Weekend Links and Commentary #3

The passing of the Queen of England, a post-Elizabethan winter looks bleaker and bleaker, Ukraine continues to be offered as a sacrifice to American interests.

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Summary:

1. Queen Elizabeth II has died. Whatever you believe about the Windsors and her reign, it is undeniable that she represented something of a final flicker of a faded age. Her death reminds the liberal west of our current rule by grey bureaucrats.

2. Is her death a harbinger of a tumultuous winter to come in England and Europe? Latest news of the upcoming energy crisis gets worse and worse.

3. And for what? Is the obsession with Ukraine even helpful to Ukrainians. What are the soldiers on the frontline there saying, and why has a peace deal been deliberately avoided?

“If we no longer believe in God, we can no longer believe in God’s anointed, and therefore we must offer ourselves to rule by grey-suited technocrats”

This piece from IM-1776 was written before the death of the Queen but it was being shared online again as it became clear she was dying.

Writing on the occasion of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, Dan Simons perfectly expressed how I imagine I would feel about the monarchy if I were British:

Cards on the table, I am an incorrigible monarchist although I recognise that the Windsors have done their best to cheapen, besmirch and enfeeble the proud tradition of the English, and latterly British, monarchy. I have toyed with the idea of being publicly and ostentatiously Pro-Monarchy / Anti-Windsor, and maybe even trying to get the hashtag trending, but the whole point of the King or Queen is that they are anointed by God, not selected by committee or hailed by the demos like a President or a Prime Minister. Whether I have reservations on the Queen matters not at all. She is the Queen. Overthrowing monarchs is suspiciously French behaviour and God Save The Queen doesn’t come with conditions…

Even those in media who make a claim for the continued existence of the monarchy do it in such a way as to appease the tedious, po-faced critics of our “unelected” Head of State. “The royals”, they gush, “bring more money into this country than they take from it”. As if the Royal Family should be judged by balance sheet, a tourist attraction like Warwick Castle or Madame Tussards…

There seems to be no case made, even amongst notionally pro-monarchy media outlets, for the glory of monarchy, the safety of stability and the extremely British value of pragmatically sticking with what you know. Her Majesty is a descendent of those storied kings of yore; Charles II, Elizabeth I, James I, Henry V, all the way back to Alfred the Great. Shepherding the wayward flock of these islands is in her very blood. That no-one seems to think this is every bit as compelling a reason for her, and her heirs and successors, is telling of a culture that has forgotten itself…

That no one is willing to defend this perspective anymore speaks to a saddening loss of the sparkle and shine of the ritualistic and the degradation of the hereditary contract between monarch and subject. If we no longer believe in God, we can no longer believe in God’s anointed, and therefore we must offer ourselves to rule by grey-suited technocrats. All the remaining Royal Houses of Europe that haven’t had their heads stretched on the block have modernised to the point of tedium. They cringe at the pageantry, the pomp and ceremony to placate their politicians and keep their lifestyle. Only on our sceptre’d isle does the crown get transported to parliament in its own golden carriage. Long may it continue.

The English Monarchy has not exercised its royal prerogative for centuries. I think it should have, despite the latent threat of beheading at the hands of a Puritan Parliament.

But it has retained a sense of the sacred and transcendent. The Queen managed to be both countrywoman and other-worldly leader. The crown, the palaces, and the churches, all kept some kind of vision alive which instinctively so many in Britain and around the world recognize as natural and good.

Yesterday I was also reminded of another piece on the monarchy written for the Jubilee, Only a monarch can control the elites, by a strange American monarchist named Curtis Yarvin, writing for UnHerd.

Yarvin has long proposed that democracy is impossible. The iron law of oligarchy means that the people can never rule a country. It is a logistical impossibility.

And nor should they want to. Just as no private institution is ruled by senates or courts, but rather by an executive (usually with a board to keep him accountable), so it follows that in the interests of good governance, governments should be ruled by executives with monarchical power:

So either the whole public sector today is mad, or the rest of human history was mad, and so is the entire private sector. As an American monarchist, I choose the former. But in Britain, how should you feel about it? You already have a monarchy. Not monarchy as a form of government — but as a theatre of government. It’s a sort of official soap opera, one that has been on-air a long time — about 300 years, by some counts.

As even its defenders would surely admit, the British monarchy is not a functional organ of governance. It is a living monument of history. The German for “monument” is evocative — Denkmal, meaning “an occasion to think”. To ask questions, perhaps. Simple questions. Dangerous questions.

Yarvin goes on to consider how in reality neither the Palace nor Parliament rules Britain. Parliament is as symbolic as the Palace. The real power, if it lies in England at all, lies with the bureaucrats in Whitehall. It does not matter which of the two options you tick in the box at election time., The machine will roll on. Both Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer would have locked the country down and enforced masks. Both would have gone hard at Russia. Under the Tories or Labour, immigration and social policy remain the same. Brexit was meaningless, a parlour game. If Parliament disappeared overnight, but Whitehall remained, would anything change?

But what the Queen does offer, is the persistence of a dangerous question.

If democracy is never possible, why not have rule by a glorious monarch, with the power to do something grand, rather than the grey overlordship of pathetic bureaucrats?

What if Charles III arrives in London… and takes power?

Yarvin does not believe it will happen. But he notes the King can use his royal prerogative in an Emergency. He suggests the past fifty years has been an emergency. Society is falling apart and only a monarch could possibly save us from the talentless, invisible rulers driving liberal ‘democracies’ into the ground.

When it comes to the sense of the passing of Elizabeth II representing the fading of something once glorious, Tucker Carlson has summed it up beautifully:

Flattening the Curve, 2.0

Disclose.tv @disclosetv

NOW - EU will propose a "mandatory target for reducing electricity use at peak hours" in order to "flatten the curve."

Yes, this again.

The lockdowns were a rehearsal for draconian moves around speech and energy.

Now Pavlov stands at the ready again whilst his dogs are primed by the media once again.

For some reason, western leadership is intent on civilizational suicide.

How else can you explain getting rid of nuclear energy and then practically begging Russia to stop selling you gas?

Will the sanctions hurt Russia? Probably not. China and India will just buy more.

The ruble is stronger now than at the beginning of the year.

The British press is warning of a phenomenon we know all too well in South Africa - power rationing, or lockdowns, or, more accurately, rolling black-outs.

The new British Prime Minister is putting together an ‘energy bail-out’ package amounting to 170 billion pounds - the entire annual budget for the NHS. Which, by the way, is on its knees as it struggles to mount a comeback after locking itself down for years, supposedly to preserve healthcare provision.

This is all borrowed money, too.

Why the radical plan?

Because if British citizens have to pay themselves for the huge increase in energy prices, it is estimated 10 million households would fall into poverty - one-third of all families.

So the idea is to borrow more money and hand it out, with some lockdowns to flatten the curve, whilst watching everything else fall apart, currency becoming worthless, in order for global elite to carry on pursuing their liberal policies.

Will this next flattening of the curve cause riots in Europe this winter?

Doubtful, considering how acquiescent the majority was in the face of lockdowns. As long as the media remains in thrall to the agenda, if not driving it, replacing the current regimes will be very difficult.

And the notion that any of this defends Ukrainian democracy, or that it helps the environment, are just lies.

First of all, there is no reason to believe solar or wind, whilst maybe beneficial to a few who can afford it at a small scale, can ever replace fossil fuels.

Michael Shellenberger @ShellenbergerMD

Many think we will subsidize our way to renewables, but we won't, for inherently physical reasons. Sunlight & wind are too energy-dilute. Solar/wind projects need ~300x more land, 300% more copper, and 700% more rare earths than fossil fuels, making them prohibitively expensive.

Meanwhile, it is not clear more CO2 would even add to the greenhouse effect:

And if you are worried about CO2, worrying about it in Europe is useless too:

So much of the fear is induced by scientific modelling. Modelling is always wrong. The IPCC maintains that by averaging out all the models, you get some accuracy. That is, of course, not true, if the models are all guesses.

And what is certainly true, is that if the Europeans were really worried about climate change, they would not be shutting down nuclear power plants.

Let’s turn now to Ukraine, to see how the ‘pro-Ukrainian’ policy is going…

Ukraine, like the poor, the young, and the middle class during lockdowns, is nothing but a sacrificial lamb

American website, Responsible Statecraft, reported the following this past week:

Russia and Ukraine may have agreed on a tentative deal to end the war in April, according to a recent piece in Foreign Affairs.

“Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement,” wrote Fiona Hill and Angela Stent. “Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.”

The news highlights the impact of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s efforts to stop negotiations, as journalist Branko Marcetic noted on Twitter. The decision to scuttle the deal coincided with Johnson’s April visit to Kyiv, during which he reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to break off talks with Russia for two key reasons: Putin cannot be negotiated with, and the West isn’t ready for the war to end.

The apparent revelation raises some key questions: Why did Western leaders want to stop Kyiv from signing a seemingly good deal with Moscow? Do they consider the conflict a proxy war with Russia? And, most importantly, what would it take to get back to a deal?

It is unthinkable that Boris Johnson personally has the power to scuttle peace talks. It could only have been at the behest of the US.

We have been told over and over that Putin is a maniac, that this is not about Ukrainian NATO membership, but about stopping somebody worse than Hitler from invading Europe.

Then why was Russia willing to end the war in exchange for Ukraine remaining neutral?

And if Putin is another Hitler ready to invade the world, why does it take him so long to deal with Ukraine?

It is shocking to think that the US would purposefully want more Ukrainian destruction rather than a peace Ukraine was willing to live with, involving ceding small regions which are populated almost entirely by ethnic Russians who do not support the Kiev regime anyway.

The only explanation is one I have been suggesting now for weeks.

This is not about Ukraine. This is a proxy war with Russia to extend the American liberal empire by making Russia bleed for as long as possible.

Just as lockdown leaders literally did not care about people’s health, or the climate change movement not care about preserving the earth’s natural beauty, the Americans and British do not care about Ukrainians.

The left-wing foreign policy news site, The Grayzone, has done some reporting on conditions on the ground amongst Ukrainian soldiers, and the reality of the situation is grim.

American aid and the war effort has turned a corrupt and poor state into a failed, deathly banana republic.

In a video sent via Facebook messenger in July, Ivan* can be seen standing next to his car, an early 2010s model Mitsubishi SUV. Smoke is pouring out of the rear window. Ivan laughs and pans his phone’s camera across the length of the vehicle, pointing out bullet holes. “The turbocharger died in my car,” he said, panning his phone toward the front of the vehicle. “My commander says I should pay to repair it myself. So to use my own car in the war, I need to buy a new turbocharger with my own money.”

Ivan flipped the camera toward his face. “Well, you fucking motherfucker members of parliament, I hope you fuck each other. Devils. I wish you were in our place,” he said.

Last month, Ukraine’s parliamentarians voted to give themselves a 70% salary increase. Filings indicate the raise was enabled and encouraged by the billions of dollars and euros of aid that have poured in from the US and Europe.

“We, the Ukrainian soldiers, have nothing,” said Ivan. “The things the soldiers have been given to use in the war came directly from volunteers. The aid that goes to our government will never reach us.”

Ivan is not optimistic about Ukraine’s chances to win the war. “There won’t be a Donbas left,” he said. “The Russians will destroy it, or they’ll control all of it, and then they’ll move on to the south. And now, as it is, I’d say 80% of the civilians who have stayed in Donbas support Russia and leak all of our location information to them.”

When asked if he thought the US and European countries truly want Ukraine to win the war, Ivan laughed. “No, I don’t think they want us to win,” he said. “The West could give us weapons to make us stronger than the Russians, but they don’t do this. We know Poland and the Baltic countries want us to win, 100%, but their support isn’t enough.”

“It is obvious that the US doesn’t want Ukraine to win the war,” said Andrey*, a Ukrainian journalist based in Mykolayiv. “They only want to make Russia weak. No one will win this war, but the countries the US is using like a playground will lose. And the corruption related to the war aid is shocking. The weapons are stolen, the humanitarian aid is stolen, and we have no idea where the billions sent to this country have gone.”

Does this seem worth wrecking the global economy for?

On my radar this week: the excess mortality data in high vax countries is getting worse, 21 years since 9/11, Sweden and Italy take a right turn.