Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission (the “executive arm” of the European Union), says “if we want to keep global warming below the tipping point” then it’s about time we put a price on carbon emissions. Here’s this, shared to X a few days back:
EU chief von der Leyen: "And there's a way to cut emissions…Put a price on carbon. It is a market driven instrument and the message is very clear: You're polluting, you must pay a price. You want to avoid the payment, well then innovate and decarbonize. Carbon pricing nudges… pic.twitter.com/t1tt0xYlzX
(Now this video seems to be from November 2023, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that perhaps it was proposals like this that led to the overwhelming rebuke many leftist Eurocrats just suffered at the polls—to be clear, Ursula isn’t going anywhere just quite yet.)
Ursula suggests that implementing a carbon tax would force “heavy polluters” to pay a price, but who determines what a “heavy polluter” is? Big government bureaucrats? Since when has the government, or a bureaucrat for that matter, ever been a reliable litmus test of objectivity and fairness? These are the same types of people who insist I can afford to fork over 25% of the money I earn just in federal income tax, and tell me I still have enough to afford the very high price of quality food, and massive energy bills because they want to eliminate affordable energy. They’re either totally unaware, or just plain sadistic and murderous—I lean toward the latter.
But Ursula also said that if “you’re polluting” then you’re going to “pay a price,” which seems pretty unambiguous to me. (Yet, even in some alternate reality where the governing bodies simply taxed the “heavy polluting” industries and called it good, instead of slowly moving the needle like they always do, that cost would still reflect onto the consumer.)
Are you ready to pay for each breath you take? After all, when you exhale, out comes those pesky “polluting” emissions! Are you ready to pay for your children’s breathing? Your dog? Your gas stove, A/C unit, garden harvest, your computer? You could even be so impoverished and back in a state of nature, huddling over a fire for warmth, and that’s still a carbon tax right there.
This is all of course a notion evolved from a false premise: Carbon is not a pollutant, and joined with two oxygen molecules, it’s still not a pollutant. Carbon is a building block of life, which is why “they” see it as an enemy; the climate cult is a death cult after all.
What happens when you can’t afford the carbon bill anymore, because you’ve literally been taxed to the point of death? Are they going to jail us? Well, why would they, we’d still be emitting carbon—seems more likely that things would go more along the lines of the now-common saying, “You are the carbon they want to reduce.”
A trans-identified male in Wisconsin is facing five counts of felony child pornography possession after local authorities were tipped off by the nation’s top child safeguarding organization. Clayton William Solberg, also known as Sofie Solberg, was first arrested in December of 2023, but was found with even more child sexual abuse material while out on bond.
Solberg, 22 and of Galesville, was first apprehended by Trempealeau County deputies on December 27, 2023, after the Sheriff’s office received a cyber-tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). He was charged with two counts of possession of child pornography, and was booked in the Trempealeau County jail. On January 3, he was released on a $2,500 cash bond.
Clayton William Solberg. Reduxx is withholding the source of the photo to protect the suspect’s relatives.
Among the conditions of his bond was that Solberg was not to have contact with minors or vulnerable adults, which the court noted included “those where defendant was previously residing.” Solberg was also prohibited from accessing the internet and having any devices which could connect to the internet.
But not long after being released from jail pending trial, the NCMEC became aware of a Dropbox baring Solberg’s “feminine” name which was transferring child sexual abuse material. The account was registered to an address in the City of Galesville.
A meme from Solberg’s Instagram account in which he jokes about being in possession of child pornography, made years before he was arrested for being in possession of child pornography.
A search warrant was executed on Solberg’s Google Photos account which found several more videos and images of child sexual abuse.
On May 7, Trempealeau County deputies raided Solberg’s home and found three devices capable of connecting the internet, which were prohibited under the conditions of Solberg’s January bond. The man was once again arrested, and this time his bond was set by the court at $20,000.
Solberg posted bond this past Wednesday, June 12. He is prohibited from possessing any device that can connect to the internet, prohibited from accessing the internet, and is to have no contact with minors.
Solberg had a lengthy and prolific social media presence which went dark just days before his arrest in December.
On Reddit, he went by the name Sofie Fordo, which was the same handle associated with the Dropbox where child sexual abuse material was found. That name has since been registered into the court system as one of his aliases.
Calling himself “Slutty Step Sister,” Solberg primarily posted memes to various Reddit communities, including ones dedicated to LGBT issues, transgender gamers, and self-identified lesbians. One of his most frequented boards required all users to align with the ideology of anti-fascism, “All Cops Are Bastards,” and Black Lives Matter.
Solberg also posted multiple lewd photos of his micropenis and male breast tissue to various pornographic communities, including r/dykesgonewild, r/FtMsex, r/FtMsPunished, r/SmallPenisHumiliation, and r/19_sex.
He maintained an OnlyFans where he re-posted much of the same content to a small handful of subscribers who were paying $4.99 per month.
Solberg’s Instagram presence featured a similar theme as his Reddit account, with hundreds of memes and short videos being posted, most of which utilized female characters drawn in the style of Japanese animation with captions related to transgenderism, sex, or video games.
Some of Solberg’s content was explicitly political and called for violence against Republicans and police officers.
One 2018 post featured a photo of a man wearing an Antifa-logo shirt punching a bruised woman in the face. The photo was captioned “53% of white women voted for a fascist. #punchwhitewomen,” an apparent reference to the percent of white American females who voted for Donald Trump in the last election. Solberg repeated the hashtag in the photo in his own caption.
Solberg is next expected to appear in court on July 10, and is facing a total of 5 counts of felony child pornography possession, plus one count of bail jumping.
In 2005, an American evangelist called Harold Camping made a startling prediction: the world was going to end on May 21st, 2011. He spread the word through the media, primarily his popular radio and television programmes, gaining followers and adherents who sold their possessions and readied themselves for the apocalypse.
Of course, when May 21st, 2011 arrived, the world failed to end. “Never fear,” he said. His math was off: the end would actually come later, in October. While he lost some supporters, a core stayed with him – until the world failed to end in October, whereupon he faded away.
Why is this relevant? Because change the names, dates, and some nouns, and you have the story of what has happened to the European Green movement.
Just five years ago, in 2019, they had a huge promise. In that year’s European Parliamentary election they gained 22 seats, making them a serious player in the parliament.
That same year the Austrian Greens entered that country’s parliament for the first time. Two years later they would join Germany’s government, wiping out nuclear power there. Youth, led by Greta Thunberg, were marching across the continent. Mainstream parties were rushing to vacuum up some of that intensity, voting through bans on gas-powered engines and supporting portions of the Green New Deal.
But five years later, that energy is sapped. Though they did well in some countries, the Greens lost around 20 seats in the recent European Parliamentary elections, erasing practically all of their gains from 2019.
On the national level, things look grim as well. The youth energy has dried up and their champions, like Thunberg, have outed themselves as simply unserious.
Why? Have people become immune to the “climate crisis”? The world is about to end!
Well, no. It is because the Green Party is the political version of Harold Camping’s apocalyptic cult. The same things which caused the party to become so popular – their predictions about the end of the world, their angry nihilism, and their demands at systemic change – all ultimately contributed to their reduction back to near-irrelevance.
Let us start with their most headline-grabbing aspect: their predictions of doom.
Now, predictions of doom do not inherently hurt organizations. Plenty of people have predicted the end. Christians around the world pray every Sunday for the return of Christ – the end of the world – and Christians are growing more numerous, not less. Predictions of wars are made by successful politicians all the time.
But Green predictions are a different sort. Ecologist Paul Ehrlich, in the 1960s, predicted mass famine-induced death was coming in the 1970s.
Scientists were hyperventilating about a 21st century ice age (back then, the fear was global cooling). New York City was supposed to be underwater by now.
Greta Thunberg warned in 2018 (in a now-deleted tweet) that humanity would end in five years(!) unless we stopped using fossil fuels. US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was more lenient in her prediction of doom, saying in 2019 that the world would end in 12 years, giving humanity until 2031.
There are dozens more false predictions. The problem for the environmentalist radicals is that, before the internet, it was easy to be wrong. If you made a prediction in a small article somewhere, or in a presentation, no one would remember it in a year or two. People would have to actively track down decade-old copies of Time Magazine to find out what you said. Harold Camping was able to use this to his advantage. He first predicted the world would end in 1994, in a now out-of-print book.
But now, a quick Google search reveals the long history of absurd predictions. Now everyone can easily see that the entire history of the environmental movement is one failed prediction after another. Thunberg deleting a tweet cannot help them.
The angrily nihilism embedded in the nature of those predictions is the second reason why the Greens are in trouble. When Christians pray for the end of the world, they are doing so believing they can be forgiven of their sins if they honestly repent.
But the Green movement is a religion without forgiveness. You can never make up for the sins of your ancestors (who were evil and selfish). If you agree to cut emissions, live in the pod, and eat the bugs, you win no medals and gain no plaudits. You always need to do more.
Pointing out the West has reduced emissions far more than China will only get you attacked. Even if emissions are reduced, the future is still, in their telling, bleak. The best we can do is make the future slightly less awful. It can never be a wonderful thing. It will always be hard and sad, and it will be so because you were selfish enough to fly Ryanair instead of taking the train.
There is something nihilistic in this. It is hard to convince people things matter if the world is going to end and you cannot hope to really improve things. All life – from your trips to your food to your clothes to your air conditioner – must revolve around the end of the world, an end you cannot really avoid.
There is a reason that apocalyptic cults get big quickly but flame out faster. It is simply depressing to be around people who are angry all the time, and want you to be angry too.
But this is what loses them their base. What makes it hard for them to grow beyond that base, after they explode onto the scene, is what they actually do once in power.
Their demands for systemic change inconvenience everyone. Demands for taxes on meat make things harder for working people. In the Netherlands, their demands to reduce farmland – which would raise prices and destroy the livelihoods of farmers – garnered such intense pushback that it resulted in the creation of the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB), a party which is now likely to join the Netherlands’ new right-wing government coalition and may end up leading the Agricultural ministry. Talk about a self-own.
Now there is a push in the European Parliament to undo some of the biggest Green successes from the previous five years, primarily a reversal of the gas-powered engine ban, which is currently scheduled to go into effect in 2035. The ban would have allowed for expensive eFuels, a more environmentally-friendly fuel, to continue to be used, essentially meaning that the super-wealthy could continue to drive cars of their choice.
This is the other thing about Green Party proposals. The super wealthy are practically always able to avoid them. Meat taxes do not affect the rich, who can afford an expensive dish. Nor do more expensive flights. They can simply fly in their private jets.
They can avoid being attacked for their sins by paying for “carbon offsets,” donations which supposedly go toward helping the environment – the modern-day form of an indulgence.
An apocalyptic movement which depresses its adherents, pushes away potential new ones, and has carve-outs for the wealthy. Just like their religious equivalents, they will always be around in some shape or form, sometimes even briefly gaining power. But they will never be able to hold it for long. For a party so concerned about the environment, it is just not in their nature.
It is about alleged hostility from citizens of the city and a deportation authorised by the court, but which is not being enforced. The man’s lawyer, Christoph Käss from Ulm, told FOCUS online this Friday:
“My client is not allowed to work, he is obliged to live in the town where everyone knows him. He’s met with hostility everywhere. When people spot him there, they call him a criminal, spit at his feet and demand that he finally leave Germany.” He is portrayed as a “devil in disguise”.
Christoph Käss continues: “He is not allowed to leave the Alb-Donau district because of a residency requirement. The authorities have banned his attempts to leave. And so he vegetates, lives in a dump and doesn’t know what to do. That takes its toll.”
According to the lawyer, his client is “now traumatised because he no longer has a chance to live in Illerkirchberg”. Nevertheless, he wants to stay in Germany. “His girlfriend will have a child with him in the autumn.”
He has rejected a state cash reward for voluntary return to Afghanistan, and the rejected asylum seeker is currently living on “benefits in kind, a little pocket money and a payment card”.
The lawyer emphasises: “He stands by his sentence and he has served his time.” Society has to accept that. His client, who has not relapsed so far, says: “People should realise at some point that they can’t get rid of me.”
The Sigmaringen Administrative Court has already ruled that the man can be deported from a legal perspective. The 31-year-old was unable to convincingly prove to the court that he had no social connections in his home country that would support him in making a new start.
He arrived in Germany in November 2015. His asylum application was rejected in 2017 and since then he has been considered “tolerated”.
Lawyer Käss told FOCUS online: “In practice, deportation is currently not possible. Because you need a country that is willing to accept you. However, as far as I know, there are no negotiations between Germany and the Taliban in this regard.”
Mayor Markus Häußler has already spoken out unequivocally in favour of a swift repatriation of the released offender – “because it is part of regulated immigration to deport people to their countries of origin consistently and swiftly if they have committed serious crimes or have no prospect of a right to stay”.
Two Parisian anti-terrorism investigating magistrates have ordered that two teenagers suspected of planning jihadist terrorist attacks, particularly on the bars of the Identitarian movement, be tried in July, AFP news agency learnt on Friday from a source familiar with the case. The main suspect, who was a minor at the time of the attacks, will be tried before the juvenile court on July 9 and 10, while his alleged accomplice Hamza K. will be tried before the 16th chamber of the Paris criminal court on July 4. www.leparisien.fr
Several anti-Semitic graffiti were discovered on buildings in the town centre of Pont-Audemer, including on the outside wall of a church. The gendarmerie has launched an investigation. (…)
The local authority contacted the gendarmerie. “I immediately asked for a report to be made,” emphasised Alexis Darmois. The Pont-Audemer police corps has opened an investigation. Paris Normandie
TAGS ANTISEMITES ET NAZIS à Pont-Audemer. Je m’insurge aux côtés des élus de la ville face à ces agissements qui visent à pointer nos compatriotes juives.! Honte à ces criminels, ceux qui veulent détruire notre société ont allumé des flammes partout ! Dégoût absolu pic.twitter.com/vLxwg7ENG2
In the early evening of June 13, 2024, a fire in the Notre-Dame-de-Délivrance basilica in Quintin (Côtes-d’Armor) was quickly brought under control by the emergency services. There is no doubt that the fire was caused deliberately. The gendarmerie has launched an investigation. (…)
The sacristan of the church, who opens the church in the morning, looks after it and closes it every evening, noticed the damage at around 7.15 pm. She immediately alerted the fire brigade, who arrived very quickly and contained the fire (…). Ouest France
Photo: Quartl, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The German climate protest group ”Hungern, bis ihr ehrlich seid” (Starve until you’re honest), whose members have taken turns hunger striking in a Berlin park since March, has ended that form of activism and is now telling members to take more aggressive action.
Adam Lack, one of the activists, called on people to join an environmental group and commit acts of sabotage, Tagesspiegelreports, such as turning off pipelines or blowing them up, slashing the tires of SUVs, and blocking roads.
The group had earlier approached Chancellor Olaf Scholz, asking him to publicly affirm three of their statements, including that “[the] continued existence of human civilization is extremely endangered by the climate catastrophe.” Scholz has not spoken to the group, its website says, adding that “[t]his trivializes the climate crisis we are heading towards.”
Wolfgang Metzeler-Kick, who ended his hunger strike after 92 days after a medical emergency, said since more peaceful protests have failed to achieve their purposes, “the last chance now lies in self-empowerment,” adding:
I call on you: do what you enjoy. If you want to blow up pipelines, please don’t get caught.
After speaking to the media, Metzeler-Kick glued himself to the asphalt on a nearby street, blocking car and tram traffic.
https://x.com/madlen_hapunkt/status/1801173589128855958 It is not the first time German climate activists have called for sabotaging pipelines. In 2022, Luisa Neubauer, the German spokesman for Fridays for Future, suggested blowing up the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP). After blowback on social media, Neubauer backtracked from the statement, saying she was referring to a radical left-wing extremist book that called for an escalation in activism to stop fossil fuels.
The public prosecutor’s office in Essen has brought charges against the Islamist influencer Ibrahim El-Azzazi. The well-known Salafist is alleged to have raped and physically abused his wife, reports the newspaper Die Welt.
For example, he is accused of injuring the woman’s hand with a so-called Kubotan, a melee weapon, in November 2021. On another occasion, he allegedly choked her until the woman “could no longer breathe for about a minute”, said a spokeswoman for the Essen district court.
The public prosecutor’s office also accuses him of raping his wife at least twice in February 2022 and, in one case, penetrating her genital area with his hand against her will. According to El-Azzazi’s defence lawyer, Roland Rautenberger, the wife denies the allegations against her husband. According to this, she stated in a non-public statement in court that her husband had not acted against her will.
El-Azzazi was remanded in custody from the end of February to the beginning of June and was released on conditional release last week. He must report regularly to the authorities. The next day of the trial is scheduled for June 14. According to a spokeswoman for the chamber, a judgement could possibly be reached on that day. Ibrahim El-Azzazi has been spreading Salafist and Islamist content on social networks for several years. On the internet platform TikTok, his videos sometimes attract up to 100,000 people. One popular example is a series of videos in which the imam answers questions from the audience – for example, whether Muslims are allowed to play chess or shave their beard.
In its 2022 annual report, the Bavarian Office for the Protection of the Constitution noted that it was monitoring El-Azzazi’s activities on TikTok “closely”. In its 2023 annual report, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in North Rhine-Westphalia mentioned that preachers like El-Azzazi were able to target young people and make Islamist content “accessible to a wider audience”.
