Good! But: why only on one castle? why not on all of them?
Why does She even need more than one castle?
Ever heard of mobile homes or energy self sufficient homes? No?
“A man who told the Queen he was a solar panel engineer when she asked him ‘what do you do?’ was stunned when she later got in touch—and paid him to install some on Balmoral Castle.”
“Businessman George Goudsmit met the Queen at an event and had a quick ’20 second’ conversation with her.”
“She asked the 80-year-old what he did and he replied that he made solar panels.”
“The Managing Director at AES Solar recalls, “As she walked away she turned around and said, ‘maybe I should have solar panels at Balmoral’.”
“He was shocked” -> why that? the tide is rising, it’s about time the rich & powerful do something about the world going to waste.
As if – saving the world – would always be the job of the powerless have-nots-peasants?
As if the rich & powerful are betting there will be golf courses on Mars – if Earth is f***ed.
This is a very risky bet.
As doing that is a mega-project – nobody – not SpaceX – not China – can do alone – just as with climate change – it is a project that mankind has to tackle – together!
But will mankind be able to work together? or indulge in egomaniac luxury senselessness?
FREE SOLAR E-CAR CHARGERS & FREE WIFI FOR ALL “PEASANTS” ON ALL CASTLES AND ALL CHURCHES!
While it is a good thing, UK-Scotland goes windenergy, the question remains, as with all big energy projects:
how can peasants participate in this? (the “have nots” by birth)
what is in it for the peasants?
cheaper electricity?
maybe a reduction in taxes?
no?
nothing? (again)
The wishful longing for a “Good King & Queen” that “fixes it all”
Good Kings & Queens care bout their people.
Actually that was the idea behind voting for Trump.
But just as Hitler, Trump was no good King, rather behaved like a reckless wracking ball.
Example: The German General Bismarck hated democracy and was loyal to the King, even when the king was incompetent, mismanaged Germany, lost WW1, while giving Bismarck the clever but also ruthless general – the boot (dismissed).
Imho all monarchs and dictators of this planet, that feel just a bit responsible for the people & land (which ought to belong to the people too) of whom they derive their wealth
shall once a year, publicly transparently, present, if they “did their job” and have acted beneficial to the country – or not (exploitational)
sum up: what they took from the country (to buy yachts and castles)
and what they have have done for the country
to proof they are not – excuse me – feeding on others – living on century old privileges – while living in luxury while others hardly survive the day (yes it is that harsh in an stupid economy of non-sustainability)
WindEnergy: yes please!
“The largest of the projects offered is the project for the construction of a floating wind farm with three GW by the Scottish subsidiary of the Spanish energy company Iberdrola, Scottish Power Renewables.
This is followed by a 2.9 GW project with foundations rammed into the ground on a similar scale, which the British oil company BP is planning together with the Baden-Württemberg energy supplier EnBW, as well as a 2.6 GW project by the Scottish energy supplier SSE Renewables for a floating wind farm.
The Bavarian project planning company Baywa is also involved with a wind farm project of almost one GW with floating turbines.
The bids of the project developers include the payment of an option fee to Crown Estate Scotland. (effectively the UK Queen?)
The winning bids resulted in such option fees ranging from £10Million for 450 MW to £86million for 2 GW.
In total, the bids add up to £700million, which will eventually flow from the authority to the Scottish government.
If project developers withdraw a project before the final agreement, the next best project that has not yet been awarded will move forward, as Crown Estate Scotland explains.”
“Crown Estate Scotland is the public corporation of the Scottish Government responsible for the management of land and property in Scotland owned by the monarch in right of the Crown.”
“The monarch remains the legal owner of these assets“
there is so much still relevant wisdoms in that Eisenhower Farewell speech from 1961 such as: don’t consume and waste resources, leave some for future generations.
General Wesley Clark: “About 10 days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon, and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second.” I said, “Well, you’re too busy.” He said, “No, no.” He says, “We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?” He said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.” So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no.” He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.” (source democracynow.org)
“that the pullout from Afghanistan equated to a $75 million revenue loss on top of another $275 million loss related to supply chain and people issues” (source)
every war is good income for those companies and “permanent warfare” would have constant flow “a subscription” of public money to private pockets
Because “bad behavior” aka reckless exploitation, greed and stinginess accumulates more money (as if that was the solution to all of mankind’s problems).
if this paradox is not resolved, the end of Western capitalism (including the end of mankind) is just a matter of time.
capitalism and democracy, can those go together? well?
A lot of Americans say, the current system is not “true” capitalism, just as many hard-core Communists say Stalinism was not true Communism.
Or Socrates would say what Western countries are not “real” democracies.
(He and Bismarck would probably puke, when looking at the current form of democracy in Western countries)
Of course democracy worked better in Athens as it was much smaller (only native Greek men at the age of 18 with swords were allowed to vote).
The ancient Greek citizens even voted directly on issues such as “should we go to war with Troja or not?” (cast a white stone in a basket for yes and a black stone in another basket for no)
Ancient Greek and Western democracies had the same result:
“Democracy, which had prevailed during Athens’ Golden Age, was replaced by a system of oligarchy after the disastrous Athenian defeat in Sicily in 409 BCE.” (brewminate.com)
Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in Gorky, circa 1922.
short version: Stalin wanted more centralized power
Lenin wanted more de-centralized power, but then suffered a stroke and died
long version: Stalin’s solution didn’t go over well, either
In August 1922, Joseph Stalin and Sergo Ordzhonikidze, his right-hand man in the Caucasus (the region encompassing Georgia, Armenia and Azerbijan), formed a special commission to recommend a new model of relations between the communist Party’s Central Committee, Russia and the republics.
Stalin’s proposal, which he called the “autonomization of the republics,” was quite simple.
The formally independent republics would be incorporated into the Russian Soviet Federation with rights of autonomy.
The government bodies of the Russian Federation would become the central institutions of Soviet rule,
exercising control over formally autonomous republics.
The republics rebelled.
The Georgians led the charge against Stalin’s model, claiming the whole unification idea was premature.
Ukrainians expressed a preference for the status quo.
The Belarusians said they would mimic whatever model the Russians and the Ukrainians developed.
Stalin refused to budge and pushed ahead with his plan for autonomization—only to be stopped in his tracks by Lenin, who sided with the Georgians and Ukrainians.
As far as he was concerned, the inclusion of the republics into the Russian Federation, especially against the will of their leaders, put the Russians in the position of imperial masters, undermining the idea of the voluntary union of nations—and making them little better than the tsarist empire they had overthrown.”
“Lenin stays firm: All republics should have ‘separate but equal’ status”
“Instead of enlarging the Russian Federation, Lenin proposed creating a Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia. The union would establish Russia and the existing formally independent republics as equals and develop all-Union government bodies separate from the Russian Federation’s.
Stalin, recognizing that an enlarged Russian Federation would create a poor image for the multinational communist state as a community of equals, proposed simply to turn the Russian government bodies into all-Union ones. As he saw it, there was no need for another level of bureaucracy. But Lenin wouldn’t back down: For him, the Union was a matter of principle, not expediency. Some way had to be found to accommodate rising non-Russian nationalism. But Stalin’s model proposed a return to the ethnic inequality of the past, which had already brought down the Russian Empire—and might topple the Soviet state as well.
Stalin backed down. Lenin’s authority in the Bolshevik Party was too great for him to question it openly. He agreed to adopt Lenin’s ideas as the basis for the creation of the Union, which was officially declared at the First All-Union Congress of Soviets on December 30, 1922.”
“Lenin falls from view, but battles from his bed”
“But by the time the Congress was called to order, Lenin disappeared from sight.
The 52-year-old leader of the Bolsheviks, who had fought tooth and nail for the creation of the Union, stayed put in his Kremlin apartment, a short walk from the Bolshoi Theatre, where the Congress was holding its sessions.
It was a walk he couldn’t make.
Eight days earlier, on December 12, he had suffered a major stroke and lost control of his right hand and leg.
The stroke occurred after Lenin’s heated conversation with Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the head of the secret police and a client of Stalin’s in the party leadership.
Dzerzhinsky headed the commission that exonerated another supporter of Stalin’s, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, who had been sent to the Caucasus to crush local opposition to Stalin’s “autonomization” model and had beaten up a Georgian dissenter.
Although Stalin and many of his supporters, such as Ordzhonikidze and Dzerzhinsky, were non-Russians (Stalin and Ordzonikidze hailed originally from Georgia, Dzerzhinsky from Poland), Lenin accused them of Russian chauvinism.
But the stroke prevented him from taking any decisive steps against them.
Two days later, a commission of party officials, led by Stalin, placed strict limitations on Lenin’s activities, effectively isolating him.
They said the restrictions were designed to prevent the worsening of Lenin’s health.
But they also served a political purpose.
Barred from attending the congress and not trusting Stalin to fully implement his line, the paralyzed Lenin resolved to dictate his thoughts on the nationality question in a document to be passed on to the party leadership.
Titled “On the Question of Nationalities or ‘Autonomization,’” it took the form of a letter and was completed the next day, December 31.
In it, he attacked Stalin’s policies on the subject and criticized the rights provided to the republics by the Union treaty, deeming them inadequate to stop the rise of Great Russian nationalism, which he referred as “great-power chauvinism.”
To Lenin, Russified non-Russians like Stalin and Ordzhonikidze were some of the worst offenders.
In Lenin’s view, Great Russian nationalists posed the main threat to the unity of state—not the regional nationalists, whom he hoped to accommodate by giving them local autonomy within the context of the Union.
Lenin was prepared to replace the Union he had originally proposed with a looser association in which the centralized powers might be limited to defense and international relations alone.
He felt that the republics’ right of secession, guaranteed by the Union treaty, might be an insufficient counterweight to Russian nationalism, and proposed that at the next congress the Union could be reformed to leave the center only with the aforementioned functions.”
“As Stalin presses his advantage, Lenin dies”
“Stalin did his best to isolate Lenin from the rest of the leadership and keep his last letters secret. He even came into conflict with Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, whom he accused of passing political news on to Lenin, thereby threatening Lenin’s peace of mind—and ultimately his health. Stalin insulted Krupskaia at one point by telling her, “We shall see what sort of wife of Lenin you are,” apparently hinting at Lenin’s past extramarital ties. When Lenin heard of it, he became furious and demanded an apology. Stalin wrote back saying he apologized, but did not know what Lenin wanted of him—he had just been protecting the leader from unnecessary stress.
Lenin’s stress level clearly increased when he learned that Stalin was stuffing the Chamber of Nationalities of the newly created Union parliament with his Russian supporters. Enraged, Lenin tried to enlist his fellow revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky’s support in his struggle against Stalin, but his call for help went unanswered. Lenin’s note of encouragement to Georgian Bolsheviks, dictated on March 6, 1923, turned out to be his last text ever. The next day, he suffered his third stroke, which left him permanently paralyzed. He died on January 21, 1924.
The result: a compromise
Ultimately, the Soviet Union, created in the midst of a battle between Lenin and Stalin, became a compromise between two visions and approaches. Stalin had to accept the federalist structure of the new state, but never gave up his “autonomization” scheme, which found its incarnation in the true backbone of Soviet rule—the Bolshevik Party. The Union was fully controlled from Moscow, and the republics’ parties had no more rights than regional party organizations in Russia. Russian institutions and identity dominated, forming the basis for much of the Union’s. The Russian Academy of Sciences, for example, would become an all-Union body.
Lenin didn’t get his way on the creating a loose union of the republics united only in military and foreign-policy terms. But he won on the issue of the structure of the Union—the collection of discreet republics—a victory that, ironically, would ultimately have greater consequences for the Russians than for the others. Lenin’s victory helped endow the Russians with a territory, institutions, population and identity distinct from those of the Union as a whole. In the state envisioned by Stalin, the Russians would have continued to share all those features with the empire, now renamed a Union. In Lenin’s state, they had no choice but to start acquiring an identity separate from the imperial one. Almost by default, Lenin became the father of the modern Russian nation, while the Soviet Union became its cradle.
Serhii Plokhy is the professor of history at Harvard University and the director of the university’s Ukrainian Research Institute. He is the author of numerous books, most recently, Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation and Chernobyl: The History of the Nuclear Catastrophe.”
“The scandal has sent shockwaves through German politics: there are allegations that both financial regulators and the government failed to do proper checks on Wirecard.”
£1.9 billion (2018) (why not more recent data? afraid of the peasants reaction?)
US$−1.88
