Maybe Britain needs a First Amendment, too

PC gone mad 

''...Think of Paul Chambers, who was fined £3,000 and lost his job for tweeting, in jest, words to the effect that he would blow up an airport if its closure due to bad weather disrupted his travel plans. Or of Gareth Compton, the Tory Councillor who was arrested in November when – after hearing the Independent’s Yasmin Alibhai-Brown argue on a radio programme that the West had no moral authority to condemn the practice of stoning women in the Muslim world – he asked his Twitter followers ‘Can someone please stone [her] to death?’, adding ‘I shan't tell Amnesty if you don’t. It would be a blessing, really.''

Read the whole thing 

Fukushima: sounding worse, getting better

by Bill Durodié


Over the weekend, much of the world’s media reported a radiation spike emanating from Japan’s stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant of the order of 10million times above the norm. It soon transpired that this figure was erroneous and it has since been retracted by the Japanese authorities. But why did so many seem so keen to report the alarming estimate?


The closer the situation comes to being resolved at Fukushima, the clearer it will become what actually happened there. Hence it will sound like matters are getting worse just as they are getting better. As things stand it would seem that one of the worst earthquakes ever recorded, followed by a devastating tsunami that took out the back-up generators required to cool the nuclear facility, may have caused a minor fissure to the casing of one of six reactors, leading to some radioactive materials being released into the environment.
It is important to maintain a sense of proportion and perspective about this. The quantities released, while alarmingly headlined as raising radiation levels in nearby seawater to 1,250 times the normal safety limit, still amounts to less than one per cent of that which was released over the course of the worst nuclear accident in history at Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union in 1986.

Honor From Our Fathers

My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person: he believed in me.

- Jim Valvano

Honor is essential to the maintenance of a free society.
 
We learn about honor from our fathers.

When the duties of fatherhood are widely dismissed, or rendered poorly, our understanding of honor is diluted… and freedom soon begins to wither.

This is not to belittle the importance of mothers.  Many single mothers do a spectacular job of providing their children with an understanding of personal honor.  We can respect and celebrate the achievements of extraordinary individuals, without blinding ourselves to the effect of broad trends upon vast populations.  Both fathers and mothers are uniquely important.  Our society is suffering from a pronounced deficit of fatherhood.

There are many ways to define honor.  I suggest viewing it as an expression of faith, in both yourself and others.  An honorable man or woman displays honesty and integrity because they believe others deserve such treatment.  It is a sign of faith in other people that we deal honorably with them, and presume they will do the same, unless they prove otherwise.  Honor is also a gesture of respect we offer to ourselves, because we have faith that we can succeed without deceit and savagery.  If you truly respect yourself, you believe you can win without cheating.

A good father reveals the nature of honor to his sons and daughters through his conduct.  He is loyal to his wife and children, despite the easy temptations offered by the modern world.  He works to build a better future for them, rather than waiting for it to be dropped in his lap, or demanding others provide it for him.  He rejoices in this task, and his joy is so obvious that his family forgives his occasional moments of weariness or frustration.  Through marriage, he has chosen duty over indulgence.  He sees the intricate beauty of permanence, when the flickering neon light of passing fancy is more obvious. 

Honor is one of the many frequencies of love.

Self-Inflicted Poverty

by Walter Williams

Why is it that Egyptians do well in the U.S. but not Egypt? 
We could make that same observation and pose that same question about Nigerians, Cambodians, Jamaicans and others of the underdeveloped world who migrate to the U.S. Until recently, we could make the same observation about Indians in India, and the Chinese citizens of the People's Republic of China, but not Chinese citizens of Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Let's look at Egypt. According to various reports, about 40 percent of Egypt's 80 million people live on or below the $2 per-day poverty line set by the World Bank. Unemployment is estimated to be twice the official rate pegged at 10 percent.

Much of Egypt's economic problems are directly related to government interference and control that have resulted in weak institutions vital to prosperity. Hernando De Soto, president of Peru's Institute for Liberty and Democracy (www.ild.org.pe), laid out much of Egypt's problem in his Wall Street Journal article (Feb. 3, 2011), "Egypt's Economic Apartheid." More than 90 percent of Egyptians hold their property without legal title.

Handouts, Morality and Common Sense

by Walter Williams


Whether Americans realize it or not, the last decade's path of congressional spending is unsustainable. Spending must be reined in, but what spending should be cut? The Republican majority in the House of Representatives fear being booted out of office and are understandably timid. Their rule for whom to cut appears to be: Look around to see who are the politically weak handout recipients.

The problem is that those cuts won't put much of a dent in overall spending. The absolute last thing a Republican or Democrat congressmen wants to do is to cut handouts to, and thereby anger, recipients who vote in large numbers. To spare myself ugly mail, I'm not going to mention that handout group, but members of Congress know of whom I speak.

More than 200 House members and 50 senators have co-sponsored a balanced budget amendment to our Constitution. A balanced budget amendment is no protection against the growth of government and the loss of our liberties. Estimated federal tax revenue for 2011 is $2.2 trillion and federal spending is $3.8 trillion leaving us with a $1.6 trillion deficit. The budget could be balanced simply by taking more of our earnings, making us greater congressional serfs. True protection requires an amendment limiting congressional spending.

The Nazi Roots of Multiculturalism

by Lewis Loflin

In 2010 the West is still in denial as more and more "homegrown" terrorists pose more and more of a threat. The political left believes they can use Muslims to help over throw the West hoping they can then step in and take over. Socialist theology predicts a "fall" of capitalism, which to their dismay keeps failing to happen. But Muslims are not stupid and we must question who really is using whom?
The origin of multiculturalism (a secular/leftist belief system) lies with two Nazis, Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man. National Socialism is also another leftist belief system. Their philosophy became the basis of Deconstructionism, an irrational belief system that rejects facts for feelings. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930 - 2004) introduced the term, but he was influenced by Heidegger. Another definition for Deconstructionism from answers.com:

Democracy

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government.
It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury.
From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship.”

Alexander Fraser Tyler, “The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic”

The road to Serfdom

Our Brave New World of Malthusian madmen

From Burgess’s Wanting Seed to Huxley’s Brave New World, the wacky Malthusian ideas of dystopian literature are now everyday beliefs.


by Brendan O’Neill

Reading an op-ed in an American newspaper last month, which argued that gay marriage should be legalised because it will help reduce overpopulation (homosexuals don’t breed, you see), I knew I had heard a similar sentiment somewhere before.

‘Given the social hardships of our era, the benefits of homosexual marriage could be immeasurable’, the op-ed said. ‘Even America, though its population pales in comparison to that of other nations, is considered overpopulated because the amount of energy each of its citizens expends in a lifetime is enormous. Obviously homosexuals cannot, within the confines of a monogamous relationship, conceive offspring.’ So, legalising gay marriage would ‘indirectly limit population growth’.

Gays celebrated because they don’t have children… homosexual relationships culturally affirmed on the basis that their childlessness could help solve a planetary crisis… gay monogamy bigged up because it doesn’t involve conceiving offspring. Where had I heard such ideas before? Why did this promotion of homosexual relationships as a possible solution to the alleged problem of fertile, fecund heteros cramming the world with too many ankle-nippers sound familiar?

Then it struck me. It’s the storyline of Anthony Burgess’s Malthusian comedy-cum-nightmare,The Wanting Seed. In that 1962 dystopian novel, which I devoured during a Burgess phase in my teens, Burgess imagines a future England in which overpopulation is rife. There’s a Ministry of Infertility that tries desperately to keep a check on the gibbering masses squeezed into skyscraper after skyscraper, and it does so by demonising heterosexuality - it’s too fertile, too full of ‘childbearing lust’ - and actively promoting homosexuality.

We are doomed ...

Aurélie Boullet is an unlikely whistleblower. A straight-A student, she attended Paris's most prestigious universities and won a coveted place to train as a high-ranking civil servant in local government. On the first morning in her first job at the regional council of Aquitaine, she immediately felt there was something very wrong. Her first task took her an hour, but she was told it was a week's work.

"It was a sheer waste of time. There are plenty of people and not enough work. So there are a lot of people who have nothing to do," she says. "They go on Facebook, they chat, they go to endless meetings and spend a lot of their day complaining about being overworked."
Writing under a pen name Zoé Shepherd, she started a blog documenting the daily grind of not having enough to do. Her blog picked up hundreds of followers from all over France, many also languishing in dusty corners of government with not enough to do.
"These are not people celebrating being able to be lazy, but frustrated that they can't do more," she says. The blog became a book, Absolument Debordée (Absolutely snowed under), Boullet was exposed by a colleague and, amid a blizzard of publicity last June, she was suspended. Her employers issued a statement accusing her of producing a 300-page "denigration" of her colleagues. "One more drop in the populist anti-civil servant discourse that we hear too often," it said.

The Royal Society’s two-year study of population seems to have already decided that there are ‘too many people’.

by Brendan O’Neill

The Royal Society in London, the prestigious, 350-year-old scientific institution, is launching a major study into the alleged problem of overpopulation. It will spend two years and thousands of pounds employing a working group to find out what is likely to be the impact of the twentieth century’s unprecedented growth in human numbers on politics, economics and the pursuit of ‘sustainable development’.

RS, take a tip from me, a friendly critic: in this era of belt-tightening, save yourselves loads of time and oodles of cash by simply writing down and press-releasing the following words: ‘Overpopulation is NOT the cause of social or economic problems.’

I’m not being a philistine. I’m not opposed to having big, deep, profound studies into the issues that impact, or don’t impact, on society. But when it comes to evidence for the fact that overpopulation is not the driving force for social disarray, there is already an embarrassment of riches.

There’s the fact that life has improved for the vast majority of humanity even as population has grown exponentially. When the original population scaremonger Thomas Malthus (a member of the Royal Society, funnily enough) predicted in the 1790s that if people didn’t stop breeding then ‘premature death would visit mankind’ - that there would be ‘food shortages, epidemics, pestilence and plagues’ which would ‘sweep off tens of thousands [of people]’ - there were a mere 980million human beings on Earth. Today, there are nearly seven times that number – 6.7 billion – and while there are still problems of poverty and hunger, especially in parts of the Third World, for most of us living standards and life expectancy have leapt forward.

The essence of climate-change alarmism.

by Frank Furedi 

The rise of eco-Malthusianism shows the anti-human, future-fearing essence of climate-change alarmism.

Below a picture of 12 black babies, the caption warns:   ‘Babies in Dakar, Senegal.’ 

Then, with a literary sigh of relief, the subtitle to the caption points out that a ‘cost analysis commissioned by [the Optimum Population Trust] claims that family planning is the cheapest way to reduce carbon emissions’. 

In other words, the destructiveness of such babies, these carbon emitters, can be counteracted if we prevent them from being born in the first place.

The odious Optimum Population Trust (OPT) is a zombie-like Malthusian organisation devoted to the cause of human depletion. Looking at the article by John Vidal in the Guardian, which contained that photo of 12 black babies and reported on the OPT’s new initiative inviting people in the West to offset their CO2 emissions by sponsoring ‘family planning’ in the developing world, I am not sure what I found most shocking: the message conveyed through the photograph, or the absence of any anger over the OPT and its supporters’ casual devaluation of human life.

The suicide fantasy

I went to see Avatar and found it quite interesting. Although many reviewers have complained the film takes too long to reach its climax, I thought the early and middle sections were the most enjoyable parts. The visual achievement is dazzling, in both design and execution, making the exploration of both the human and alien portions of Avatar’s beautiful world very entertaining.
Right after our hero consummates his relationship with his alien love, the whole thing goes very sour. I couldn’t quite put a name to its disagreeable flavor at first – it’s preachy and predictable, to be sure, but that isn’t what makes its gorgeous rainbow soup curdle during the grand finale. I figured it out later that night, while reading a seemingly unrelated post from Mark Steyn on National Review Online, discussing angry global warming fanatics reacting to their disappointment over the pointless farce at Copenhagen.

Leap in void

by Ross McKitrick
I abhor Earth Hour.
Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity. Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. Getting children out of menial labour and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading.

Development and provision of modern health care without electricity is absolutely impossible. The expansion of our food supply, and the promotion of hygiene and nutrition, depended on being able to irrigate fields, cook and refrigerate foods, and have a steady indoor supply of hot water. Many of the world’s poor suffer brutal environmental conditions in their own homes because of the necessity of cooking over indoor fires that burn twigs and dung. This causes local deforestation and the proliferation of smoke- and parasite-related lung diseases. Anyone who wants to see local conditions improve in the third world should realize the importance of access to cheap electricity from fossil-fuel based power generating stations. After all, that’s how the west developed.

Natural Resources and the Environment

by George Reisman
There is a fundamental fact about the world that has profound implications for the supply of natural resources and for the relationship between production and economic activity on the one side and man’s environment on the other. This is the fact that the entire earth consists of solidly packed chemical elements. There is not a single cubic centimeter either on or within the earth that is not some chemical element or other, or some combination of chemical elements. Any scoop of earth, taken from anywhere, reveals itself upon analysis to be nothing but a mix of elements ranging from aluminum to zirconium. Measured from the upper reaches of its atmosphere 4,000 miles straight down to its center, the magnitude of the chemical elements constituting the earth is 260 billion cubic miles.This enormous quantity of chemical elements is the supply of natural resources provided by nature. It is joined by all of the energy forces within and surrounding the earth, from the sun and the heat supplied by billions of cubic miles of molten iron at the earth’s core to the movement of the tectonic plates that form its crust, and the hurricanes and tornadoes that dot its surface.

Earth First !

"If you haven't given voluntary human extinction much thought before, the idea of a world with no people in it may seem strange. But, if you give it a chance, I think you might agree that the extinction of Homo sapiens would mean survival for millions, if not billions, of Earth-dwelling species . . . . Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental."

- An excerpt from Wild Earth, (Summer 1991, page 72) a magazine edited by David Foreman, cofounder of Earth First!

Public Education is necessary

"I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology. . . . Various results will soon be arrived at: that the influence of home is obstructive. . . . Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen. . . . Educational propaganda, with government help, could achieve this result in a generation. There are, however, two powerful forces opposed to such a policy: one is religion; the other is nationalism. . . . A scientific world society cannot be stable unless there is a world government."

-- Fabian Socialist Bertrand Russell in his book, The Impact of Science on Society, 1953

The Green Death

By Dr Zero

Who is the worst killer in the long, ugly history of war and extermination? Hitler? Stalin? Pol Pot? Not even close. A single book called Silent Spring killed far more people than all those fiends put together.

Published in 1962, Silent Spring used manipulated data and wildly exaggerated claims (sound familiar?) to push for a worldwide ban on the pesticide known as DDT – which is, to this day, the most effective weapon against malarial mosquitoes. The Environmental Protection Agency held extensive hearings after the uproar produced by this book… and these hearings concluded that DDT should not be banned. A few months after the hearings ended, EPA administrator William Ruckleshaus over-ruled his own agency and banned DDT anyway, in what he later admitted was a “political” decision. Threats to withhold American foreign aid swiftly spread the ban across the world.

Less people = better health for Earth

Biofuel policy is causing starvation, says Nestlé boss

By Stephen Foley in New York

Soaring food inflation is the result of "immoral" policies in the US which divert crops for use in the production of biofuels instead of food, according to the chairman of one of the world's largest food companies.

Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the chairman of Nestlé, lashed out at the Obama administration for promoting the use of ethanol made from corn, at the expense of hundreds of millions of people struggling to afford everyday basics made from the crop.

Mr Brabeck-Letmathe weighed in to the increasingly acrimonious debate over food price inflation to condemn politicians around the world who seem determined to blame financial speculators instead of tackling underlying imbalances in supply and demand. And he reserved especially pointed remarks for US agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack, who he said was making "absolutely flabbergasting" claims for the country's ability to cope with rising domestic and global demand for corn.

Human Achievement Hour

by Julie Kirsten Novak
It’s that time of year again when that rag‑tag coalition of conspicuously compassioned doctor’s wives, tambourining hippies still living as if they’re in the ‘60’s, ‘hug a whale’ do‑gooders, humanity = camphylobacter misanthropes, anti‑coal wowsers, and eco‑warriors brainwashed by standardised school curricula exhort the general public to replicate North Korea by turning off the lights for Earth Hour 2011.

The practical curiosity and problem-solving inclination of previous generations to seek to transform night into day, for mass convenience, started to produce real outcomes from 1800. The English chemist Humphry Davy connected two pieces of wire to a battery with a piece of charcoal between the ends of the wires. The carbon fragment glowed, producing light.