According to Wikipedia: “Since 1950, when a group of children in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, donated $17 they received on Halloween to help post-World War II victims, the Trick-or-Treat UNICEF box has become a tradition in North America during the haunting season. These small orange boxes are handed to children at schools and at various locations prior to 31 October. To date, the box has collected approximately $91 million (CAD) in Canada and over $132 million in the USA.”

What does this money do? It supports the starving, hanging and suicide of children. 

Claudia Rosett writes at PJ Media:

 UNICEF — the UN’s children’s fund — often gets a pass as an outfit which must by nature be benevolent and politically benign. It is, after all, dedicated (at least in theory) to children.

Think again. UNICEF …  is a big UN fund, bathing in government money (more than $255 million last year in U.S. tax dollars alone), and as such it is prone to the same hypocrisies … and politicized travesties that bedevil the rest of the UN.

For a summing up, it ought to be enough to note that among the 36 member states on UNICEF’s executive board is China — where the one-child policy has led to staggering numbers of sex-selective abortions, and in some cases, the killing of baby girls. Because the UN values geographic diversity, rather than moral integrity, in parceling out seats on its governing boards, UNICEF’s executive board also includes Somalia, Sudan, Belarus, Russia, and Cuba.

She refers to an article here that lists some of the regimes and enterprises that UNICEF supports with US tax payers’ money:

The list includes UNICEF’s fondness for Libya’s late Moammar Qaddafi; UNICEF’s funding of Palestinian summer camps where kids are encouraged to become suicide bombers; and anti-Semitic propaganda such as an advertisement produced by a UNICEF-funded Palestinian youth group, featuring the UNICEF logo under a picture of an axe smashing a Star of David, with the command, in Arabic, “Boycott.”

To this, I can add some further items, such as UNICEF’s announcement on its own web site that, partners being “an essential aspect of UNICEF’s work,” its main partner in North Korea is the North Korean government. That would be the same North Korean government whose totalitarian and utterly self-serving policies have resulted in the stunting and starving to death of millions of North Koreans — a great many of those victims being children.

Then there are such items as UNICEF’s solicitation of funds in 2009 via an Iranian bank, Bank Melli, which is blacklisted by the U.S. Treasury for its role in Iran’s proliferation rackets. UNICEF in that case was raising money for aid to Gaza, which is controlled by the Iranian-backed terrorists of Hamas. One might suppose there are better ways to help children than to funnel money to a terrorist-controlled enclave via a proliferation-prone Iranian bank. Apparently, UNICEF didn’t see it that way.

Over and over, UNICEF “partners” with thug regimes, rationalizing that this is necessary in order to deliver aid to deprived children. But UNICEF is prone to becoming so enthusiastic in its partnering that it ends up promoting precisely the dictators and thugs who cause so much suffering among children in the first place.

Earlier this month, UNICEF handed out a regional award for children’s broadcasting in the Middle East and North Africa. The winner? Iran.

Yes, the same Iran that leads the world in juvenile executions. Iran was celebrated by UNICEF under the press release headline: “Iran wins the Regional UNICEF Award for International Children’s Day of Broadcasting.” What a sweet propaganda gift for Tehran’s theocratic ruling thugs. …

While partnering with Kim Jong Il, praising Iran and bankrolling Palestinian groups putting out anti-Semitic propaganda and encouraging genocidal jihad against Israel, UNICEF is already raking in plenty of U.S. tax dollars from the U.S. government.

UNICEF collects donations on Halloween. The urgent message is:

Don’t give a dime to UNICEF.

PS. The UN must be destroyed.

Professor Herman Philipse, of the University of Utrecht, talks in this video about Science versus Religion.

We don’t agree with everything he says – eg. his accusation that the US is putting Holland under water –  and we think he takes rather too pedantically, professorially, seriously the manifestly absurd claims of religion, such as the veracity of revelation and the efficacy of prayer, even though he does so in order to demolish them.

Also he uses up too much of his time before reaching the main theme of his address, science warring with religion. Try starting at about the 10 minutes mark.

But his conclusion is that atheism and not agnosticism is the right response to the failure of religion’s arguments, and that’s why we like his address enough to post it.

This is from the American Thinker:

Most of us still stubbornly refuse to admit what we already know about Islam: that it’s a violent, malevolent religion whose adherents can’t stop themselves from announcing to us their intentions to make war against us until they’ve either killed us or made us slaves. …

Most of us still stubbornly profess our belief in a “true” Islam, peace-loving, egalitarian …

Most of us reflexively channel all blame for the daily bombings, beheadings, murders, mutilations, honor killings, and sundry other savagery committed in the name of Allah away from “true” Islam onto what we’re told is a distorted, hijacked Islam embraced by only a tiny fringe. …

Last Wednesday, the most important public trial against, potentially, the deadliest al-Qaeda jihadist to breach our airspace since 9/11 concluded when the defendant, a highly educated, well-spoken man who is neither crazy nor addled by pain nor drugs nor waterboarding, told us who he was and what he wanted. More important, he told us what Allah and the Qur’an and Islam wanted — namely, that “every able Muslim participate in jihad and fight in the way of Allah, those who fight you, and kill them wherever you find them.” …

Abdulmutallab ended his statement to the court this way: “If you laugh at us now, we will laugh at you.” Not “I,” but “we.” The very first thing to which he pleaded guilty was a criminal conspiracy count. “I had an agreement with at least one person to attack the United States.” I’ll say he did. He was doing only what is demanded of “every able Muslim.”

And for that he says he’s not guilty according to the Qur’an; for attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction, he is “innocent in Muslim law.” …

Even if a bona fide Islamist terrorist … goes to the trouble of announcing to America that “my Islamic religious obligation requires me to carry an explosive device onto an aircraft and attempt to kill those onboard and wreck the aircraft as an act of jihad,” we still act as if Islam had nothing to do with it.

This isn’t innocent until proven guilty. This is innocent regardless of pleading guilty.

The writer’s point is that, as much as the individual perpetrators, Islam itself is guilty of the “bombings, beheadings, murders, mutilations, honor killings, and sundry other savagery committed in the name of Allah”.

Right.

Pat Condell recommends the burka as the perfect costume to represent evil on Halloween.

Back in May [2011] it was reported that every rape assault in the city of Oslo in the last five years had been committed by a person with a “non-Western” background – a Norwegian euphemism for Muslim. Now it turns out that there have already been twice as many rape assaults in Oslo so far this year as there were in all of 2010. At least one member of Parliament, André Oktay Dahl of the Conservative Party, calls the situation “critical” and is brave enough to acknowledge that many of the perpetrators come from cultures “with a reprehensible attitude toward women.”

So writes Bruce Bawer, the conservative columnist who lives in Norway, in an article at Front Page. He goes on:

The scandalous fact is that Norway, for all its wealth, has chosen not to invest overmuch in law and order. The very idea is simply too reactionary-sounding for the ’68-ers and their heirs in the political and bureaucratic corridors of power. As I wrote elsewhere a few months ago, “Norway wastes millions of kroner ever year on ‘development aid’ that ends up largely in the pockets of corrupt African dictators; it pours millions more into the pockets of non-Western immigrants who have become masters at exploiting the welfare system; for heaven’s sake, the Norwegian government even funds anarchists. It’s not entirely misguided for a Norwegian citizen to feel that his tax money is going less to fight the crime that threatens his home, his self, and his business than to support criminals.” …

[But] beefing up the police force wouldn’t even begin to address the problem that’s at the root of the country’s growing rape crisis: the presence in Norway, and especially in Oslo, of ever-growing numbers of people who have nothing but contempt for Western culture, who have absolutely no concept of respect for members of religions other than their own, and who have been brought up on the idea that women who dare to walk the street alone and without veils covering their faces deserve to be violated.

Which is to say again, Muslims.

Not so very many years ago, Oslo was virtually a rape-free city, inhabited by people who had been brought up on civilized notions of mutual respect and tolerance. No longer. Over the years, the incidence of rape has risen steadily. A wildly disproportionate number of the perpetrators are “rejected asylum seekers” – which may sound puzzling unless you are aware of the perverse state of affairs whereby even persons officially rejected for asylum in Norway are still allowed to stay. … The rapists … know very well that they will probably not be caught, and, if caught, will not be severely punished …

The incidence of rapes in Oslo has now eclipsed that in the other two Scandinavian capitals, Stockholm and Copenhagen. This is quite an achievement, given that Oslo has traditionally been the smallest and sleepiest of these three cities – the least cosmopolitan, the one that feels more like a safe small town than a European capital. In fact, it turns out that the incidence of rape in Copenhagen has been on the decline. It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that Denmark, for the last decade, has also been the country with the most sensible immigration and integration policies in Western Europe. (Nor is it coincidental that the other Scandinavian capitals have twice as many police per inhabitant as Oslo does.)

A glimpse of the official mentality that makes this steady rise in rape statistics possible was provided in an article that appeared in the Norwegian daily Dagbladet on October 25. It appears that in the summer of last year, the same paper ran a story about Abdi, a Somali immigrant, then 24 years old, who since coming to Norway as an asylum seeker had committed 14 robberies, been incarcerated, become a narcotic [addict], and lived on welfare. On June 3, 2010, Dagbladet reported, an Oslo court had ruled that Abdi, who is not a Norwegian citizen, should be returned to Somalia. Now, however, that ruling has been overturned by an appeals court. Abdi’s lawyer was jubilant, saying that this decision “is important for many Somalis in this country.” (Of all immigrant groups in Norway, Somalis are among those with the lowest employment and highest crime rates.) The lawyer chided Norway for having shown “an ugly face in this case” by planning to return her client to Somalia, but she expressed hope that given the new decision Norway would “change its practice” – presumably meaning that no amount of unsavory activity would make it possible to kick an immigrant out.

When did they? Was the last time within living memory?

The appeals court’s basis for its decision to let Abdi stay in Norway was that it might be dangerous for him to live in Somalia. Whether letting him stay in Norway might make life dangerous for Norwegians didn’t seem to enter into the court’s calculus. It’s not only the courts, to be sure, that are at fault in this sort of situation. In such cases, the media almost invariably step in and bombard the public with shameless propaganda designed to stir up sympathy for the miscreant in question. So it was with the Dagbladet article the other day, which sought to present Abdi as repentant, reformed, and reflective – indeed, almost sagacious and saintly. He was represented as having claimed that he has turned over a new leaf and that he now wants to help wayward immigrant kids to straighten out. He also supposedly said that he wants to study to be a sociologist (which, the more one thinks about it, sounds potentially even more dangerous than if he decided to persevere in his life of crime).

We say: Go for it, Abdi! It’s a real good career move for you. Your college fees will be paid by the tax payers, and research in the field will provide you with heaps of opportunities to hone your skills as a robber and rapist.

A few of our regular readers become impatient with us when we write about religions – other than to dismiss them as nonsense, which we frequently do. We hope they’ll bear with us as we respond to comments and emails from readers who feel differently, by offering, as a follow-up to our post “A man named Jesus or something like that” (September 23, 2011), this first part of what will be a continuing outline of the history of Christianity.

* 

Some two thousand years ago, a man named Saul had an idea that shaped history.

His idea was that a pious Jewish preacher with a small but devoted following, who had recently been executed in Jerusalem by the Roman authority, was God in human form.

The name of the executed man in Greek (which was probably Saul’s mother tongue), was Jesus; presumably a translation of a Hebrew name lost to history.

Saul was intensely excited by his idea, but he did not rush to declare it in Jerusalem. He knew that to Jews – all Jews, including those who had followed the dead preacher – it would have been not merely absurd but blasphemous, and to preach it would have been punishable by law.

The followers of the dead man did believe that he would come back to life and lead them more successfully than he had the first time, all the way to liberation from Roman rule. It was not a strange belief among the Jews in those days that dead people would rise again in the flesh. Most of them believed in bodily resurrection. The dead Jesus’s followers claimed that he rose just three days after being executed for sedition, and that quite soon he would reveal himself to the whole nation as the long awaited “Messiah” (the Annointed One), a king destined to be as glorious as King David and King Solomon had been in their day.

Saul had never seen Jesus or heard him preach. He knew little or nothing of his life, and showed little or no interest in it. He knew of his posthumous following, a sect called the Nazarenes, or the Ebionites (meaning “the poor”); and of their belief that he rose from the dead and was the “Messiah” – “Christos” in Greek. He endowed the title with a new meaning: “Christ Jesus” was no mere earthly king but God incarnate, who had risen from his tomb to the heavens, there to reign over all creation forever. His divine mission on earth had been fully accomplished when he gave himself as a sacrifice; letting himself be killed, slowly and agonizingly by crucifixion, in order to redeem mankind not from political oppression but from sin.

According to the famous story about Saul, he was on his way to Damascus as a sort of policeman or special agent in the service of the High Priest of the Temple in Jerusalem, to arrest some members of this sect for some wrong-doing, when he heard the voice of Jesus asking him why he was persecuting him and adding “It is hard for you to kick against the pricks”. Saul then asked Jesus what he should do, and Jesus told him to go on to Damascus where his question would be answered. The answer, whatever it was, directed him away from Jerusalem for years, and started him on a new life as the missionary of a new religion born in his own imagination.

Some years after he conceived his idea, he changed his name to Paul. “Saint Paul” the Christians call him.

He did not try to convert the Jews to his new religion: he was Christ Jesus’s “apostle to the gentiles”. He posted about the Roman empire tirelessly trying to convince gentiles that Christ Jesus was the divine being who had created the universe. He, God, had not ceased to reign in heaven while he had simultaneously been living on earth as Jesus. How could this be, God in heaven and on earth in human form at the same time? Well, Paul explained, Christ Jesus was the divine Son of God. They were different persons but each was part of the same divine being, the one God that the Jews believed in, but in two persons, God the Father and God the Son; two persons, but only one God.

On this idea Christianity was founded.

[To be continued]

Jillian Becker   October 28, 2011

Okay we’re only kidding.

But in the light of this, don’t be surprised if it happens:

Crucifixes hung in a classroom at the Catholic University — a private university in Washington, D.C. — are apparently now considered a violation of Muslim students’ human rights.

It’s also a human right to be Pope.

Make no mistake about it – environmentalism is a new nature-worshiping religion.

It’s vatican is the United Nations. Its inquisitors are walking up and down and to and fro on the earth furtively trying to enforce a ukase titled “Agenda 21”.

We have warned about “Agenda 21” (see our post Beware “Agenda 21”, June 24, 2011).

We said that it is one of the biggest steps the UN has taken towards world socialist government, and we quoted Dr Ileana Johnson Paugh, an expert on the subject.

Because we cannot iterate too often or too strongly that Agenda 21 is a serious menace, we’re returning to the subject and quoting her again. She wrote on October 18 at Canada Free Press.:

Senator Robert Menendez [introduced] SB 1621 on September 22, [which may become] the Livable Communities Act. The bill has 17 Democrat cosponsors and, when passed, would create an Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), more bureaucracy to control our private land and housing by government fiat. …

All elements in this bill …  are further implementation of United Nation’s Agenda 21 goals …

The UN’s congregation for the doctrine of the faith has set up the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives [ICLEI], name-adjusted in 2003 to ICLEI — Local Governments for Sustainability. In its turn it has formed sub-bureaus, one of which is named Smart Growth America.

The  words “sustainability” and “smart growth” are euphemisms respectively for a “green” agenda and growth of government power.

Smart Growth America is another NGO (non-government organization) that pushes ICLEI’s goals …

As their site states, “Smart Growth is a better way to build our urban, suburban, and rural communities.”  They are concerned with our transportation, our communities, and reducing carbon emissions. They are using “steering committees” and “visioning” to change our lives in accordance with the United Nation’s vision of a one world government controlled by a few. Under the guise of saving the planet from the destructive humans, private property must be abolished; everybody must live in mixed-use zones, five-minute walk from work and school, moving about on public buses or light rail. Land must be given back to its intended wilderness. …

These progressives are marching on, trying to reshape, restructure, control, and fundamentally change the way we live, according to their dictates and twisted vision of the world. …

Smart Growth America is offering free technical assistance to communities “interested in smart growth strategies.” Americans must wake up fast to this “green” invasion in our way of life: smart green growth, green transportation, saving the green planet, sustainable development, sustainable agriculture, and sustainable green jobs. Everything now is sustainable and all jobs and activities are green.

[But] there is no green industry. We have windmills and we build solar panels expensively. Wind and solar power cannot provide enough electricity for our huge economy. Nobody has built a nuclear power plant since the seventies. There are no green jobs. …

Beware of the Green Monster coming to your community, the excuse for United Nations to take over our economy, take over private property, and set the country back a few decades to the level of third world countries in the name of “social justice.” Watch for these signs and language of UN Agenda 21 activities underway in your communities:

• Installation of Smart Meters in your area, an illegal surveillance device without a warrant in the name of reducing electricity consumption and costs by cutting your power at peak usage and causing all sorts of health ailments because of radiation from the meter itself
• Your area is a member of ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives) or ICMA (International City/County Management Association)
• Your area has a Vision, Master, or Comprehensive Plan that has been adopted in the last 5-10 years, promoting the “Triple Bottom Line,” or the three Es of Sustainable Development (Environment, Economy, and Social Equity)
• Your community supports Smart Growth, New Urbanism, and Resilient Communities with emphasis on using light rail, bike paths, walking, public transportation, discouraging the use of cars.
• Some communities narrow the roads to make them less accessible or install thousands of speed bumps; parking is at a premium and no parking garages are planned.
• Sustainable agriculture and community gardens are emphasized, encouraging a shift away from traditional free market driven food system, providing food just for the local community
• Your city established an Urban Growth Boundary [and] anything beyond it is considered “sprawl” and “blight” .. discouraged through incentives and regulations.
• Your town has joined Public-Private Partnerships, local regional councils, state, or federal government to promote Sustainable Communities Planning or Initiatives.
• Measurement of wealth through GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is discouraged while “happiness” and “well-being” become measures of wealth.
• A “New American Dream” is advertised as “living simply.”
• Green energy is most important, wind and solar, fossil fuels are evil.
• More and more restrictions and regulations are placed on land use, farm, residential, and commercial, in order to preserve the wilderness, small creatures, and natural resources at the expense of humans.
• The community is buying more and more “green space” and returning it to wilderness.
• You find a chart in your local government’s documents with three concentric circles with the words, Environment, Economy, Equity written in the middle of each circle.
• Community leaders subscribe to global warming as a manmade fact. They take action to lower the community’s carbon footprint by adopting “green” LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, “an internationally recognized green building certification system”] building and energy code standards for construction and development, including incentives, benchmarks, and retrofitting.
• Your town belongs to Earth Charter, the Sierra Club’s Cool Cities Initiative, the Audubon Society’s Sustainable Community Initiative, or your mayor has signed the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ Climate Protection Agreement.
• Officials refer to your town as a “transition town,” a “resilient city,” or a “livable community” and begin teaching “globalism,” “interdependence with nature,” and “interconnectedness”.
• Social Equity vocabulary is being used in your community such as “food justice,” “economic and environmental justice,” “fairness,” “direct democracy,” “diversity,” “food deserts,” “social justice,” and “wealth redistribution.”
• NGOs (non-governmental organizations) become involved in your city’s planning through other “stakeholders” in the “collaborative, consensus-building,” “visioning” process that takes about 18 months to complete and details your community’s future without input from the voters.
• Your school system starts teaching children how to be good “global citizens” and stewards of the environment via International Baccalaureate and other UN sponsored education agendas.
• Your local government authorities start to exceed their constitutionally granted powers by working with private international and national organizations through Public-Private Partnerships.
• You notice a significant push toward “social justice,” interfaith initiatives that promote “one world” along with community diversity, multiculturalism, sameness of faiths, social inclusion, and environmental stewardship.

There is some good news in that here and there people are becoming aware of the threat and are beginning to resist. In another article, October 26, the same author wrote:

As the battles against the green sustainability monster pushed by ICLEI and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) rage across the nation, ten communities have officially rejected membership in the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI).

Rep. Matt Shay reported the creation of an anti-UN Agenda 21 Caucus in the Washington State Legislature … [and]  following the latest rejections of ICLEI by James City County, VA and Lexington, VA, several more communities across the nation are making similar decisions.

The Wisconsin Legislature has introduced two bills (Assembly Bill 303 and Senate Bill 225) to “allow local governments to repeal comprehensive development plans that were forced under smart growth legislation.” …

But the hooded monks of the UN, and their local collaborators – many disguised as “educators and entertainers” – pursue their mission relentlessly:

Meanwhile, the Office of Sustainability Institute at George Mason University invited the “sustainability community” of Fairfax, Virginia, to the Sustainable Living Roadshow on October 19, 2011. If you have no clue about the nature of this road show, it is safe to guess, it is environmental propaganda. I am still trying to understand the need for a sustainability institute at GMU, but then every government entity now has such an office or at least a sustainability plan.

When I saw the invitation, I began to understand the depth and length of brainwashing that the environmental minority is assaulting this country with in order to pass and promote their anti-American agenda.

“The Sustainable Living Roadshow is a caravan of educators and entertainers who tour the country in a fleet of renewable fuel vehicles setting up off-the-grid eco-carnivals with interactive learning villages at K-12 schools, universities, festivals and community events. These villages are designed to empower communities to utilize sustainable living strategies for a healthier planet.”

The sponsors of the Sustainable Living Roadshow are an interesting mixture of corporations, stores, and environmental groups: Birkenstock, Nature’s Gate, Petzl, Hemp Oil Canada, Organic India, The Living Seed Company, Hemp Industries Association, Elemental Herbs, Natracare, and Synchro.

The Sustainable Living Roadshow website displayed pictures of energetic young people holding signs that read, “Toss out fossil fuels,” “We’re Ready, Green Jobs Now,” emphasizing a global culture, another element of UN Agenda 21, a powerful assault on impressionable minds to erase any trace of our culture, our nationality, our borders, our sovereignty.

It does not matter that there is no viable, full replacement for fossil fuels yet to run the largest economy on the planet. Let us toss them out because teachers and environmentalists say so. There is no green industry and there are no green jobs. Students, impressionable children, and ignorant adults have overlooked these tiny details. The media never reports the truth. People do not know that there are are no green jobs and no green industry, just windmills and solar panels.

GMU asked attendees to arrive preferably by bike or public transportation, keeping in line with their walkability and mass-transit goals, which happen to coincide with UN Agenda 21. …

I wondered if parents knew what kind of brain washing their expensive tuition bought for their children and what kind of generation was going to lead our country into the future.

A future of –

Crowding humans off their lands and off their suburban homes into high-density, high-rise mixed-use tenements.

And as the environmentalists complain that there are too many people in the world, reduction of populations would come next by means of abortion, infanticide, refusal of medical treatment to the old, and – we guess – punitive executions for (eg) endangering a species of owl or smelt.

Not to mention suicide, which would be fully understandable in such circumstances.

“Agenda 21”, Dr Paugh points out, is not a treaty, and no member state is as yet bound to implement it. But although its recommendations, “covering every facet of human life”, are not legally binding, they are being implemented administratively in the US “without Congress ever approving or debating them”. If Senator Menendez’s Livable Communities bill is passed, they will become the law of the land.

Plainly, the religion of environmentalism would put total political power in the hands of a self-elected priestly caste.

Primitive earth-worshipers believed that human blood had to be spilt to ensure fertility. We don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the priests and inquisitors of the new earth-worshiping religion plan to carry out mass human sacrifice, and the enslavement of those they’ll permit to live.

We see the “Occupy Wall Street” protest as a manifestation of economic ignorance and the politics of envy.

We find confirmation of our view at PowerLine, where Steven Hayward quotes from the great free-market economist Friedrich Hayek:

As we continue to fixate on the inchoate [“incoherent” would be more apt  – JB] but plainly radical demands/desires of the lefty-losers Wall Street Occupiers, this passage from Hayek’s famous chapter in The Constitution of Liberty on “Equality Value, and Merit” hits the spot dead on:

“When we inquire into the justification for these demands [to equalize all outcomes], we find that they rest on the discontent that the success of some people often produces in those that are less successful, or, to put it bluntly, on envy. The modern tendency to gratify this passion and to disguise it in the respectable garment of social justice is developing into a serious threat to freedom. Recently an attempt was made to base these demands on the argument that it ought to be the aim of politics to remove all sources of discontent. This would, of course, necessarily mean that it is the responsibility of government to see that nobody is healthier or possesses a happier temperament, a better-suited spouse or more prospering children, than anybody else. If really all unfulfilled desires have a claim on the community, individual responsibility is at an end. However human, envy is certainly not one of the sources of discontent that a free society can eliminate. It is probably one of the essential conditions for the preservation of such a society that we do not countenance envy, not sanction its demands by camouflaging it as social justice, but treat it, in the words of John Stuart Mill, as “that most anti-social and odious of all passions.”

It’s almost as if Hayek wrote this with Occupy Wall Street in mind.

This undated handout photo provided by the National Nuclear Security Administration shows the United States’ last B53 nuclear bomb. The 10,000-pound bomb is scheduled to be dismantled Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2011 at the Pantex Plant just outside Amarillo, Texas. It’s a milestone in President Barack Obama’s efforts to reduce the number of nuclear weapons and their role in the U.S. (AP Photo/National Nuclear Security Administration)

Yesterday the deed was done – more about it here.

The last of the nation’s most powerful nuclear bombs – a weapon hundreds of times stronger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima – is being disassembled nearly half a century after it was put into service at the height of the Cold War.

The final components of the B53 bomb will be broken down Tuesday at the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, the nation’s only nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility. The completion of the dismantling program is a year ahead of schedule, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, and aligns with President Barack Obama’s goal of reducing the number of nuclear weapons.

In pursuit of compassionate aggression?

Lying in disassembled pieces, the B53 bomb is an apt symbol of surrender – by the American left to America-haters everywhere.