Saving the world Has very little to do with kids handing over their pittance pocket money to this or that disaster or famine riddled society. But leveraging the heartless, soulless energy barons away from captive markets and whatever the market can bear, strategies!

Every western style economy rests solely on just two support pillars, energy and capital. energy has never ever been more expensive, and capital never ever cheaper.

When the economic crisis is over how much unrepayable debt will the poorest of the poor be carrying?

If we would serve humanity, the poor and downtrodden, it will be by providing new and vastly cheaper energy sources, i.e., MSR thorium and powerful engines that run exclusively on solar power and batteries. Plus, desalinated water and hydroponic solutions that allow rooftops, balconies, windowsills etc., to be highly productive gardens

Give a man a fish and you will feed him and his family for a day, teach him to fish and you will feed him for life.
Alan B.

Well I was never in school long enough to notice the the strange types of fruit among girls.

Most girls seemed well adjusted and behaved as girls do: But there were certainly an abundance of strange types of boys.
They were the ones given appropriate nick names which they struggled with.

Keeping kids at school for an inordinate time is plain unhealthy. That seems to be the clear message.

Boys in my day had real wars to attend to in person. That was a quick way to grow up.

Dan

What a nasty, irrelevant and pointless piece of work this is!

The world is a far better place for having idealistic, compassionate and ultruistic people in it. Unfortunately, they will always be outnumbered by the Lillians of the world who just want to look after themselves and live life unencumbered by worries about preserving the planet or caring for the less well off.

One can only wonder what Lillian has ever done for anyone apart from herself. What has she done to make the world a better place? Is there any point to her writing, apart from tearing down others?

Lillian I confess that I probably fitted your description of a 'woke' student when I was at school 60 years ago; all the more 'unfortunate' because I am male.

So would it have been better for the world if I had bought the Landcruiser V8 and extended the house instead of giving regularly to overseas projects for all those years?

great article Lillian.

You are on tremendous learning adventure. Keep it up.

I almost have, a 7 in front of my age, but I remember people, not just girls, like you describe at similar ages from the late 1960's. They preached free love and peace. sadly I involved myself selfishly in the free love, often, but was awfully violent in nature in the community, until my late teens.

I'd characterise the values displayed as 'Woodstock values'. Like the woke today all were underlined by self-interest and hypocrisy.

Now I've not only learned from my involvement in and watching community development over the years but also from an enormous amount of reading.

Woke is going the same direction and will suffer the same consequence as all the great ideological 'fakeries' of the past. In particular the fakery of the left. as epitomised in the Soviet Union. Nazi Germany, Socialist Italy and Spain.

History shows leftism always mutates into fascism (Capitalism has never become fascist) and eventually is destroyed by its own hypocrisy. We are seeing that in NZ and more graphically in Canada today.

At your age a dive into the great literature of the past would guide your great intellect in development. My son is a similar age and, where I stated with Luther, Hume, Mills and Smith worked back, he has started with the great Americans. Today. I'd probably start with their two great women poets.

Enjoy your journey. I enjoyed your article Lillian, I hope I've added another perspective.

Just to add a couple of thoughts to your piece.

My son found Franklin first, then Charlie Munger, a modern Economist (I cannot recall his name), I led him into Angelou, Burnham and then the other founding fathers along with a few classic poets and authors from the 1800 and 1900 hundreds.

Mass mental illness has been caused by the closure of the asylums in the early 1980s, the redefinition of psychoses, particularly narcissisn, and the abandonment of the traditional definition of madness. It used to be, since the time the Ancient Greeks, two psychoses or more.

Today I see most politicians fit the old definitions of psychoses and madness ... perfectly. So my view is today the mad people ((politicians) run the asylum (Society).

This is a great description of fascism, 'the relentless mob mentality of ruthlessly hounding dissent into submission'. See Adolph, Josef, Benito and the Spaniard nutcase.

You forget while capitalism allows for the greatest Hunan failure, greed, it is often balanced in societies that allow for and practise it, the greatest human strength, generosity. At the moment we have lost that balance because of the mad people and the 'educated managerial elites' who now are not creating or enforcing the laws which once tended to regulate, to the majorities measure, both generosity and greed.

Peace arrives when people gain fairly from trade. The Romans Legions epitomised this in their conquest and expansion of the civilised known world. Trump proved it.

Cheers

You Lillian are very special.

Many scholarly and carefully researched articles have attempted to identify the genesis of wokeness.
That's as far as I read because anyone who doesn't know that Wokeness is the result of not very intelligent people having had it too easy & too good for too long at the expense & from the effort of others, isn't going to become more interesting when reading on !

There's no substitute for capitalism as cooperative capitalism as opposed to greed is good, rat eat rat, extreme capitalism/individualism!

The latter saw long standing co-ops disassembled and small country towns sent into mass bankruptcy as the first visible result of the extreme right wing (greed is good) bastardry.

Society functions far better when we all pull together and for the common good as we do inside a working co-op.

Co-ops were the only private enterprise, business model to survive the great depression largely intact. And because they are the most efficient and operate inside a fair system that rewards effort, not the lazy money bags promoting their greed is good philosophy.

And trying to concentrate more and more of our finite resources into fewer and fewer hands! All while complaining about how much of "their money" goes to taxes and supporting the less well off.

Let them keep all their money and let the less well off starve! Who will do all the work then, pick the harvests mine the rocks, etc., that produces all our wealth? Clive, Gina and co.?
Alan B.

hi Allan B

Co-operatives have and will follow the usual descent into fascism.

My assessment of greed isn't necessarily absolute. Regulating the natural human instincts rather than banning them altogether is more appropriate. It worked very well for generations and indeed for longish periods in christian based societies.

It is better to say, while absolute greed and enforced generosity are bad, regulated greed and generosity produce fairer distributions of wealth and create optimum opportunity for economic growth, intellectual development and innovation.

As has occurred repeatedly in the developing wester traditions.

Greed isn't totally bad. Absolute greed is destructive.

cheers

Most of the adults in the world are sick and tired of virtue signalling snowflakes whose ignorance is only matched with their fervour in trying to stop people who are actually being productive.

The worst of these trolls are the zealots that protest against climate change and simultaneously against nuclear power while wondering why nothing happens.

How could we get the Woke to wake up ?

I've long suspected that weird causes look for vulnerable children to suck into their wake- it gives them a feeling of belonging- and they can be used as canon fodder against the machine. The Machine needs to be aware of this and redirect the vulnerable to more productive and meaningful pursuits. Thanks for the article Lillian. Kudos.