been developing a similar set of spending information each year.

2nd Annual Technology Conference

Last year R&D Magazine brainstormed what else they might do, given all the accomplished people that come to the Awards each year, and they decided to wrap a "technology and technology management conference" around the Awards dinner. The first conference, in conjunction with the awards dinner, was last year. I was invited to speak at the inaugural conference last year at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

This year, I was invited back to give two presentations. In my mind however, I didn't think the location would be as much fun. But, I was wrong. The Gaylord National Convention Center is a specially created oasis just south of DC, right on the Potomac River. Many government and military conferences are held at this giant convention center. A small community thrives around this all-in-one facility/town, with plenty of entertainment for traveling spouses.

Like McCormick Place in Chicago, this is perhaps another location that professionals should attempt to experience at least once in their career.

The table of contents of my two presentations at the 2nd Annual Technology Conference are directly below. There was standing-room only on the Breakthrough Innovation topic. The highlight of the 12 Trends topic was GGI's roll-out of the upcoming 8th generation of product development processes. Folks that have been to our presentations will recognize the seven generations slide being projected in the picture below, and I verbally explained the 8th generation. [The 8th generation was officially published in Machine Design in December 2016.]

10 Techniques to Achieve Breakthroughs Through Innovation

2015 marked the 20th anniversary of Christensen's work on disruptive innovation. In 2016, GGI researched disruptive, radical, and breakthrough innovation. It was time to take a snapshot of how the body of knowledge had evolved over two decades.

Our work found ten distinct breakthrough strategies. They vary greatly, from competing on business-models to specific market or business strategies to technology mastery to commercialization execution. There is no common root to them, except that your company and industry will know they are experiencing a breakthrough from a new or a changing basis of competition.

12 Trends in the Science of Managing R&D and Product Development

After my presentation on Complexity at the 1st Annual Conference, R&D Magazine asked me to build off it and to make recommendations on how to manage in the decade ahead. I presented this work for the first time at a conference in Poland in April 2016 and further refined it for R&D Magazine.

Directing and overseeing science, materials, technology, software creation-to-commercialization activities is already a good bit more challenging this past decade. Well, not to disappoint, we have another tumultuous decade to go. There will be another reset around 2025, once there are 100 billion connected devices and that becomes the new normal.

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ANNOUNCEMENT

GGI's next Metrics Summit is February 28 to March 2, 2017

A quick note to let you know that our 21st R&D-Product Development Metrics Summit is coming up.

It will be held in Norwood, Massachusetts.

Our conference facility is equidistant between the Providence and Boston airports,

and a comprehensive renovation was completed last fall.

The place is beautiful, the food is great, WI-FI is throughout.

Our content is stimulating, our discussions are lively,

and the teamwork during the Workshop makes for lasting relationships with colleagues

who deal with many of the same professional issues and challenges.

Please join us.

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TWITTER

GGI became significantly more active on Twitter in 2016.

No chit chat.

GGI Tweets content from our primary and secondary research,

140-character summaries of good articles in trade publications,

and announcements and recaps on GGI events and presentations.

A quick look.

@GoldenseGroup

Please consider Following GGI on Twitter.

#Research #Strategy #R&D #Invention #Innovation #best practices #product innovation #breakthrough #disruptive innovation #disruption #intellectual property #IP #performance #business results

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rulystuff · 4 years

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https://servicemeltdown.com/the-united-states-witnessed-an-economic-renaissance-under-president-trump/

New Post has been published on https://servicemeltdown.com/the-united-states-witnessed-an-economic-renaissance-under-president-trump/

THE UNITED STATES WITNESSED AN ECONOMIC RENAISSANCE UNDER PRESIDENT TRUMP

Much has been said by pundits on the Left that the nation’s recent economic dynamism was due in large measure to President Obama’s policies and initiatives. Setting aside that these talking heads happen to be economic illiterates they also have a great deal of animus toward President Trump which further clouds their thinking. It is incumbent on citizens, therefore, to go behind the curtain of demagoguery and propaganda and get at the truth.

On practically every measure that has economic significance President Trump’s economy was decidedly superior to the paltry results left behind by President Obama.

Some notable examples should suffice to make the point.

Stock Market Performance:

The Dow Jones Industrial Average when President Obama left office stood at 21,126. In contrast, the closing average on December 31, 2020 registered 30,409 points. Better still, on President Trump’s last day in office, January 20, 2021, the market closed at 31,118. This represented an increase of roughly 47% in the Dow Jones Index.

The increase in the Index was more than just about points on stock market boards as the total market capitalization of public companies increased by about 89%. When President Obama left office total market capitalization stood at around $27 trillion. In contrast, total market capitalization as of December 31, 2020 came in at $51 trillion. Americans who own stock directly or indirectly through pension funds, 401K’s or mutual funds are the beneficiaries of this dramatic wealth creation.

Gross Domestic Product:

The Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a scorecard which represents the value of all goods and services produced across the economy, was superior under President Trump. Under President Obama, GDP averaged $16.375 trillion. Under President Trump, GDP averaged $20.605 trillion despite the onslaught of the Chinese Communist Virus and the draconian lockdown measures instituted by politicians nonplussed by how their actions would affect a “Trump” economy. Nonetheless, America’s GDP improved by 26% under President Trump.

GDP growth is similarly unsympathetic to President Obama. Growth under President Obama’s regime averaged 1.6%. And, in his last year in office he handed off an economy that was growing at that same meager rate of 1.6%. Under President Trump’s first three years in office, GDP growth averaged 2.5%. [In the President’s last year in office, the economy contracted 3.5% as a direct result of the aforementioned lockdowns]. There is more to this percentage increase than meets the eye for the simple reason that one has to take into account the base amount on which the growth is calculated. In other words, an equal percentage increase on a higher base yields a greater amount than on a lower base. In sum, the growth of the Trump economy, added approximately 26% more real dollars.

The nation’s balance of payments deficit accumulated over roughly four decades now stands at about $12 trillion. President Obama is responsible for roughly a third of that total or about $4 trillion but he was not alone in his malfeasance. Prior administrations Democrat as well as Republican simply looked the other way as countries, friend and foe alike, excelled at cheating through currency manipulation, intellectual property theft, import tariffs, and prohibited commercial transactions. The accusations that were made of President Trump that he was somehow triggering a “trade war” ignored the fact that the nation was financing a deficit which cost millions of American workers their jobs, depressed wages, closed thousands of factories, contracted R&D, and exported capital to foreign shores. In fact, the United States had been engaged in a trade war long before President Trump came on the scene.

Sovereign Debt:

President Obama ran up the country’s debt from $10 trillion to about $20 trillion while in office. President Trump’s Administration ran the national debt to just shy of $27 trillion in his four years. This amount, however, includes the debt effect of $3 trillion of virus-related stimulus expenditures.

A critical barometer of a nation’s economic health is the ratio of debt-to-GDP. While President Obama was in office this ratio climbed over twenty percentage points. Worse, during the last six years of President Obama’s tenure the debt-to-GDP ratio was near or in excess of 100%. In contrast, President Trump maintained the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio steady at about 104% during his first three years in office. With the advent of the pandemic, however, the nation’s debt-to-GDP ratio went through the roof and as of December 31, 2020 stood at 122%. This makes it the nation’s highest debt-to-GDP ratio since World War II, and places the financial performance of the United States economy in the same ugly neighborhood as the near basket-case that is Italy.

Unemployment and Wages:

The unemployment rate under President Obama averaged 7.5%. Under President Trump’s first three years in office the unemployment rate averaged 3.9% for a nearly 50% improvement. The unemployment rate as of February 2020 was 3.5% for a roughly fifty year-low. The underemployment rate – the so-called U6 rate – which measures the unemployed, those that are not looking for work, and those that have had to settle for part-time work never got below 9.2% under President Obama and was at its highest in 2010 at 17%. In contrast, the underemployment rate under President Trump came in at 6.9%. Again, both the unemployment and the underemployment rate deteriorated significantly with the onset of the virus beginning in March of 2020.

The number of workers seeking work under the Obama Administration averaged 3.6 for every job opening. Under President Trump the number of workers seeking work was on par with the number of job openings. Which is to say that for every one job opening in the nation there was one worker seeking work.

Wage growth for production workers during President Obama’s term in office averaged 2.3%. Wage growth during President Trump’s first three years in office averaged 2.9% for a 24% increase.

Left unsaid in the sophistry which is dished out by the talking heads on the Left is that President Obama had $700 billion of Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) monies authorized to spend with which to stabilize the economy. In the end, Wall Street Banks were the principal beneficiaries of the government’s largesse while approximately ten million homeowners lost their homes.

Facts are stubborn things and citizens owe it to themselves to learn those facts through self-study, reading, and research as a way to immunize themselves from the campaign of disinformation served up by the Left. Rest assured, the disinformants are all around us: in schools, the media, academia, think tanks, and most perversely, in the halls of Congress. In the end, an informed citizenry is the best antidote for thwarting the malignancy that is disinformation.

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rulystuff · 4 years

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https://servicemeltdown.com/climate-change-science-or-propaganda/

New Post has been published on https://servicemeltdown.com/climate-change-science-or-propaganda/

CLIMATE CHANGE: SCIENCE OR PROPAGANDA?

As evidence mounts, however, that there is no global-warming calamity in the offing or that global-warming has its roots in mostly anthropogenic causes, climate change advocates have become more and more reliant on propaganda and disinformation to deliver their message of fear. Major media outlets, for their part, are complicit in parroting the latest shrill accounts of impending climate disaster without pushback or a critical analysis of the facts. One journalist in a Midwest newspaper, for example, recently stated that “The weather machine… is starting to act erratically…”, and that “The flood of immigrants around the world has been set in motion…principally by unbearable temperatures and loss of water and arable land.” No mention is made in the writer’s column of the fact that millions of people have been displaced by war, persecution and overpopulation. Not to be outdone, Nobel Laureate in Economics, Joseph Stiglitz, tells the New York Times that “Wall Street could be underwater by the year 2100.”

But what could top the Associated Press story of June 29, 1989, when it reported that a senior U.N. environmental official had stated that “entire nations could be wiped out off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if global warming trends are not reversed by the year 2000.” We are now near the end of the year 2020 and as far as we know no nations have been wiped off the face of the Earth!

THE THEOLOGY OF CLIMATE CHANGE BLINDS OBJECTIVITY

The IPCC, which should stand as a paragon of scientific objectivity, and impartiality, is far from it. Emblematic of the agency’s bias, the IPCC has published a “manifesto” to guide authors in writing reports. Members of the IPCC are obligated to uphold the strictures contained in the manifesto. As such, authors are urged to parse their otherwise negative findings and to state questionable points of view without qualification. Certain word choices are prohibited and expressions which would cast doubt on an author’s expertise in a certain area are to be avoided. Members are in effect censored as they must not express opinions beyond the scope of published reports. Finally, minority opinions expressed in the body of an IPCC report rarely get mentioned in the Policymakers Summary. Journalists, and other non-experts unable or unwilling to wade through several hundred pages of technical data presumably read only the Summary. So much for scientific objectivity and impartiality.

The Earth’s temperature has been exceptionally stable for a very long time. For five thousand years global temperatures have been within the range of plus or minus one-half of one degree Celsius from average. And, according to astrophysicist S. Fred Singer “While it is true that global temperatures have risen about one-half of one degree Celsius in the last century, most of this warming occurred before 1940, while most of the human-caused carbon dioxide emissions occurred after 1940.” Recent global temperature readings come as a surprise to many.For example, scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space report that the average global temperature for 2019 was unchanged from 2016 with two dips – global cooling, in effect – in 2017 and 2018.

And, while there has been much said in the media about how global-warminghas been responsible for a surge in major hurricane activity the facts prove otherwise.The fact is thatthe number of severe storms has not measurably increased during the last fifty years. According to the Stormfax Weather Almanac, the average annual number of category 3,4, or 5 hurricanes in the Atlantic from the year 1970 to 2017 is 2.5. If we look at more recent data say from the year 2000 to 2017, the average annual number of major hurricanes shows a slight and inconsequential uptick to 3.2.Scant notice of any of these findings have been seen in media reports. All of which goes to say that the apocalyptic data usually reported by the media is anti-empirical as it is not backed up by actual observation.

Climate change has been found to be the result of hugely complex phenomena such as oceanic tides, solar radiation, volcanic activity, tectonic plate movements, magnetic field variations, winds, and ocean current fluctuations that are far beyond the scope of existing computer models to accurately simulate. It is no wonder then that computer modeling predictions fail to line up with observable data and for any government to rely on them as a guide in reordering a nation’s economic priorities is sheer folly and does a serious disservice to its citizenry.

The United Nations Paris Climate Accord, as a case in point, would have required the United States to reduce its greenhouse emissions by the year 2025 to between 26 and 28 percent below its 2005 levels. Compliance with the dictates of the accord would have cost the nation 2.7 million jobs, by 2025, according to the National Economic Research Associates and caused a sizeable contraction in GDP. Our arch-enemy Communist China, the world’s biggest polluter, was given a pass in the Paris Accord and by the terms of the agreement was allowed to continue increasing its carbon emissions until 2030. Still, according to an article published in the Global Policy Journal on November 2015, Danish Statistician, Dr. Bjorn Lomborg wrote, “Even if all nations keep their promises under the agreement, temperatures will be cut by just one-half of one degree Celsius by 2100.” In the end, the Paris Climate Accord amounted to a huge redistribution of wealth at the expense of the United States. Seeing the writing on the wall, the United States wisely withdrew from the accord in 2019.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

Climate change proponents are undeterred by the facts. As Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, once said, “Increasingly, it seems facts aren’t necessary because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief.” In other words, belief trumps facts.

A counter narrative to deal with the potentially destructive economic and political consequences of an unbridled and imperialist climate change agenda must therefore go beyond a reliance on scientific arguments alone. Deep-seated doctrinaire beliefs cannot be overcome through logic and reason. A more effective counter narrative must have citizens demand of their government officials that the potentially coercive practices of supranational organizations like the United Nation’s IPCC will not be tolerated.

If we cherish the freedoms we have come to enjoy as citizens of an independent sovereign state we have little choice but to forcefully resist institutional intimidation whether foreign or domestic. When it comes to climate science, free-thinking citizens must remain skeptical and engage in greater self-study and research. Citizens must also take to the public square and hold policymakers accountable if they seek to embark on hastily thought out harsh economic policies. Keep in mind that the Left in the United States is proposing a net-zero emissions standard by the year 2050 which would cost the nation on the order of $5 trillion per year. In the end, citizens must demand more science and less propaganda.

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