I want to say something here about Kamala Harris: not only as an almost perfect example of an empty signifier in politics, but also as a perfect embodiment of what we could call POSIWIS politics – the politics of a system in which “the purpose of the system is what it says, not what it does”.
Kamala Harris is (all but) what the radical theorist Ernesto Laclau called “an empty signifier”. An empty signifier is a word which is an empty vessel: which is available for use. It is a word which can mean more or less anything. Or, if I suggest that an empty signifier could be a thing or a person, it would be a thing or person which could be made to stand for more or less anything, especially if it has an appropriate appearance: which, in this instance, because woman, because black, is something that can be aimed at the double-glass-ceiling. (Glass ceiling: another empty signifier.) At the moment, Kamala Harris is in the enviable and very unusual situation of having been a black hole which has turned supernova: dragging all the light into its apparent emptiness only to explode suddenly in a great glaring star which lights up the entire Democratic universe. And, across the Atlantic, the people who are always wrong are also transfixed at the fireworks of joy streaming across from America. It is inspiring, it is wonderful – it is absurd.
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Thanks; good article.
Twas ever thus, and again we are powerless to do anything. They falsely blacken the names of anyone who opposes their view, call them deniers (of what), or accuse them of being in the pay of vested interests (have you got to be one to know one?) like big oil or the Russians/Chinese.
A pox on the lot of them, except they would exploit the pox, lock us all down and try to feed us untested drugs to destroy our spirit.
Perhaps “incestuous,” is a bit harsh. Just friends helping each other out.
At our expense.
Lovely people.
“A bit harsh”?? There is nothing too harsh for the charlatans. The friends “helping each other out” are sending millions in the wealthy west into energy poverty and causing those in the third world to stay dying young of preventable diseases and back breaking labour because they are denied fossil fuels and fobbed off with phony renewables to “save the planet”.
I was of course extracting the urine. My dry, northern humour clearly doesn’t travel well.
AHH Yes——————–I have tried my dour Scots humour a few times and it hasn’t worked. People got the wrong idea and thought I was being serious and then I had to go and explain. It’s never good when you have to explain your jokes. —But actually I kind of knew you were taking the piss. I just never let a good opportunity for a rant about the climate hoax to pass.
I think the term “renewables” is deliberately misleading. Solar panels and turbine blades are not renewable or recyclable and have to be replaced. We should have energy definitions around the common denominator of “fuels”, viz:
fossil fuels
nuclear fuels
biomass fuels
imported fuels &
*weather fuels*
That’s much more honest!
They mean the fuel itself is “renewable”, but ofcourse there is nothing “honest” when it comes to anything remotely connected to climate change dogma. The whole thing is a pseudo scientific fraud with all manner of people and businesses feeding at the subsidy trough filled with taxpayers misspent money.
Intermittent (weather) and non intermittent (everything else). Non intermittent could usefully be subdivided into “easily ramped up” (e.g. gas) which is good for meeting peak demand and not easily ramped up (e.g. nuclear, possibly coal) more suitable for base load. You could also usefully subdivide between sources that are under our control (we have the fuel and the technology) and sources where we rely on other countries.
We get roughly 10% of actual generated electricity from abroad (mainly France and Norway)
To some extent it’s a question of time. The only one on the list that is not renewable is nuclear; the rest are produced by plants in the longer term. After all, they claim that “biomass” such as wood fuel for Drax is kind of renewable in the medium term, whereas so-called “fossil fuels” are longer term storage mechanisms.
Is Uranium not naturally occurring / created in the ground around the world? Highly reprocessable fuel as well. Take your general point though. Biomass through growing weed trees etc could be sustainable,
trouble is you need a lot of land
They didn’t get it wrong. The figures were changed, or to use a previously used term, sexed up to support a pre determined policy.
The system doesn’t work how it’s supposed to work or how people are made to believe it works.
We.live in a completely corrupt system.
I challenge anyone to show me otherwise.
Yet how often do we hear that anyone who questions Climate change orthodoxy or the green technologies that are supposedly going to fix all of that (whatever all of that is supposed to be) must be “in the pay of big oil”. They are “stooges for the fossil fuel companies”. The implication being that fossil fuels are the devil incarnate despite providing 85% of the worlds energy and bringing billions out of a miserable life of abject poverty, and renewables are all sweetness and light despite providing about 1% and forcing poorer people in developed countries into energy poverty and adversely affecting economies. Those champions of these niche technologies then insist that poor people living on a dollar a day in the third world should not use their fossil fuels to “fight climate change”——-Yes Green Politics is a nasty old business.
Well, here’s an example of natural long-term energy storage (NLES). A picture’s worth a thousand words.
If even a little bit of the astronomical sums spent on renewables had been put into clean coal development we would not be seeing the enormous electricity bills we currently have, crippling the economy and leaving people unable to afford energy.
It’s blatant corruption and grifting. But since the corrupt grifters are in the House of Frauds or protected by the other corrupt grifters in Government, they’re untouchable.
As ever, follow the money. It was funny when the last offshore auction attracted zero bids – say what you like about the private sector, they tend not to invest in loss making ventures if they can help it, unlike our lovely government