Following this press conference, Greta Thunberg delivered this speech at the opening of a European Economic and Social Committee event in Brussels.
Now compare this with Prince Charles' campaign and his Ladybird book showing people that they need to turn down their central heating to save the world. And as to the causes of climate change, and government inertia, I presume the Prince's Ladybird book goes into the history of the British Empire. Let's try to find out why The Natural Step UK didn't happen. I suspect it had something to do with British Petroleum. I now think, on balance, that David MacKay did not understand the issues he was dealing with. The only other possibility to explain what he said in his final interview was that he was terrified of the consequences to his family of him saying what he really thought. But perhaps things really are that bad in Cambridge, now. I don't know, because I have had no direct contact with anyone there for over ten years.
The opening of this two-part documentary film is really striking.
At 19 mnutes 22 seconds, there is an interesting experiment in economics. See A General Strategy for Solving Problems. At 23 mins 7 seconds, the Evolutionary Biologist claims that people have not "evolved" to care about the future. He says that "Our evolved strategies tell us to 'prefer the profit now', as the chimpanzee does." He may be right, but I would not dignify that with the name strategy. This whole business of people saying, after Richard Dawkins, that human nature is evolved and is therefore necessarily selfish is downright ridiculous and doesn't even deserve a response. Human nature is artificial. We have to create it through actual human thought, i.e. reason. But Dawkins and people like him believe that reason itself is a product of evolution, so for them this position is merely a tautology: a vacuous fact that couldn't ever be refuted by any logical argument. This is why Dawkins is anti-religion. It is because almost every religion takes reason as being a fundamental part of the universe, and attributes it in one way or another to God or a creator. Dawkins wants to justify antisocial, irrational behaviour as natural and inevitable, therefore he cannot accept rational, social behaviour as the basis for human nature. But Dawkins is a famous scientist, from a famous university, so people think he is an authority on human nature. Well, that tells you more about Oxford University than you probably wanted to know. But not all Oxford professors are idiots. Peter W. Atkins, for example, wrote an excellent book, in my opinion the best popular science book written in the 20th century, which is Creation Revisited. W. H. Freeman & Co Ltd. 1993. ISBN 0-7167-4500-3. It's over twenty years since I read it though. When Neil Turok told me, at a garden party in Cambridge one day, that he was thinking of writing a popular science book, I said "Read Atkins' Creation Revisited before you start." And I lent him my copy, which he never returned. I am not sure he ever got around to writing a popular science book, either! 😂 Neil Turok, by the way, is the founder of the AIMS institute which David MacKay refers to in this final interview he gave before he died. Neil Turok later, after the aforementioned garden party, invited me to spend a year there, as a computer systems administrator. The character Alice in this text was one of Atkins' students. That story also featured AIMS, in Scene V. This "play", which I wrote around 14th August 2011, had a very strange genesis, and somebody seems to have interfered with the links in my Google Drive account, so I have no idea what you will get following that link. Here's what I see in that document, but I have no idea what you will see in this image:
At 31 mins 4 secs there is some footage taken on the Trans-Siberian Railway. I travelled the other way, from Beijing to Moscow, in 1990, I think. But I may have thought it was 1989 at the time! 😂
Part two of the film:
Now compare this with Prince Charles' campaign and his Ladybird book showing people that they need to turn down their central heating to save the world. And as to the causes of climate change, and government inertia, I presume the Prince's Ladybird book goes into the history of the British Empire. Let's try to find out why The Natural Step UK didn't happen. I suspect it had something to do with British Petroleum. I now think, on balance, that David MacKay did not understand the issues he was dealing with. The only other possibility to explain what he said in his final interview was that he was terrified of the consequences to his family of him saying what he really thought. But perhaps things really are that bad in Cambridge, now. I don't know, because I have had no direct contact with anyone there for over ten years.
The opening of this two-part documentary film is really striking.
At 19 mnutes 22 seconds, there is an interesting experiment in economics. See A General Strategy for Solving Problems. At 23 mins 7 seconds, the Evolutionary Biologist claims that people have not "evolved" to care about the future. He says that "Our evolved strategies tell us to 'prefer the profit now', as the chimpanzee does." He may be right, but I would not dignify that with the name strategy. This whole business of people saying, after Richard Dawkins, that human nature is evolved and is therefore necessarily selfish is downright ridiculous and doesn't even deserve a response. Human nature is artificial. We have to create it through actual human thought, i.e. reason. But Dawkins and people like him believe that reason itself is a product of evolution, so for them this position is merely a tautology: a vacuous fact that couldn't ever be refuted by any logical argument. This is why Dawkins is anti-religion. It is because almost every religion takes reason as being a fundamental part of the universe, and attributes it in one way or another to God or a creator. Dawkins wants to justify antisocial, irrational behaviour as natural and inevitable, therefore he cannot accept rational, social behaviour as the basis for human nature. But Dawkins is a famous scientist, from a famous university, so people think he is an authority on human nature. Well, that tells you more about Oxford University than you probably wanted to know. But not all Oxford professors are idiots. Peter W. Atkins, for example, wrote an excellent book, in my opinion the best popular science book written in the 20th century, which is Creation Revisited. W. H. Freeman & Co Ltd. 1993. ISBN 0-7167-4500-3. It's over twenty years since I read it though. When Neil Turok told me, at a garden party in Cambridge one day, that he was thinking of writing a popular science book, I said "Read Atkins' Creation Revisited before you start." And I lent him my copy, which he never returned. I am not sure he ever got around to writing a popular science book, either! 😂 Neil Turok, by the way, is the founder of the AIMS institute which David MacKay refers to in this final interview he gave before he died. Neil Turok later, after the aforementioned garden party, invited me to spend a year there, as a computer systems administrator. The character Alice in this text was one of Atkins' students. That story also featured AIMS, in Scene V. This "play", which I wrote around 14th August 2011, had a very strange genesis, and somebody seems to have interfered with the links in my Google Drive account, so I have no idea what you will get following that link. Here's what I see in that document, but I have no idea what you will see in this image:
At 31 mins 4 secs there is some footage taken on the Trans-Siberian Railway. I travelled the other way, from Beijing to Moscow, in 1990, I think. But I may have thought it was 1989 at the time! 😂
Part two of the film:
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