French farmers have today started an “indefinite” tractor siege of Paris to protest the Government’s crippling Net Zero policies, blocking off key routes after threatening to “starve” the city amid warnings the capital only has three days of food. The Mail has more.
Tractors are clogging major roads bringing traffic to a grinding halt around the city with stacks of hay bales also used to block carriageways as part of a bitter on-running dispute over work conditions.
Meanwhile, the southern city of Toulouse has nearly been ‘cut off’ in the midst of similar protests in what will be a major test for France’s youngest ever PM Gabriel Attal – just weeks after he was appointed by President Emmanuel Macron aged 34.
In recent weeks there has been a slew of protests in France, a major agricultural producer, by farmers angry about incomes, red tape and environmental policies they say undermine their ability to compete with other countries.
Protesting farmers started the operation by blocking the A13 highway to the west of the capital, the A4 to the east and the A6 on which hundreds of tractors rolled towards Paris from the south. The Government in response has deployed some 15,000 police officers.
By mid-afternoon [the farmers] appeared to have met their objective of establishing eight chokepoints on major roads into Paris, according to Sytadin, a traffic monitoring service.
“We need answers,” said Karine Duc, a farmer in the southwestern Lot-et-Garonne department as she joined a convoy of tractors heading for Paris. “This is the final battle for farming. It’s a question of survival,” she added.
A banner on a tractor in the convoy said: “We will not die in silence.” …
The agriculture workers are protesting for more protection against rising production costs and for an end to green Net Zero policies that they say are putting them out of business.
The Government, wary of seeing the protests escalate and with an eye on European Parliament elections in June, has already dropped plans to gradually reduce subsidies on agricultural diesel and promised to ease environmental regulations.
France also said it would push its European Union peers to agree to ease regulations on fallow farmland. But farmers’ organisation said it was not enough.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Science does not exist. It is all philosophy. Philosophy filters natural experience, data and evidence.
Real mechanical Science ended in the early 19th century.
Now it is contrived ridiculous maths, tensor matrices, jargon, fraud, word salads, AI paper mills, money, propaganda, coercion, censorship, bullshit and violence. All to fit a worldview and philosophy.
$cientism.
Ferd, I disagree as a scientist and engineer. The reality is more nuanced. The science of Mechanics and Mechanical Engineering developed rapidly in 19th Century and continues to do so. Science develops tools, largely mathematical, to explain and predict behaviours of real materials and structures and engineering takes these through to enable real structures to be designed to withstand real environments. Of course there is incompetence and fraud but generally if what one delivers does not meet this criteria one does not get paid.
Of course with politics and corporatism there are plenty of pressures to corrupt this process, for instance the whole climate change edifice and it’s use to bludgeon the masses to pay enormous sums to the elites and their masters with specious arguments. At a Conference in the Netherlands recently earnest scientists and engineers advanced arguments not directly based on scientific fact but political economics, to support a vast ‘emissions’ trading scheme for alternative fuels to enrich the UN to the tune of billions per year. And with descriptions of (say) hydrogen with more colours than the LGBTQ+ flags. And all with different rewards and penalties. Whether hydrogen is an appropriate fuel or not for Diesel engines is an engineering science matter, the rest falls into your category of fraud.
And when engineers create a model it is tested to prove that it is valid and therefore useful. Not something that can be said of the climate science computer games.
“Real mechanical Science ended in the early 19th century…”
…So how come we’ve all got access to physical working embodiments of the proliferation of physical science that took place from the mid-19th century onwards, when the modern world arguably began?
By way of example, in rough chronological order 1850-1950: wireless telegraphy, X-ray radiography, telephony, internal combustion engine, synthetic fertilisers, plastics, antibiotics, jet engines, nuclear power, etc, etc.
None of these technologies came about in the first place in parts of the world not practised in applied physical sciences.
Agreed there’s been an explosion of voodoo science as well over the last two centuries, which politicians have lapped up and taxpayers are funding to this day.
Science is a mode of enquiry that each of us has to undertake in order to understand how things behave. Self selecting pearls of wisdom from the famous isn’t enquiring. That is why passing the information through a ‘non-scientist’ destroys the integrity of the message. Questioning the statement often returns a blank look, at best, or a deligated response, and the end of the conversation. Hence, the inclusion of Arts, Humanities and Social Science graduates, even if they have some intelligence, is likely to degrade the conversation, as has happened with the BBC monopolising and controlling the Climate Emergency discussions.
The West’s initial attempts into Scientific endeavour were very successful, enabling industry to innovative and improve, as well as gaining much understanding of the Physical World. But, as the 19th century progressed, some awkward experimental results started to appear. While “Mechanical Science’ continued to accumulate knowledge, other subdisciplines were producing contradictory evidence. The Mathematical solution, which has left many questions about the Physics unanswered, was derived through inspiration, and a good knowledge of Mathematics:
“Max Planck produced his law on 19 October 1900″
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck's_law
What followed is briefly described under the heading (in the link) ‘Subsequent events’ , and has led to Quantum Mechanics, which is used extensively. It isn’t the ‘final solution’ as the Physics isn’t particularly elegant, and Jacob Barandes is working on a new Stocastic approach, which keeps the Maths nearer to Reality, with no collapsing wave function, and all that it entails. Physics isn’t static by any means.
The problem with many recent experimental results isn’t the Scientific Method; as has already been mentioned, it’s that the Scientific Method isn’t being followed, for whatever reason. Of particular concern is the sloppy Statistics that is frequently found.
No, science exists. That in itself is not a problem.
The problem is that it has been taken over by and turned into a method of exercising political power.
Just like in medieval times religion (which also exists, undoubtably as long as there is at least one person who believes in the supernatural) was taken over and turned into a method of exercising political power.
By the way, science serving political power is much worse than medieval religion was, as science is devoid of any values. It can create nuclear power, for example, but says nothing about whether or not it is morally wrong to use it to incinerate people.
Politicians like to refer to “science” to justify things because people like and trust “science” because they perceive it to have been successful and helpful and amazing. “Scientists” are often happy to be political tools or actors because they need money and like power and prestige.
As always, caveat emptor and cui bono? apply.
What brilliant arguments you’ve all put forward in the comments on this topic, it’s a joy to read!
The real problem with politicised science is the irresistible temptation of neo-Lysenkoism – science as political control. We already see this with the fake climate emergency, where only one particular outcome, climate catastrophe requiring the subjugation of the population, is acceptable. And anyone who doesn’t accept this is tarred with the heresy-designation of “denier”.
Neo-Lysenkoism indeed. But what many ‘uses’ of the Science ignore is that the Scientific Method is self-correcting. And there will be some scientists willing to upset the consensus, if they can, for a better match to reality.
Exactly – that’s my #1 red flag test, when ever the people pushing ‘whatever’ use censorship or bullying or whatever to avoid an open debate, you know their argument is not what it seems… trouble is many people seem to lap it up.
As an example, many people now seem to trust the massive social media corporations, such as during covid, who 10-15 years ago would have disagreed with such corporate entities, no matter what they said, by default… because they hated big business. Maybe they appear more cuddly than big business of old – however we should be more wary than ever given their reach and power