The PR Blog

Last night I watched the 2007 movie “ The Last King of Scotland. “ At the beginning, there was the inevitable “inspired by true events” and what followed was a story that was certainly inspired but not necessarily by true events.

It was about a bloke called Idi Amin who was a brutal and crazy dictator ( true ) who ruled Uganda under a regime of tyranny and oppression ( true ) and ended when an Air France airplane carrying 250 passengers to Paris from Tel Aviv was hijacked by terrorists. The Israeli mission to rescue them, known as Operation Entebbe was also true but beyond that, it was a load of Hollywood stuff and nonsense.

“Zero emissions” requires no diesel, petrol or gas-fuelled cars, trucks, tractors or dozers and no burning of coal or gas for electricity generation. But without nuclear power or a massive increase in hydro-electricity, green energy will not support metal refining or manufacturing, and domestic electricity usage will be rationed. “Zero emissions” will also force closure of most cement plants, mechanised farms and feed lots and will demand nuclear or wind-powered submarines, destroyers and bulk carriers.

Among those who’ve watched the tragic and needless lockdowns unfold over the last 11 months, a frequent question has come up: what if the coronavirus had spread, but had never been diagnosed or detected? Would life have been any different absent the discovery of what has caused a massive global panic among politicians?

It’s not an unreasonable question. Really, ask yourself what politicians and nail-biting media members would have done 100 years ago if the virus had revealed itself. Since work was a destination for realistically everyone, there’s no way there could have been lockdowns. People would have revolted.

Back in the Great Depression when the Jarrow March took place, the unemployed workers of the closed shipyard in South Shields walked from the north of England to London to protest the loss of their jobs. their livelihoods and their ability to feed their families.

It was known as the Hunger March.

Today, as the Governments around the world close down coal mines, oil pipelines and people's ability to earn a living, I cannot help but wonder why we have hundreds of thousands globally being cast out of work while our governments invite millions in to feed off the taxpayer's teat. In other words, you and me.

Australia is being bled of jobs as are other nations around the world. This time around, will it take hunger marches to change things? Or will it, like Jarrow, mean nothing?

The Satanic Church of Noosa ( yes, you read that right ) has just been given permission to place a pentagram in the Chapel of the Sunshine Coast University Hospital.  The chapel is now a place that no self respecting, God loving Christian or Jew would ever enter. 

Welcome to 2021 folks. The world is officially insane and the darkness is descending.

As the war on white privilege seems to be going from insane to dangerously insane, I cannot help but cast my mind back to my white privilege as a child growing up in the 1950s and ’60s in rural New Zealand. We were not a poor white family: My Dad had a job and we had a comfortable and clean home. 

Our household probably didn’t receive much more income than our neighbours but there was a fundamental difference between me and the neighbours kids – my parents didn’t smoke, drink or gamble. I knew kids who had their Dad bring home his paypacket, head off to the pub for the ” 6 o’clock swill ” ( Kiwi term for the fact that pubs closed at 6 pm ) over to the betting shop and into the tobacconist for some roll your own tobacco or cigarettes. And then return home and the kids would go hungry unless my mother fed them.