To start the week, a few thoughts on the passing scene:
~Freedom of movement has seemed increasingly conditional since the Covid got going. And - surprise! - our rulers are reluctant to give up on the Permanent Emergency:
Germany's transport minister is threatening to ban driving on weekends to meet climate goals if the ruling coalition does not pass reforms to the Climate Protection Act by July...
A reduction in traffic to help meet the climate goals would only be possible through measures that are difficult to communicate to the public, such as "comprehensive and indefinite driving bans on Saturdays and Sundays," Wissing added.
There seems, from the news coverage, some doubt as to whether Herr Wissing is threatening this...
a) in order to save the planet;
b) in order to persuade his colleagues to modify an insane Merkel-era law requiring Germany to reduce its CO2 emissions by sixty-five per cent by 2030 - which is a mere half-decade away; or
c) just 'cause he's German, and Germans are as cruel and unbending about pink-unicorn fluffy-bunny saving-the-planet progressivism as they once were about subjugating the entire continent of Europe to their merciless will.
Our friend Jo Nova sees it this way:
He is warning that if the Greens don't sign a change in legislation to average emission across all sectors, he will have to take drastic action to meet the transport sector goals, which means banning driving on weekends. (Trap set.)
The Greens responded like any petty tyrants would, saying he shouldn't aggravate people unnecessarily, because there were other ways to fix the climate, like forcing everyone to drive slower. (Trap sprung.) The Greens stepped right into it..
Naturally, at the next election, policies that make people drive slower to stop storms 80 years from now will sink like a boat full of burning cars.
I'm not so sure. I wonder if backing off "climate change" isn't a bit like backing off Covid and the vaccines: it's asking a lot to get people to admit they were suckered, and half the population will never go there.
On that point, Dr Angus Dalgliesh has a terrific piece at The Conservative Woman about the increase in certain types of cancer and its connection to the vaccine "boosters":
Last week an amazing paper from Japan was published. It was available on a pre-publication server last year but now it has been peer-reviewed and published in Cureus. Titled Increased age adjusted cancer mortality after the third mRNA lipid nanoparticle vaccine dose during the COVID pandemic in Japan, it is authored by Miki Gibo and colleagues. It is an enormous study and compares the full official statistics by annual and monthly age adjusted mortality rates (AMR) for the years 2020, 2021 and 2022 with regression analysis.
Across the world - or at any rate the jabbed world - we are seeing an increase in colorectal, pancreatic, renal and ovarian cancers. One can understand why the politicians and public-health "experts" are reluctant to acknowledge the problem - because they did this to us, and engaged in unethical and possibly criminal behaviour to do so. But a far huger number of people will likewise never acknowledge it - because it requires acknowledging that they were patsies.
All I know is that if a certain "niche Canadian" were questioning whether we really needed to ban driving on weekends, a DC jury would have no problem sticking him with a million bucks in punitive damages. Once the narrative is embedded, it's not so easy to get rid of it.
~Multiculti Outreach of the Day:
SYDNEY
Bishop Mar Mari stabbed and attacked in terrorist attack during Mass pic.twitter.com/eSTWO3HV4p
— Catholic Arena (@CatholicArena) April 15, 2024
Diversity is not our strength. It is a profound weakness. And multiculturalism is merely an interim phase until the dominant uniculturalism triumphs.
~My old friend from GB News, Dan Wootton, has compiled a Hit Parade of freedom fighters. There are many who would be on my list (Kellie-Jay Keen, RFK Jr, Megyn Kelly) and a few who wouldn't. But that's fine. If you signed up all fifty, you'd have a helluva 24/7 cable network.
I raised a slight eyebrow at Dan's characteristically generous inclusion of Nigel Farage at Number Thirty, mainly for non-political non-policy reasons. In my GB News days, I always looked forward to my "tosses" (handovers) to Dan at 9pm because they were both fun and professional, whereas Nigel's tosses to me at 8pm were always perfunctory and unprofessional. But I did enjoy those Wootton handovers, because affable banter makes you feel you're really doing TV - in the same way, some of my favourite moments on Fox were way back when I'd be guest-hosting for Hannity and Shannon Bream would be in for Greta at ten. Shannon is also a great banterer, as is Stuart Varney.
As for GB News post-Steyn post-Wootton, the other night Jacob Rees-Mogg could do no better than 22,000 viewers at 8.30pm and Patrick Christys 13,000 in the 9pm hour. The management chose to kill two hit shows, and you can't pay the bills on just Farage: poor Nigel couldn't crack 100,000.
~Seven months from now, the usual dysfunctional American polities - Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, etc - will be in the middle of the re-recount of the recount of their presidential votes. So, naturally, prepping of the battle space is underway. From The Daily Caller:
Google shut down our ads promoting our documentary about election fraud because they could "undermine trust in [the] democratic process."
But taking three months to determine who won some Congressional district in upstate New York doesn't "undermine trust in the democratic process", not at all.
~I thank you for all your kind comments this last grisly couple of months - and thank you especially to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead. And I look forward to bringing the UK state censor Ofcom into court on June 11th.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's consideration of Canada as the first hermaphrodite member of the G7. Rick McGinnis's Saturday movie date plumped for John Malkovich's film The Dancer Upstairs, and on Sunday Steyn's Song of the Week previewed America's Tax Day. Iran's strike on Israel was the subject of Mark's weekend column, and our marquee presentation was the return of Tales for Our Time with a classic and pertinent story from Edgar Allan Poe.
If you were too busy spending the weekend getting a mix'n'match second set of private parts, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
