On Wednesday's edition of Tucker, mein host noted that the likes of Justin Trudeau and John Kerry are now speaking openly about "the Great Reset". That phrase has traveled a long way in a little over six months. Conversely, most of the citizens on the receiving end of it have traveled very little. Here's what I had to say when it was first floated back last summer:
One of the themes of our summer audio entertainment The Prisoner of Windsor is that most of the chaps who matter in this world are people you've never heard of - by which I mean they are other than the omnipresent pygmies of the political scene: In a settled democratic society such as Canada, for example, if you wind up with an electoral contest between a woke mammy singer with a banana in his pants and a hollow husk less lifelike than his CBC election-night hologram whose only core belief is that he has no core beliefs other than that party donations should pay for his kids' schooling, you can take it as read that the real action must be elsewhere.
A lot of those chaps you've never heard of turn up in this video from the "World Economic Forum" - ie, the Davos set. After five months of Covid lockdown, you'll be happy to hear that all the experts have decided that 2021 will be the year of "The Great Reset":
I see my chums at the Heartland Institute headline this the "World Leaders' 'Great Reset' Plan". But, if by "leader" you mean an elected head of government accountable to the people, there is a total dearth. Indeed, it's a melancholy reflection on the state of "world leadership" that the nearest to anyone accountable to the people in this video is HRH The Prince of Wales, in whom one day in the hopefully extremely far distant future the executive authority of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, etc will be nominally vested but which cannot be exercised without the consent of the people's representatives. Yet even that token accountability is, as noted, in the future. So right now he's just another guy who's a "world leader" because he gets invited to Davos and you don't - and, even if you were minded to show up anyway, you'd need a private jet because all the scheduled flights have been Covid-canceled and the world's airports are ghost towns.
As is the custom among our big thinkers, the blather is very generalized. "Now is the time to think about what history would say about this crisis," says the head of the IMF. If you say so. Personally, I was thinking that now is the time to eat a meal in a restaurant, if they weren't closed.
But, why is it history's job to say something about this crisis? Why, don't you "world leaders" of the here and now say anything about it? "It is imperative that we reimagine, rebuild, redesign, re-invigorate and re-balance our world," declares the UN Secretary-General.
That's almost a full set, but he forgot "redefined". "Possibilities are being redefined each and every day," says the chief exec of British Petroleum, who as is his wont sounds like he's in any business other than petroleum.
There is, of course, an inscrutable Oriental, who is chairman of something called the "China Green Finance Committee". He's there as a not so subtle reminder not even to bring up the subject of China, whose lies amplified by their sock puppet at the WHO are the sole cause of the present crisis - and whose death-grip on our future is the thing that most urgently needs to be reimagined, rebuilt, re-balanced and redefined. As I've mentioned many times over the spring and summer, twenty years ago we were told to forget about manufacturing - from widgets to "These Colors Don't Run" T-shirts, that's never coming back; from now on, we're going to be "the knowledge economy". Yet mysteriously, with the 5G and the Huawei and all the rest, China seems to have snaffled all that, too.
So what's left for citizens of the developed world? Retail, restaurants, theme parks, low-paid service jobs... In other words, everything that the Covid has clobbered. Cities that grew in the age of manufacturing transformed themselves into giant shopping malls for an indolent post-industrial west - cheeseburgers, Macy's, multiplexes, sports stadia, concert halls, Miley Cyrus - The Musical ...all gone. A few years back, I took my daughter to a bankrupt shopping centre in Reading, England that had been converted into a "Zombie Shopping Mall", wherein for a fiver or so one could battle zombies through abandoned W H Smith's and Boots' and Tesco's. In Seattle and Portland and Chicago they're recreating the experience city-wide. In Minneapolis, as in that Zombie Shopping Mall, the rubble is being left in place: the city won't let storekeepers clear away the ruins of their incinerated businesses unless they pre-pay their end-of-year property taxes. America's cities are a whole new kind of business model: Zombie Shopping Mall With Paperwork.
It's hard to see what's in front of your nose when you're so far-sighted all you can glimpse is the distant horizon, so the Davos crowd have nothing to say about any of that and instead retreat to their comforting tropes - mostly the "climate emergency", with a little light slathering of social justice, just in case the #BLM crowd get a yen to torch their charitable foundations. Still, one notices the absence of some once familiar bromides. Nobody's cooing over the "borderless world" beloved of brain-dead big thinkers of the day before yesterday. Unless you're a Davos jetsetter, a "Syrian" "refugee", a Covid-positive Mexican or member of some other approved group, there are borders everywhere now - around your home in many jurisdictions, five kilometres from your home in the Irish Not-So-Free State, between Australian states...
Underneath the lofty generalities of the Davos set, this is what the Great Reset boils down to as a practical matter. "Each and every one of us has a vital role to play," says the Prince of Wales. His vital role is to think big thoughts, your vital role is to stay indoors on pain of a $5,000 fine unless given permission to leave for approved purposes during daylight hours.
That distinction between the rulers and the ruled has sharpened during the last year - and the very acceptance of that distinction by the overwhelming majority of western citizens does us no credit whatsoever.
~"The Great Reset" derives in large part from Big Climate panic-porn - which I see the third-rate jurists of Canada's high court have swallowed wholesale. From The Toronto Sun's Anthony Furey:
Take a look at a couple of sentences about climate change that appeared Thursday concerning the Supreme Court of Canada's ruling on the carbon tax.
Here's one: "It is a threat of the highest order to the country, and indeed to the world." And here's another: "The undisputed existence of a threat to the future of humanity cannot be ignored."
That's in a judicial decision from the highest court in the land. Whether or not global warming is "settled science", in Canada it's now res judicata.
~Speaking of judicial decisions, having been in the case for almost a decade, I find most commentary on Mann vs Steyn very low-grade, mainly because most of the climate fanatics still ga-ga for Mann's "hockey stick" have very little understanding of either law or science. Francis Menton gets both, and his column is a pretty good summation of where things stand now that National Review has managed to wiggle out of the case. I stand on the truth of everything I wrote in my original post, including on the fraudulence of the Michael E Mann's stick. Mann, on the other hand, is seeking summary judgment on the ground that his stick is not in the least bit fraudulent. Mr Menton writes:
Remarkably, eight and a half years into this case, only now is the truth or falsity of the claim that the "hockey stick" graph is fraudulent being addressed.... From the Steyn March 3 submission:
'The [Hockey Stick graph as published in the IPCC's Third Assessment Report in 2001, in a portion written by lead author Mann] omitted tree ring proxy data collected by climate scientist Keith Briffa that showed a decline in temperatures after 1960, a message inconsistent with the prized hockey stick shape. . . . The IPCC TAR did not disclose the deletion of this data. . . . As lead author, Mann decided to omit the Briffa data without the input of his other lead authors.. . . Mann's own collaborators cautioned him against the deletion. IPCC TAR Coordinating Lead Author Chris Folland wrote to Mann that Briffa's data "contradicts the multiproxy curve and dilutes the message rather significantly.". . . Briffa himself urged Mann not to succumb to "pressure to present a nice tidy story" by "ignor[ing]" his post-1960 results. . . . Mann agreed with them on the merits but bemoaned the data's political impact: "[I]f we show Keith's series . . . skeptics [will] have a field day." . . . To prevent a "skeptics' field day," he chose to delete the data.'
One would think that this is about as clear a demonstration of scientific fraud as it is possible to have. And as indicated, this is just one of three instances of fraud in the Hockey Stick graph that are set forth in detail in Steyn's March 3 submission.
Of course, as that Supreme Court decision from Ottawa suggests, the politicization of the judiciary goes very high on this topic. Mr Menton again:
As clear-cut as this may appear from the excerpt I provided, the court's decision could well not come out until late in the year. If summary judgment is denied, there will then be a trial. Another possibility is that the court grants summary judgment to Mann as plaintiff. I find that possibility almost too ridiculous to contemplate, but the fact is that when things get as politicized as the "climate change" thing has become, the human mind loses almost all rational capability.
Alas, under the Great Reset, many things "too ridiculous to contemplate" are now part of our daily lives.
~After the usual threats against Marc Morano's new tome (with an introduction by me) taking apart the Green New Deal, we're now offering Green Fraud at SteynOnline (with a personal autograph from yours truly). If you want to combine both the Green New Deal and the Hockey Stick in one dynamite denialist double-bill, check out our special limited-time warm-monger twofer - A Fraud and a Disgrace.
