Climate prat of 2016 – We have a winnah! Posted by Pointman on December 23, 2016 · 27 Comments

I did wonder if it was worth running this years competition, because it seemed to me there would be little or nothing in the way of any excitement occurring, since there only appeared to be one horse in the race, and he was already galloping over the horizon before it had even began.

The rest would be plodding along miles behind him, morosely contemplating not so much a race track ahead of them but a road sloping down to end inexorably at the gates of the knacker’s yard, out of which they would be reemerging as either glue or inside tins of guaranteed organic dog food.

All through the year there’s been a real dearth of dedicated monomaniac climate prats. It was like a team fallen on hard times with the best of their talent permanently injured or retired out of the game altogether. Where were the great free-range climate prats of the golden age? The Hansons, the Gleicks, the Nuccitellis, the Gorean monsters of climate nightmares that once bestrode the Earth like veritable Titans? Gone, gone, all is gone.

Trump had the politeness to listen to Gore and then DiCaprio and an hour later and possibly not an unconnected event, he announced the appointment of a well-known skeptic Scott Pruitt to lead the EPA, which in Washington circles is understood to mean eviscerate it.

Trump’s hatchet men like Pruitt are going to do a job on the various troughers of the federal budget and bureaucratic cancerous outgrowths like the EPA that’ll make “Neutron Jack” Welch look like an avid fan of full employment. A lot of federal fat is going to be redeployed back into the private sector labour pool, where it’ll be joined by those former masters of the universe climate scientists pan handling for replacement grant money on street corners.

But as they say, it’s always darkest before the dawn and a totally unfancied outsider slipped into the jostling mob of nags, hags and old bags and really perked up the nominations stage with the unexpectedly vitriolic response he provoked in the average prat fancier. The odds immediately swerved in his direction.

By the end of the nominations phase and the start of the voting, it looked to be his to stroll but yet again another cruel twist of fortune’s dagger occurred, and Britain was to be denied the glory of its first Climate Prat trophy; that was to be reserved for yet a new country on the winner’s podium.

All the time, there was a latent contender lurking in the pack, a potato-headed squirrel lying doggo in the mud but actually playing a classic game of stalk and pounce. Within the space of the last few days, he pounced big time, but I’m getting ahead of myself here. Let’s do the traditional reverse order announcement of results.

In fifth and final place, we have Hilary Clinton, not so much a nag but more a broken down old bag after her electoral woes, when so many Saudi princes had bet so heavily on riding her ass into the winner’s enclosure behind the white picket fence, only to be disappointed by the punters unexpectedly saying neigh. After that, I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised at her lame performance in what is after all an end of season race.

For most of the voting phase, she attracted precisely zero votes and it was only in the last two days of it a couple of kind but I feel misguided Christian souls donated their votes to her.

In what was a remarkably poor effort by someone who’d been trumpeted as a thoroughbred, her performance in the 2016 Prat Steeplechase cup was more like a tipsy Alzheimer’s dance in the general direction of the horse’s asses in front of her as they steadily pulled out of sight.

In the light of this not exactly fleet of foot performance, rumours abounded of her trainer “Crooked” Billy the Groper having slipped her a tad too much of his infamous Whitewater stimulant to keep her going, and it perhaps showed especially in her efforts to get over the sticks.

The sight of her much maligned (especially by her) Secret Service minders pushing her trouser-suited, pear-shape sack of a body up and over the jumps had to be seen to be revolted. There was simply no dignity to be found in the final hands on buttocks thrust to get her over the top.

With things going so badly for her and the finishing tape by now nothing more than another one of her dashed hopes, she staggered off the course before the end in a fit of pique to get a refill or four of Billy’s Whitewater shine and to take it out on her minders with nothing but her handbag – her stiletto-heeled shoes having been carefully “lost” by them at the first signs of what was coming at them.

She confirmed our worst fears for this year’s competition. Is this really what the Pratties has come down to? Two miserable votes, and those for a drunken old slattern with no other talent but handbagging her carers who aren’t allowed to fight back. And to add insult to injury, she doesn’t even believe in any of the global warming bollocks anyway; it’s just another thing she talks about to her fawning supporters but actually doesn’t give a damn about.

The only thing she’s ever believed in is ruthlessly exploiting public office for every penny she can wring out of it, and then shoving the proceeds of it all into that safely tax-fortified and FBI-proofed laundromat commonly called The Clinton Foundation, where the “innocent” Chelsea’s signature is on everything. As crime families go, the Clintons put the Corleones to shame.

Coming in fourth, not very far ahead of Clinton but still straggling well behind the main body of the prat pack, we have John Kerry. Like so many holders of high offices of state, he allowed his service at the court of King Obama to overrule the principles enshrined in that now tattered document called the constitution, which after eight years of circumvention by presidential diktat, is looking pretty shop soiled.

He and other office holders like Lynch, Comey and several senior bureaucrats need to be shat out of high government posts in order to restore the sort of integrity that’s been signally lacking for the last eight years under an administration that itself shat all over the founding fathers’ principles.

However, as a candidate to run in the Pratties, misguided though his global warming beliefs might be, at least he had some beliefs, which made him much more suitable than Clinton, who wouldn’t recognise a principle never mind a belief if she tripped over it in one of her drunken rages.

He was the perfect exemplar of an ineffectual vassal appointed by a weak king, because the last thing a weak king ever does is let anyone strong anywhere near a sniff of real power. Secretary of State is a position which must be filled, but there’s no law prohibiting you appointing a complete idiot to it and Kerry fitted the bill nicely.

He spent his time in State labouring under the delusion that lecturing the leaders of various developing countries to avoid exploiting their natural energy resources (someone else would relieve them of that tiresome chore) and instead concentrating on renewables, was the way forward for them.

If they did that, and only that, they’d get the money. The beggars, who as we all know can’t be choosers, did the noddies, funds were transferred in through the front doors of various institutes with noble-sounding names, out the back door to the Cayman Islands (Switzerland just ain’t what it used to be in the good old days) and everybody from the wannabe virtuous to the wannabe not pecuniarily impoverished in their old age was happy as a sandboy, except for the intended recipients of such taxpayer-funded largesse, who starved to death as usual.

In the meantime, and in areas some fools thought might more properly reside within the demesne of a US Secretary of State, little Vladi gobbled up a few bits of Eastern Europe he fancied, secure in the knowledge that weak King Obama was too shit scared of him to make any fuss, preferring instead to push Kerry out in front to deal with the nasty bullying midget.

The idea of using John Kerry as muscle against an ex-KGB full-bird colonel must have raised gales of laughter from the Riverine veterans.

To quote a certain Pointman – “You can imagine how inspired the people living on the borders of a megalomaniac like Putin feel when Barry’s representative John Kerry appears and lectures them patiently on climate change and how fracking, which represents energy independence from Russia, is so evil, just when Vladdi is giving them one up the butt by turning off their gas supplies for winter”

What isn’t so funny is the sham deal he negotiated with the Iranians on behalf of his master to stop them developing nuclear weapons. In return for not actually stopping development, barring inspectors and giving the UN the complete run around, they get paid money which they’ll no doubt plough into their weapons development program.

Every security adviser in every country in the world knows as soon as they’ve produced enough weapons-grade material, they’ll try doing something biblically stupid like smuggling it into an embassy in Tel Aviv before exploding it.

It could just as easily be Washington, London or Berlin as a prelude to some blackmail, which is why when the Israelis do the preemptive strike, whether it’s nuclear or not, nobody will be complaining too loud, least of all Saudi Arabia and all the other Arab states. With the shale revolution, the days of OPEC ruling the energy roost are long gone and anyway, Sunnis will always hate Shias.

The curiosity about both Kerry and Clinton is that between them, they barely garnered 4% of the votes cast. She doesn’t believe in global warming and he obviously does but they were both equally ignored by the voters anyway. I think the explanation is they both represent typical types of an establishment people threw out of power this year; she’s totally corrupt and he’s a total idiot. People were simply sick and tired of them and wanted to move on.

In third place we have DiCaprio who initially appeared to be the three hundred pound gorilla everyone stood little chance of beating, but turned out to be a harmless little chimpanzee scampering around in circles but steadily dropping back very early in the competition.

He gives the lie to life imitating art. Put simply, his life is bad art.

His zigzag journey through it has certainly had a few zigs which should have been zags and vice versa what with his transitions from gay icon, to romantic straight lead, to serious actor (well, the latter in the Hollywood sense) and now a statesman bestriding the world’s stage like a pocket Colossus and rubbing shoulders with the likes of Obama.

King Obama was in such desperate need to leave something behind him that didn’t look like the burnt out remains of Detroit or a Russian-occupied Crimea, he was glad to invite him in for a few photo opportunities, even if that did involve having to feign a modicum of interest for the camera while bouncing him up and down on his knee and listening to his long, boring and half-witted concerns – the bloody things a failed president has to endure to eke out even a very modest legacy.

I don’t know why Obama bothered, there really wasn’t much glam or glitter which might rub off Leo and onto himself. You see, unlike most actors, Leo’s sense of timing is quite simply atrocious, as is apparent from the complete absence of the long closeup shot in his movies and the sometimes frantic editing to make it appear as if there is one.

In a year when; the most deranged climate nutters had gone quiet, it was never mentioned by anyone in the presidential election and climate didn’t make it onto any opinion poll listing people’s concerns – he decides to come out as the saviour of the planet. Obviously, he’s getting tip top advice about what was trending five years ago.

As it happens, an imploding climate industry was clutching at straws this year and invitations to speak at places like the UN were thrust upon him, which earned him some rebranding type publicity and a lot of sniggers behind his back. Just how old is that “I want to be taken seriously” syndrome that so many ageing entertainers let themselves get sucked into, and end up spending the rest of their lives tending rescued donkeys on a farm somewhere hidden away in the arse end of Provence?

Not at all discouraged by the deafening indifference greeting his efforts to save the world, little Leo then financed out of his own secret cache of pennies a cinematographic horror movie on climate that was so bad, he ended up using his own carbon-spewing jumbo jet to fly his reluctant supporters over to Europe for its premiere, where it bombed spectacularly, just as it has bombed everywhere else.

I’m sure there must be a few places like Kazakhstan that lack any craters caused by that particular WMD.

As I said, his timing is terrible and having fluffed his entrance into an issue nobody actually cares about these days, he appears to have ducked under radar and is slithering away from yet another embarrassing makeover that didn’t quite work. The rumour was that he actually expected to get a Nobel prize for his climatic efforts, but I don’t know how much credence to lend to that scuttlebutt. Not even he’s that thick, but you never know, Obama got one after only two weeks in office.

Anyway, he failed to ignite in the competition and after this year’s PR disaster, I doubt he’ll be so active or prominent in climate circles next year. It’s more likely to be crop circles.

In second place and therefore this year’s runner-up, we have Brian Cox who provided both the first surprise of the competition and was the victim of its second one.

The surprise he provided was immediately zooming past the favourite DiCaprio in both the nomination and voting stages to take the lead. As soon as his name was mentioned, you could almost hear people saying “of course, that smart-arsed git” and they piled in big time to get him crowned prat of the year.

With a twenty point lead on his nearest challenger and only days to go before the polls closed, the prize looked to be his for the taking before fate intervened, but more about that later.

Once he gets off his specialty of physics to join the ranks of the media luvvies echoing off at each other out of their anal cavities about stuff they know absolutely nothing about, his pronouncements are truly cringe worthy. Obviously, he’s an immensely irritating prat and everybody who nominated or voted for him have their own favourite Coxism engraved on a plaque standing on their mantelpiece, but that’s not what I find truly revolting about him.

It’s the prospect of years of him being dragged into shot as required and being represented as some terribly terribly clever science toy boy ready to give us all the skinny on whatever sciency topic is getting the 150 second sound bite mastication for the toothless treatment. God help our children or grandchildren being shortchanged by such apparent cleverness because there’s a lot better knocking around out there and he sure ain’t one of them.

To use that damning phrase that only could be disparaging if delivered in a certain British manner; he’s very clever. Clever, unimaginative, televisual in a sticky freshly-licked wet-lipped sort of way and utterly devoid of any capacity to think outside the box, either in science or beyond the infantile thumb-sucking safe spaces of academia.

I’ll tell you a story about the real thing.

When I’d got over my juvenile delight in hunting down things I could brain and then eat, I switched to hunting down interesting types of person whom I knew existed in an abstract sort of way but had never met in the flesh, so to speak. One of the types I wanted to bag was a real, honest to goodness, genuine, free-range genius. As all good hunters do, I studied up on their habits, habitats and what kind of spoor they left behind them.

In response to rumours of one, I went looking all over a university campus for a kid I wanted to run my slide rule over. The story went that he’d appeared at three physics lectures and never been seen at another one since. At the end of the first two, where you do the any questions bit, he’d asked two seemingly simple questions of the lecturer, the answers to which were quite straight forward for the first twenty seconds or so before the lecturer ground to a halt once the truly horrible implications of the simple questions started to sink in.

It was a sign; they know the simple questions to ask.

The kid for some reason obviously assumed the lecturer had all the answers to the stuff that was puzzling him. That was another sign.

At the end of the third lecture, the “any questions?” was by all accounts quite hesitant and accompanied by a slightly fearful squint up into the semi-darkness of the lecture hall’s back row. All heads in the hall twisted awkwardly to look over their shoulder at the kid. He turned red, shook his head rapidly and shrunk down behind the back of the seat in front of him.

That was the last anyone had seen of him though he still turned in his assignments, which after a quick skim through were interesting little pearls in themselves, but as for the kid, he’d gone to ground. The hunt was on. To quote Hemingway “There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.” He was right too.

Hearing of a sighting in the library, I got there quick and ransacked it but appeared to have missed him by a whisker.

Not in the best of moods and on the stomp out of the back of the place along a long rat-run corridor whose existence was known to very few, I clocked someone sitting on some stairs off the corridor and treated them to my best snarl-glare in passing before marching on.

A pace and a half past him, my spidey sense went ping. I post-processed the image and ground to a halt. Big textbook on his lap, a pile of more of the same on the step beside him, the titles of some I recognised but none of which were written by Zane Grey.

I took two steps backwards and looked him over more carefully. Big round unblinking innocent eyes, bushy eyebrows, a seven dwarfs round face, dressed in a slightly olde worlde but natty outfit his mum had probably picked out for him, a cravat for God’s sake, sitting absolutely still and watching carefully from his hidey hole what this strange new variable in his world might do. I shudda known he’d hole up somewhere near the library. Another sign; they never stray far from good input.

I’d found my run away genius.

He was like a bashful little rotund owl. I wanted to pick him up, give him a friendly shake and place him carefully back down on the top step to continue his roost on whatever egg he was hatching, but resisted the impulse. He was lovely.

We became good friends and I helped him work on his very own snarl-glare so he’d have a better defense mechanism than run away and hide, and made a few of the right introductions for him – and not before time.

They’d been feeding a potential apex thinker with tofu nibblets of undergraduate problemettes when they should have been throwing him large lumps of raw red meat problems that everyone else found indigestible. He was already half way out of the place through boredom to do his own stuff anyway.

Over the years he’s more than lived up to his potential and still thinks in wonderfully original ways. A lot of media luvvies like to think Brian Cox falls into the same category as people like Owly.

He doesn’t. Not on the best day of his life.

Finally we get to this year’s winner, who is of course Justin Trudeau. It’s perhaps thematic of his life, but for most of the competition he was just another non-entity in the middle of the prat pack, but within the last three days of voting he zoomed past a by now totally shagged out DeCaprio who’d ran out of poof to take second place, and then with a supreme effort, got in front of Brian Cox and in so doing shattered once again Britain’s hope of winning a Prattie.

Questions were raised about such a dynamic finish, but I’m happy it was a fair result, caused by all those Canadians realising they finally had a dog with real prospects in this year’s fight for a Prattie, and being banned from saying anything nasty about the smarmy git in their legacy media, leapt at the opportunity to put the boot into him.

It’s a very understandable compulsion. If you thought the media’s cloying love for Obama was bad, the Canadian media are positively prostrating themselves down before Trudeau and building a cult of personality with him atop of it that would be the envy of North Korea.

He was born on Christmas day, which according to Greek legend makes him a child of the Killikantzaros, a malevolent goblin whose disciples chop away at the Tree of the World to bring it down and therefore bring about the fall of the Earth as well. Thinking about what he’s doing to Canada, and especially Alberta, that’s probably not too far off the mark.

A little bit of time researching him does underline the argument of how injudicious political dynasties actually are. They suffer the same fundamental problem as monarchies in that as much as daddy might have been a good king, the first child inheriting the throne from him rarely is. Any comparison between his dad, the former Canadian premier Pierre Trudeau, and himself illustrates the point.

Daddy had a glittering collection of academic scalps, attending the University of Monreal, Harvard University, Institut d’études politiques de Paris and the London School of Economics. He even did some time in the army, but there was a hint of his future slipperiness in him artfully dodging out of any active service in WWII because of what he termed his deep political reservations about how les Québécoise were being treated by the great powers, or in other words just avoiding the possibility of getting his ass shot off like the other plucky Canadians in places like Normandy, Monte Cassino and Caen …

In an effort not to strain what was rightly perceived as his limited understanding of anything, Sonny Boy Justin was dispatched to the local polytechnic to study engineering, but quit after a year. Two years later after a period licking his wounds shuttered away in his bedroom and not being understood, he embarked on something simpler, namely an MA in Environmental Geography but that one didn’t make a year either, so it was once again back to a bit more of the wound licking, shuttered away in his bedroom, not being understood etc etc.

After a period of deep thought and sheer brutal forehead wrinkling analysis, the problem appeared to be those book things you were actually expected to read, so a career without them seemed like a good idea.

Another two years later a very unpromising acting career fell off the cliff of indifference by both audiences and his fellow thesps and after yet another two years of the usual lolling around in his bedroom, punctuated by a spot of instructing and teaching which guess what, didn’t last, he finally entered politics courtesy of his late father’s coat tails and a safe seat, which not even he could cock up.

What followed was a meteoric rise through some of the most arduous, vital but commonly looked down upon quasi-ministerial posts all of which began with the title of “Critic of”. In his time making his political bones, he was variously Critic of Youth, Multiculturalism, Citizenship, Immigration, Secondary Education (with his record?) and finally ended his long run of criticisms by criticising Youth and Amateur sport. Don’t laugh please, someone has to fill those kind of God awful bloody posts in even a play government.

Having put him to the test, nay several, and him being found wanting in most of them, it was decided by that exhaustive process of elimination that his true talent therefore lay in being leader of the party and perhaps one day the leader of Canada.

Given that golden boy record and the media with their love of the Trudeau dynasty and their mutual hatred of Alberta, they made him supreme dictator of the Liberal party from which he’s never managed to look forward. It was the Peter Principle in action, but unfortunately with an overshoot upwards by several rungs of the slippery ladder.

By the way, my best advice to anyone living in Alberta would be to move to Quebec, affect an outrageous Pepé le Pew accent and develop a taste for cuisses de grenouille. You’re up against that ingrained Gallic sense of inferiority towards English-speaking culture and the consequent antipathy so many ethnic French people feel against it.

It’s very easy and a habitual put down to call someone you don’t like stupid, but in his case it’s actually clinically true. He also has that chronic left-winger view of the world as being populated by good people and bad people, but in his case with the latter mainly consisting of those his charm bounces off.

Most of them outgrow it to various extents, but that involves a certain perceptiveness sonny boy Justin doesn’t possess, and that simplicity of outlook will come back to hurt him again and again as it did with his remarks on the death of Fidel Castro.

Castro, a brutal tyrant whichever way you look at him, was the recipient of a gushing eulogy by Trudeau, which caused jaws to drop around the world, except in the delusional bubble of the extreme loony left. How out of touch can a PM be with the current Zeitgeist? Perhaps the internet conspiracy theory of Castro being his dad was correct. After all, Castro shagged everything in sight and Justin’s mum had a reputation of being quite a sporty gal herself.

It’d be hard to take that seriously but you never know. On one occasion a famous ballerina proposed to George Bernard Shaw, saying with her looks and his brains they’d make a superior child. He replied that with his luck, the poor child would probably inherit his looks and her brains. That might go some way towards explaining Justin.

That tendency to be accident prone without quite realising it is becoming apparent with those he chooses to emulate. For some reason, he appears to be modelling his premiership on the Clinton template without realising just how toxic that brand has become. For instance his dealings with the Pierre Trudeau Foundation are beginning to look a lot like the money laundering operation currently at work in the Clinton Foundation.

Not only has the government been making donations to it since he became PM, but people attending its $1500 a plate fund-raisers and donating to the foundation afterwards, have connections to various questionable organisations such as the Chinese Communist Party, whose abuses of human rights he refused to condemn on a visit to China using the words “… Canada is not immune to criticisms on human rights, either.” Do I smell the whiff of pay to play?

The thing about losers, and be in no doubt Trudeau is a loser, is that it becomes a lifelong habit. They launch into grand but improbable enterprises sweeping their admirers along with them using a mixture of charm and enthusiasm, but after they’ve failed to overcome the problems that will inevitably come at them, they give up after a year or two, blaming everyone but themselves and already I can see that process at work in him and in Canada’s love affair with the idea of a Justin Trudeau.

One of the multitude of jobs he gave up on was teaching ballet. As time passes and his media overexposure continues, Canada will run foul of Oscar Wilde’s dictum about never sitting too close to the stage when you visit the ballet; you can smell the sweat coming off the ballerinas.

I think in darling Justin’s case, the great Canadian public are starting to sniff out a certain stench from him which all the Eau de Cologne sprayed on him in billowing clouds by the home-grown legacy media can’t mask. Or should that be musk, because some enterprising Canuck is attempting to disprove the old saying that you can’t fight the market by selling Trudeau scented candles. To quote from the marketing blurb – “the prime minister’s mysterious musk.”

Mysterious indeed. God help Canada.

This time last year I wrote of Barack Obama when he’d just carried off that year’s Pratty, “I suspect Barry’s contribution to history will be ushering in the era of President Trump”. A few years and several disasters down the line, I rather suspect someone will be writing the equivalent about Justin Trudeau.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

The Pratties 2016 – The race is on!

Climate Prat of 2015 – We have a winnah!

Climate Prat of 2014 – We have a winnah!

Climate Prat of 2013 – we have a winnah!

Climate Prat of 2012 – we have a winnah!

Description of a climate prat.

Click for a list of other articles.