The Woke Mind Virus at Work; Autumn is Back; & Mother Nature Goes to Court
The Woke Mind Virus at Work; Autumn is Back; & Mother Nature Goes to Court
In his Editor’s Column this week, Michael Walsh meditated upon two unexpectedly similar parasites.
The Toxoplasmosis of the Feline Left
If you're unfamiliar with the single-celled parasite toxoplasma gondii, it probably means you're a cat lover, and if you are a cat lover it likely means you have an infection called toxoplasmosis gondii and therefore have no idea you're sick. All you know is, you can't get enough of cats, which is exactly what the bacillus intends. And if you have the misfortune to be a small animal, such as a mouse, the disease causes you to lose your fear of the predators, turning you from prey into lunch in short order.
So it is with what Elon Musk has called the "woke mind virus" now found today on the international Left. Like toxoplasmosis, it seems to thrive chiefly among females, although both sexes are well represented. Its symptoms are an unaccountable compulsion to cozy up to your deadliest enemies, to soothe them and coddle them and caress them until one day they finally eat you. It's suicidal, of course, but such is the power of the virus.
Consider the case of poor Vivian Silver, a Canadian "peace activist" recently murdered by Hamas in Gaza.
Silver was a dominant figure in several groups that promoted peace between Israel and the Palestinians, as well as a prominent Israeli human rights group. She also volunteered with a group that drove Gaza cancer patients to Israeli hospitals for medical care.
“On the one hand, she was small and fragile. Very sensitive,” her son Yonatan Zeigen told Israel Radio on Tuesday. “On the other hand, she was a force of nature. She had a giant spirit. She was very assertive. She had very strong core beliefs about the world and life.”
Zeigen said he texted with his mother during the attack. The exchanges started out lighthearted, with Silver maintaining her sense of humor, he said. Suddenly, he said, there was a dramatic downturn when she understood the end had come, and militants stormed her house. “Her heart would have been broken” by the events of Oct. 7 and its aftermath, Zeigen said. “She worked all her life, you know, to steer us off this course. And in the end, it blew up in her face.”
As I noted in this space over the past few weeks, Reality Bites. Nor do the Gods of the Copybook Headings ever really go away. And perhaps, at long last, the Scales Have Fallen from many pairs of eyes. And yet it seems that over and over again well-meaning people must learn that good intentions do not change the world. As Al Capone famously said of growing up in Brooklyn, in his old neighborhood you could get farther in life with a kind word and a gun than with just a kind word.
Alas for the bien-pensant, Capone's is the voice of reason. Of hypocrisy as well, as course: the gang leader ordered the 1929 hit on his Irish rivals in the bootlegging business in what came to be known as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, a little fatal squabble between competitors and fellow businessmen that in today's culture of violence would hardly even make the papers, let alone go viral on the internet. But Capone and the mobsters of his day did not get where they did without a keen understanding of human nature and a ruthless willingness to see the world as it actually is and not how they wish it were, and to act accordingly.
Ah, but kittens are cute, you say. What harm can there be in "rescuing" one of the little darlings? And then two, then three, then eight, then a house full of them? Once infected, you can't stop. The bug has caused you to lose all fear for your own safety or well being, and dedicates you entirely to serving its cause, which is its survival, not yours.
A couple was found dead inside their Yorktown home this week with nearly 150 cats inside. The man and woman were discovered Monday after a request for a welfare check at the home on Cordial Road. Yorktown police found the couple dead but were not able to investigate further due to the number of cats inside the home. "I'm surprised people could live inside with the conditions present," said Yorktown Police Department Chief Robert Noble.
Well, they did until they didn't. And so it is with geo-politics and the noxious poison known as "wokism" or whatever the shape-shifting radical Left is calling its war on Western civilization today. The goal, like the parasite found in cat poop, is to get well-meaning, big-hearted, but soft-headed fellow travelers to lose their fear of consequences and only see the adorable objects of their pity. World peace! Who could be against that?
Deputy Editor Tom Finnerty wrote about how what seemed to be Rishi Sunak’s new found climate sanity was less that met the eye.
Rishi Sunak's Green Eyewash
Just last month The Pipeline's John O'Sullivan wrote about British prime minister Rishi Sunak's newly announced plan "to delay the ban on the sale of new petrol-driven cars from 2030 to 2035, water down the ban on gas heaters from 2030, and in general adopt a general attitude that the U.K. economy cannot be sacrificed to unrealistic Green targets of energy reduction." It was a hopeful report, and seemed to speak well of Sunak, who had evidently decided to distance himself from his climate utopian predecessors by leaning into reality.
Well unfortunately our hope was misplaced. In Britain's The Spectator, Ross Clark looked into the fine-print of Sunak's new plan, and saw that it was essentially window dressing:
What few noticed at the time was that the government has left in place most of the targets on the way to what had been the outright ban in 2030. Under the Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate, from next year each manufacturer will have to ensure that 22 percent of the new cars they sell are zero emission (which in practical terms means pure electric as there is a dearth of hydrogen-powered cars on the market). If they fail to do this, they will have to pay severe fines of up to £15,000 per vehicle. The target will increase to 28 percent in 2025 and 33 percent in 2033.
Which is to say, while it is technically true that the gas-and-diesel car sales won't be banned by 2030, in practical terms they will, since the government's "pathway" to the ban was still in force. Clark pointed out that it is exceedingly unlikely that U.K. car manufacturers meet these mandated E.V. goals on their own, as a quick glance at their current numbers demonstrates.
Last month, sales of pure electric cars were up 20 percent compared with October 2022. The trouble is, sales of petrol cars and hybrids rose sharply, too, so that the proportion of sales made up by pure electric cars has hardly shifted: only 15.6 percent of new cars were pure electric, up modestly from 14.8 percent in October 2022. As for sales over the first ten months of 2023, 16.3 percent were electric, up from 14.6 percent over the same period in 2022. These are figures across the whole industry. Given that some manufacturers have higher electric sales than others – Tesla, of course, is 100 percent electric – some must be falling a long way behind the 22 percent target which will be imposed on them in just two months’ time. Electric cars sales have stalled at around one sixth of total cars sales for a couple of years now, but so far manufacturers have not faced a penalty for that. So what happens now that they are going to be penalized?
Simple -- they will increasingly limit the number of traditional vehicles on offer in the U.K., something that Ford has already done with the Fiesta, one of Britain's most popular cars. Says Clark, "That will result in a lot less choice for motorists, and may end up with some manufacturers withdrawing from the UK market altogether."
Finnerty also blogged about the return of weather.
Meet the New 'Climate,' Same as the Old Climate
Our North American readers will likely have noticed that we've been having some rather unseasonably cool weather of late. Or perhaps we should say "seasonably," since though we've had a few comparatively mild autumns and winters over these past few years (at least here in southern New England), leading to widespread "global warming" freak-outs, a few points of data do not a trend make.
Though the "climate change" crowd will tell you that we've been living through the New Normal, their goddess Gaia has lately taken to making them look foolish by returning to the Old Normal. This author's propaganda-inflected cell phone apps don't know what to do with it actually -- one second blurting out notifications that today (the mildest in weeks) is "nearing record highs" for temperature; the next warning me that temps are "set to plummet overnight." Well, that's mid-November for you!
According to Peter Smith, the outcome of a recent constitutional referendum shows that the Australian people still have some sense. Their political leaders? Not so much.
More Energy Pipedreams Down Under
We had a "climate-change" hiatus in Australia for months leading up to a referendum on October 14. Anthony Albanese, the prime minister, put everything on hold while he tried to foist a racially-divisive change to the constitution onto the Australian population. The proposal, known as the “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice” -- or, simply, the Voice -- would have created a third (advisory) chamber of parliament to "better represent" the country's indigenous population, a people who make up only 3 percent of the population and who, for the most part, are much more of European than they are of aboriginal descent.
All the big boys in town were vocal supporters: major corporations, sporting codes, universities, churches, "celebrities," legal eagles, inner-urban latte sippers who’ve never met an Aborigine. And polling initially suggested that Australians favored it by a 2-to-1 margin. How could it possibly fail? Well, a large majority of adults might show some degree of sense, that's one possibility. And that's what actually happened -- more than 60 percent voted down this foolishness. I mention it, because it gives hope which goes beyond this particular referendum. Good sense is out there, if it is allowed a say.
Significantly, among the states and territories, only the Australian Capital Territory, where federal public servants work and live, voted for the Voice. Sense is scarcer in that neck of the woods, as it is in those other capital territories Washington, D.C., and London. Unfortunately, that’s where climate-change policy is made. If the minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, has any momentary doubts about blowing up coal-power stationsor suffers spasms of realism, his advisors will steer him back on track.
Remarkably, while a change to the constitution must be put to the people, destroying Australia’s cheap and reliable energy system can be cooked up by politicians and public servants, without so much as a by-your-leave. I reckon those same sensible sixty-odd percent of the population who voted down the Voice would vote down net-zero, if they were given half a chance. Those in charge are not silly enough to give them half a chance. And so the fantasy of net-zero continues apace.
Smith also blogged about his homeland’s energy ponzi scheme.
An Aussie 'Dreamtime' Ponzi Scheme
David Cavena looked into the actual cost of giving the environmentalist Left what they want.
The Impossible Task of Proving a Negative
When environmentalists are backed into a corner and asked for the projected cost of their proposals, they hem and haw and occasionally toss out a favorite line of Al Gore and John Kerry: “What is the cost of doing nothing?” Since answering this requires proving a negative, their question cannot be answered. The “climate change” hucksters have created an atmosphere in the academic, political, NGO, and media world in which “climate change” is unfalsifiable – the antithesis of actual science.
This is because the actual science supporting their position is extremely thin. In fact, numerous scientists have done their best patiently explaining that no, the climate cannot be accurately modeled, no, there’s nothing we can do to change it. And, ‘Have you considered the sun…?’
One such testimony has not received the attention it deserves, because it addresses the most basic question of any society and its form of government. This is the “Bali Open Letter,” penned in 2007, and signed by over a hundred climate scientists:
… the current UN approach of CO2 reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it…
In order to increase our suffering, we must kill all the cows, eat all the bugs, murder all the eagles and whales and tortoises, move out of the suburbs, mine lithium and cobalt and pay China to turn them into car batteries, and deforest the planet. Again, what is the cost? As the Federalist notes, current carbon taxation proposals would destroy the global economy.
Clarice Feldman blogged about a recent vote in Holland which granted Nature human rights, including the right to sue in a court of law.
Gaia Goes to Court
That’s all for this week, but keep a look out for our upcoming pieces at The Pipeline!