THE COLUMN: Hoax of the Millennium

Today, and each day for the next two weeks, the-Pipeline.org will address the issue of "climate change," which like Covid-19 and "Russian collusion," is one of the great hoaxes of the modern era, maliciously concocted out of whole cloth by people who mean to harm western civilization and using the cudgel of "compassion" and "concern" with which to do it. Of the three, the "climate change" hoax, which threatens the foundations of civilized life, is by far the most inimical. Please follow our series as we debunk the claims made by the apocalypticists and their media allies.

To begin: the climate is always changing. Only an illiterate or a fool cannot understand this elementary concept. There is no need to delve into any scientific studies based on wildly or deliberately inaccurate computer "models" to know this. There is no need to be emotionally stampeded by tiresome, and always wrong, Jeremiahs of doom like Paul Ehrlich. There is no truth in the statistical manipulation that proclaims a full 97 percent of "climate scientists" agree that changes in the climate are the work of mankind. You don't have to worry about carbon emissions. The Last Days are not upon us.

Worked for a while, until it didn't.

Yet. But the "climate movement" bids fair to undo everything Western man has accomplished in the fields of science, technology, and religion and replace it with a savage new primitivism that is both inhuman and godless. It relies on the patina of science to promote a culture based on fear and guilt, with the goal of reducing and taming the human population under the aegis of a small group of self-appointed bonzes.

Our writers will tackle this topic and more in the coming fortnight, but one thing is clear: you are being lied to on a massive scale by a quasi-Marxist mass-suicide cult -- think Jonestown on a global scale -- in order that you lower your standard of living, rid yourself of all earthly possessions, abandon your expectations for the future, stop having children, cease all consumption, and disappear from planet Earth.

There are many reasons for the rise and ascendancy of this contemptible sect, including the demise of the educational system, the return of superstition, the prolonged assault via some form or variant of Critical Theory upon all the institutions of Western civilization and, now, upon the essence of that civilization itself. Such "theory" teaches that property is theft, profit is exploitation, consumption is rapine, and the nuclear family is a form of oppression: everything must be questioned, attacked, and destroyed. Western civilization is, in their eyes, the ultimate expression of "white supremacy," and therefore must be liquidated.

The decline of traditional Christianity, the cornerstone of the European-American West, has gone hand in hand with the rise of its prospective replacement, a perverted and obscene form of dictatorial nature worship, which has induced an entirely unnecessary guilt trip over real and imagined sins against other cultures that now use their very lack of achievements in the sciences and the arts as a j'accuse against the West. That would be the very same West that has provided them with access to technology, medicine, transportation, and the philosophy of Greece, Rome, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment as well as the Judeo-Christian bible that has -- imperfectly to be sure -- guided man's behavior for nearly three millennia.

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It is imperative that we break the stranglehold this new form of demonic possession now has on our society. "Demonic" is not too strong a word. In Holland, the leftist government is attempting to forcibly seize farmers' land in order to take it out of food production to appease this new Moloch. Meanwhile in Ireland its government of mediocrities has been captured by the Green Party, which now holds all its important ministries, and has decreed that some 200,000 heads of cattle be culled in order to meet its "mandated" emissions targets -- a report that instantly made the poor beleaguered country a laughingstock around the world, and from which Éire now seems to be backing away. The fact that, historically, cattle have been integral to the country's sense of itself -- viz. the epic poem, Táin bó Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), which dates from the seventh century A.D. -- and was the standard by which wealth was measured means nothing to the Eurocrats in Dublin who function at Brussels' behest. Expect more of the same across Europe, which even now is struggling with soaring energy costs and reduced access to dependable sources of power.

The cattle of Ireland salute the Greens.

The bugbear du jour is "emissions," a nebulous, one-size-scares-all excuse imposing an otherwise clearly insane policy on a body politic that has never once voted to starve itself to death. Our feminized culture has been so browbeaten by the Left's shameless propaganda that the very sight of a wisp of smoke or the hint of a fart now gives a manipulated populace the vapors. Worst of all are "carbon emissions," which have been dishonestly linked to "climate change" and have created a perfect storm of panic and fear among the gullible.

Here is the truth, which instantly gives the lie to every claim made by the "climate crisis" crew: we ourselves are carbon-based life forms. Indeed, life is impossible without carbon:

Carbon is the graphite in our pencils, the diamond in our rings, the oil in our cars, the sugar in our coffee, the DNA in our cells, the air in our lungs, the food on our plates, the cattle in our fields, the forest in our parks, the cement in our sidewalks, the steel in our skyscrapers, the charcoal in our grills, the fizz in our sodas, the foam in our fire extinguishers, the ink in our pens, the plastic in our toys, the wood in our chairs, the leather in our jackets, the battery in our cars, the rubber in our tires, the coal in our power plants, the nano in our nanotechnology, and the life in our soils.

Carbon is life. It exists in every organic life form. Life is impossible without it. When combined with water, it forms sugars, fats, alcohols, and terpenes. When combined with nitrogen and sulfur, it forms amino acids, antibiotics, and alkaloids. With the addition of phosphorus, it forms DNA and RNA, the essential codes of life, as well as ATP, the critical energy-transfer molecule found in all living cells. The carbon atom is the essential building block of life. Every part of your body is made up of chains of carbon atoms, which is why we are known as "carbon-based life-forms." Chemically, we're just a bunch of inert compounds. What breathes life into us? The answer is the relationship between the molecules of energy and nutrients, fueled by carbon and water.

No, it's not.

Carbon, to put a theological point on it, is the breath of God that animated the clay of Adam and turned him into a man. To attack "carbon" as an evil is to attack yourself; to eliminate carbon is to eliminate humanity. And make no mistake: this is precisely the goal of the "climate-change" movement. 

There is a word for what is happening. Evil. And evil is never to be combated idly or half-halfheartedly but with the force of one's strength, mind, and body, fueled by the now-derided virtue of righteous anger. Which is to say: hatred. As I wrote in my 2015 book, The Devil's Pleasure Palace:

At multiple moments in our lives, we are forced to choose between good and evil – indeed, we are forced to define, or provisionally redefine, both terms, and then choose.

The terms have been defined. The battle is joined. You are hereby called to arms.

Prosperity per Kilowatt

The average middle class American family lives in a modest house or apartment, and owns a car or two, along with various modern amenities to make life a bit easier -- refrigerator, dishwasher, heating and cooling units, etc. And we are lectured ad nauseum by our social and economic "betters" -- a class whose prosperity depends on our productivity -- about our overreliance on these conveniences, which we've worked hard to build and to pay for. We've already been forced to curtail our few small pleasures in life, like occasionally dining out, because inflation -- caused in large part by the elite obsession with “climate change” -- has forced us to tighten our belts.

Meanwhile our elites tend to have multiple large homes that must be heated and cooled, luxury cars (yes, Teslas count), perhaps multiple refrigerators, massive use of electronics and digital technology, servants, and either own or have ready access to a private jet, a yacht, etc. Their loudly proclaimed devotion to Mother Gaia, and even their multiple (often carbon intensive) devotional practices, never seem to get in the way of their worldly pleasures.

Better living through penury.

How bad is this disconnect? To find out, let's see how many kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity are produced in three major nations per dollar of GDP output. Based on the Cantrill Ladder, a measurement system for quantifying life satisfaction, how satisfied do the people in these countries say they are?

In America, to create and maintain our lifestyles, we generate 4,152 TWh (Tera-Watt-hours; billions of kWh) of electricity and produce $20.49 trillion of goods & services (GDP), using 0.203 kWh to produce $1.00 of GDP, a kWh per dollar of GDP ratio of 0.203. Americans rank themselves at 6.89 on the Cantrill ladder (on a scale of 0-10; higher is better).

China, a nation our elites ignore in their climate plans, generates 8,484 TWh of electricity and produces $1.34 trillion of GDP, using over three times as much electricity and generating three times as much CO2 as America to produce $1.00 of GDP, a kWh per dollar of GDP ratio of 0.633. China reports a Cantrill satisfaction of 5.82.

In Nigeria, the most prosperous sub-Saharan African country, generates 31 TWh of electricity and produces $580 billion of GDP, using one-fourth of the electricity of America to produce $1.00 of GDP, a kWh per dollar of GDP ratio of 0.053. Nigeria’s residents report a “happiness and life satisfaction” metric of 4.98. It's not a surprise, but modernity -- and electricity -- makes people happier.

If we measure prosperity in kWh per dollar of GDP, America has a prosperity metric of 0.203, China of 0.633, and Nigeria of 0.053. Having the lowest living standard of the compared nations, Nigeria uses the least amount of electricity to produce $1.00 of goods. More readily available electricity would over time lead to the increase of their GDP, wages, education, infrastructure development, and standard of living.

And yet, western elites are actively trying to prevent Africa from modernizing. This modernity-for-me-and-not-for-thee looks suspiciously like the elite caricature of “colonialism,” which they themselves proclaim to be the root of all modern evils.

It is shocking, until you remember that they would happily see us living in squalor as well. Because ultimately their power and self-gratification is all they care about.

THE COLUMN: Actually, It Is 'Blah, Blah, Blah'

One pernicious development of these parlous times has been the rise of various cults that ape the trappings of Christianity while being fundamentally and unalterably opposed to its moral tenets. Case in point, the Marxist Suicide Cult masquerading as heroic do-gooderism that goes by the name of "climate change," by which these solipsistic lunatics mean "man-made climate change."

The argument that the climate is changing is prima facie false, because there is no argument. The climate is always changing. An hour in any major art gallery immediately illustrates that. Start with the Dutch paintings from the Little Ice Age, such as Brueghel's Hunters in the Snow from 1565 if you doubt me. Note also that the old city of Alexandria, in Egypt, which was founded by the Macedonian Greek Alexander the Great c. 331 B.C., and once ruled over by Cleopatra, is now under water. Man had nothing to do with either.

All gone now.

In fact, to say that puny human beings can affect the climate is arrogance of the highest order when one considers the size of the Sun and the vastness of even our little solar system at the edge of the Milky Way galaxy. "An ant in the afterbirth," as Mr. Dolarhyde famously put it.

In the roughly five thousand years of recorded human history, there has been one period in which we have had a real taste of our climate’s potential for moodiness, beginning around the start of the fourteenth century and lasting for hundreds of years. During this epoch, often known as the Little Ice Age, temperatures dropped by as much as two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.... This was also the period between the end of the Middle Ages and the birth of the modern world.

The effects of the Little Ice Age were global in scale. In China, then as now the most populous country in the world, the Ming dynasty fell in 1644, undermined by, among other things, erratic harvests. In Europe, rivers and lakes and harbors froze, leading to phenomena such as the “frost fairs” on the River Thames—fairgrounds that spread across the river’s London tideway, which went from being a freakish rarity to a semi-regular event. (Virginia Woolf set a scene in “Orlando” at one.) Birds iced up and fell from the sky; men and women died of hypothermia; the King of France’s beard froze solid while he slept... in 1588, the Spanish Armada was destroyed by an unprecedented Arctic hurricane, and a factor in the Great Fire of London, in 1666, was the ultra-dry summer that succeeded the previous, bitter winter.

And then a warming trend began, continuing into our day: high culture flourished, science advanced along with the arts, and a longer growing season helped fuel a rise in population. This, of course, is not good enough for the ninnies, hysterics and bed-wetters who are convinced We're All Going to Die if we don't immediately reverse these civilizational advances (which, remarkably, seemed to have passed the entire southern hemisphere by), tear down our offending infrastructure, cease having babies (but import other people's babies), reduce our mobility, and ban everything that "pollutes" our precious air and water, even at the cost of a grotesque and unnecessary reduction in living standards: 1565, here we come again!

How times change.

Hence my use of the word "cult," which should not always be interpreted as a pejorative. In Roman times, the Latin word cultus went beyond simple reverence to include the ritual of the act itself. There were cults of every description, most of them benign. The emperor Severus, for example, was involved with a cult devoted to the Egyptian goddess Isis and the god Osiris, renamed Serapis. This in addition to the official pantheon of Roman gods, including the deified emperors, among whom would soon enough be Severus himself. To this day, Catholic Christians have the devotional cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which at its most extreme exhibits itself in various Marian apparitions, such as at Lourdes, Fatima, and most recently at Medjugorje in Bosnia. The earliest adherents of Jesus belonged to various Jewish sects or cults; the Ebionites, for example.

We may therefore define a "cult" as a group of adherents that regards a certain person or object (whether real or mythical) with intense devotion and is not interested in hearing any evidence to the contrary: you either believe in the Virgin Birth, or Isis, or you don't. Since modern Leftists have forsaken traditional religion, one cult they have invented and embraced is the Climate Cult, which in the U.S. began around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, established by Sen. Gaylord Nelson, Democrat (of course) from Wisconsin. Here's how its demon, immortal bureaucratic offspring, the EPA, tells its origin story:

It may be hard to imagine that before 1970, a factory could spew black clouds of toxic smoke into the air or dump tons of toxic waste into a nearby stream, and that was perfectly legal. They could not be taken to court to stop it. How was that possible? Because there was no EPA, no Clean Air Act, no Clean Water Act. There were no legal or regulatory mechanisms to protect our environment.

In spring 1970, Senator Gaylord Nelson created Earth Day as a way to force this issue onto the national agenda. Twenty million Americans demonstrated in different U.S. cities, and it worked! In December 1970, Congress authorized the creation of a new federal agency to tackle environmental issues, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Love that exclamation point! Here's how Nelson, who died in 2005, describes his great accomplishment, which began as a Children's Crusade and morphed into a straitjacket of punitive legislation:

My primary objective in planning Earth Day was to show the political leadership of the Nation that there was broad and deep support for the environmental movement. While I was confident that a nationwide peaceful demonstration of concern would be impressive, I was not quite prepared for the overwhelming response that occurred on that day. Two thousand colleges and universities, ten thousand high schools and grade schools, and several thousand communities in all, more than twenty million Americans participated in one of the most exciting and significant grassroots efforts in the history of this country.

Earth Day 1970 made it clear that we could summon the public support, the energy, and commitment to save our environment. And while the struggle is far from over, we have made substantial progress. In the ten years since 1970 much of the basic legislation needed to protect the environment has been enacted into law:

  • the Clean Air Act,
  • the Water Quality Improvement Act,
  • the Water Pollution and Control Act Amendments,
  • the Resource Recovery Act,
  • the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act,
  • the Toxic Substances Control Act,
  • the Occupational Safety and Health Act,
  • the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act,
  • the Endangered Species Act,
  • the Safe Drinking Water Act,
  • the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and
  • the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act.

And, the most important piece of environmental legislation in our history, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was signed into law on January 1, 1970. NEPA came about in response to the same public pressure which later produced Earth Day.

The false premise here is that some of us wanted to destroy the planet; it never seems to occur to the Left that there might have been, and still be, better ways to improve everybody's quality of life besides using the full force of government (which is to say, gunpoint) to mandate it. And so here we are, prisoners of our own device, our jailers in the thrall of childish fears that, despite the accomplishments of the late Sen. Nelson, the world is still coming to an end and, worse, it's all our fault. They have driven themselves so mad that the sight of a puff of smoke coming from a chimney or the sight of a cow's ass throws them into paroxysms of panic. And to accommodate their madness, we have to stop driving, stop heating our homes, stop cooking our food, stop traveling, stop. We've even got our military believing that "fighting 'climate change'" is its top priority instead of killing our enemies.

Praise Gaia! Praise him/her/it!

Which is why they are, at root, a Suicide Cult. Again, hardly unusual. Cults often kills themselves en masse. In 1997, the lunatics of the Heaven's Gate cult killed themselves en masse in order to leave their bodies and be transported to an alien space ship hiding behind the Hall-Bopp comet. Most spectacularly, the 900 apocalyptic nutbags of the Peoples Temple in Jonestown willingly drank the deathly Kool-Aid at the behest of their guru, Jim Jones, in Guyana in 1978. David Koresh's Branch Davidians were spared the time and expense courtesy of the FBI, which slaughtered 76 of them in Waco in 1993, for no good reason. Desperate times demand desperate measures.

Today's Climate Cultists, led by a foolish, troubled child who's but a plaything in the hands of another cult, resemble the loner in the New Yorker cartoons wearing a sign that proclaims the End is Near. Which is something they're looking forward to, with the profound joy of an early Christian martyr heading into the arena. These people are carbon-based life forms who, after all, believe that the carbon dioxide they exhale as part of the necessary breathing process—and the very thing that gives life to the trees they're always hugging so protectively—is a poison that threatens all forms of life on Earth. They've taken the tiniest slice of planetary history that they could (their own short, pampered, transient lifetimes) and extrapolated doom. They call for "climate resilience" based on one hot summer in a place where hot summers are rare. They regard human beings as an excrescence. They could not possibly hate themselves more.

We can no longer let the people in power decide what is politically possible. We can no longer let the people in power decide what hope is. Hope is not passive. Hope is not blah, blah, blah. Hope is telling the truth. Hope is taking action. And hope always comes from the people.

Thus spake professional hooky player and "climate activist" Greta Thunberg at the Youth4Climate summit in 2021. Accordingly, their mission here on earth is to make life as difficult and uncomfortable for the rest of us as they can. To that end, disguised as "Green" political parties, they have declared war on the human race; no amount of their own suffering, it seems, can rob them of the joy of seeing the rest of us suffer, too. The early Christian martyrs gave up their own lives joyously in order to show the pagan world the righteousness of their cause. The "environmentalists" want you to give up yours for the same reason—and because they can.

Your Credit Score Please, Comrade

Recently, the World Economic Forum (WEF) held its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Known as a globalist influencing operation, it is funded through membership fees from a cross-section of the elites from the private and public sectors, including CEOs, diplomats, celebrities, media personalities, government officials, religious leaders, and even union representatives from around the world. With attendance this year encompassing 52 heads of state and government and nearly 600 CEOs, the disconnect between the social and political objectives of the attendees and the best interest of the citizens and communities from which these WEF members hail, is widening.

From Sri Lanka to Belgium and from Main Street to Wall Street, the policy proposals and social change the WEF promotes and funds have by now been repeatedly rejected, legally challenged, and roundly criticized by the people these policies are purportedly intended to help. WEF policy prescriptions caused the collapse of the government in Sri Lanka last year, the degradation of the farming sector in Belgium, the destruction of the social fabric in New Zealand, the freezing of citizens’ bank accounts in Canada, higher fuel prices in Europe, the neutralization of the US. Energy sector, the funding and promotion of totalitarian policies similar to those in Communist Chinese, the support of border collapse, and perhaps most relevant to Americans, the creation, of the reporting and scoring scheme known as environmental, social and governance (ESG).

Poisonous to every living thing on the planet.

While WEF policy failures abound, and the ESG apparatus is being met with increasing legal and market challenges, the construct has nevertheless already had a significant negative impact on some industry sectors. ESG was created as a reporting and scoring system used to justify re-orienting the capital markets toward the social and political objectives important to WEF members, and their philosophical eco-system of non-profits, NGOs and financial sector partners. Though in defiance of the "sole interest" principle and fiduciary obligations codified in U.S. law to protect investors, the outsized influence of the financial sector, which has fully embraced ESG, has delivered a particularly strong blow to the U.S. oil and gas industry.

Because of the importance of capital in the scaling and management of many businesses, creating capital pressure through the ESG scheme has been one way ESG progenitors believe they can affect the growth of certain industries. Energy companies have had to look harder to find capital to finance oil and gas assets. This attempt to impede capital has led to supply constraints and higher energy prices globally. According to WEF literature, industries including agriculture, steel and concrete will likewise begin to be attacked which will drive prices across the economy even higher.

This year’s WEF theme of “Cooperation in a Fragmented World," was an ironic choice since the policies promoted by its members seem to reflect cooperation intended to create a fragmented world. The podium and panels overflowed with quips from elites from the United States to the United Nations, all seeking to sound more relevant than the person next to them. Their very attendance revealed their desire to financially enrich themselves, even if at the expense of those in their own countries or of society more broadly. With fear-filled descriptions of the imminent destruction of the planet unless their solutions, however dystopic, be accepted, it was a parade of anti-market misfits and international villains keen to strip you of your personal liberties while entrenching their own privilege and economic benefit. 

Central to their success is the continued fomenting of fear about "climate change." According to their narrative, all problems in society emanate from this chimera. According to their logic, ESG therefore must necessarily be more deeply integrated into all business and society at large, not just corporate boardrooms. "Climate" is the pretense and ESG the mechanism from which to hang all of their liberty-defying policies and society-killing changes.

While initially focusing their ESG scoring scheme on the board rooms of publicly traded companies, WEF members and ESG advocates ultimately intend to also wrest control from private companies and even individuals. With societal control as an important strategic endpoint—think of  the social credit scoring system used in China—the WEF highlights technologies and promotes companies whose sole purpose is in some way to track and surveil members of otherwise free societies. Always couched as an effort to improve one’s life, of course.

In the WEF-inspired world, your privilege will emanate from your social credit score. Use public transportation and your score goes up. Have children, and your carbon emission score goes down. Buy products deemed environmentally acceptable and your score goes up. Use too many fossil-fuel inspired luxuries like computers and private automobiles and your score goes down.  If you have the correct colored check mark on your phone, you will be permitted to access to particular products, services, and experiences. Everyone else is relegated to the existence they are granted by their overseers.

Atop the sinister Magic Mountain, dread Klaus lies scheming.

Some of the mounting evidence: as first reported by True North during last year’s WEF’s annual meeting, an executive with the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba revealed that the company was working on an individual carbon footprint tracker. “We’re developing through technology an ability for consumers to measure their own carbon footprint,” president J. Michael Evans said at the time.

Meanwhile, Mastercard already provides a CO2 emissions-tracking card, developed with technology from the WEF-promoted Swedish company, Doconomy. In May 2019 Doconomy launched its credit card that monitors the carbon footprint of its customers—and cuts off their spending when they hit their carbon max.

Then last fall, the Canadian-based credit union Vancity announced the introduction of Canada’s first-ever carbon tracking Visa card. It is available beginning this year. “The Carbon Counter will help Vancity card holders understand the carbon footprint of their purchases as well as provide advice on what they can do to reduce their emissions footprint.” a statement by Vancity read. In the case of Visa’s credit card technology, developed by Ecolytiq, it too provides “education and behavioral nudging.”

How long before one isn’t even permitted to have a credit card because one’s purchases don’t comport with the values of these arbiters of the acceptable? That day is coming, unless we stop it. 

'A Revolution in Civilization'

If this is an improvement on several millennia of human urban living, I'd hate to see what a diminution would look like. Called "The Line," this great leap backward in urban development is the brainchild of an outfit called NEOM, derived from the Ancient Greek word for "new" combined with the letter "M," an abbreviation of Mostaqbal, an Arabic word meaning "the future" -- and also the first letter of the first name of "Prince" Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.

How would you feel about moving into a vertical city, where the lives of nine million people are contained in a building spanning over 170km in length, 500 metres in height, and 22 metres in width? These are the dimensions of The Line, and drone footage over north-western Saudi Arabia has shown it’s already in construction.

To some it’s a futuristic utopia, where a five-minute walk can take you to all of your daily needs, leaving plenty of time to enjoy the city’s stadiums, opera houses, and perfectly manicured gardens. To others however, the strict Sharia laws combined with the high levels of surveillance The Line enables makes the city seem straight out of a sci-fi horror.

No roads or cars will be seen in The Line, and since it will run on 100% renewable energy, the city will have a zero-carbon footprint. The planners also promise a perfect climate year-round, access to all facilities within just a short walk, and a high-speed rail service to enable rapid transit to the other neighbourhoods known as “modules.”

“95% of land will be preserved for nature [and] people’s health and wellbeing will be prioritized,” making this city the perfect home for “the best and the brightest,” the site exalts.

So what could possibly go wrong?

"New Mostaqbal." That sounds vaguely familiar. Sort of like "New Seoul" from Cloud Atlas. And wasn't that a peachy place?

And when you combine futuristic technology with a 7th-century moral system from a dark and savage part of the world that has brought humanity almost nothing but trouble... well, there's a heck of a lot than go wrong.

The top concerns regarded the lack of natural light in the lower levels of the building, the noise and reverberations that the high-speed rail will create, and the estimated 1.8bn tonnes of carbon dioxide required to construct the “zero-carbon footprint” city. Beyond the worries related to the building itself, many fear the consequences of building such a structure that enables high levels of surveillance and control within a country governed by an “exceptionally murderous and repressive regime.”

Ah, but to the fascists of the World Economic Forum, one suspects that last bit might be a feature, not a bug. As the Davoisie says: "2023 will be a year of action," so buckle your seatbelts and get ready for a bumpy ride.

Enemies of the People: Albert Arnold Gore, Jr.

Go Sell It On A Mountain

A Who's Who of the world' great if not good is converging on the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2023. In addition to presidents, ministers and other bureaucrats, 116 billionaires, none of them Russian, will be at Davos, not to mention celebrities, advocates, media personalities, etc. The Business Insider describes how hoteliers are preparing to receive an Olympian throng that will include the likes of Bill Gates:

We emptied almost half of the hotel in order to set up for all of the events and prepare for the guests... no one will have access to the hotel without their badge. We have X-ray machines and metal detectors, and each and every person has to go through these to enter the building. It's almost like an airport. Davos itself is like a military zone, where you have limited access and everything is cordoned off.

Greenpeace disapprovingly noted that hundreds of ultra-short private jet flights converged on Davos, as global leaders headed to the World Economic Forum in a rush to save the planet from asphyxiating in carbon. But there is more than climate change on the agenda. Banking, finance, cryptocurrencies, racism, artificial intelligence, workplace robotics, global governance, and cybercrime are probably going to be up for discussion. It is so wide-ranging one may think of it as the first draft of tomorrow, a glimpse of a future you are going to be part of, whether you like it or not.

The return of S.P.E.C.T.R.E.

This wide-ranging character is why the Davos call to action is known as the "Great Reset." Like the familiar reboot of your computer, everything you have ever known will go away and after a moment's blackness (you may be conscious of a spinner as it restarts) all will be replaced by a new OS, interface and architecture you're sure to love. It will be like you've died and gone to atheist heaven. What it will be like is hinted at in a phrase since removed from the WEF’s website. “Welcome to 2030,” read the headline to an article by a Danish member of parliament, “I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.”

It reminds the world that Wokeness, which has points of similarity with the great religions, also has its own eschatology. There is a a hazy belief in a singularity, after which like Communism's 'withering away of the state', everything will be different. Thus the elect gather on a Swiss mountain to bring on the end of the old world and midwife the new. But while the Davos conclave has borrowed many traditional religious forms and metaphors from the great religions, there is something uniquely contemporary in its character which sets it apart.

Against the Great Reset

Now on sale.

Davos might be described as the Woodstock of power. Like its namesake, it is a new nation. In the past, the presidents and billionaires of the world were kept socially apart by distance, language, and localism. Once those barriers had been dissolved in the acid bath of air travel, the Internet, and universal English, the great men realized they were more alike than not. To a not-insignificant degree, people at the pinnacle of power have, as I like to put it, all "gone to the same school together," sometimes literally, and share more in common with other Big Guys than the unwashed in their respective national slums.

The men on Davos are a tribe; and it would be impossible to understand the nature of the Great Reset without grasping the tribal nature of this enterprise. These are the most narcissistic people on the planet. Of course they know all the answers. Why else would they be presidents and billionaires? John Kerry said it best: "it's so almost extraterrestrial."

Yet ironically the new word out of Davos is "polycrisis," meaning "multiple concurrent economic, political, and ecological shocks are converging to rock the globe in the next decade, and the world is playing catch-up to address them... Only 9 percent of respondents saw the world returning to a state of 'renewed stability with a revival of global resilience.'" This glorious world, whose leaders have gathered at 5,118 feet in the sky to congratulate themselves, is presently suffering from a kind of multiple organ failure. In the next two years, according to a WEF report, we might expect: a cost of living crisis, natural disasters and extreme weather, geoeconomic confrontation, widespread cybercrime and insecurity, large scale involuntary migration to name only some -- unless we hand over the keys now.

Of course the world must 'act together.' The WEF article on polycrisis continues:

Solving climate change is the ultimate team sport. It isn't just coming from one sector. It has to be governments, it has to be business, it has to be the finance sector to work together to really address these complex and systemic issues.

Yet in that approach may lie part of the problem. According to the Cascade Institute, a polycrisis occurs when "multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects," as when the world is wired up like an electrical circuit in series, like a line of dominoes. When components in a system are critically dependent on chains, as for example a Christmas tree with 100 light bulbs in series, if one breaks down, all of them may stop working and it will be difficult to find out the damaged one and replace it.

All hail the New World Order!

The globalization project is nothing if not a recipe for entanglement, and Davos prescribes more of it. Yet central planning by the elites may have caused at least some of the instability we are in the midst of. The men of Davos cannot pretend to stand outside the system, in which they were the leading actors, as if they had nothing to do with anything; that the polycritical world was just an unfortunate event they encountered along the road, for which they bear no responsibility. They should consider, if only hypothetically, whether they are part of the problem.

Perhaps Elon Musk, the billionaire who is not going to the WEF meeting, hit the nail upon the head. The danger isn't that the world won't hand control over to the Elect in time, but that the saviors of the planet will get in over their heads and create more monsters than they slay. "My reason for declining the Davos invitation was not because I thought they were engaged in diabolical scheming, but because it sounded boring AF lol," Musk tweeted. He added that Davos is "not some illuminati plot to destroy humanity, but rather an extension of the well-meaning environmental sustainability movement that has gone too far."

How far is too far? What comes after 'polycrisis'? And do we really want to find out?

Al Gore, Lunatic

Somebody help this man. Speaking at the World Economic Forum's annual wankfest in Davos, Switzerland, the inventor of the internet and the scourge of massage therapists everywhere went on an unhinged rant that tells you all you need to know about the psychosis currently afflicting politicians all over the world. Gesticulating wildly, his face reddening, his voice rising, the former vice president of the United States became a man in the deadly grip of a panicked, violent, superstitious reaction to... the weather.

A decent human being would be ashamed to show his face in public ever again after this embarrassing display of childish, Thunbergian pique, but in front of the unctuous barking seals who make up the attendees at Klaus Schwab's Klubhaus Gore was greeted with whoops and cheers for his messianic fervor. The cultish behavior of the so-called global elites was never more in evidence, a perverse clerisy of crackpots in charge of a global suicide sect.

Sanctimonious, smug, silly, and stupid. Also very, very dangerous. Be sure to watch the whole thing to see the true face of "climate" activists, whose goal is nothing short of the destruction of the fossil fuel industry, the reduction of the civilized way of life, and the political capture of Western governments all over the planet in order to install their punitive program of oligarchic rule. And to hear Gore, at the beginning of his deracinated fulmination, reveals the inconvenient truth that "In my country we passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which is primarily a climate act," and then boast about how much money it's really going to cost. Not him, of course; the American taxpayer.

Hail, victory!

So take a bow, Herr Schwab. Your plan for the Fourth Reich is well underway. But remember this: with friends like Al Gore, you and your Great Reset don't need enemies, and the rest of us are now on to your malignant scam.

 

Best of 2022: 'Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Davosing' by Jenny Kennedy

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.

Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Davosing

Jenny Kennedy, 29 May, 2022

Hello Davos at long last! It feels a little weird—being here in summer, and also like the prom date who's been stood up four times. but Davos is on, and there are 1,500 private planes here to prove it. I’d hired an assistant named Mila for the conference because I couldn’t very well be seen setting up my own meetings or trying to get myself into parties. I had several invites already but you never really do know which ones will be the hot ticket until you get here.  I’d also set her to the task of sorting out a driver.

A summer conference meant summer clothes, and I refused to be clomping around in wedge-sandals just because modern pavement hadn’t met old Europe. This is among the things Americans find particularly galling and I am starting to agree with them. Hotels never advertise the abysmal water pressure, the inability to use a hairdryer in bathroom, or the two children’s beds shoved together and presented as a king.

I walked through the Partner’s Lounge after checking in with hospitality and could see there were very few women, in addition to a thousand fewer attendees than in previous years. It was hard to know if the drop-off in attendance was rising anti-elitist sentiment, or Putin's war in Ukraine, but many of the A-listers weren’t coming at all. Not Biden, or Boris, or Macron, or Prince Charles or even Greta. And not even Jamie Dimon, which was a double blow because Jamie’s always liked me, and it meant no JP Morgan Chase-hosted suite. Boo! In its geographic place this year is the Covid testing area, to which we all had to submit upon arrival.

Welcome to the World Environmental Forum.

Mila arrived on foot, and with a local bus map mumbling something about Line 4 (Flüelastrasse). Bus? This wasn’t going well. I was going to have to skip the second half of Xi Jinping to get ready for the India Today party.  It’s just as well, it was hard for me not to focus on the singular-plural mismatch by Xi’s translator. Also I wasn’t happy Klaus opened with Xi. I know we are the World Economic Forum but let’s be honest, the environment is our focus and I won’t give China any credit in that department. Detractors may find us duplicitous (we really should be called the World Environmental Forum) but they don’t grasp how important it is to do our fine work by any means necessary...

AGAINST THE GREAT RESET: The Great Reset and 'Stakeholderism'

For the next two weeks, The Pipeline is presenting the remaining excerpts from each of the essays contained in Against the Great Reset: 18 Theses Contra the New World Order, which was published on October 18 by Bombardier Books and distributed by Simon and Schuster, and available now at the links. 

 

Part V: THE PRACTICAL

Excerpt from "The Great Reset and 'Stakeholderism'," by Alberto Mingardi

Politics has always oscillated between Right and Left. After World War II, Western countries took many a step toward interventionism, regardless of warnings by a handful of intellectuals such as Friedrich Hayek and Michael Oakeshott. If the West went down the “road to serfdom,” that serfdom was bureaucratic, benevolent in its aims and generous with many. Yet in a few years, the consensus for growing interventionism was eroded, leading to the elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. In recent years, at least since the financial crisis of 2007–2008, politics have moved in the opposite direction, aiming to put an end to whatever “neoliberal policies” (as they came to be known in the public debate) a country ever pursued.

Yet with the Covid-19 pandemic, this process accelerated. Rahm Emanuel’s advice regarding the usefulness of a good crisis had a profound impact on the Western ruling classes: in the U.S. (where unprecedented and previously unimaginable levels of public spending have been reached), in the European Union (where the alleged need for stimulus policies allowed for the first-ever emission of common debt), in the Western hemisphere (where Covid-19 inspired unimaginable restrictions on the freedom of movement of the citizens). Hence, right from its beginning, the Covid-19 pandemic has been considered something more and different than simply a health crisis, however profound and indeed dramatic it’s been. In the pandemic, governments found (and, perhaps, searched for) an opportunity to address other problems. The pandemic was soon compared to a war and it was assumed that after it, like after war, we should “rebuild.” But “rebuild differently.”

How differently? Intellectuals and experts soon realized that it was their business to answer the question. Though the world in 2019 could hardly be seen as a laissez-faire paradise, a common cry has been a call for different institutions to plan, more solidly, from the top down. Technological transitions of the sort that are now typically advocated for (from the “green” economy to central bank digital currencies) indeed presuppose experts picking a technology. Yet the prevailing view seems not to be content with only industrial policies. The very nature of the economic system should change, moving from “shareholder” to “stakeholder” capitalism.

One element that differentiates this approach from previous waves of interventionism is that it goes hand in hand with a genuine revision of the political vocabulary. Think of the very locution “the Great Reset,” which acquired currency thanks to Professor Klaus Schwab, the influential founder and president of the WEF. The very use of those words implied (a) that the world needed a rebooting after the pandemic; (b) that such a rebooting could be done; and (c) that it could come about thanks to a specific set of policies. The discussion over these two terms includes a considerable toying with words.

Against the Great Reset

Now on sale.

The Great Reset and the Stakeholder Model

Professor Klaus Schwab is a German-born economist that most people know as a highly successful entrepreneur: he is the founder and president of the WEF, a not-for-profit foundation headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. The WEF is most famous for its conferences, beginning with its annual Davos meeting, where business and political leaders reconvene to enjoy the company of some public intellectuals and ponder the world’s future. The WEF success put Davos on the map, and made the village—ten thousand in population, in the Swiss canton of Graubünden—a household name. In 2004, Samuel P. Huntington christened the participants “Davos men… a (then) new global elite… empowered by new notions of global connectedness.” They “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations.”

In media accounts and in public perception, “Davos men” were at times seen as advocates of neo-liberalism, of globalization, of unfettered competition. This was a common misconception: equating the interest of companies and its moneyed classes with deregulation and competition, which most of the time, they dread. In one way, this was also quite naïve, even disingenuous: “crony capitalism,” meaning a system in which private companies and the government collude, is the greenhouse of the global elites. In fact, the spirit of the Davos meeting was always to bring all “stakeholders” around the table.

In Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy that Works for Progress, People and the Planet (written with Peter Vanham), Schwab, who coined the locution “the Great Reset,” suggested that we should “use the post-Covid-19 recovery to enact stakeholder capitalism at home, and a more sustainable goal economic system all around the world.” Why? And, in particular, why now? One would expect the aftermath of Covid-19 to see us all busy in getting back to what used to be “normalcy.” The time for reform should come later, not now.

Klaus Schwab: "you will own nothing and be happy."

The idea of “stakeholderism” isn’t new. Schwab himself has been advocating some version of it since the 1970s and is happy to provide an account of his own intellectual enterprise as a struggle against Milton Friedman. An important body of literature grew up around the theme, particularly in the field of business economics and corporate governance. Why should stakeholder capitalism be important in the wake of the pandemic? Why should we all go for it, particularly now? Why has the discussion about it moved out of the circles of experts, to include wider sections of society?

In part, these discussions were rejuvenated by the anniversary of an article published by Milton Friedman in the New York Times Magazine. Fifty years later, in the midst of a pandemic that saw an enormous growth of public spending, Friedman’s piece seemed the ideal starting point to launch a discussion regarding the future of business in the world’s economies. But this would have been a more academic, less heated discussion. Instead, important public figures like Schwab emerged to say that “free markets, trade, and competition create so much wealth that in theory they could make everyone better off… But this is not the reality we’re living in today.”

Schwab is a capable intellectual entrepreneur and a sharp mind. If he believes that “there are reasons to believe a more inclusive and virtuous economic system is possible—and it could be just around the corner,” this means that for him, the rethinking of the capitalist system is not necessarily more urgent because of the pandemic crisis, but such “reimagining” becomes easier, more within reach thanks to the growing role that governments have taken on during the lockdowns and other “emergency” measures. In other words, let’s not let a good crisis go to waste...

Next week: an excerpt from "History under the Great Reset," by Jeremy Black.