Useful Idiots

How one group of Scientists got a glimpse into the coming Dark Ages...

(Porsche Abarth Carrera. Source: Getty Images)

Joel Bowman, appraising the situation from Buenos Aires, Argentina...

Welcome to another Sunday Session, dear reader, that time of the week when we pull up a barstool at the virtual watering hole, take stock of the week just gone, and try to recall a little perspective to our lives... one nip of flu medicine at a time (we’ve been “crook as a dog” all week, to put it in Australian vernacular, but seem to be on the mend now)...

It ought to go without saying that we live in an unprecedented Age of Abundance. Our modern economy is one brimming with cheap and abundant goods... manufactured using cheap and abundant energy... financed using cheap and abundant credit. 

For better and worse, modern man scarcely wants for his bare necessities. His physiological requirements, the base of Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, he takes more or less for granted. If anything, he is overburdened with worldly goods, a slave to his possessions. 

But when he requires painkillers – as we did during the week – he need only visit a drugstore and choose from a variety of on- and off-label products. Pills, potions, capsules and caplets... daytime, nighttime... drowsy, non-drowsy... balms, rubs, ointments. You name it.

As Bill wrote during the week, such a casual cornucopia of pharmaceutical remedies and therapeutics were not so readily available in the recent past... not even to a man whose word was law and who ruled over the richest land on earth. (Read Bill’s excellent essay about King Louis XIV’s toothache ordeal here.)

But what happens when the things we take for granted... simple things, like light... and heat... and door-to-door food delivery... suddenly cease to work?

One group of climate activists snatched a valuable glimpse into this Modern Dark Ages earlier in the week, when the company they were “occupying” decided to “just stop oil” by shutting off the power. Read on for their tale of irony and woe, below...

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Useful Idiots

By Joel Bowman

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Poor Gianluca Grimalda. The 51yr-old researcher must have thought he’d found his higher calling, discovered his raison d'être, caught a glimpse of his name, for one fleeting moment, etched in the history books. Donning a symbolic white lab coat, Grimalda joined a group of die-soft climate activists last Wednesday in “occupying” a Volkswagen showroom in Wolfsburg, Germany. Here’s how that went down...

Like similar stunts played out across the UK over the past month, this antic involved, predictably (and rather unimaginatively, it must be said), the group gluing themselves to the floor in front of three top of the line Porsches... photos of which appeared in newspapers across Europe and all over the Internet, presumably saving the auto company millions in advertising. 

Alas, no sooner had the petrochemical-based adhesive set when the campaign started to go south. Summoning the kind of staying power that would make Liz Truss cringe, the group quickly ran into a slew of entirely foreseeable difficulties. Scientist Grimalda (who was live Tweeting the whole thing from his compost-powered smartphone) dutifully posted:

@VW told us that they supported our right to protest, but they refused our request to provide us with a bowl to urinate and defecate in a decent manner while we are glued, and have turned off the heating.

Bad Xenia

Yes, gentle reader, not only had the ungracious hosts neglected to provide their trespassing protestors with a proverbial pot to piss (etc.) in, but they had the hide to turn off the heat and even the lights, too... and at night time! (Wait, wasn’t this about “decarbonizing?”) More unsettling yet, VW dared to monitor their own private facility, without so much as informing the unhinged interlopers, who had stuck themselves right next to the company’s rather expensive private property. 

And what were these renegade Long Marchers to eat, anyway, now that they had gone dozens of minutes without DoorDash? The situation was getting grim. Relayed Scientist Grimalda (whose Tweeting was beginning to show understandable signs of fatigue, perhaps due to malnutrition):

We can't order our food, we must use the one provided by Wolkswagen. Lights off. Random unannounced checks by security guards with bright torches. Police just came in.

Next, as if the situation could not get any more dire, the unthinkable happened. For almost three heartbreaking hours, Grimalda and his team went dark. Like witnessing an Apollo mission lost to the dark side of the moon, the free world waited. Still, no word. Without firewood to burn or dung huts to keep out the elements, loved ones huddling in the parking lot, several yards away, had all but given up hope when... contact! Scientist Grimalda, emotional, but alive:

I love so much all fellow scientists supporting us outside....(emoji love heart) you don't know how important this is for us! 

But the danger was not yet past. Digging deep into his training as a social psychology researcher, Scientist Grimalda and his Super Scientific team of Scientists settled in for the long night ahead... laying themselves down in the refulgent glow of the headlights of a skeek, white 2022 Porsche Panamera. (For details, see here.)

Almost a whole day into the grueling campaign, Scientist Grimalda recorded another video on his renewable phone, leveraging their obvious position of strength to summon the Volkswagen CEO. (And also to alert the free world that the team – that’s Team Science, made up of Scientists – had indeed received pizza on their first night. Phew!)

Their demands were simple-minded enough. Decarbonize the global auto industry. Lobby to reduce the speed limit in Germany to 100kms/h. Reintroduce €9 public transport tickets (presumably so the Scientists from Team Science could get home). Oh, and ensure the earth’s temperature be managed within 1.5% degrees from pre-industrial levels by a certain calendar date some decades into the future. 

Lest you think that’s all a bit rich, coming from a group of adult humans who could not collectively foresee their next bowel movement, may we hasten to remind you: these are not mere humans, like you and me... they’re (capital “S”) Scientists. 

The Speed of Science

That’s right. The same mob who brought you “2 weeks to flatten the curve,” who fought to clandestinely quash any open dialog regarding blanket Covid lockdowns, who sent infected seniors back into aged care facilities, who declared masks, then no masks, then masks, then no masks (etc...), who shuttered your children’s schools, who brought you a “vaccine” that stopped neither transmission nor infection and that, it turns out, wasn’t even tested for efficacy against transmission before it hit the market. 

These are the same people who travel, not by Porsche sports coupe, but by “the speed of Science,” who constantly invoke “The Science” as if it were the final unalterable word and not, as is actually the case, a process, and whose very climate models have so far predicted that... the earth would enter into another Ice Age by 2021. That “major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020.” That Arctic summers would be ice free by 2000... 2004... 2008... 2013... 2014... 2015... 2017. Or that Australia would have “no more snow” by 2020 when, actually, Australia saw huge snowfalls to kick off the 2022 Season. One could go on... and on...

But never mind all that. Unwilling to let a track record entirely devoid of correct forecasts damper their spirit, Team Science fought marched sat boldly on. Until, that is, they didn’t. After twenty-six hours of grueling, unrelenting sitting down and a harrowing night in which he nearly got no sleep, Scientist Grimalda’s hand – the one he had voluntarily glued to somebody else’s ground – got a bit swollen. 

Assessing the “life-threatening” situation confronting him, and no doubt tapping into his special skill set... as a Scientist, Grimalda made the tough decision to allow doctors (summoned to the scene at his request) to unglue him and transport him (presumably by bicycle or sedan chair) to (a solar powered) hospital for further tests. 

“My health is of course paramount,” he video tweeted before adding, in case of any lingering doubt, “I feel pain, but not so much. And nothing in comparison to the suffering that people in Africa and other countries have to suffer.” 

Thanks to the brave sacrifice of Scientist Grimalda and his Scientific team of Scientists, we have some small insight into what a cold, dark, hungry world it might be without fossil fuels.

Thank goodness for useful idiots.

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And that’ll do for this short ‘n’ snappy Sunday Session, dear reader. Grateful for the miracles of modern medicine, we’re heading back to the couch to find a mindless show to binge watch while we await our food delivery. A hot toddy or two ought to knock this bug on the head in the meantime.

Tune in again next week when Bill will be back with his regular weekday missives. Whatever you’re up to this weekend, give a little thanks to the wonders of the modern world… without which, we’d just be a bunch of Grimaldas, lost in the dark.

Until next time...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman