THE COLUMN: Bust Go the Boomers

When the first wave of Baby Boomers reported for kindergarten duty in the early/mid 1950s, they got a shock that has lasted throughout their – our – lives. Waiting for them were tens, dozens, scores of other kids in their classrooms, each one ready to eat your lunch. Welcome to the politics of scarcity, kids.

American families tended to be large in those days (women had not yet fully entered the workforce, and so could attend to their primary duty of birthing and raising the next generation), but the sheer numbers of the cohort was still a shock. In the ensuing years, the Boomers gradually realized they would be competing against each other for the rest of their lives for advancement, prestige, power, sex, and money. If they had to claw their way to the top and fend off all who would try to take their throne as King of the Generations, so be it.

Then they came of age during the revolutionary Sixties. They chose up sides. Woodstock hippies vs. the Ohio National Guard at Kent State were the shots heard 'round the world. Mutual loathing burgeoned and increased. Politically, the nation split in half: Nixon over McGovern; Carter over Ford, Reagan/Bush over Carter and Mondale; Clinton over Bush and Dole; Bush Jr. over Gore and Kerry; Obama over McCain and Romney; Trump over Clinton; Biden (!) over Trump. The dreary litany of the Zeitgeist continues apace, and yet here we remain, in Zugswang forever. 

Some years back, writing as my deracinated lefty character "David Kahane" in the pages of National Review Online, I coined the phrase "the Cold Civil War" (often incorrectly attributed to my friend, the late Angelo Codevilla, but he got it from me). My thesis: 

Despite all the evidence of the past several decades, you still have not grasped one simple fact: that, just about a century after the last one ended, we engaged in a great civil war, one that will determine the kind of country we and our descendants shall henceforth live in for at least the next hundred years — and, one hopes, a thousand. Since there hasn’t been any shooting, so far, some call the struggle we are now involved in the “culture wars,” but I have another, better name for it: the Cold Civil War

Your side admired strength, resolve. and purposefulness; we were stuck with weakness and indecision. You saw the world as something to be conquered; we saw the world as a hostile force needing to be appeased. You dealt with life head-on, never complaining and never explaining; we ran home and told our mommies. Think of us as Cain to your Abel, hating you from practically the moment we were born, hating you for your excellence and your unabashed pursuit thereof while we were the ugly stepchildren. Well, Cinderfella — how do you like us now?

Today, we are cock of the walk, king of the world, all our vices are made virtues, and all us sinners, saints. While you were out trying to make your way in the world, earning a living, being responsible, raising a family, paying your taxes, we infiltrated your every institution: the schools, the law, Hollywood, the culture, the government. We learned to train your own weapons upon you and, while you weren’t looking, we shot you in the back with them.

That was an excerpt from my book, Rules for Radical Conservatives, published in 2010. How right was I? Don't bother answering, because the evidence is all around us. From the safe and secure world of the Boomers' childhoods (until the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, nobody ever really believed the Rooskies would drop the Bomb on us) to the present mishegoss of open borders, "identification," black urban lawlessness, violent white storm troopers calling themselves "Antifa," a weaponized FBI, IRS, and Justice Department all in service to the Democrat Party and its senile, resentful president, an intelligence community now openly boasting about they can affect domestic political politics by planting disinformation, men competing in drag in women's sports, and tranny chic, the norms of post-war America have been shattered beyond repair, and we have to live in the resultant mess. 

And so it came to pass that Woodstock has been transmogrified into Altamont; the Beatles have passed but their satanic majesties the Rolling Stones are still with us.

Having put down the Democrat-led rebellion of 1861-1865 (which began when Democrats refused to accept the results of the 1860 election), the former United States are once again on the brink of dissolution, its citizens slowly but surely separating themselves into enclaves, making ever clearer the likelihood that the nation that (according to Leftist mythology) began as a "proposition" – in fact, it began as an outpost of the European Enlightenment, and once that tribe disappeared so also did most of its founding principles – will revert to a Balkanized collection of non-Western ethnic groups and their squabbling discontents. Absent a strong sense of national purpose and the shared inheritance of Greco-Roman culture, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and into the ash heap of history we go. 

The signs are all around: the fading of the dollar as the world's safe-harbor currency; the decline of the American military into a combination of meals on wheels and a social experiment in leaderlessness; the complete lack of trust in the electoral system (how can there be any when one side, the Democrats, is adamantly against any secure measures regarding voting?); and the utter disbelief in the most fundamental tenets of biological science while at the same time celebrating the Covid fascism of Faucism? As the saying goes, what cannot go on won't go on.

This morning, conservatives were stunned by the news that Tucker Carlson, 53, the highest-rated host on the network and the most popular media figure on television, was abruptly terminated in the wake of Fox's hefty financial settlement with Dominion Voting Services over allegations prominently pushed by Donald Trump supporters, including some at the network. The triggerman was most likely the nonagenerian Rupert Murdoch, an increasingly erratic media mogul who recently called off what would have been his fifth marriage. Other prominent media figures have been defenestrated recently as well, including Dan Bongino and CNN's Don Lemon. Forget Bud Light: now even the media (still dominated behind the scenes by the ancient gentry) is cracking up.

Meanwhile, wars and rumors of wars. The U.S. is fighting Russia in a disgraceful proxy war over the Ukraine's ahistorical pretensions to nationhood. Meanwhile, militarily inept China, the gold standard of a country that's never won a war against a Western power, is making noises about the South China Sea and eyeing Taiwan, the last bastion of Chiang's losers in the most recent Chinese civil war. No one except perhaps senator minority leader Turtle McChao, 81, will care if an when China invades with a good chance of winning. As history shows, the only people the Chinese can beat in an armed conflict is themselves. 

And so the elderly Boomers and gerontocrats find themselves at the end of the road with no place to go. Facing the hideous prospect of a Biden-Trump rematch next year, when Biden will be 82 and Trump 78, the Boomers have finally got their wish to stay on top of American society, locked in mortal combat with each other like Holmes and Moriarty going over the Reichenbach Falls. Another analogy might be Sammy Glick in Budd Schulberg's great novel What Makes Sammy Run?, conniving and hustling his gonoph rear end to the top of Hollywood, only to find himself condemned to a living hell from which the only escape is death.

It was never in our nature to go quietly. We arrived in those freshly built schools kicking and screaming, went muling and puking and toking through high school and college, dodged the draft as best we could, got laid as often as possible, stayed in graduate school until they kicked us out, infiltrated every organization on earth, found a comfortable, undemanding safe spot in the bosom of governments, where we found we could indulge our taste for the torture of other at no expense to ourselves, and then went about whole-heartedly tearing down every institution, just because we could.

Sure, we're on our way out. But just ask Biden, Trump, McConnell, Dianne Feinstein, Chuck Grassley, Jim Clyburn, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Maxine Waters, and all the other superannuated public officials — too old even to be Boomers but dearly supported by them! From our cold dead hands, baby, and if we have to take you all with us, nothing could make us happier. After us, the deluge. It's the least we could do for you, America. 

THE COLUMN: To Save America, Repeal the 26th Amendment

For only the second time in their sordid history—the first was the repeal of Prohibition—the Democrats have found a "progressive" law they want to repeal. It's the woefully misbegotten 26th Amendment to the Constitution, the one passed by Congress and ratified by the states that gave 18-year-olds the right to vote. It's one of the briefest pieces of legislation ever to emerge from the bowels of Washington, rushed through in a Vietnam-era fever to mollify the young people who were rallying in their thousands and ten thousands to protest the war. Here it is:

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The impetus behind the amendment was the slogan, "old enough to fight, old enough to vote." The reference was to the draft, which yanked multiple platoons of baby boomers out of their ordinary lives and packed them off with a gun in their hand to fight for LBJ and Tricky Dick Nixon. Well, that's not exactly true: those kids of the era smart enough or rich enough to attend college were deferred under the Selective Service Act, the theory being that there was no need to sacrifice the best and brightest when you could ship a year's worth of high-school mechanics-in-training off to the rice paddies as cannon fodder in a war the American government most certainly did not want to win, while preserving the Robert Strange McNamaras of tomorrow for lives in corporate or governmental servitude. Who knows, you might even get a president—or two or four—who managed to dodge military service and bounce straight from academe or business into the Commander-in-Chief's chair without ever picking up a gun.

Nope from Hope.

Through Joe Biden, a total of 16 presidents (or 14, depending on how you count) never spent any time near a boot camp or one of the service academies, including FDR (who was, however, Asst. Secretary of the Navy from 1913 to 1920), William Howard Taft (Secretary of War 1904-1908), John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, and Calvin Coolidge. These usually were men who came of age during peacetime, in contradistinction to the 31 men who fought for their country, including the five Civil War presidents such as Grant, Hayes, Garfield, and a raft of presidents who saw action during World War II (Eisenhower, JFK, Nixon, et al.). It wasn't until Bill Clinton supplanted veteran George H.W. Bush in 1992 that the era of the draft dodger got fully underway, with only George W. Bush having spent any time in the military among the most recent five presidents.

Amazingly, we heard nary a peep from the likes of Grant and Ike or the men who served under them regarding the "unfairness" of being sent to fight before first casting a ballot. This is partly because the draft, in its various manifestations during American history, generally came during a time of national emergencies and then stopped; a peacetime draft didn't appear until 1940, with the U.S. on the verge of war in both Europe and Asia. The military is now all-volunteer (i.e. a professional standing army, a notion previously abhorrent to Americans).

More important, the vote was considered a privilege, not a "right" (there is no such right in the Constitution), and it was correctly judged that a young man needed to attain his majority and his maturity before he could share in the governance of the Republic. The franchise, therefore, represented a coming-of-age of the men to whom it was granted. It was never intended to be "universal."

Choom Gang this.

By 1971, however, the Vietnam War had already been going on for nearly a decade, and under the spectacularly bad management of phony veteran Lyndon Baines Johnson (Silver Star for riding in an airplane) and the quintessential egghead, McNamara (disqualified for combat service during WW2 by "bad vision"), and three years after Nixon promised he had a "secret plan" to end the war, the natives were growing restive. Especially the Boomer generation, who had experienced neither the Depression nor the war, as their parents had; hardship was unknown to them.

During that period, a college education—once reserved for the upper classes and meritocratic strivers—was gradually transforming from something that only a very small minority of American men and women enjoyed into something deemed to be necessary to achieving a middle-and-upper-class lifestyle. This was when a wag-the-dog attitude toward higher education began to take root, not least in academe itself. Because holders of a college degree generally earned more than their high-school-only counterpart, it became axiomatic that the degree itself caused the rise in income. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

Further, graduate degrees at that time tended to be highly specialized; the figure of the Eternal Graduate Student appeared, in part to continue avoiding exposure to Selective Service, although those deferments were eventually done away with as well by the time the draft was finally abolished in 1973. It is this context, therefore, that the move to lower the voting age took hold and eventually, in the teeth of massive opposition to the draft—not the war, which most Americans supported until LBJ's ineptitude had become clear to all—must be considered.

Five deferments for asthma.

The war is long gone, lost from the start by American unwillingness to devote the resources necessary for victory, but the 26th amendment lives on. So I wish I could hail the latest Democrat proposal to repeal the 26th, but alas I can't, since the cure is worse than the disease:

More than a dozen House Democrats this week proposed an amendment to the Constitution to allow 16-year-olds to vote in an apparent attempt to make it easier to enact left-leaning policies like gun control and pro-environmental measures. Democratic Rep. Grace Meng of New York introduced a resolution that would do away with the 26th Amendment to the Constitution, which allows U.S. citizens to vote if they are at least 18 years of age. The resolution would replace that with new language that says: "The right of citizens of the United States, who are sixteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age."

Meng hadn’t released a statement on her proposal by early Thursday afternoon. But she released a statement in the last Congress, indicating a belief that lowering the voting age by amending the Constitution would let younger people have a say on many of the positions supported by Democrats. "Our young people, including 16- and 17-year-olds, continue to fight and advocate for so many issues that they are passionate about from gun safety to the climate crisis," she said. "They have been tremendously engaged on policies affecting their lives and their futures."

Yes, you read that right: 16. At an age when boys are eating boogers and lighting farts, getting more tattoos than the average sailor, and having sex with high school girls. At an age when girls (they're not even close to being "women") are pondering sex change operations and seeking out abortion services and getting even more tattoos than the average hooker. And these are the unformed humanoids with whom the Democrats (unformed humanoids themselves, to be sure) want to entrust the nation's future?

Missed me by this much.

So yes: repeal the 26th. And then restore the status quo ante, to 21. It was an amendment passed in the heat of the moment and under tremendous political pressure. It didn't do Nixon any good; a year after it became law, he was forced to resign over the now-trivial matter of Watergate, less than two years after he had won one of the greatest landslides in American history. (America's first media coup; Trump was the second). Like Trump, he was reviled from the start, cordially loathed by the Democrat/Media Complex, tortured weekly by the Washington Post's singularly nasty political cartoonist, Herbert Block, and never handed an even break.

Ditto Trump with the Covid hoax, played for a fool by Anthony Fauci and the Democrats and maneuvered by media pressure into crashing a "vaccine" that has proven more deadly than the semi-imaginary disease it was meant to "cure," the news of which was conveniently withheld by Big Pharma and the media until after the election, at which point it was administered to a reluctant populace at gunpoint by a party of political opportunists who now want to bring you... the 16-year-old voter.

Where will it stop? It won't, until we stop it. As I like to say, they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit. Next will be the 12-year-old voter, then the 8-year-old voter; by the time the Democrats reach the unborn voter they may finally reconsider their position on abortion, but by then the Republic will have passed into history, the victim of its own unlimited appetite for diversity, tolerance, and "progress." The parable of Chesterton's Fence comes once more to mind, except this time the fence has been demolished, the teenagers are not about to bring it back, and the grownups are long gone.

Best of 2022: 'Reality Intrudes Upon Biden’s Climate Hypocrisy' by Steven F. Hayward

The year of Our Lord 2022 has been a good one for us here at The Pipeline, which has seen the launch of our weekly Substack column; the release of our first book, Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order; and the publication of a lot of excellent content from our wonderful group of contributors. As the year comes to its close, we thought we would spotlight some of our best work, chosen from our most clicked articles.

Reality Intrudes Upon Biden’s Climate Hypocrisy

Steven F. Hayward, 5 April, 2022

It's time for a reality check. If you take a confidential survey of environmentalists, the candid ones will admit that the Obama administration was a great disappointment when it came to "climate change "and moving the country to “green” energy. Despite promising on election night in 2008 that the sea levels would stop rising because he’d deliver green nirvana, the Obama years saw the massive reversal in America’s long decline in domestic oil production, as the fracking revolution took Washington by surprise.

The fracking revolution happened quietly out of view; if Washington had been aware of what was happening, they would surely have stopped it cold. Like Uber when it shows up to challenge a taxi monopoly in a city, it is hard to kill off a thriving sector entirely once it has taken root.

Obama was an ideologue, but he wasn’t stupid. After the financial crash of 2008 and the slow-growth recovery that followed, the oil and gas sector was about the only sector that boomed aside from Wall Street. He likely knew that without the resurgence of oil and gas, especially in swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, he likely would have lost his re-election bid in 2012. Ironically the hated fracking revolution led in the U.S. to the largest decrease in carbon emissions anywhere in the world, as suddenly cheap natural gas outcompeted coal in the marketplace—all without a signing ceremony on the White House lawn.

In sum, the political agenda of the climate campaign largely ground to a halt during the Obama years. Ambitious new legislation stalled out on Capitol Hill despite large Democratic majorities before the 2010 election, and Obama’s regulatory strategy—the so-called “Clean Power Plan”—was blocked in court. The Paris Climate Accord was so weak that the founding father of climate alarmism, NASA’s James Hansen, called it a “bull----” agreement. The only exception to this litany of disappointment was lavish and solar subsidies, which both parties in Congress love to expand, even though they generate meager amounts of energy. By the time he left office, Obama was embracing an “all of the above” energy strategy that implicitly recognized the long-term necessity for fossil fuel energy.

Joe Biden took office apparently after gulping extra helpings of climate Kool-Aid, determined to strangle fossil fuels more seriously than Obama ever did. Halting the Keystone XL pipeline in mid-construction was an unprecedented step...

 

Stop the 'Ministry of Truth' (Again)

Too few understand the scale of the Left’s attack on America. This lack of understanding stems from a rejection of what our senses are telling us and our refusal to think critically about our nation and the future liberty of our children. The now-renamed federal “Disinformation Governance Board” (more accurately, Orwell’s 1984 Ministry of Truth) the Covid “vaccine,” “climate change,” “transgenderism,” have nothing to do with truth, health, climate or one’s sex.

The Ministry of Truth… is concerned with erasing the truth of the past and present and replacing it with whatever the Party deems “correct.” Those in charge of the ministry decide what “truth” is.

What the Mis-Dis-Mal-information gang does have to do with includes spying on Americans and monitoring elections to ensure removal of any information that might be found in an abandoned laptop, for example, and preventing the investigation of voter fraud.

Federal authorities searched the suburban Virginia home of former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark Wednesday... Clark features heavily in the House Select Committee hearing today that focuses on former President Donald Trump's efforts to push the Justice Department to do his bidding in the weeks before the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

His crime seems to have been believing that the 2020 election had irregularities that might be worth investigating.

Forgotten, but not gone.

In March, President Biden issued an executive order to federalize the mid-terms that all polls show Democrats losing badly. You didn’t think Progressives were going to allow their accelerating fundamental transformation of America to be stopped by a silly mid-term, did you? As the reach of this column by Mollie Hemingway broadens, be assured it will be labelled MDM: Mis-Dis-Malinformation.

Executive Order 14019 ignores that the Constitution does not give the executive branch authority over elections. That power is reserved for the states, with a smaller role for Congress. With H.R. 1 and other Democrat Party efforts to grab more control over elections have thus far failed, Congress hasn’t authorized such an expansion.

Did the labeling of Hunter Biden’s laptop as "disinformation" alter the election outcome? We will never know. What we do know is that 48 percent of Americans believe it did and 16 percent of Biden voters would not have voted for him had they known about it. This is what happens by design when the government monitors and is allowed to label information rather than letting speech and thought survive, or not, in a free marketplace of ideas.

Having told the American people that this attack on speech and thought had been “paused” and Minister of Truth Nina Jankowicz fired, the administration gave the task of  truth assignment to the ever-vacuous Kamala Harris, and now, quietly, the Ministry of Truth is back in action.

Why was this clear violation of the primary right of all humans, to use our unique gift of speech to speak our unique thoughts freely – reinstated so quickly?  Because the truth of the costs of going green must be hidden until those paying these costs have already been impoverished.

White House national climate adviser Gina McCarthy wants them to censor content on the costs of a force-fed green energy transition, and "We need the tech companies to really jump in,” she said, because highlighting the costs of green energy is “equally dangerous to denial because we have to move fast."

"Highlighting," not lying about, "the costs" is disinformation. It is axiomatic that if free speech and thought enabled rather than hindered the goals of this Administration, censorship would not be on the table. The idea of censoring speech in America is a blatant and unconstitutional attempt to force the public to “choose truth over fact,” raising the questions, “Whose ‘truth’?” and, more importantly, "Who gets to decide?"

Those familiar with the totalitarian movements of the last century will see the demand to accept a "vaccine" (which does not prevent infection, does not prevent re-infection, does not prevent transmission, and so fits no previously-known definition of the word, “vaccine”), the acceptance of the "climate change" fiction, and the required approval and celebration of the sexual mutilation fantasy of "transgenderism," as exactly what they are: Party membership. Refuse Party membership by speaking against the Klimate Kult, refusing the “vaccine,” rejecting gender “re-assignment,” and be removed from school or your career and excluded from professional, social and economic life by the Party.

You will be made to care.

In 1945, General Eisenhower, the WW2 Supreme Allied Commander, European Forces, on finding the infamous death camps, marched the local townspeople through the camps to force the them to understand the evil to which they had turned a blind eye as millions were murdered and incinerated. No moral or ethical difference, only a difference of scale, exists between those German townspeople and those continuing to demand the “vaccine” be forced on others regardless of Pfizer's own documentation, “Cumulative Analysis of Post-authorization Adverse Event Reports,” that at least 1,223 recipients of their vaccine died and another 42,000 experienced “serious” adverse events in the first 90 days of injections. In the world of professional athletes, FIFA has noted the 420 percent increase in athlete deaths in 2021. That the FDA accepted this “vaccine” as “safe and effective,” is indicative of a government that "choose[s] truth over fact.”

We are ruled by those not interested in freedom, liberty or truth. This is what former president Trump meant when, in his inauguration speech, he said,

Today's ceremony, however, has very special meaning because, today, we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the people.

It was that giving back power to those to whom it belongs that got him run out of town on a rail.

For those not yet connecting the dots, here is Obama campaigning in 2008:

We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.

A straight line connects that speech to our new Truth Ministry. From here on, things will only get worse unless our own national socialists are stopped, now.

Time to Play 'Truth or Consequences'

There are lessons to be learned from the baby formula shortage, though few of our elected representatives are clever enough or sufficiently industrious to be instructed. The biggest lesson is this: every time our elected representatives cede another portion of their constitutional authority to unelected bureaucrats, they weaken the sinews of our nation.

The price of gasoline is an obvious example. Prices at the pump have doubled and more since President Biden took office. This did not happen because there is any shortage of crude oil reserves or refining capacity. This happened because Congress knowingly granted unelected bureaucrats at agencies like the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency the power to override market demand for crude oil and refined products.

The choice to utilize that power or not then rests with the executive branch, aka: the President. Trump reigned in Interior, the EPA, et al. The result was that we did what Barack Obama tartly assured America we could not possibly do: we drilled our way to two dollar per gallon gasoline. Biden has given Interior, the EPA, et al. their head to gallop away and even applied a bit of the whip for good measure. The result? It’s a crapshoot whether your next fill up will set you back a Franklin, or just a handful of Jacksons.

Where does it stop?

How does this mindset, or rather lack of mindful attentiveness, lead us to the baby-formula shortage we face today? There are at least three reasons, all inter-related and all applicable to the production of most every vital resource domestically produced today.

Globalization Breeds Automation Breeds Consolidation: It will be a very, very long time till the cost of labor in developing Asian countries like China approaches anything like equity with the cost of labor in nations that are industrially and economically mature. The only way to stay domestically competitive in many an American industry is to rely more and more on automation. While the capital investment to automate processes is significant, the operating costs once the robots go to work are trivial. Plus, they are unlikely to demand mental-health wellness days or gender re-assignment elective surgery.

If one is going to invest in automation, it makes the most sense to make that investment a single time at one big plant rather than multiple times at a plethora of small plants. I do not claim to know the baby formula market, but I have seen this time and again in other markets. As automation takes root, consolidation follows and products that used to come from dozens of factories scattered across the country now come from a handful of plants. The fact that the shutdown of Abbott’s plant in Sturgis, Mich. could have such a marked effect on the baby food market strongly suggests to me that the baby formula market has followed that course.

Bureaucrats Wear Blinders:  Bureaucrats are necessary. I won’t even say they are a necessary “evil,” because there is nothing inherently evil about telling a fair-minded person that his job is to “make sure thus and so is done, and done correctly.” Still, there must be limits to the power of a bureaucrat. A company does not want an accountant to forgo auditing their books in order to stroll over to the Research and Development department to opine on new formulas the chemists are trying out.

But there is another side to that mindset. Having their role narrowly restricted, many bureaucrats seem to believe that the world they are allowed to impact is the only world that exists. As the old saw suggests, a carpenter equipped only with a hammer tends to see every problem as a nail.

Imagine if you had cause to be concerned about the welfare of children at a neighbor’s house. The Department of Children and Family Services sends an inspector over. That inspector is charged with looking at everything that impacts the welfare of the children and to weigh competing factors before making a recommendation. The official may conclude the children are being well cared for, or that there are certain shortcomings in the household that should be corrected. When DCFS does it’s job correctly, it removes a child from a household only if the child is in clear and imminent danger. If the kids are living on fast food and Goldfish crackers, the inspector may recommend dietary improvements. If the children are not being fed and living in filth, they will and should be removed from the danger and neglect.

I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

In our example, what DCFS does not do is to send over an electrician to inspect the wiring and base their decision on whether the home is up to code. But that is precisely the mindset of the bureaucratic inspector, whether from the FDA, the EPA, OSHA or any other of the alphabet soup of government bureaucracies. And that leads us to the final problem:

Nobody Looks at the Big Picture: We are told that the Sturgis plant was shut down because bacteria (described by some outlets as “deadly," but hyperbole is as common in stories involving elements of risk as funny hats are at a Shriners convention) was found in the plant. Not only was the plant shut down, Abbott – surely at the advice of counsel – issued a recall notice for formula already on the shelves. Thus, the fear of tort liability more or less instantly caused a shortage and heedless bureaucratic despotism ensured demand could not be quickly satisfied.

Politicians love to piously declare that they are following the science, although few understand enough science to recognize gravity if you dumped a bushel of apples on their head. The bigger problem is that when they invoke the magisterial authority of science, they only consider one aspect of science, much as the blinkered bureaucrat considers only their own mission and authority.

There is another aspect of science involved here, as with the fossil-fuel debate, the vaccine debate, the gender debate, etc. That is the science of public welfare. That science is not about one thing, it’s about everything. It is precisely that science that our public officials are elected to consider and act upon.

Let's say that bacteria was found at the Sturgis plant. Was it truly “deadly”? Was it found in an isolated area? How widespread was the contamination? Is there anything that could be done to ensure that formula already on the shelves could be used safely? Given the choice between boiling formula before using it and not having formula, I’m pretty sure what choice most mothers would make. Could Abbott have been protected from lawsuits in such a case?

There are many more issues that should have been considered before the plant was shut down and product recalled, because those two drastic actions have had drastic consequences for public welfare. Unfortunately this administration possesses no one with the courage to make those kind of decisions, much less that ability to understand they need to be made.

THE COLUMN: No Country for Old Men

The President of the United States, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., who is 79 years old and suffering from senile dementia at the end of a long life of bullying, lying, boasting, conniving, grifting, grafting, and living off the public tit to an extent indecent even by Washington standards, declared war on Russia on Friday. In the course of a typically blustering, hectoring speech, the senescent Biden went off script and interpolated the following peroration: "For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power."

To which the only proper response is: "For God's sake, this man cannot remain in the Oval Office." Joe Biden needs to be removed from the White House as soon as possible, before his failing mind, his erratic behavior, and his proven lack of character get us all killed. The question is, is there enough political will in the capital to do what needs to be done?

Biden's blunder was immediately walked back by the few adults left in the room, called a "gaffe," or—worse—actually defended by the neocons and other leftists as truth-telling on a heroic scale, evocative of Ronald Reagan's 1987 "tear down this wall" speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, which two years later actually did result in the Wall coming down. But his rash words continue to ring, now matter how swiftly his handlers and apologists and even Biden himself try to make us disbelieve our own lying ears:

Mush-mouthed as usual, and delivered with all the Scrantonian sincerity of one of his typical campaign speeches, Biden's address was not only the low-water mark of his presidency so far, but a nadir in the history of the United States and its practice of diplomacy. 

As bad as the State Department is, it's generally been able to enforce some sort of diplomatic protocol on even its loosest cannons. Barack Hussein Obama's spectacular breach of etiquette in his toast to Queen Elizabeth in 2011 was a notable exception. On the other hand, Donald Trump's own Warsaw speech in 2017 was a triumph of forceful, cogent argumentation and a full-throated defense of Western civilization.

But for Biden to end his intemperate saber-rattling with a call for Vladimir Putin to be deposed is something nearly unprecedented in our nation's history. George H.W. Bush, during his feckless and pointless war against Saddam Hussein, effectively did so, at least as a hypothetical, and characteristically hedged his bets:

'I would be be willing to take a new look if the army took matters into their own hands,' said Bush, who noted that the United States would not resume normal relations with Iraq as long as Saddam remains in power. 'If a new regime emerged then I'd like to see what their goals are.' Despite his claim that Saddam 'has got to go,' Bush said again that it is not his intention to involve the United States in Iraq's internal affairs.

But Saddam wasn't deposed, and it was left to Bush II to clean up Poppy's mess, by making an even bigger one.

During his long occupation of a Senate seat, Biden served for many years on the foreign-relations committee, and learned all the wrong lessons without acquiring an ounce of real-world savvy. This is the problem with electing a lifelong senator to the presidency with no prior executive experience except ribbon-cutting ceremonies and attending foreign funerals as veep. Senators' words have no real-world consequences; presidents' do. Senators can say anything they want, because their words carry no executive authority and they cannot be legally held accountable for them. They're meant for the ears of voters back home, not for the guy in the Kremlin with his finger on the button.

For 50 years this creepy blowhard has been dining out off his dead wife and daughter, and more recently, a dead son, parlaying sympathy votes into a lifetime sinecure. Now, by accident/design/hook/crook he's Potus. And God help us, by calling for regime change in Moscow, he's just given the Russians a casus belli, should they choose to accept it. They would be perfectly within their rights to do so under the laws of war.

All in all, it's just another hair-raising moment in the funhouse ride from hell that has been the Biden "presidency" so far. Robinette Junior came to D.C. in the 1970s and he's brought the '70 back along with him to the White House: flaccid leadership, an energy crisis, rampant inflation, and consummate failure abroad. Even the lickspittle media can't disguise the stench of his latest poll numbers: 

Amid Europe’s largest land war since World War II, 7 in 10 Americans expressed low confidence in President Joe Biden’s ability to deal with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in a new NBC News poll, and 8 in 10 voiced worry that the war will increase gas prices and possibly involve nuclear weapons. And during the nation’s largest inflation spike in 40 years, overwhelming majorities said they believe the country is headed in the wrong direction and disapproved of the president’s handling of the economy. Those are some of the major findings of the new national NBC News poll, which found that Biden’s overall job approval rating had declined to 40 percent, the lowest level of his presidency. 

This simply cannot continue if the nation is to survive. The stumbling block, of course, is what would come after him should he be removed via the 25th amendment or suffer an unfortunate act of God or simply reach the end of his rapidly diminishing physical and mental capacity: President Kamala Harris. A vapid affirmative-action female-type person without the slightest aptitude for any job she's so far been handed by the Democratic establishments in California and D.C., she very likely would be even worse than her current boss, at least for the short time she, too, would hold office.

Heroes to zeroes in two years.

But take heart: there is precedent. During the Democrat/Washington Post coup against Richard Nixon in 1974, the first order of business was to remove Tricky Dick's veep, the genially corrupt Spiro T. Agnew, the former Baltimore County executive and governor of Maryland, on conveniently discovered charges of penny-ante bribery, extortion, and income-tax violations. Such things were and remain part of the way business is done in Baltimore—just ask the former Nancy d'Alesandro, now Speaker Pelosi, about corruption in Baltimore—but they suddenly loomed large when it was time to overturn the results of the 1972 presidential election, which saw Nixon win 60.7 percent of the popular vote, carry 49 states (he lost only Massachusetts and D.C.), and garner 520 electoral votes.

Less than two years later, both Agnew (replaced by congressman Gerald Ford) and Nixon were gone. So it can be done, and perfectly legally. And don't worry—if Biden were to leave office early, Nancy Pelosi would not automatically become vice president. The succession pecking order only kicks in when both the senior executive offices suddenly become vacant. 

Removing Biden shouldn't be that difficult. Section 4 reads:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

There's a catch, of course:

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.

Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

We can cross that Rubicon when we come to it. America at this point in her history is no country for old men, no matter which party they belong to.

               ELLIS
           ...What you got ain't nothin' new.
           This country is hard on people. Hard
           and crazy. Got the devil in it yet
           folks never seem to hold it to
           account.

                        BELL
           I'm... discouraged.

                          ELLIS
           You can't stop what's comin. Ain't
           all waitin' on you.

          The two men look at each other. Ellis shakes his head.

                          ELLIS
           ...That's vanity.

In the meantime, and for the sake of the nation, Biden must go. 

Biden Blows Up Yet Another Gas Pipeline

Are you baffled by an administration which, to take just one example, adopts an open border policy at home while mouthing platitudes about the sanctity of borders regarding Russian incursions in Ukraine? There’s an easy answer: its policy is to strengthen the hand and fill the pockets of  those who oppose and wish to weaken us at every turn while harming the interests of American citizens and our allies abroad.

Take seven-billion-dollar Eastern Mediterranean Gas Pipeline. In August of 2020 I reported how the Greeks, Cypriots, and Israelis  had coordinated plans for a 1,200-mile undersea pipeline connecting Israeli and Cypriot gas fields to Greece and then to Europe. This is a huge, expensive project in which, following on the Abraham Accords engineered by then-President Trump, the United Arab Emirates has a substantial interest, including a 22 percent stake in the large Israeli Tamar gas field.

President Trump  supported the pipeline. But President Biden, in a “non -paper” (an unofficial communication), has notified the Greek government that we are no longer supporting the project, allegedly because it posed a security threat to the region. Except, of course, when Russia wanted waivers to build Nord Stream 2,  a non-green gas pipeline to Europe, it had no such qualms.

The Eastern Mediterranean pipeline would have benefitted our allies Greece, Cyprus, Israel and the UAE. It would as well, have provided desperately needed future  energy supplies to Western Europe which has been engaged in suicidal green policies. As a result, Western Europe at the moment faces a cold winter with insufficient energy, predictable shortages, higher prices, and potentially disastrous economic consequences, including manufacturing shutdowns.

It is hard to sympathize with a Europe whose leaders have made their lack of natural energy sources like coal and oil worse by adopting explicit anti-energy policies. Its governments have banned hydraulic shale fracturing of which it does have substantial amounts of technically recoverable shale gas. Coal-rich Germany has made itself dependent on outside sources of energy, primarily Russian gas, shutting down three nuclear plants and planning to mothball three more this year. It has allowed LNG import terminals to be snarled in permitting delays, cutting off another possible source.

But even if you have little sympathy for our allies on this score, the withdrawal of support for the pipeline will harm U.S. interests. If we wish to discourage Russian incursions into Ukraine, we are hamstrung by Europe’s dependence on Russian gas (about 40 percent of imports at present) and certain to rise. To tighten the screws, Russia has the capacity to inflict great damage by instituting a gas embargo or simply reducing gas supplies, reducing Europe to dependency. Additionally. Russia has had a large hand in fueling the "green" opposition to energy in western Europe.

Russia is not the only beneficiary of this volte face on the pipeline. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan sought to undermine the project from its inception because he gets no benefit from it. Why shouldn’t this latest Biden administration blunder give him more reason to crow?

Joe and Vlad: the Odd Couple

President Biden was roundly mocked last week for answering a reporter's question about a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine with a bowl of fully dressed word salad which began, "It's one thing if it’s a minor incursion." And rightly so -- it was a bizarre response that sent the wrong signals to all parties. I'm sure Ukraine's President Zelensky didn't relish having to send out this tweet in reply:

But this isn't the first time that Biden has broadcast mixed signals on Russia. Remember when his administration gave the go-ahead for construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which will allow Russia to transport natural gas to desperate western European nations like Germany without having to go through Ukraine? Team Biden had condemned the project in the clearest possible terms, saying Nord Stream was "a bad deal because it divides Europe, it exposes Ukraine and Central Europe to... Russian manipulation, and because it goes against Europe’s own stated energy and security goals." And then one day -- immediately after Russian hackers shut down a major American pipeline for several days, oddly enough -- he relented. Sorry, Ukraine!

Even seemingly unrelated Biden moves have redounded to Russia's benefit. The cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline extension, for instance, was Biden's first attempt at undermining former President Trump's goal of American energy independence. Well, here we are a year later and American oil imports from Russia have more than tripled! Whereas thousands of oil and gas workers in the U.S. and our ally Canada have lost out, thousands of Russians (and their Putin-crony, ex-KGB, oil billionaire bosses) have gained.

What's in it for the Big Guy?

We've just had four years of frankly libelous accusations against Donald Trump, claiming that he was a Putin stooge who colluded with the Kremlin to (somehow) steal the 2016 election, that he might even have been a Soviet sleeper agent, or at least that he was desperate to prevent the leaking of whatever kompromat they had on him. The reality is that Trump came into office hoping to improve our relationship with Russia, just like every president since the fall of the Berlin Wall, but on the level of policy he was actually tougher on Putin than any of his predecessors.

Meanwhile, Biden is always happy to talk trash about Putin to American reporters -- he's recently taken to claiming, unbelievably, that he looked Putin in the eye in 2014 and said to him, "I don't think you have a soul" -- but somehow Putin always seems to come away the winner in every situation Biden involves himself in.

Is it just me, or is "America First" sounding like a much better foreign policy by the day? I bet they're starting to feel the same in Kiev right about now as well. In Moscow, well, maybe not so much.

Of Covid Mandates and Legal Liabilities

Last month President Biden announced an initiative that he asserts will ‘stop’ the SARS Cov-2 virus. A scientifically implausible objective, his outline included a plan to require all private businesses with 100 or more employees to ensure their employees are fully vaccinated or require weekly testing. The mandates are curious because they burden businesses in unprecedented and legally nebulous ways.

Using a mechanism referred to as an Emergency Temporary Standard through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the administration asserts mandating vaccines will stop the transmission of the virus. However, the vaccine was neither developed for, nor indicated to arrest transmission of the virus. According to the FDA website, the vaccine is intended to “…reduce severe illness, hospitalization and death.”

So why might the Administration be issuing mandates for a vaccine that cannot achieve their stated purpose of ‘stopping the virus”? Consider possible reasons by looking through the lens of liability.

Cross my heart and hope to die.

As business-minded leaders do in the face of government overreach, a response must be developed that helps create certainty for the business. To get there in this case, one must review the most fundamental aspect of a mandate… if the business requires the action as a condition of employment, the business owns the consequence of what happens as a result. Understanding the business of vaccine liability may help a business determine whether it is in its best interest to accept the premise of the Biden Administration mandate, or perhaps consider other strategies, including legal challenges.

An important element of the liability relating to vaccines is whether the individual receives the Emergency Use Authorized (EUA)-version of the vaccine, or the newly FDA-approved, branded-version known as Comirnaty. While there is no difference in the actual drug in the syringe, there are differences in the liability protection offered under EUA for those who manufacture, distribute or in some way deliver the vaccine, compared to the FDA-approved Comirnaty.

According to the Congressional Research Service, “…in order to encourage the expeditious development and deployment of medical countermeasures during a public health emergency, the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act) authorizes the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to limit legal liability for losses relating to the administration of medical countermeasures such as diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines.”

In a declaration effective February 4, 2020, nearly six weeks before the U.S. lock-downs, the HHS Secretary invoked the PREP Act and declared Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19) to be a public health emergency warranting liability protections for covered countermeasures inclusive of the available vaccines. According to the current PREP ACT, the protection against liability reaches into 2025.

Ummm...

All state and local governments, medical providers and related manufacturers and distributors of modalities for treatment of Covid-19 were exempted from liability. So for anyone who receives the EUA- version of the vaccine, which as of this writing is still the only version available in the U.S., one has no recourse from a liability perspective, except in very specific and limited circumstances should one experience an adverse event or die. However, once FDA-approved and sold under the brand name Comirnaty, liability is handled differently. Comirnaty is currently only available in Israel.

Under normal circumstances, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) provides compensation for injuries caused by most vaccines routinely administered in the U.S., such as childhood vaccines and non-pandemic seasonal influenza vaccines.

Enter mandated businesses. Once a vaccine is mandated by a private business, an entity not outlined and protected under the PREP Act, nor protected once a branded drug is available on the market, liability protection seemingly does not  exist for businesses.

Looking beyond the PREP ACT, consider the long-term efficacy data currently available. Since vaccines have only been available for a relatively short time, long-term data is simply unknown. However, that doesn’t mean the potential adverse events are not a liability for which a mandated company must model and prepare.

Consider the language from the FDA’s website, pertaining to long-term efficacy of the FDA-approved Comirnaty regarding Myocarditis and Pericarditis.

Additionally, the FDA conducted a rigorous evaluation of the post-authorization safety surveillance data pertaining to myocarditis and pericarditis following administration of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 Vaccine and has determined that the data demonstrate increased risks, particularly within the seven days following the second dose. The observed risk is higher among males under 40 years of age compared to females and older males. The observed risk is highest in males 12 through 17 years of age. Available data from short-term follow-up suggest that most individuals have had resolution of symptoms. However, some individuals required intensive care support. Information is not yet available about potential long-term health outcomes. The Comirnaty Prescribing Information includes a warning about these risks.

Add to this, we now believe the SARS CoV-2 virus was modified in a Chinese lab and the liability issues are more nebulous. A recently exposed a 2018 grant proposal submitted by Peter Daszak of the Eco Health Alliance, to DARPA, the Pentagon’s research and development arm. The proposal sought funding to engineer a Furin Cleavage site (FCS) into a beta coronavirus. The FCS was intended to increase the virulence of the virus in humans. DARPA deemed it too dangerous and denied the grant.

A year later, in 2019, a beta coronavirus virus with a FCS shows up having potentially ‘leaked’ from a Wuhan lab at which Daszak was coincidently using National Institute of Health (NIH) funding to make gain-of-function modifications to beta family coronaviruses. A significant percentage of the spike protein from the original strain of SARS Cov-2 are in the vaccine now being mandated. What other enhancements were made to that virus and inadvertently stitched into the vaccine? The answers are presently unknown.

Companies must decide whether mandating the vaccine for their most valuable asset, their employees, is a sound business decision. Can businesses confidently assert that without a legal fight, they will not have some liability in the face of potential short and long-term health issues associated with the currently available vaccine?

Keystone Pipeline Firm Sues Feds for $15 Billion

Back when Biden cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline, we mentioned the possibility that TC Energy, the Canadian energy firm which owned and operated Keystone, might ultimately sue the U.S. government for damages. Well it looks like they're going to do just that:

In a statement on July 2, [TC Energy] said it had filed a notice of intent with the State Department to begin a legacy North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) claim under the U.S.–Mexico–Canada Agreement. The company said it aims to “recover economic damages resulting from the revocation of the Keystone XL Project’s Presidential Permit,” adding that it suffered a loss of more than $15 billion “as a result of the U.S. Government’s breach of its NAFTA obligations.”

Killing the XL has meant the loss of thousands of jobs on both sides of the border; it has meant that oil and natural gas is now being transported by rail, which is both more dangerous and more carbon intensive, and now it might end up costing American taxpayers a few billion dollars. Who, exactly, has benefited from this idiotic move?

Oh, right -- the activists.