Today, April 22, is Earth Day, the Holy Day of the present-day religion of Gaia.

She is very thirsty for human blood.

Here’s a UK government 2010 video canvassing our sympathy for the environmentalism that Earth Day celebrates:

Earth Day was begun in 1970.

Alan Caruba, writing at Canada Free Press, quotes leading environmentalists of that year:

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” – George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” – Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” – New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” – Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.” – Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day in 1970.

“What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” – Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator (D-CO)

“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” – Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace.

“We have wished, we eco-freaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion — guilt-free at last!” – Steward Brand, writing in the Earth Catalog.

Now there’s a confession! Affording us proof of a theory we’ve held about eco-freaks these many years.

“Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.” – Dave Forman, founder of Earth First

Indeed it will. No one left to worry about anything.

“I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.” – John Davis, editor of the Earth First Journal

Yeah, pity about modern medicine curing diseases. Much nicer when life was hard, agonizing and short.

“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing….This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run.” – An editorial in The Economist.

All that was way back when Earth Day was begun.

How have the predictions panned out?

Daniel Flynn, a skeptic with a taste for facts, writes at Front Page:

The world’s population on [the forty-second] Earth Day is double the world’s population on the first Earth Day. Rather than ushering in Doomsday, more people have meant a more livable Earth. Life expectancy rates in the U.S. have ballooned by about ten years for men and women since the first Earth Day. Other parts of the world have experienced even greater gains. Revolutions in travel and communications have made the globe a smaller ball. Farming techniques opposed by extreme environmentalists have shifted the conversation from “Will we have enough to eat?” to “Will we eat what’s healthy?” The more, the merrier.

But in the doom-predicting and humanity-hating business, nothing’s changed.

The following comes from an article at Infowars.com by Paul Joseph Watson:

In 2006, an environmental magazine to which Al Gore and Bill Moyers had both granted interviews advocated that climate skeptics who are part of the “denial industry” be arrested and made to face Nuremberg-style war crimes trials.

[In 2010]  “Gaia hypothesis” creator James Lovelock asserted that “democracy must be put on hold” to combat global warming and that “a few people with authority” should be allowed to run the planet because people were too stupid to be allowed to steer their own destinies. 

Writing for Forbes Magazine, climate change alarmist Steve Zwick calls [now] for skeptics of man-made global warming to be tracked, hunted down and have their homes burned to the ground, yet another shocking illustration of how eco-fascism is rife within the environmentalist lobby. … “We know who the active denialists are – not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn. Let’s swap their safe land for submerged islands. Let’s force them to bear the cost of rising food prices. … They broke the climate. Why should the rest of us have to pay for it?” …

It’s the argument of a demented idiot who’s obviously in the throws of a childish tantrum over the fact that Americans are rejecting the global government/carbon tax agenda for which man-made global warming is a front in greater numbers than ever before.

*

What news for this special day from the Gaian Church of Man-Made Global Warming?

This comes from an article by Daniel Greenfield at Front Page:

A University of Illinois 2009 survey [found] that 97.4% of scientists agree that mankind is responsible for global warming. This is easily debunked when one considers its selection methodology. … The Illinois researchers decided that of the 10,257 respondents, the 10,180 who demurred from the so-called consensus “weren’t qualified to comment on the issue because they were merely solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists, astronomers and the like. Of the remaining 77 scientists whose votes were counted, 75 agreed with the proposition that mankind was causing catastrophic changes in the climate. And, since 75 is 97.4% of 77, ‘overwhelming consensus’ was demonstrated once again.” The real percentage of concurring scientists in the survey is less than .008%. That these 75 were … “scientists of unknown qualifications” adds yet another layer to the boondoggle.

Food and water may from now on be allocated to or withheld from you on the decision of a single Obama deputy.

Very quietly on March 16 the President issued an Executive Order – the instrument by which he is increasingly inclined to govern – which gives him and his gang this power.

The EO grants the administration martial law powers in peacetime.

Drudge and Canada Free Press have carried this news. The mainstream media must know about it. If they choose not to report it, what are they allowing by their silence?

The issue of such an order in peacetime raises suspicion that Obama may be preparing to refuse to relinquish power if he is defeated in the November presidential election.

This is from Canada Free Press, by Alan Caruba:

An Executive Order posted on the White House website on Friday, March 16, 2012, has generated a wave of fear. It is officially about “National Defense Resources Preparedness” and its stated policy addresses “national defense resource policies and programs under the Defense Production Act of 1950.”

Its stated policy is that “The United States must have an industrial and technological base capable of meeting national defense requirements and capable of contributing to the technological superiority of its national defense equipment in peacetime and in times of national emergency.”  …

In effect, the EO allows the federal government, directed by the President, to commandeer and control all aspects of the economy and the lives of all Americans. It centralizes control to an astonishing and frightening degree. …

It parcels out control to the Secretary of Agriculture with respect to food resources …

The Secretary of Energy with respect to all forms of energy;

The Secretary of Health and Human Services with respect to health resources;

The Secretary of Transportation with respect to all forms of civil transportation;

The Secretary of Defense with respect to water resources; and

 The Secretary of Commerce with respect to all other materials, services, and facilities, including construction materials.

The obvious question is why is this EO necessary in the absence of any threat of an invasion or even an attack? [And] why should the President of the United States, in the run-up to a national election, feel that this is the time to issue such an EO?

I have frankly been dismissive of widely expressed fears that Obama would or could carry off a coup d’etat to establish himself as an American dictator. The problem, however, is that Obama has surrounded himself with Cabinet Secretaries and a shadow government of “czars” that would likely support him if he were to attempt such an audacious move.

The “legality” of such a move would be rubber-stamped by the Attorney General whose regard for the Constitution and laws of the nation is dubious at best, elastic at worst. The President’s views about the Constitution are well known and he resents the limits it puts on his powers.

Would Congress stand by and allow its powers be usurped? Imagine yourself a Senator or Representative fearful of arrest and detention. Rounding up all 435 members would not be a difficult task.

The nation’s media, with exceptions, has “covered” for this President regarding the legitimacy of his right to hold office, his absurd energy policies, and his takeover of various segments of the nation’s economic base; the auto industry, the insurance industry, and Obamacare’s attempt to takeover the healthcare sector.

That is why this EO has evoked such fear and concern and that is why Congress has to assert its Constitutional powers before this President is permitted to overthrow the legislative branch of government and seize control through an EO that is so broad that it is a breathtaking seizure of power that could only be considered if the nation was, in fact, under attack.

This EO is about “preparedness”, but for whom?

Is this unwarranted scare-mongering? Or is it valid cause for fear?

The Cult of Warm doesn’t accept that there is a debate. As far as they are concerned, the debate never happened because it never needed to happen because they were always right. They can’t intelligently address dissent, because their science is not based on discovering the evidence needed to lead to a consensus, but on insisting that there is a consensus and that accordingly there is no need to debate the evidence. …

So Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page.

Here are some more quotations that we like:

If you believe that freedom is at the core of what it means to be human, then the Warmists and what they stand for are instinctively repulsive to you. On the other hand, if you believe that human society must be organized into a moral collective for the betterment of all, then the Warmist idea provides a wake up call compelling us to form into ranks and goose step in recycled rubber boots into the green future. …

The Cult of Warm has no use for science except as a totem to wave over the crowd. They don’t want to be the seekers for knowledge, but the exclusive possessors of absolute truths. And that isn’t how science works. …

Global Warming has gotten too big to fail. Too many prominent names have committed to it. Too many serious people have nodded their heads and accepted it as an obvious truth, who would be unacceptably embarrassed if it were proven that the whole thing was nothing more than a giant prank. Too many business leaders and governments have invested serious money into it to just shake it off. And much of American and European policy-making is now routed through Global Warming. …

[But] Global Warming is not just a failure of a sizable chunk of the scientific establishment to put theory before ideology, it represents a failure of the entire process by which the West has been governed … It is a demonstration of how a handful of people in prominent positions can push through otherwise unacceptable measures by manufacturing a crisis and pipelining it through business and government. It’s a hack of our entire system of government.

Fortunately, economic realism compels a continuing reliance on fossil fuels, always argues for freedom, and in the long run must win the debate.

The British Conservative James Delingpole, with whom we usually agree, writes at the Telegraph about the dismal view he takes of the Republican Party candidates in this year’s presidential election.

His assessment of them is so dismal that he thinks that letting Obama, “the POTUS from hell”,  wreck the country for another four years would be a better choice than electing any of them.

We cannot wholly agree with him this time because we think no one on the political horizon could be worse for America than Obama, but we like his article and see his point:

Let’s get one thing clear: Obama unquestionably ranks among the bottom five presidents in US history. In terms of sublime awfulness he’s right up there with our late and extremely unlamented ex-PM Gordon Brown – which is quite some doing, given that Brown singlehandedly wrought more destruction on his country than the Luftwaffe, Dutch Elm Disease, the South Sea Bubble, the Fire of London and the Black Death combined.

Agreed: the damage President Obama has done to the US economy with everything from Ben Bernanke’s insane money-printing programme, to his cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, to his ban on deep-water drilling to his crony capitalism hand-outs to disaster zones like Solyndra to his persecution of companies like Gibson is incalculable. And, of course, if he gets a second term the damage he and his rag-bag of Marxist cronies at organisations like the Environmental Protection Agency manage to inflict on the US small businessman trying to make an honest buck will make his first term look like Calvin Coolidge on steroids.

So why do I think this would be preferable to a presidency under Mitt Romney? Simple. Because I’ve seen what happens, America, when you elect yet another spineless, yet ruthless, principle-free blow-with-the-wind, big government, crony-capitalist RINO squish. His name is Dave Cameron – and trust me, the cure is far worse than the disease.

Of course it may not seem that way at first. You’ll be so busy dancing round in circles singing “Ding Dong the witch is dead!” that euphoria and relief will completely overwhelm your intellect and your powers of observation. You’ll read endless articles by David L Brooks, the New York Times’s pet pretend-conservative, telling you how Romney is just the kind of uniting, post-partisan, pragmatic POTUS America needed. And you’ll believe it because you’ll want to believe it. This may last for some considerable length of time. In Britain, many Cameroon conservatives … continue to perform this auto-lobotomisation even now.

But then, little by little, something rather unpleasant will begin to dawn on you. The label on the can may have changed but the contents taste remarkably similar. Similarly emetic, that is.

Yes, I know from the other side of the pond David Cameron may look just the kind of stand-up conservative you’d like running the US. But that’s only because the stories you hear about him are extremely selective. For example, I’m constantly surprised by US talk show hosts telling me how tough on militant Islam Cameron is because of some speech they heard Dave give once about the problems of multiculturalism.

But surely we should judge our political leaders by what they actually achieve rather than (Tony Blair-style) by what they tell us they are achieving.

Here are some of David Cameron’s achievements so far:

He has prolonged the economic crisis …

He has urged quotas for women in the boardroom, apparently in the belief that the State has either the knowledge or the right to decide how business conducts its affairs.

He has presided over a massive wind-farm building programme which, besides destroying the British countryside and enriching his father-in-law, is causing energy bills to soar to the point where old people are dying of hypothermia.

He has surrendered at almost every turn to the Carthaginian terms offered to Britain by the European Socialist Superstate.

He has proved himself incapable of expelling the Islamist hate-preacher Abu Qatada. [See our post The tale of a Muslim terrorist parasite, January 18, 2012.]

The list is by no means exhaustive. I would go on but, actually, this was never meant to be a “collected examples of the unutterable crapness of David Cameron” blog. Rather, it’s supposed to be a more generalised warning about the dangers of short-termist thinking.

Yes, of course, conservative/libertarian America, I fully understand how desperate you are to rid yourself of the POTUS from hell. But what you need to ask yourselves – and I don’t believe many of you are: you’re a bit like an hysterical woman who’s just had a tarantula drop on top of her in the bath, you just want to GET RID OF IT NOW! – is what ultimately you’re trying to achieve.

I’m presuming what you really want is stuff like: smaller government; a genuine – as opposed to an illusory, QE-driven – economic recovery; sensible environmentalism (ie conservation but not eco-fascism); liberty; an end of crony capitalism; a diminution of the power of Wall Street; a resurgence of American greatness; a renewed sense of confidence and purpose.

You’re not going to get any of that from a Romney administration.

But you will, provided you’ve got the patience, get it in 2016 from President West or President Rand Paul or President Palin or President Ryan.

Only it might be TOO LATE.

(Hat-tip Andrew M)

Learn more here.

A socialist society is a stagnant society. And stagnation is a terminal illness of powers and peoples.

Invention springs from one brain, even if the development of it is advanced by other brains. A committee, a commune, a community, a jolly gathering of drinking chums will never do it.

Not only is there no incentive under socialism for an inventor to invent, there is also a lack of what he (have you noticed an inventor is always a “he”?) needs to do it: spare money, spare time, and above all freedom. No one interfering with him, no one saying you may or may not do this or that. No one directing him how to use his time. No one sharing his facilities and tools.

Only freedom fosters innovation.

Look how little in the way of important invention has come out of socialist Europe since WW2. It’s not because Europeans can no longer invent, it’s just that they have to go to non-socialist countries to do it. (Vide Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who invented the World Wide Web – in capitalist Switzerland.)

Fortunately in America, despite Obama’s efforts to turn the United States into Big Sweden, there are still some of the right conditions – some freedom and capital and incentive – for invention. But already ideas conceived in America need to be taken elsewhere for their development. Where? Shamefully, to communist China, because it has a freer economic system, less government regulation, and no pestilential environmentalist lobby. 

Here’s the story of an American inventor and his idea, from an article by Carl Shockley in the National Review:

An extraordinary pair of events occurred this week. They concerned the future of energy and two of the world’s richest men, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. No one took much notice but they have remarkable implications for the future of the American economy.

First, Gates returned from a secret visit to China where, it was revealed in the Chinese press, he struck a deal with the Chinese National Nuclear Corporation to develop the Travelling Wave Reactor, a highly innovative technology that Gates has been developing with his spin-off company, TerraPower.

The Travelling Wave is a profoundly sophisticated technology that, thus far, exists only on paper. The idea is this: First, you design a fuel assembly in the shape of a long cigar, so that it burns slowly end-to-end. The uranium first “burns,” producing heat and electricity and transforming into plutonium and other highly radioactive isotopes in the process – creating what is usually called “nuclear waste.” But this is no “waste,” as the design of the reactor then allows the plutonium to “react” with itself as well, producing another round of nuclear fission and burning up the “waste” fuel in the process. By the time the “wave” has travelled end-to-end it will have generated up to 1000mW or more of electricity for a century with no refueling and very little waste remaining at the end of the process.

The Travelling Wave is the brainchild of Nathan Myhrvold, the legendary chief of research at Microsoft who, a decade ago, founded his own company, Intellectual Ventures, to research futuristic technology. Myhrvold settled on the Travelling Wave as the wave of the future and convinced Gates to fund TerraPower in order to develop it. The company is now working on the design with the aid of “1,024 Xeon core processors assembled on 128 blade servers,” which is a cluster that has “over 1,000 times the computational ability as a desktop computer,” according to its own report. TerraPower President John Gilleland estimates that a demonstration model can be assembled within ten years, with commercialization in 15.

But where to do all this? Developing nuclear technology in the United States means squeezing through the portals of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, that 11-story building in Beltsville, Md., that serves as corporate headquarters and clearinghouse for all new ideas in the nuclear industry. Right now, NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko is complaining he doesn’t have enough staff to conduct license-renewal applications for aging reactors such as Vermont Yankee and New York’s Indian Point (which will conveniently allow him to postpone these contentious issues until after the 2012 election, thereby protecting President Obama’s environmental flank). Getting approval from the NRC to build anything new is basically a lost cause. …  Several start-up companies have been trying to commercialize small-modular reactors but so far they have barely managed to get a foot in the door at the NRC.

So where to go with your revolutionary ideas? Why, China, of course! There they don’t have a mandarinate bureaucracy or hordes of environmental lawyers waiting to oppose your every move. So Gates has taken his pet idea to China — which means, of course, that if the Travelling Wave ever becomes a reality, China will be manufacturing them.

But wait — don’t we have “alternative technologies” that are going to make all this fossil fuel and nuclear stuff unnecessary? That’s what Warren Buffett thinks. Last week his MidAmerican Energy Holdings plunked down $2 billion to buy the 550-megawatt Topaz Solar Farm in the Central Valley of California. This is one of those projects in which about five square miles of photovoltaic panels are deployed in order to produce slightly less electricity than the 40-year-old Vermont Yankee nuclear facility — and only when the sun shines. During the night, when nuclear power just about runs the whole country, we’ll have to try something else.

Is Buffett riding the wave of the future? Does he see something that Gates and others don’t recognize? Well, not really. What he is perceiving most clearly is the array of federal and state subsidies, plus California’s “renewable portfolio standard” that requires utilities to build and buy solar electricity regardless of whether it’s reliable or even needed. … Even if these projects produce off-and-on electricity at four times the price of today’s power, they will be guaranteed a profit.

Under redistributionist big-government regimes there is always Obama-type “crony-capitalism”, which is not capitalism but the destruction of it.

We may soon see a wave of American inventors emigrating to anomalous China where, among other favorable conditions, fossil-fueled and nuclear power will reliably provide the energy to drive progress.

(Hat-tip Andrew M for the link)

Here are a couple of picks from an article  in Canada Free Press, by Dr. Karl L.E. Kaiser, on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change recently held in Durban, South Africa. We’re glad to say it fizzled out with no result to please the delegates other than an agreement to meet and try again to scare the world into enriching the UN.

First, here are some figures to startle and amuse. The first column of figures may be overlooked; not only because they’re uncertain, but the heading is nonsense – not every country, certainly not every little island, has a “federal government”. The second and third columns taken together have the flavor.

Table 1. Official pre-registrants at the Durban conference (COP17).

*) Data from unfccc.int; some registrants’ government affiliations are uncertain.

Clearly there are groups which were represented at extraordinarily high levels on a per capita basis. Without fail, they are the ones who feel that much (or any) of the “green” dollars to be funded (by other countries on this table) are owed to them. To underline the need and claim, the myths about “drowning in a rising sea” are perpetuated. Unfortunately, for them, the facts are somewhat different. Rather than becoming de-populated as we are told, and just prior to the last ocean wave sloshing over the remaining few square miles of land, their populations are doing the opposite. They are expanding in size and “happily living thereafter”. All of the ocean island nations claiming to be inundated by rising seas have had growing populations in recent years, without exception. If you really want to see what is happening, just look, for example, at a Google Earth picture of the Maldives’ main island Male at the coordinates 4° 10’ N, 73° 30’ E. You’ll see luxury yachts at the moorings, hotels, buildings, and residences from shore to shore.

Next, here is news, funny or sad depending on your point of view. (Sad anyway about the birds.)

One of the great green developments touted were thousands of wind mills, sorry, wind turbines, installed in California. Under various state governments, generous tax-subsidized handouts were given to manufacturers and buyers of such. But now, some 14,000 of such turbines are cluttering the landscape of the western US, without producing any power whatsoever. Their gear boxes are broken and they just keep on flailing without generating anything. (But they still keep shredding any bird getting into their path). As the tax subsidies have disappeared, it is not even profitable to repair them any longer, even with the existing (and generous) “feed-in” tariffs. Of course, the groups which were early in the game and have all left the game since, were the real winners. Who cares about any electricity actually being produced?

Dr. Kaiser concludes that “the green bubble has burst”.

We hope he’s right.

As we provoked indignant comments from an environmentalist enemy with our post yesterday (though he/she only addresses marginal points), we return to the attack today with more on the UN’s climate conference being held now in Durban, South Africa, and the lethal threat named “Agenda 21”  (see our posts 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).

Phyllis Schlafly goes right to the heart of the matter – the UN making a power-grab on the pretext of protecting the planet from human depredation – with this article at Townhall:

The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, opening on Nov. 28, called COP-17, is one of a series of U.N. meetings working toward a specific goal … to move the United States into a global government by environmental regulations and a vast network of taxes. These newly imposed taxes will give the U.N. a tremendous stream of money in addition to U.S. dues and congressional appropriations.

The plan for taxes was launched at the 1992 U.N. meeting in Rio de Janeiro, known as the Earth Summit, where Conference Secretary-General Maurice Strong produced a 300-page document with 40 proposals called Agenda 21.

The tax-seeking route then proceeded through U.N. meetings in Cancun in 2010, in Durban this November and will be finalized next year at what is called Rio+20 (i.e., Rio de Janeiro after 20 years).

Agenda 21 is a comprehensive master plan to reshape and control the U.S. while locking us into the clutches of the U.N. under the innocuous phrase “sustainable development.” Along with 178 countries, President George H.W. Bush accepted Agenda 21 as “soft law.” It was adopted by a new tactic called collaborative consensus building, instead of by treaty.

Bush popularized the term “new world order,” but left it for others to define. Mikhail Gorbachev said the threat of an environmental crisis will be the international key to unlocking the new world order, and former President Bill Clinton issued an executive order in 1993 creating the President’s Council on Sustainable Development.

Advocates of Agenda 21 talk about the three E’s of sustainable development: economy, equity and environment.

Equity means replacing our American constitutional system with central planning and social justice, which is a code word for redistribution of wealth, abolition of private property rights and giving favored corporations tax breaks, grants, and use of eminent domain.

Economy means shifting from a private enterprise system to government, private-corporation partnerships. That would be a giant step toward total government and U.N. control of our economy, with the ability to redistribute our goods and services to foreign countries.

Environment means giving animals and plants more rights or equal rights with humans. It also promotes worship of nature and mother Earth.

Yes, a multitude of genuine anti-human fanatics are only too happy to be used by the UN as it pursues its political aim of a centrally controlled world economy, which is to say a global socialist tyranny.

To talk about Agenda 21, you will have to get used to a new vocabulary: green jobs, green building codes, going green, regional planning, smart growth, biodiversity, sustainable farming, growth management, resilient cities, sustainable communities, redistribution, urban growth boundaries, redevelopment districts and consensus.

Agenda 21 wants to herd people into crowded communities with limited housing space and limited parking spaces. This will promote the green goal of reducing our use of automobiles, allowing only electric cars that can’t go very fast or very far, so people will have to walk, use bicycles and mass transit.

Agenda 21 supports the Wildlands Project, which seeks to re-wild 50% of our nation and turn it into a pre-Columbian wilderness where animals roam freely and humans are crowded into limited spaces. Already, we find that rural roads are not being repaired or maintained.

Agenda 21 has started its attacks on rural and small-town property rights. Six hundred U.S. cities and counties have signed on to the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives putting themselves indirectly under supervision of U.N. regulations and restrictions.

Advocates of Agenda 21 believe the earth is overcrowded. They demand an 85% reduction in human population. It’s a major goal of Agenda 21 to lower the U.S. standard of living by cutting our use of energy. Agenda 21 plans to use smart meters, smart grids and smart growth so that our nation’s use of electricity can be controlled, limited and redistributed.

Schools and universities are important to Agenda 21’s goals. The plan is make them indoctrination institutions, where kids are taught “green” propaganda, as well as global education to make them citizens of the world.

The UN will tax “currency transfers, fossil energy production including oil, natural gas and coal, the commercial use of oceans, international airplane tickets and all foreign exchange transactions”.

Taxes of this magnitude would give the U.N. so much power that it would become a de facto world government.

So, Phyllis Schlafly urges, take action to prevent this happening:

Tell your members of Congress to pledge that the day the U.N. adopts this nonsense will be the day we say goodbye to the U.N.

But why wait until then? The UN does enough harm right now.

The UN must be destroyed.

It is not only the probability if a nuclear bomb that is to be feared from Iran’s persistent development of nuclear power.

According to this article, Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor is likely to repeat the disaster of Chernobyl:

The first Iranian nuclear power station is inherently unsafe and will probably cause a “tragic disaster for humankind,” according to a document apparently written by an Iranian whistleblower.

There is a “great likelihood” that the Bushehr reactor could generate the next nuclear catastrophe after Chernobyl or Fukushima, says the document …

It claims that Bushehr, which began operating last month after 35 years of intermittent construction, was built by “second-class engineers” who bolted together Russian and German technologies from different eras; that it sits in one of the world’s most seismically active areas but could not withstand a major earthquake; and that it has “no serious training program” for staff or a contingency plan for accidents. …

Bushehr was started in 1975 when the Shah of Iran awarded the contract to Kraftwerk Union of Germany. When the Germans pulled out after the 1979 Islamic revolution the reactors were far from finished. They sustained serious damage in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88. The document claims airstrikes left the steel containment vessel with 1,700 holes, letting in hundreds of tons of rainwater.

The regime revived the project in the 1990s, but with one reactor only. It wanted a prestige project to show the Islamic Republic could match the scientific achievements of the West.

It may also have wanted a cover for developing its nuclear weapons program — and the opportunities for personal enrichment that the project gave Iran’s elite. This time Iran employed Russian engineers, who had not built a foreign nuclear reactor since the Soviet Union started to collapse in 1989.

Russia’s experts wanted to start from scratch. The Iranians, having already spent more than $1 billion, insisted they built on the German foundations.

This involved adapting a structure built for a vertical German reactor to take a horizontal Russian reactor — an unprecedented operation. Of the 80,000 pieces of German equipment, many had become corroded, obsolete or lacked manuals and paperwork.

“The Russian parts are designed to standards that are less stringent than the Germans’ and they are being used out of context in a design where they are exposed to inappropriate stresses,” the document says. It goes on to claim that “much of the necessary work for Bushehr is outside the competence of the Russian consulting engineers,” who consider the project a “holiday.”

The first victims of a Chernobyl-like disaster in Iran would be the Iranian people. We wonder how many of them are aware of the danger. Even if many of them are, there is nothing effective they can do about it.

It would be a boon for them and the rest of the world if Bushehr were bombed.

The presidency of Barack Obama is disastrous for America, and so for the world. Yet it may turn out to be good for America, and so for the world, because it is such a disaster.

Obama coming to power was “progressive” liberalism coming to power. It was environmentalism coming to power. It was a late-twentieth-century revised leftism coming to power – the leftism that had given up on a vanishing proletariat as the target of its ruthless “compassion” and substituted “victims of colonialism, racism, and sexism”. It was multiculturalism – ie sympathy with Islam – coming to power. It was Robin Hoodism – take from the rich and give to the poor –  coming to power. It was the Western-academic version of egalitarianism coming to power. All those ideological theories that had been stewing in the skullpots  of professors and community-organizers and pacifists and spoilt-kid terrorists ever since the 60s and Vietnam, could now at last be put into practice, and a new Virtuous America would emerge. There would be “social justice”. There would be “free” health care for all and education distributed and quality-controlled by the wise decisions of trade union bosses. Everyone would work – in ever greater numbers for the government. There would be no more fossil-fuel pollution; the sun, the wind and the waves would keep everyone cleanly supplied with light and warmth and transport. No one would eat too much or anything bad for their health. Of course everyone would be less free, but that would be a trifling sacrifice for Virtuous America. All the Left’s high ideals would at last be realized.

To do this Obama was elected.

He has made America poorer and weaker.

Will the lesson be learnt?

If the Obama disaster doesn’t bring the ideology of the Left into derision forever, it should at least keep a few generations from trying the failed experiment again.

Victor Davis Hanson is thinking along the same lines as we are. He writes at PajamasMedia:

Barack Obama has done the United States a great, though unforeseen, favor. He has brought to light, as no one else could, many of the pernicious assumptions of our culture from the last half-century. He turned theory and “what ifs” into fact for all America to see, experience, and, yes, suffer through. …

As a young, post-racial, first African-American president — glib, hip, cool, charismatic, with unapologetic Chicago hard-core leftist roots and Ivy League certification — Barack Obama was right out of liberal central casting. He would do what no other liberal had done in fifty years: prove to America that it really, really was left-of-center by ramming down its throat both a liberal agenda and thousands of left-wing facilitators. …  Obama arrived with a super-majority in the Senate, and a large majority in the House: anything was now possible and almost everything was thus tried. …

At last we sheep got the messianic prophet to deliver the divine message. When he was declared a “god,” with supernatural powers that sent tingles up journalists’ legs, we were at last to climb the mount into the Promised Land. Electing him was the trick; simply enacting his redistributive agenda would be easy … now the people’s money could be at last directed to saving the planet, helping mankind, and bringing heaven to earth. …

What of the Obama effect on the outer world – of the weaker America?

I don’t think another president will ask the Arab League and the UN — but not the U.S. Congress — whether he can lead from behind France and Britain in bombing an Arab oil exporter on behalf of “rebels” who promise Sharia Law. “Putting light” between America and Israel earned us this week’s charade at the UN, and a new Middle East war on the horizon in the manner of 1967 or 1973, but this time with new enemies on the periphery like Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan in addition to a hostile Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. “Reset” won’t be used any more, and the idea that friends like Britain, Israel, Eastern Europe, etc. were to be shunned while rivals and enemies like the Palestinians, Russia, and the Latin American communists were to be courted is over also. Friends are friends for a reason, and enemies the same …

And of the poorer America?

After $5 trillion in borrowing and 9.1% unemployment, Keynesian economics has been slain by Obama. Oh, Obama may crisscross the country demanding just one more chance to borrow another half-trillion to “grow jobs,” but no one is listening any more. “Shovel ready,” “stimulus,” “investments,” and “infrastructure” simply have been redefined by Obama as euphemisms for wasteful borrowing. I doubt they will regain currency for a decade or so. And thanks to Obama, a billion is now a passé noun, and trillion has been reduced to the status of monopoly money. …

The old welfare state after Obama will soon be addressed as never before. With almost 50 million on food stamps, and record numbers on new extended unemployment insurance, with Medicare and Social Security nearly insolvent, the Obama boilerplate remedies of making “millionaires and billionaires,” “corporate jet owners,” and “fat cat bankers” pay their fair share won’t nearly be enough. Obama demagogued the “fair share” issue to the death, and it cannot be demagogued much longer since the money is about gone. …

Of nationalized health care?

For much of the 1950s and 1960s, we were told that we lacked a British-style National Health Service, thanks to all sorts of devilish AMA conspiracies. JFK, LBJ, and Carter could not get passed what we all secretly were supposed to have craved. Hillarycare failed. But Obama alone brought us federalized health care, a trillion-dollar borrowing plan that will supposedly streamline care, save us trillions in the long term, and cost less in the here and now, as state GS-20 doctors attend to us, in DMV lines, far better than their greedy counterparts. Despite all the noble lies, no one believes that. After 2012, ObamaCare will be repealed in short order, and there will be no more fantasies about economical cradle-to-grave health care denied us by conspiratorial doctors and greedy insurers. …

Of race relations?

The public thought, with their first “black” president, they would be hearing even-handed lectures, as one week Obama explained why the federal government had to ensure equality of opportunity in a multiracial society, while on the next he gently warned minorities not to rely on government to ensure parity when success or failure for all Americans far more often hinged on personal choices, discipline, and sacrifice. Instead, Obama voted present while his surrogates ensured that America is more racially polarized than any time in our history [recent history, anyway – JB]. But this too was cathartic. A majority of the population of all races has simply tuned out the now near meaningless charge of “racist” and sees the real danger to America in racial tribalization and balkanization rather than classical racial discrimination. We will see another black president some day, but race will be incidental not essential to his or her character.

Of environmentalism?

For the foreseeable future, “millions of green jobs” and “cap and trade” are also the stuff of comedy. Thanks to Obama we’ve been there with Van Jones, Solyndra, and EPA hyper-regulations, and done that. I don’t think Al Gore will be any more quoted or EU policies emulated. More likely we will go back to finding new fossil fuel sources as private technology keeps improving on alternative energy. Fairly or not, “green” conjures up everything from Climategate to Solyndra, and suggests an entire class of elite academics, financiers, and activists who wished to follow the oil companies’ crony-capitalist business plans of the 1940s and 1950s without the basic truth that oil is a logical energy source and so far a windmill isn’t.

Of socialist idealism in general?

After Obama, I don’t think there will be any more John Kerry or Al Gore sermons about the superior Europe model either. A disarmed, undemocratic, insolvent, shrinking, and increasingly polarized continent is now a model of what the United States should not be. There simply have been too many California as Greece stories for any politicians to advise us with the old admonition: “But In Europe, they….”

Obama thought that he would replicate the EU paradigm. He would bring in properly certified technocrats from academia or government like Chu, Geithner, Goolsbee, Holder, Orszag, Romer, and Summers to oversee massive new regulations and taxes that would dictate from on high how the ignorant masses must be protected from everything from cheap gas to old-style light bulbs. In less than three years, they all proved far more ignorant about what makes America work than the local car dealer, welder, or farmer. After Obama, Americans will not be fooled for a generation or so into thinking that a Harvard PhD or Berkeley professor “really” knows that borrowing is prosperity …

Had McCain been elected, or had Obama proved a canny Clinton triangulator, we would never have gotten out of the bipartisan rut of massive borrowing, growing government, higher taxes, and unionized public employee regulators. But with Obama as the great liberal deliverer and with the masses scared to death of Him, the next president will inherit an America in catharsis. The future is uncertain, but at least now, after our cauterizing, we have some sort of chance to return to the old principles that might save us.