Albion the news that's fit to print

Can't talk about it in England. Likely no one in England will read these words, but in case someone from England does happen across this blog, I share the reportage of Ezra Levant:

On Friday, May 25, Tommy [Robinson] was reporting from outside the courthouse in Leeds, where an accused Muslim rape gang was on trial for repeatedly raping British girls as young as eleven years old. Tommy was broadcasting on Facebook, from his cell phone.  

Tommy was very careful:
He did not set foot on the court precinct.
He did not call the men “rapists”, but rather called them “accused rapists”.
In no way did he interfere with the trial, which was on its final day.
When Tommy mentioned the names of the accused rapists, he was reading from a BBC website — so the names were clearly public information, on the state broadcaster.
Tommy did nothing wrong.

But suddenly, seven police officers swarmed Tommy and threw him in the back of a police van.

They said he was causing a disturbance, which is absurd — he was by himself on the street, with only a cameraman and a friend.

But it got worse. Much worse.

Within hours, Tommy was summoned before the judge. Tommy’s long-time lawyer was not informed of this. Rather, the court appointed a lawyer who didn’t know Tommy and wasn’t an expert in the specialized law of contempt of court.

In a matter of minutes, Tommy was sent to prison — with a 13-month sentence. He is now in HM Prison Hull, a brutal facility near Leeds. 

You aren't allowed to talk about certain things in England any more. In the United States, we have a First Amendment. In England, there are hate speech laws. If the government hates your speech, you can be thrown into a police van without warning. Back to Levant:

The basic facts here — what Tommy was doing and what he didn’t do; the shocking speed with which he was imprisoned; the fact that his own lawyer was not notified; the fact that Tommy has not had a proper chance to meet with his lawyer — are banned in the UK.

Not just the underlying facts of the rape gang trial — but the whole incident involving Tommy.

The judge who sent Tommy to jail, made it illegal to report that he sent Tommy to jail.

Why did the judge keep his justice secret? 

Why? Because he rightly assumed he could get by with it. More at the link, including a fundraising appeal if you're so inclined.

The Climate Kabuki

Writing for the American Interest, Jason Willick makes a key point about the scuttling of the Paris agreement:

Like many Trump-era debates, the President’s actions on Paris are best understood through the lens of what we (following Tyler Cowen) have called “placebo politics”—elevating or reducing the status of this or that group through symbolic actions that won’t have much if any material impact on policy. President Trump’s repudiation of the agreement falls into this category: It delights his nationalistic base and sends his internationalist-minded critics into paroxysms of rage and despair—all without actually doing anything, because the Paris agreement consists simply of voluntary, unenforceable emissions pledges that are already being flouted.

All religious movements bewail apostates. And on an operational level, faith in the efficacy of climate agreements, and treaties generally, requires belief in the perfectibility of human nature, and on the self-proclaimed genius of those who negotiate such things. Back to Willick:

The drama of the Paris climate accords, then, amounts to a portrait in miniature of our political moment. A smug establishment indulged in vacuous, photo-op politics that doesn’t get us any closer to solving our major problems but pleases donors and nonprofits and makes the great and good feel even better about themselves. An angry coalition of people who felt that their status was declining reacted against this half-hearted phoniness by indulging in a placebo politics of their own—raising their own status by nihilistically tearing down the other side. Trump’s decision today doesn’t make the U.S. better off, but it probably doesn’t make us much worse off, either.

That mostly seems right to me, but I do have one quibble -- are we really talking about nihilism in this context? I don't really know too many nihilists -- do you? And as Mark Steyn has said, when we are talking about climate treaty supporters, we are talking about people who believe, in the main, that we cannot control political borders, but we can control the heavens. Clearly there's faith involved.

Peggy dials in

Peggy Noonan is a former Reagan speechwriter who has had a perch at the Wall Street Journal for years. She seriously went off the rails in 2008, becoming an acolyte for Barack Obama. She was hardly alone in that season of self-deception, but given her prominence and pedigree she garnered a lot of attention and, subsequently, a lot of scorn, especially on the Right.

She's been better for the last few years, and her recent column concerning Donald Trump and the people who support him is pretty good. A lot of Trump supporters feel betrayed. She draws on the recent experience of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who threw open the doors of Germany to a sea of immigrants who aren't particularly attuned to Western culture, to make a salient point:

Ms. Merkel had put the entire burden of a huge cultural change not on herself and those like her but on regular people who live closer to the edge, who do not have the resources to meet the burden, who have no particular protection or money or connections. Ms. Merkel, her cabinet and government, the media and cultural apparatus that lauded her decision were not in the least affected by it and likely never would be.

Nothing in their lives will get worse. The challenge of integrating different cultures, negotiating daily tensions, dealing with crime and extremism and fearfulness on the street—that was put on those with comparatively little, whom I’ve called the unprotected. They were left to struggle, not gradually and over the years but suddenly and in an air of ongoing crisis that shows no signs of ending—because nobody cares about them enough to stop it.

The powerful show no particular sign of worrying about any of this. When the working and middle class pushed back in shocked indignation, the people on top called them “xenophobic,” “narrow-minded,” “racist.” The detached, who made the decisions and bore none of the costs, got to be called “humanist,” “compassionate,” and “hero of human rights.”

Emphasis mine. If you ask the average bien pensant liberal in the U.S. about Trump and his supporters, you'll hear many of the same adjectives. Back to Noonan:

The larger point is that this is something we are seeing all over, the top detaching itself from the bottom, feeling little loyalty to it or affiliation with it. It is a theme I see working its way throughout the West’s power centers. At its heart it is not only a detachment from, but a lack of interest in, the lives of your countrymen, of those who are not at the table, and who understand that they’ve been abandoned by their leaders’ selfishness and mad virtue-signalling.

I think "virtue-signalling" is a lot of it and although I live in flyover land, this "not our kind, dear" sentiment is plenty strong in our area. Although most people around here are closer in station to those who are objecting to globalism, Trump and his supporters are just too unseemly. Back to Noonan:

From what I’ve seen of those in power throughout business and politics now, the people of your country are not your countrymen, they’re aliens whose bizarre emotions you must attempt occasionally to anticipate and manage.

That last part matters. If our leaders assume that people in the hinterlands are alien, what difference does it make if you import some more aliens of a different sort? It's just something to be managed and the managerial class is all about that. Noonan again:

Affluence detaches, power adds distance to experience. I don’t have it fully right in my mind but something big is happening here with this division between the leaders and the led. It is very much a feature of our age. But it is odd that our elites have abandoned or are abandoning the idea that they belong to a country, that they have ties that bring responsibilities, that they should feel loyalty to their people or, at the very least, a grounded respect.

Is it odd? I don't think so. I've spent most of my adult life on the outside of the elite, but I know people who have made it there, mostly from my college days. You wouldn't have assumed, based on what was happening at the time, that they would rise to the heights they occupy. And that's where we'll leave things for now.

Indulgences

Of course it's a scam:

As a result of political horse trading at UN negotiations on climate change, countries like Russia and the Ukraine were allowed to create carbon credits from activities like curbing coal waste fires, or restricting gas emissions from petroleum production. Under the UN scheme, called Joint Implementation, they then were able to sell those credits to the European Union’s carbon market. Companies bought the offsets rather than making their own more expensive, emissions cuts.

But this study, from the Stockholm Environment Institute, says the vast majority of Russian and Ukrainian credits were in fact, “hot air” – no actual emissions were reduced.

And the beauty part? Even more gas:

According to a study released in the journal Nature Climate Change, plants in Russia “increased waste gas generation to unprecedented levels once they could generate credits from producing more waste gas,” resulting in an increase in emissions as large as 600 million tons of carbon dioxide—roughly half the amount the EU’s ETS intends to reduce from 2013 to 2030.

Working great. Maybe that's why you aren't seeing any calls to have the climate summit grandees meet on Skype -- they aren't serious about any of it.

As one of the co-authors of the report put it, issuing these credits “was like printing money.”

Perhaps when this all goes south, they can work for the Fed.

Blink

Away from the brink, for at least a while, in Greece:

Greece reached a deal with its European creditors Monday, pledging stringent austerity to avoid an exit from the euro and the global financial chaos that could have followed.

The deal calls for Greeks, already reeling from harsh measures and economic decline, to cut back even further in exchange for more loans without which its financial system would surely collapse. The deal, which still needs approval from Greece's parliament, will be the country's third bailout in five years.

I'll admit it -- I wanted to see what would happen if there were a Grexit. The creditor nations, particularly Germany, couldn't afford to blink, especially with Portugal and Italy standing in the wings. We'll continue to watch the story.