Live Earth on Polish TV

It’s the first time that extensive coverage on Polish TV has been given over to one of these global media events. But many Poles will be right to ask: what is the point of all this?

Thenews.pl reports:

The most extensive coverage of “Live Earth” will be on TVP Kultura. From 8.00 a.m. till late at night the channel will transmit “Live Earth” concerts from, among others, New York, London, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg, Tokyo, Hamburg and Istanbul.

“Live Earth” will also be broadcast in special live coverage on MTV Polska. In addition, the station will also show a special, ecological episode of “Pimp my Ride” with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a guest star, and clips in which young people will tell about efficient ways to protect the environment.

The audience of RMF FM radio will also be at the centre of things - the station will cover the concerts in the form of commentaries and live coverage. In the evening the broadcaster will replay the most interesting parts of the event – the “Live Earth” music will be played all night.

Extensive coverage then. But apart from getting to see lots of live bands play a few songs, what else will Poles get from the experience?

A man with a mission
Life for Al Gore has changed over the last few years far quicker than the rate of climate change. Not ten years ago he was ‘Al Bore’ – the man who was not only more wooden than a forest, but who also somehow lost an election he appeared to win. Or something.

Now, all of a sudden, he is ‘Mr Interesting’, a man with a mission, who can turn a power point presentation into a hit movie documentary with dire warnings about global warming, and bag himself an Oscar in the process.

Gore, the man of the moment, the inspiration behind Live Earth, has said that climate warming is not ‘about politics’, it’s about morals…’ Meaning, it’s not up for debate, ‘it’ is a done deal, beyond the questioning of us mere mortals.

So what’s the point of Live Earth then? ‘To raise awareness’, says the Live Earth web site.

But you would have to be living on planet Mars to have ‘low awareness’ of the constant, moralistic, media deluge on ‘carbon footprints’ and ‘carbon credits’. So what is the point of ‘raising awareness’ of something that everybody ‘knows’ and is ‘aware’ of already?

But maybe you wouldn’t have to be living on Mars to have missed that kind of media coverage. Maybe you might have been living in Poland?

It’s true – Poles have not been lectured about our ‘debt to the planet’ like those of you have in the UK or US. In a country that has been starved of economic development like Poland and the rest of the old ‘Eastern bloc’, has, being lectured by rich westerners - like Al Gore – about how we must cut our energy consumption (and cut the rate of economic growth) is frankly, a pain in the neck.

The constant self – flagellation that many middle class liberals go through in the west about global warming – “Ooo, I really must connect the manual knitting machine to the roof-top, small holdings wind farm, this weekend…” – is not so common among the aspiring middle class in Poland.

That’s because the Polish middle class ARE aspiring: much of the liberal, middle class in the UK, for instance, thinks advanced economic development is the reason why they are not happy…. “Perhaps if we went back to living in straw huts and drove around in ox - drawn carts we might improve our self esteem’, they ponder over organic nuts and berries.

So maybe the real target of Al Gore and assorted celebrities this weekend is not just to improve their self esteem and make them feel important: perhaps the target audience is people in emerging economies – like China, India, Poland, who want the benefit of economic development, so as to be in a better position to adapt to any change mother nature has in store.

But that rational attitude, for Al Gore, is immoral.

I think I liked him more when he was boring.

A misanthrope pretending to be a humanitarian...

...is like a cannibal on a healthy diet, who only eats vegetarians.

We are currently in the middle of National Vegetarian Week in Poland. Oh, joy. Sometimes they can act a bit like little Hitlers - vegetarian fascists.

Although only 1.5 percent of Poles don’t eat meat at all, the few fundamentalist grass-eaters that are here have some tasty tactics to force their obsession on the rest of us. Polish Radio reports:

’Come and buy our mouth-watering dachshund veal! Cheap shoulder of cocker spaniel. Dog paws and heads. Only two zloty a kilogram.” – a butcher wearing a white blood stained coat shouted at a makeshift stand in the centre of Warsaw.

He was wielding an enormous axe, chopping what looked like animal parts, but in reality were soy cutlets covered in mashed beetroot[!!!]. But some passers-by actually believed it was real meat. “This is absurd. It shows how ignorant many people are if they assumed it was real meat”, says Cezary Wyszynski, a vegetarian since 1996, from the Viva Foundation, championing animal rights.

Note the contempt that animal lovers have for their fellow man: 'ignorant'! Now who would that be, then?

Iwona Kossowska from the Empatia or Empathy Association explains why the organizers decided to shock people.

“We want to show the people of Poland that it’s sad to divide animals into those that are loved and those that are eaten. We ask – why? Is there a real difference between a dog whom we love and a pig that we eat?’

Er...

Each year 470 million animals are slaughtered in Poland. More than one million a day. Almost one thousand every single second. No one seems sympathetic to those animals. They are completely unnoticed and forgotten. They are proudly eaten every day. Sold in supermarkets. No one cares for them. So, we want to recall that not only dogs and cats deserve attention and care. Pigs, cows, calves, chickens, fish, rabbits, goats, sheep are living creatures that feel the same as do cute and loving dogs.”

Note ‘sold in supermarkets…’ – another current obsession that some ‘liberals' share with their conservative nationalist counterparts in Poland. Both would like to go back to the good old days (and still the sad experience for the many car less poor today) when a mother had to drag her kids from shop to shop each day, paying for over priced food from miserable, unhelpful shop keepers.

Of course, in some countries people do eat dogs. And the reason why people don’t eat dogs in Poland and the rest of Europe is that dogs were used for work – they controlled the sheep that were kept for wool or eaten.

What’s sadder than animals kept in bad conditions – and there are many – is humans that become obsessed with animals, above any concern for humans. These are misanthropes dressed up as humanitarians.

And there are many of those, too. Too many.

The vegetarian is another example of our modern day obsession with our bodies. Food is not seen as something that we in the West have lots of, to be relished and enjoyed for its own sake. For the grass-eaters and tree huggers food says something about ourselves – it’s become a pseudo morality.

The militant vegetarian is someone who is a product of an age with little else to believe in, so the body and what is put in it becomes, literally, a ‘way of life’.

But what a sad, ultimately meaningless, way of life.

And anyway - vegetarians eat...(sniff) beetroots! Don't they have rights, too?

Go Barroso!

On the 50th anniversary of the EU, I should admit I am not a big fan of Eurocrats. But Barroso is a star. Kind of.

As pointed out at the EU Referendum blog, it’s a weird world when EU bonkers-crats like the President of the European Commission (or something), Jose Barroso, starts saying something sensible.

But it’s happened.

Look what he has to say about the UK’s New Labour plans to (green) tax cheap airlines, so the (Polish) masses travel less, just as they have got out of the habit of going everywhere by horse and cart.

EU Ref writes:

He …hails cheap air travel as "a great thing for our civilisation" and expresses grave concerns over fashionable plans, floated by [New Labour], for personal carbon rationing and suspects that proposals to restrict CO2 emissions from an individual's activities will lead to intrusive surveillance into private lives.

"I do not see any need to establish these intrusive approaches that may reduce the freedom of our societies," he says. "We have to find the right balance and I believe the right balance is not found if we start giving these kind of personal good or bad behaviour certificates to people."

What next? Brussels decides to end the obscenity of CAP agricultural subsidies?

Nah...I was just dreaming.

Population time bomb...tick...tock...tick

Polish Catholic-nationalists, and 'liberal' environmentalists, in their different ways, fear there is a demographic time bomb waiting to go off. Bang!

Poland’s population is shrinking faster than any other country in the EU. Strange that, in a country that claims to be 95 percent Catholic, don’t you think?

The average family in Poland has 1.22 children, and a couple of weeks ago the government announced tax breaks for working women with children which will cost the tax payer 17 billion zlotys (US$5.6 billion, €4.5 billion). At a time when the EU is pressing the government to cut its budget deficit, that's not going to help, fiscally.

Catholic nationalists (of which the governing coalition is full of) blame all sorts of things for this. Feminism is the main culprit, apparently. They would like women to get back in the home and return to what the ‘natural’ function of a woman should be: being a baby machine.

A report by the UN adds to these people’s fears. In half a century’s time Poland will be one of the oldest nations on earth. In a dozen nations - including Japan, Bulgaria, Macao, Hong Kong, Italy, Poland, Korea, Slovenia, Romania and Spain - four in 10 citizens will be 60 or older by 2050, the UN says.

Eeek!

Does this mean that Poland will simply fade away as a nation?

But scratch the surface and you will find that what these people are really worried about is that there will be no Polish Catholics - the 'true' Poles - left in Poland to light up the candles in church before Mass.

A shortfall of population can easily be addressed by immigration, of course. But that, as catholic nationalists like Maciej Giertych would say, would weaken Polish (read ‘Polish Catholic’) ‘civilization’.

But if immigration is the obvious solution, then where would it come from?

There is always the less developed countries. They have lots of babies, don’t they?

And the tree huggers don’t like it

Whereas catholic nationalists in Poland fear that the low birth rate is a threat to (Latin) civilization as we know it, western ‘liberals’ think that there is just too many people in the world.

It’s getting impossible, for instance, to pick up the UK Guardian without being confronted by some misanthropic gibberish like this from ‘columnist’ Juliette Jowit:

In the time it takes you to get to the end of this sentence, seven people have been added to the population of the world…..

Then welcome seven new people to the world, I say! It’s a great place to be, if you avoid reading the Guardian too often, that is.

Jowit works herself up into a froth of indignation about how we cannot deal with ‘climate change’ without cutting down the number of humans on the planet.

Some population activists argue the world can only support a population of two to three billion, even as few as 500 million in future [?!?]. But even if reducing the world's population is unlikely or distasteful, it is incredible that there is not even a debate about limiting and maybe one day reversing growth.

….some braver voices - Sir David Attenborough, Jonathan Porritt and Professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, to name a few - have begun to raise the issue.

Well, Juliette (where does the Guardian get these morons from?) Sir David Attenborough, Porritt et al have not suddenly 'began to raise this issue', they have been raising it for sometime. In 2003, these people - who have formed the scary sounding Optimum Population Trust (sounds like a bunch of Nazis) - were calling for the UK’s population to be cut in half!

Attenborough, the BBC’s natural history guru, seems to prefer the company of tigers and algae to his fellow human beings.

But whereas these kind of people would be scoffed at in the past, today this kind of thinking is becoming almost mainstream.

It’s basically a form of neo-Malthusian ‘analysis’ – which progressives used to laugh at when I was at college in the late 1980s – which fits in well with the culturally miserable-ist times.

What both Catholic Polish nationalists, and the tree hugging human haters need to be told is that too many humans, or not enough Poles, is not the problem. The problem is the lack of faith in human ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

It just goes to show that neither conservatives nor liberals have the ideology to cope with the modern world.

A little more faith in humanity, and a little less fear of the future, will sort this out. Humans - even immigrants! - are not the problem, they are the solution.

Polish news to piss off Prince Charles – hah!

Sales at McDonald’s in Poland grew by 14.6 percent to 668 million zloty in 2006, and their net income increased by 47 percent to 40 million zloty (10 million euro) compared to 2005.

How would that news make the heir to the British throne want to reach for his sick bucket?

Because when he was in the United Arab Emirates last week he was overheard remarking to a nutritionist there: ‘Have you got anywhere with McDonald’s? Have you tried getting it banned? That’s the key.’

I think it's about time Charlie got a proper job.

The key to what, is not known. But given Charlie’s reputation for talking to plants, and wanting to set up a degree course in parapsychology, it’s probably got one of those wacky ‘alternative’ tags to it.

The obsession with Big Mac’s by the western middle classes (and royals) is very sad, indeed. They seem to hate anything popular. Like George Orwell’s similar obsession with tinned food, this is a manifestation of a fear of the masses, of mass produced goods.

Big Mac’s are not the end of civilization as we know it. A hamburger and french fries is a nutritional (if not particularly tasty) meal. As part of a balanced diet, MacDonald’s is not a threat to anyone.

But that doesn’t stop British aristocratic morons – and the liberally challenged - like Prince Charles from trying to push weirdo, organic fantasies on us.

And to think I was annoyed another unelected public figure like the First lady of Poland thought she could have influence on public debate.

At least she never had the cheek to want to ban something as harmless as a cheese burger, just because it’s popular.

Polish First Lady - eco-warrior

Has the First Lady, Maria Kaczynska (she actually is the one on the right of the picture, the beatroot believes) been backseat driving u-turns in government highway development policy?

An interview in a national daily last week, where Mrs President declared that she was not happy about the planned Rospuda bypass (see the previous posts) - “It would be barbarian”, she said - came only days before her brother-in-law, Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, announced that work would be halted on the highway until a local referendum was taken.

But has the (completely unelected) First Lady had an influence on public opinion?

Well, PBS pollsters are reporting today that 65% of Poles are against the bypass.

But the people of Augustow, the town where the bypass would take away choking amounts of traffic and bring economic development to the area, are firmly for the proposal. Eighty one percent said they want the highway.

So it appears Poland’s new eco-warrior is having a limited influence on the inhabitants of Augustow, but maybe is having an influence inside the Polish government.

What a shame that unelected family members of politicians can’t seem to keep their mouths shut. Who does Maria think she is: a 1990s Hilary Clinton?

Remember the 100,000 World Cup East European sex slaves story?

Well, it was a load of...balls.

Remember the beatroot wrote back in May last year, just before the FIFA World Cup in Germany, that the Catholic News Service reported:

'Polish nuns, anticipating an increase in human trafficking and prostitution during the World Cup in Germany, have issued anti-prostitution leaflets in multiple languages for circulation during the competition.

"Our resources are extremely limited, but we're doing what we can," said Ursuline Sister Jolanta Olech, president of Poland's Conference of Superiors of Female Religious Orders. "We're deeply concerned at reports that men's lives are to be made nicer by importing 100,000 young women from Europe's poorest countries."

The story of the ‘100,000 sex slaves’ originated in the European Parliament (as 40,000) when the matter was raised by German Green MEP Hiltrud Breyer. The Polish nuns then added another 60,000 to the scare for good measure.

So German Greens formed an allaince with Polish nuns (and weirdly, George Bush got involved, too) against the more baser instincts of us thuggish football fan types, who like a nice eastern European sex slave after a good game of footie.

I also noted that the figure of 100,000 appeared to have been plucked out of thin air, much like a goalkeeper plucks a ball from the head of an attacking forward.

Well, Bruno Waterfield of the UK Daily Telegraph has seen a copy of the reports by the Council of the European Union - documents 5006/1/07 and 5008/7 – on the matter, which reveal the real number of the East European sex slaves imported into Germany during the World Cup. One hundred thousand? Well, Waterfield quotes from the report:

‘Of the 33 investigation cases reported to the Federal Criminal Police Office on the grounds of human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation and/or the promotion of human trafficking, and which took place at the time of the 2006 World Cup, only five cases were assumed to have a direct link to the 2006 World Cup’, concludes the report.

‘The increase in forced prostitution and human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation during the 2006 World Cup in Germany which was feared by some did not materialise’,

So not 100,000, or 40,000, but...five.

The next time you see an unholy alliance of a German Green with a Polish nun, keep your cynical hat on, won’t you. Football fans are not a bunch of sex starved Neanderthal things.

Read the rest of Bruno Waterfield’s article here.

Via Baltica: humans versus the environment

Stop Press!!! the beatroot agrees with Polish prime minister...shock!!!...well, there is a first time for everything!!!...

Euro-green protestors get upset about a planned bypass around the Polish town of Augustow.

Greens are campaigning about a planned bypass around the northeastern town which will cut through the wetland area of Rospuda Valley. As usual, Greens turn to the EU for help. Environmental Data Interactive reports:

In December 2006 the European Commission launched legal procedures against the Polish government for consenting to a series of eight road developments along the Via Baltica route which are likely to damage important and protected sites.

The road developments as they are currently proposed run through the Augustow and Knyszyn primeval forests and the Biebrza Marshes National Park.

These areas contain a broad array of threatened wildlife including wolf, lynx and white-tailed eagles.

The road - part of the E67, or Via Baltica - will form a major link from Helsinki to Prague and greatly increase trade in the area.

I was talking to Kasia today, who is from Augustow. She says that most people in the town are for the bypass. Currently around one and a half million trucks rumble through the town every year, causing traffic accidents and casualties, damage and congestion. Ironically, Augustow is known as a health resort – the pollution caused by the traffic is damaging that reputation and the tourism that it attracts.

The EU has many designated protected sites in Poland, mostly in the east of country – an area of economic underdevelopment. Of course, nobody would casually want to damage areas of beauty. But sometimes humans, and economic development, have to come first.

I think this is one of those times. Poland badly needs better road transport, which at the moment is the most under constructed in Europe.

We are getting to the stage where an abstract idea such as to what constitutes what ‘natural’ is is taking precedence over human development. What Poland needs more than anything is economic growth. The Eurocrats in Brusesels, and Green NGOs from all over Europe (mostly city dwellers who have a romantic, yet detached idea of what ‘natural is) are trying to slow down economic progress here.

I think its time they were told that birds and wetlands come second; humans come first.

Just when Poles can finally afford to fly…

… a coalition of homeowners, eco-anarchists, NIMBYs and ‘internationalists’ want them to stay at home.

It’s only been three years since ‘no-frills’ budget airlines started operating to and from Poland. And the Poles love ‘em.

During communism they didn’t have freedom to travel. When the Iron Curtain came down most Poles still couldn’t travel very far abroad as they couldn’t afford the air ticket. If they wanted to go to western Europe many had to endure a 24 hour plus coach journey - I’ve done it, and it’s nasty. The Iron Curtain had been replaced by the Money Curtain.

And then the cheapies came along and suddenly travel became much easier.

Enter the environmental lobby, turning up just as Poles were checking in their luggage, with an apocalyptic message of global warming and impending doom.

One of the most fanatical of the Green warriors is the British columnist for the Guardian, George Monbiot (photo). Our George doesn’t like air travel, apparently. I remember one article at the time of the 100th anniversary of that great human acheivment, the first heavier than air vehicle flight by the Wright Brothers. George wasn’t impressed, however. Not at all. His article had the headline A weapon with wings.

Today he’s at it again. This time his column has the headline, We Are All Killers Until We Stop Flying.

What a twat.

After telling us that all technological solutions are hopeless to the climate change problem, he starts having a go at his mates.

"This [impending eco-disaster] is now broadly understood by almost everyone I meet. But it has had no impact whatever on their behaviour. When I challenge my friends about their planned weekend in Rome or their holiday in Florida, they respond with a strange, distant smile and avert their eyes. They just want to enjoy themselves. Who am I to spoil their fun? The moral dissonance is deafening."

He really is a twat. But he isn’t finished yet. He starts blaming global warming for the famines in Africa (nothing to do, of course, with colonialism and other outside interventions, wars, a lack of infrastructure, a lack of civil society, lack of government…) and then finishes with the flourish:

Flying kills. We all know it, and we all do it. And we won't stop doing it until the government reverses its policy and starts closing the runways.

Don’t be holding your breath, George.

I have no idea of the extent of global warming and how much humans have had to do with it. I would like a bit more debate about the subject in the media, instead of the usual panic and doom. Maybe we are just going to have to adapt to the Earth as it changes.

But if Monbiot thinks that people from Central and Eastern Europe, and the less well off in Britain and the rest of developed world, are going to give up the new found freedom of travel, then he is going to be in for a bit of a shock. Does he think Poles are going to go back to travelling about the place in a horse and cart? Cheap airlines have helped tear down the Money Curtain. Monbiot and his eco-nostalgia will not be putting it back up.

More?
Polish market may become cheaper for airlines, Puls Biznesu, Feb 28

The Chernobyl myth revisited

The United Nations has confirmed that fears of hundreds of thousands dead and dieing from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 are unfounded.

As I pointed out in an article I wrote last January (see The solution for a cleaner environment: Go nuclear!) the reporting of the meltdown of the old No. 3 reactor in rural Ukraine nearly two decades ago continues to exaggerate what really happened there.

The United Nations report states that 56 emergency workers lost their lives in Chernobyl that day. Many more have gone on to develop cancers directly as a result of the accident. But these are all from the emergency services, not, as has been reported over and over again, from those living in, around, and far away from the reactor. Radiation did travel west and north of the town into Poland and Belarus, but nobody has died as a result.

But this has not stopped reporters from reputable organizations from repeating what has become another doomsday myth. For instance, the BBC in December 2000, when the reactor was finally shut down for good, stated that:

“Thirty-one people, mostly firemen, were killed immediately after the explosion, and several thousand more - those involved in the clean-up and children - have since died from radiation-related illnesses. Ukraine says the health of millions of its people have been affected by the disaster.” (see Chernobyl shut down for good)

The new UN report merely restates what an earlier report by the same organization (see United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation) stated in 2000. The deaths that occurred were to emergency staff and not the local population, and that many less have died and will die than was originally reported.

Well, they would, wouldn't they?

I was at a dinner party shortly after I wrote my original story nine months ago, and was talking about the Chernobyl myth. I was asked how I knew all this, and I said that I just read a report by the UN and talked to one of the scientists that worked on the report, Zbigniew Jaworowski. The disbelieving response was typical: “Well, the UN would say that, wouldn’t they. I bet they have a lot to hide.”

When I asked my dinner party friend what he thought the UN had to hide by ‘covering up’ what happened in the Ukraine many years ago, he couldn’t answer. Incapable of having a discussion about nuclear energy, he fell back on that old, limp tactic of ‘Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they.”

And of course you can’t discuss something with somebody who sees cover-ups and conspiracies everywhere – even though they have no evidence to back up the claims. Looking for motives for saying x has become more important than looking at, and confronting what x actually means. Consequently, nothing is debatable. Nothing can be argued to be right, or wrong. We live in a world where people (mostly scientists and politicians) only think and believe things because of some ulterior motive.

So debating politics (or anyting else for that matter) has become impossible with these sorts of people. Debating nuclear energy is now impossible with the techno-luddite and the NYMBY.

And this is a shame at a time when the EU, and the Kyoto agreement is telling us to cut our reliance on fossil fuels.