Or, to put it another way, the Invisible Hand – not of a Deity, not of Nature, but of Free Economic Man (in the generic sense of “man”) – looks after land and sea best.* 

From the Conservative Tribune:

You have no doubt heard environmentalists say on multiple occasions that humans are utterly destroying the world’s forested areas, a terrible development that will dramatically increase the catastrophic effects of global warming and devastate the earth as we know it.

That assertion was put forward recently in a BBC report on the prospects of survival for Koala Bears in Australia, in which Deborah Tabart of the Australian Koala Foundation declared that “85 percent of the world’s forests are now gone”.

That shocking statistic likely came from a 2014 article by GreenActionNews, which asserted that 80 percent of the world’s forested areas had been destroyed, largely through human activity such as deforestation — a problem that would likely get worse unless regulations to restrict the rate of deforestation were implemented around the globe.

But a recent article in HumanProgress took great issue with the assertion that the world’s forested areas are disappearing, and offered up facts to dispute the claim.

For starters, roughly 4 billion hectares of forested areas exist around the globe, which in its entirety encompasses approximately 14.8 billion hectares of land, both above and beneath the earth’s oceans and seas.

If 4 billion hectares of forest were to remain after 80 percent of forests had been destroyed, that would mean 135 percent of the earth would have been covered by forests, and some 5.2 billion hectares of forest would have been removed from the oceans and seas.

Obviously those numbers don’t add up. The world’s plethora of deserts, frozen tundra, grasslands and swamps obviously disprove the notion that the entirety of the earth’s land surface was once covered by forests.

Furthermore, the GreenActionNews piece suggests the world’s remaining intact forest areas were “unevenly distributed”, as the five most forest-rich nations were Brazil, Canada, China, Russia and the United States. Though obviously not a precise correlation, it shouldn’t be surprising that a significant portion of the world’s forests are found in five of the world’s largest nations by landmass. Indeed, for every 7.6 million hectares of forest lost worldwide per year, some 4.3 million hectares of forest were added, meaning the globe was losing its forested areas by a rate of only 0.08 percent per year, hardly as dramatic as environmentalists would have you believe.

Making matters worse for the leftist environmentalists, the areas where afforestation or reforestation were occurring were happening in economically developed regions of the world. In fact, regions that have embraced forms of capitalist economic systems, like North America and Europe, have actually increased their forested areas in recent decades, in some places to more than pre-industrialization levels.

This phenomenon is also occurring in many still developing regions and has come to be known as the “Environmental Kuznets curve,” which posits that economic development will initially lead to environmental degradation, but as economies grow and improve that degradation will eventually reverse course.

That usually occurs around the same time a nation reaches approximately $4,500 GDP per capita, which has been dubbed the “forest transition” point, which is when forested areas begin to increase instead of shrink. The phenomenon also appears to apply to a nation’s biodiversity as well, such that animal species initially feared as nearing extinction will tend to stabilize their populations and begin to bounce back in more economically developed regions.

Thus, it would appear that — contrary to the assertions of radical environmentalists — a rapidly developing economy and urbanization are actually good overall for the environment, as rich nations can afford to spend money on environmental protection policies and more people living in cities means more land outside those cities can be returned to its original state of nature.

Bear in mind that radical environmentalism is, at its core, just an offshoot of Marxism and the marxist obsession with inequality would rather see all humankind be equally miserable in poverty than see some people rise farther and faster than others through capitalism.

While it is true that forest areas are declining in some regions of the world, they are actually being replaced and growing in others, typically those that have adopted a form of capitalism as their economic model.

Sorry environmentalists, but that is a form of inequality that we can manage to live with.

*From the Encyclopaedia Britannica:

Invisible hand, metaphor, introduced by the 18th-century Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith … characterizes the mechanisms through which beneficial social and economic outcomes may arise from the accumulated self-interested actions of individuals, none of whom intends to bring about such outcomes.

Tommy Robinson was arrested on Friday, May 25, 2018, outside Leeds Crown Court for live-streaming interviews with people who were there to protest the prostitution of underage girls by the Muslim men who were on trial that day in the court. He did nothing wrong, nothing illegal. He had even asked a police officer where he could and couldn’t stand to do his interviews.

He was arrested because Theresa May runs a police state in which any criticism of Muslims is a greater offense than the pimping of underage girls. Within an hour, Tommy was arrested, tried, and sentenced to thirteen months in prison. Some reports say the charge was “disturbance of the peace”, some say “contempt of court”. He is likely to be put among the general population of the prison, where Muslims will beat him – possibly to death.

The court also forbade the reporting of his arrest and sentence.

But the word got out. And this has so incensed the British people – or some of them – at last, that his arrest was followed by riots in Whitehall.

The leader of the Freedom Party in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, made a public protest (see the video here), and  raised the matter in the Dutch parliament, asking the Dutch foreign minister to take action on behalf of Tommy Robinson. A member of the German Bundestag offered Tommy political asylum in Germany.

Bruce Bawer writes at Gatestone:

The swiftness with which injustice was meted out to Tommy Robinson is stunning. No, more than that: it is terrifying.

Without having access to his own lawyer, Robinson was summarily tried and sentenced to 13 months behind bars. He was then transported to Hull Prison.

Meanwhile, the judge who sentenced Robinson also ordered British media not to report on his case. Newspapers that had already posted reports of his arrest quickly took them down. All this happened on the same day.

In Britain, rapists enjoy the right to a full and fair trial, the right to the legal representation of their choice, the right to have sufficient time to prepare their cases, and the right to go home on bail between sessions of their trial. No such rights were offered, however, to Tommy Robinson.

Tommy Robinson now belongs among the great national heroes of the British people.

What is also clear is that Celsus is more than just disdainful. He is worried. Pervading his writing is a clear anxiety that this religion—a religion that he considers stupid, pernicious and vulgar—might spread even further and, in so doing, damage Rome. Over 1,500 years later, the eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon would draw similar conclusions, laying part of the blame for the fall of the Roman Empire firmly at the door of the Christians. The Christians’ belief in their forthcoming heavenly realm made them dangerously indifferent to the needs of their earthly one. Christians shirked military service, the clergy actively preached pusillanimity, and vast amounts of public money were spent not on protecting armies but squandered instead on the “useless multitudes” of the Church’s monks and nuns. They showed, Gibbon felt, an “indolent, or even criminal, disregard for the public welfare.  

The Catholic Church and its “useless multitudes” were, in return, magnificently unimpressed by Gibbon’s arguments, and they promptly placed his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, its list of banned books.

Even in liberal England, the atmosphere became fiercely hostile to the historian. Gibbon later said that he had been shocked by the response to his work. “Had I believed,” he wrote, “that the majority of English readers were so fondly attached even to the name and shadow of Christianity . . . I might, perhaps, have softened the two invidious chapters, which would create many enemies, and conciliate few friends.”

Celsus did not soften his attack either. This first assault on Christianity was vicious, powerful and, like Gibbon, immensely readable. Yet unlike Gibbon, today almost no one has heard of Celsus and fewer still have read his work. Because Celsus’s fears came true. Christianity continued to spread, and not just among the lower classes. Within 150 years of Celsus’s attack, even the emperor of Rome professed himself a follower of the religion.

(From The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey)

Now in America as then in Germany?:

In the decade preceding the First World War, Germany, the country most advanced on the path toward bureaucratic regimentation, witnessed the appearance of a phenomenon hitherto unheard of: the youth movement. Turbulent gangs of untidy boys and girls roamed the country, making much noise and shirking their school lessons. In bombastic words they announced the gospel of a golden age. All preceding generations, they emphasized, were simply idiotic; their incapacity has converted the earth into a hell. But the rising generation is no longer willing to endure gerontocracy, the supremacy of impotent and imbecile senility. Henceforth the brilliant youths will rule. They will destroy everything that is old and useless, they will reject all that was dear to their parents, they will substitute new real and substantial values and ideologies for the antiquated and false ones of capitalist and bourgeois civilization, and they will build a new society of giants and supermen.

The inflated verbiage of these adolescents was only a poor disguise for their lack of any ideas and of any definite program. They had nothing to say but this: We are young and therefore chosen; we are ingenious because we are young; we are the carriers of the future; we are the deadly foes of the rotten bourgeois and Philistines. And if somebody was not afraid to ask them what their plans were, they knew only one answer: Our leaders will solve all problems.

It has always been the task of the new generation to provoke changes. But the characteristic feature of the youth movement was that they had neither new ideas nor plans. They called their action the youth movement precisely because they lacked any program which they could use to give a name to their endeavors. In fact they espoused entirely the program of their parents. They did not oppose the trend toward government omnipotence and bureaucratization. Their revolutionary radicalism was nothing but the impudence of the years between boyhood and manhood; it was a phenomenon of a protracted puberty. It was void of any ideological content. …

The bulk of them  … had one aim only: to get a job as soon as possible with the government. Those who were not killed in the wars and revolutions are today pedantic and timid bureaucrats in the innumerable offices of the German Zwangswirtschaft. They are obedient and faithful slaves of Hitler. But they will be no less obedient and faithful handy men of Hitler’s successor, whether he is a German nationalist or a puppet of Stalin. 

From Bureaucracy, by Ludwig von Mises (1945). 

(Hat-tip Robert Kantor)

Raising children to believe that Whites are to be hated and feared:

https://youtu.be/XlsbrhMqIl4 

Medieval monks, at a time when parchment was expensive and classical learning held cheap, simply took pumice stones and scrubbed the last copies of classical works from the page. …

In some cases “whole groups of classical works were deliberately selected to be deleted and overwritten in around AD 700, often with texts authored by [the fathers of the Church or by] legal texts that criticised or banned pagan literature”.

Pliny, Plautus, Cicero, Seneca, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Livy and many, many more: all were scrubbed away by the hands of believers.   The evidence from surviving manuscripts is clear: at some point, a hundred or so years after Christianity comes to power, the transcription of the classical texts collapses. From AD 550 to 750 the numbers copied plummeted.

This is not, to be clear, an absolute collapse in copying: monasteries are still producing reams and reams of religious books. Bible after Bible, copy after copy of Augustine is made. And these works are vast. This was not about an absolute shortage of parchment; it was about a lack of interest verging on outright disgust for the ideas of a now-despised canon. The texts that suffer in this period are the texts of the wicked and sinful pagans.

From the entirety of the sixth century only “scraps” of two manuscripts by the satirical Roman poet Juvenal survive and mere “remnants” of two others, one by the Elder and one by the Younger Pliny.

From the next century there survives nothing save a single fragment of the poet Lucan.

From the start of the next century: nothing at all. Far from mourning the loss, Christians delighted in it. As John Chrysostom crowed, the writings “of the Greeks have all perished and are obliterated”.  He warmed to the theme in another sermon: “Where is Plato? Nowhere! Where Paul? In the mouths of all!”  …

It has been estimated that less than ten percent of all classical [Greek] literature has survived into the modern era.   For Latin, the figure is even worse: it is estimated that only one hundredth of all Latin literature remains.   If this was “preservation” — as it is often claimed to be — then it was astonishingly incompetent. If it was censorship, it was brilliantly effective. The ebullient, argumentative classical world was, quite literally, being erased.

(from The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey)

Here is Robert Spencer on “Is Islam a Religion of Peace?”

It is not. It is a Religion of War by all means, including terrorism.

More from The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey

In such an atmosphere, it took something for a law to stand out as particularly repressive.

Yet one law did. Out of all the froth and fury that was being issued from the government at the time, one law would become infamous for the next 1,500 years.

Read this law and, in comparison to some of Justinian’s other edicts, it sounds almost underwhelming. Filed under the usual dull bureaucratic subheading, it is now known as “Law 1.11.10.2.” “Moreover,” it reads, “we forbid the teaching of any doctrine by those who labour under the insanity of paganism” so that they might not “corrupt the souls of their disciples.” The law goes on, adding a finicky detail or two about pay, but largely that is it.

Its consequences were formidable.

This was the law that forced [the philosopher] Damascius and his followers to leave Athens. It was this law that caused the Academy to close.

It was this law that led the English scholar Edward Gibbon to declare that the entirety of the barbarian invasions had been less damaging to Athenian philosophy than Christianity was.  

This law’s consequences were described more simply by later historians. It was from this moment, they said, that a Dark Age began to descend upon Europe.

Why?

The answer according to the US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, is in order (at least partly) to ensure the recipients’ supporting votes in that assembly.

But how’s that working out?

From Breitbart:

The U.S. State Department has released a report on the voting behavior of other countries at the United Nations — and has identified the top ten best and worst countries in terms of voting for or against the U.S., respectively.

The April 26 report, Voting Practices in the United Nations 2017, was prepared after the Trump administration made clear it would consider cutting aid to countries that voted against the U.S. in UN institutions. That warning came after the UN General Assembly voted 128 to 9 (with 35 abstentions) last December to oppose President Donald Trump’s decision to relocate the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to the capital city of Jerusalem.

“They take hundreds of millions of dollars and even billions of dollars, and then they vote against us. Well, we’re watching those votes. Let them vote against us. We’ll save a lot. We don’t care,” the president said.

His warning was reiterated by UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who said after the vote: “We will remember it when we are called upon to once again make the world’s largest contribution to the United Nations and we will remember it when so many countries come calling on us, as they so often do, to pay even more and to use our influence for their benefit.”

The report on UN votes is prepared annually, but has additional significance this year due to those warnings.

In 2017, the best U.S. ally at the UN was Israel, and the worst U.S. enemy at the UN was Zimbabwe.

The report also notes the best ten: “The 10 countries with the highest voting coincidence with the United States were, in descending order: Israel, Micronesia, Canada, Marshall Islands, Australia, United Kingdom, France, Palau, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic.”

It also notes the worst ten: The 10 countries with the lowest voting coincidence with the United States were, in ascending order: Zimbabwe, Burundi, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, North Korea, Turkmenistan, Cuba, Bolivia, and South Africa.”

According to the USAID website, the latter countries received the following amounts of U.S. aid, across all agencies, in fiscal year 2016 (the last year for which full records are available, rounded to the nearest million):

• Zimbabwe: $261 million
• Burundi: $75 million
• Iran: $3 million
• Syria: $916 million
• Venezuela: $9 million
• North Korea: $0
• Turkmenistan: $3 million
• Cuba: $16 million
• Bolivia: $1 million
• South Africa: $597 million

The total was close to $2 billion.

Haley said last week, upon release of the report: “This is not an acceptable return on our investment. When we arrived at the UN last year, we said we would be taking names, and this list of voting records speaks for itself. President Trump wants to ensure that our foreign assistance dollars – the most generous in the world – always serve American interests, and we look forward to helping him see that the American people are no longer taken for granted.”

Of the ten countries voting least often with the U.S., South Africa may already be feeling the consequences.

On Monday, South Africa learned that the U.S. would not be exempting it from new steel tariffs. The South African government released a statement in protest against the U.S. decision: “South Africa is concerned by the unfairness of the measures and that it is one of the countries that are singled out as a contributor to US national security concerns when its exports of aluminium and steel products are not that significant.”

The there’s the $320 million a year that goes to Mexico, where it is funding “human right abuses”.

USAID, an “independent agency” of the US government, is the spigot.

From Wiki:

USAID’s programs are authorized by Congress in the Foreign Assistance Act which Congress supplements through directions in annual funding appropriation acts and other legislation. As an official component of U.S. foreign policy, USAID operates subject to the guidance of the President, Secretary of State, and the National Security Council.

But who are the actual decision makers? Almost certainly denizens of the Swamp: Obama appointees, Hillary Clinton voters, Muslim Brotherhood fans, Iran “deal” supporters, President Trump haters (crocodile-green with envy) …

“Racism is being used to turn blacks into single-issue voters.”

Candace Owens speaks for conservatism, capitalism and the free market: