"Do as I say, not as I do." King Charles III
@wideawake_media
"King" Charles is spending Christmas at his Sandringham estate, which boasts 20,000 acres of land, and hundreds of servants. He spends just two weeks of the year here.
Where are all the solar panels and wind turbines, generating the huge amounts of energy required to power and heat the place?
Do you think heat pumps are being used instead of gas boilers?
Do you think insects are on the menu, instead of the finest meats and produce?
This is what hard-earned money—stolen from those he ‘serves’ via the industrial-scale extortion racket euphemistically called "taxation"—is funding, while many struggle to heat their homes and put food on the table.
While "King" Charles lectures you about needing to sacrifice your mobility, comfort, standard of living, economic prosperity, and ability to heat and feed yourself, in the name of Net Zero—a tyrannical and impoverishing "solution" to a non-existent problem.
I hear you Roger. A few big variables are jumping out at me regarding collective human nature.
1 — There may be a correlation between even a light use of psychoactives and an empathy-driven, egalitarian-Taoist view of the world as opposed to a Confucian, rule-driven hierarchical view (using Toaist vs. Confucian because I live in Japan, but there are plenty of Western counterparts.)
2 — Cluster B personality types (dark-triads), tend to be attracted to concentrations of power over others. And power over others, as Tolkien's metaphorical "one ring to bind them", tends to be addictively corrupt.
3 — Even more typically neurotypically empathetic people, when placed in a position of authority, are subject to the temptations that power brings with that position ... cronyism, nepotism, self-indulgence, and so on.
4 — Empathy-driven behavior, to me, is synonymous with morality, and any ethical system worth its salt is necessarily provisional, and grounded in empathy. Direct empathy probably correlates with the highest morality, but it is limited by scale, probably Dunbar's number or less. Populations larger that that are necessarily hierarchical, rule-driven, and require a concentration of authoritative, rule-or-fear-driven power ... which evolves and then devolves into corruption ... until the population regains a sense of empathy, and the process starts again.
I have become pretty pessimistic about our long term chances of flourishing as a species ... but then again, if I identify with "life", what does it matter that homo sapiens is just one of millions of species that has come and gone? Life will find another way.
Still following the Lahaina massacre, I am torn between rage and despair at how the government fenced off the burn for months, "to protect the locals from toxins" ... and now is determined to hastily dump those same toxins next door. Like the life of King Charles, the hypocrisy is infuriating.
Without getting our hopes too high, let's keep up the good fight next year Roger.
Cheers from Japan,
steve
Hi John, aloha. I hear you and also feel the pain of Lahaina and elsewhere in your message. Thanks for having natural human feelings ... where too many people are, or seem to be just numb with no opinion. Here's to better days.