Andrew W. Griffin
Red Dirt Report
November 29, 2010
OKLAHOMA CITY — On a recent visit to England, an evening in the hotel room found me flipping channels. To say much of British television is awful would be an understatement. However, one program caught my attention – the BBC reality program Turn Back Time: The High Street.
The premise of the program is that a group of shopkeepers and their families on High Street in the historic English market town of Shepton Mallet, Somerset, are instructed to run their businesses – grocer, butcher, blacksmith, etc. – as they would have under the circumstances of their particular time in history. In the episode I watched the time period was World War II, when times were hard for many Britons and citizens had to make do with whatever they happened to have or could afford. It was also a time of austerity, as the Shepton Mallet families soon discover.
Air raids, food shortages and annoyed customers were common throughout the program. The grocer even offered certain customers black market goods, undermining the “community spirit” approach that developed during those times of hardship, woe and want.
The program struck me, I suppose, because of all the talk these days of austerity, of “sacrifice” and such. British newspapers like The Independent were noting that the climate summit in Cancun, Mexico is incredibly important but that most nations won’t do enough to save the smaller, poorer nations that will be adversely affected by so-called climate change.
And in today’s edition of The Daily Telegraph, it notes that a professor named Kevin Anderson is actually calling for a “halt (to) economic growth in the rich world over the next 20 years.” It continues, noting that “(t)his would mean a drastic change in lifestyles for many people in countries like Britain as everyone will have to buy less ‘carbon intensive’ goods and services such as long-haul flights and fuel-hungry cars.”
But the part that really caught my attention in regards to Prof. Anderson’s insane rantings about austerity was this – “(Anderson) said politicians should consider a rationing system similar to the one introduced during the ‘last time of crisis’ in the 1930s and 40s.”
Nineteen thirties and forties, eh? Just as BBC viewers witnessed on the Turn Back Time program. Coincidence?
Said Anderson in the Telegraph: “The Second World War and the concept of rationing is something we need to seriously consider if we are to address the scale do the problem we face.”
Now, Prof. Anderson reassures readers that he doesn’t expect people to “go back to living in caves,” but we do need to wear sweaters more often, rather than turning up the heat in your home. It’s starting to feel like the 1970′s all over again, isn’t it?
As Steve Watson, writing an article for PrisonPlanet.com, noted that a group called the Royal Society, an “ultra-elitist environmental group,” wants the first world to stave off alleged rising global temperatures by adhering “to a system of rationing.” This Royal Society group is part of a the global-warming cult that wants drastic cuts in CO2 emissions, even it means folks have to endure austerity and rationing at levels never before seen in modern times.
Meanwhile, greenie globalist do-gooders like U2′s Bono and Al Gore are jetting around the world, wagging their fingers and telling people to reduce their “carbon footprint” while they live well and preach down to everyone for driving an SUV or using certain sorts of light bulbs. As someone who caught U2′s performance in 2009 in Norman, Okla., as part of the 360 Degrees Tour, the set was enormous and as Andrew Bolt of Melbourne, Australia’s Herald Sun newspaper noted: “U2′s 360 Degrees Tour, the most expensive rock spectacle ever, is here. The tour, with a daily running cost of $850,000, arrived on six 747 jets …”
And back to my trip to the UK – there was a lot of grumbling about the serious financial challenges facing Ireland and the fact that Britain will have to help them out financially. Yeah, the European Union finance ministers have approved the bailout of Ireland and the Irish people are mad, and protesting, just as they are in Greece and other European countries. If a country like Ireland can fall so quickly, what lies ahead for Britain and America, for that matter?
While in the United Kingdom, young protesters – students, mostly – were occupying buildings, like Oxford’s Radcliffe Camera, or in London, smashing police vans or causing low-level mayhem, protesting the planned cuts in education funding and higher student fees. While walking the streets of Oxford this past week, it was clear that the students were not happy about these recent developments, some holding signs, much as their parents – and even grandparents – had in the 1960′s and 70′s. One British columnist called these students part of “Generation Scared,” where these younger people won’t enjoy what their older siblings, parents and grandparents got to enjoy, before everything started going to hell, as it were.
Will we have to revert to the kind of rationing and austere conditions that the WWII generation faced? Is this all an engineered collapse that will bring about some sort of dystopian nightmare on a global scale? Between the recent TSA protests in the U.S., student uprisings in Britain, collapsing economies, the war-like footing on the Korean peninsula and an increasingly smug China and Russia, the “grand chessboard,” as the globalists like to say, is looking pretty active and more uncertain. Of course most of us are the “pawns” and we all know what usually happens to the pawns in the game of chess.
