Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is the prime mover in restricting the supply of water to the farms of California’s hitherto fertile Central Valley, so severely that the farmers are going out of business with  dire consequences. Food production is dropping, and local unemployment is 40% and rising.

She is doing this in order, ludicrously, to save the hypomesus transpacificus, a wee fish that she and her fellow environmentalists apparently believe the world cannot conceivably do without. [See our post below, Smelt fishy, 2 September, 2009]

You would think, wouldn’t you, that Nancy Pelosi is passionate about preserving endangered species?

Yet, according to the American Spectator, she herself ‘circumvented ESA [Endangered Species Act] requirements for two endangered species on one of her own investment properties‘.

While hypocrisy so characterizes the left that no new instance of it can be surprising, the wickedness of what Pelosi is doing is too outrageous to be passed over with a sigh.

This is an abuse of power that should be punishable by law. Is it? If not, why not?

Mike Adams, at Townhall, while telling the story of one farmer’s ruin, points out more consequences of this scandal:

For nearly 20 years, California’s water availability has been precariously tied to decisions made by bureaucrats and politicians using the power of the Endangered Species Act. The effects of the far-reaching ESA could ultimately lead to the destruction of one of the most fertile valleys in the world, the reduction of the nation’s food supply and greater dependence on foreign food sources that don’t meet high U.S. food standards. The use of this overriding legislation that mandates federal control of our nation’s land and water is representative of the overall trend in this country of increased government intrusion into the lives of its citizens. That a statutory decree exists that can override human suffering in the service of preserving animal habitats is a serious indictment of our government’s commitment to preserve liberty and the American way of life. …

In August, fifty mayors from the San Joaquin Valley asked President Obama to come see the devastation first-hand. He refused. Obama previously denied a request to designate California as a federal disaster area. To do so would have acknowledged the fact that Obama’s radical environmental policies are, quite literally, scorched earth policies. Just go to the San Joachim Valley and you’ll see plenty of scorched earth.

At least in the eyes of global warmists, Osama bin Laden has his good points: his life-style is very ‘low carbon-footprint’.

PETA, however, wouldn’t approve of him at all – he gassed kittens. But they would see a good side to Adolf Hitler, a vegetarian.

What feminists on the left think of Osama we don’t know: when it comes to the treatment of Muslim women, they prefer to remain non-judgmental. Still, the left in general can give both Osama and Adolf full marks for being anti-Jewish.

Phyllis Chesler writes:

Osama bin Laden’s first wife and one of their sons, Omar, have written a Memoir, Growing Up Bin Laden. … For a son to go public, exposing his father, and for him to stand by his mother, is unheard of, wondrous, heroic, and quite dangerous. Growing Up Bin Laden shows us how cruel, weird, misogynist, and tyrannical Osama is both as a husband and a father. …

Osama did not allow modern medicine for his children; refrigerators were forbidden, as were air conditioners, phones, toys, and televisions. Osama expected his sons to also become suicide killers and he subjected his young children to dangerous and frightening military maneouvers. According to Omar and Najwa, Osama also murdered his children’s pets in chilling ways …

Once, Osama killed a pet monkey. He had one of his lackeys run it over with a car. Osama said “The monkey was not a monkey but was a Jewish person turned into a monkey by the hand of God.” He gassed a new litter of puppies … to see how long it would take them to die.

But what was it that sent Osama totally over the edge? What compelled him to plan the mass murders of civilians on every continent? Omar tells us. When Osama saw American female troops on Middle Eastern Arab soil, he cried out. “ Women! Defending Saudi men!”

Read  more here.

Lawrence Solomon writing for the Financial Post exposes fibs and crimes in the global warming racket:

This week, the doomsters were embarrassed to learn, once again, that the planet was not in grave peril. Antarctica, their greatest candidate for catastrophe, was not melting at an ever-faster rate, according to a report in Geophysical Research Letters, but at the slowest rate in 30 years. To add to their frustration, they couldn’t even lash out at the lead author, Marco Tedesco of the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Department of City College of New York — the doomsters had praised his previous reports showing high rates of Antarctic melt.

The latest news from the Arctic — delivered daily via satellite — is no better. Two years ago with the Arctic ice in rapid retreat, the doomsters, convinced of the coming of an ice-free Arctic, could scarcely contain themselves. Now, with the Arctic ice in rapid return, their anticipation of disaster seems more a cruel hoax of Nature. …

The red faces aren’t all caused by Nature’s refusal to cooperate in Earth’s demise. The clean carbon folks have recently discovered that they’ve been in bed with organized crime. Scotland Yard and Europol, among numerous other law enforcement agencies across Europe, are hot on the trail of scam artists believed to have made off with £1-billion by illicitly trading carbon credits. In Australia, authorities are investigating claims that a supplier to Carbon Planet, a carbon trading business, has been using fake carbon trading certificates to persuade forest dwellers in Papua New Guinea to sign over the rights to their forests under a UN scheme called REDD, for “Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation.’’ Australia’s REDD-faced Climate Change Minister Penny Wong may now be unable to tout Carbon Planet — about to list on the Australian stock exchange on the promise of A$100-million in REDD assets — at the upcoming climate change meetings in Copenhagen. Other dodgy carbon dealings led to the suspension of the UK branch of SGS, one of the world’s largest clean energy auditors, and of the Norwegian certification company DNV.

If universities could blush, Stanford would be setting the skies ablaze with its latest embarrassment, an attempt to censor a global warming documentary about to be released that had filmed one of its professors, global warming catastrophist Stephen Schneider. “You are prohibited from using any of the Stanford footage you shot, including your interview of Professor Stephen Schneider,” Stanford demanded in a letter. “Professor Schneider likewise has requested that I inform you that he has withdrawn any permission for you to use his name, likeness or interview in connection with any film project you may undertake.”

What caused Stanford and Schneider to go ballistic over the release of the documentary, Not Evil Just Wrong, by independent Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer? He asked Schneider about his many predictions of global cooling catastrophe in the 1970s. …

Here is Mark Steyn talking with Hugh Hewitt on the question of whether the war in Afghanistan should be abandoned:

In Afghanistan, it was illegal, it was under the Taliban, illegal by law, by law, for a woman to feel sunlight on her face, illegal by law. And leftist feminists, the left wing feminist organizations in the Western world had absolutely nothing to say about that.

And George W. Bush liberated those Afghan women. He got them out of their burkas. He allowed them to feel sunlight on their face. A year after the Afghan invasion, there were a higher proportion of women elected to the Afghan parliament than to the Canadian parliament. And the idea that you can simply allow this disgusting party of the Taliban effectively to return large parts of Afghanistan to a prison state, is, speaks very poorly for us.

But in a sense, you know, in hard national interest terms, if you want to get out, the thing to do would be to figure out a way to get out without making it look like a defeat. The minute you re-burkaize parts of Afghanistan, what you’re telling the world is that you have been defeated, that the patrons of Osama bin Laden are now back in charge. You couldn’t stick it. You couldn’t stick it. You’re, as the historian Niall Ferguson says … the superpower with ADHD. It hasn’t got the staying power, can’t concentrate long enough… harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.

Now having said that, I think we’ve got confused here. We’re not nation building in Afghanistan. You can’t nation build in Afghanistan. It’s never been a nation in the sense that anybody in the United States or Sweden or Switzerland would recognize. You’re there to identify bad guys, kill bad guys in large numbers. And what has happened, I think, in the sort of multilateralization of the mission there, which wasn’t true at the beginning, by the way, this was a largely American operation in the fall of 2001, with a few special forces from select allies. But since all the sort of non-combat members of NATO have gone in, your Germans and Norwegians and all the rest, the whole thing’s being schoolgirl’d up. And the young men on the streets of Afghanistan and in the hills know that the rules of engagement favor them enormously. And they’ve made a mockery of these NATO forces. NATO and the United States should be there to kill large numbers of bad guys, and nation building is something that will take thousands of years in Afghanistan.

Kill large numbers of the bad guys. Find a way of getting out without  making it look like defeat. Stop using soldiers as social workers. Give up any idea of nation-building.

In our view, all good advice.

But the Afghan women will be re-burkaized. For them to be saved, it is Islam itself that needs to be defeated.

First Islam must be recognized as an irredeemably evil ideology. Then it must be anathematized, in the same way as racism has been anathematized.

If the energy and passion that has gone into saving the world from the imaginary threat of global warming were to be invested instead into saving it from the real threat of Islam, Afghan women might reasonably hope to live their days in the light – and warmth – of the sun.

Lydia Aran, a specialist in Buddhism, wrote an illuminating article on Tibet, published in Commentary magazine in January 2009.  Inventing Tibet needs to be read in full to be fully appreciated. Here we quote parts of it to support our comments on the shock and anger of the Dalai Lama’s admirers on learning that he is not to be received at the White House by its present incumbent.

In the 1960s and 70’s a new Tibet was born, not so much a country as a mental construct. Its progenitor was the Diaspora establishment headed by the Dalai Lama, centered in the Himalayan hill station of Dharamsala in North India. There, the leaders of a small community comprising no more that 5 percent of the Tibetan people as a whole undertook to construct a wholly new idea of Tibetan identity – and hugely succeeded. …

They did so by incorporating into Tibetan Buddhism [traditionally a cult of magic] a number of concepts and ideas that had never been part of Tibetan culture. These include the espousal of non-violence, concern with the environment, human rights, world peace, feminism, and the like …

This kind of Buddhist modernism [which also includes reconciliation with Western scientific thought], unknown in Tibet, was adopted by the Dalai Lama more or less simultaneously with his adoption of a philosophy of non-violence derived from Tolstoy, Ghandi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. To this he eventually added the rhetoric of world peace, ecology, human rights, and the rest of the amorphous agenda that informs the liberal Western conscience. …

[But] nonviolence has never been a traditional Tibetan practice, or a societal norm, or, for that matter, a teaching of Tibetan Buddhism. …

She goes on to tell us of the maintenance of private armies to fight internal wars, and the frequent settlement of political rivalries by assassination in Tibetan history. Before 1960, Dalai Lamas did not preach or practice nonviolence.

Yet here is Robert Thurman, the well-known professor of Tibetan studies at Columbia University … declaring that the great 5th. Dalai Lama (1617-1682) was “a compassionate and peace-loving ruler who created in Tibet a unilaterally disarmed society.” And here, by way of contrast, are the instructions of the 5th. Dalai Lama himself to his commanders, who had been ordered to subdue a rebellion in Tsang in 1660:

‘Make their male line like trees that have had their roots cut; make the female lines like brooks that have dried up in winter; make the children and grandchildren like eggs smashed against rocks; make the servants and followers like heaps of grass consumed by fire; make their dominion like a lamp whose oil has been exhausted: in short, annihilate any traces of them, even their names.’

Until the incorporation of Tibet into the People’s Republic of China in 1950, and the subsequent flight of the 14^th. Dalai Lama to India, Tibet had ‘barely registered in the West’s consciousness’.  The Dalai Lama has made it his life’s mission to preserve ‘the Tibetan cultural heritage’. But what is being preserved is ‘an idealized and hybridized image of his culture for Western consumption’ – at which, the author concedes, he has been ‘spectacularly successful’.

That idealized image … has indeed succeeded in gathering much enthusiastic support, thereby keeping alive both the Tibetan issue [of its annexation by China] and the diaspora community embodying it [our italics].

It is not the real Tibet, but this idealized version of it, made to measure for them by the Dalai Lama and his esoteric circle, that Westerners are emotionally exercized about. To them Tibet is Shangri-La, the fictitious Himalayan community of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, where unique spiritual wisdom is being preserved for the future benefit of the whole world. And they see this Tibet, ‘vague enough to serve as a kind of screen on which to project their own dreams and fantasies’, as ‘highly endangered, in need of urgent support and rescue by the West.’

It is almost as if the Dalai Lama has become for these pacifists and one-worlders, these New Agers and greens, these schizophrenics of the left, the personification of their dreams and fantasies, a living, breathing, symbol of all that they hold dear. As such, he is a thorn in the flesh, or at least a stone in the shoe, of China.

For their almost equally adored President Obama who, they trust, shares their dreams, to refuse to receive the Dalai Lama is incomprehensible even more than it is shocking. It does not compute. They grope for understanding. Yet it isn’t hard to find the reason why. Obama is confronted by China as a child in Jurassic Park is confronted by Tyrannosaurus Rex. ‘The Dalai Lama?’ he stammers at it. ‘No, no, he’s no friend of mine!’

To us, Communist China is an abomination, however economically successful it has become by allowing a degree of economic freedom. We would be happy to see such a regime thwarted by having territory wrested from its grasp. But we do not share the Shangri-La illusion, or believe that Tibet is the guardian of a ‘spiritual wisdom’ that will ultimately save the world. Whether Obama entertains the smiling gentleman or not, does not concern us. What we care about is that the West should continue to be prosperous, free, strong, and rational. The Dalai Lama, Barack Obama, New Agers, Greens, leftists, pacifists, feminists, environmentalists, and one-worlders do not. We watch with a cold eye to see how they fare in the Jurassic Park of international political and economic realities.

The Roman Senator, Cato the Elder, repeated and repeated, in every speech he made, no matter what his subject was, and however irrelevant the iteration:

‘Carthago delenda est!’ –  ‘Carthage must be destroyed’  – until it eventually was destroyed  by Rome in 146 B.C.

He set an example for us. We must repeat and repeat:

The United Nations must be destroyed!

It should be shouted at every protest rally;  written on placards and carried high;   printed on T-shirts; emblazoned on billboards.

The UN must be destroyed!

It is a den of despots, a coven of conspiracy, the engine of evil.

Watch this week as Qaddafi of Libya, Ahmadinejad of Iran and all the other monstrous tyrants gather at the UN to spew their poison.

The International Socialists want to develop the UN into a World Government. They are proposing a universal currency to be issued by the United Nations. They propose United Nations regulation of financial institutions world-wide. They propose that the United Nations enforce controls over the lives of people in all countries to ‘protect the planet’. They propose, in other words, global totalitarianism.

And if the United Nations should became the Kremlin of the whole planet, who might be craving to be its supremo, its Stalin?

Can we think of his name?  Yes, we can.

And we must not let this happen.

UN DELENDA EST!

THE UN MUST BE DESTROYED!

John Perazzo writes at Front Page Magazine (please read it all here):

The Apollo Alliance, which helped craft portions of the $787 billion “stimulus” legislation that the President signed into law in early 2009, exerts a powerful influence on the environmental views and policies of the Obama administration. Specifically, the Alliance had a hand in writing the “clean energy and green-collar jobs provisions” of the bill, for which $86 billion was earmarked. Apollo Alliance’s name gained some notoriety in recent weeks because of its ties to Van Jones, the communist revolutionary who resigned his post as Obama’s “Green Jobs Czar” during Labor Day weekend. But there is another highly noteworthy Jones – Jeff Jones (no relation) – who also holds a lofty post with the Apollo Alliance, and who, as such, also has the ear of the President. Remarkably, Jeff, like Van, also has a history as a communist revolutionary – with longstanding, intimate ties to domestic terrorism, no less.

Today Jeff Jones is director of the Apollo Alliance’s New York State chapter… .

In 1965 Jones joined the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and became active as an anti-war speaker on college campuses. In April 1967 he quit school to become the regional office coordinator of New York City’s SDS chapter, a position he held until December 1968. SDS supported America’s Communist enemies in the Cold War while denouncing the U.S. as a nation rife with bigotry, injustice, greed, and unrestrained militarism – and calling for America’s unilateral disarmament. During his tenure with SDS, Jones became a sworn enemy of the United States government. Believing that America’s military involvement in Southeast Asia was immoral, he sided openly with the North Vietnamese communists. Formally renouncing the conscientious-objector status that had been conferred on him as a result of his Quaker lineage, he began referring to himself and his ideological comrades as “communist revolutionaries.”…

By mid-June of 1969, Jones, along with Bill Ayers and Mark Rudd, became a leader of SDS’s most militant wing and formed a new radical organization, Weatherman. They issued a Weatherman “manifesto” eschewing nonviolence and calling for armed opposition to U.S. policies; advocating the overthrow of capitalism; exhorting white radicals to trigger a worldwide revolution by fighting in the streets of the “mother country”; and proclaiming that the time had come to launch a race war against the “white” United States on behalf of the non-white Third World…

In March 1970 Jones and his fellow Weathermen adopted a new name, the Weather Underground Organization, taking fake identities and restricting themselves exclusively to covert activities. Also in 1970, Jones and the Weather Underground issued a “Declaration of a State of War” against the United States government. The FBI launched a manhunt to track them down.

Jones would elude law-enforcement authorities for more than a decade. He lived for over a year in San Francisco with fellow fugitive and Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn, who would later marry the America-hating terrorist Bill Ayers. Dohrn and Ayers, you may recall, would eventually (in the mid-1990s) give Barack Obama his start in politics when they hosted meet-and-greet events for him at their home in Chicago…

Since his capture in an October 1981 police sweep, Jones has found a home in the environmental movement, the place where many former communists have established a platform from which to promote anti-capitalist agendas and portray Western industrialized society as the scourge of the natural world…

After all those years as a communist revolutionary seeking to undermine capitalist America, Jeff Jones has finally found his way back home. Now he can pursue that same objective under the more socially acceptable auspices of the Apollo Alliance, the organization whose board of directors features that other Marxist, Van Jones – the man whom President Obama selected six months ago as his highest-level environmental adviser.

So why is anyone surprised that Obama is ruining the economy, diminishing liberty, and sucking up to despotisms of the Third World?

From Investor’s Business daily:

The world has significantly cooled in the last decade, a period that corresponds to a decline and virtual halt in sunspot activity. Solar activity is in a valley right now, the deepest of the past century. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that in 2008 and 2009 the sun set Space Age records for low sunspot counts, weak solar wind and low solar radiance.

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada’s Carleton University, has said that “CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long-, medium- and even short-time scales.”

Rather, he says, “I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet.”…

Current solar inactivity is similar to what scientists call the Maunder Minimum, a period of solar inactivity from 1645 to 1715 that spawned what is known as the Little Ice Age. At Christmas, Londoners could ice skate on the frozen Thames and New Yorkers could walk over the Hudson from Manhattan to Staten Island.

The NCAR study shows how complicated atmospheric and climate science really is and how many variables must be factored in to have even a basic understanding of all the components that make up and influence earth’s climate before the world commits economic suicide.

Mark Steyn notes in ‘the corner’ of the National Review Online:

It’s official! Environmentalism is now a religion:

Senior executive Tim Nicholson claimed he was unfairly dismissed by a property investment company because his views on the environment conflicted with other managers’ “contempt for the need to cut carbon emissions”.

In the first case of its kind, an employment tribunal decided that Nicholson, 41, had views amounting to a “philosophical belief in climate change”, allowing him the same legal protection against discrimination as religious beliefs.

We may all know it, but it needs to be repeated from time to time: The great political divide is between those who favor collectivism and those who favor individual freedom.

Collectivism on a national scale is necessarily statism. Human nature being what it is – instinctively self-preserving and self-advancing – such collectivism requires compulsion, or, to use a softer word, organization: the organization of an entire nation. (At least the nation: the ultimate collectivist dream is the global collective, the organization of the whole world.) And only a government, which is to say the state, has the power to do it.

A collectivized nation is not simply one that is under the rule of a common law. To the contrary, a society in which the citizens consent to be subject equally to the abstract authority of law (a constitution, or a body of laws made by representatives answerable to their electors), is a free society.

A collectivized nation is under the rule of human organizers who exert control of the people according to their own will. It is the opposite of a free society. Such a state is, in the true meaning of the word, a tyranny.

It may be a benign tyranny; its rulers, serially or in concert, could be (in laughable theory) persons of admirable uprightness, possessed of the utmost goodwill and kindly intentions, moved by the highest ideals, inspired by the loftiest visions of human happiness, but it is nevertheless a tyranny.

And besides, what sort of person can believe he knows what’s best for everyone else? How can he be a good sort? Wouldn’t such a man (or woman – there have been tyrannous queens) have to be an insufferably arrogant know-it-all? Or the sort who doesn’t really give a damn about the effects of his orders on others just so long as he has his own way? And is there likely to be a person who really can know enough to be the best arbiter of everyone else’s fate? Or can be trusted to set the best possible direction for millions of lives? And is it conceivable that one direction can be best for everyone?

Collectivists include Socialists, Communists, Nazis, Fascists, global government idealists, the Greens, and in sum the ideologists of any form of totalitarianism, including Islam.

There are two types of collectivist states and movements:

Non-egalitarian: such as Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Salazar’s Portugal, Islam.

This type, except for Islam, has too few devotees at present to constitute an ideological threat. (Islam is an active enemy of freedom, but not only because it is collectivist, so we won’t discuss it any further here.)

Egalitarian: such as Soviet Russia, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, Greens.

A collectivist state of the egalitarian type controls the distribution of material goods, of course. If goods are to be equally distributed, there has to be an agency doing the distributing, and that agency can only be the state. Having the monopoly of force, the state alone has the power to redistribute all property; to seize what is yours and bestow it on someone else. Maybe you worked long and hard for it, but nevertheless the state ordains that someone else who didn’t work for it has at least as much right to it as you have, in fact more. That’s the immorality of redistribution. It is called ‘social justice’. Equality of this sort is incompatible with liberty.

Millions pursue these egalitarian ideals, as ‘socialists’, ‘liberals’, ‘progressives’, or ‘greens’, despite their colossal failure wherever they’ve been tried in practice.

The attraction of an egalitarian collectivist system lies in its apparent guarantee of security. It offers you an alternative to a lonely struggle for survival. It will, theoretically, provide you with food, shelter, schooling, healing. And on top of all that, it will give you a sense of (communal) purpose, and a lifting of responsibility to make life-directing decisions for yourself. If you just do what you’re told, work where you are directed to work, live where you are allowed to live, eat what is made available to you, repeat the lessons you are taught, you will survive. And furthermore you‘ll have nothing to reproach yourself with; you can bear a lightness of moral being, certain that you are no higher or lower than anybody else, having neither to envy others nor to be annoyingly envied by them.

Paradise? For those who think it may be, there is bad news. The whole utopian structure is built on a fallacy. The idea that you will be more secure in the arms of the state than you are if left to your own devices is an illusion. What the state provides the state can withhold. If the state gives you a job, it can deny you a job. The same with housing, education, medicine. You are dependent on it, and if it fails you or punishes you by withdrawing its patronage, you will have no recourse. Your choice is to live as a slave obedient to the state, or perish.

The only real security lies always in your own ability to act for yourself (and your immediate dependents). It may not be easy, yet most who try succeed. The more freely you can act for yourself, the safer you are. The state’s only legitimate role is to safeguard you while you pursue your self-chosen aims, by protecting your country from external enemies with military strength, and you personally by enforcing the law.

The state is forever an incipient threat to freedom. It tends to accumulate power and encroach gradually on the freedom of the citizens. It needs to be kept from becoming too powerful. How to limit the power of government is the chief problem for representative democracies.

The state will take more power to itself in times of national crisis, such as war or severe economic recession. It can – and governments often do – invent crises as an excuse to take more power. They are doing so now. One of the most potent excuses that representative governments are seizing on to expand way beyond acceptable limits is ‘climate change’ with its ‘threats to the environment’.

It is in the name of an apparently overriding necessity – nothing less than the preservation of our planet – that governments are busy trying to organize populations into collective compliance with their will. All populations. The salvation of Earth is only possible, the environmentalists say, if their remedies are applied uniformly to the entire planet. Never has there been such a gift of an excuse for collectivists in power to organize the rest of us. We must all, they insist, henceforth live, work, play, travel, dress, eat, and house ourselves as they tell us to if we are to survive.

DO NOT BELIEVE THEM.

Post Script: Green is the new Red (as in Communist Red). The Communist Van Jones, briefly appointed as Green Jobs Adviser to President Obama, made no secret of why he liked the job. He said that the green economy would start off as ‘a small subset’ of a complete revolution, away from ‘grey capitalism’ toward redistribution of all the wealth. ‘We are going to push it and push it and push it and push it until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society.’

Jillian Becker   September 2009