To think for yourself and express your thoughts is a capital offense in Iran and Saudi Arabia, because Islam will not tolerate it.

This is from Poetry Foundation:

We were saddened and horrified today to learn of the death of Hashem Shaabani, who was executed on January 27th by the order of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

From Radio Free Europe:

An Islamic Revolutionary Tribunal reportedly had sentenced the poet to death, along with 14 others, last July on charges that included “waging war on God.”

Press reports said Shaabani was hanged after his sentence was approved by President Hassan Rohani.

In a statement on February 5, Freedom House said Shaabani was subjected to severe torture and interrogation during his three years in prison.

Human Rights Voices also reports on the execution, writing:

To those who knew him, Hashem Shaabani was a man of peace and understanding struggling to extend spaces of individual freedom within the despotic Khomeinist system…In one of his letters from prison, made available to use through his family, Shaabani says he could not have remained silent against ‘hideous crimes against Ahvazis* perpetrated by the Iranian authorities, particularly arbitrary and unjust executions’.  He adds, ‘I have tried to defend the legitimate right that every people in this world should have which is the right to live freely with full civil rights. With all these miseries and tragedies, I have never used a weapon to fight these atrocious crimes except the pen.’

And this is from the Friendly Atheist section of Patheos Press:

Saudi blogger and religious dissident Raif Badawi has been cruelly punished and toyed with by the Saudi legal system for about a year now, and things have taken a darker turn. According to Badawi’s wife, now living in Lebanon, the high court will try Badawi on the charge of apostasy. If convicted, Badawi could be executed.

This comes after a court opted not to charge him with apostasy in January, but did put him up on charges of “insulting Islam and showing disobedience.” How did they come to this decision? Badawi is the co-founder of a website called the Liberal Saudi Network, which is bad enough, but imagine the horror that washed over Saudi society with this kind of action:

The evidence against him included the fact that he pressed the “Like” button on a Facebook page for Arab Christians.

As a result of this heinous behavior, in July, Badawi was sentenced to 600 lashes and seven years in prison.

Which was horrifying enough. But now it looks like Badawi is being brought up on apostasy charges in earnest. Badawi’s case is one of many being watched by the Office of Public Policy at the Center for Inquiry, where I work, and our Campaign for Free Expression. …

Those who position themselves as “allies” of Saudi Arabia, such as the United States, need to discover their consciences. How can the civilized world refer to itself as such when an ally practices such barbarism, it looks the other way?

Hangings in Iran

* Ahvazis – people of the city of Ahvaz or Al-Ahwaz, capital of  Khuzestan Province, Iran. Many of them are Arabs. Sympathetic as we are to Hashem Shaabani and his principles, we hope he was not defending the four Ahvazis who had been executed for a terrorist bombing in their city in 2007. (Terrorists should be executed. But the Iranian regime has no principled approach to terrorism. It is itself a terrorist regime. And just think of the thousands who have been killed, and continue to be killed by Iran-sponsored terrorists, chief among them the criminal organization Hezbollah.) 

This video is the trailer of a forthcoming documentary, Honor Diaries:

Here is a video clip of the NBC puff for Russia, describing 70+ years of Bolshevik terror and enslavement as a “pivotal experiment”, which we wrote about yesterday.

Disgraceful, insulting, grandiose hogwash.

This is how NBC, at the start of the Olympic Games in Russia, describes the 70+ years of hell on earth that was the Soviet Union:

The towering presence, the empire that ascended to affirm a colossal footprint. The revolution that birthed one of modern history’s pivotal experiments. But if politics has long shaped our sense of who they are, it’s passion that endures. As a more reliable right to their collective heart. What they build in aspirations lifted by imagination. What they craft, through the wonder of every last detail. How magical the fusion of sound and movement can be. How much a glass of distilled perfection and an overflowing table can matter. Discover the Russian people through these indelible signatures. Discover what we share with them through the games that open here tonight.

It is seldom that words fail us, but all we could do as a first reaction was gasp at the monstrousness, the gobsmacking ignorance – or evil blatant lying – of NBC.   

“An overflowing table”?  Around 7 million people died in the famine that Stalin forced on the Ukraine. For instant information about it, go here, for instance. Volumes have been  written about it.  

Passion endures? Whose passion? For what? For the “pivotal experiment” of Communism?

The Encyclopedia Britannica records –

Western scholarly estimates of the total number of deaths in the Gulag in the period from 1918 to 1956 range from 15 to 30 million.

The Gulag was the system of imprisonment in Communist Russia in which millions of people were worked, starved, and beaten to death.

All Russians in the Soviet Union, and all the people in its empire, were slaves.

Starvation began under Communism years before Stalin decided to force famine on the Ukraine.

We quote from A People’s Tragedy by Orlando Figes:

By the spring of 1921 one-quarter of the peasantry in Soviet Russia were starving. … The famine was accompanied by typhus and cholera which killed hundreds of thousands of people already weakened by hunger. The worst affected regions were on the Volga steppe. In Samara province nearly two million people (three quarters of the population) were said to be dying of hunger by the autumn of 1921 … Throughout the Volga region hungry peasants resorted to eating grass, weeds, leaves, moss, tree bark, roof thatch and flour made from acorns, sawdust, clay and horse manure. They … hunted rodents, cats and dogs. In the villages there was a deathly silence. Skeletons of people, children with their bellies bloated, lay down quietly like dogs to die. …

Hunger turned some people into cannibals. … In the Bashkir region and on the steppelands around Ougachev and Buzuluk, where the famine was at its worst, thousands of cases were reported. It is also clear that most of the cannibalism went unreported. … Mothers, desperate to feed their children, cut off limbs from corpses and boiled the flesh … People ate their own relatives – often their young children … In some villages the peasants refused to bury their dead but stored the corpses … The stealing of corpses from cemeteries became so common that in many regions armed guards had to be posted on their gates. Hunting and killing people for their flesh was also a common phenomenon. …

And those are only glimpses of parts of the tragedy that NBC praises as a “pivotal experiment”.

Failing to draw the right conclusions from the experiment, the Left aims to repeat it over and over again.

NBC, along with the Left in general in these times, spits on man-made human suffering.

Economics Professor Tim  Groseclose explains the Laffer Curve:

But 33% tax! No. A flat rate of about 10% – and government doing much less – is our wish.

Unrealistic? Yes. Unfortunately.

“Everything brought forward in favor of Socialism during the last hundred years, in thousands of writings and speeches, all the blood which has been spilt by the supporters of Socialism, cannot make Socialism workable.” – Ludwig von Mises, 1922.

Socialism/Communism is sweetly attractive to certain minds and temperaments. It is also fatally poisonous.

The quotation from the great Austrian School economist von Mises occurs in an article by Jean Kaufman at her website Neo-Neocon. Her article makes the point that Socialism/Communism can never be destroyed as a temptation to some people. But the arguments against it must be unremittingly pursued. Better that it be understood through reason than suffered in experience.

Communism/Socialism is an idea whose time has always come, ever-fresh and ever-new. It keeps rearing its ugly head wearing a new mask, like some vampire who keeps returning in a new guise. But can’t we finally drive a stake through its wretched heart? …

The rhetoric of Socialism/Communism has intrinsic appeal to certain groups of people and some members of each group are always likely to fall under its spell: the guilt-ridden wealthy and/or their even-more-guilt-ridden spawn, the poor who feel they’ve been screwed by society, the politically and economically naive intelligentsia who feel they know better than others, the religious and/or idealistic who want everyone to be loving and good and selfless, and those who just like the idea of power and control over others and plan to be the ones in charge.

Combine all that natural appeal with the undeniable propagandist skill of the left — including their willingness to lie in the most brazen manner — and you have an even greater effect. And then combine all of that with ignorance of history and economics, our culture’s reluctance to teach the young our good points and its eagerness to harp on our bad ones, and the fact that people only tend to really learn something through bitter and personal experience.

The wonder is that more people don’t believe that Socialism/Commmunism is the answer to the world’s prayers, not that so many succumb to it in the first place. Never imagine that the fight, especially in the intellectual and educational and propaganda spheres, can be over. It would be too bad if each generation had to learn the lesson through personal suffering rather than in the realm of ideas.

Post Script: In an earlier guise, the sweet poisonous idea was called Christianity. It has often been pointed out that Communism/Marxism is a Christian heresy.

Attorney Cleta Mitchell sums up the IRS scandal:

Prince Charles, heir to the throne of a disintegrating United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, is a firm believer in man-made global warming.

The issue is not scientific as much as political.

British monarchs and their immediate heirs are not allowed to take sides in party political controversies.

The excellent Viscount Monckton of Brenchley takes Prince Charles to task for doing so.

We gladly reproduce his letter from Watts Up With That?:

His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales,

Clarence House, London.

Candlemas, 2014

Your Royal Highness’ recent remarks describing those who have scientific and economic reason to question the Establishment opinion on climatic apocalypse in uncomplimentary and unroyal terms as “headless chickens” mark the end of our constitutional monarchy and a return to the direct involvement of the Royal Family, in the Person of our future king, no less, in the cut and thrust of partisan politics.

Now that Your Royal Highness has offered Your Person as fair game in the shootout of politics, I am at last free to offer two options. I need no longer hold back, as so many have held back, as Your Royal Highness’ interventions in politics have become more frequent and less acceptable in their manner as well as in their matter.

Option 1. Your Royal Highness will renounce the Throne forthwith and for aye. Those remarks were rankly party-political and were calculated to offend those who still believe, as Your Royal Highness plainly does not, that the United Kingdom should be and remain a free country, where any subject of Her Majesty may study science and economics, may draw his conclusions from his research and may publish the results, however uncongenial the results may be.

The line has been crossed. No one who has intervened thus intemperately in politics may legitimately occupy the Throne. Your Royal Highness’ arrogant and derogatory dismissiveness towards the near-50 percent of your subjects who no longer follow the New Religion is tantamount to premature abdication. Goodnight, sweet prince. No more “Your Royal Highness”.

Hi, there, Chazza! You are a commoner now, just like most of Her Majesty’s subjects. You will find us a cheerfully undeferential lot. Most of us don’t live in palaces, and none of us goes everywhere with his own personalized set of monogrammed white leather lavatory seat covers.

The United Kingdom Independence Party, which until recently I had the honor to represent in Scotland, considers – on the best scientific and economic evidence – that the profiteers of doom are unjustifiably enriching themselves at our expense.

For instance, even the unspeakable Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has accepted advice from me and my fellow expert reviewers that reliance upon ill-constructed and defective computer models to predict climate was a mistake. Between the pre-final and final drafts of the “Fifth Assessment Report,” published late last year, the Panel ditched the models and substituted its own “expert assessment” that in the next 30 years the rate of warming will be half what the models predict.

In fact, the dithering old fossils in white lab coats with leaky Biros sticking out of the front pocket now think the rate of warming over the next 30 years could be less than in the past 30 years, notwithstanding an undiminished increase in the atmospheric concentration of plant food. Next time you talk to the plants, ask them whether they would like more CO2 in the air they breathe. Their answer will be Yes.

The learned journals of economics are near-unanimous in saying it is 10-100 times costlier to mitigate global warming today than to adapt to its supposedly adverse consequences the day after tomorrow.

Besides, in the realm that might have been yours there has been no change – none at all – in mean surface temperature for 25 full years. So if you are tempted to blame last year’s cold winter (which killed 31,000 before their time) or this year’s floods (partly caused by the Environment Agency’s mad policy of returning dozens of square miles of the Somerset Levels to the sea) on global warming, don’t.

You got your science and economics wrong. And you were rude as well. And you took sides in politics. Constitutionally, that’s a no-no. Thronewise, mate, you’ve blown it.

On the other hand, we Brits are sport-mad. So here is option 2. I am going to give you a sporting second chance, Charlie, baby.

You see, squire, you are no longer above politics. You’ve toppled off your gilded perch and now you’re in it up to your once-regal neck. So, to get you used to the idea of debating on equal terms with your fellow countrymen, I’m going to give you a once-in-a-reign opportunity to win back your Throne in a debate about the climate. The motion: “Global warming is a global crisis.” You say it is. I say it isn’t.

We’ll hold the debate at the Cambridge Union, for Cambridge is your alma mater and mine. You get to pick two supporting speakers and so do I. We can use PowerPoint graphs. The Grand Debate will be televised internationally over two commercial hours. We let the world vote by phone, before and after the debate. If the vote swings your way, you keep your Throne. Otherwise, see you down the pub.

Cheers, mate!

Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

The Europeans made nearly a $100 billion wrong bet on renewable energy, and their economies and citizens have taken a big hit. Now they’ve awakened to their mistakes.

We confess to enjoying more than a little Schadenfreude over this report.

It comes from Investor’s Business Daily:

The media aren’t paying much attention, but in recent weeks Europe has decided to run, not walk, as fast as it can away from the economic menace of green energy.

That’s right, the same Europeans who used to chastise us for not signing the Kyoto climate change treaty, not passing a carbon tax and dooming the planet to catastrophic global warming.

In Brussels last month, European leaders agreed to scrap per-nation caps on carbon emissions. The EU countries — France, Germany, Italy and Spain — had promised a 40% reduction in emissions by 2030 (and 80% by 2050!). Now those caps won’t apply to individual nations.

Brussels calls this new policy “flexibility”.  Right. More like “never mind”, and here’s why: The new German economic minister, Sigmar Gabriel, says green energy mandates have become such an albatross around the neck of industry that they could lead to a “deindustrialization” of Germany.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said earlier this year that overreliance on renewable energy could cause “a problem in terms of energy supply” — and she’s always described herself as a green politician and a champion of these programs.

A good example that of how politicians, preoccupied with riding the winds of popularity, fail to think things through.

But green dreams have collided with cold economic reality.

Of course they have. The only question was how long it would take.

Green programs aren’t creating green jobs but green unemployment at intolerable double-digit rates.

The quip in economically exhausted Europe these days is that before we save the planet, we have to save ourselves.

Now European leaders are admitting quietly that they want to get into the game of fracking and other new drilling technologies that have caused an explosion of oil and gas production in the U.S. …

If Europe wants to remain competitive, these nations must tap the fountain of abundant and cheap shale gas and oil. … European leaders now realize a major factor behind the economic woes in euroland is that electric power costs are two to three times more expensive than in the U.S.

Consider the price of natural gas in the U.S. vs. other nations in the chart below. U.S. prices are about three to four times lower.

… Few American politicians get it. President Obama talked in his State of the Union speech about doubling renewable energy output over the coming years. … these are exactly the goals the Europeans are abandoning. Why chase the losers?

Why not try a different approach to energy policy? Get rid of all taxpayer subsidies for energy — oil, gas, wind and solar power, biofuels, electric-battery-operated cars and others — and create a true level playing field where every energy source competes on efficiency and cost rather than political/corporate favoritism?

We guess that will not happen while Obama is president. He remains green in judgment.