The god who ate the sun

Galileo was almost silenced by the Catholic Church

Albert Einstein saw that mass is energy

How the universe created itself

(Thanks to our commenter Don L for the link)

David Solway asks in a PajamsMedia article, “Who and what is the vampire?”

Here’s part of his answer:

It presents itself as a composite figure — a political party, an ostensibly liberal bringer of gifts and cachet, a potent ideology that strives to transform the world, a utopian philosophy that promises bliss upon conversion to its purposes but leads only to a society of the locavore undead. Its acolytes and minions swarm through the world infecting the gullible with the serum of its malignity… It proceeds systematically to undermine the strength of those among whom it freely moves, surviving by transfusions of the energy and substance of others who remain unaware that they are the quarry and not the beneficiaries. It redistributes the lifeblood of nations throughout its own body and the collective body of its adherents. It offers ease, comfort, and security, but at the insidious expense of vitality and freedom — and ultimately of the very ease, comfort, and security it has guaranteed. Its manner can be suave and polished though often enough a rough impatience pokes through its carefully constructed veneer. It responds to challenges with aristocratic haughtiness and gutter ruthlessness. It is clever and unscrupulous. It is a purveyor of lies and deceptions. It loves the accoutrements of power and the grand architecture of its residence. It embraces what appear to be noble causes the better to hide its appetite for dominion. …

Doesn’t it remind you of  … you know … Whatshisname?

Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey is furious that the Palmer report found Israel was acting legally when it intercepted the protest flotilla launched from Turkey to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza in May 2010. (See our post A surprise, Sept. 1, 2011). The report – although issued by the United Nations – actually found fault with the protestors and with Turkey itself.

The Islamic world is not used to being found fault with by the UN, especially in relation to Israel. And Erdogan won’t stand for it.

He plots revenge – not against the UN but against Israel.

“I will do such things – what they are, yet I  know not: but they shall be the terrors of the earth!”

Well, that wasn’t exacty what he said – that was King Lear. Erdogan has some definite plans in mind, not very awe inspiring, but he sure would like them to be the terrors of the earth.

These are the things he has threatened to do:

Strengthen the presence of the Turkish navy in the eastern Mediterranean, and “pursue a more aggressive strategy”.

Again send ships to “carry aid” to Gaza. Turkish naval vessels will accompany civilian ships carrying aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.Whether to try reaching the shore of Gaza itself, in order to incite action by the Israeli navy, is not clear.

Personally visit Gaza. Whether he’ll sail directly to Gaza, to incite interception, is again not clear. An official said –

“Our primary purpose is to draw the world’s attention to what is going on in Gaza and to push the international community to end the unfair embargo imposed by Israel.”

If the blockade is not illegal it is at least “unfair”, Turkey maintains. To be fair, the Israelis should allow Hamas to import weapons freely into Gaza to use against them.

Will Erdogan really do what he threatens and risk a clash at sea with Israel? Or is all his vengeful talk mere bluster?

According to this report, Israel’s navy is far superior to Turkey’s:

The Turkish Navy is no match for Israeli missile boat technology and their electronic jamming and tracking systems. Neither do the Turks have advanced submarines like Israel’s German-made Dolphins or close air cover.

Stamping about the stage raging against Israel may be all he can do.

Time will tell.

The greatness of the West began with doubting. The idea that every belief, every assumption, should be critically examined started the might of Europe. When those old Greek thinkers who founded our civilization learnt and taught that no one has a monopoly of truth or ever will have, they launched the intellectual adventure that has carried the human race – not without a long interval in the doldrums – literally to the skies.

Socrates taught the utility of suspicion. He is reputed to have said, “The highest form of human excellence is to question oneself and others.” He was not, however, the first to use doubt for discovery. Thales of Miletos, who was born 155 years before Socrates, dared to doubt that religion’s explanatory tales about how the world came to be as it is were to be trusted, and he began exploring natural phenomena in a way that we recognize as scientific. He is often called the Father of Science. With him and his contemporary, Anaximander, who argued with him by advancing alternative ideas, came the notion – for the first time as far as we know – that reason could fathom and describe how the universe worked.

Science is one of the main achievements of the West, but it is not the only product of constructive doubt that made for its greatness. Doubt as a habit of mind or tradition of thinking meant that new, foreign, even counter-intuitive ideas were not dismissed. Europe, before and after it stagnated in the doldrums of the long Catholic Christian night (and even to some extent during those dark centuries), was hospitable to ideas wherever they came from.

Totally opposed to this intellectual openness were the churches with their dogma. Those who claim that the achievements of our civilization are to be credited to Christianity (or in the currently fashionable phrase to “the Judeo-Christian tradition”) have a hard case to make. It was the rediscovery of the Greek legacy in the Renaissance in the teeth of Christian dogmatism, and the new freedom from religious persecution exploited by the philosophers of the Enlightenment that re-launched the West on its intellectual progress, to become the world’s nursery of innovation and its chief factory of ideas.

Our civilization cannot survive without this openness. Critical examination is the breath that keeps it alive. But it is in danger of suffocation. It is more threatened now than it has been for the last four hundred years by dogmatisms: Marxism, environmentalism, religion – above all Islam which absolutely forbids criticism.

The Founding Fathers of the United States perfectly understood the necessity for an open market of ideas. Every citizen of the republic, they laid down, must be free to declare his beliefs, to argue his case, to speak his mind, to examine ideas as publicly as he chose without fear of being silenced.

No longer?

This warning comes from Nina Shea, writing in the National Review:

An unprecedented collaboration between the Obama administration and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC, formerly called the Organization of the Islamic Conference) to combat “Islamophobia” may soon result in the delegitimization of freedom of expression as a human right.

The administration is taking the lead in an international effort to “implement” a U.N. resolution against religious “stereotyping,” specifically as applied to Islam. To be sure, it argues that the effort should not result in free-speech curbs. However, its partners in the collaboration, the 56 member states of the OIC, have no such qualms. Many of them police private speech through Islamic blasphemy laws and the OIC has long worked to see such codes applied universally. Under Muslim pressure, Western Europe now has laws against religious hate speech that serve as proxies for Islamic blasphemy codes.

Last March, U.S. diplomats maneuvered the adoption of Resolution 16/18 within the U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC). Non-binding, this resolution, inter alia, expresses concern about religious “stereotyping” and “negative profiling” but does not limit free speech. It was intended to — and did — replace the OIC’s decidedly dangerous resolution against “defamation of religions,” which protected religious institutions instead of individual freedoms.

But thanks to a puzzling U.S. diplomatic initiative that was unveiled in July, Resolution 16/18 is poised to become a springboard for a greatly reinvigorated international effort to criminalize speech against Islam, the very thing it was designed to quash.

Citing a need to “move to implementation” of Resolution 16/18, the Obama administration has inexplicably [not if Obama’s Islamophilia is remembered – JB] decided to launch a major international effort against Islamophobia in partnership with the Saudi-based OIC. This is being voluntarily assumed at American expense, outside the U.N. framework, and is not required by the resolution itself.

On July 15, a few days after the Norway massacre, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton co-chaired an OIC session in Istanbul on religious intolerance. It was there that she announced the initiative, inviting the OIC member-states’ foreign ministers and representatives to the inaugural meeting of the effort that the U.S. government would host this fall in Washington. She envisions it as the first in a series of meetings to decide how best to implement Resolution 16/18.

In making the announcement, Clinton was firm in asserting that the U.S. does not want to see speech restrictions: “The resolution calls upon states to ‘counter offensive expression through education, interfaith dialogue, and public debate . . . but not to criminalize speech unless there is an incitement to imminent violence.’” (This is the First Amendment standard set forth in the 1969 Supreme Court case of Brandenburg v. Ohio.)

With the United States providing this new world stage for presenting grievances of “Islamophobia” against the West, the OIC rallied around the initiative as the propaganda windfall that it is. It promptly reasserted its demands for global blasphemy laws, once again sounding the call of its failed U.N. campaign for international laws against the so-called defamation of Islam. It has made plain its aim to use the upcoming conference to further pressure Western governments to regulate speech on behalf of Islam.

The aim of the OIC is to criminalize criticism of Islam, though it might go along with banning the criticism of religion in general as an interim step. It will reserve to itself the right to condemn all other religions and beliefs, but allege that any criticism of Islam is incitement to violence – and call angry crowds on to the streets to prove it. 

Islam is now the major threat to the West. Its ideas are the very opposite of those on which the USA was founded. It is an ideology of intolerance and cruelty. It forbids the free expression of thought. By its very nature, even if it were not now on a mission of world conquest (which it is), it is the enemy of the West.

The best way to defeat it is by criticizing it, constantly and persistently, in speech and writing, on the big screen and the small screen, in the schools and academies, in all the media of information and comment, in national and international assemblies.

If the weapon of words is forbidden, the only alternative will be guns. 

While leftists and other “humanitarians” in the United States and Europe are in a perpetual state of moral outrage concerning Israel’s alleged mistreatment of Palestinians, the savagery of modern-day Arab enslavement of black Africans elicits almost no reaction.

So writes Stephen Brown at Front Page in an article on the Arabs’ African slaves, particularly in Mauritania:

The most recent case highlighting this leftist hypocrisy concerns four anti-slavery activists in Mauritania, who were sentenced last week to six months in jail for protesting the enslavement of a ten-year-old girl earlier in August in Nouakchott, the country’s capital. …  The convicted men belong to the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement in Mauritania (IRA), an anti-slavery NGO. …

Yet under Mauritanian law the criminal was the slave-owner:

The IRA discovered the child slave in Nouakchott, and reported the matter to police. Owning a slave was made a crime in Mauritania in 2007. It calls for a penalty of up to ten years in prison and fines ranging from US $2,000 to $4,000. A prison term of up to two years is also mandated for anyone who “facilitates” slavery. …

The law was nodded at:

The ten-year-old slave girl’s mistress… was arrested and charged but only has to report to the police once a week.

The slave child is nowhere to be found:

The child, for whom the demonstrators braved the government’s “draconian response,” is reported as still missing.

Why are the authorities allowing this obvious miscarriage of justice?

A problem in abolishing slavery in Mauritania, says one former slave, now an anti-slavery activist with SOS Esclaves, is that “the authorities themselves keep slaves.” …

SOS Esclaves is another anti-slave group in the country, which –

estimates there are about 500,000 black African slaves among the country’s population of 3.1 million. Their masters are Arab and Berber Mauritanians, who share only the same Islamic religion with their chattel. Unlike in Sudan, where the Arabs get their African slaves from old-fashioned, brutal slave raids, the Mauritanian slaves are the product of a system that has kept them in a state of bondage for generations, going back, in some cases, several hundred years. …

Laws made against slavery in Arab countries are a matter of window-dressing for Western observers. They mean little because sharia, the law of Islam, promotes slavery:

Slavery in Mauritania and other Arab countries will be difficult to eradicate. Slavery is an ingrained, centuries-old institution in Islamic countries. It is also legal under Sharia law …

From the seventh century to the twentieth, it is estimated 14 million Africans were violently enslaved and transported under harsh conditions around the Islamic world.

Black Africans became synonymous in Arab eyes with inferiority and with even something less than human. And since the Islamic world experienced no abolition movement … the black slave … continued to remain sub-human in the Arab worldview.

Which goes a long way towards explaining why black Africans are being hunted down, imprisoned, tortured, or just summarily murdered in Libya by the Libyan rebels whom the US, Britain, France, NATO are actively supporting – while the attention of those multitudes of leftists and other “humanitarians” whom Stephen Brown so rightly scorns is otherwise engaged.

*

The plight of the Arabs’ black slaves will not be the subject of UNESCO’s “anti-racism” convention, Durban III, to be held in New York later this month.

No doubt, like Durban I and Durban II, it will be an international hate-fest against Israel and the Jews.

Last November these countries voted against the Durban III session: Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, the Netherlands, Palau, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Sweden, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, the United Kingdom and the United States. (Austria, Belgium, France, Greece, Hungary and Spain abstained.)

Governments (in addition to Israel’s) that have announced they will not be joining in the coven are those of: The Czech Republic, Canada, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, and – reluctantly? – the US.

The Palmer report on the flotilla which sailed from Turkey to break the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza and was intercepted on May 31 2010 by Israeli forces, is here in full. It is to be published tomorrow, Friday September 2, 2011.

Proceeding as it does from the nefarious UN, it is something of a surprise.

Here’s a summary of its findings from the New York Times. Since the NYT is an organ of the Left and and ideologically anti-Israel, the information it provides is unlikely to be deliberately spun in favor of Israel’s account of the events. In fact it does its best to stress every fault found with the Israelis, but conveys the report’s conclusion that Israel did not act illegally. 

[The report] found that when Israeli commandos boarded the main ship they faced “organized and violent resistance from a group of passengers” and were therefore required to use force for their own protection. But the report called the force “excessive and unreasonable,” saying the loss of life was unacceptable and the Israeli military’s later treatment of passengers was abusive. …

Turkey is particularly upset by the conclusion that Israel’s naval blockade is in keeping with international law and that its forces have the right to stop Gaza-bound ships in international waters, which is what happened here. …

Israel considers the report to be a rare vindication for it in the United Nations. A Security Council statement at the time assailed the loss of life and Israel suffered widespread international condemnation. …

The United Nations investigation into the events …  was headed by Sir Geoffrey Palmer, former prime minister of New Zealand, aided by Álvaro Uribe, former president of Colombia, along with a representative each from Israel and Turkey.

It takes a broadly sympathetic view of Israel’s sea blockade of Gaza.

“Israel faces a real threat to its security from militant groups in Gaza,” the report says in its opening paragraphs. “The naval blockade was imposed as a legitimate security measure in order to prevent weapons from entering Gaza by sea and its implementation complied with the requirements of international law.”

The report is hard on the flotilla, asserting that it “acted recklessly in attempting to breach the naval blockade.” It said that while the majority of the hundreds of people aboard the six vessels had no violent intention, that could not be said of IHH, the Turkish aid group that primarily organized the flotilla. It said, “There exist serious questions about the conduct, true nature and objectives of the flotilla organizers, particularly IHH.”

It also said that the Turkish government tried to persuade the organizers to avoid an encounter with Israeli forces but that “more could have been done.”

Regarding the boarding of the [Mavi Marmara] ship, the Palmer committee said Israel should have issued warnings closer to the moment of action and should have first turned to nonviolent options. …

Some earlier reports say they did just that, firing nothing more lethal than paint balls in self-defense.

The [Palmer] report does, however, acknowledge that once on board the commandos had to defend themselves against violent attack.

The report also criticizes Israel’s subsequent treatment of passengers saying it “included physical mistreatment, harassment and intimidation, unjustified confiscation of belongings and the denial of timely consular assistance.”

But they were armed passengers according to this source:

The passengers … pulled out bats, clubs, and slingshots with glass marbles, assaulting each soldier as he disembarked. The fighters were nabbed one by one and were beaten up badly …

And as for “the majority of the hundreds of people aboard the six vessels” having “no violent intention”, a video clip casts doubt on that claim. It shows –

the hysteria against Israel being whipped up on board before the ships set sail, with the chanting of intifada songs about ‘Khaybar’ – the iconic slaughter of Jews by Muslims in the 7th century which is used as a rallying cry to kill the Jews today — and threats of ‘martyrdom’. This was not merely a propaganda stunt, but a terrorist attack.

From the Religion of Peace:

Ramadan Bombathon
2011 Scorecard  

There are conflicts in which neither side is worthy of sympathy.

An example from the past is the Afghan Mujahideen versus the Soviet Union. The Western powers decided to give help to the Mujahideen. The result was the victory of the Taliban, the formation of al-Qaeda, and 9/11.

Another example, in the present, is the Libyan civil war in which again both sides are abominable.

This report comes from The Independent:

The killings were pitiless.

They had taken place at a makeshift hospital, in a tent marked clearly with the symbols of the Islamic Crescent. Some of the dead were on stretchers, attached to intravenous drips. Some were on the back of an ambulance that had been shot at. A few were on the ground, seemingly attempting to crawl to safety when the bullets came.

Around 30 men lay decomposing in the heat. Many of them had their hands tied behind their back, either with plastic handcuffs or ropes. One had a scarf stuffed into his mouth. Almost all of the victims were black men. Their bodies had been dumped near the scene of two of the fierce battles between rebel and regime forces in Tripoli.

“Come and see. These are blacks, Africans, hired by Gaddafi, mercenaries,” shouted Ahmed Bin Sabri, lifting the tent flap to show the body of one dead patient, his grey T-shirt stained dark red with blood, the saline pipe running into his arm black with flies. Why had an injured man receiving treatment been executed? Mr Sabri, more a camp follower than a fighter, shrugged. It was seemingly incomprehensible to him that anything wrong had been done.

The corpses were on the grass verges of two large roundabouts between Bab al-Aziziyah, Muammar Gaddafi’s compound stormed by the revolutionaries at the weekend and Abu Salim, a loyalist district which saw three days of ferocious violence. …

It is also the case that the regime has repeatedly unleashed appalling violence on its own people. But the mounting number of deaths of men from sub-Saharan Africa at the hands of the rebels – lynchings in many cases – raises disturbing questions about the opposition administration, the Transitional National Council (TNC) taking over as Libya’s government, and about Western backing for it.

The atrocities have apparently not been confined to Tripoli: Amnesty International [a nasty lefty organization which sometimes inadvertently tells the truth – JB] has reported similar violence in the coastal town of Zawiyah, much of it against men from sub-Saharan Africa who, it has been claimed, were migrant workers. …

Only a few of the dead found at the roundabouts yesterday were in uniform. However, regime forces have often worn civilian clothes during combat in Tripoli. The street-fighting for Abu Salim was particularly fierce with regime snipers taking a steady toll among the ranks of al-Shabaab volunteer fighters. The losses, and frustration at the continuing stubborn resistance by the enemy after an entry into the capital greeted with celebration by residents, has led to something approaching fury among some of the revolutionaries in the last few days.

“They were shooting at us and that is the reason they were killed,” said Mushab Abdullah, a 35-year-old rebel fighter from Misrata, pointing at the bodies. “It had been really tough at Abu Salim, because these mercenaries know that, without Gaddafi to protect them, they are in big trouble. That is why they were fighting so hard.”

His companion, Mohammed Tariq Muthar, counted them off on the fingers of his hand: “We have found mercenaries from Chad, Niger, Mali and Ghana, all with guns. And they took action against us.”

But, if the men had been killed in action, why did they have their hands tied behind their back? “Maybe they were injured, and they had to be brought to this hospital and the handcuffs were to stop them from attacking. And then something went wrong,” suggested Mr Abdullah.

What went wrong and stays wrong is the Arab culture, shaped by the Islamic ideology of cruelty and murder.

The Libyan rebels are no better and no worse than the savage regime they’re replacing.

Ghaddafi’s cruelty has been well documented. Here’s a titbit of information from CNN about a member of his family – what Aline, wife of his son Hannibal, did to their children’s nanny:

One of the staff told us there was a nanny who worked for Hannibal Gadhafi who might speak to us. He said she’d been burnt by Hannibal’s wife, Aline.

I thought he meant perhaps a cigarette stubbed out on her arm. Nothing prepared me for the moment I walked into the room to see Shweyga Mullah.

At first I thought she was wearing a hat and something over her face. Then the awful realization dawned that her entire scalp and face were covered in red wounds and scabs, a mosaic of injuries that rendered her face into a grotesque patchwork.

*

What do the Western powers expect of this new regime in Libya that they are helping to establish?

If the Europeans are expecting oil, okay, maybe they’ll get it. Libyans must sell oil to survive.

But what is America expecting? Gratitude?  From that blood-thirsty rabble?

Why yes, it seems so.

This is from Investor’s Business Daily:

So the U.S. just spent $1 billion to liberate Libya from terrorist rule only to have Libya’s new rulers thumb their noses at extraditing the Lockerbie bomber? Explain to us again what we’ve been doing in Libya.

Presumably, President Obama’s slapped-together NATO mission to aid Libya’s rebels was to rid that country of its mad-dog dictator, who was a one-man nexus for global terrorism. …

His biggest atrocity was his own: killing 270 innocent people, many of them Americans, in the 1988 bombing of Pan-Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Gadhafi’s on the run now, but his key man on Lockerbie, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, remains in a wealthy Tripoli neighborhood, incredibly enough because Libya’s new rulers have declared they won’t extradite him abroad to face justice.

“Extradition is what Gadhafi did,” the National Transition Council’s Justice Minister Mohammed al-Alagi said. “We will not give any Libyan citizen to the West.”

That’s some chutzpah coming from someone who’d be just another dead body in the street or a prisoner dangling from a meat hook had NATO not intervened on his behalf with airstrikes, training and aid since March.

It’s even more ungrateful because these rebels have made it clear they expect more military and humanitarian aid from the West.

Libya’s National Transitional Council chair Mustafa Abdul Jalil urged NATO at a meeting Monday in Qatar to continue its air campaign against Gadhafi’s forces. …

But with Libya’s rebels willfully sheltering one of the world’s worst terrorists — the latest report is he’s sick, a ruse Libyan officials used to get him prematurely released from a U.K. prison two years ago — it seems they aren’t interested in creating a new kind of democratic and law-abiding nation and ridding Libya of the taint of terrorism. …

Imagine that! Arab rebels including al-Qaeda not interested in democracy and getting rid of terrorism! What a revelation, what a shock!

Is the White House reminding the rebels that the U.S. taxpayers have just shelled out $1 billion to buy their freedom? Or that the U.S. has released several billion in Gadhafi’s oil assets abroad for their use? No.

There were plenty of good reasons to object to the NATO involvement in the Libyan rebellion, and perhaps the main one was that the rebels were an unknown quantity. With this refusal to release the Lockerbie bomber, they’ve shown their colors.

If the Obama administration doesn’t want to be seen as Uncle Sucker, it must make the Libyan rebels face consequences for their ingratitude.

Obama will do that? Oh, sure. Wait for it … … any moment now … …

We repeat it often: The UN must be destroyed.

If the US stopped funding it, that atrocious institution would collapse like a pricked balloon.

And now there’s a chance it could happen.

On the “unilateral campaign by Palestinian leaders to secure recognition from individual foreign governments and from the United Nations for a self-declared Palestinian state”, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, writes in the Miami Herald:

If the U.N. were to act in support of this unilateral Palestinian scheme, it would deal a blow not only to Israel and to the cause of peace, but to the U.N. itself. The U.N.’s obsession with castigating Israel — from the Human Rights Council and the Goldstone Report and the Durban conferences to the multitude of U.N. bodies created for the sole purpose of condemning Israel — has eliminated the U.N.’s credibility to aid in achieving peace and security in the Middle East. …

Next month, if the U.N. again sides with Palestinian rejectionism and against Israel and peace, it will be “Zionism is racism” all over again. The U.N., not Israel, will lose whatever remaining legitimacy it holds, and it may never be able to recover.

Fortunately, we are not helpless in the face of this dangerous challenge. There is a historical precedent for how to stop it.

In 1989, Yasser Arafat’s PLO also pushed for membership for a “Palestinian state” in UN entities. The PLO’s strategy looked unstoppable until the George H.W. Bush administration made clear that the U.S. would cut off funding to any UN entity that upgraded the status of the Palestinian observer mission in any way. The UN was forced to choose between isolating Israel and receiving U.S. contributions, and they chose the latter. The PLO’s unilateral campaign was stopped in its tracks. …

With Arafat’s successors up to the same tricks today, the U.S. response must be as strong. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has consistently refused to use our strongest leverage — our financial contributions — to advance U.S. interests at the UN.

Of course Obama hasn’t said or done anything to challenge the UN and its evil practices. He likes it – no, that’s an understatement, he loves it. He wants it to become the most powerful institution on earth, to develop into nothing less than the Government of the World, in which a majority (or even better all) of the states are Islamic and the universal system of law is sharia, and has as its head no less a personage than – himself.

But Ros-Lehtinen hopes to circumvent the administration.

If the executive branch will not demonstrate leadership on this issue, Congress must fill the void.

I will soon introduce the United Nations Transparency, Accountability, and Reform Act, which will reflect the executive branch’s previous successful policies by cutting off U.S. contributions to any UN entity that grants membership or any other upgraded status to the Palestinian observer mission. This legislation will also leverage U.S. taxpayer dollars to make sure they do not fund biased or wasteful UN activities, and to achieve other much-needed reforms that will make the UN more transparent, accountable, objective, and effective.

It is time to use all our leverage to stop this unilateral Palestinian scheme — for the sake of our ally Israel and all free democracies, for the sake of peace and security, and for the sake of achieving a UN that upholds its founding principles.

Of course it would be best if the US simply cut off all funding to the UN immediately, expelled it from Turtle Bay, and breathed a national sigh of relief as the ghastly thing died.

But politicians have to act cautiously, taking one step at a time, and what Rep. Ros-Lehtinen is proposing could be a first step towards the total destruction of the malignant monster.

We think she knows as well as we do that the UN can never become “transparent, accountable, objective, and effective”. Insisting that it should so transform itself, and that if it doesn’t it cannot be allowed to go on, could compel its demise.

Even if it were to start functioning according to its “founding principles”, it would still be a menace. Its declared aim was for nations “to work together to help people live better lives, to eliminate poverty, disease and illiteracy in the world, to stop environmental destruction and to encourage respect for each other’s rights and freedoms.” Very pretty. Wholly unrealistic. The idea that nation-states should consider anything but their own self-interest is romantic. To set unrealistic objectives is to invite lying and cheating, hypocrisy, and every form of corruption – as is proved beyond doubt by the histories of the League of Nations and the United Nations Organization. The experiment has been devastatingly destructive of human life and happiness, and needs to be abandoned.

The idea of uniting the nations of the world was always foolish, has proved to be bad, and must be given up, never to be tried again.

Milton Friedman, champion of the Consumer, delights an audience and confounds TV host Phil Donahue, with his explanation of how Ralph Nader did harm by trying to do good, and why the free market ought to be allowed to work. The video was made way back in 1979, but what the great economist says will never become outdated.