Men; Keystone; & the Global Pandemic Treaty
Happy Memorial Day from The Pipeline! Michael Walsh’s editor’s column this week focused on what needs to change in our country to help prevent the types of cowardly attacks on the innocent we’ve recently seen in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York.
Forget Guns. Whatever Happened to Men?
The Uvalde school shootings, coming as they did just before Memorial Day, have thrown into high relief one of this country's most vexing problems. No, it's not guns, even "military-style" guns, to use a term that has no meaning except apparently to journalists—who should also brush up on the meaning of "semi-automatic" while they're at it but probably won't. Guns have been a part of American society since the Pilgrims shot their first turkeys, and have served the country well throughout its history. That some of them have been used in the commission of crimes by criminals hardly outweighs their usefulness to the founding and maintenance of the Republic. Just ask Sergeant York.
The perfect cannot be the enemy of the good. A disarmed domestic society is not something devoutly to be wished for. In any case, what the gun-grabbers are really aiming for is not "gun control" or "common sense" gun laws but confiscation and abolition. And with nearly 400 million firearms in the country, and gun ownership widely popular, that is not going to happen as long as the Second Amendment is the law of the land. In the meantime, see what just happened in Canada, which is now completing its post-Covid descent into a fascist tyranny:
The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, today announced the introduction of new legislation to further strengthen gun control in Canada and keep Canadians safe from gun violence. Bill C-21 puts forward some of the strongest gun control measures in over 40 years. These new measures include:
Implementing a national freeze on handguns to prevent individuals from bringing newly acquired handguns into Canada and from buying, selling, and transferring handguns within the country.
Taking away the firearms licenses of those involved in acts of domestic violence or criminal harassment, such as stalking.
Fighting gun smuggling and trafficking by increasing criminal penalties, providing more tools for law enforcement to investigate firearms crimes, and strengthening border security measures.
Addressing intimate partner violence, gender-based violence, and self-harm involving firearms by creating a new “red flag” law that would enable courts to require that individuals considered a danger to themselves or others surrender their firearms to law enforcement.
Luckily, here in the U.S., "shall not be infringed" has a meaning that is clear to everyone who speaks English, even Supreme Court justices and emotive half-wit Connecticut senators who shamelessly exploit dead children for their own political purposes. Gun confiscation from overwhelmingly law-biding legal gun owners makes about as much sense as locking down the healthy during a relatively minor viral epidemic. Oh wait...
No, the fault, to paraphrase Shakespeare, is not in our guns but in ourselves, and specifically in our men. For half a century masculinity has been under concerted attack in this country—fish, bicycle is one of the more benign forms, although still passive-aggressively hateful—until today it has been deemed "toxic" by the harpies of fourth-wave feminism and their very strange bedfellows in the QWERTYUIOP+ brigades. The unsurprising result has been the diminution and removal of genuine masculinity from the public square— even in the military, which now prizes women and trans-wokeness over men—and its replacement with sundry culturally unacceptable substitutes.
Chief among the missing males have been fathers: real, biological, spiritual, emotional, disciplinary fathers. Not "baby daddies," to use the ghetto term that has percolated its way up and into the larger culture. Not transient sperm donors, who wouldn't exist in the first place without trampy women to enable them. Not semi-functioning biological males embedded in the transgressive woke community who take an "X" for the team. But real men, who not only take responsibility for their children but impart responsibility to the next generation, especially to their sons.
No, the problem isn't "gun violence," it's the enforced emasculation of teenage American males via liberalism, feminism, academia, psychiatry, pharmacology, and the media, which all too often explodes in inchoate rage. Innate female impulses and values are critical to civilizational formation, but they are antithetical to civilizational preservation, prizing collectivism over individuality, shared instead of personal responsibility, and constant, generally irrational fears for physical and emotional safety. ("Safety" on line? Twitter can instantly "suspend" you permanently and Facebook can send you to Sugarmountain Prison on the spot for unspecified "harassment," but the Uvalde shooter can yap on social media about his desire to assault a school and nothing happens to him, algorithmically speaking.) There has never been a successful matriarchy in Western history and there never will be. Neither sex would or should want it….
There is no one-size-fits-all solution to America's violence problem but surely all but the wokest among us can agree that the current state of affairs is not only unacceptable but intolerable in the literal meaning of the word: no longer to be endured. So what about this for a start:
a uniform age of adulthood, including drinking and voting, restored to 21;
no weapons sales to any male under the age of 21 without a lawful father present who is willing to take legal responsibility for the actions of his child, whether natural or adopted;
an option to forego college (useless for most young men in the first place, and doubly so today) and instead head directly into a three-year, sexually segregated stint in one of the military services upon graduation from high school or on his 18th birthday.
It goes without saying that the services would have to be purged of current leadership in order for this to be effective, but no doubt such a purge will be one of the first things President Ron DeSantis does upon taking office in 2025.
No vote, no guns, no dorms, no unsupervised booze until legal coming of age. Think of the lives and the parental fortunes that would be saved, plus the services, which haven't won a war since Truman was president, would revert to being largely masculine provinces, while education would return to the custody of women. Both the services and colleges could at once fire all their diversity directors and Title IX warriors and return to concentrating on teaching and fighting. Win-win!
Steven F. Hayward contributed a column arguing that canceling the Keystone XL pipeline was the original sin of the Biden Administration, and most of our economic crises flow from that source.
America's Economic 'Bad Luck' Began with Keystone
President Joe Biden’s inauguration day decision to shut down and cancel construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada is even more shocking when it is recognized that environmentalism has moved on to an ominous new phase. For the last two generations at least, the political battle over energy in the U.S. has revolved around the left’s attempts to strangle the oil, gas, and coal energy that generates 80 percent of America’s total energy supply. The typical move was challenging every drilling permit application, and having Democratic presidents seal off more federal land from exploration and production through the executive fiat of designating more “wilderness areas.”
Environmentalists wrapped their intransigence against domestic oil and gas with the lie that America’s oil and gas supplies were so limited that we couldn’t “drill our way out” of our dependence on foreign supplies, mixed with happy talk about the fantastic “renewable energy revolution.” While windmills and solar panels are spreading like kudzu grass throughout the land (thanks to lavish subsidies), strangling oil and gas production hasn’t worked fully worked out.
A funny thing happened on our way to the new green utopia—we did drill our way out of foreign oil and gas dependence, much to the fury of the left. Dramatic improvements in technology, especially precise directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) unleashed a revolution in domestic oil and gas production. Much of this revolution occurred by stealth, and on private or state land, largely during the anti-oil Obama Administration. If the political class in Washington had known this revolution was under way, they would have moved aggressively to stop it.
By degrees environmentalists have become open and explicit about their goal, with the more honest slogan, “Leave it in the ground.” Environmentalists have long enjoyed considerable success in blocking or delaying oil and gas exploration and production even in the region of Alaska quaintly called the “National Petroleum Reserve,” let alone the oil-rich Alaska Natural Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and many offshore areas. The offensive has broadened, with success in getting Wall Street and several federal bureaucracies such as the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and others to make life more difficult for domestic oil and gas production.
But while the environmental crusaders may hamper, they cannot entirely strangle, domestic oil and gas production. We can see this dynamic in action in real time right now. Between the typical epicycle of oil prices and the disruptions in the global market the Ukraine war has caused, suddenly we desperately need increased supply from our domestic producers. Credible predictions of $8 a gallon gasoline and rolling electricity blackouts this summer have had a sobering effect. While Wall Street may look down its nose at oil and gas companies in their public pronouncements, their capital allocation tells a different story. The oil and gas sector’s value has soared over the last year as capital seeks the best return, while the rest of the stock market is in bear territory.
Our domestic hydrocarbons are not going to stay in the ground in these circumstances. But there is another way for environmentalists to achieve their objective of strangling it—one that is a lot simpler and more effective than opposing every drilling permit application. In a variation of the old gangster approach to a protection racket, environmentalists have settled upon a new tactic: “Nice little oil well you have there; good luck getting any of it to a refinery.”
This is preface for understanding the deeper meaning of Biden’s decision to cancel Keystone. The decision made no sense on the merits, and seemed heedless of basic politics. The Obama Administration had concluded that Keystone would have no effect on "climate change" (because that Canadian oil is going to go somewhere regardless), and canceling it angered our largest trading partner and leading foreign oil supplier—this from a person who said he’d repair relations with foreign nations that President Trump supposedly trashed. It was also an unprecedented abuse of presidential power: no president has ever shut down a private-sector construction project—unionized, no less—already under way absent clear malfeasance or illegality.
Keystone should be seen therefore as a capstone to the strategy environmentalists have embraced by degrees in recent years of seeking to block pipelines and other infrastructure necessary for a flourishing hydrocarbon sector. The Dakota Access Pipeline, proposed in 2014 and under construction in 2016 after clearing the usual concerns from state governments and native American groups, suddenly faced a late vigorous protest movement that went national, supplementing spurious environmental claims with a heady mix of identity politics. The Obama administration intervened late to halt Dakota Access, but Trump swiftly gave it the green light upon taking office in 2017….
The point should now be obvious: Biden’s Keystone decision was a political rather than a serious policy decision. Message: Don’t even think about proposing any new pipelines in the U.S. Keystone isn’t just one pipeline; it is all pipelines. And even if a future Republican administration approves construction of a new pipeline, we’ll tear up the permit and expropriate your project the next time we’re back in office. Who is going to risk billions on new pipelines with this kind of political uncertainty? (Little noticed in the media is that international rating firms now place the United States as one of the highest risk countries for oil and gas investment.)
John O’Sullivan looked at a few of the problems facing the Electric Vehicle industry:
Chasing the Future by Slow Train
San Francisco in recent years has become an advance warning for the collapse of city government, urban life, and even of civilization itself. Now it seems that “a survey of electric vehicle (E.V.) charging stations in the San Francisco area has discovered that about one in four don’t work.” It’s no surprise, of course, that some of the urban infrastructure of San Francisco might not be in the best of shape.
At the same time, California used to think of itself until very recently as the future of America and even of the world—the harbinger of innovative technologies that will transform our lives for the better. It’s also the state that has the deepest-greenest consciousness in the U.S. There’s a “tension” between these two self-perceptions, as we’ll see, but they combine easily enough to make Californians the Americans most likely to lead the switch from petrol-driven to electric vehicles.
And the latest statistics confirm that. With only 10 percent of the nation’s cars, California now accounts for over 40 percent of all zero-emission cars in the U.S. As sales of E.V.s rise, however, there needs to be a matching increase in the number of electric charging stations to give the new model vehicles the juice to keep them on the road.
As Yahoo News discovered, when researchers drove their E.V.s to hundreds of public charging stations in nine Bay Area counties, they found that 27.5 percent were unusable for one reason or another. Given the newness of the technology, the list of failings had an oddly familiar, almost domestic ring to it. The most common fault, at 7.2 percent of stations, was a payment system failure. Second was a charge initiation failure, at 6.4 percent, where charging either didn’t start after paying or stopped within two minutes. Around the same number had a problem with the screen — either totally blank, non-responsive or displaying an error message. Almost 5 percent of chargers had cables too short to reach the car, and a few had broken connectors or other trouble connecting with the cars.
Because a full tank of electricity goes less far than one of petrol, E.V. drivers often have to calculate pretty accurately how long a journey they can afford to take in time rather than money. If a quarter of charging stations aren’t working, they can be stranded unexpectedly. Hilly San Francisco has its own kinds of hazards for stranded drivers—ditto California’s endless series of spaghetti junctions—but only very rarely will they include the weather (earthquakes, more so).
What, however, of the great plains? Even for everyday driving tasks, people there are accustomed to going long distances through places where you wouldn’t want to be stranded on a cold day anyway, but in particular if you were driving an E.V. since they don’t work so well on cold days.
Consumer Reports has recently examined the performance of E.V.s in this regard. The experts they asked pointed to two problems: first that an E.V.’s battery power and range declines as the temperature falls, especially when it falls below zero Fahrenheit—not uncommon in large parts of the U.S. during the winter, from the Upper Midwest across to New England; second, even at somewhat warmer temperatures, the car’s internal heating arrangements draw electricity from the battery and decrease its range….
Now, these are early days in the development of E.V.s, and their development teams are very confident of finding ways to improve their performance on battery power and distance range as on much else. For the moment, however, E.V.s can’t travel very far in cold weather, and in wide open spaces they depend upon the availability of a large network charging stations (that actually work). That means the more thinly populated areas of the United States will need to expand their network of E.V. charging stations very considerably to make it worthwhile for local folks to buy E.V.s—which in turn means a vast program of electrification across the fruited plain.
David Solway delved into the World Health Organization’s extremely concerning proposed Global Pandemic Treaty:
The Global Pandemic Treaty: A Diabolical Plan
As should be common knowledge by this time, the Covid-19 pandemic was a godsend for the political Left. It allowed democratic governments to bypass Charters and Constitutions guaranteeing freedom of speech, worship, assembly and mobility, and to assert authoritarian control over their citizens—all under the cloak of protecting people from future outbreaks of pestilence.
A key player in what is nothing less than a paradigm shift from democracy to despotism among the nations of the West, the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) is proposing and, indeed, engaged in enacting a Global Pandemic Treaty intended to coordinate emergency response to whatever pandemic may lurk on the horizon. New Omicron strains, Bird Flu, Monkeypox and hemorrhagic smallpox are only the latest pathogenic candidates, and more are sure to come. The plan envisions total political control over medical initiatives, censorship of “disinformation,” restrictions on travel, discretionary imposition of lockdowns and masking, and the issuing of digital vaccination certificates, in effect forming an Orwellian Ministry of Health whose arbitrary authority will dictate how governments are to act and react whenever a threat to public health is declared.
But there is more to the scheme than at first appears. It comprises nothing less than an existential peril to the sovereignty of nations and constitutes the central plank in the Globalist platform associated with the so-called Great Reset, namely, the dismantling of national borders in the interests of a putative New World Order with its capital at Davos, to be overseen by the plutocratic Left. The plan has been in operation for some considerable time: the deliberate absorption of millions of immigrants, refugees and economic migrants from third-world countries, as if the host nations were essentially borderless, and now, in the U.S., the intentional opening of the Southern Gate to additional millions of fugitive hordes of “asylum seekers.”
This contemporary species of Volkswanderung, vast caravans of invasive supplicants and interlopers permitted willing entry into the homeland, represents only the physical aspect of the operation. As we see, it is now complemented by a proposed legislative apparatus ensuring the dissolution of the concept and practice of Westphalian statehood and its replacement by a presumptive one-world government dominated by a global cabal of wealthy oligarchs and administered by an immense organization of unaccountable bureaucrats.
As Dr. Peter Breggin writes, “This threat is contained in new amendments to W.H.O.’s International Health Regulations, proposed by the Biden administration [that] will empower WHO’s Director-General to declare health emergencies or crises in any nation… The same threat looms over all the U.N.’s 193 member nations.” These regulations and amendments are a “binding instrument of international law [that will] strengthen WHO’s ability to unilaterally intervene into the affairs of nations merely suspected of having a health emergency.” The notion of borders circumscribing a coherent and independent political entity will have been “cancelled.”
As to be expected, the plot thickens. Chinese exile Dr. Li-Meng Yan claims on Two Mikes that the bogey of "climate change" is also in the mix. Climate change will be held responsible for pandemics to come, as well as for food shortages and many other critical issues, giving the World Health Organization and its affiliates increased control over national policy. The Pandemic Treaty, as noted, is the vestibule to promoting the objectives of the Great Reset, hinging on the pretexts of pestilence and climate, as even the language in which the strategy is formulated makes clear: “the World Health Assembly also requested the W.H.O. Director-General to… facilitate the participation of other United Nations system bodies, non-state actors, and other relevant stakeholders in the process to the extent decided by the INB” (Intergovernmental Negotiating Body).
Tom Finnerty contributed one blog post on the Democrats’ desperate desire to recreate “most disastrous decade since the close of the Second World War, that is, the 1970s” and another on the Biden Administration’s rhetorical shift on high gas prices.
And finally, our very own acclimatised beauty Jenny Kennedy has made it to Davos and is ready to party.
Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Davosing
Thanks for reading, and keep a look out for upcoming pieces by Joan Sammon, Rich Trzupek, Tom Finnerty, and Matthew Vadum. All this and more this week at The Pipeline!