The End of Climate Hysteria

We all hope that the recent election has finally put an end to DEI. It might take some time, but the bell is tolling for DEI. 

The same seems true regarding climate change hysteria. A current international climate change conference, taking place in Azerbaijan, has been largely ignored, by both the press and even politicians.

Now, Joel Kotkin explains that the rush to renewables is petering out, and that, without important government subsidies, wind and solar energy will soon be going the way of Solyndra.

Kotkin takes the measure of the state of the Green New Deal:

The wind-energy sector is increasingly beleaguered and huge numbers of climate start-ups are failing. Despite receiving billions in subsidies, green companies are recording big losses, declaring bankruptcy or avoiding new projects – even in China. Yellen’s opportunity of the century is becoming its most obvious bust, with little apparent impact on the climate.

That last is the most unkindest cut of all. For all the shrieking and hollering about the end of the world, our efforts to pretend that we control the climate have been for naught.

The Green New Scam seems largely to have been perpetrated by activists and corporate interests:

The alliance between big corporate interests and activist bureaucracies has created what political scientist Bjorn Lomborg has labelled the ‘climate-industrial complex’. As energy analyst Robert Bryce points out, parts of Wall Street have been ‘feeding at the trough’ and will lobby Trump and Congress to keep some of their goodies. At the same time, some deep-blue states, like California and New York, are girding themselves by issuing their own green regulations to replace those that might have come from DC.

Perhaps you will not find it shocking, but China has taken the lead in greenhouse gasses. Moreover it has taken over the solar panel industry:

The only major country set to benefit from the ‘energy transition’ is China, which continues to spew more greenhouse gases than all advanced countries combined. It is using efficient, cheaper fossil fuels to dominate the solar-panel industry, building its battery capacity to roughly four times the size of America’s while exercising effective control of rare-earth minerals and the technology for processing them.

The Green New Scam wants to turn back the Industrial Revolution. This war on manufacturing has hurt the job prospects of those who are working in industry. For countries like Great Britain, the shutdown of drilling means being more reliant on foreign source of oil and gas:

The working classes in Western nations have particular reason for concern. In the UK, the path to lower emissions has been driven by deindustrialisation. The manufacturing sectors’ share of GDP has dropped by 50 per cent since 1990, at the cost of several million jobs. This parallels a two-thirds drop in the UK’s domestic energy production. It now increasingly depends on energy imports from the Middle East and other unstable regions.

Deindustrialization… that is what happened to Germany. 

Arguably, the most traumatic change is taking place in Germany, the last redoubt of European manufacturing and engineering prowess. Overall, Germany’s entire industrial structure is in decline. It is estimated that it could lose upwards of 400,000 of its estimated 800,00 car-manufacturing jobs by 2030.

Dare we notice that the people are rejecting the green agenda. Ironic or not, democracy has become the enemy of the environmentalist cause:

Given the damage being done to Europe’s industrial base, the political tide is unsurprisingly turning against the greens. The gilets jaunes demonstrations in France in the late 2010s have been followed by large-scale farmers protests in the Netherlands, Poland and Germany. This year, voters gave the greens a ballot-box kicking at the European Parliament elections. Even as the technocracy sticks to its green religion, voters are headed in the opposite direction.

In America, Kotkin explains, the incoming Trump administration will put an end to Biden administration climate policies:

Delays on new liquified natural gas (LNG) export facilities will be lifted, and the tacit mandate for electrical vehicles is also likely to disappear. 

Some groups will continue to resist. That includes environmentalist judges and bureaucrats. Here, Trump will surely have some influence.

But Trump’s control of the Senate guarantees he will appoint judges who will severely limit the power of the environmental bureaucracies and progressive jurists to set fuel and emissions standards. This could prove particularly tough for the left-leaning nonprofits, which can expect their gravy train to stall. ‘This is a massive pushback against the green more than anything’, energy analyst Bryce suggests. ‘They are now on the outside looking in.’

After all, the people voted down the green agenda. Blue collar workers rejected it:

Little wonder blue-collar workers in the ‘carbon economy’ proved critical to Trump’s rise, particularly Latinos. Indeed, Latinos account for more than two-fifths of US food production and the forestry workforce, over a third of ground-clearing and maintenance workers, and a quarter of workers in logistics and manufacturing. In states like California, roughly 60 per cent of manufacturing, trucking and construction jobs belong to Latinos.

Also,

Opposition to Biden’s climate policies may have also played a critical role in Trump’s wins in Pennsylvania, a major fracking state, as well as manufacturing-oriented Wisconsin and Michigan. The auto industry’s plan to lay off workers to prepare for the forced march to electric vehicles may also have nudged more working-class voters towards Trump.

Considering the constant drumbeat about the pending end of the world, it is not surprising that most people find it all to be rather hysterical. You can only run around screaming that the sky is falling for so long before people notice that the sky has not fallen:

Most Americans and Europeans simply aren’t buying the climate jihad. In the US, a recent Gallup poll shows that just three per cent of the population considers climate change and the environment their main concern. Even young people, the group most concerned with climate change, rank it far below issues such as inflation, housing, gun violence, jobs and corruption.

The indignity of it all. For all the hue and cry Americans, like their European soulmates, have largely rejected climate hysteria.

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Poison Food

Americans are seriously overweight. They are also, apparently, seriously unhealthy. Now, Robert Kennedy, Jr. who did not much care about the health of his second wife, one Mary Richardson Kennedy-- when he tried to destroy, as a tactic in a divorce negotiation, thus leading her to hang herself in the barn-- is going to help us solve it by removing some bad chemicals from children’s cereals.

So, cereal makers are poisoning our children and compromising everyone’s health. And lest we ignore it, pharmaceutical manufacturers are poisoning our minds by advertising the latest and greatest pill, advising us to rush out and inform our doctors that we know best, because we saw some ad.

Obviously, the issue of American obesity is well beyond my ken. If the condition requires a choice between gastric bypass surgery and a new pill, one might reasonably argue that the problem involves physiology and cannot be overcome by better diet and more exercise.

Surely, there are perfectly appropriate uses for the new drugs. The problem is that we have been told that they will solve everyone’s weight problem, to the exclusion of other treatments.

It’s one thing to say that some people are suffering a metabolic disturbance. It’s quite another to say that everyone should be taking a pill to control weight. 

So, Heather Mac Donald suggests that we are losing sight of the simple fact that healthier behavioral habits can do wonders for our weight. 

As she sees it, chronic obesity, as a societal issue, is a cultural issue. We eat too much and exercise too little:

We are to believe that the sharp rise of obesity in the U.S. over the last several decades is due to genetic changes in Americans’ susceptibility to weight gain. To portray obesity as something brought on by behavior—overeating and under exercising—is to blame the victim and to commit “fat-shaming.”

To what extent is obesity a function of bad habits? To some extent it must be. If, as Aristotle once said, the cure for bad habits is to develop good replacement habits, then our relationship with our appetites should not always be considered a biomedical issue. Besides, there are degrees of overweight:

By medicalizing behavioral issues, the elites transfer power from the individual to themselves, the dispensers of technocratic responses to social problems.

The recent alteration in the Anglosphere’s diet and lifestyle is massive and obvious, however: snacking throughout the day, a diet of highly sweetened processed foods, and a lack of exercise or even of merely walking modest distances. 

To state the obvious, food consumption is a social ritual. It is not equivalent to shooting up nutrients. True enough, chemicals are involved, but there is more to it than chemistry.

 Environmental litigation focuses obsessively on chemicals. Kennedy ties Americans’ worsening health to those chemicals. He is fixated on the dyes that make processed junk food more brilliant. He wants to get rid of the artificial coloring in Froot Loops. He wants more regulation of preservatives and pesticides.

But, Mac Donald has an alternative. Don’t feed your children Froot Loops. Simple and direct. How come no one else thought of this.

Rather than coloring Froot Loops with “natural” dyes, as Kennedy suggests, a better course would be to persuade parents not to feed their children Froot Loops in the first place. 

Mac Donald recommends that we reconsider what we have done to the rituals surrounding food consumption. We know that children who participate in regular family dinners tend to have superior mental health. 

Worse yet, the alternative to excessive snacking is home cooking. Naturally, our culture does not approve of it. Surely, feminists do not approve of it. 

Family dinners socialize children, to their benefit. One suspects that it moderates appetite. It is far more difficult to scarf down a bunch of cupcakes when other people are witnessing your  bad behavior.

Kennedy should make the case for home cooking—for mothers actually preparing meals for their families, rather than leaving their children to wolf down the contents of cellophane packs or to microwave frozen pizza whenever those children can tear themselves away from their screens. (Sitting down to a cooked family meal is also a means of socializing children. Feminists scorn such domestic activities as a sneaky means of diverting females from the partner track.)

So, it’s about discipline, but especially about ritualizing food consumption.

Understandably, Big Food wants us to eat as much of its products as we can stuff down our stomachs before bursting. The solution to its blandishments is not more regulation but more self-discipline. Nor are costly drugs, with their inevitable side effects, necessary to reduce obesity.

Of course, there is the problem of appetite. The therapy world tells people who have eating disorders to eat when they feel hungry. It’s a bow to the goddess of appetite.

The trouble is, unless every member of your family feels hungry at precisely the same time, this so-called rule will make family dinners impossible.

So, let’s introduce a new rule: eat when it’s time to eat. Eat when everyone has gotten together around the table to partake of the repast. Make dinner a social bonding ritual, not merely a nutritional issue.

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Wednesday Potpourri

First, as the race for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination begins, among the contenders is one Tulsi Gabbard. Considering that Mark Cuban managed to make a fool of himself by declaring that Donald Trump does not relate to strong, intelligent women, one cannot help but relish the irony in his naming Gabbard to be the Director of National Intelligence.

And then there was Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz-- who is evidently not a strong, intelligent woman-- declared that Gabbard was a “Russian asset.”

But then, surprisingly, Sen. Bernie Sanders replied to the effect that she Debbie should stifle herself.

In his words:

Tulsi Gabbard has put her life on the line to defend this country. People can disagree on issues but it is outrageous for anyone to suggest that Tulsi is a foreign asset. 

Second, speaking of cabinet member qualification, Liz MacDonald recites the qualifications of Biden’s cabinet secretaries. It is a rather sad bunch indeed:

Xavier Becerra, HHS - not a doctor, he’s a lawyer, ex-attorney general of California 

Jared Bernstein, Chair of Council of Economic Advisors - not an economist, Bachelor’s degree in music, masters in sociology. 

Pete Buttigieg, Transportation Secretary - no transportation background, Mayor of Indiana, “pothole Pete” 

Mayorkas, DHS Secretary - no security background, lawyer, Asst U.S. attorney, Obama transition team. 

Jennifer Granholm, Energy Secy - no energy background, Michigan Governor. 

Gina Raimondo, Commerce Secretary - No trade background. 

Gov of Rhode Island Deb Haaland, Interior Secy - New Mexico Congressman And just for kicks…

Bill Nye, the environmentalist “Science Guy” — no background in environmentalism or science, he’s a mechanical engineer and comedy writer.

Third, it’s bad enough that Joe Biden was trying to assert a moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas. He was also trying to manage the IDF. It was perfidy at the highest level. Let’s not keep saying that Biden was a friend of Israel.

Marina Medvin reports:

Netanyahu just revealed how Biden was trying to keep Israel from retrieving the hostages from Rafah, including American hostages. 

“Biden called me before entering Rafah and said to me: Prime Minister Netanyahu - you will be left alone!” 

“I answered him, ‘then we will do it alone!’” 

“Two days later, Blinken was sent to threaten me — ‘You will not receive any armaments.’” 

“I answered him, ‘We will fight with our hands and claws. We will not compromise on Rafah.’” 

“The Americans estimated that 20,000 people would be killed in Rafah. It turned out to be an absolute lie.” 

Palestinians were holding many hostages in Rafah, including American hostages. The leader of Hamas was also hiding out in Rafah.

Fourth, we recall the pogrom mounted in Amsterdam by anti-Semites. And we were wondering where the anti-Semites got the idea that they could do it and get away with it. Apparently, they read the city’s mayor correctly.

Dutch News reports:

Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema has said she would not again use the word “pogrom” when talking about the violence surrounding the Ajax-Maccabi Tel Aviv football match earlier this month, saying the word was now being used as propaganda.

Halsema also told current affairs show Nieuwsuur on Sunday evening that she should have mentioned the trouble caused by Maccabi supporters before and after the Europa League game in the Dutch capital. It emerged later than 10 Maccabi fans were arrested on the evening of the match and several more are included on a police “wanted” list.

“What I wanted to emphasise was the sadness and fear experienced by Jewish Amsterdammers,” she said. “But I have to say that in the following days, I saw how the word pogrom became politicised, to the level of propaganda.

“The Israeli government spoke of a ‘Palestinian pogrom on the streets of Amsterdam’ and in The Hague the words were used to discriminate against Moroccan Amsterdammers, Muslims. That is not what I meant or what I wanted.”

As for which groups are defending Amsterdam’s Jews, the answer is conservative Christians:

And ahead of last week’s parliamentary debate on the violence, Israel’s minister for the diaspora Amichai Chikli sent a 27-page special report to The Hague with its own analysis of the situation to politicians.

The report, which purported to outline links between Dutch organisations and Hamas, was used by the fundamentalist Christian SGP to draw up a motion stating that all Dutch organisations considered to be pro-Hamas by Israel should be put on a terrorism sanctions list.

The Telegraaf newspaper quoted Chikli as saying that “the Dutch authorities should take legal and economic measures against the criminals and as Geert Wilders suggests, deport those involved”.

The mayor declared that they were merely dealing with individuals who had behaved badly.

Now you know the attitude that sustains anti-Semitism.

Fifth, as for the feminization of the publishing world, it is proceeding apace. 

The following is from Helen Andrews:

University faculties went from being 32% female in 1987 to over 50% female in 2020...The majority of New York Times employees are female. The publishing industry is 77% female...coincided with a drastic cultural shift in the direction of feminine values.

Could it be that the results of the most recent election represented a repudiation of said feminization?

Sixth, Hitler lives. Or, at least, his dream of ridding the world of Jews lives on. Nowadays it’s called the Palestinian cause. 

According to Gerfried Ambrosch the current anti-Israeli mania was produced by melding of Nazi ideology with traditional Muslim attitudes towards Jews. From his Quillette article:

Anti-Israel activists in Germany who call on the country to “free Palestine from German guilt” not only downplay our Holocaust responsibility but also ignore the significant role that German antisemites played in shaping anti-Zionism in the Middle East. Their influence reflects a deep-rooted and enduring anti-Zionist strain within German antisemitism that predates even the rise of Nazism.

However, as historian Matthias Küntzel points out, while Islam traditionally treated Jews “with contempt or condescending toleration,” imported antisemitic conspiracy theories escalated this animosity by vilifying Jews as agents of diabolical evil.

Seventh, on a more positive note, it is good to be polite. Emma Jacobs writes in the Financial Times that rudeness is bad for business:

… rude­ness can demo­tiv­ate col­leagues and lead to a dys­func­tional work­place. Research in the Applied Psy­cho­logy Journal found rude­ness dimin­ished indi­vidu­als’ per­form­ance and their abil­ity to work in a team, which “may even have life-threat­en­ing con­sequences”.

Eighth, a few words from Peachy Keenan, about the august body called the American Academy of Pediatrics. You may know that this body has supported transmania transitions:

Of all the sulphuric, corrupt, evil institutions I want to see turned to ash, the one I most long to see getting leveled is the AAP. The American Academy of Pediatrics is the reason my doctor felt empowered to make me leave the exam room so she could ask my devout Catholic 16 yo son if he "felt comfortable with his gender," and then give him a lecture on using condoms. 

The AAP is the organization that twisted medicine and science to give cover to gender orcs seeking to ragdoll vulnerable young children for their dastardly political purposes. They gave the OK to trans surgeries. Chemical castrations. "Puberty blockers" (no such thing).

They're the ones who give new parents the option in the labor and delivery room to check "no gender" on their baby's intake form. They have lost the thread. Parents and children are not patients to them anymore: they are just dumb cannon fodder for their Quixotic political schemes. Dismantle, defund, and destroy it. Bring real medicine back to families. We need it!

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Cry-Bullies

Famed British essayist Julie Burchill is especially proud that she invented the term-- cry-bully. If I had invented it, I would be proud too.

How do you get to be a cry-bully? You begin with emotional incontinence, as you choose to advertise your emotions, preferably as a sign of superior spiritual and mental health. 

And then,you will insist that your emotional incontinence is a constructive contribution to the ambient conversation. At times, not just constructive, but definitive. 

After all, if you feel it that deeply, it must be the truth. Don’t we believe, as an article of our new secular faith, that an individual who believes that he is really a she is really a she?

Rather than argue the point or to present a rational argument, the cry-bully harasses and abuses other people, forcing them to believe what he wants them to believe.

Deliberative democracy does not support cry-bullies.

Now, Burchill suggests that people become cry-bullies when reality thwarts their expectations. They were sure that a certain candidate could not win an election and then, when he won, they went fully cry-bully and tried to ensure that he could not govern. All in the name of democracy.

Burchill wrote:

But just as fame is a mask that eats the face, emotional incontinence is a poison that eats the brain. It’s possible that these people are suffering from an actual thing called ‘disconfirmed expectancy’, a type of cognitive dissonance produced when new information directly contradicts an individual’s existing beliefs. This causes disciples to double down on the trounced worldview, much as followers of apocalyptic religious cults, disappointed when the aliens fail to land, say it’s going to happen next year instead.

One must also note that bullying is sadistic. It feels like it came to us from the world of therapy. People feel permitted to diminish and demean someone for failing to have the right opinions or even the right feelings because they think that it represents a higher stage of consciousness. 

Cry-bullying is not designed to persuade, but to force an opinion on someone else. In a strange sense the tactic seems indigenous to people who define themselves as victims. 

‘This is the age of the cry-bully, a hideous hybrid of victim and victor, weeper and walloper.

You cannot earn your way, so you explain it away by saying that you have been subjected to abuse and prejudice. Surely, it is better than taking personal responsibility.

Thus, the world owes you a living. It owes you payment to make you stop the whining and leave the rest of us alone. It is not excessive to call it moral extortion.

Think of it this way. When you are emotionally incontinent you lose face. In the most literal sense of the term. When your face is contorted to express an emotion it becomes less recognizable and you become less identifiable. 

In normal circumstances anyone who witnesses your dereliction, your failure to exercise the minimum of self-control, will immediately attempt to cover your face, to cover for you.

If you cannot save face someone will surely try to take up the slack.

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Speaking Liberalese

I trust Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh on this. I am confident that he hangs out with more liberals than I do. So, when he suggests that liberals have their own special language, I can only assent. He calls it liberalese. Do you speak it?

If Ganesh is right, it explains why liberal Democrats failed so conspicuously to communicate with the American people. It also tells us that the American left has become a cult, with its own special passwords. If you speak the language, presumably you belong. But you also exclude all of those who are not fluent in liberalese. 

I am even more intrigued by Ganesh’s analysis when he links it all to therapy. The cult followers of the American left seem to have seen the same therapist. They speak the same psychobabble, and they use the proper therapeutic terminology to signify that they have survived the same initiation ritual, and are now fully fledged members of the cult.

The new language is chock full of therapy jargon:

What char­ac­ter­ises the dia­lect that we might call Lib­eralese? First, psy­cho­thera­peutic jar­gon. The spray­ing around of such con­cepts as inten­tion­al­ity is an attempt to give things a sci­entific and even med­ical ven­eer by people who mostly stud­ied com­par­at­ive lit­er­at­ure. Second, an unbe­com­ing obses­sion with tran­si­ent pop cul­ture. Ref­er­ences to the “Bey­hive” and to “Brat sum­mer” are lost on much more of the pop­u­la­tion than lib­er­als think.

For the record, and considering that I spent more than a few years in a Freudian cult that has its own special language, my own experience makes this perfectly plausible.

One might even take it a step further and remark that the screaming ninnies who refuse to let you forget how much they hate the Donald are following instructions that their therapists gave them. Express your feelings, openly, honestly and shamelessly.

Then you can go off your meds.

As Ganesh points out, it is not just vocabulary. When Joe Biden took over the White House a new wave of liberals moved to Washington. They had their own mannerisms, their own dress codes, and of course their own language.

This tells us, rather vividly, that this group does not belong to the same nation as its opponents. For all the ranting about the Trump cult, these liberals are even more cult-like than the more Trumpian or Republican faction. 

As for the new liberal language, Ganesh describes it thusly:

Well, you were like­lier to hear someone vow to be “inten­tional”. Or use the phrase “redemp­tion arc”. Or accuse a third per­son of hav­ing “main char­ac­ter syn­drome”. Or of doing something “per­form­at­ive”. You were like­lier to hear “toxic” and “cos­play” and “nar­ciss­ism” and — more on this in a bit — “gas­light­ing”. Your date was like­lier to say, “I’m an empath”.

I defy anyone to explain what a “redemption arc” is? As for empaths, I have long since opined on the sadistic empaths among us. 

In truth, you do not need to know what any of this means. The terms are empty signifiers, roughly equivalent to passwords. How many of those who toss around the term performative have even heard of J. L. Austin.

Anyway, after four years of Biden, this liberalese has infested the culture. We see it on television ads and even in football games. I will take his word on that one.

Again, none of it means anything. Those who do not belong understand that the special liberal language is designed to exclude them. It all explains the Democratic Party failures during the last election.

In fairness, Ganesh continues, Kamala herself did not run around using this language. And she did not make diversity a pillar of her new policies. 

And yet, it does not matter. Her proxies spoke perfect liberalese and, as for diversity, she was the ultimate diversity candidate. She did not have to say it. She was it.

It was ultimately a pathway to the right.

Mean­while, the right is out there, in people’s ears, on their screens and all too easy to under­stand.

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