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Today, we are informed by the BBC that the billionaire landowner, Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor, 6th Duke of Westminster, has died aged 64. In fairness to the BBC, this sudden loss to us all (apparently) was not featured as a major headline on its Home page, but as a ‘sub’ further down, below the threat of a Eurostar rail strike, a report on half of women being sexually harassed at work (it doesn’t define which ‘half’), and the rejection by Peppa Pig of an offer from the media company, ITV.

The report on the late Duke is highly detailed, including video, images of him with the Queen and Prince Charles, and much enthusing on his life and work. It also noted that his bank roll was good to the tune of $10.8 billion, though he lost nearly a billion due to the fall in the value of the U.K. pound following the Brexit result. Perhaps it was the thought of that which brought on his rapid and fatal illness?^[1]

It’s never been clear to the writer why it’s necessary to publicise these people so widely just because they’re stinking rich, and dead. This guy owned half of London, (the better half, that is) and much of the fertile county of Cheshire, had estates in Oxford and Scotland, owned most of Liverpool City Centre, as well as land in Europe. He led a privileged existence and wouldn’t have known a darned thing about working class people, though he may have thought he did.

He joined the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst to train as an army officer, which is really amazing as he left Harrow with only two ‘O’ level GCE passes. The military demands the equivalent of at least four ‘O’ level pass grades – to include English language, mathematics and either a science subject or a foreign language – plus the equivalent of at least two ‘A’ level passes, to enroll at Sandhurst. One can only assume friendship with Prince Charles and the Queen of England made all that academic nonsense irrelevant.

As a ‘military man’ he was awarded the Companion of the Order of the Bath, Efficiency Decoration, Volunteer Reserves Service Medal, Canadian Forces Decoration, the Order of the Garter, the Order of St John, the QEII Silver Jubilee medal, the QEII Golden Jubilee medal, the QEII Diamond Jubilee medal, the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Lazarus, and the Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Order of Francis I. He ended up as a Major-General. And all without once going to war.

Privilege is the preserve of too many and the right of none. The BBC makes much of the man’s life, but in truth he was no different from Geoffrey Jones, a council worker from Bridgend in South Wales, except that he had tons more money than Geoff. The Welsh binman enjoyed the occasional bet on the horses and had been known to frequent the seamier areas of Bridgend, after dark, in search of certain ladies of the night.

Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor, 6th Duke of Westminster, was no stranger to such ladies, either. Following investigation into the ‘Eliot Spitzer affair’ it was revealed that said Duke had also made use of the services supplied by the Emperors Club VIP, an illegal, high-class, prostitution ring made notorious by Spitzer, then governor of New York, when it was discovered he spent in excess of $80,000 on prostitutes from the club over a two year period.^[2]

There was one difference between the Welsh binman and the Duke: Geoffrey Jones had been a widower ten years, the Duke – like Spitzer – was a married man.

Interestingly, the coat-of-arms of the 6th Duke of Westminster (see above) bears the motto: ‘Vertus Non Stemma’. It can roughly be translated as; ‘Virtue, Not Birth’.

Now that Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor, the 6th Duke of Westminster, is dead his son, Hugh, inherits the title and all the billions of dollars that go with it. To achieve this fine state of being all he had to do was that which we all have to achieve just once – suffer the necessary contortions to escape our mother’s womb. Only in his case, mummy’s interior could be likened to a one-armed bandit primed to pour forth the jackpot.

Funeral arrangements for the 6th Duke of Westminster have yet to be finalised. No doubt they’ll be lavish. Most of the British ‘gentry’ and their hangers-on will be in attendance.

Geoffrey Jones also died yesterday. His funeral will be paid for out of council finances, as he couldn’t afford insurance and the government’s funeral allowance is paltry. There’ll not be many to say goodbye to Geoff, just a few old mates from the council and a frail old lady, a neighbour, who kept an eye on him after his wife died.

When Geoffrey Jones first came into this world he worked just as hard to get here as the 6th Duke of Westminster, yet he started with nothing. Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor had everything from the moment he uttered his first breath.

Somehow, it just doesn’t seem right.

^{[1] “Duke of Westminster, Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor, dies aged 64” BBC, August 10th 2016}

^{[2] “Richest man in England also a regular of prostitution ring in Spitzer scandal” New York Daily News, March 12th 2008}

In 2015, politicians met in Paris and agreed to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The meeting was hailed as a breakthrough. Now, one year later, that limit seems almost impossible to achieve. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meets in Geneva this month it will discuss research that shows global temperatures this year twice peaked at 1.38 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

It seems the only hope of slowing this advance is to shut down all coal-burning power stations and ban the use of combustion engines across the globe within fifteen years – according to a report in the Guardian newspaper.

“If the world puts all its resources into finding ways to generate power without burning fossil fuels, and if there were international agreements that action must happen instantly, and if carbon emissions were brought down to zero before 2050, then a rise of no more than 1.5C might just be achieved,” said Dr Ben Sanderson of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. “That is a tall order, however.”

The problem was made particularly severe because moving too quickly to cut emissions could also be harmful, added Field. “If we shut down fossil fuel plants tomorrow – before we have established renewable alternatives – we can limit emissions and global warming, but people would suffer. There would be insufficient power for the planet. There is an upper limit to the rate at which we can move to a carbon-free future.”^[1]

Banning all combustion engines means taking every petrol or diesel driven vehicle off the road. Global economies would collapse. Even if alternatively powered cars could be produced at reasonable cost, it seems unlikely that 48-ton trucks can ever be developed to run on alternative fuels, and certainly not within a fifteen year time-span.

The situation is now so bad that not only do we need to reduce our CO2 emissions to zero, but we must also develop a method to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and store it on Earth. At present, the technology just isn’t available to do that.

“Some negative emission technology will inevitably have to be part of the picture if you are going to keep 1.5C as your limit,” said Professor Jim Skea, a member of the UK government’s committee on climate change. “There will always be some human activities that put carbon into the atmosphere and they will have to be compensated for by negative emission technology.”

But what form that technology takes is unclear. Several techniques have been proposed. One includes spreading crushed silicate rocks, which absorb carbon dioxide, over vast tracts of land. Another involves seeding oceans with iron to increase their uptake of carbon dioxide. Most are considered unworkable at present – with the exception of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. Under this scheme, vast plantations of trees and bushes would be created, their wood burned for energy while the carbon dioxide emitted was liquefied and stored underground.

Unfortunately, ‘bioenergy with carbon capture and storage’ would mean covering so much of the planet with plants used for combustion that there wouldn’t be sufficient left to grow enough food to feed us all.

Basically, it would seem that scientists now believe that unless we can develop clean technology to produce all the energy we need, and convert every vehicle on the planet to run on non-CO2 producing fuel, and do it all in such a way that the world economy isn’t affected, within fifteen years, we’re all doomed.

Cambridge University climate expert Professor Peter Wadhams provides the last word on the subject:

…I think we just have to hope that some kind of extraction technology, as yet unimagined by scientists, is developed in the next couple of decades. If not, we are in real trouble.”

There is, however, another alternative. We can all follow the lead given to us by U.S. Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, and become climate change deniers. He believes all the world’s scientists are wrong, and climate change is just a malicious rumour put about by the Chinese for their own nefarious (and somewhat vague) purposes.

We could all follow Mister Trump’s lead, bury our heads in the sand and hope we don’t eventually end up as the latest edition to the McDonalds’ burger range. Unfortunately, he has such a poor record for being right on anything that most bookies would place him as a rank outsider on this one.

Personally, if this writer were a betting man, he’d know where to put his money. Even if it’s unlikely he’d still be around to collect the winnings.

^{[1] “Scientists warn world will miss key climate target “ Guardian, August 6th 2016}

We can all breathe a sigh of relief now that the U.S. political conventions are over. In Europe, there wasn’t as much coverage as that shown by the American media, but as the Daily Show is transmitted in the U.K., (albeit a day or two late) and it covered both conventions in detail over six nights, we saw sufficient to realise that Hollywood-style glitz and stardust certainly isn’t dead. It was alive and in robust good health at both conventions.

What was sadly lacking was any hint of truth, sincerity, or honour. Both the Republican and Democratic conventions were about inciting strong emotion. The only difference between the audiences at the conventions and those of a football game was the latter are probably better behaved and less prone to chant anti-social slogans at the goading of the person on the podium.

The question now is: where do we go from here?

Most sane folks would probably settle for Clinton, given the somewhat dubious (at best) alternative. But what has Clinton got to offer the country, and the world?

More of the same?

More of the same, may not seem all that dreadful – after all, Obama wasn’t such a bad president, was he?

No, not if you conveniently forget about his 465 drone strikes on Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, that had killed 2,464 people as of January 2015. At least 314 of those have been civilians, including children. That’s nine times as many drone strikes as under his predecessor, George W Bush, and these are very conservative figures.^[1]

Or, if you conveniently forget those imprisoned for years without trial at Guantanamo Bay – many of whom died there – a ‘facility’ that Obama promised to close “within a year” of becoming president, or, the 3,050 U.S. servicemen still actively serving in Iraq and the 10,000 still on active duty in Afghanistan, bogged down by the Taliban just as the Russians were in the 1980s.

It’s also necessary to forget the fervour portrayed by Obama in attempting to force through the Trans Pacific Trade Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, both designed to transfer more powers to the corporate establishment and debilitate the rights of working people – that is, if we want to regard the Obama presidency as ‘not so bad’.

Not that any of this means Hillary Clinton will necessarily continue the ‘Obama Doctrine’. Provided we forget that her husband – with her backing – was responsible for the North American Free Trade Agreement that resulted in thousands of US jobs being shipped to Mexico, or, that he instigated the ‘Three Strikes’ law (Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994) that resulted in over two million Americans being incarcerated and 160,000 serving life sentences for petty crimes, or, his Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which crippled many poor black families, or, how he joined up with the Republicans in 1999 to repeal Glass-Steagall and set the scene for the crash of 2008, or, his drastic and unnecessary increase in sanctions against Iraq, from 1993 onwards, that crippled the Iraqi economy and directly led to the deaths of half a million Iraqi children – one reason put forward by Osama bin Laden for the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Or, without doubt, his worst act of omission: failing to commit U.S. troops to support a paltry collection of U.N. peacekeepers in Rwanda. Knowing what was happening in that country, aware of the impending genocide, he did nothing. His inaction contributed to the appalling suffering and deaths of perhaps a million innocent people.^[2]

Doing nothing when people are in danger seems a recurring problem for the Clintons. Was Benghazi, perhaps, a ghostly reminiscence of Rwanda?

Okay, so Hillary Clinton may not be the greatest presidential candidate ever, but she is a woman. That’s the most important criteria for many.

Why will being a woman make her a better president?

It won’t, of course. History shows us that women in power behave just like men, and we can be assured that Clinton will, too.

With regard to her Republican competitor it’s equally difficult to find anything good to recommend him. Donald Trump, by anyone’s standards, is an arsehole. He runs roughshod over any who stand in his path. He’s a narcissist par excellence, and the idea of him being in control of the nuclear codes that could destroy the world truly doesn’t bear thinking about.

Consequently, when every factor is taken into consideration, the decision that folks in the U.S. have to make come November, is between a madman (a la ‘Dr Strangelove’) and a committed neoliberalist liar hellbent on implementing the already discredited U.S. ‘New World Order’, and burying the last vestiges of democracy forever.

All Americans should ensure they have a coin in their pockets come polling day.

^{[1] “Almost 2,500 now killed by covert US drone strikes since Obama inauguration six years ago: The Bureau’s report for January 2015” The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, February 2015}

^{[2] “15 Ways Bill Clinton’s White House Failed America and the World” AlterNet, June 2015}