This one coming from 'Workers Liberty' is even better

By James Bloodworth

On the back of last week’s Cuban Communist Party congress, the first since the mid-1990s, the government of Raul Castro is going ahead with plans to lay-off around 500,000 state employees and open-up the economy further to private enterprise. The Cuban government also plans to cut the social safety net, eventually eliminating the ration card and food subsidies all together.
Despite raising hopes that a new generation of leaders would step up to top posts, the 79-year-old president said 80-year-old Vice President Jose Ramon Machado Ventura would be his No. 2 in the party. Half of the new Politburo personnel are drawn straight from the military, where much of Raul’s support base lies.
From some quarters Raul Castro is said to be an admirer of the Chinese model; to others these reforms are simply a ruse, done out of sheer economic necessity rather than due to any meaningful ideological shift.
Cuban labour rights are non-existent as things stand. There are no independent trade unions; and there was little talk at the congress about the rights of workers to organise independently of the state – less about an increased role for workers in the running of their enterprises. Nor are there any plans to open up the media, its printed organs being most accurately described by the late Argentinean editor and dissident Jacobo Timerman as "a degradation of the act of reading".

Raul Castro’s same old Cuba

Coming from the editorial of the socialist  Washington Post it is really something 

IT HAS NOW been five years since Raul Castro assumed control of the Cuban regime from his ailing older brother, Fidel. In that time, the younger Mr. Castro — an accurate, if strange, description for a man who will turn 80 in June — has repeatedly reflected on the economic failings of the Cuban Revolution and promised to correct them. Over the past year, in fact, Raul Castro has sounded almost apocalyptic. “Either we change course, or we sink,” he declared in December. “We have the basic duty to correct the mistakes we have made over the course of five decades of building socialism in Cuba.” Such rhetoric raised expectations that Raul would at last bring the free enterprise and political opening that Cuba so desperately needs.

But Cuba’s Communist Party congress last week, the first such meeting since 1997 and the first ever under Raul’s direction, confirmed that talk of reform in Cuba is mostly just that. Instead of liberating the economy, Raul sketched a program of limited privatization that could take “at least” five years to phase in. The most dramatic measure would authorize Cubans to buy and sell houses and cars for the first time since 1959, but Raul provided few details, except to assure Cubans that no one would be allowed to accumulate too much property.

As we go marching

Labor Board Case Against Boeing Points to Fights to Come

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

For businesses, it was the type of action they have feared from a National Labor Relations Board dominated by Democrats. For labor unions, it was the type of action they have hoped for. And for both, it may be a sign of things to come.

These fears and hopes were stirred this week when the labor board’s top lawyer filed a case against Boeing, seeking to force it to move airplane production from a nonunion plant in South Carolina to a unionized one in Washington State. Boeing executives had publicly said they were making the move to avoid the kind of strikes the airplane maker had repeatedly faced in Washington; Lafe Solomon, the labor board’s acting general counsel, said the company’s motive constituted illegal retaliation against workers for exercising their right to strike.

The agency’s unusually bold action angered business groups and some politicians, who said it was an unwarranted attempt by the government to interfere with a fundamental corporate decision.

The Welfare Empire

A fundamental misconception about America’s welfare state misleads millions of voters to reflexively support ever bigger and more generous government. William Voegeli fingers the attitude in his book, Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State: “no matter how large the welfare state, liberal politicians and writers have accused it of being shamefully small” and “contemptibly austere.”

Barbara Ehrenreich expresses the attitude in her book, Nickled and Dimed: “guilt doesn’t go anywhere near far enough; the appropriate emotion is shame” regarding the stingy miserliness of America’s welfare state. In light of the current budget debate, with House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan putting fundamental entitlement reform on the table, this misconception especially needs to be corrected.

Grocery School

by DON BOUDREAUX

Suppose that we were supplied with groceries in same way that we are supplied with K-12 education.

Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties.  A huge chunk of these tax receipts would then be spent by government officials on building and operating supermarkets.  County residents, depending upon their specific residential addresses, would be assigned to a particular supermarket.  Each family could then get its weekly allotment of groceries for “free.”  (Department of Supermarket officials would no doubt be charged with the responsibility for determining the proper amounts and kinds of groceries that families of different kinds and sizes are entitled to receive.)

Except in rare circumstances, no family would be allowed to patronize a “public” supermarket outside of its district.

Residents of wealthier counties – such as Fairfax County, VA and Somerset County, NJ – would obviously have better-stocked and more attractive supermarkets than would residents of poorer counties.  And, thanks to a long-ago U.S. Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer; such private-supermarket families, though, would get no discount on their property-tax bills.

When the quality of supermarkets is recognized by nearly everyone to be dismal, calls for “supermarket choice” would be rejected by a coalition of greedy government-supermarket workers and ideologically benighted collectivists as attempts to cheat supermarket customers from out of good supermarket service – indeed, as attempts to deny ordinary families the food that they need for their very survival.  Such ‘choice,’ it would be alleged, will drain precious resources from the public supermarkets whose (admittedly) poor performance testifies to the fact that these supermarkets are underfunded.

And the small handful of people who call for total separation between supermarket and state would be criticized by nearly everyone as being, at best, delusional and – it would be thought more realistically – more likely misanthropic devils who are indifferent to the malnutrion and starvation that would sweep the land if only private market forces governed the provision and patronizing of supermarket.  (Some indignant observers would even wonder aloud at the insensitivity of referring to grocery shoppers as “customers”; surely the relationship between suppliers of life-giving foods and the people who need these foods is not so crass as to be properly discussed as being ‘commercial.’)

Does anyone believe that such a system for supplying groceries would work well, or even one-tenth as well as the current private, competitive system that we currently rely upon for supplying grocery-retailing services?  To those of you who might think so, pardon me but you’re nuts.

Choc and Awe

You are doomed

A cross-border kerfuffle over a popular chocolate treat nearly cost a Winnipeg woman a $300 fine and saddled her with a bureaucratic headache.

Lind Bird was recently stopped at the U.S. border and selected for a random search of her vehicle. She was warned she could have faced a fine after the customs official found — and seized — her $2 Kinder Surprise egg as illegal contraband.

Bird learned U.S. authorities have banned the candy because they come with a plastic toy inside that could, if eaten, choke a small child.

"It's just a chocolate egg," Bird said. "And they were making a big deal. They said 'if you were caught with this across the border you would get charged a $300 fine,'" she said.

"It's ridiculous. It's so ridiculous," she added.

In Canada, however, officials said the eggs are so difficult to get into there's little chance they could harm anyone. As such, they are legal.

The U.S. takes catching illegal Kinder candy seriously, judging by the number of them they've confiscated in the last year. Officials said they've seized more than 25,000 of the treats in 2,000 separate seizures.

"They have been determined to present … a choking hazard to young children," said Mike Milne, a spokesman for the U.S. department of customs and border protection. Milne said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration supports the Kinder Surprise ban.

As trivial as the border seizure may seem, Bird said the U.S. government has sent her a seven-page letter asking her to formally authorize the destruction of her seized Kinder egg.

"I thought it was a joke. I had to read it twice. But they are serious," she said.

The letter states if Bird wishes to contest the seizure, she'll have to pay $250 for it to be stored as the two sides wrangle over it.

'Shut Up'

''From my cold dead hands!"

"Every time our country stands in the path of danger, an instinct seems to summon her finest first — those who truly understand her.

"When freedom shivers in the cold shadow of true peril, it's always the patriots who first hear the call.

"When loss of liberty is looming, as it is now, the siren sounds first in the hearts of freedom's vanguard. The smoke in the air of our Concord bridges and Pearl Harbors is always smelled first by the farmers, who come from their simple homes to find the fire, and fight, because they know that sacred stuff resides in that wooden stock and blued steel -- something that gives the most common man the most uncommon of freedoms.

"When ordinary hands can possess such an extraordinary instrument, that symbolizes the full measure of human dignity and liberty. That's why those five words issue an irresistible call to us all, and we muster. So -- so, as, ah, we set out this year to defeat the divisive forces that would take freedom away, I want to say those fighting words for everyone within the sound of my voice to hear and to heed -- and especially for you, Mister Gore: 

''From my cold dead hands!"

Charlton Heston (born John Charles Carter; October 4, 1923 -- April 5, 2008) was an American actor of film, theater and television. Heston is known for having played heroic roles, such as Moses in The Ten Commandments, Colonel George Taylor in Planet of the Apes and Judah Ben-Hur in Ben-Hur, for which he

won the Academy Award for Best Actor. He was one of a handful 

of Hollywood actors to speak openly against racism and was an active supporter of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Initially a liberal Democrat, he later supported conservative politics and was president of the National Rifle Association from 1998 to 2003.

Heston campaigned for Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson in 1956 and John F. Kennedy in 1960. Reportedly when an Oklahoma movie theater premiering his movie El Cid was segregated, he joined a picket line outside in 1961. Heston makes no reference to this in his autobiography, but describes traveling to Oklahoma City to picket segregated restaurants, much to the chagrin of Allied Artists, the producers of El Cid. During the civil rights march held in Washington, D.C. in 1963, he accompanied Martin Luther King Jr. In later speeches, Heston said he helped the civil rights cause, "long before Hollywood found it fashionable." 

A bunch of Murderers

Several ultra-leftist groups organized a visit to the Arab village of Awarta on Saturday, April 16, in support of the villagers and against the IDF's activities there in the search for the murderers of Ruth and Rabbi Ehud Fogel and their children Yoav (11), Elad (4) and Hadas (three months).

The Victims

The leftists visited several homes in the Samaria village, including that of the Awad family, which spawned the murderers. The identities of the confessed murderers were released for publication on Sunday, the day after the visit. The murderers were already in IDF custody at the time of the leftists' visit and their arrest - including the fact that they are relatively young - was already widely rumored and hinted at by the press.

A photograph from the visit, posted by one of the activists on her Internet blog, shows Raya Yaron, spokeswoman of Machsom Watch, comforting a woman described as being 37 years old and "in a deep depression." The blogger explained in her post that the woman fainted during the leftist women's visit and was distraught over the arrest of her husband, her two sons and a daughter.

The Murderers

The woman is easily recognizable as Nuf Awad, mother of Hakem Awad, whose photograph was featured on the front page of Arab newspaper al-Hayat al-Jadida Monday.

"It is impossible that my son did this," she is quoted by the paper as saying. "My son doesn't know how to slaughter a chicken" (the translation is from the Seventh Eye media-watch website). The two murderers confessed, however, to slaughtering five human beings and investigators reported that they expressed no remorse, and even said that had they realized there were two more children sleeping in the house, they would have killed them as well. They saw no problem in slitting baby Hadas's throat, they explained, since she was a Jew.

Another leftist visitor, Yaakov Manor of the Alternative Information Center, described the visit thus on the AIC's Hebrew website: 

"The horror that we witnessed at the home of the family of Muhammad Awad cannot be described as anything but a pogrom - a primitive and brutal act of revenge intended to strike fear and awe into the hearts of the residents..."

"The father, Muhammad, 45, the son Majdi, 20, a third year university student, the son Amjad, 19, a freshman university student, and the son Hakem, 17, were arrested."  

At about the same time that Manor wrote the post, a court lifted a gag order and allowed the press to publish the names and photos of the murder suspects. One of them was 17 year old Hakem Awad. The other was his cousin, Amjad Awad, who is apparently not the same Amjad mentioned above as brother of Hakem.

Machsom Watch is a women's group that interferes with soldiers looking for weapons and explosives at checkposts and is a member of the Women's Coalition for Peace. Both are radical groups that espouse a pacifist, anti-religious and anti-Western brand of gender feminism, and both received considerable funding from the New Israel Fund as recently as 2007, according to NGO Monitor. 

Despite allegations of siding with Israel's enemies, the New Israel Fund is still perceived as a legitimate body by many liberals in Israel and outside it.

Mother of physical murderers

As reported on Arutz Sheva, Israel Online Ambassadors said Sunday that these leftist groups had crossed a red  line. “The time has come to make leftist groups that support murderers illegal. Whoever supports baby killers has no place in a democratic society,” the group said in a statement.

Nothing is more profitable than a good crisis

We all worried needlessly about acid rain, expanding deserts and global cooling, but these failed predictions weren't quite dire enough to make our list. To find out which prophecies of doom did make our list, you'll need to watch Reason.tv's "Top Five Environmental Disasters that Didn't Happen."book Silent Spring. And ever since, chicken littles have warned us about imminent environmental disasters that ultimately didn't happen.

We all worried needlessly about acid rain, expanding deserts and global cooling, but these failed predictions weren't quite dire enough to make our list. To find out which prophecies of doom did make our list, you'll need to watch Reason.tv's "Top Five Environmental Disasters that Didn't Happen."

Because They're Not Spending Their Own Money, Patients Aren't Consumers, But They SHOULD Be

Paul Krugman argues in yesterday's NY Times that Patients Are Not Consumers:
"How did it become normal, or for that matter even acceptable, to refer to medical patients as “consumers”? The relationship between patient and doctor used to be considered something special, almost sacred. Now politicians and supposed reformers talk about the act of receiving care as if it were no different from a commercial transaction, like buying a car — and their only complaint is that it isn’t commercial enough. What has gone wrong with us?

Medical care, after all, is an area in which crucial decisions — life and death decisions — must be made. Yet making such decisions intelligently requires a vast amount of specialized knowledge. Furthermore, those decisions often must be made under conditions in which the patient is incapacitated, under severe stress, or needs action immediately, with no time for discussion, let alone comparison shopping. 

That’s why we have medical ethics. That’s why doctors have traditionally both been viewed as something special and been expected to behave according to higher standards than the average professional. There’s a reason we have TV series about heroic doctors, while we don’t have TV series about heroic middle managers.

The idea that all this can be reduced to money — that doctors are just “providers” selling services to health care “consumers” — is, well, sickening. And the prevalence of this kind of language is a sign that something has gone very wrong not just with this discussion, but with our society’s values." 

MP: Krugman is correct that patients are not consumers, but for a completely different reason that Krugman misses entirely: Almost 90% of health care costs are paid with "other people's money" (insurance companies, government and employers, see chart above, data here), and only about 11% is paid "out of pocket" by patients.  So patients are no longer the "consumers" of health care, and they haven't been for a long time, because the "consumer" paying almost the entire cost of medical care is a third party.  Over time, the "consumer" paying the bill for health care services has gradually become third party payers, and the trends projected in the chart above indicate that it won't get any better in the future.

But Krugman seems to be arguing that regardless of who is paying for health care, "there’s something terribly wrong with the whole notion of patients as “consumers” and health care as simply a financial transaction." Krugman's further claims that “'Consumer-based' medicine has been a bust everywhere it has been tried."

Well, what about LASIK surgery, retail health clinics, concierge medicine, medical tourism and cosmetic surgery, to name just some of the successful "consumer-based" medical services?  

When we think about soaring health care costs in the United States, isn't one of the main reasons precisely because patients have NOT been treated as consumers spending their own money?  In that case, I think Krugman has it backwards.  If the goal is to control health care costs, that will never happen until patients are treated like consumers. 

What About a Capitalism Day?

"Of the estimated 1 billion people who will observe Earth Day worldwide this year, few will know about the progress that has been made. Fewer still will know how it was made. The media, uninterested in looking at the real story, will simply credit the environmental movement for the improvements.

Buried beneath all the badgering and fear-mongering about lavish Western lifestyles is a reality that the stuck-on-green left won't talk about and the average American isn't aware of: The world, especially in developed nations, is a cleaner — and greener — place than it was when the environmental movement began (the chart above shows the positive trends in air quality since 1980, data).

Topping the agenda of today's environmentalist groups is the pulling down of market economies, the raising up of central planning for egalitarian goals, forced lifestyle changes and the vilification — in hopes of the elimination — of signs of wealth.

None of these advance the planet's environmental health. But capitalism has. Through wealth generated by the free market, we have enough resources to move beyond the subsistence economies that damage the environment, enough disposable income to fund clean-up programs, enough wealth to scrub and polish industry.

Only in advanced economies can the technology needed to recycle hazardous waste or to replace dirty coal-fired power plants with cleaner gas or nuclear plants be developed. That technology cannot be produced in centrally planned economies where the profit motive is squelched and lives are marshalled by the state.

There's nothing wrong with setting aside a day to honor the Earth. In fairness, though, it should be complemented by Capitalism Day. It's important that the world be reminded of what has driven the environmental improvements since Earth Day began in 1970."

Beyond the Welfare State

YUVAL LEVIN

It is becoming increasingly clear that we in America are living through a period of transition. One chapter of our national life is closing, and another is about to begin. We can sense this in the tense volatility of our electoral politics, as dramatic "change elections" follow closely upon one another. We can feel it in the unseemly mood of decline that has infected our public life — leaving our usually cheerful nation fretful about global competition and unsure if the next generation will be able to live as well as the present one. Perhaps above all, we can discern it in an overwhelming sense of exhaustion emanating from many of our public institutions — our creaking mid-century transportation infrastructure, our overburdened regulatory agencies struggling to keep pace with a dynamic economy, our massive entitlement system edging toward insolvency.

But these are mostly symptoms of our mounting unease. The most significant cause runs deeper. We have the feeling that profound and unsettling change is afoot because the vision that has dominated our political imagination for a century — the vision of the social-democratic welfare state — is drained and growing bankrupt, and it is not yet clear just what will take its place.

That vision was an answer to a question America must still confront: How shall we balance the competing aspirations of our society — aspirations to both wealth and virtue, dynamism and compassion? How can we fulfill our simultaneous desires to race ahead yet leave no one behind? The answer offered by the social-democratic ideal was a technocratic welfare state that would balance these aspirations through all-encompassing programs of social insurance. We would retain a private economy, but it would be carefully managed in order to curb its ill effects, and a large portion of its output would be used by the government to address large social problems, lessen inequality, and thus also build greater social solidarity.

Can you believe this guy

The Human Right Not To Be “Offended”

. . . now trumps all throughout the Western world.

by Mark Steyn

In Australia, the columnist Andrew Bolt is on trial for the crime of “offending” prominent members of the taxpayer-remunerated “professional Aborigine” elite. One of the complainants simultaneously “offended” a fellow Aborigine by comparing her recent appearance on TV unfavorably to an act of equine bestiality, but that’s not actionable because no formally designated white people were involved — which was kind of Bolt’s point in the first place: Collective rights based on race, sex, orientation, and ideology (ie, religion) destroy the concept of equality before the law.

In Denmark, despite an earlier acquittal, Lars Hedegaard of the Danish Free Press Society is to be re-tried by the State for the crime of “offending” Muslims by discussing Islam’s treatment of women in a private conversation.

And in Canada the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal has just fined a stand-up comic, Guy Earle, $15,000 for the crime of“offending” lesbians at a comedy club. They were drunk and were heckling him, and he unburdened himself of some putdowns. But they were homophobic putdowns, and so he must be punished. Earle was working for a fifty-buck bar tab and doesn’t have 15 grand, and no comedy club in Vancouver will hire him ever again. He donated money to a gay charity in atonement, but his fellow liberals abandoned him anyway.

In all the above “human rights” cases, the traditional protections of Common Law do not apply — whether the notion that truth is a defense or the principle of equality before the law. For the crime of giving offense is in the eye of the offended. A “multicultural” society needs not sensitivity training but insensitivity training — that’s to say, thicker skins. The alternative is what is happening in some of the oldest free societies on earth: a state ever more comfortable in regulating the citizenry’s speech, thoughts, and jokes. There’s a word for that, and it isn’t “diversity”

... increasingly dependent on the Muslim vote ...

By Mark Steyn
Lars Hedegaard looks at Europe and Islam from the left’s point of view, starting with a forgotten line by Marx:

There are still a few grizzled post-socialists around that will remember what their old prophet, Karl Marx, had to say about religion in the very first sentence of his Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right from 1843:  “Criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism”.
Criticism of religion is not only the starting point of all criticism. It is the prerequisite of any kind of criticism. In a society where religion cannot be criticized, everything becomes religion – from the length of your beard to what hand to use when wiping your backside.

The above would have been unexceptional observations to any Continental lefties a generation ago. Why then are the Euroleft prostrate before Islam? Simple arithmetic:

They are now increasingly dependent on the Muslim vote, which they hope will guarantee them a perpetual foothold at least in the major population centers.

With Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, and many other Continental cities from Malmo to Marseilles approaching majority Muslim status in the next decade, the demographic reality of a re-religionized Europe is too hard to buck. For the soft-left establishment, to be unsolicitous of Islam is to condemn yourself to a few fast shrinking redoubts. (It’s strange, for example, to hear American Jews still professing bewilderment at the ever more naked hostility in Europe toward Israel. Look at the electoral math: For your average squishy Europol, there is nothing to gain and an awful lot to lose by being perceived as insufficiently hostile to “Zionism”.)

So democratic parties maintain their electoral viability by pandering to the anti-democratic impulses of their fastest-growing bloc. As Mr. Hedegaard sees it:

This new weltanschauung takes us back to a legal order – or rather lack of order – the like of which we haven’t seen in the civilized world since – when? The democratic revolutions of the 19th century, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, England’s Glorious Revolution, John Milton’s Areopagitica, Magna Carta?
Take your pick. Any one of the above is true.
The road chosen by the parties on the Left permits no return.

On a smallish point: He notes the routine application of the “extreme right-wing” label to Geert Wilders. These terms have always been somewhat portable, but it’s already clear that in the new Europe the “right-wing” badge will be pinned most enthusiastically on those opposed to Islamization.

Earth Day predictions of 1970. The reason you shouldn’t believe Earth Day predictions of 2011.

For the next 24 hours, the media will assault us with tales of imminent disaster that always accompany the annual Earth Day Doom & Gloom Extravaganza.

Ignore them. They’ll be wrong. We’re confident in saying that because they’ve always been wrong. And always will be.

Need proof? Here are some of the hilarious, spectacularly wrong predictions made on the occasion of Earth Day 1970.

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.” 
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” 
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” 
• Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
• New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.” 
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
• Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….” 
• Life Magazine, January 1970

“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” 
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.” 
• Martin Litton, Sierra Club director

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Keep these predictions in mind when you hear the same predictions made today. They’ve been making the same predictions for 39 years. And they’re going to continue making them until…well…forever.

Here we are, 39 years later and the economy sucks, but the ecology’s fine. In fact thisplanet is doing a lot better than the planet on which those green lunatics live.