THE COLUMN: 'Events, Dear Boy, Events'

And so, just like that, Covid hysteria has suddenly receded, the manifest limitations of "green energy" have revealed themselves, and "gun control" suddenly doesn't seem so urgent in light of plucky little Ukraine's citizen-soldiers. Inflation is soaring, pocketbook issues are back on the table, and the outbreak of a real shooting war in the Ukraine, in which people are fighting and dying, has suddenly yanked the word "catastrophic" back from the realm of mental illness and into reality. As the late British prime minister Harold Macmillan is supposed to have replied when asked what was his greatest challenge: "Events, dear boy, events."

Amazing what happens when reality bites. The small stuff, the transient concerns, the self-indulgence in lunacy and cultural suicide suddenly slips away, revealing bedrock truths beneath. The prolonged propaganda assault by the national media, led by the unabashedly racialist New York Times, on the traditions and institutions of this country has screeched to a halt as people stare in disbelief at supermarket receipts and gas pump prices and watch the shelling of Kiev on their televisions. Perhaps now words like "assault" and "hostile environment" won't be thrown around with such gay abandon:

So much for the dreaded "assault" rifles, which now seem to have some usefulness after all. Note as well that these "assault" rifles aren't firing themselves, but are instead wielded by responsible adults in an actual hostile environment in defense of their lives, their families, and their homelands—exactly the conditions under which the Congress and the several states ratified the second amendment.

Vladimir Putin's aims have been clear for decades to anyone who knew anything about Russian history. Raised in the Soviet Union, he regarded the collapse of his country as a great tragedy, but he is not trying to restore anything like the U.S.S.R. Rather, his ambition is to reanimate the Rodina of Tsar Alexander, the scourge of Napoleon who also played a large part in the formation of modern Europe at the Congress of Vienna. To that end, he has cemented an alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church—the historic soul and animating spirit of the country—which forms, along with the coterie of gangsters that emerged from the ruins of the KGB, his power base.

He's long had his eyes on Kiev, in many ways the heart of Mother Russia but unfortunately for him occupied by his Slavic cousins, the Ukrainians who, having experienced the Soviet Union, have little desire to re-unite. Like Poland, Ukraine lives in a bad neighborhood between two ugly neighbors, Germany and Russia , one in which the borders keep switching around. But the foolish American notion of pushing the moribund corpse of NATO eastward, into Albania, Bulgaria, and the Baltics has been seen by Putin and the Russians as both a humiliation and a provocation.

"Climate change," too, has been back-benched for a while. Not a peep out of the usual suspects complaining about all the carbon emissions from the land and air power unleashed on the Ukraine by Putin and the sorry shambles of the once-formidable Red Army as their genuine assault on a neighboring sovereign nation has seemed to sputter. But never fear, intrepid eco-warriors such as John "Mr. 16 Weeks in Nam" Kerry, who racked up more medals-per-hour than Audie Murphy, are here to keep the focus where it belongs:

And to think that this man was almost president of the United States. Then again, an even bigger fool currently sits in the Oval Office. Like Kerry, Joe Biden is a lifelong government functionary with no real-world experience but a huge chip on his shoulder over what he perceives as non-recognition of his genius. Biden is that Irish archetype, the braggart on the far barstool mouthing off and trying to provoke the real men of the community into taking a poke at him. The more they ignore him, the angrier he gets. Until reality slaps him in the face.

What is Biden to make, then, of his abysmal approval ratings, his demolition of the American economy in order to satisfy his "green" saboteur/enablers, and his consummate ineptitude at handling the levers of government except signing "executive orders" shoved under this nose by chief of staff Ron Klain. With his first act in office, the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, Biden suddenly threw the booming Trump economy into reverse without even hitting the clutch, causing the engine to conk out. By choking off energy supplies—the lifeblood of the economy—in order to appease the Luddite god of the malevolent Greens, Biden has now been reduced to begging other countries, including Russia, into selling us oil. How's that for diplomacy?

All but the most demented Democrats, however, hate personal privation, so now of course there are calls to restart the pipeline again. Forget the former fretting over the environment and "public health"—the all-purpose excuse for punitive fascism these days. Ah, but how some outfit calling itself the "Natural Resources Defense Council" crowed just thirteen months ago:

The takedown of the notorious Keystone XL (KXL) tar sands pipeline will go down as one of this generation’s most monumental environmental victories. After more than 10 years of tenacious protests, drawn-out legal battles, and flip-flopping executive orders spanning three presidential administrations, the Keystone XL pipeline is now gone for good. The project’s corporate backer—the Canadian energy infrastructure company TC Energy—officially abandoned the project in June 2021 following President Joe Biden’s denial of a key permit on his first day in office. But the path to victory wasn’t always clear.

Many had hoped that the disastrous project was finally done for in November 2015, when the Obama administration vetoed the pipeline—acknowledging its pervasive threats to climate, ecosystems, drinking water sources, and public health. But immediately after taking office, President Donald Trump brought the zombie project back to life, along with the legal battles against it. By the time President Biden took office in 2021, ready to fulfill his campaign promise to revoke the cross-border permit, the dirty energy pipeline had become one of the foremost climate controversies of our time.

That was then, this is now:

Friday, U.S. Sen. Steve Daines (R-Montana) called on the Biden administration to immediately restart the Keystone XL pipeline project. “President Biden set us on a dangerous path when he decided to kill the Keystone XL pipeline on Day One in office. What’s happening in Russia and Europe is a stark reminder of the need to support American energy development, not hinder it. Energy security is national security, and a global energy dominant America is a safer world. Biden must restart the Keystone XL pipeline now.”

A spokesperson for Montana’s other U.S. senator, Jon Tester (D-Montana), said, “Senator Tester was Montana’s leading champion for the Keystone Pipeline for more than a decade, and he was bitterly disappointed when the project was canceled. Senator Tester will continue to work aggressively to support responsible natural resource development that will create good-paying Montana jobs, secure our energy independence, and defend our national security.”

This push from Daines comes as oil prices jumped to $100 a barrel this week, as tensions escalate between Russia and Ukraine.

Which brings us to the latest, highly politicized "thinking" on the Left regarding the prolonged and by now thoroughly tiresome Covid hoax. Via the power of the media, a standard coronavirus (akin to the flu) with a 99 percent survival rate, and which claimed the majority of its victims from the ranks of the elderly and the morbidly obese, was transformed into the Black Death, and unleashed an army of meddlesome, fearful Karens upon the nation. Now that the transparent falsity of the claims the government made for the virus and for the efficacy of the vaccines is beginning to sink in, suddenly the "science" is not so settled after all, and maybe it's time we—you guessed it—declared victory and pulled out.

These are addressed to a man who just two months ago gleefully threatened a winter of "severe illness and death" on the unvaccinated. Instead, predictably, now that Heisenberg has left the building Covid has essentially vanished. But for the past two years, we had the luxury of obsessing about a passing illness that posed almost no danger to most of us, but did hand the government the tools to lock us down, create health passports, restrict the free movement of peoples, and abrogate the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, assembly, and religion.

And whaddya know? No more mask mandates on Capitol Hill for Brandon's big State of the Union speech tomorrow night!

The US Capitol's attending physician said Sunday that masks will be optional on Capitol Hill starting Monday, just a day before President Joe Biden will deliver his State of the Union address in the House chamber. Citing new guidance from US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Brian P. Monahan said in a memo that "individuals may choose to mask at any time, but it is no longer a requirement."

"New guidance." Thanks, but Real Americans have had just about enough of governmental "guidance." A bright shining lie, as I wrote in these pages not long ago. You know they're just itching to do it again, but we need to make one thing perfectly clear: no more "mandates," ever.

Even Saturday Night Live is making fun of them. So you know this prank is running out of steam.

"There is a great deal of ruin in a nation," observed Adam Smith in the 18th century. But how much ruin, exactly? Russia is testing that proposition now, and the United States under Biden is not far behind. Events, dear boy, events.

A Timely Warning

Andrew Pollard, one of the developers of the AstraZeneca vaccine, recently addressed a U.K. parliamentary group with a timely warning. What the virus will throw up next, he said, “is a variant which is perhaps even better at transmitting in vaccinated populations [and which is] even more of a reason not to be making a vaccine program around herd immunity.” Further, “[w]e need to get used to the concept that this will become what we call an endemic disease rather than a pandemic disease. A disease that is with us all the time—probably transmits seasonally a bit like influenza where we see winter outbreaks.”

In the technical terminology of Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, “the ongoing universal mass vaccination program will soon promote dominant propagation of highly infectious, neutralization escape mutants,” which will “no longer offer any protection to immunized individuals whereas high infectious pressure will continue to suppress the innate immune defense system of the nonvaccinated.” In other words, in an ironic reversal of popular thinking, the unvaccinated are at risk of vaccinated transmission. A study in Nature offers tentative support for his prognosis. Bossche has been much maligned by his detractors as a “doomsday prophet” but his basic research, though predictably contested, appears plausible.

This is a hard pill to swallow for the current crop of diehard vaccinologists, who will labor to obscure the issue with meretricious stats. The political echelon and the medical establishment are engaged in an act of truth-formation, that is, a kind of credible dissimulation, forming a story, as Albert Norton Jr. observes in another context, by “selectively assembling and spinning facts and inferences to support it,” thus diluting our “intuition of significance.” 

To take one example, as Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, former chair of Medical Microbiology at the University of Mainz, writes, deaths due to other factors than SARS-CoV-2 were regularly recorded as owing to Coronavirus—“The numbers may have been grossly exaggerated.” Covid fatality numbers were routinely inflated by the inclusion of unrelated morbidities. The CDC, for another example, will begin to count anyone who was hospitalized or died within two weeks of getting the jab as “unvaccinated.”

No less troubling, many governments have embarked on a scorched earth policy, vowing to keep restrictions in place until the virus is totally eliminated. But as Pollard points out, the push to reach “Covid zero” is a fool’s errand, for the virus, according to many such competent professionals, is like the seasonal flu and the common cold and will be with us in perpetuity. Dr. Peter McCullough, among the world’s most widely published medical scholars, stated before the Texas Senate Health and Human Services Committee that the disease cannot be defeated, but with the proper approach and treatment it can be managed. Over-the-counter supplements, including Vitamin D3, Vitamin C, Quercetin, Zinc and aspirin and, as the Great Barrington Declaration recommends, “focused protection” for the elderly, are far more sensible alternatives than the present foolhardy therapeutic agenda of masks, lockdowns, injectable products and discriminatory passports.

Sweden gets it right. As Kevin Downey Jr. remarks, “One would think the world would take notice, and tips, from a country with no lockdowns, a healthy economy, and comparatively few deaths… While people worldwide are rioting against despotic Covid lockdowns and mandates, Swedes are enjoying cocktails after returning home from work, just like they have been since the beginning of the pandemic.” History professor and blogger Tom Woods shows that “this year Sweden, even during the Delta phase of all this, where mitigation measures have been light at best and schools have been open without masks or distancing, excess mortality has actually been lower than normal.” Woods includes a comparative graph contrasting Sweden to the U.S.:

And as of September 10, Denmark will be lifting all Covid restrictions, including vaccine passports. 

Our political leaders and health officials are not paying attention. They are determined to implement policies that have little chance of success and whose primary effect will be to exacerbate an already dire situation—the vulnerability of the already vaccinated, the trauma of viral transmission, the constant irruption of ever new variants, and the creation of two classes or “varnas” of citizens resembling India’s Brahmins and Shudras. In at least partial confirmation of such debilities, Public Health England provides much pertinent information on the issue.

If, in their blind pursuit of an elusive solution, the powers that be do not consider a course correction even at the eleventh hour, a social, medical and attendant economic disaster now well into its second year will persist into the indefinite future, and life as this generation knew it will likely never return to what we once called “normal.”