The UN must be destroyed because (to put it very mildly, coolly, and objectively):

• It does no good to anyone
• It does much harm to many
• It is unreformable
• It was a colossal mistake of wishful thinking from its beginning
• It is kept going only because it is a gravy train for its bureaucrats and diplomats at enormous expense to tax-payers, especially Americans

A documentary film made recently by Ami Horowitz and Matt Groff, UN Me, exposes the worst incidences of its uselessness and corruption, violent and cruel actions, and refusals to do what it purportedly came into existence to do.

The following extracts are from an excellent article on the film by Bruce Bawer at Front Page. (It is well worth reading in full.)

UN Me begins by according us a few brief glimpses of the sheer sloth that characterizes the whole shebang. Old UN hands describe the short working days, long lunches, and frequent midday naps that characterize the everyday life of many of its functionaries. Wandering the halls of UN headquarters in New York shortly after 5 PM on a weekday, Horowitz … encounters a virtual ghost town: almost everybody has long since cleared out for the day. This institutional torpor is, he makes clear, emblematic of the whole worldwide enterprise. …

Horowitz reminds us that countries like Libya, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and China have sat on the UN Human Rights Commission – and, later, on the Human Rights Council that was meant to be an improvement on that comically corrupt agency.

In 2010, Iran was elected to the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

At one point in the film, Horowitz asks Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and director of the UN’s 2009 anti-racism conference in Geneva, why Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, of all people, was named keynote speaker at that event. That question, she replies in a small voice, is “not for me to answer.” (No, you don’t get far at the UN by providing honest answers to reasonable questions like that one.)

Horowitz informs us that Article 6 of the UN Charter actually “calls for the expulsion of any nation that consistently violates the principles of the charter.” Yet no member country has ever been expelled under Article 6. Shashi Tharoor, UN information chief, cheerfully explains that it’s best to have everybody “under the same tent.” …

The  film covers some of the more egregious scandals involving UN peacekeeping …  anecdotes about peacekeepers in various countries who, in their interactions with the people they were there to protect, acted like thugs, got rich trafficking drugs, spent their time whoring, and sexually abused minors. Peacekeepers in the Congo committed literally thousands of rapes. At least one ran a pedophilia ring.

We’re shown video of UN bureaucrats solemnly vowing that errant peacekeepers will be caught and punished. But in fact almost no UN peacekeeper has ever been held accountable for anything.

In Côte d’Ivoire, peacekeepers actually fired on peaceful, unarmed protestors.

They were standing together, men women and children, singing happily when UN sharp shooters fired on them. One of the few times the “peacekeepers”  have actually used their arms.

But was anyone punished? No; that’s just not the UN way. When Horowitz, in a sit-down interview with Abou Moussa, head of the UN mission in Côte d’Ivoire, asks about the episode, Moussa gets up and leaves.

The film moves on to the absurdity that is the International Atomic Energy Agency – which, tasked with preventing nuclear-arms proliferation, has actually helped North Korea, Iran, India, and Pakistan to acquire nuclear technology, purportedly for peaceful purposes. Since, as the film notes, the IAEA can only perform inspections in countries that invite it to do so, it spends more than 80% of its $380 million annual budget inspecting facilities in – believe it or not – Germany, Japan, and Canada. …

Iran carries on towards making nuclear weapons. The UN and its agencies can do nothing about it, nor would if they could. Iran’s President Ahmadinejad is one of the most honored, ecstatically applauded gasbags in the UN General Assembly, he who has homosexuals hanged and women stoned to death. Ahmadinejad is the perfect personification of the spirit of the United Nations Organization.  

Then there’s terrorism. After 9/11, the UN passed Resolution 1373, which was supposedly designed to fight terrorism. It would appear to be as toothless a measure as was ever ratified by a deliberative body. Horowitz interviews Javier Ruperez, whose title is – get this – Executive Director of the Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate of the Counter-Terrorism Committee of the Security Council. Asked what the committee actually does to fight terrorism, Ruperez speaks blandly of the production of reports. Member countries, you see, are asked to file reports indicating whether or not they’re aiding terrorists. The directorate, or committee, or whatever it is also sends inspectors for, oh, a week or so to various countries to find out whether anything fishy is going on there. None of this, of course, actually accomplishes anything. Asked whether the UN has official lists of terrorist groups and of countries that support terror, Ruperez says no: “This is not the practice of the UN.” …

Another question: how does the UN define terrorism? This, Ruperez declares, is still a “pending matter.” …

The UN will not define terrorism because the General Assembly is dominated by terrorism-sponsoring states.

Next up: the Oil for Food scandal – which, as Claudia Rosett, the top-notch UN expert and eloquent UN critic, tells Horowitz, was absolutely “designed to produce corruption.” Allegedly, the objective of the program was to provide food, medical supplies, and so forth to the Iraqi people in exchange for oil; in reality, a bunch of UN big shots, up to and including Security Council representatives … lined their pockets with kickbacks. But, again, the UN did nothing – it was, as Rosett says, “the biggest scam in the history of human relief,” but nobody was fired or jailed. As always, the UN proved that nothing could be more alien to its institutional culture than the idea of accountability.

The Rwanda genocide gets its own sad chapter in UN Me. The head of the UN peacekeepers in that country, General Romeo Dallaire, actually wanted to do the right thing. But when he asked Kofi Annan, then in charge of all UN peacekeeping forces, for authority to take relatively modest action to prevent a looming genocide, Annan said no. Why? Because it was more important to protect the UN’s “image of impartiality” than to protect people from genocide. UN forces were even ordered to withdraw from a school where they were the only thing standing between Tutsi refugees – many of them children and old people – and Hutus with machetes. Result: a brutal massacre for which – yet again – no UN personnel were punished.

Live footage of what happened there is one of the most heart-rending scenes in the film.

While this nightmare was unfolding in Rwanda, Boutros-Boutros Ghali, then secretary-general of the UN, was on a European tour, which he refused to cancel in order to deal with Rwanda.

He had urgently to attend a string of universities bestowing honorary degrees on him for being such a benefactor of mankind.

When he did return to New York, he denied that Tutsi were being exterminated. …  Horowitz and Groff even got Jean-Marie Guéhenno, former Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, on camera smoothly asserting that in the wake of the Rwanda genocide, it’s best not to “allocate the blame to one actor or the other.”

Horowitz also interviews Jody Williams, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who was invited by the UN to examine the situation in Darfur and who ended up livid at the UN’s palpable discomfort with her undiplomatic conclusions and its failure to act on her urgent recommendations. …

At film’s end, Horowitz and Graff pose a simple question: what, given all these unpleasant facts, does the UN stand for? The answer, alas, is clear. It stands for itself – period. Like many other pointless bureaucracies, it is about perpetuating its own existence and enhancing its own image – and about seeking to squelch the truth about its fecklessness, incompetence, and absolute lack of a moral compass. It’s also … about providing hack politicians from around the world with yet another career steppingstone, once they’ve risen to the top of the ladder in their own crummy little countries and finished emptying their own citizens’ pockets.

Please watch the film!

We found this text, extracted from a speech Mitt Romney is to make in Missouri today, at PowerLine, posted by John Hinderaker:

Along with the genius of our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and our Bill of Rights, is the equal genius of our economic system. Our Founding Fathers endeavored to create a moral and just society like no other in history, and out of that grew a moral and just economic system the likes of which the world had never seen. Our freedom, what it means to be an American, has been defined and sustained by the liberating power of the free enterprise system.

That same system has helped lift more people out of poverty across the globe than any government program or competing economic system. The success of America’s free enterprise system has been a bright beacon of freedom for the world. It has signaled to oppressed people to rise up against their oppressors, and given hope to the once hopeless. 

It is called the Free Enterprise System because we are both free to engage in enterprises and through those enterprises we ensure our freedom.

But sadly, it has become clear that this President simply doesn’t understand or appreciate these fundamental truths of our system. Over the last three and a half years, record numbers of Americans have lost their jobs or simply disappeared from the work force. Record numbers of Americans are living in poverty today – over 46 million of our fellow Americans are living below the poverty line. …

This is not just a failure of policy; it is a moral failure of tragic proportions. …

John Hinderaker comments:

Conservative economic policies don’t just create more wealth than socialism or liberalism, they are morally superior to socialism and liberalism. Let’s hope that today’s speech is just a small preview of what is to come from the Romney campaign.

Socialism creates no wealth at all. It’s a wealth and prosperity killer. Vide Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, France …

As to the morality of socialism, we often say that to take money from someone who has earned it and give it to someone who hasn’t is intensely immoral. And that is what socialist governments do.

Walter Williams writes at Townhall:

Benjamin Franklin, statesman and signer of our Declaration of Independence, said: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” …  Are today’s Americans virtuous and moral, or have we become corrupt and vicious? Let’s think it through with a few questions.

Suppose I saw an elderly woman painfully huddled on a heating grate in the dead of winter. She’s hungry and in need of shelter and medical attention. To help the woman, I walk up to you using intimidation and threats and demand that you give me $200. Having taken your money, I then purchase food, shelter and medical assistance for the woman. Would I be guilty of a crime? A moral person would answer in the affirmative. I’ve committed theft by taking the property of one person to give to another.

Most Americans would agree that it would be theft regardless of what I did with the money. Now comes the hard part. Would it still be theft if I were able to get three people to agree that I should take your money? What if I got 100 people to agree — 100,000 or 200 million people? What if instead of personally taking your money to assist the woman, I got together with other Americans and asked Congress to use Internal Revenue Service agents to take your money? In other words, does an act that’s clearly immoral and illegal when done privately become moral when it is done legally and collectively? Put another way, does legality establish morality? Before you answer, keep in mind that slavery was legal; apartheid was legal; the Nazi’s Nuremberg Laws were legal; and the Stalinist and Maoist purges were legal. Legality alone cannot be the guide for moral people.

The moral question is whether it’s right to take what belongs to one person to give to another to whom it does not belong. 

Don’t get me wrong. I personally believe that assisting one’s fellow man in need by reaching into one’s own pockets is praiseworthy and laudable. Doing the same by reaching into another’s pockets is despicable, dishonest and worthy of condemnation. Some people call governmental handouts charity, but charity and legalized theft are entirely two different things. [And] as far as charity is concerned, James Madison, the acknowledged father of our Constitution, said, “Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.” To my knowledge, the Constitution has not been amended to include charity as a legislative duty of Congress.

Our current economic crisis, as well as that of Europe, is a direct result of immoral conduct. Roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of our federal budget can be described as Congress’ taking the property of one American and giving it to another. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid account for nearly half of federal spending. Then there are corporate welfare and farm subsidies and thousands of other spending programs, such as food stamps, welfare and education. According to a 2009 Census Bureau report, nearly 139 million Americans — 46 percent — receive handouts from one or more federal programs …

Ayn Rand, in her novel “Atlas Shrugged,” reminded us that “when you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good.”

Would a President Romney return America to virtue as well as to prosperity?

We know better than to hope that any government would shrink itself to the minimal size of the libertarian-conservative ideal. Or that entitlements such as Social Security will ever be entirely abolished.

But Romney respects the idea of individual liberty as the Founding Fathers did; and he knows that only the free enterprise system opens the way for every individual to become prosperous – by his own endeavors. So Romney would be likely to take steps to restore confidence in business, reduce the number of hampering regulations the Obama administration has imposed, encourage innovation, and generally reward self-reliance.

That would be a good start, and the expectation of it a good reason to support his bid for the presidency.

Why waste a perfectly good baby – when you’ve killed him?

(Please note: we are being sadly and somewhat bitterly sarcastic. We are against the killing of babies, even if magical and lucrative uses may be found for their corpses.)

Herb “clinics” or “chemists” in northern Chinese towns sell pills made from human foetuses.

Feeling low? Getting old? Take a dose of ground-up baby

The picture and quotations come from the Mail Online:

This week the South Korean customs department revealed it had foiled 35 attempts to smuggle these “human-flesh pills” across its border and seized more than 17,000 of them from China in just nine months. …

This grotesquely unsavoury industry appears to cash in on China’s strict family planning laws, which limit most families to just one child each and are said to result in 13 million abortions a year, the equivalent of more than 35,000 terminations a day.

The country, which has a population of more than 1.3 billion, is said to have ‘dying rooms’ in hospitals where unwanted newborn babies are abandoned to perish. Those trying to avoid a huge fine for violating the one-child laws have even been known to commit outright infanticide.

We maintain that abandoning newborn babies to perish is infanticide.

Now, unscrupulous pharmacists, hospital workers and even the relatives of those having abortions are making money from archaic beliefs that consuming infant cells can cure and rejuvenate us.

In fact, it is dangerous to swallow the  powdered flesh of another human being.  The pills are “likely to be poisonous”.

A South Korean television team investigating the trade, “discovered that the make-up of the pills they bought were between 97 per cent and 99 per cent human. And they all contained high levels of harmful bacteria, many of them of a type that could only have come from decomposing bodies.”

The SBS journalists saw how a foetus could be turned into pills in just two days.

Once the hospital pharmacist had defrosted the foetus stored in her kitchen fridge, she cut it into “manageable pieces”. Overnight she dried it out on absorbent paper before slowly microwaving it on a low heat.

According to the undercover team, the smell at this stage was overpowering.

So “aromatic herbs [are] added to the capsules to try to disguise the smell of rotting dried flesh.”

Hair and nails were discernible in the human material.

Once it was thoroughly dried, the pharmacist placed the flesh into a herbal grinder, not unlike a kitchen food processor, to render it down to a coarse, light brown powder, similar to the texture of human ashes following a cremation. That powder would then be put into soluble capsules which were counted out into bags for packing, shipment and sale. …

[The capsules] are believed by many to have fantastic healing powers which fight the ravages of ageing and are capable of defeating even cancer. …

The belief is that the nearer the foetus is to its birth date, the more healing properties it harbours.

One of the foetuses being pulverized, the TV team was told, was seven months old – a fully developed child ready to live outside the womb.

The footage taken by the team showed how placentas — the most common form of illegal human flesh traded in China for alternative medicine — are sold alongside the dried organs of creatures including snakes and bats from around the world to satisfy an appetite for powders, soups and potions said to have tremendous healing properties.

It is a sickening, cannibalistic and illegal trade that the Chinese authorities do not want the world to know exists. Yet it is disturbingly widespread. … While the trade in such drugs is thought to be more frequent in communist China, smugglers see the capitalist state of South Korea as an increasingly lucrative market. … The pills used to be shipped to South Korea brazenly in clear plastic cellophane bags, but more recently smugglers have had to become increasingly sophisticated and use orthodox dark brown pill bottles, with sealed caps and labelled with the names of legitimate drugs or more traditional Chinese herbal medicines to evade detection.

Plainly those Chinese authorities have more moral compunction (though not much) about the freezing, heating, grinding up, selling and eating of dead babies than they have against  killing them.

(On Chinese population control, forced abortion, and infanticide, see also our post immediately below, Environmentalism the supreme killer, May 11, 2012.)

Change? Yes, there is change under the Obama administration.

A free democracy is being turned into a tyranny.

How is this being done?

One way is by unleashing anarchic mobs; tying the hands of the police; criminalizing the victims of mob-violence; and systematically discrediting civilized values, as described in this column by Thomas Sowell on the “Occupy” movement:

The unwillingness of authorities to put a stop to their organized disruptions of other people’s lives, their trespassing, vandalism and violence is a de facto suspension, if not repeal, of the 14th Amendment’s requirement that the government provide “equal protection of the laws” to all its citizens.

How did the “Occupy” movement acquire such immunity from the laws that the rest of us are expected to obey? Simply by shouting politically correct slogans and calling themselves representatives of the 99 percent against the 1 percent. But just when did the 99 percent elect them as their representatives? If in fact 99 percent of the people in the country were like these “Occupy” mobs, we would not have a country. We would have anarchy.

Democracy does not mean mob rule. It means majority rule. If the “Occupy” movement, or any other mob, actually represents a majority, then they already have the votes to accomplish legally whatever they are trying to accomplish by illegal means. Mob rule means imposing what the mob wants, regardless of what the majority of voters want. It is the antithesis of democracy.

In San Francisco, when the mob smashed the plate-glass window of a small business shop, the owner put up some plywood to replace the glass, and the mob wrote graffiti on his plywood. The consequences? None for the mob, but a citation for the shop owner for not removing the graffiti.

When trespassers blocking other people at UC Davis refused to disperse, and locked their arms with one another to prevent the police from being able to physically remove them, the police finally resorted to pepper spray to break up this human logjam. The result? The police have been strongly criticized for enforcing the law. Apparently pepper spray is unpleasant, and people who break the law are not supposed to have unpleasant things done to them. Which is to say, we need to take the “enforcement” out of “law enforcement.”

Everybody is not given these exemptions from paying the consequences of their own illegal acts. Only people who are currently in vogue with the elites of the left – in the media, in politics and in academia.

The 14th Amendment? What is the Constitution or the laws when it comes to ideological soul mates, especially young soul mates who remind the aging 1960s radicals of their youth?

Neither in this or any other issue can the Constitution protect us if we don’t protect the Constitution. When all is said and done, the Constitution is a document, a piece of paper.

If we don’t vote out of office, or impeach, those who violate the Constitution, or who refuse to enforce the law, the steady erosion of Constitutional protections will ultimately render it meaningless. Everything will just become a question of whose ox is gored and what is the political expediency of the moment.

There has been much concern, rightly expressed, about the rusting of bridges around the country, and the crumbling and corrosion of other parts of the physical infrastructure. But the crumbling of the moral infrastructure is no less deadly. …

If everyone takes the path of least resistance – if politicians pander to particular constituencies and judges give only wrist slaps to particular groups or mobs who are currently in vogue, and educators indoctrinate their students with “non-judgmental” attitudes – then the moral infrastructure corrodes and crumbles.

Another way is by criminalizing citizens who are going about their lawful business. This method is as ruthlessly pursued by the Obama administration, in the name of preserving the environment and species, as the promotion of mob-rule.

How it is done is described in this study by Joe Luppino-Esposito, a Visiting Fellow at the the Heritage Foundation:

How did a law originally enacted to target poaching of migratory birds evolve to authorize an armed raid of a guitar factory in search of wooden veneers imported without the proper paperwork? The Lacey Act was the first federal wildlife conservation statute, narrowly targeted at the interstate sale in poached game. But in the century since its enactment, the statute’s scope has been enormously expanded to the point that it now incorporates the wildlife and trade laws of every foreign nation. As a result, it has become a trap for the unwary, placing honest businessmen and businesswomen at risk of criminal liability for unknowing violations of hyper-technical foreign laws and regulations.

In short, the Lacey Act has become the poster child for the phenomenon of overcriminalization and should be at the top of Congress’s list for reform. …

The original Lacey Act was … a modest addition to federal authority. In effect, it promoted federalism by preventing poachers and pot hunters from circumventing the states’ game laws. And it expanded criminal liability hardly at all, making federal crimes out of conduct that was already prohibited under state law rather than creating a new federal mandate. The penalty for a violation was a not-inconsequential $200 fine.

Over time, however, the scope of the Lacey Act expanded as federal legislators became more comfortable with passing broad federal environmental laws. In 1935, Congress increased the penalty for violations to $1,000 with a maximum penalty of six months imprisonment. Congress also empowered Department of Agriculture agents to arrest citizens for violations in their presence and to execute warrants. Most important, Congress also extended the Act’s list of predicate offenses to include foreign laws. This meant that if a bird was “captured, killed, taken, shipped, transported, or carried” in violation of the foreign state from which it originated, the United States could prosecute that individual or organization. …

In 1981 … indigenous plants were added to the list of covered species, including those that are considered endangered under U.S. law and those identified in the appendices of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). …  The Act’s criminal offenses were divided into felonies and misdemeanors, with the former carrying a maximum sentence of five years’ imprisonment and a $20,000 fine and the latter a maximum of one year’s imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. …

The most significant change occurred in 2008, when Congress expanded the statute’s reach once again to criminalize improper marking and labeling of protected plants. As amended, the statute prohibits the “knowing” import or export of a prohibited fish, wildlife, plant or the “knowing” conduct of a sale of prohibited fish, wildlife, or plant. Additionally, anyone who “knowingly engages in conduct prohibited by any provision of this chapter … and in the exercise of due care should know that the fish or wildlife or plants were taken, possessed, transported, or sold in violation of, or in a manner unlawful under, any underlying law, treaty or regulation” may be subjected to criminal punishment.

This amendment was hailed by proponents as the first ban on illegal logging operating across international borders. Critics, however, have explained that tracking wood products back to their sources is incredibly difficult and that the “due care” provision is too vague.

Since the beginning of the debate on the Lacey Act, Congress has been concerned about how the statute may affect legitimate business. The result, one century later, is that individuals who try to act within the law are too often ensnared by the Lacey Act.

David McNab and Abner Schoenwetter, who were engaged in the lobster trade, were convicted under the Lacey Act for importing undersized lobsters in 1999. In addition, some of the lobsters were also egg-bearing, and all of them were shipped in plastic bags instead of cardboard boxes. These were not requirements of American environmental law, but requirements of Honduran law—requirements that Honduran courts later determined were invalid. Nonetheless, McNab and Schoenwetter were sentenced to eight years in prison. Due to the low level of criminal intent required for conviction, it did not matter that the two men were unaware of the Honduran environmental regulations.

More recently, armed federal agents raided Gibson Guitar facilities …

Gibson Guitar Corporation being “the world’s best known and most respected maker of fretted instruments” …

… to seize imported woods intended for fingerboards, for the second time in two years. Although no formal charges have been filed, Gibson believes that it is being targeted for their importing of ebony from Madagascar in 2009 and from India this past year. The Justice Department has confirmed that a criminal investigation is under way.

The case appears to turn on the thickness of the wood and what constitutes “finished” wood. The Indian tariff code “HS 4407” is meant for wood that exceeds 6 millimeters in thickness, which cannot be exported. Wood thinner than that is identified as “HS 4408” and may be exported. In this case, the Indian export documents labeled the fingerboard blanks as “HS 9209,” which refers to “[p]arts (for example, mechanisms for music boxes) and accessories (for example, cards, discs, and rolls for mechanical instruments) of musical instruments,” which may also be exported. But the import forms identified the wood as “HS 4408.” An affidavit filed by a special agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service alleges that the Lacey Act declarations incorrectly identified the wood as finished veneers rather than unfinished wood that exceeded 6 millimeters in thickness. …

In effect, Gibson was raided because of an otherwise harmless paperwork error. At worst (although even this is unclear), the company may have violated regulations pertaining to the export of unfinished wood that were intended to protect jobs in India. In any event, neither the law in question nor the pending investigation seems based upon the alleged violation or appears to have anything to do with protecting the environment.

Beyond criminal intent, both of these cases also raise questions regarding the requirements of foreign law. In the lobster case, evidence was presented showing that the Honduran regulations at issue were invalid because the size restriction had never been signed by the President of Honduras. The Honduras Attorney General issued an opinion confirming that without the presidential signature, the law was, in fact, invalid. [But] the U.S. court determined that this testimony by an expert on Honduran law was not sufficient to reverse convictions.

As for Gibson Guitar, the company claims that Indian officials permitted the export of the unfinished wood.

If that claim is correct, it appears that in both cases, the United States government is now attempting to make a federal crime out of foreign conduct that the foreign countries do not hold to be unlawful.

Finally, both cases suggest that enforcement of the Lacey Act has deviated far from the Act’s purpose of respecting existing environmental laws to its current use in enforcing laws concerned with trade protection and economic advantage. The Indian regulation that Gibson stands accused of violating exists only to protect Indian workers from foreign competition …  And McNab and Schoenwetter were victims of an anonymous fax to the Fish and Wildlife Service by a competitor who lost out on the bid for the lobster shipment.

Environmental protection was not even at the heart of either case. …

The Lacey Act has now become a casebook example of federal overcriminalization run amok.

The abandonment of law and order along with contemptuous disregard of the Constitution on the one hand, and over-regulation to criminalize the innocent and productive on the other, provide a double-barreled means of bringing free America to its knees. “Change – or else!”

And the change to tyranny is also helped along, of course, by Obamacare, the redistribution of wealth, the growingof the national debt, the corruption of the Department of Justice, the implemention of “Agenda 21″* …

* For the evils of Agenda 21, see our posts: Blessed are the slimy, May 5, 2012; Beware “Agenda 21″, June 24, 2011; The once and new religion of earth-worship, October 27, 2011; Agenda 21: the “smart growth” conspiracy, November 21, 2011;Three eees for environmental equalizing economics, December 4, 2011; Prepare to be DICED, March 23, 2012.

Notice in particular the grinning man who comes near the camera, ready and eager with his stones. No sorrowful religious duty this – it’s pure sport.

The video clip – which is new to us though we don’t know when it was made – and the following text and pictures are from Islam Watch:

Stoning-to-death for adultery is a legal form of punishment in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Muslim-dominated northern Nigeria, Taleban-rule Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Islamists-controlled region of Somalia. Indonesia’s Aceh province legalized stoning to death of adulterers in 2009. In Sharia-ruled Islamic countries …, stoning being a form of legal punishment, offenders are killed by stoning on a regular basis, but those cases get little media attention to the outside world. Stoning adulterers and/or fornicators to death or orders to do so have also been reported in countries like the Sudan, Turkey, Nigeria, and Pakistan, perpetrated extra-judicially upon fatwa by local imams and village courts.

Somali adulterer readied for stoning to death

Somali adulterer stoned to death

How many stones hitting his head, his face, his shoulders, the part of his body that was not buried in the ground, did it take to kill him, we wonder. How long did the killing take? Was he stunned and rendered unconscious long before he died, or did he fully experience the blows and the pain almost to the end?

Compassioneers of the Left who habitually protest against death penalties being carried out on convicted murderers painlessly by lethal injection in the US, say nothing that we can hear against Muslims killing men and women by the cruel and primitive method of stoning, for doing something not regarded as criminal in civilized countries: having a sexual relationship without their being married to each other. Or for merely thinking about having it. Or for being suspected of merely thinking about having it. Muslims say it is by God’s law, the law of “Allah the merciful”.

See also our post The religious observance of stoning, July 11, 2011, where we first posted this:

If the stones are too big they’ll finish off the victim too quickly; if they’re too small they might not be lethal. Muslim men went to a lot of trouble at some time in the past to determine the right size of stones for carrying out these atrocities – by experimenting on people? How else?

Under daily observation from thousands of surveillance cameras mounted everywhere from street corners to taxicabs to public parks, Britons rank among the most-watched people on earth. But a new government plan is poised to take the gaze of this nation’s security services dramatically deeper: letting them examine the text messages, phone calls, e-mails and Web browsing habits of every person in the country.

According to the Washington Post report that we are quoting –

Britain generates more than 2 million e-mails a minute, and observers say the government may face technical challenges in capturing and storing such vast amounts of data. Currently, firms are required to store some communications data, such as phone calls, for one year. But the proposed law could compel them to store far more varied forms — such as Skype calls or online video game data — for at least twice as long.

Even with massive electronic help in selecting words and phrases to reduce the millions of messages, how  many people working how many hours would be needed to investigate the (surely still enormous) residue? And if they do come upon evidence of crime being plotted or committed, what will they do about it?

It’s not as if the police are really working to reduce crime (except maybe drug related crimes). For years now in Britain, if a crime is reported the police routinely issue the victim with a number but seldom investigate it. If the police investigate a crime, they seldom make an arrest; if they make an arrest, the case seldom comes to court;  if it comes to court the accused is seldom found guilty;  if the accused is found guilty, he is seldom convicted; if he is convicted he is seldom sentenced; if he is sentenced he seldom goes to prison; if he goes to prison he is seldom – no, he is never kept there even for the inadequately punitive time he is sentenced to serve.

Terrorists? If they are Muslim – and are there any terrorists other than Muslims now? – they are unlikely to be charged; if charged they are unlikely to be tried; if tried they are unlikely to be convicted; if convicted they are unlikely to be punished. Instead they are likely to be luxuriously housed and granted lavish incomes at tax-payers’ expense. (See our posts The tale of a Muslim terrorist parasite January 18, 2012, and A model citizen December 17, 2010.)

So what would the watching and listening really be for?

The only plausible answer is: for government power and control. But what is the feeble feckless government doing with its power? What is it controlling and to what end? Britain aims for nothing, has no vision of its future, and is unlikely to become an Iran-like or Afghanistan-like totalitarian state until Islam comes to power. Of course that won’t take long now, and Islam knows exactly what it will compel everyone to do. It will be nice for the Islamic Enforcers to find efficient means of surveillance already in place for them.

Let’s read on.

The “snooping” proposal set to be presented in Parliament later this year is sparking an uproar over privacy in Britain, fueling a debate over the lengths to which intelligence agencies should go in monitoring citizens — a debate that has resonance on both sides of the Atlantic.

Government officials say the new powers are critical to countering terrorism and other threats in an era of fast-changing social media, with criminals using even seemingly innocent venues such as Facebook and online games as means of communication. But furious citizen groups and some members of Parliament see the push as a part of Britain’s evolution into a “surveillance society” in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States and the 2005 London bombings.

Although the plan is yet to be fully outlined by the Conservative-led government, observers say parts of it may go beyond even the ability of officials in the United States to quickly access private data. Critics say the sheer breadth and scope of the plan also could put Britain out in front of other European countries such as Germany, where the government acts to block some Web sites deemed objectionable, and Sweden, where a law passed in 2008 allows the government to intercept international communications conducted via phones or the Internet.

“I’m afraid that if this program gets introduced, the U.K. will be leapfrogging Iran in the business of surveilling its citizens,” said Eric King, head of research at Privacy International. “This program is so broad that no other country has even yet to try it, and I am dumbfounded they are even considering it here.”

The plan may authorize the national surveillance agency — which is known as GCHQ and whose Web site describes its mission as keeping “our society safe and successful in the Internet age” — to order the installation of thousands of devices linked to the networks of Internet service providers, giving agents broader access to everyday communications. The examination of the contents of those exchanges — such as the text or images contained in an e-mail — would still require special warrants. But for the first time, intelligence agencies might, for instance, access information such as the times, destinations and frequencies of phone calls, texts and e-mails without a warrant…

The measure reportedly would compel communications companies to grant intelligence agents instant access to real-time information in certain circumstances, such as data that could be used to target the location of a user’s mobile phone or computer if authorities suspected a crime was in progress. It remained unclear whether British authorities would need judicial or other authority before accessing such data.

“It is vital that police and security services are able to obtain communications data in certain circumstances to investigate serious crime and terrorism and to protect the public,” Britain’s Home Office — a rough equivalent to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — said in a statement.

Privacy advocates reacted swiftly Monday, saying the move would intrude so deeply into the lives of British citizens that it would rival or exceed measures used by totalitarian governments. They say it marks another of many steps that have curtailed privacy rights here in the post-Sept. 11 world, with one study by British police officials, for instance, indicating that a person strolling around London is captured on film by at least 68 cameras on any given day …

As it stands, key aspects of the proposal may go beyond the kind of surveillance now authorized in the United States, where privacy advocates were quick to raise concerns about the plan — especially given the heavy traffic of transatlantic communication. …

How does America do its watching?

Access in the United States to “metadata” — such as the time, who e-mailed whom and how often — depends on the kind of data and type of case. For example, authorities have to obtain court orders before accessing real-time data in both criminal and national security cases.

In criminal cases, authorities need a subpoena to get stored metadata on phone numbers dialed but a court order for e-mail information. In contrast, federal agents seeking stored e-mail header information in national security cases have contended that they may use a national security letter, which is an administrative subpoena that can be issued by an FBI field office. But some providers have refused access to such data without a court order.

Only some? And should that make us less worried?

Is it possible that sheer overreach could render government impotent? That freedom will be recovered because government has too big a body for its tiny brain, like dinosaurs, and will perish by taking on far more than it can ever accomplish, losing sight of what it means to accomplish and why?

Or would anarchy result? And would that make it easier or harder for Islam to take over?

(Hat tip to our reader True Freethinker for the link to the video)

Jonathan S. Tobin wrote at Commentary-Contentions on March 17:

Yesterday, John Demjanjuk died in a German nursing home. Though twice convicted of participation in one of history’s great atrocities, with the assistance of clever lawyers, liberal judges and owing to his age and infirmity, Demjanjuk didn’t pass away in jail. Upon his death, his family once again declared his innocence and, due to a technicality in German law that says sentences are not final until the last appeal is ruled on, could even claim that his death voided his conviction. The New York Times obituary, though providing voluminous detail about his case, insisted on describing his case as merely a one of “questions” and “mysteries.”

But any objective examination of his story reveals little that could be fairly termed a “mystery.” Demjanjuk was a soldier in the Red Army who was captured by the Germans. Like many other Ukrainians he fought for Hitler’s army. But he was no ordinary turncoat solider hoping to evade the grim fate that befell most Soviet prisoners of the Nazis. He volunteered to be a death camp guard. Even if one accepts the doubts that were raised as to whether he was the infamous “Ivan the Terrible” of the Treblinka extermination facility, there is no doubt that he was a terrible Ivan who served at the equally horrific Sobibor, Majdanek and Flossenbürg camps. But though enough proof of his complicity in these crimes was brought forward to secure two convictions many years later, like many another Holocaust criminal, Demjanjuk didn’t die inside prison walls. While his Holocaust-denying fan club (among whose members we must count pundit and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan) may claim the last laugh we must credit the hard work of activists and prosecutors who never gave up the fight to bring him to book for his crimes. In doing so, they did honor to the victims as well as to the cause of justice. We can’t help but note though that their efforts must be said to have fallen short since Demjanjuk never got the date with the hangman that he richly deserved.

The Cold War allowed many Eastern Europeans who took part in Nazi-era crimes to pretend to be victims. Demjanjuk was one such person and like many others who took part in these crimes, Demjanjuk evaded the long arm of the law after World War II ended and entered the United States where he took the name John and eventually became a citizen and raised a family. But unfortunately for him, evidence of his ties to the SS was uncovered, including an identity card with his picture. Survivors also identified him. His lies were eventually exposed and after many years of litigation the Justice Department was able to revoke his citizenship and deport him to Israel where he was put on trial.

After exhaustive arguments and extensive testimony from survivors who identified him as the man who brutally assaulted victims and killed many with his bare hands at Treblinka, Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death. But five years later, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the verdict and set him free.

The court’s justification for this action was the claim that other guards claimed that another Ivan, named Marchenko was the “terrible” guard of Treblinka. But the court’s ruling was not so much a conclusive ruling about his innocence as a meditation on the role of Israel justice. The majority seemed to feel that so long as even a shadow of a doubt existed as to his guilt it would be better that Israel should not take his life or deprive him of his liberty. This was meant and was actually perceived in many quarters as tribute to the quality of Jewish mercy as well as Israeli justice but it may well have been very bad law. As even the Times noted, Demjanjuk had listed his mother’s maiden name as Marchenko on his U.S. entry papers. The preponderance of evidence still must be said to show that Demjanjuk really was Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka.

Instead of the execution that he merited, he was sent back to America in 1993. But there again, intrepid prosecutors set to work to try and convict him again, this time, for being a guard at the camps that his lawyers said he was at rather than Treblinka. Again long delays put off his second deportation and trial (this time in Germany) and his conviction on those awful charges did not come until 2011. …

Among the most shameful aspects of this story is the way some, like Buchanan, used Cold War enmity to obfuscate the guilt of Demjanjuk and other Eastern Europeans who were Hitler’s collaborators. Also shameful was the criticism aimed at the many Holocaust survivors who stepped forward to identify Demjanjuk as one of their torturers. The aspersions cast and doubts that were raised about the veracity of their testimony were deeply unfortunate. Most of all, the unwillingness of the Israeli Supreme Court to take responsibility for the case and to rule with fairness as well as mercy did little honor to that institution.

The plain fact of the matter is that John Demjanjuk never got the sentence his crimes warranted. In that he was not alone since many such criminals evaded prosecution, let alone prison time or execution. And for that we may all hang our heads in shame.

What would be justice for the Nazis and their paid sadists? What would be justice for Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Kim Jong-il, Joseph Kony, Torquemada …? “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”  – though sentimentally decried by Christians and liberals – is a good definition of justice. It aims for balance, for the punishment fitting the crime. But what should be done to men who take hundreds, thousands, millions of eyes and teeth and lives?

Was hanging a just punishment for Adolf Eichmann? Oh, he had to be hanged. Anything less than the taking of his life would have been egregious injustice. It was the most that could be done to punish him, yet it wasn’t much. The Israeli court, too tender of its own conscience (a form of moral hubris typical of the Left), should have hanged Demjanjuk, yet it wouldn’t have been enough. For great crime there is no condign punishment. 

For lesser crimes justice may be done. It’s past time that Pat Buchanan were condemned for his Nazi sympathies, at least in the court of public opinion.

Here’s a new scandal in the on-going climate change drama.

It concerns a now disreputable scientist, Peter Gleick, who “studies the hydrological cycle” and “serves as president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security in Oakland, Calif.” Or did so serve.

The Washington Post – sympathetic to warmism – reports:

The battle over climate science continues to escalate. The latest skirmish culminated in the admission Monday night by Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and author, that he assumed a fake identity to obtain documents that would expose the inner workings of a climate skeptic group. 

The “climate skeptic group” is the Heartland Institute. Gleick (and the Washington Post, no doubt) hoped the stolen documents would expose something shady about that honest institution, but they didn’t. So in the interests of manmade global warming’s higher truth, Gleick found he had to forge a document to fulfill his hope.

Here’s what the Heartland Institute President Joe Bast has to say about Peter Gleick, the theft and the forgery. He names the scandal “Fakegate”.  (Video from Watts Up With That?):

And this commentary is from RedState:

The preliminary steps of removing Peter Gleick from positions of authority and respect have begun: he’s ‘resigned’ from his position with the National Center for Science Education, and his scientific ethics task force chairmanship(!) for the American Geophysical Union. One wonders whether groups like the MacArthur Fellows Program and NAS will insist that Gleick cut all ties from them, as well. Nobody’s really expecting the Pacific Institute to join in, of course: it’s a well-known reliable quote machine for the American Left.

Quick background: last week … a variety of documents appeared that purported to show that there was some sort of nefarious global warming ‘denialist’ (that’s what a Lefty calls somebody who has noticed that, hey, the temperature’s not actually rising the way that people told us it would) conspiracy centered around the Heartland Institute. The Heartland Institute was not amused by this, and has been making it clear that at least one document was a pathetic forgery. This latter point has generally been conceded by all the players, if tacitly, and the great walkback is beginning. …

But let’s go back to what got revealed, for a moment. The documents can be grouped into two categories: a variety of materials that global warming advocate (and lecturer on ethics) Peter Gleick admitted stealing from Heartland; and the aforementioned pathetically faked document. Since we now know that not even Gleick is standing by the provenance of said document, let us ignore it completely… So, what’s in those [stolen] documents?

• Fundraising plan – confidential budget and fundraising information that has nothing to do with Heartland’s positions on climate change policy (thus, not germane). Also, this was a general fundraising plan, not one specifically concentrating on climate change.

• 2012 Budget -…Umm, it’s their general budget. No line items for Sooper Sekret Globeal Wharming Projekt here. Just salary/line item information that’s nobody’s business except Heartland’s.

• January 17, 2012 Director’s Agenda – They read a bunch of reports at that one. Which happens at every meeting, everywhere, and will continue to do so until the end of time, amen.

• Notice of January 17, 2012 – I assume that it’s here to get more phone numbers into the internet stream.

• IRS Tax forms …

• October 18, 2011 Director’s meeting …

• Board of Directors contact list – Hey, let’s make sure that Heartland staffers get a lot of personalized hate mail/stalkers/harassment! Smooth move there, Peter Gleick.

In other words? Nothing. No conspiracies, no nefarious plans, nothing really of particular interest to outsiders – except, of course, for contact information for Heartland’s top staff, which is provided in handy-dandy format for the Left’s near-psychopaths to use to try to make a bunch of climate “denialists’” lives miserable. Which is really the point to this sort of thing; it’s not actually about the climate, and it’s not even really about the politics. It’s about shutting people up.

*

The term “warmther” has come into use to describe an Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) devotee; on the analogy of “truther” to describe the obsessive who believes fantastic lies about 9/11.

The Occupy movement is turning against and horrifying its supporters on the religious left.

This is from an article by Mark Tapson at Front Page:

Initially, the Los Angeles Times pronounced the Occupy movement “a predominantly secular undertaking,” although it did note that “some left-leaning religious groups see a golden opportunity in the Occupy movement, whose central message of greater economic equality resonates deeply among faith-based progressives.”

Sure enough, religious progressives did rush to anoint the movement as it began to swell. [Some] religious left icons … rhapsodized about the Occupiers standing with Jesus in their defense of the poor, even resembling St. Francis of Assisi….

St. Francis of Assisi, it is worth noting, was very much like the average Occupier: a rebel against his bourgeois parents who had made their ample fortune in trade.

By the beginning of December The Huffington Post asserted that “more than 1,400 faith leaders from around the country [had] signed a pledge of solidarity with Occupy protesters.” They conducted services and provided counseling, and their churches hosted Occupy meetings. Religious communities of all stripes rushed to offer the Occupiers shelter and solidarity:

In addition to spiritual ministry and space to assemble and sleep, religious communities have provided the Occupy movement with material support such as food, clothing, tents, blankets and heaters.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams wrote that Jesus would be among the Occupiers of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and that the movement had prompted people to examine themselves and ask, “What would Jesus do?” …

If the Occupiers did ask themselves “What would Jesus do?” then they apparently came to the conclusion that Jesus would expose himself, rape, urinate and defecate in public, endanger children, steal, trespass, trash public and private property, harass and denounce Jews, assault non-protesters and police, block traffic, take drugs, hurl Molotov cocktails and blood and vinegar, and more. … To date, arrests at Occupy events number over 6,000, including over 400 in Oakland alone last weekend.

By contrast, the Tea Party movement doesn’t even litter.

So it was only a matter of time before the Occupiers began misbehaving in the very churches that had given them sanctuary and assistance …

Members of the movement urinated on a cross inside a Brooklyn church recently and have been accused of desecrating New York’s West Park Presbyterian Church. The pastor ordered sixty protesters to leave the sanctuary after one of them stole a bronze lid from the $12,500 baptismal font. Initially a supporter of the Occupy movement, the pastor now is outraged by their behavior …

Some leftists begin to see sense when they’re hit on the head or robbed by fellow leftists. But we don’t suppose that any number of hits on the head will wake up Archbishop Rowan Williams. He’s probably still expecting a polite Thank-you note from leaders of the Occupy movement.

Occupiers also began wreaking havoc in London’s St Paul’s Cathedral, the very one where Archbishop Williams claimed Jesus would be showing His solidarity.

The registrar of St Paul’s, Nicholas Cottam, described the disruptions:

Desecration: graffiti have been scratched and painted on to the great west doors of the cathedral, the chapter house door and most notably a sacrilegious message painted on the restored pillars of the west portico.

Human defecation has occurred in the west portico entrance and inside the cathedral on several occasions.

We like the idea of human defecation “occurring”. No actual crapper to be blamed for crapping intentionally in the sacred precincts. It recalls the old Christian conundrum about “hating the sin but loving the sinner”.

He also noted noisy interruptions during services, foul language directed at staff, and the use of alcohol and other stimulants that appeared to “fuel the noise levels day and night.” Litter has piled up and dogs roam freely on the site. This led to more than half of the schools scheduled to visit the cathedral cancelling since the occupation began there in October. Visitor numbers were also down by half, leaving the cathedral’s cafe, shop and restaurant “faltering.”

A little trade on the side? What would St. Francis have said about that?  And isn’t there a story about Jesus chasing money-changers out of the Temple? Okay, not money-makers, but still …

The cathedral’s director of community and children’s services expressed concern about people who were exhibiting behaviour that was indicative of poor mental health …

Only some people? And we’d assumed that all members of the Occupy movement were in poor mental health!

… people who were exhibiting signs of drug use including stumbling and compulsive behaviour, people who had body odor arising from significant periods without washing or change of clothing and a number of people who were clearly under the influence of drugs and alcohol.

The only surprising thing about all this being that the director was surprised.

Occupiers recently threw Bibles at police officers from an abandoned San Francisco hotel, and disrupted a Right to Life rally inside the Rhode Island state capitol, shouting down a priest’s prayer and tossing condoms on Catholic school girls.

Well, boys will be boys.

And sentimental idealism whether of the church or a political movement invites a dousing with the cold water of actuality.

Everything possible should be done to save children and their mothers from a sinking ship.

Feminists though, if they’re to be true to their professed principles … Pause. True to their professed principles? Principles such as freedom from male oppression? Never. Vide their indifference to the subjugation of Muslim women. So let’s say, their clamor… If they’re to be true to their clamor for equality with men, feminists on board a sinking ship insufficiently supplied with lifeboats should be willing to go down with it.

This post is about the sinking of a particular ship, about the captain and most of his men pushing past women and children to save themselves, and how the event is a metaphor for the sinking of Europe – and of  civilization. We view feminism, along with all leftist egalitarian movements, as a cause of our civilization’s decline.   

On what happened when the cruise-ship Costa Concordia hit the rocks and sank, Mark Steyn writes:

There was no orderly evacuation from the Costa Concordia, just chaos punctuated by individual acts of courage from, for example, an Hungarian violinist in the orchestra and a ship’s entertainer in a Spiderman costume, both of whom helped children to safety, the former paying with his life.

The miserable Captain Schettino, by contrast, is presently under house arrest, charged with manslaughter and abandoning ship. His explanation is that, when the vessel listed suddenly, he fell into a lifeboat and was unable to climb out. Seriously. Could happen to anyone, slippery decks and all that. Next thing you know, he was safe on shore, leaving his passengers all at sea. On the other hand, the audio of him being ordered by Coast Guard officers to return to his ship and refusing to do so is not helpful to this version of events.

In the centenary year of the most famous of all maritime disasters, we would do well to consider honestly the tale of the Titanic.

On the Titanic, the male passengers gave their lives for the women and would never have considered doing otherwise. On the Costa Concordia, in the words of a female passenger, “There were big men, crew members, pushing their way past us to get into the lifeboat.” …

The principle that when a ship sinks the women and children should be first in the lifeboats was established, Steyn says, on February 26, 1852, when –

HMS Birkenhead was wrecked off the coast of Cape Town while transporting British troops to South Africa. There were, as on the Titanic, insufficient lifeboats. The women and children were escorted to the ship’s cutter. The men mustered on deck. They were ordered not to dive in the water lest they risk endangering the ladies and their young charges by swamping the boats. So they stood stiffly at their posts as the ship disappeared beneath the waves. As Kipling wrote:

“We’re most of us liars, we’re ‘arf of us thieves, an’ the rest of us rank as can be,

But once in a while we can finish in style (which I ‘ope it won’t ‘appen to me).”

Sixty years later, the men on the Titanic – liars and thieves, wealthy and powerful, poor and obscure – found themselves called upon to “finish in style,” and did so. They had barely an hour to kiss their wives goodbye, watch them clamber into the lifeboats, and sail off without them. They, too, ‘ope’d it wouldn’t ‘appen to them, but, when it did, the social norm of “women and children first” held up under pressure and across all classes.

Today there is no social norm, so it’s every man for himself – operative word “man,” although not many of the chaps on the Titanic would recognize those on the Costa Concordia as “men.” From a grandmother on the latter: “I was standing by the lifeboats and men, big men, were banging into me and knocking the girls.”

Whenever I write about these subjects, I receive a lot of mail from men along the lines of this correspondent:

“The feminists wanted a gender-neutral society. Now they’ve got it. So what are you complaining about?”

We think that’s a pertinent and cogent argument – though a distressing one, since we’re not all feminists.

And it doesn’t exonerate the men.

So the manly virtues (if you’ll forgive a quaint phrase) shrivel away to the so-called “man caves,” those sad little redoubts of beer and premium cable sports networks.

We are beyond social norms these days. A woman can be a soldier. A man can be a woman. A 7-year-old cross-dressing boy can join the Girl Scouts in Colorado because he “identifies” as a girl. It all adds to life’s rich tapestry, no doubt. But I can’t help wondering, when the ship hits the fan, how many of us will still be willing to identify as a man. …

Now to the nub:

The Costa Concordia isn’t merely a metaphor for EU collapse but – here it comes down the slipway – the fragility of civilization. Like every ship, the Concordia had its emergency procedures – the lifeboat drills that all crew and passengers are obliged to go through before sailing. As with the security theater at airports, the rituals give the illusion of security – and then, as the ship tips and the lights fail and the icy black water rushes in, we discover we’re on our own: from dancing and dining, showgirls and saunas, to the inky depths in a matter of moments.