Dr. Jill; President Joe; Australian Acronyms; and Environmentalist Dinos

Jul 18, 2022

In his editor’s column this week, Michael Walsh discusses the circumstances which led to Joe Biden — he of the “empty suit and the empty head” — becoming president of these United States.

'End of Quote. Repeat the Line'

In 2016, the only Democrat candidate Donald Trump could possibly have defeated was Hillary Clinton. And the only Republican candidate she could have lost to was Donald Trump. In 2020, Joe Biden was able to defeat Trump because Trump was so busily engaged in the process of skunking himself that he barely took notice of Biden's candidacy. So much for the old saying that you can't beat something with nothing: the cipher Biden, a professional nonentity for exactly half a century, was a ballot placeholder who didn't bother to campaign because that would have taken the focus off Trump, which is exactly where the Democrats wanted and needed it to be. Any other candidate would have been a distraction.

The also-rans—Warren, Marge Gunderson (excuse me! Amy Klobochar!), Li'l Pete—were relatively fresh faces on the national scene. Biden's only serious rival, Bernie Sanders, was too radical for the party bosses to seriously contemplate, even though their hearts were with him. But Joe from Scranton was that old well-sprung sofa that's occupied the same place in your grandparents' living room for decades because no one could be bothered to throw it out or replace it. On such a delicate fulcrum of paralysis oftentimes teeters the fate of nations.

Now, however, the focus is on Biden. The empty suit and the empty head that currently masquerade as the president of the United States is now subject to the one thing he never was during his undistinguished, comically malevolent, supererogatory, opportunistic career in the Senate: scrutiny. As Buster Scruggs says in the Coen brothers' The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) after observing the freshly drilled bullet hole in his white hat, courtesy of a faster shootist, "Well, that ain't good."

Scrutiny is the one thing Biden can't handle, in part because he's never been held responsible for anything in his life. He's dined out for 50 years on the false story that a drunk driver killed his wife and baby daughter just after his first election to the Senate in tiny, corrupt Delaware—when in fact the driver of the tractor-trailer was not drunk and was never charged, and Neilia Biden's car had prematurely entered his right of way at an intersection. He wallows in the death of his son, Beau, and waves the bloody shirt every change he gets, and consistently defends his dirtbag son, Hunter, as "the smartest guy I know" (which, frighteningly, just might be true.) Don't even ask about his daughter, Ashley, or the rest of the family….

Even though he's now president—and he is; the Democrats stole the 2020 election fair and square—Biden still acts like he's a senator. Indeed, in some of his campaign speeches, the senile figurehead even rote-repeated that he was running for the United States Senate.

But rote is all you have left when your brain has turned to mush. After a lifetime of bullying, bragging, lying, threatening, embellishing, finger-pointing, chest-bumping, insulting, and outright plagiarizing, Sundown Joe has been reduced to his essence, which is nothing. Like a ham actor in his dotage, reduced to doing dinner theater in Paducah, he relies on the accumulated tics and strategems of a lifetime of performing a script others have written for him.

During a recent speech calumniating the Supreme Court's rational and measured rejection of Roe v. Wade—a legal enormity exactly contemporaneous with Biden's own political career, which is probably one of the reasons he's so attached to it—Joe just barreled through his staff-provided boilerplate, unconscious of what he was saying, and causing some to suspect he even included a stage direction:

Biden's defenders immediately pointed out, correctly, that "end of quote" was in fact part of the speech, and that what sounds like him saying "repeat the line" may well have been "let me repeat the line," rendered unintelligible by Scranton Joe's habitually mush-mouthed eastern Pennsylvania accent, in which the speaker swallows half the words before spitting out the rest. (The claim that Biden once had a "stutter" or a "speech impediment," as his partisans claim, is absurd to anyone who's been trapped on the same planet with him for a lifetime, as I have. First I ever heard of it was just a couple of years ago, as the media began making excuses for his clearly accelerating dementia.) The point is: when the guy is this far gone, how can you tell?

Still, "repeat the line" makes an apt epitaph for the coming end of the Biden administration, since repeating the [party] line is all Joe Biden has ever done. For nearly his entire career, this human weathervane has understood that words are only a means to end—his re-election—and he treats them accordingly. As a senator he could say anything that wandered, or was implanted, into his empty head. As Obama's vice president, all he had to do was occasionally show up and take an airplane ride to somewhere. Like Fredo Corleone, he's stupid and he knows it, but demands that others deem him smart. Hey, if he's so dumb how come he's president?

We know how. In the 2020 duel between two aging gunslingers, one of them couldn't shoot straight, and the other could only shoot himself in the foot. The first debate was a disaster for Trump; all Biden had to do was sit back, smirk, and catcall, something he can do even as a somnambulist. The second one was canceled due to Trump's Covid. And the third was a draw, since both mouths had their microphones muted when the other guy was talking. With all the election "fortifications" in place, instituted right under the Trump administration's noses, the result was in retrospect a foregone conclusion, the flip side of 2016: win in the Electoral College by narrow margins in six states, lose by narrow margins in the same six states.

Well, that ain't good.

This past week The Pipeline published the fourth excerpted essay from our new book, Against the Great Reset: 18 Theses Contra the New World Order. The book will be published on October 18 by Bombardier Books and distributed by Simon and Schuster. It is now available now for pre-order at the links above.

EXCERPT FROM "SOVEREIGNTY AND THE NATION-STATE," BY ROGER KIMBALL

I think I know man, but as for men, I know them not.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau

In a memorable passage at the beginning of The Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant evokes a soaring dove that, “cleaving the air in her free flight,” feels the resistance of the wind and imagines that its flight “would be easier still in empty space.” A fond thought, of course, since absent that aeolian pressure, the dove would simply plummet to the ground.

How regularly the friction of reality works that way: making possible our endeavors even as it circumscribes and limits their extent. And how often, like Kant’s dove, we are tempted to imagine that our freedoms would be grander and more extravagant absent the countervailing forces that make them possible.

Such fantasies are as perennial as they are vain. They insinuate themselves everywhere in the economy of human desire, not least in our political arrangements. Noticing the imperfection of our societies, we may be tempted into thinking that the problem is with the limiting structures we have inherited. If only we could dispense with them, we might imagine, beating our wings, how much better things might be.

What a cunning, devilish word: “might.” For here as elsewhere, possibility is cheap. Scrap our current political accommodations and things might be better. Then again, they might be a whole lot worse. Vide the host of tyrannies inspired by that disciple of airy possibility, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “Man was born free,” he declaimed, “but is everywhere in chains”: two startling untruths in a single famous utterance. Rousseau was keen on “forcing men to be free,” but we had to wait until his followers Robespierre and Saint-Just to discover that freedom in this sense is often indistinguishable from what Robespierre chillingly called “virtue and its emanation, terror.” Something similar can be said about Karl Marx, that other acolyte of possibility. How much misery have his theories underwritten, promising paradise but delivering tyranny, oppression, poverty, and death?

It wasn’t so long ago that I had hopes that the Marxist-socialist rot—outside the insulated purlieus of humanities departments at Western universities, anyway—was on the fast track to oblivion. Has any “philosophy” ever been so graphically refuted by events (or the number of corpses it created)?

Maybe not, but refutation, like reason, plays a much more modest role in human affairs than we might imagine. In fact, the socialist-inspired utopian chorus is alive and well, playing to full houses at an antidemocratic redoubt near you. Consider the apparently unkillable dream of “world government.” It is as fatuous now as it was when H. G. Wells infused it with literary drama toward the beginning of the twentieth century.

All human children need to learn to walk by themselves; so, it seems, every generation needs to wean itself from the blandishments of various utopian schemes. In 2005, the political philosopher Jeremy Rabkin published a fine book called Law Without Nations? Why Constitutional Government Requires Sovereign States. Rabkin ably fleshes out the promise of his subtitle, but it would be folly to think this labor will not have to be repeated. The temptation to exchange hard-won democratic freedom for the swaddling comfort of one or another central planning body is as inextinguishable as it is dangerous. As Ronald Reagan memorably put it,

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

The late English philosopher Roger Scruton made the connection between this insight and the bulwark provided by the nation-state. “Democracies,” he wrote, “owe their existence to national loyalties—the loyalties that are supposedly shared by government and opposition.” Confusing national loyalty with nationalism, many utopians argue that the former is a threat to peace. After all, wasn’t it national loyalty that sparked two world wars? No, it was that perverted offspring, nationalism, which at great cost was defeated only by the successful mobilization of national loyalty. Scruton quotes G. K. Chesterton on this point: to condemn patriotism because people go to war for patriotic reasons is like condemning love because some loves lead to murder.

It is one of the great mysteries—or perhaps I should say it is one of the reliable reminders of human imperfection—that higher education often fosters a particular form of political stupidity. Scruton anatomizes that stupidity, noting “the educated derision that has been directed at our national loyalty by those whose freedom to criticize would have been extinguished years ago, had the English not been prepared to die for their country.” This peculiar mental deformation, Scruton observes, involves “the repudiation of inheritance and home.” It is a stage, he writes,

through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which intellectuals tend to become arrested. As George Orwell pointed out, intellectuals on the Left are especially prone to it, and this has often made them willing agents of foreign powers. The Cambridge spies [Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, and others] offer a telling illustration of what [this tendency] has meant for our country.

It is also telling that this déformation professionelle of intellectuals encourages them to repudiate patriotism as an atavistic passion and favor transnational institutions over national governments, rule by committee or the courts over democratic rule. Rabkin reminds us of the naïveté—what others have called the “idealism”—that this preference requires. In order to believe that international bodies will protect human rights, for example, you would have to believe

that governments readily cooperate with other governments on common projects, even when such cooperation promises no direct exchange of benefits to each side. In the end, you must believe that human beings cooperate easily and naturally without much constraint—without much actual enforcement, hence without much need for force.
To believe this you must believe that almost all human beings are well-meaning, even to strangers. And you must believe that human beings have no very serious disagreements on fundamental matters.

The persistence of such beliefs is no guide to their cogency or truth. What another Jeremy, Jeremy Bentham, long ago called “nonsense on stilts” presents a spectacle that is perhaps unsteady but nonetheless mesmerizing. And when it comes to the erosion of the nation-state and its gradual replacement by unaccountable, transnational entities such as the E.U., the U.N., or the so-called “World Court,” the results are ominous.

The political tendency of such institutions was brilliantly captured by John Fonte’s coinage “transnational progressivism.” As Fonte explains in his book Sovereignty or Submission: Will Americans Rule Themselves or Be Ruled by Others? (2011), “transnational progressivism” describes the antinationalist impulse that seeks to transfer political power and decision-making “from democratic nations to supranational authorities and institutions” such as the European Union, the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and kindred organizations (“judges from the European Court of Human Rights and the International Criminal Court; career officials in the U.S. State Department, the British Foreign Office, and the German Foreign Ministry; American CEOs of major global corporations; NGOs such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Greenpeace”; and so on and so forth).

A sterling contemporary example is the Great Reset recently proposed by the Davos-based WEF, which seeks “to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions.” Exploiting the panic caused by the Covid-19 crisis, the WEF demands that “every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed” in its socialist scheme to bring about a “Great Reset of capitalism.”

The true political ends of such elite enterprises are generally swaddled in emollient rhetoric about freedom and democracy. Thus the PR surrounding the WEF’s Great Reset is festooned with talk of “stakeholder capitalism,” “equality,” “sustainability,” and other items in the lexicon of socialistically oriented political obfuscation.

The real agenda, however, is revealed in its call for “changes,” i.e., increases in taxes on wealth, a turn away from reliance on fossil fuels, and “building ‘green’ urban infrastructure and creating incentives for industries to improve their track record on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics.” Stepping back, John Fonte uncovered some revelatory gems that speak candidly about what’s really at stake. For example, Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution put it with all possible clarity when he declared in 2008 that the “United States…should not oppose, but welcome a world of pooled and diminished national sovereignty” (my emphasis). “Pooled and diminished national sovereignty.” At least we know where we stand.

The question of sovereignty—of who governs—is at the center of all contemporary populist initiatives. It has been posed with increasing urgency as the bureaucratic burden of what has been called the “deep state” or administrative state has weighed more and more forcefully upon the political and social life of Western democracies.

Joan Sammon weighed in on the sleight-of-hand the Bide Administration is engaged in on newly announced sales for oil & gas leases.

Biden's New Energy Leases Less Than They Appear

Last week the Biden administration took steps to open public land to oil and gas development in a plan released by the Department of Interior (DOI). The proposal offers additional offshore leases for oil and gas drilling rights that would open parts of the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Cook Inlet to leasing through 2028. While already active areas of drilling with the requisite infrastructure are currently in place, any new Gulf or Cook Inlet leases merely represent potential future supply while doing nothing to change the supply constraints that currently burden the market. The department included a range of options for consideration in the final plan, including not opening any areas to leasing at all. They additionally included an extensive comment period, an important opening for those who will inevitably weigh in.

Since this is the third time since November that the Biden administration has announced the sale of new oil and gas leases, the oil and gas industry has appropriately low expectations about the administration’s leadership in the face of genuine economic hardship being borne by the American people. The administration took the action not because of some ideological change of heart, but because the law, known as the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act requires that a plan for new oil and gas leases in federal waters be updated every five years. The agency’s response to its own proposal is the dog whistle for the lawsuits that will inevitably ensue from the activist community. It assures the American people that this has nothing to do with improved oil and gas policy and everything to do with politics.

“From Day 1, President Biden and I have made clear our commitment to transition to a clean energy economy,” said Deb Haaland, the Interior secretary, in a statement. “Today, we put forward an opportunity for the American people to consider and provide input on the future of offshore oil and gas leasing. The time for the public to weigh in on our future is now.”

So while at first glance, last week’s proposal seemed to run afoul of President Biden’s own promise to, “…end oil and gas.” A closer look at the administration’s policy reveals that nothing has changed in either its stated intention or its ongoing efforts to destroy the domestic oil and gas industry. But under mounting pressure from high gas prices that the administration’s own policies have created, the president has to appear to be doing something.

With the release of this proposal, the administration believes it has found a clever path that President Biden can claim offers producers the ability to produce oil and gas if they want to, while ensuring years of legal challenges by the activists that will render the lease policy ineffective at increasing production. The effort is cynical, does nothing substantive to solve the problem of limited supply and is purely political. It's also emblematic of most Biden-era policies, giving an institutional middle finger to the American people, while genuflecting to the most radical, socialist green activists, many of whom are being funded by the internationally renowned, extreme left organization known as the World Economic Forum (WEF).

Peter Smith informed us of Australia’s newest acronym.

In Oz, No REST for the Greenies

An advantage of acronyms is that they slide off the tongue. So it is that a new slick acronym has been introduce into Australia’s climate debate by Zali Steggall. Namely, REST; standing for "renewal energy storage target." This obviously complements the acronym RET, standing for renewable energy target. Incidentally, for the avoidance of doubt, RET is a word.

Ms Stegall is notable for depriving former prime minister Tony Abbott of his seat in the 2019 federal election. She’s a pathbreaker for six Stegall lookalikes (the so-called Teals) who defeated their putative right-of-centre opponents in well-heeled electorates in this year’s federal election. All ran, almost entirely, on the single policy of being greener than mere green; of proposing impossible-to-achieve renewable energy targets. I dare say they’ll all adopt REST as part of their sloganeering.

'REST is a crucial piece in Australia’s energy transition puzzle,' argues Steggall. Puzzle is a well-chosen word. Australia’s transition to intermittent, unreliable and costly energy from abundant coal and natural gas is a great puzzle. Matched by a mind-bending solution. The Australian market Operator (AEMO) issued its '2022 Integrated System Plan' on 30 June. The objective of the plan is to engineer “a true transformation of the NEM [National Electricity Market] from fossil fuels to firmed renewables.”

And what will the transformed electricity market look like? Far-flung wind and solar farms, connected to the grid by 10,000 kilometres of new transmission lines; pumped hydro and plain old hydro; super batteries; gas peeking stations; hydrogen, generated by electrolysis, fed by desalination plants, converted into ammonia for safer transport; so-called virtual power plants (see below); a nationwide network of charge points for EVs; and, lest we forget, demand management (aka, rationing).

I will have missed something. Doesn’t matter. I’m not alone in Oz in seeing it as a dead ringer for the instantaneously-ridiculed Knowledge Nation, ex-quiz champion and former science minister Barry Jones drew up on a whiteboard for the Australian Labor Party in 2001. Irreverently called ‘spaghetti and meatballs’ and, rather more cleverly, ‘noodle nation’; its shelf-life expired within the blink of an eye. If only that were predictive of the fate of the new-beaut electrical system that they (renewable-energy fantasists) intend foisting on the Australia population.

Storage, hence REST, is the last piece in the puzzle for fantasists. It completes the renewable-energy utopia in their delusional minds. But storage is a stock. Stocks run down. The supply of electricity is a continuous flow. Lapses require a compensating flow; for however long. Now those in the front line of keeping the lights on (prominently AEMO) are not complete dimwits. So, it’s not storage but firming which takes centre stage in bridging lapses. Words are important. Firming is a flow of power.

What can provide a flow of power for the extended periods when renewable energy is MIA? Not batteries, however super. The Australian Energy Council provided an unusually factual take on Victoria’s big battery (VBB). A battery twice the size again of the now doubled, much-vaunted, battery installed in Hornsdale in South Australia, courtesy of Elon Musk.

The VBB will not store huge quantities of surplus energy generated by renewables on sunny,windy days, and release this back into the grid for days and days when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Its energy storage capacity is limited to at most a few hours’ worth of charging and release. Claims that such batteries will magically solve all the challenges of renewable generation variability and set us on a path to 100 per cent renewables tomorrow totally misconstrue the real roles that grid-scale batteries can effectively play.

Never mind, there’s always pumped hydro and virtual power plants to fill the breach. And do I have the Sydney Harbour bridge to sell you.

Lisa Schiffren wrote about the casual ways that environmentalist propaganda intrudes on our lives and

There's No Escape from 'Climate Change'

Sometimes random events conspire to drive home unpleasant realities. "Climate change," as this website argues daily, is a fundamentally political mantra used by the globalists to usurp world economies, and direct vast amounts of economic activity toward socialist ends, including The Great Reset. It is a plot. It is a coordinated effort, to destroy vibrant capitalism, which has created the highest standard of living for the most people in history. This is true even during unpleasantly hot summers or cold winters.

When an idea is based on a lie, it is hard to imagine it winning an essential, worldwide political debate. But in the past few weeks I’ve had three encounters with businesses that have brought home the raw power of the "climate change" lobby, raising harsh questions about whether it can be defeated.

Over July 4th weekend I went to a big chain movie theater in ex-urban Connecticut, to see Top Gun: Maverick, a fundamentally conservative movie about flying planes very fast, which uses up a lot of fuel, not that that’s the point. The audience was older and, presumably, mostly Republican. After the endless coming attractions, a pretty clever commercial played. A CGI dinosaur spoke to a U.N.-like body about climate change. He pointed out that it was killing our planet. And yet we subsidize fossil fuels, which, the velociraptor noted, is like him subsidizing an asteroid. This was brought to us by United Nations Development Program, and voiced by actor Jack Black.

Commercial American movies have not heretofore included such blatant political propaganda pieces. It was presented no differently than the usual ads for Coke and popcorn, which is horrifying. It was well done enough to have an impact on a younger, or apolitical, audience. Is this suasion a condition of post-pandemic entertainment?

David Solway contributed a piece on our ongoing, culture-wide infantilization.

Life Among the Toddlers

We see the PsyOps strategy, or manipulative behavioral modification, at work in all the ordinary walks of daily life, diluting and even eliminating the virtues of independent thinking, self-reliance and the faculty of mature consideration. Our political masters, corporate hegemons and cultural soothsayers are intent on population control, under the cloak of ensuring our security. Everything now is about safety, not choice and reason, resulting in a lack of personal initiative, an attitude of submission, fear of risk and renunciation of self.

In short, we have become imbeciles—the word itself derives from the Latin for “weak, feeble,” like children who need to be pampered, monitored, taken by the hand, told what to do and kept obedient and “safe.” To adapt a metaphor from Theodore Dalrymple, it is as if we spend our lives demanding safety certificates from bus drivers before boarding. Examples abound in every domain of life.

Thus, a timorous and fearful public could be easily spooked by the Covid scam, including the universal hype about the effectiveness of the vaccines and boosters. Anyone who has been led to believe that a mask will stop a Covid particle, or that a face shield or plexiglass barrier will prevent an ambulatory virion from taking a detour to mouth and nose, is living in a fantasy world, like a child who believes a teddy bear is a talisman against the dark.

Untold millions of gullible grown-ups raced to get their improperly tested, experimental and likely harmful lipid jabs, swallowing whole the media and government line without performing their due diligence. A population so tamely led by the nasopharyngeals, so readily susceptible as children are to group persuasion, was easy picking for the WHO, the WHA, and the Davos bunch in cahoots with compliant medical regimes and unethical or authoritarian governments.

But the Covid panic is only the most glaring contemporary instance of galloping puerility. Everywhere we look we see examples, great and small, of childish obeisance to the rule of dumbing-down, the real pandemic of fright. Take the weather. If we have a heat wave or a week of sultry temperatures, it’s now called a heat dome under which we cower in fear, as if in the shadow of a massive alien spacecraft blotting out the sky and come to wreak planetary havoc. Here in temperate Vancouver, the most recent “heat dome”—the thermometer in the lower 80s—lasted two days. If it rains a lot, we are experiencing an atmospheric river which may conceivably flood our homes. The only possible response is to seek shelter or start paddling. The terminology seals the deal.

And Tom Finnerty blogged about the strange dynamics of the electric vehicle market.

The E.V. Market: Mandated, Not Demanded

Thanks for reading, and keep a look out for upcoming pieces by Rich Trzupek and Tom Finnerty, as well as another excerpt from our new book, Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order. All this and more this week at The Pipeline!

Michael Walsh at The Pipeline

Discussion about this post