Gorbachev to anyone listening - 'I'm not dead'
Thursday, May 29, 2008And furthermore declares, 'look at me'.
As noted the other day, ol' splodgetop was due to attend the Energy Globe Awards, the 9th no less, and indeed did. And hung around for a good old moan the day after.
So what did the man dubbed 'a blow-dried bolshevik' (can't recall the origin, but trust me on this one) have to say, beyond my précis?
Well, firstly an epic re-writing of history:
"1990 Nobel laureate Mikhail Gorbachev, also speaking at the conference, drew on personal experience - both as a young man growing up in Stavropol (1)and a rising star in the Communist Party - to explain how his understanding and appreciation of climate change grew over the years (leading him to found, in 1993, Green Cross International(2), an advocacy group. Europe, he later argued, had a lot to learn from the experience (and errors) of the USSR, where - by the mid-80s, under Gorbachev's glasnost - the "number one issue [on people's minds] was the environment (3)".
1 - Let's be really generous and take 'young' as being under 30. That takes us to 1961 at the outside. Are we believe that he had the jump onnew ice age, global warming cough the 'climate change' lobby by at least ten years?
2 - Who would have thought that road safety campaigning has gone international? Maybe Misha the Olympic bear runs the equivalent of the Tufty Club.
3 - I'm calling BS on that one. Not the cost of living, lack of civil rights, the Afghan war etc etc?
And there's more:
"Complaining about the attitude that the West took vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and the challenges it faced throughout the 1980s, he warned: “if we take the same attitude towards developing countries as we did towards the USSR”, we will face "a catastrophe."
This 1980s Soviet Union was a nuclear-armed totalitarian behemoth, and not exactly on the West's Christmas card list. If it could afford to invade Afghanistan, and fund trouble worldwide then improving the air quality in Magnitogorsk was for it to do, not us.
Meanwhile, "A special award went to Mikhail Gorbachev in recognition of his work with the "Green Cross Foundation".
Said Foundation is not exactly high profile (no wiki page), or maybe lacks the tender attentions of search engine optimisation, as the lead google hit is for an American "Academy of Traumatology, established in 1997 to bring together world leaders in the study of traumatology for the purpose of establishing and maintaining professionalism and high standards for this new field".
However, it does exist and has a fairly snazzy website. The Board has Gorbachev himself, one of his mates from the glory days back in the Kremlin, a Polish investor, a Swiss brigadier and a Portuguese Socialist. The honorary board is quite a list of the usual suspects, most of whom appear not to have done a damned thing since 2001, or perhaps have not had their biographies updated. I very much doubt that 99 year old Rita Levi-Montalcini is that active on the board. There is also something of an outbreak of the use of rather old photographs to depict both Robert Redford (when did he last make a half-way decent film?(4)) and 65 year old Pat Mitchell.
(4) Brubaker. 1980. However, we both have accountants for Standard Oil as fathers. Fascinating, eh?
As noted the other day, ol' splodgetop was due to attend the Energy Globe Awards, the 9th no less, and indeed did. And hung around for a good old moan the day after.
So what did the man dubbed 'a blow-dried bolshevik' (can't recall the origin, but trust me on this one) have to say, beyond my précis?
Well, firstly an epic re-writing of history:
"1990 Nobel laureate Mikhail Gorbachev, also speaking at the conference, drew on personal experience - both as a young man growing up in Stavropol (1)and a rising star in the Communist Party - to explain how his understanding and appreciation of climate change grew over the years (leading him to found, in 1993, Green Cross International(2), an advocacy group. Europe, he later argued, had a lot to learn from the experience (and errors) of the USSR, where - by the mid-80s, under Gorbachev's glasnost - the "number one issue [on people's minds] was the environment (3)".
1 - Let's be really generous and take 'young' as being under 30. That takes us to 1961 at the outside. Are we believe that he had the jump on
2 - Who would have thought that road safety campaigning has gone international? Maybe Misha the Olympic bear runs the equivalent of the Tufty Club.
3 - I'm calling BS on that one. Not the cost of living, lack of civil rights, the Afghan war etc etc?
And there's more:
"Complaining about the attitude that the West took vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and the challenges it faced throughout the 1980s, he warned: “if we take the same attitude towards developing countries as we did towards the USSR”, we will face "a catastrophe."
This 1980s Soviet Union was a nuclear-armed totalitarian behemoth, and not exactly on the West's Christmas card list. If it could afford to invade Afghanistan, and fund trouble worldwide then improving the air quality in Magnitogorsk was for it to do, not us.
Meanwhile, "A special award went to Mikhail Gorbachev in recognition of his work with the "Green Cross Foundation".
Said Foundation is not exactly high profile (no wiki page), or maybe lacks the tender attentions of search engine optimisation, as the lead google hit is for an American "Academy of Traumatology, established in 1997 to bring together world leaders in the study of traumatology for the purpose of establishing and maintaining professionalism and high standards for this new field".
However, it does exist and has a fairly snazzy website. The Board has Gorbachev himself, one of his mates from the glory days back in the Kremlin, a Polish investor, a Swiss brigadier and a Portuguese Socialist. The honorary board is quite a list of the usual suspects, most of whom appear not to have done a damned thing since 2001, or perhaps have not had their biographies updated. I very much doubt that 99 year old Rita Levi-Montalcini is that active on the board. There is also something of an outbreak of the use of rather old photographs to depict both Robert Redford (when did he last make a half-way decent film?(4)) and 65 year old Pat Mitchell.
(4) Brubaker. 1980. However, we both have accountants for Standard Oil as fathers. Fascinating, eh?
Labels: EU fun and games, Greenery, History lessons
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