Horror After Horror
Silence of the Lambs, Putin, and the IPCC Climate Change Report
Cartoonist Roman Genn took another shot at Vladimir Putin, the Russian President’s second appearance in our Enemies of the People series.
In his Editor’s Column this week, Michael Walsh discusses Will/Lia Thomas’s ‘victory’ in the NCAA’s women's 500-yard freestyle championship and the “lunatic world” which allows or encourages such things. In the course of the discussion, he notes a cultural shift which is recent enough to have been wholly absent at the time that various works of art dealing with sexual dysmorphia were released.
Silence of the Lambs
What did Dr. Lecter say? “He’s making himself a girl suit out of real girls.”
That's from Thomas Harris's novel, The Silence of the Lambs, which concerned the hunt for a serial killer of women named Jame Gumb, aka "Buffalo Bill" because he "skins his humps." In the film, the line was changed to "he's making himself a woman suit out of real women," one of the few clunky notes in Ted Tally's otherwise superb screenplay, which won Oscars all around for him, director Jonathan Demme, actors Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster, as well as Best Picture. Hopkins got the accolades for his scenery- and face-chewing portrayal of Hannibal Lecter, but Ted Levine's embodiment of Buffalo Bill, a homosexual who'd been rejected for sex-reassignment surgery and is taking out his anger on the roomy girls of the world, is every bit as chilling. Indeed, my only other criticism of the script is the omission of Bill's dying words after he's been shot by Clarice Starling: "How does it feel to be so beautiful?"
Because that's the whole point: sufferers from sexual dysmorphia (do not say "victims") such as the fictional Mr. Gumb envy the opposite sex (there are only two; there are three "genders" but that is a grammatical term), and want to be like them. That's why he tucks his dangly bits between his thighs as he nears his apotheosis—a practice that some pediatricians are now teaching our children. This is called "guidance":
Doernbecher Children's Hospital, a pediatric teaching hospital in Portland, Oregon, has come under fire over its guidance for kids interested in changing their gender identity. The guidance teaches kids how they can hide their genitals, called “safe tucking,” discusses the use of puberty blockers, some say encouraging their use, and even refers children to “a sex-positive shop in Portland” where they can find “gender-affirming” products in addition to “sex toys, videos and more.”
Gumb's valedictory as he expires from a sucking chest wound courtesy of the FBI is the only touching moment he has. Unmanly cheaters like Will Thomas, the irrefutable evidence between their legs, simply want to take advantage of women.
John O’Sullivan reports from Budapest on the refugee crisis which has developed out of the war in Ukraine, how it should be handled, and how it has momentarily overshadowed the E.U.’s tensions with “bad boy” nations like Poland and Hungary, who have behaved with extreme generosity towards their Ukrainian neighbors:
Dealing with the Fallout from Putin's Folly
It is impossible to calculate as yet the number of Ukrainian refugees who have been displaced from their homes by the Russian invasion and forced to flee to safety. An estimated 2.7 million Ukrainians have been accepted by Poland and Hungary and now rest in those countries. Others have gone to neighboring countries or farther afield where they have homes, foreign spouses, and family connections—there are large Ukrainian diasporas across the world, especially in the so-called Anglosphere. Finally, an unknown but large number of Ukrainians have left cities like Kiev under attack to stay with family members and other places of refuge across Ukraine.
By the time the killing stops, as many as 4-5 million Ukrainians could be living outside Ukraine and as many more (out of a population of forty million) will have moved into rural areas or regions outside the war zone. This displacement of millions of people by war is a humanitarian disaster, but of what kind we don’t yet know. That will depend in part on the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian War. If it were to end quickly in a clear victory for either side, the refugees would almost all return to rebuild their homes.
Cities where they used to live are being pulverized into ruins by the Russian invader. Restoring those destroyed cities—as the Poles restored Warsaw after the Nazis leveled the city in World War Two—will be Ukraine’s first task. The country would receive a great deal of European and American help to do so.
But if the refugees are returning to a country under Russian occupation or divided between Western and Russian “sectors”—with or without a peace treaty—many will want to wage a guerrilla war to drive the invader out. That’s the kind of spirit that currently grips Ukrainians everywhere, and it’s likely to grow fiercer while the war persists.
In the first case, the refugee crisis will be short-lived. Ukrainians are not leaving their country now because they want to live somewhere else. They are leaving it to avoid being bombed or shelled by Russian soldiers. Once that’s no longer threatening them (even if Russia has stationed troops there), the great majority of them will return home—and the refugee crisis will cease to exist.
It is the second case—a Ukraine wholly or partly occupied by Russia—that will produce a permanent refugee crisis. Some refugees will return home to fight; most (probably) will want to settle down in the Western country where they find themselves “for the duration” of Russian occupation. That could be a decade or more.
Here are two short posts from Tom Finnerty. First, he discusses Sarah Bloom Raskin’s defeated Federal Reserve nomination which was accomplished by a union of Senate Republicans and the “last sane Democrat,” Senator Joe Manchin.
Manchin Slams Door on Greens at the Fed
Soaring gas prices may have claimed their first victim. Sarah Bloom Raskin -- Joe Biden's nominee for Vice Chair for Supervision at the Federal Reserve -- was forced this afternoon to withdraw herself from consideration for the position.
This is because her pre-nomination calls for environmental activism among banking regulators came to the attention of the senators considering confirming her. In the past, Raskin had argued that regulators must "leave their comfort zone" and "think more imaginatively" in considering how "their existing instruments can be used to incentivize a rapid, orderly, and just transition away from high-emission and biodiversity-destroying investments." Translation: she believes they must co-opt existing laws and procedures -- using them not as they were intended to be used -- to deny capital investment in oil and gas producers and to encourage "green" investment.
When those positions came out, senate Republicans, got spooked. After all, they know that their voters are extremely concerned about the rise in oil prices and are annoyed at the decisions of the federal government that have contributed to it. Consequently, they announced their plan to oppose Raskin, making her confirmation math very tight. Democrats argued that the Republicans were irresponsibly blocking the president's Fed's nominees at a time of soaring inflation -- essentially the central bank's raison d'etre. But the ranking Republican on the senate banking committee, Pat Toomey, countered with an offer to confirm every one of Biden's nominees but Raskin. Said Toomey, “Ms. Raskin’s repeated and forceful advocacy for having the Federal Reserve allocate capital and choke off credit to disfavored industries is alone disqualifying.”
Sensing that her dream job -- a plum ten-year political appointment with limited oversight from the people's representatives -- was slipping away, Raskin changed her tune. During her confirmation hearing last week, Raskin asserted that “it is inappropriate for the Fed to make credit decisions. Banks choose their borrowers, not the Fed.” Senator Toomey joked about her about-face, saying “this is one of the most remarkable cases of confirmation conversion I have ever seen.”
Next, Finnerty reports on the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s desperate call for the president to declare a “climate emergency” at a time when the public are waking up to the necessity of increasing domestic oil and gas production.
House Greens Call for 'Climate Emergency' Declaration
According to Politico's Joshua Siegel, the Congressional Progressive Caucus is leaning hard on the White House to declare a "climate emergency" in order to advance their cherished climate goals in one fell swoop via executive order. Why go this route? Obviously they have lost faith in the willingness of their Democratic colleagues -- many of whom are looking at tough reelection battles in the Fall -- to gamble on their priorities at a time of skyrocketing oil and gas prices. Consequently, they're leaning hard on the White House to declare a "climate emergency" and do the work for them via presidential mandate. Siegel continues,
Progressive Caucus member [Jared Huffman] told me calling on Biden to declare a climate emergency is one of the “centerpiece” actions to headline their EO plan. A draft of the plan I saw also calls for Biden to ban oil/gas drilling on public lands and end fossil fuel subsidies... [Rep. Huffman] told me the national emergency declaration would unlock Biden's authority to invoke the Defense Production Act in order to build more renewable energy and heat pumps to ease the strain in oil and gas markets that has been caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
"Never let a crisis go to waste," said Rahm Emmanuel, but this is ridiculous. They're proposing to disrupt and reorient the American energy industry on a massive scale away from reliable energy sources and towards unproven ones in the midst of an energy crisis! This plan -- particularly the total ban on oil and gas drilling on public lands -- would provoke a recession at least, and maybe worse. And this at a time when Covid policies and inflation have left the U.S. economy in a precarious state. No wonder their fellow Democrats are reluctant to go along.
The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released their 2022 Climate Change Report, and Lawrence Meyers and Clarice Feldman were good enough to read it so that you don’t have to.
Here’s Meyers with an overview:
United Nations to World: We're All Gonna Die
If you want to read the "climate change" equivalent of Orson Welles’ terrifying radio version of “War of the Worlds,” take a look at the 2022 Climate Change Report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This is the United Nations’ (aka globalists') report intended to generate hysteria over our impending doom if we don’t take a flying leap back to the Stone Age.
The full report runs an astonishing 3,675 pages, but is conveniently summarized in a mere 37 pages “for policymakers.” For geeks, there's also a "Technical Summary" that runs a tight 96 pages.
Science is supposed to rely on observable data that is interpreted to form statistically relevant conclusions. Instead, the report relies on fragmented data, disagreements on defining terms and analytical approaches, and fallacious and admitted unsupportable assumptions. It is also so large that folding all the observations together merely results in metastatic error propagation. Conclusions based on false representations of reality are not conclusions at all, but propaganda. This comes as no surprise. Few of the authors are actual climate scientists and most have impeccable left-wing credentials, as is obvious from their current affiliations.
The report is broken into chapters, with each chapter led by Coordinating Lead Authors (CLA). Examining a single chapter demonstrates the inherently and fatally flawed nature of the report.
Feldman’s piece zoomed in on a few particular issues. Below is excerpted her section on wildfires.
U.N. Climate Report: Cloudy, with No Chance of Silver Linings
The section on the effect of climate change on wildfires begins with an assertion that in the Amazon, Australia, North America and Siberia wildfires are burning wider areas than in the past and human-caused climate change has driven the increases in the forests of western North America but, that “elsewhere, deforestation, fire suppression agricultural burning, and short-term cycles like el-Nino can exert a stronger influence than climate change.” It’s of a piece with claims made earlier by others, including NASA, and just as false.
In fact, bad land-management policies in western North America are a more significant driver of wildfires than anthropogenic climate change. Depending on moisture content, most fuels must reach ignition temperatures between 644°F (340°C) and 795°F (440°C) to start a fire. The IPCC report makes the same mistake that NASA earlier made:
Stronger winds are more dangerous in part, because they transport larger embers. Small embers lack adequate energy to raise fuels from ambient temperatures of 70°F or 90°F to an ignition temperature of 644°F and higher. More so, the 2°F increase in global air temperatures since the Little Ice Age, increases the fuel’s temperature insignificantly and thus highly unlikely to increase 'the likelihood of a fire starting, or increasing the speed at which it spreads' as NASA claimed.
Reduction in both fire -uppression policies and the creation of fire breaks are a more likely driver of western wildfires. The warmer dry periods in these areas cannot be sufficient to reduce the humidity inside trees so as to affect wildfires: “From a global warming perspective, if relative humidity is kept constant during California’s rainless summers, for every 2 °F increase in temperature anomalies, calculations estimate that moisture content will only decrease by a rather insignificant 0.056% .” In any event the drier air is more closely related to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), the el Nino and la Nina events over which man has no role. Historically, wildfires increased in the southwest when “let it burn” policies were instituted; and ice cores reveal that “maximum fire activity in boreal forests occurred during the Little Ice Age between 1500-1700 AD and was attributed to the failure of Asian monsoons about which, again, man has no control and as to which he had no impact.
Dr. Jon Keeley, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist who researched the topic for four decades was clear: “We’ve looked at the history of climate and fire throughout the whole state [of California] and through much of the state, particularly the western half of the state, we don’t see any relationship between past climates and the amount of area burned in any given year.”
Every politician, every environmental group and every scientist trying to scare up more funding by uncritically blaming wildfires on CO2- induced climate change are not only ignoring good published science, but they’re also pushing wrong remedies and downplaying the correct remedies needed to benefit society and our environment. Better managed landscapes that control fuel supplies, and the re-introduction of fires via prescribed burns, will create more effective firebreaks and more healthy open habitat that coincidentally also increases wildlife diversity.
I cannot fathom the motives of the IPCC authors of this section but if one were to suggest it was to cover the rear end of California governor Newsom and his blinkered forest management policies, you’d be hard pressed to refute that. Of course, given the overall tenor of the report one might as well suspect the idea is to enrich Third World countries at our expense under the guise of preventing a disastrous climate change.
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading, and keep an eye on The Pipeline.