The Death of Humor; Climate Reparations; & Another Boer War.
The Death of Humor; Climate Reparations; & Another Boer War.
Enemies of the People: Klaus Schwab
This week we resumed publishing excerpts of our new book, Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order.
'You Will be Made to Laugh'
Excerpt from "You Will be Made to Laugh: Humor under the Great Reset" by Harry Stein
There’s a joke that used to make the rounds in the Soviet Union. It was about a judge seen chuckling as he walks out of his courtroom.
“What’s so funny?” asks a friend.
“I heard a great joke.”
“Tell me.”
“Can’t, I just gave someone ten years for repeating it.”
If we can still laugh at that, it is surely not with the smug self-certainty we once could—not given the regularity of the assaults on free thought in today’s America and the brutality with which they are everywhere enforced, from the newsroom to the boardroom and, yes, on late night television and comedy club stages. Indeed, at this point Hiram Johnson’s famous adage might well use some updating: in the culture wars at hand, truth may be the first casualty, but its sidekick, humor, blindfolded and smoking its last cigarette, is just a split second behind.
Things have been trending this way for quite a while, of course. For a good fifty years, conservatives have watched in horrified stultification, seemingly helpless, as the cultural barbarians rampaged through the institutions, overturning fundamental understandings of decency, equality, and human biology itself. While we’ve argued policy, and occasionally even won, temporarily, progressives have traded in feelings, usually hurt, and have twisted reality to their ugly purposes. While we’ve embraced our history as affirming timelessly noble principles and ideals, they’ve ever more brazenly redefined the past as irredeemably squalid and shameful.
How have they gotten away with it?
It is only recently, and even then only dimly, that many of us have gotten the message that a large part of the answer has been the Left’s near-absolute domination of mass popular culture—music, film, TV—all of it thoroughly infused with values and assumptions that reflect their warped worldview and are inimical to ours. Directly, or more often subtly, they have been able to define, unimpeded, to a vast audience interested in nothing more than entertainment, what is fair, moral, and just—and what is unjust and must be changed.
Little wonder that to most in the generations with the annoying names—X, millennials (aka Y), and Z—the Left is reflexively seen as compassionate, forward-thinking, socially just, while the Right is backward and hateful. Everything they’ve heard in the classroom is echoed, ad infinitum, by academia’s glamorous twisted sister, mass entertainment.
And now comes the Great Reset, which would be the final nail in the free-thought coffin. Nothing less than a frontal attack on capitalism and its underlying values, taking the pandemic as “a unique opportunity” to “build a new social contract that honours the dignity of every human being,” it is a scheme of such grandiose evil it might have been designed by a DC Comics archvillain.
One need not ever have set foot on a college campus or even watched Fox News to hear the tocsin in the blizzard of buzzwords in the declaration that emerged from Davos in 2020. Inequality. Climate change. Social justice. Diversity. The language of permanent victimhood—only now nuclear-armed by the elite of the elites.
While entertainment media is not explicitly cited in the chilling manifesto, Klaus Schwab, the German executive chairman of the WEF who even looks like Lex Luther, blithely notes that “every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed.” Indeed, nothing is so sobering as to scroll down the seemingly endless list of the institutions and corporate entities signing on as partner/enforcers and note (though with something other than surprise), that it numbers not just the likes of Amazon, Google, and Facebook but also NBCUniversal and Sony.
Needless to say, in this potent new crackdown on dissident thought, American media companies have a healthy head start. By now, we’ve long since taken it for granted that, for instance, there’ll never be a feature film celebrating the young Clarence Thomas like 2018’s hagiography about the young Ruth Bader Ginsburg; let alone a tale of injustice with a happy ending about the Duke lacrosse case. And it is equally a given that in what passes for comedy in traditional mainstream venues, conservative attitudes and beliefs are fair game while progressive ones are an ever-expanding herd of sacred cows.
For far too long, our failure to counter the Left’s stranglehold on popular culture, or even fully appreciate it, has been among the other side’s most conspicuous assets. Rarely has a maxim been so often repeated, yet so seldom acted upon, as the late Andrew Breitbart’s truism that politics lies downstream from culture.
Steven Hayward wrote about the tendency of environmentalist organizations to suppress inconvenient information, looking especially at one particular
The 'Energy Transition' Will Be Delayed a Bit
Perhaps the most scandalous aspect of environmental ideology is that its religious fervor for the Malthusian apocalypse requires its high priests to ignore data and science. The actual monitoring data for core environmental problems such as air and water quality, deforestation, and other genuine problems show that most environmental problems are improving all around the world, most conspicuously in prosperous nations that have market economies, embrace technological innovation, and protect property rights and the rule of law.
Presenting these data, from credible sources as various as Human Progress, Our World in Data, or Environmental Progress, or figures such as Bjorn Lomborg or Matt Ridley (to name just two), sends environmentalists into a rage of denunciation. For environmentalists, good news is bad news, akin to depriving a fundamentalist fire-and-brimstone preacher of original sin.
This is true even of the grand-daddy of all environmental scares: "climate change." The latest official “consensus” scientific estimates of climate change have been backing away from the most dire climate disaster predictions of a decade ago, though the media never notice, and the relentless climate campaign won’t admit it.
It is not just more congenial, but essential, that environmentalism suppresses all data that does not support the urgency of their latest disaster scenarios. The most scandalous example came this week with news that BP (formerly British Petroleum) is weighing whether to discontinue its annual “Statistical Review of World Energy.” This fabulously useful report, which BP has published for 71 years, provides detailed trend data for every country in the world in downloadable spreadsheets, enabling analysts to conduct independent analysis easily, often noting findings that BP omits to highlight in its own write-up. Surprise: BP’s data turns out to be uncongenial to the renewable energy cheerleaders. Therein lies a tale.
Why would BP think of abandoning this well-regarded report, which can’t be a huge expense or labor for a multinational of its size and expertise? The Reuters report that broke this story hints at the problem:
The report has been seen by some BP executives as detrimental to the company's new direction, sources told Reuters... "Put simply, it (Statistical Review) is bad PR," one company source said. The company has in recent years also cut its ties with several oil and gas associations and has sought to raise its profile as a clean energy provider.
Why would a detailed, data-rich report on actual energy trends be “bad PR” for a major oil company?… BP lately has returned to the fold of climate hysterics, and is once again pledging to become carbon-neutral by 2050 if not sooner, and a full partner in the “energy transition” that is the fever dream of the climate campaign. And that’s where the Statistical Review of World Energy becomes an inconvenience and PR problem: BP’s data show that the “energy transition” isn’t happening. While we are inundated with headlines and advocacy group celebrations of the rapid growth of “renewable energy,” the data show that hydrocarbon energy—especially coal—has been increasing more than renewable energy for the last decade.
Richard Fernandez looked at the feasibility of climate reparations.
'Global Warming' Meets the Kobayashi Maru
Have you ever wondered how progressives were going to get the West to pay for climate reparations, estimated to cost between $1-1.8 trillion, yet limit economic activity enough to keep global temperature from rising more than 1.5°C and do so with significantly fewer people? The populations of nearly all the present great military and economic powers will collapse in this century. One has to wonder who's going to be left to foot the bill.
For example, unless things radically change, Ukraine will halve from its 1990 level by 2100, annihilated not by Russia, but by legacy Soviet population control policies. Russia's population is also in free fall. It has already lost more than two million people since the fall of the USSR, even counting Crimea which it may not be able to keep. Even worse new census data shows that the only regions growing are ethnically non-Russian. "All predominantly ethnic Russian areas are declining." By 2100 China will have nearly half a billion people fewer than today. The One Child Policy is aging it fast. Japan's population, a World Economic Forum publication notes, is shrinking by a quarter million people each year. By the end of the century Europe will have diminished by 117 million.
Tom Finnerty contributed a few blog posts, including one on the ongoing struggle between the Dutch government and that nation’s farmers.
More War on the Boers
This past summer we reported on the tensions between the farmers of the Netherlands and that nation's government. The latter, at the behest of the E.U., had enacted various overweening environmentalist regulations, including a plan to slash the emission of gases like nitrogen oxide and ammonia by 50 percent by the end of this decade. These regulations were aimed squarely at farming, which is a sizable portion of the Dutch economy. They've already implemented nitrogen licenses, which are required for any new activity -- including the expansion of existing farms -- which emit the gas, and are pushing significant livestock reductions.
Dutch farmers have been understandably upset at these impositions, feeling that their livelihood has been unjustly targeted…. Unfortunately the government, led by Prime Minister Mark Rutte, has refused to change course. It has recently unveiled plans to "buy and close down up to 3,000 farms near environmentally sensitive areas." They insist that farmers will be well-remunerated, and unconfirmed reports suggest the government's purchase price will be around 120 percent of the value of the farms in question. One thing that is confirmed, however, is that they're not asking:
“There is no better offer coming,” Christianne van der Wal, nitrogen minister, told MPs on Friday. She said compulsory purchases would be made with “pain in the heart” if necessary.
And another on government’s increasingly telling their citizens not to charge their E.V.s
Swiss to EV Drivers: Stay Home
And Joan Sammon looked into some very revealing comments made by the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab.
From Social Credit to Societal Control
While attending the APEC CEO Summit in Bangkok, World Economic Forum founder and Chairman Klaus Schwab was interviewed by a Chinese state media outlet and made a stunning series of comments about the People's Republic of China. The 84-year-old mastermind behind the Great Reset described China as a “role model for many countries” and expressed admiration for what the communist dictatorship has accomplished over the last four decades.
Schwab's comments provide a look at the kind of world for which he and other WEF member corporations currently advocate. With Chinese President Xi Jinping’s reign resting solely, if tenuously, on his government's ability to control the lives, opinions, currency, capital flows, and social interactions of Chinese citizens, Schwab’s fawning over Xi's achievements should set off alarm bells for the entire free world. It suggests that Schwab and his corporate WEF partners believe that all people should be similarly controlled, in defiance of national borders and democratic processes and institutions, with the capital flows of the U.S. and other nations redirected toward what WEF members describe as global goals. Conspicuously absent from their vision of a transformed world are the opinions, rights, and liberties of the governed.
Schwab claims that a great societal transformation is coming, led by people tasked with specific duties to ensure its success. Enter the ever-feckless financial sector, including BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, State Street, Wells Fargo and most other banking and financial sector corporations.
Always willing to place profit above principle, they are ideal partners in a campaign to rob investors of their sole-interest rights, while abdicating their own fiduciary obligations. These are the partners Schwab has in mind when he refers to the best people and most relevant people:
We have to try, with a collaborative platform where we integrate the best people -- the most relevant people. Where we work for progress. Now the base has been formed, but we have to go one step further.
This is where the Environmental Social, and governance (ESG) construct comes in. An initiative launched by the WEF over two decades ago and introduced through its multi-layered non-profit eco-system, ESG is a mechanism to re-orient capital flows toward political and social objectives that include government regulation, communal property rights and, ultimately, social scoring. It is an organized effort to wrest control of private property from the hands of owners and transfer it to WEF-minded interests under the guise of "protecting" the environment and repairing the "damage" done by capitalism.
According to Schwab, “We [WEF members] have to define specific elements of the global system. For example, nature and environment, climate change…to see what areas we can make... real progress.”
To underscore this, consider the report “Accelerating the Rate of Change: 2021-2025,” produced by the WEF-funded non-profit, Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), which contends that the most pressing objective to ensure the culmination of a transitioned world is to define the concept of natural capital as having parity with financial capital. "Natural capital," under the ESG construct, refers to the entire planet's stocks of water, land, air, and renewable and non-renewable resources such as plant and animal species, forests, and minerals. If natural capital is given partiy with financial capital, as the WEF desires, there is no longer any private property. If property can be controlled by everyone, it is owned by no one.
Thanks for reading, and keep a look out for upcoming pieces by Michael Walsh, Joan Sammon, and Tom Finnerty. And, once again, don’t forget to order our book, Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order. Christmas is just a few weeks away!
All this and more this week at The Pipeline!