Biden Must Go; Trudeau & the Pandemic Are Here to Stay; and Math Will Beat the Great Reset
Biden Must Go; Trudeau & the Pandemic Are Here to Stay; and Math Will Beat the Great Reset
Also: Spiders, Environmentalists, and the SEC. Oh, my!
In 2014, former secretary of defense Robert Gates observed that Joe Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Biden’s foreign policy instincts have not improved in the years since that was written, and that, coupled with his long-standing lack of rhetorical discipline — aggravated by his advancing age — is beginning to get us in trouble.
Michael Walsh’s editor’s column this week discusses how extremely dangerous it is to have Biden occupying the White House as his administration stumbles towards war with a nuclear powered Russia.
No Country for Old Men
The President of the United States, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., who is 79 years old and suffering from senile dementia at the end of a long life of bullying, lying, boasting, conniving, grifting, grafting, and living off the public tit to an extent indecent even by Washington standards, declared war on Russia on Friday. In the course of a typically blustering, hectoring speech, the senescent Biden went off script and interpolated the following peroration: "My God, this man cannot remain in power."
To which the only proper response is: "My God, this man cannot remain in the Oval Office." Joe Biden needs to be removed from the White House as soon as possible, before his failing mind, his erratic behavior, and his proven lack of character get us all killed. The question is, is there enough political will in the capital to do what needs to be done?
Biden's blunder was immediately walked back by the few adults left in the room, called a "gaffe," or—worse—actually defended by the neocons and other leftists as truth-telling on a heroic scale, evocative of Ronald Reagan's 1987 "tear down this wall" speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, which two years later actually did result in the Wall coming down. But his rash words continue to ring, now matter how swiftly his handlers and apologists and even Biden himself try to make us disbelieve our own lying ears:
Mush-mouthed as usual, and delivered with all the Scrantonian sincerity of one of his typical campaign speeches, Biden's address was not only the low-water mark of his presidency so far, but a nadir in the history of the United States and its practice of diplomacy.
David Solway made an unsettling prediction for us about the supposed “emergency measures” initiated to deal with Covid 19:
The Pandemic State Is Here to Stay
The governing elect and their enablers—the medical colleges and the media—still have the support of a substantial portion of the public: the elite classes and the financially insulated on the one hand, the parasitical, financially-recipient classes on the other. Their authoritarian grip on power will be hard to dislodge. Even after the pandemic is officially declared over, the public will remain fearful and politically tenderized. Irrational attitudes fostered by the authorities will persist. Millions will continue wearing masks for years to come…. Meanwhile, the official and media narrative, that pervasive machinery of lies, will credit the mask/lockdown/vaccination program for having defeated the pandemic when it was the very mandate policy itself that caused incalculable harm and prolonged the disaster.
In many countries a majority of citizens obligingly fall for the great swindle. In his seminal essay Discours de la servitude volontaire, generally rendered in English as The Politics of Obedience, the 16th-century political philosopher Étienne de la Boétie cogently analysed the dynamic in play. “What strange affair is this?” he asks. “To see a vast multitude of people not merely obeying, but welcoming servility… deprived of the bulk of their revenues, their fields plundered, their dwellings robbed?”
His basic insight is that despotism owes its hegemony primarily to popular acceptance. There seems to be no help for it, except in those rare historical cases where a “spirited people” rises up against their ruthless leaders and expels “the villainous dross of the nation,” thus refusing “to give consent to their own woe.” Regrettably, in most Western nations today, there are simply not enough Trucker Convoys intent on restoring their rights and freedoms, too many people who give consent to their own servitude, too many non-truckers on the road to serfdom.
The “pandemic state” is here to stay for the indefinite future, though in different manifestations. Political authority has devolved into one or another form of totalitarian governance, characterized by disparate structures of repression as they arise across the political spectrum. In his must-read Scanned: Why Vaccine Passports and Digital IDs Will Mean the End of Privacy and Personal Freedom, Nick Corbishley exposes the technology of population control, showing that a return to normality is a mere fantasy.
No new virus need emerge. Pandemic psychology controls the public mind and pandemic policy has prepared the way for a new political order—Schwab’s “global strategic framework of governance,” that is, a fascist regime in all but name. The norms and customs we took for granted will not return. Metaphorically, it is as if someone who has been severely wounded or disfigured must still bear the scars and impediments of his trauma. The handicap is here to stay.
Peter Smith feels for anyone who has to actually read the recently released 2022 IPCC climate change report, even if they only have to read the condensed Summary for Policymakers. Of course, we should have even more pity for ourselves, who will have to suffer through the policies of those who read that document.
Still, Smith sees a glimmer of hope, namely economics and its handmaiden, cold, hard arithmetic.
Supply and Demand Will Undo the Great (Climate) Reset
I’m treasurer of my local church and banked the cash offertories the other day. You’re $21 short, the teller said. Sure enough, I’d forgotten the loose change in my pocket which added up to exactly $21. Arithmetic can’t be fooled around with. Indigenous, feminist, transgender arithmetic. You name it, two plus two is still four. Those of the green Left must hate it. Science, on the other hand, is embraceable. It is manipulable.
Whether it’s Covid or "climate change," the science can be exactly what they choose it to be. Their science becomes the science. Everything else is unscientific; the province of cranks.
Debauchment of the methodology of science? Sure. But the contestability of science makes it hard to disprove their science. In other words, unlike arithmetic, while there might be a right answer, it’s darned hard to pin it down….
Thankfully, it’s not the end of the story. Enter economics. Economics is termed one of the soft sciences compared with the hard sciences of physics and chemistry and the like. It’s not so soft. At least one of its central underpinnings isn’t. To wit, supply and demand. Let’s put aside the so-called science of "climate change." Economics has nothing to say about it. However, it has everything to say about the supposed solutions. And it has the exactitude of arithmetic; and applies universally under whatever political regime you care to envisage.
Supply and demand govern the practical world. We experienced that in the supply-chain issues which saw prices rising and supermarket shelves emptied. And we see it when obstacles are put in the way of developing the West’s oil and gas supply; when Russian oil and gas is cut off or, these days, when the wind doesn’t blow.
In the capitalist world prices brings supply and demand into balance. In the communist world corruption, special favours, rationing and the black market do the job; though much less beneficially. But the job is done. It’s part of human nature to abhor unrequited demand and junk excess supply….
The Great Reset guys would like to change the nature of men and women to square the circle. Make us (not them, mind you) more satisfied with less, in the cause of the “common good.” Listen in on their ideal post-Great-Reset conversation:
“Have to freeze tonight, Edith,” her husband explained resignedly, “the wind’s dropped again.”
“It’s all for the common good Archie, Herr Schwab says so,” Edith replied submissively, as she shivered under layers of blankets.
Good luck bringing that about. My conclusion. Supply and demand will undo the Great (climate) Reset.
Here’s Clarice Feldman examining the newly approved SEC rules whose object is to continue to strangle investment in the resource sector. Feldman points out how these rules double as a job creation program for environmental activists and their allies.
Securities and Exchange Commission Tackles 'Climate Change'
On March 21, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), by a 3-1 majority (the lone Republican Hester Pierce voting against the proposal), drafted rules that will further burden all American energy production and thus hamper economic growth. The proposal would require listed companies to disclose to investors how their future value might be impacted by climate impacts or reduced demand for fossil fuels. Specifically, they must disclose:
The "carbon footprint" of its operations.
How much energy the company uses.
If the company is a large one, the emissions from its supply chain and customers.
Of course, for fossil fuel companies customers account for the majority of the emissions it must disclose. The whole point of a SEC-mandated disclosure is to give investors relevant information about the company in order to make wiser investment choices. Not specified in this category is how much of these emissions are “material” to its investors, which you can be certain will be a topic of substantial litigation.
The draft rules provide a backdoor for climate activists “to use a ‘layer of bureaucracy to enact their radical agenda that failed to get approved by Congress.” The rules would increase job opportunities and benefits for anti-corporate, anti-energy non-governmental agencies, a plethora of “climate certification consultants," accountants, auditing firms, and lawyers. The remoras attached to the bureaucracy—parasites who constitute no small part of the present administration’s remaining backers—are the winners if this goes into affect….
Likely objections include that it exceeds the SEC’s legal mission; and that it requires companies to disclose information that's immaterial to investors and therefore violates the Supreme Court’s rulings that the SEC cannot require disclosures that are not material to investors.
Certainly, the objections will also include a claim of impossibility—that is, without an agreed method for calculating the emissions from its supply chain and customers, compliance would be costly and subject the companies to litigation from claimants arguing the disclosure was inaccurate. The requirement that businesses must disclose even those "greenhouse gas" emissions that are produced indirectly by their operations illustrates how burdensome and preposterous this is—how to document company transportation, the vehicles used to transport what they produce and even employee business travel?
In the face of galloping inflation and rapidly rising energy costs, this proposal should be a non-starter in a rational world. It’s flatly ridiculous. Add to the mix of considerations, the fact that the suicidal energy policies of the Europeans and the Biden administration have impoverished their citizens, created supply shortages of everything including medicines and food, and increased the political power of Russia, and you are hard-pressed to justify this intrusive, costly bureaucratic overreach.
Unless of course, you are an environmental activist whose litigation teams are hell bent on slaying the sky dragon presently known as “climate change," or a partner in an auditing firm that that will be in high demand to fact-check these disclosures lest companies run afoul of fraud laws. When companies prepare disclosures to comply with SEC regulations, third parties must be engaged to check it, and the Big Four accounting firms may not be in the best position to audit these climate audits, so voila! A new industry—climate consultants—will be in the money.
Tom Finnerty has a report on the new ‘Don’t-Call-it-a-Coalition’ agreement between Justin Trudeau’s governing Liberal Party of Canada and Jagmeet Singh’s far-left New Democratic Party, which will keep Trudeau’s minority government in power, no matter how unpopular it gets, until he is constitutionally obligated to call an election.
Trudeau Good to Go Until 2025
The deal -- which they're calling a "confidence and supply agreement" -- would see the N.D.P. support the government on every potential confidence vote for the next four years. In exchange, Trudeau's Liberals would embrace policy priorities championed by the N.D.P. in last fall's election, including free dental care for Canadians who make less than $90,000 per year; a "pharmacare" program, which would develop a list of "essential medicines" to be paid for with tax dollars; lengthening the period of time for voting in federal elections to three days; and anti-fossil fuel initiatives, the details of which are not yet clear.
The Liberals under Trudeau have gone into the past two Canadian elections expecting an outright majority, and both times they were disappointed. In each instance, they won only a minority of seats while also losing the popular vote to the Conservatives, a fact that has no technical significance, but which illustrates Trudeau's tenuous grasp on power, especially in the Westminster system where a government can theoretically fall at any time. This deal is meant to combat that that instability, putting the Liberals comfortably over the majority threshold on the most important questions and ensuring that the Conservatives won't be able to effect an early election.
Finnerty also looked into Trudeau’s embarrassing appearance before the E.U. parliament last week, which saw him lambasted for attempting to wax poetical about democracy while "persecuting and criminalizing his own citizens as terrorists" during the recent Freedom Convoy protests.
'A Disgrace for Any Democracy'
Rich Trzupek thinks that the celebrity climate crowd’s ‘All or Nothing’ approach to combatting climate change is a sign that they don’t really believe their own rhetoric. If, for instance, they really believed that we must drastically reduce carbon emissions, why employ their capital promoting natural-gas fired, combined-cycle power plants?
Practical Solutions to Pretend Problems
We're awash in clean-burning natural gas reserves. Combined-cycle is, by far, the most efficient way to burn it. It’s so efficient that the Sierra Club used to promote use of this technology back in the nineties, before they went off the deep end. Having trashed coal, they now also demonize natural gas, the fuel on which combined-cycle depends and which they used to champion.
And finally, our very own acclimatised beauty, Jenny Kennedy, finds herself at war with jumping spiders and — worse — environmental activists.
Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Beetling
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading, and keep an eye on The Pipeline.