They Don't Make Crooks Like That Anymore; Ireland Lost; & No O2 for You!
They Don't Make Crooks Like That Anymore; Ireland Lost; & No O2 for You!
Enemies of the People: Helen McEntee
In his Editor’s Column this week, Michael Walsh wrote about the subject of one of his best books, the great Owney Maddon.
A Model Immigrant
And a very happy 132nd birthday (yesterday, Dec. 18) to the greatest Irish gangster of them all, Owen Vincent Madden! Leader of the Gopher Gang, inmate at Sing Sing, NYC's leading beer brewer during Prohibition, Mae West's lover (hardly an exclusive category), Broadway producer, founder of the Cotton Club, the man who hired Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Lena Horne, and Harold Arlen and made them all stars, owner of five heavyweight champs, including Primo Carnera and James J. Braddock, stone killer, the man who led Mad Dog Coll to his death in the call box at the London Chemists on 23rd St., very likely the guy behind the hit on Dutch Schultz in the Palace Chop House in Newark, boss of Hot Springs, Ark., and mentor to young William Jefferson Blythe/Clinton in his final years. Truly a great American, even if he was a criminal.
Using Madden's voice, I recounted Owney's exploits in my 2003 novel, And All the Saints, which went on to win an American Book Award for fiction. This is how it begins:
Lately I’ve been thinking about the Mad Mick and how he died bloody in the London call box on 23rd Street, and about Little Patsy and his gunsels, Granny and his damsels, and Texas and her brassy lungs, and about how we shot the Dutchman in the Palace john in Jersey along with his dear boy Lulu.
The Cotton Club has crossed my mind more than once, which was after it was Jack’s Club Deluxe, although if you ask me, it was never the same after they moved it from darktown to midtown and Hymie Arluck went Hollywood and turned into the Wizard of Oz. So has the Duke, for that matter, although nobody ever called him that when I was around, because I was always the real Duke, if you ask anybody who knows. Like Walter and Damon and Jimmy Hines and Joe the Boss and Arnold and Lucky and Meyer, and Estes the Senator from Tennessee and John the Senator from Arkansas, and Joe’s kids Jack and Bobby and all the rest of them who made my life so remunerative and difficult more or less at the same time.
Not to mention the Kitchen gang, One Lung, Razor, Happy Jack, Art and Hoppo, but also Legs, Lucky and the Bug, the Big Fella and the Little Man. Gone now, most of them long gone, except for old friends like Mae and Georgie, big stars now, four-letter household words. And here I sit in Bubbles, alone with Agnes and my pigeons, gazing out on North Mountain and West Mountain and the rest of the Ouachitas, which remind me of Ireland, at least the Ireland my mother used to tell me about, which was probably mostly a lie. Whereas they’ve all been plugged, fried, planted and otherwise disposed of.
There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about them all, and what we did and how we did it and sometimes even why. Most of all I think about them that died and those what lived, whether any of them deserved it or not, and wonder how it all turned out the way it did and why I’m still here, with five bullets in my gut and six gone but God it hurts, still hurts, fifty years on and more. And most of all, in this month of April I think of May.
Being both a connoisseur of classic Gangland and Irish myself, I found that Madden made an appealing subject for a fictional "autobiography." The "Duke of the West Side," was the most successful of the great Roaring Twenties gangsters, stylish and handsome, hell on the ladies, wealthy, influential politically, and a great contributor to American culture by way of the Cotton Club. An indigent boy, with a dead father left back in Liverpool, he made the crossing as a boy and took right to the streets, racking up seven kills during the course of his life in crime because by his way of reckoning if a man crossed you, you simply killed him, and if you got caught by the law, you did your time in "college" and then went right back to work. "Owney the Killer" loved to be loved by beautiful women but preferred to be feared by his enemies, who only got the drop on him once.
With immigration much in the news today, Madden as it happens was a model immigrant, who gave back more than he took. Yes, he was a gangland kingpin, but as the greatest living American novelist, James Ellroy, consistently illustrates in his works -- a la Balzac -- behind every great American institution is a very great crime, or series of crimes. Madden's influence was felt as bootleg brewer (Madden's No. 1," the best-selling beer in Manhattan during Prohibition), on Broadway (he produced Mae West's shows), and in Hollywood, to which he introduced his protégé, Georgie Ranft. Tinseltown turned the German-Italian Ranft into George Raft, the second banana in 1932's classic, Scarface, directed by Howard Hawks, and Raft went on to a career of portraying a snazzy Jazz Age gangster much like Madden for the rest of his career.
Tom Finnerty wrote about the ongoing fall of the land of his ancestors.
Eire, We Hardly Knew Ye
Perhaps you heard about the riots that took place in Dublin last month, which began as an expression of rage after an Algerian-born man (holding an Irish passport and thus an "Irishman") attacked several children with a knife outside of their school, leaving one little girl in critical condition. The Irish people had already been on edge, after the conviction of a Roma gypsy from Slovakia named Jozef Puska for the senseless murder of Aishling Murphy, a young Irish woman, as she was jogging in her native County Offaly. Murphy's boyfriend, in a victim impact statement given at the time of sentencing, angrily noted that Puska had “come to this country, [to] be fully supported in terms of social housing, social welfare, and free medical care for over 10 years [but could] never hold down a legitimate job and never once contributed to society in any way, shape, or form.”
His words were instantly censored by the country's one-party state media outlets, but they reflected the frustration of many normal Irish men and women who have watched their country's radical transformation at the hands of its current Taoiseach (prime minister) Leo Varadkar and his Uniparty coalition government over these past several years. And just how radical has it been? Here are some numbers from Philip Pilkington, writing in UnHerd:
A full 2.8 percent of the population is made up of people who have moved to Ireland only in the last year. This means that if you walk down the average Irish street, one in 35 people will be newcomers to the country. While Ireland had been accepting large numbers of migrants for a long time, this was turbocharged by the war in Ukraine. Ireland, whose political and media classes have become notably outward-looking over the past decade, wanted to prove its liberal values and committed to hosting huge numbers of Ukrainian refugees. On a per capita basis, Ireland accepted six times more refugees than Britain — and made almost no plans for how to accommodate them. The latest numbers show that Ireland’s foreign-born population is 904,800 people. This means that 18 percent of the Irish population is foreign-born.
Pilkington argues that there is no nation known to history that has successfully assimilated this percentage of recent immigrants. And Ireland, which historically has been known for out-migration -- hence the prevalence of scores of "Mc" and "O" prefixed surnames throughout the Anglosphere -- is unlikely to buck that trend.
Why has the Irish governing class, almost without exception, actively encouraged this transformation? In part it is because it associates Ireland itself with backwardness, and that includes its people -- the Muintir na hÉireann, in the old language -- whom they refer to as "boggers," and "culchies," and find terribly unsophisticated and embarrassing. This is their opportunity to, as Bertolt Brecht facetiously suggested, "dissolve the people" and replace it with another. Which is exactly what they're doing.
And, moreover, it's because of their devotion to what Irish cultural commentator Conor Fitzgerald has termed "Goodboyism," which he defines as "the tendency in the Irish establishment to ostentatiously direct themselves towards external sources of cultural authority over and before the Irish populace or the interests of Irish people." Which is to say: they're obsessed with doing things which inspire the European and American elite to pat them on the head and say "good boy!" no matter the cost to Ireland itself. Of seven hundred years of being slave state -- first to Britain, and now to the E.U. -- is such an inferiority complex born.
Finnerty also contributed a blog post about the nations which aren’t particularly happy about the direction of COP28.
Dropping Out of COP?
Peter Smith wrote about an under discussed enviro-scam.
Vying to be a Boondoggle Superpower
An offshore wind/green hydrogen project has been scrapped in Germany. "The once-pioneering Westküste 100 green hydrogen project was announced with much fanfare in 2019, with plans to build 30MW of electrolysis capacity at independent oil refinery Raffinerie Heide in northern Germany by 2025, before scaling it up to 700MW by 2030. But despite the German federal government approving €30m ($32.6m) in funding and giving the green light for construction in 2020 of what was supposed to be one of the world’s first large-scale renewable H2 projects, the €89m first phase has now been scrapped — after its development consortium had reportedly already spent €1m."
And here things looked so promising in August 2020: "The funding from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy to the Westküste 100 project is a significant step forward for our hydrogen business." Thus spake Martin Neubert, Ørsted vice president. Amazingly, there is no report of the government funding being returned. Meanwhile, far from Germany, in Australia, Squadron Energy has canned plans to build a power station running on a blend of natural gas and green hydrogen at Port Kembla in New South Wales:
Squadron Energy's plans to build a gas-fired power station at Port Kembla have quietly been withdrawn despite the company insisting it remains committed to building a similar facility in the region. The company, which is owned by Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest, is in the process of building a terminal to import liquefied natural gas (LNG) on the east coast of Australia through the Wollongong port of Port Kembla.
The project's scoping report claimed the $1.3 billion dual-fuel power station would have the capability to run on a blend of 50 per cent natural gas and 50 per cent green hydrogen "should a local source of green hydrogen develop in the coming years". The scale of the project led to it being granted State Significant Infrastructure status by the NSW government.
There is no report of any return of the $30 million the project was awarded by the NSW state government in its 2021-2022 budget. Of course not.
"Green hydrogen" is a siren song to governments in search of a green-energy nirvana. They have money to burn and ready takers. Australian fantasists see Australia becoming a green-hydrogen superpower. Numbers of countries share the delusion; though there can be only none. With a nod to Joni Mitchell, it’s part of the dreams and reckless schemes and ice cream castles in the air, which make up the forlorn pursuit of net-zero.
Clarice Feldman blogged about a new study which suggests that the amount of human emitted CO2 in our atmosphere are miniscule compared with that emitted by volcanos.
Fiddling with Volcanic CO2
Many factors determine the weather at any given time and place on the globe: water cycles, air masses, jet streams, weather fronts, elevation, and topography are among them. The more these natural factors are examined, the less credible the environmental narrative -- that man’s use of fossil fuels is the most significant factor in those changes -- appears to be. If you believe, as I do not, that human-emitted CO2 is the principal driver of climatic warming, you have to downplay the importance of other natural phenomena.
Take volcanos. This year through October, there were 67 confirmed eruptions from 66 different volcanos around the world. This is not an unusual amount of volcanic activity -- it has been fairly consistent for two centuries -- though the population increases near volcanos and better reporting sometimes obscures that fact. Here's what The Smithsonian has to say on the matter:
The best evidence that these trends are apparent rather than real comes from the record of large eruptions, whose effects are far reaching and less likely to escape documentation even in remote areas. Their constancy over the past two centuries is a better indicator of the global frequency of eruptions than the improved reporting of smaller eruptions.
The volume of volcanic CO2 emissions has been substantially underestimated. Because naturally-emitted CO2 and Co2 emitted as a result of human activity have the very same isotopes, it is impossible to distinguish the source and has not been accurately assessed for a number of reasons. For example, the amount of CO2 from volcanic action cited over and again is based on an analysis of only seven active volcanoes and three seafloor emitting volcanos (o.oo.1 percent of earth’s volcanic features). Recent studies indicate massive amounts of C02 are emitted from non-erupting volcanos, such as Greenland’s Katla volcano.
A recent study, authored by Hermann Harde, a professor of Experimental Physics and Materials Science at Helmut-Schmidt-University in Hamburg, indicates that CO2 emissions from volcanos and other natural causes are six times higher than man-made sources. Not only is the data relied on to argue against this phenomenon surprisingly inaccurate, the claim of higher human-sourced CO2 relies on a fiddling of the record of how long these emissions remain in the atmosphere.
Lisa Schiffren looked into a shocking report out of the United Kingdom.
Just Stop Breathing
Sometimes you read something so preposterous that you can’t believe it isn’t satire. Rarely are they about science. But Britain's Daily Mail had one such this week: an article highlighting an apparently respectable study that argues that human breathing is bad for the environment: “Gases we exhale contribute to 0.1 percent of the U.K.’s greenhouse gas emissions." And, what's more, "that's not even accounting for the gas we release from burps and farts, or emissions that come from our skin without us noticing.”
According to the author of the study, Dr. Nicholas Cowan, an atmospheric physicist at the U.K. Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Edinburgh, “exhaled human breath can contain small, elevated concentrations of methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N20), both of which contribute to global warming,” Dr. Cowan said. “We would urge caution in the assumption that emissions from humans are negligible.”
But they are negligible. To be clear, 0.1 percent is such a minuscule amount of anything that it is hard to see why an editor decided to devote space to the study. Unless…. well, we’re back to satire. Not that satirizing the climate change scientific establishment is so hard. Why should we be panicked, or even concerned about human breathing? Because “human respiration has a net warming effect on the atmosphere.” Apparently human breath contains two greenhouse gases – “both more potent than CO2.” “One is methane which is famously also emitted from livestock such as cows.”
The fact that cows emit methane is the usual rationale for "climate-change" fanatics wanting to kill them. Remember last spring when Ireland was commanded by its eco-betters to kill off 200,000 cows to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases? This is also the rationale for forcing us plebs to become vegetarians (bug-etarians?). No beef, no methane emissions from cows. I guess we’ll have to give up dairy, too, since those herds also breathe and fart. The thing is, you could theoretically do without beef. But you cannot do without breathing. Unless, of course, you are willing to do without humans. And it's hard not to notice the suicidal Malthusian tendencies of climate crowd poking through when they're putting out breathless reports like this.
That’s all for this week, but keep a look out for our upcoming pieces at The Pipeline!