“That which is not good for the beehive cannot be good for the bees.“
— Marcus Aurelius (A.D, 121-180), Meditations
60 MINUTES SPECIAL ON AUSTRALIA
”Everyone has known this,” said former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. “We’ve been warned by the climate scientists. Everyone has been aware of this except for those who, well, the climate change deniers are aware of it, but they choose to deny reality.”
The fires in Australia are out of control, burning 27 million acres to the ground, and killing an estimated billion animals and 33 people. He was warned, he said, during his term in office (2015 – 2018) that fires in his country were getting worse because of climate change.
Malcom Turnbull is a member of Australia’s conservative party, whose growing right wing turned against him for braking ranks with his party’s denial of climate change. He was replaced by a climate-denying party loyalist, Scott Morrison, whose hand few people shook after he took a vacation as the fires raged.
“The right wing climate deniers treat an issue of science and physics and fact as though it was a question of ideology, and their conduct is not just idiotic,” Turnbull said. “It is downright dangerous. Dangerous for us here in Australia and around the world.”
“You’re talking about people in your own party,” Williams said.
“Of course I am. Yeah. Absolutely,” Turnbull confirmed.
“Dangerous and idiotic,” Williams said.
“Well, of course it is dangerous and idiotic not to be taking the strongest action to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions,” Turnbull said.
LITTLE BOY BLUE ON AIR FORCE ONE
The 60 Minutes’s special report on Australia competed with the NBA All-Star game in Chicago, and NASCAR’s Daytona 500 in Daytona when the focus on basketball and racing were trumped by an eye-catching stunt.
Air Force One was strafing Daytona, drawing everyone’s attention to the entertaining climate-denying president blowing his horn in the air.
It was a Little Boy Blue scene from “Mother Goose.” –1901 illustration by William Wallace Denslow.
Little boy blue, Come blow your horn, The sheep's in the meadow, The cow's in the corn. But where is the boy Who looks after the sheep? He's under a haystack, Fast asleep. -- Mother Goose
While the Aussies were asking the whereabouts of the Little Boy Blue they elected to look after their sheep and meadows, cows and corn, kangaroos, and koala bears, America’s own Little Boy Blue was strafing Daytona at dangerously low altitude, summoning media attention to Air Force One spewing emissions while the fires burn and the floods rise across his country. It was dangerous and idiotic.
WHAT IS THE ECONOMY?
“This is the greatest economy in the history of the world,” boasts the American president and his party in the U.S.A.
It’s not.
Science and theology now agree with Marcus Aurelius that what’s not good for the beehive is not good for the bees. Economic success is not measured by stock markets or unemployment rates. It is measured by the health of the beehive and the bees.
The origins of the English words ‘economy’ and ‘economics’ date back to the classical Greek words oikos (house), and oikonomia (household management). “Before anything else, economics is a perspective, a frame of reference. Economics concerns the well-being of the residents of the same house. Before it decides anything about household management, it knows that there is only one house. Good household management — good economics — pays attention to the entire house and all of its residents.” –“The Economy: Only One House,” Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness.
THE PLANET IS OUR BEEHIVE
The planet is our beehive. The bees are in trouble everywhere. “In the long-term,” said Mollie Beatty, former director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “the economy and the environment are the same thing. If it’s unenvironmental, it’s uneconomical. That is a rule of nature.”
“When we forget what an economy and economics really are, we enshrine greed as the essential virtue, ignoring and imperiling everyone else and the house in which we all live.” — Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness)
- Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Feb. 21, 2020.
The president often tweets after a stormy night. Perhaps the timing of the Tillerson firing less than a week before Stormy Daniels’ scheduled 60 Minutes interview is an ill-considered attempt to circle the wagons around the cuckoo’s nest before Stormy and the Mueller investigation findings shut off the television in the White House bedroom.
Views from the Edge 