It's getting more and more like The Hunger Games out there. You know, those movies and the novels about a dystopian postwar America run by an utterly corrupt, all powerful government presiding with impunity over the lives of the populations of 13 communities, where starving people live as slave labour, and every year must send children to fight to the death as the fodder of reality TV entertainment.
The elite of the so-called Capital, the seat of power, where life is altogether different, are obscenely rich in powdered wigs and outrageous garb, caricatures of vanity and wealth, ogling the gladiatorial combat of other people's children, feigning empathy and emotion while they do so. The first Hunger Games novel was published in 2008, and the first film came about four years later, and they were surely meant as satirical comment on the absolute corruption indulged by the absolutely powerful.
By now I say it's getting harder and harder to watch the real world elite - caricature politicians, billionaires, shameless movie villains, peacocking, preening and pontificating, apparently for their own amusement. How can we be expected to watch the show, have our noses rubbed in the shameless all but declared corruption, without wondering when satirical fiction became indistinguishable from the reality we're living through.
Many times in recent years, I've offered my opinion that the world is held hostage by those determined to centralise power, bent on imposing an anti-human agenda, an agenda born in the mane of the fear and loathing of regular people, an agenda that will lead to death on an unthinkable scale, and the enforcing of lesser hobbled lives for the rest. When I've said anti-human, I've been thinking about individual people, individual faces at threat of death or hardship.
By now, my view has changed, until it's humanity itself that seems to me in deadly peril. Whatever survives into the future, whatever populations persist after agenda 2030 and the rest, may not be the humanity we've known. I'm so troubled by the plight of humanity, I bothered to look up the etymology of the word itself. Since the 14th century or thereabouts, humanity, the word, has encompassed notions like kindness, graciousness, consideration for others.
It refers to life on earth, to the capacity for pity. It means the whole human race. All colours, all creeds. It's about humane conduct, it's about philanthropy, and not the full philanthropy that only further enriches the billionaires who only give to receive, speculate, to accumulate.
Humanity refers to the essential quality of being human. It also takes in the thought of politeness, which is a word that comes from the jewellery trade and means to polish and complete, to make the best of something rare and precious.
Neil Oliver shares his views on GB News
GB News
The sickening spectacle of what seems like real life Hunger Games has been before us, not only but also in gruesome, dehumanising Technicolor at the Democratic National Convention. A veritable cavalcade of ghouls taking turns on stage to say things surely even they themselves can't believe, even as their lips and tongues are shaping the words. Along with every other currency, the truth is utterly devalued now.
The truth is merely whatever the powerful say it is, and whatever it is today, it will likely be something else tomorrow, so pay attention. There was space and time made for the effective humiliation of President Biden. T-shirts and placards on the one hand declaring we love you, Joe. Well, the blood from his having been stabbed in the back by his own party metaphorically puddled on the floor at his shuffling feet. He's getting on for four years of Joe Biden's presidency, four years of Democratic Party government over the United States of America and of much of the world besides, to all intents and purposes.
And yet, one by one, the Democrat old guard seemed able to make out as though it had really been their nemesis, Donald Trump in the White House all along. How else to explain why or how everything wrong from the illegal migrants flooding across the nation's southern border, the state of the economy, the state of health, the standing of the United States in the wider world, everything is apparently still Trump's fault. How can that be if we're supposed still to believe that the truth counts for anything at all?
Hillary Clinton, that bloodiest of old hawks, actually said, and I'm not making this up, that Biden had brought decency, dignity and competence back to the White House. So how come you kneecapped him, then? One of the opening speakers said a Trump administration would, and again, without the faintest whiff of irony, weaponise the judiciary against political opponents.
This was spoken with all apparent sincerity from the heart of a Democrat party that has jail time hanging over Trump's head. A sword of Damocles, even as her eyes blazed and her fists clenched in righteous anger. Michelle Obama actually said, with no discernible trace of irony, that Kamala Harris is the "most qualified person ever to seek the office of the presidency, one of the most dignified, the embodiment of stories Americans tell each other about America". I couldn't say for sure, but I doubt if even Kamala Harris's own nearest and dearest actually believed any of that.
I watched all the way to Democrat anointed and crowned candidate Kamala Harris's speech, and listened to more empty promises of Utopia jam tomorrow from someone who's been in the White House for four years, and yet done none of the things she's pledging now. All form and zero substance. A clickbait speech based on falsehoods welcome only for the faithful who so fear the truth, they would rather stick with the lies.
Any reasonable person looking on would surely draw the conclusion that the path into the future offered by the Democrats is paved only with the lies of the past. Lies and fear are all they have to offer. I challenge anyone to watch these people, maybe with the sound off, maybe with The Hunger Games on a screen alongside and tell the difference between the two.
And lest anyone might feel sorry for Biden, bear in mind that 291 page report, published following work by three House committees, alleges the Biden family and its associates are $27million richer on account of peddling access to the so-called big guy while he was Vice President to Barack Obama. Talk about elites mired in obscene corruption.
It's not just the US, of course it's not, but nobody does it better. I see again that we've arrived as a species at the edge of the abyss. It's humanity itself that's teetering. We've reached a point in our journey together when we must ask and pardon the tortured grammar, who even are we? In the Hunger Games the poor, which is almost everyone, are daily threatened with death and starvation, bread features as a symbol of the essential stuff of life upon which the poor must depend.
The fundamental foundation all around us are signs, intentionally placed or not, that humanity must remember fundamental things all over the world and here at home, to more and more people evidently feel the absence of, and therefore the need for, meaning in their lives above and beyond hollow promises. Mankind cannot live by bread alone, but the elite even have their eyes on that as well.
Their hands grasping after the land, the arable land. Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates. The Bill Gates who is no farmer in the same way that he's no scientist, no virologist, no immunologist, no doctor. That Bill Gates, holds well over a quarter of a million acres of farmland in the US. Why? He has all sorts of plans, from the food we might eat, the seeds we might sow.
All across Europe, farmers are an open revolt against the elite EU intentions to force them off the land and therefore out of the business of growing food. In India, it's been reported that increasing numbers of farmers are taking their own lives out of desperation at their inability to scratch a living by growing food. Environmental activist Vandana Shiva has fought for decades to safeguard that most humble and yet that most potent fundamental symbol and promise of life being the seed.
Everything comes from the seed, but we have forgotten that the seed isn't a machine. We think we can engineer life, we can change the carefully organised DNA of a living organism, and there will be no wider impact, but this is a dangerous illusion.
60 per cent of the world's seeds are sold by just four companies. The monoculture forced upon the farmers and farmland of India. Seed patented as yet more property might be a warning of the fate awaiting all life, humanity included in a future where technology rules and people are dispensable.
This much is true not just of seeds, but of us, of humanity. Soil fertility is failing all over the world. No farmers means no food, no food means no people. The sustained and deliberate attack on humanity, what it means to be human, has come down to the most basic fundamentals of life itself, all life, as well as destroying the fertility of the soil from which comes our food. Our own natural fertility is in steep decline as well.
I've lost track of how many times I've talked on here about how nation after nation across the world is failing to produce enough babies, even to keep their indigenous populations going. That one nation after another is on the path to literal extinction. And yet, back at the de facto real world Hunger Games for that old ghoul Hillary Clinton, told her audience straight faced that her own presidential hopeful, Kamala Harris, cares about children and families.
A mobile abortion and vasectomy clinic provided by Planned Parenthood Great Rivers was doing brisk trade close by. Abortion is a controversial subject, demanding serious consideration, but it seemed hardly surprising that the presence of a mobile unit offering such services, trivialising life and death at such a time alongside such an event, drew accusations from commentators that the American political left, so called left, is shadowed by a death cult.
The only policies you hear Harris talk about are abortion and the rights of the LGBTQ lobby - inside and outside the venue, are thousands and thousands of people wearing the blue face masks, those still trapped in the Covid era. More lies.
I mentioned the idea of maybe watching those political speeches alongside clips of the elites of The Hunger Games, and it might also be instructive to review images of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, those captured during the war on terror that never ends, like all wars now, and notice how blue face masks were mandatory there, part of the demoralising and dehumanising of those others the state wanted to break and brainwash into submission.
Here's the thing - for so long we've been told wrong is right. Down is up. Lies are truth.
The DNC was slick and polished as any Oscars, and the Oscars were abandoned as fakery long ago. The hollowness, the falsehood, bare faced from the highest levels has cut millions adrift from the truth of what humanity is.
It's more important than ever that we question the script - every word. Because in the real life Hunger Games, it's our lives that are being played with.